The Fracturing of Christianity.

Vic Biorseth, Thursday, June 28, 2012
http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

The Fracturing of Christianity is the story of how one Christian Church, established by Jesus Christ Himself, has since become so incredibly factionalized and denominational-ized into literally thousands of divergent Gospel messages and interpretations. In the beginning, there was one Church, and many bishops, and they operated their individual bishoprics in ecumenical agreement on theology. They held great Ecumenical Councils to settle matters of contention into formalized doctrines that all agreed to follow. Then, the purpose of ecumenism was to keep all scattered bishoprics singing from the same hymnal. That was and remains the internal meaning of ecumenism within the Roman Catholic Church. But, we have had this serious fracturing and dividing of Christianity through history, and the word Ecumenism now has broader interpretations.

After all this fracturing – the splitting of East and West into two distinct Churches, and then the devastation wrought by the Reformation, followed by the long descent into denominationalism – the word ecumenism, in broad usage, has come to mean something more akin to a sort of shared spirituality among various kinds of Christians, and an increase in interfaith dialogue not necessarily aimed at total Christian unity into one Church.

For me, ecumenism means, precisely, persuading or helping non-Catholic Christians to return, of their own free will, into the actual Church Christ founded. It involves an examination of the correctness of the one true original Gospel message preached to the one true original Church. It is either both correct and uncorrupted, or it is not. If it is incorrect and/or corrupted, then, where is the evidence of the perceived error or corruption, and, where, exactly, did the original correct and uncorrupted Gospel message go?

For many non-Catholic Christians ecumenism means pretty much the same thing, except that they think their particular denomination or interpretation is the one the rest of the world should adopt and follow, working toward the same ultimate goal involving the achievement of returning Christianity to one and only one Christian Church.

Only the first group – the shared spirituality group – has no real interest in reuniting Christianity into one single Church again. They prefer the stand-alone, I’m OK – you’re OK individual churches, where various confessions can just get together in a vague, indeterminate theology and liturgy. For some of them, who may be ministered by someone who is some form of schismatic from some confession or other, their church is a business, and subordinating their church to any larger Church might put them out of business and / or disqualify their pastor. Thus, they fear real ecumenism.

The Fracturing of Christianity between East and West.

On the word Filioque - would anyone today believe that a great Church could be torn in two over one word? Well, it was a little more involved than that. Worldly politics were involved. At the time of this particular fracture, the Pope reigned in Rome, but the Emperor reigned in Constantinople, or New Rome, as it was known in the West. This geographic / political point contributed to the schism that was to come. Emperor Constantine had moved his capital there back in 330 A.D.

It may be argued that the whole split between the Eastern and Western Church was instigated by an intrigue of Charles the Great (Charlemagne) when he failed to make himself emperor of the whole Empire. Charles’ plan to marry the reigning Empress in Constantinople was foiled, and, in revenge, he set out to cause a split and destroy the universal rule of Constantinople. (If he couldn’t be Emperor of the Roman empire, nobody could.)

In 792 A.D. Charles sent his Libri Carolini letter to pope Hadrian, criticizing some of the documents of Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787 A.D.) and charging Emperor in Constantinople with heresy. The charge was that the Emperors in Constantinople could not claim to be proper successors because they worshipped idols and they confessed that the Holy Ghost proceeds “from the Father by the Son” rather than “From the Father and the Son.” While the Church was unhappy with the Emperor’s seat being in Constantinople rather than Rome, it rejected the charges of heresy and Charles’ interpretation of the Council of 787. But, this laid the groundwork for the fracture that was to come. It fed a growing animosity between East and West. (The West did not like the Emperor being seated anywhere other than Rome, and that may have been the real root of the ever growing animosity.) Both sides began to harden their stands on the word Filioque.

The charges of Charles were bogus and politically inspired. The Council of 787 had declared that the prayers before icons represented veneration, not worship, of the icons, and that prayers before icons were properly directed at that which the icon art represented. The Council had held for the iconographers and against the iconoclasts, or image-smashers. Similarly, Charles’ “by the Son” charge was largely ignored because there had been more than one interpretation from the beginning, and Filioque was a topic still under active theological discussion within the Church.

To bring it into proper perspective, perhaps we should look at the Credo itself at this point. This is the Creed developed in the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. with the word in question underlined and in bold print:

I believe in one God, The Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God.
Born of the Father before all ages.
God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God.
Begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.
By whom all things were made.
Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.
(here all present kneel)
And became incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary: AND WAS MADE MAN.
(here all present arise)
He was also crucified for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried.
And on the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, and who spoke through the prophets.
And one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I await the resurrection of the dead and the life + of the world to come.
Amen.

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father Uncreate, the Son Uncreate, and the Holy Ghost Uncreate. The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible. The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost Eternal and yet they are not Three Eternals but One Eternal. As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible. So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not Three Almighties but One Almighty.

So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not Three Gods, but One God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not Three Lords but One Lord. For, like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by Himself to be God and Lord, so are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion to say, there be Three Gods or Three Lords. The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father, and of the Son neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

So there is One Father, not Three Fathers; one Son, not Three Sons; One Holy Ghost, not Three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is afore or after Other, None is greater or less than Another, but the whole Three Persons are Co-eternal together, and Co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity.

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting Salvation, that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess, that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man.

God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the substance of His mother, born into the world. Perfect God and Perfect Man, of a reasonable Soul and human Flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His Manhood. Who, although He be God and Man, yet He is not two, but One Christ. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God. One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by Unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one Man, so God and Man is one Christ. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into Hell, rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into Heaven, He sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting, and they that have done evil into everlasting fire. This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.

So all three – Father, Son and Holy Ghost – are equally and wholly God; this we accept in faith, knowing that our full understanding cannot be satisfied, because the finite human mind cannot fathom, let alone contain, that which is infinite. We believe it because it is revealed to us, and the Church preserves, protects and passes on the revelation of it to us. The only way, in our limited ability to understand it, that the word through might be more appropriate than the word and would be in a time-line relationship. The Father “sent” the Son for our redemption, and the Son “sent” or called-forth the Holy Ghost – in this way of thinking of it, you would say “ … from the Father through the Son” rather than “ … from the Father and the Son” even though Father, Son and Spirit are all one and the same in substance.

Semantics, you say; a horrible split in the Church, over mere semantics, or different ways of saying the same thing. Well, it’s not that simple.

Ulterior Motives. Other animosities had been smoldering between East and West.

1. Geographic jealousies:
   1. The Eastern Church considered itself to be the actual cradle of Christianity and of greater importance than any possible seat anywhere in the West, including even Rome. Peter Himself, and Paul, had established Churches all over the East long before they went to Rome.
   2. The Western Church considered itself to be the logical seat of Christianity because that is where Peter and Paul were martyred and buried, and once Rome accepted Christianity, the city of the Emperor would logically be the preferred place for the Holy See.
2. Political jealousies:
   1. We have seen how Charles the Great tried to make himself emperor through marriage, and sought to destroy East-West unity of the empire in revenge. It was he who planted the seed of the filioque controversy that would grow over time as positions hardened.
   2. There would always be animosity between East and West so long as the Emperor was seated in Constantinople and the Holy See was in Rome. Civil and Ecclesial authority were two different things, but with overlapping and important areas of governance.
   3. The Emperors in the East were determined to maintain hereditary dynasties that would always be Greek, and the Emperors always favored Eastern theological opinions.
   4. The Holy See in Rome was increasingly controlled or constrained by Western kings, and generally favored Western theological opinions.

246 The Latin tradition of the Creed confesses that the Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque)". The Council of Florence in 1438 explains: "The Holy Spirit is eternally from Father and Son; He has his nature and subsistence at once (simul) from the Father and the Son. He proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and through one spiration … And, since the Father has through generation given to the only-begotten Son everything that belongs to the Father, except being Father, the Son has also eternally from the Father, from whom he is eternally born, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son."⁷⁵

247 The affirmation of the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople. But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had already confessed it dogmatically in 447,⁷⁶ even before Rome, in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of 381. The use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). The introduction of the filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches.

248 At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father's character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he "who proceeds from the Father", it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son.⁷⁷ The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, "legitimately and with good reason",⁷⁸ for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as "the principle without principle",⁷⁹ is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.⁸⁰ This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed.

Mutual Excommunications.

Perhaps at this point, positions had hardened too much and voices had been raised too high. In 1054 Pope Leo IX sent Cardinal Humbert, as his legate, to Constantinople to try to reconcile the matter. Perhaps the Cardinal was not the best diplomat; perhaps the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularious was too obstinate; who knows. At any rate, they clashed immediately. Cardinal Humbert excommunicated Patriarch Cerularious, and the Patriarch responded by excommunicating Cardinal Humbert. And there the Christian world stood. The validity of Cardinal Humbert’s excommunication of the Patriarch is doubtful because Pope Leo died while all this was going on. However, while there is no doubt that the Patriarch’s excommunication of Hubert was effective, it applied only to Cardinal Humbert, not to the Pope, as is popularly believed.

While these were shocking events in the West, no one really believed the split was permanent. Everyone thought the East and West would eventually reconcile, because all they were talking about was semantics, surrounding one word, having no effect on the true, full nature of the Divine Trinity. But the argument of the East held that no one could add to, detract from or modify the Depositum Fidei, and that whatever doctrine was established by Ecumenical Council was formally recognized, from that point on, as part of the Sacred Deposit. The Creed itself is the Church’s highest and strongest doctrine, recognized as dogma. Every word is vitally important. This is a very strong argument indeed.

The problem is that the West likely always interpreted the verse to mean that the Holy Ghost comes from the Father, but through the Son only in time, as man understands time. He still comes from the Father. But the East has a good argument; even one word of the Creed should not ever change outside of an Ecumenical Council.

In my opinion, the matter will never be settled outside of an Ecumenical Council that includes the separated Patriarchs of the East as well as the Catholic Bishops of the West.

But there were other distracting challenges afoot in the world at the time, and before anything like another Ecumenical Council could be thought of there was the ongoing Islamic invasion to be handled. As a simple matter of self-defense, the Crusades were going on. One of the Crusading armies was diverted, through political intrigue, into going to Constantinople on the way to the Levant. There, through a tragi-comedy of politics, deception and error, the Christian host wound up burning and sacking Constantinople, probably the richest and most beautiful city in the world at the time. You can read the details of these events in the Byzantine 4th Crusade page.

That event pretty well tore the fabric of Christian unity in two, as far as most Greek sensibilities were concerned. This was no mere matter of semantics. No matter what reconciliatory things any popes or patriarchs or kings or emperors might say from that point on, such terrible events would be remembered and passed from father to son for many, many generations.

After the Split the Latin-speaking Roman Catholic Church would become the dominant faith of Western Europe and the New World, while the Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Church would become the dominant faith of the Middle East and of the Slavs in Europe. At first, the new Orthodox Church was divided between four Patriarchs, of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Each Patriarch could legitimately claim direct Apostolic Succession from the Apostles, but only the reigning pope in Rome could claim direct succession from Peter, to whom were given the keys and the authority that goes with them. The East saw the Patriarch of Constantinople as somewhat senior to the other Patriarchs, but not as a pope.

Since then, Eastern Orthodoxy has split into various independent national and social Churches, notably the Syrian, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian, Greek and Georgian. The Russian Orthodox Church was for some time dominated and administered by the Czarist regime. After the Communist revolution, there was a Communist-forced assembly in which they deposed their Patriarch and endorsed Communism. Those clerics and faithful who opposed Communism were generally deported and banished, sent off to labor camps or killed. With the 1943 Nazi invasion, Stalin stopped his plan of annihilation of non-Communist Russian Orthodoxy and engineered the election of Sergius as Patriarch of all of Russia, and called upon the new official church of Russia to aid in the war effort. From that point on, the “official” Russian Orthodox Church was actually a Communist front organization.

The Fracturing of Christianity between Catholic and Protestant.

Where the problems between the Western-Latin and the Eastern-Greek Churches may be essentially described as a Schism, in that they involve primarily a questioning of authority, there remains only one doctrinal or dogmatic difference, that being the semantic interpretation of the word Filioque in the context of the Credo. In other words, there is no serious doctrinal difference between East and West as far as the Sacred Deposit of Faith is concerned. That cannot be said of the Protestant movement born of the Reformation. Protestantism is a radical altering of and even direct opposition to the long established Sacred Deposit of Faith, carefully maintained since the death of the last Apostle. Here is what we wrote about the Reformation in the For God and Country page:

Whatever else he might have been, Martin Luther was, most certainly, a world-shaking, pre-Marxian Revolutionary, as his own recorded words reveal. In written and spoken word, his violent rhetoric was aimed against authority - all authority – the authority of princes, and the authority of the Church. Even as he railed from the Catholic pulpit against the successors of Peter and the Apostles as “hobgoblins of the devil” and called for them to be “wiped from the face of the Earth”, he railed against secular government and its legitimate authority, informing the peasants that they had “ample reason to break forth with the flail and the club.” Authority was the enemy. “Among Christians there ought not to be and there cannot be any authority. But they are all at the same time subject one to another.” was his pet doctrine. That doctrine was synonymous with pure anarchy and lawlessness.

In his “gospel of freedom” the masses were introduced to miss-applied Scriptural interpretations calling for “equality” among the classes and a more equal “distribution” of private property. Luther attacked both the Emperor and the Pope with incendiary rhetoric. When he realized that his invented doctrine of Sola Scriptura had taken hold of the peasants to such a degree that they were doing their own Scripture interpretation and no longer listening to his interpretations, which is what he really wanted them to do, he began to be alarmed at what he had wrought, but it was too late. His fiery German rhetoric brought about the 1525 “Peasants’ War” in the opening round of the European bloodletting that would come to be known as the Reformation.

Peasant fanatics, Munzer in the lead, drew up a twelve article “Manifesto” using Luther’s Scriptural miss-interpretations, added onto by their own interpretations, to justify the revolt. They even produced Scripture miss-interpretations to justify their declared hunting and fishing and land usage rights. Led by Munzer, they sought to be in complete and absolute control, to overthrow the whole existing legitimate political and social structure, to establish a perfect social order in which there were to be no rulers, no subjects, no rich, no poor, no cities or commerce, but all would live in primitive simplicity and perfect equality. Sound familiar? Munzer and his captains who led the insurgent troops appealed to “Luther’s gospel” and quoted his writings as they began spreading terror and violence all across Germany. An alarmed Luther, too late, wrote his “An Exhortation to Peace” and sought to calm things down, but the peasants were doing their own interpretation, and the cat was out of the bag, so to speak. He became afraid for his own safety, as everyone was.

When the peasants would no longer listen to him and no longer recognized in him any special authority, he turned on them. He clamored for the princes to turn out in force to exterminate all who had taken up the sword against them. During this period he wrote his “Against the Murderous and Rapacious Hordes of the Peasants.” Munzer and the peasants were cut down by the tens of thousands. At the end of it all, Luther stood with little or nothing behind him and his self-declared war with all authority. He had previously attacked Emperor and princes just as ferociously as he had attacked Pope and bishops, and with whatever peasants left alive alienated from him by his treachery, he stood with no real allies in his self-proclaimed revolt. So, he did yet another about-face for political reasons, and promoted Erastrianism – the legal establishment of state supremacy over ecclesial matters.

Thus, as history records, along with his inventions of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone), Sola Fidei (Faith Alone) and the notion of the universal priesthood (We Are All Priests), we see that Martin Luther invented a radical combination of Church and state. With the first inauguration of a typical State Church came the problem similar to the one Luther had with the peasants: once the state had power over ecclesial matters, it no longer needed to listen to Luther. It took him a little longer to realize it, but once the state has authority over the Church, it becomes a church, small-c, owned and operated by the state. Still, Luther needed some strong ally to survive at all, and so we have the old maxim of the Lutheran creed, Cujus region, ejus rligio (Whoever’s reign, his religion.) A citizen’s religion became a matter of civil law. “He who owns the country owns the Church, and he that makes your laws for you has the right to make your religion for you.” In the instance of Pfalz, the religion of the people was changed four times in eighty years because of this new Lutheran principle.

Princes rallied to Luther’s cause in the main because of the ability to greatly increase their own holdings in land, buildings and wealth at the expense of the Church. If a prince could prevail in his territory, he could become vastly more wealthy than he was previously. There were numerous huge cathedrals, monasteries, convents and lands, to be plundered or to be confiscated intact. Greed can be a great motivator. As a direct result, we had the Reformation, which might have been more appropriately named Western Civilization’s first World War. Catholic and Protestant princes spent some 10 years skirmishing, intriguing and lining up for battle, another 13 years in continuous battle, followed by the Church’s far too late efforts at ecclesial defense through the Jesuits and the Council of Trent, followed by more battles, all culminating in one last struggle for Christian unity in the Thirty Years war, which ended in shear exhaustion for both sides, stalemate, and a permanently divided Europe.

There was no winner. Everybody lost. That there were excesses and sins in the Church and in the state is without question; there always was, and there always will be. Reform was needed, but this was not any Reformation. It was an unmitigated disaster for Western Civilization. Christian unity, focus and common vision was destroyed in Europe.

The worst product of the Reformation was the movement away from rationalism toward blind acceptance of questionable interpretations of text and spurious new doctrines. It was all done in the name of invented, stirred-up and increasingly rabid anti-doctrine, or anti-Church sentiment. Just as soon as the revolution started, it ceased being a “Lutheran” thing as new interpretations sprang up, and Protestants warred against Protestants just as fiercely as they warred against Catholics. The only thing that kept it from descending into an every-man-for-himself interpretation fragmentation was the new maxim: Whoever’s reign, his religion, which meant an interpretation different from that of your current sovereign prince could get your head cut off.

Luther incited the masses and started the revolt, but it was the dark genius of Calvin that moved men to absolute, blind hatred of the Roman Catholic Church and all things Catholic. Once the secular rulers, the princes, were motivated by Luther’s rhetoric, and by their own personal greed, to lead rather than to put down the insurrections, events became unstoppable. Princes, Dukes, Barons and Kings eyed not only their own, but their neighbor’s Church property, available for the plucking. If one of them saw, in a neighboring territory, a particularly rich cathedral, or a vast monastery with vineyards and rich farmlands attached, all he had to do to justify his actions was to adopt one of the new and different Scripture interpretations to seize it by force of arms, and expand his personal empire. It didn’t matter whether the rich target was on territory that currently belonged to a Protestant prince or a Catholic prince.

What emerged from the embers of this great war in Europe was, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, and the four main branches of Protestantism: Lutheran; the Calvinist – Zwinglian movement that called itself Reformed; Baptist; and Anglican. It’s a wonder there were not more. By what some historians have called a political accident, England’s Henry VIII had broken with Rome, adopted the new Protestant dictum, Whoever’s reign, his religion, declared himself head of the church in England (Anglican) and thus the senseless war had jumped across the Channel to engulf the British Isles.

It may be argued that Protestantism would have been crushed entirely by the Catholic princes and their forces if not for two major events:

1. The English “political accident” that turned Henry VIII into a Protestant. Britain had the military power to eventually cross the Channel and clean house, so to speak, for the Catholic cause.

2. The distraction of many of the best Catholic princes in battling the onslaught of Islam, which already had conquered Catholic Hungary. Vienna itself hung by a hair, and was only saved by the gallantry of a Polish king.

Many are not aware of just how close Europe came to being completely conquered by Islam, or even that this major conflict was going on at the same time as the Reformation. Those who marched against Islam in Europe did so for God and Country, and they were all singing from the same hymnal, as it were. Those who marched against Catholicism, and against other variants of Protestantism, did so for God and Country, but in variant interpretational forms. “Country” was pretty clear, although borders were changing significantly. But, in England, when the forces of the King rose for God and Country they rose for the Church of Henry, and those who opposed them rose for the same God the rest of the world had always recognized as the Christian God. But who proclaimed and pronounced His doctrines, His revealed, certain and unchangeable truths? Men rallied to the Church of Luther, the Church of Calvin, and – worst of all – princes rose in response to the call from the Church of Personal Enrichment and Acquisition – the Church of Greed.

This alienation and bitterness laid the groundwork for the advances of humanism and atheism, and the horrors of the French Revolution, which would be as much anti-religion as it was anti-aristocrat. Men were learning to question religious interpretation, religion itself, and to despise rulers and the upper class as religious hypocrites. It was clear and obvious that princes had adopted new Christian Gospels out of pure personal convenience and opportunity. Everyone firmly proclaimed a “true” Gospel; who could know what the true Gospel was? Their very ground of being was shaken.

There was no principle of separation of Church and state here; quite the opposite. Under the new Protestantism, there was a combination of Church and state. Only the Catholic princes continued to listen to Rome in ecclesial matters, but even many of them enforced Catholicism upon their subjects, as if forcing someone into a religious practice or pretense could save his soul. Of course, at least some of this was due to the fact that, during those troubled times, anyone of a different faith could potentially be a mortal enemy of the state.

So we see from all of this that the doctrinal differences between Protestantism and Catholicism are so great as to warrant the term heretical, and that was the term that was applied, in the Council of Trent.

Political Christian “Ecumenism” within American Constitutionalism.

We have spoken elsewhere on this site, in multiple places, about how America began life as the thirteen Christian theocracies, or as thirteen theocratic colonies. The first Pilgrims came here to avoid state domination of their particular brand of Protestantism. Each of the Colonies was determined to avoid the same thing, and they established themselves as theocracies for that purpose, with one Catholic Colony and all the rest representing various brands of Protestantism. After the American Revolution, during the deliberations developing the American Constitution, a major topic of deliberation involved avoidance of state control of religion. How to do that, with a federal government representing thirteen different Christian theocracies?

The Framers incorporated into the First Amendment the Religion Clause, as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

1. legally establishing any official national religion over the top of any existing state religion;
2. interfering in any way with any existing theology, liturgy, prayer or religious practice.

The religion clause put two legal restrictions on Congress, and no legal restrictions on anyone else. We have shown, in the Separation of Church and State page and elsewhere in this site, how, since 1947, the predominantly atheist, anti-Christian, Marxist-Redistributionist oriented (if not dominated) Democrat Party has grossly misinterpreted the Religion Clause of the First Amendment and used it to attack and suppress Christian religious exercise and expression anywhere in public and in many other areas of life, most especially in formal education. Suppressing Christianity in public and opposing public religious exercise was not the intention of the framers, nor is it the literal English meaning of the words in the First Amendment.

Go to the Separation of Church and State link to decide for yourself whether the Black Court decision in the 1947 Everson case was evil, stupid or both. In my opinion it was evil, and it remains for a future Congress to set it aside. It was a gross violation of the intent of the authors of the words, and an obvious and radical misrepresentation of the perfectly clear English meaning of the clause. By establishing this 1947 precedent in case law, the Court was able to establish, in essence, a new law, superseding the Constitution itself. New law is the exclusive Constitutional domain of the Congress. This Court-established “principle” of separation of Church and state is a direct violation of the Constitution.

Since that event in 1947 the Democrat Party, not without some Republican support, has been driving Christianity out of the public square, out of the educational sphere, and either promoting atheism or simply leaving a religious void. The cultural results of that political exercise are clearly visible all around us. As a direct result, the cultural ethos of America is in obvious, rapid and radical decline.

But let us consider the pre-1947 cultural effect of this quite unique American Constitutional religious freedom, which was a truly wondrous thing.

American “General” Christian Ecumenism, if that term makes any sense at all, was something new in the world. While it allowed continuance, and perhaps even acceleration, of Christian denominationalism, it brought about a cultural ecumenism, and created and strongly bound-up a new national ethos that was not based on any one Christian denomination, but rather a sort of composite of all of them.

How could you do that? Well, maybe you couldn’t do it by plan or intention. It just sort of naturally happened. (I know, and we all should know, Who the author of nature is.) In the Judao-Christian Ethos page we talked about our rather unique American national ethos, what it is, and how it came to be. It forms our set of moral-norms and establishes our common or community sense of right versus wrong. Our national morality comes directly out of our religion.

There we spoke of the Ten Commandments, divided into two groups – those that addressed man’s relationship with God – theology – and those that addressed man’s relationship with his fellow man – morality.

The First Tablet Commandments of God, addressing man’s relationship with God, forming the foundation of theology, are summarized in the old and new testaments into one Commandment, that being:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is ONE LORD; and you shall love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Wiser men than we have held that all of the law is summarized into these two Commandments.

So long as we all hold the First Great Commandment in common, we don’t have to go into enough detail to bicker about fine theological points of contention between denominations. Constitutionally, we do not make laws regarding theology. However, that being said, there is far less difference between denominations regarding moral rules and norms summarized into the Second Great Commandment. In fact, we all hold the actual Commandments themselves in common. This is what we, like the Founding Fathers, can Constitutionally and legitimately base our representative civil law upon. Our Judao-Christian morality is what forms our national ethos and our commonly held instinct for telling right from wrong.

Here, in our Judao-Christian morality, do we find solid, firm, common ground for believing Jews, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant confessions. While our clerics may on occasion point the finger of heresy at each other, they, along with all of us laymen all know how to peacefully and respectfully deal with each other out in society and in the free market place. We can all be good neighbors because we all share the same moral sensibilities; we have the same moral code. That is what makes us, as Tocqueville described us, a Good People.

This may be a terrible and false ecumenism in the eyes of the Catholic Church; but I maintain that it is less of a spiritual or religious ecumenism than it is a moral and strictly civil ecumenism. It is an ecumenism of good national citizenship. If the down-side of this overly general Judao-Christian morality is held to be the increase in denominationalism and the never-ending creation of new denominations, the up-side is that Catholics (and all others) are perfectly free to evangelize and practice real ecumenism. Man accepts the Gospel or he rejects it; man examines and accepts, or rejects, Catholic doctrine, or any other doctrine or theology, of his own free will, which is the only way man can come to God anyway. It is my job as a Catholic to speak the truth; however, everyone simply will not hear the truth, and I have to accept that. No one can be dragged, kicking and screaming against his will, into truth. God gave man free will; who are we to interfere with that?

In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville examined the American citizenry to find out the source of American greatness as a nation, and where he found that source of greatness was in the pews while being preached to from pulpits. America was great because Americans were good, he found, and the source of their goodness came from their common religious morality. He didn’t identify any of the Churches as Methodist, or Baptist, or Jewish Synagogues, or Catholic Churches; just general Churches. Americans went to Church regularly, they heard a common message regarding how to behave in this world, they took it to heart, they put it into practice, and that is what made them good people. And the goodness of the people was the source of the greatness of the nation.

He was right. Paul said the same thing using other words. Once you have been reborn into the Kingdom, the worldly law is less important, because you automatically obey the law, without looking at it or thinking about it. This remains true so long as the people remain morally upright, and so long as the civil law remains morally upright and thus remains representative of the morally upright people. America has a good and moral people; America has representative laws. This is the source of American greatness that Tocqueville found.

So, where the source of proper Catholic ecumenism is found in the examination of Scripture, the Church itself, the sacred Deposit of Faith and history, the source of the unique American secular ecumenism is found elsewhere. It is in the vital principles of America – the American Founding Principles from our Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitutional Principles established in our Constitution itself. Equality, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is at the root of it all, tempered by Judao-Christian morality.

I am equally prepared to evangelize or ecumenalize, if that’s a word, on my Catholic faith as I am on my Americanism, if that’s a word. (Sometimes I just make words up as I go along.)

We would be wise to return to what Tocqueville wrote about us so long ago; it is well worth a revisit. Perhaps his most important truism was this:

”The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.”

Tocqueville had great praise for our Constitutional Republic, but predicted the descent into Democracy, with forces working toward that end from the top down, and from the bottom up. He said that:

”The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

”A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.”

In the beginning, Demcracy was thwarted by the design of the three co-equal branches of our government; you can still see it in the Constitution.

1. In the Executive branch, the President was elected, not by mere popular vote, but by an Electoral College, with the number of Electors determined by population, and the rules for their voting established by each state.
2. The Congress was divided into two houses –
   • The House of Representatives was a popularly elected body –
   • The Senate was not elected, but appointed by individual state legislatures.
3. The Supreme Court was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
4. Thus, by design, not a single branch of the three branches of American government was ever subject to straight-up popular vote.

Fracturing of the American Ideal. We have already seen how the Democrat Party is driving Christianity out of the public square, out of formal education and out of the political dialogue. Along with that anti-Christian effort, they are politically working at overtly and subtly changing America from a Republic into a Democracy. Their greatest successful step in this effort so far is the 1913 Amendment XVII ratified under Woodrow Wilson, making the Senate into a simple elected body, no different than the House of Representatives. Now the whole Congress can participate in the contest to see who can buy the most votes with the public’s money, exactly as Tocqueville warned. Our Senate is now nothing but a bunch of professional politicians, no different than the House. We are one giant step closer to pure Democracy. Democrats are still working overtime to demonize, in the public mind, the Electoral College, eliminate it, and thus make the transition from Republic to pure Democracy complete.

And now, Obamunism is working overtime to unconstitutionally and illegally eliminate American borders and American sovereignty, and to spend America into economic oblivion, with no checks on that illegal process whatsoever, since impeachment cases are tried in the Senate, and Obamunism owns the Senate. (Elections have consequences.)

Democrats and all other Marxists of varying spot and stripe know full well that pure Democracy is the downward spiral path into Socialism and eventual economic collapse followed by dictatorship.

Democracy is the road to socialism. --Karl Marx.

The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic. --Vladimir Lenin

Democracy is indispensable to socialism. --Vladimir Lenin.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. --Joseph Stalin.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted --Vladimir I Lenin.

Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever ---Vladimir I Lenin.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. --Karl Marx.

Religion is the opium of the masses. --Karl Marx.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. --Karl Marx.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth --Vladimir I Lenin.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. --Joseph Stalin.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party. --Joseph Stalin.

It was under Wilson, of course, that the first huge parts of the Marxist program, such as the progressive income tax, were incorporated into the American system. --Robert Welch.

The old fable about how to boil a frog without any resistance from the frog is to begin with the frog in a pot of comfortable water, and then gradually crank up the heat. The frog will be boiled to death before he realizes what’s happening here. The American Constitutional Republic has been slowly raising to a Democratic boil for at least a hundred years now, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt, America’s first Progressive President, and the process is still going on, directed by the Democrat Party and their propaganda wing, the ideologically Marxist-dominated SLIMC.

The Democrat Party, many of the “Establishment” Republican Party, virtually all of academia, virtually all of entertainment and, of course, the SLIMC, do not as a rule publicly admit their Marxist leanings. What they hide behind is the softer sounding title of Social Justice advocacy. But if you look a little closer – it doesn’t take much effort – at what exactly Social Justice is, as defined by the United Nations and others who promote it, you will find that Social Justice is a prettied-up version of Marxist Redistributionism and opposition to religion and religion-based morality, and opposition to national sovereignty, all made to look somehow fair, charitable and uplifting of the common man. It’s just another smoke screen for another path to international Communism, under another new title, such as a New World Order, or an Open Society, or a Sustainable System, or a Global Governance, etc. But it’s all the same old thing.

The Fracturing of Catholicism in America is also important to consider. It has almost become a sort of denominational split within Catholicism itself. Changes from church to church are so radical that some churches are hardly recognizable as Catholic, in appearance, architecture, theology, liturgy, music, doctrine or practice. Even at this late date, after all the letters from Rome, after all the recent returning to the original language in liturgy, there is still a lot of this un-Catholic crap going on. We have witnessed Masses at which the priest used no lectionary, missal or missalette, just made up liturgical language as he went along, the Lord’s Prayer was preceded by a “Let’s everybody hold hands” instruction, some of the important prayers of the priest were simply read aloud by lay ministers, and not only was Communion given to non-Catholics, but non-Catholics even served as lay distributors.

We have a real problem with the Catholic Bishops here in America. These are their Churches.

If you think atheistic-Marxism has not reached out and touched a whole lot of American Catholic clerics, go read the Catholic Communizer Dorothy Day page. Read also the Refuting Perverted Catholicism page and the articles linked in the right-hand column of that page, especially those dealing with Cafeteria Catholicism and/or the Athenaeum of Ohio Lay Pastoral Ministry Program, which proved to be a study in corrupt and false Catholic doctrine.

We have long known that Protestants who move to a new town do not necessarily go to the denomination that they left when they seek out a new church to join. Their denomination may not be available in the new location. So, they seek out or go to several churches, they may do research, and they may read the new church’s charter, or constitution, or confession or whatever description is available. What they are looking for is a church and/or a pastor they can be comfortable with, that has values and doctrines to suit their own. For many Protestants, “values” are a purely personal thing, rather than anything out of any fixed revelation.

We Catholics cannot look down our noses at that sort of thing. We do it too. We have no choice if we wish to remain wholly Catholic. So-called Catholic churches in America are just that different from each other.

The Fracturing of Scripture is also a problem, particularly with all the Protestant versions and now the “feminist” and “inclusive” so-called Catholic versions. The important thing to remember about the history of our Scripture is that it didn’t just go Poof and suddenly appear. There was quite a lag between the Garden of Eden and Moses, who is credited with setting down the first five books. And then there was a lag of some 1,500 years between the writing of Genesis, the first Old Testament book, and writing of Revelation of John, the last New Testament book. Up until Moses, none of the Old Testament figures had any Scripture to go by. Everything taught was taught by word of mouth. Man used the ancient practice of memorization and recitation. There were specialists at this sort of thing, usually highly respected individuals who could recite long litanies, genealogies, histories and stories, for hours on end, all from memory. It was a skill; a trained trade or a profession, handed on from father to son.

Today, when you read the Old Testament story of Joseph, you should realize that Joseph existed long before the first line of the Old Testament was written and some 1,800 years before the first line of the New Testament was laid down. There was no Scripture. In point of fact, the New Testament was not even begun until many years after the Assumption of our Lord. The letters, or epistles of Paul and other Apostles to various Churches were not yet held to be anything of importance to the universal Church; they were simply held to be common communications intended for specific addressees. That is not to say that they were not inspired, but that they were not yet recognized to be of more importance than the spoken word. It was getting quite late in the lives of the Apostles when it was determined that the Gospel of the Lord should be permanently set down in writing, and then we had the beginnings of the effort, and the beginnings of the canon, or list of important letters and books to be collected and maintained.

Once the Apostles and the Evangelists began writing their Gospels and histories and preserving letters deemed important enough, our New Testament began to be formed. Up until then, and even long after then, the word was preached, not written, and not read. So far as we know, our Lord never wrote anything, nor did he tell his Apostles to write anything. He told them to speak, to make disciples and to Baptize, but he never told them to write anything. Only in John’s Revelation do we find an angel, or a “voice” from his vision, telling him to “write what you see in a book, and send it to the Seven Churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.”

The full compliment of texts would not be complete until around 90 A.D., and even after that the canon, or the list of officially recognized inspired texts would not be complete for some time. Man would not have a one-book Bible until around 400 A.D. So, at least until around that time, the Protestant dogma of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone) could not possibly have been true. If Scripture alone was the one thing that was necessary for salvation, then no one before that date knew salvation. That, of course, would be an absurdity.

When the collection of important documents were gathered together for ongoing history, they were more of a library than a book; they were called Biblia in Greek, for “the books.” All of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and all of the New Testament was written in Greek. Although Rome had conquered the previously Greek empire, Latin had not yet gained preeminence everywhere, and Greek was still the primary language of education, and of the educated.

Working in a Bethlehem cave reputed to be the cave of the Nativity, St. Jerome completed the first one-language (Latin,) one-book Bible, finishing his work in the neighborhood of 400AD. The only source documents he had that were already in Latin were the Psalms, or the Psalter. Other than that, he worked from original Hebrew manuscripts, and original Greek manuscripts. Although the famous Septuagint – a one-book Old Testament written in Greek – was available, St. Jerome didn’t use it; he worked from the original Hebrew manuscripts. During Jerome’s work the first canon was blessed by Pope Damascus in 382 AD, and thus the new Bible contained all of the blessed books, and the list of apocrypha was settled. Within the Catholic Church, that canon has never changed.

St. Jerome’s new Bible was called the Vulgate, for it was written in “the vulgar” language, meaning the predominant language of the people of the world at that time, which was Latin. A direct, straight translation from Latin to English version of the Vulgate is the Douay-Rheims version, which may be depended upon as an accurate English version. My favorite version is the Revised Standard Version, or RSV, Catholic Edition; but still, today, the original Vulgate is the only version ever blessed by the Catholic Church.

We wrote about what Protestantism did to the canon and to interpretation, rather than translation, in the Catholic Prayer page; you can read about it there. They dropped seven books from the Old Testament, using as a template Martin Luther’s new German Bible, which he plagiarized from the pre-existing Catholic German version known as the Codex Teplensis. I won’t go over all that again here; you can read about it at the link if it interests you.

The important thing about Scripture history up to that point is this: After Jerome’s first one-book Bible, there was a span of a thousand years before anyone ever saw any Bible that looks anything like the one(s) in your house today, because there was no printing press until then. Every Bible in existence up to that time, in whatever language, was a laboriously hand-printed copy.

After the ascendancy of the printing press, Protestantism went a little nuts with versions, all based on Luther’s German Bible and it’s shortened canon. As Luther added the word “only” into the text for his own purposes, many of these new versions included new interpretations, meaning that they went beyond straight translation and actually changed meaning. Most of Protestantism eventually settled on the King James version, which was a masterpiece of Old English, but contained many errors, and the Old Testament was still seven books light. Today the King James Version, known also as the Authorized Version, is the more or less official Bible of mainline Protestantism everywhere.

Catholicism is not innocent in creating these interpretations rather than translations with modified meanings. The New American Version may be an example of what I’m talking about, with feminized, so-called inclusive language throughout, to suit popular socio-political topics favoring a currently popular liberal agenda over original revelation. When you put that stuff in Scripture it winds up in liturgy, and I believe that was the intent all along. The modern Catholic Liturgist and the modern Catholic Historical-Critical Scripture Scholar are close colleagues and the very best of friends, when they are not the same people.

The bottom line is that if Protestants like their Bibles, of whatever version, they should thank the Catholic Church for producing the first one and for protecting it down through the ages. She developed the canon, one of her saints put it all into a Latin single book and she approved it. She then faithfully copied it into many languages, and held fast to the original words and the original meanings. She maintains the only proper authority to properly interpret it, because she authored it, and she continues to keep pure the Gospel she was given and entrusted with. It was from her Sacred Deposit of Faith that it was all written down; and done with the guidance of the Holy Ghost, promised by Christ to “remind you of all that I told you” and to guide her into all truth. Who else should be trusted to interpret it all? Luther? Calvin? Henry VIII? King James? Some graduate of Billy Bob’s Bible College and Transmission Repair shop? Why? Based on what?

You can always trust the Vulgate, which was blessed by the Church. If you don’t know Latin, trust the English Douay-Rheims direct translation version. Today, I use the RSV (Catholic Version) which is the version most quoted these days in many if not most of the most current Vatican documents, Council documents and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. If the Church trusts it that much, that’s good enough for me.

Tipping Point: The End Game.

What we have been talking about in all of this is the fracturing of Western Civilization, and the fracturing of the Christian part of Eastern Civilization. Christianity is our religion and from Christianity do we draw our guiding moral code and social ethos; that which Tocqueville called our goodness, and the source of our national greatness. The two great enemies of Christianity, equality before the law, individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the idea of self-rule are clearly identified today as Marxism and Islam. Both began life as outside-in aggressive systems of conquest – Marxism as an inducement to global violent revolution against the status-quo, and Islam as a simple invading and conquering military force. Both have morphed into inside-out infiltration systems aimed at slowly destroying sovereign nations from within, and eventually taking charge of them by force.

We talked about the fraud of Marxism in the Refuting Marx page. We talked about the fraud of Islam in the Refuting Mohammed page. Millions have been seduced by these two demonically evil false ideologies. They do not recognize the falsehood, deception and evil of them.

Most American Liberals do not recognize themselves as Marxists, or as promoting Marxism, let alone that Marxism itself is a false and evil ideology. Having either abandoned or minimalized religion as any sort of guiding influence on their lives, they no longer see God as the author of nature, and they seek to take charge of and improve nature, including the nature of man. Whether they call themselves liberal, progressive, Leftist, Socialist – it doesn’t matter. All aim at the exact same target. The most idealistic among them aim at the perfection of man and the perfection of a social order, so that the world will be fair, and no one anywhere will ever be wanting for anything. They seek to create a heaven on earth, in other words; worldly perfection. Having first abandoned God, without realizing it, they put themselves in the place of God.

The “in-the-know” true revolutionaries or Alinskyites among them know full well what it is all about, and they use these idealists as tools, as useful idiots, with which to achieve their evil ends.

Most American Moslems do not recognize themselves as Islamists, or Jihadists, or as promoting eventual world domination by Islam, let alone that Islam itself is a false and evil ideology. Many actually believe they follow a true religion. They point to histories of Islamic rulers such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who established a secular government over an Islamic state, divorcing religion from government. What they did not realize is that the philosophy of Ataturk was fatally flawed, because Islam itself is a self defined form of government. Islam itself is the law. You cannot faithfully follow the faith of Islam and divorce Islam from the government. You cannot faithfully follow the faith of Islam and form any form of civil law other than the law of Islam. Secular governments of Islamic people are destined to eventually fail and fall into pure Islamic rule.

American “experts” of Islam worry excessively about Sharia Law and the advance of “radical” Islam. But there is only one Islam, and only one Koran. Sharia Law should be the last thing non-Moslems need to worry about. The Islamic imperative to either get us to convert to Islam, forcefully make us submit to Islamic law, or kill us, comes out of the Koran, not out of Sharia Law. It is the order of the prophet Mohammed, recorded in the Koran, and it is an integral and irrevocable part of the Islamic religion. Islam itself opposes individual liberty, freedom of religion, the right to life, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our religion. Don’t take my word for it – read the Koran.

Forces are lining up for world war as European economies crash and burn and Islam moves the Middle East and North Africa toward one or more Grand Caliphates. Some European countries are in serious danger of internal civil war. Russia is aligning with Syria, and China is aligning with Iran, and as much as they might oppose and/or fear each other, they will all gladly ally with each other against us. Islam and Marxism, which you would think to be polar opposites, are joining in uneasy alliance; both seek greater world instability, and both seek to promote it and take advantage of it. The pattern is there; it has happened before. Economic catastrophe is followed by world war, which is followed by a major reshuffling of geo-political power. There are several very big and very ruthless competitors who hope to wind up on top in the end.

They sense that the moment is here, now, because the Obama Presidency is doomed in the next election. While he is in office, he will not come to the defense of Israel; he would not come to the defense of the Vatican; he will not come to the defense of anyone. It is now or never; the iron is hot, and there is no one to stop them.

On our side of the ocean, Comrade Obama, peace be upon him, is desperate for an excuse to suspend the election on an emergency basis, and stay in power. He would love an excuse to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution; if he does, it might be all over. He has done all he can to weaken our defense forces, cut our weapons, cut our fuel production, cut our production of everything, reduce our economy and cause an economic crisis of epic proportions. He has infiltrated Marxists, members of the Moslem Brotherhood and gangsters into the armed forces and security forces. Everyone around him, all of his advisors, read like a who’s who of radical Marxism, anarchy and anti-Americanism.

Chief Justice John Roberts stirs a surprising new blend of anti-Americanism into this witches cauldron of mischief with his two stunning decisions this week. It turns out that he is a deep-cover, exceptionally deceitful anti-Constitutionalist.

First, his hare-brained decision on the Arizona border enforcement was a direct blow against state border security, which is to say state sovereignty. Second, it was a direct blow against American border security, which is to say American national sovereignty. He knew full well when he sided with the other Court Leftists that Comrade Obama, peace be upon him, had made the un-Constitutional and illegal decision to not enforce law and protect Arizona’s border with Mexico. That was the sole reason the Arizona law was legislated. The only part of the law left standing was the one to check ID and report criminals to the Feds; but the Feds would not prosecute, and Roberts knew that. Just to seal it, and to insult Arizona, immediately after the decision the President ordered the Feds to disregard any such ID calls from Arizona; so much for American national sovereignty, and so much for Arizona state sovereignty.

Second, he upheld the whole of the flat-out un-constitutional Obamacare fraud. He actually changed the law as legislated to make the mandate into a tax, of all things. In so doing, he made it into the largest tax increase in the history of the world, and with this legal precedent he enabled the federal government to tax without limitation in the future. Even Woodrow Wilson had to go the route of an actual Constitutional Amendment to establish an income tax – Roberts just established a virtually unlimited tax license for the federal government with the stroke of a pen.

What are we to do about all this. The truly stunning thing about all this is that they – including especially Chief Justice Roberts – actually think that we are so ignorant or so stupid as to not see and understand what they are doing to us, and to America. The disconnect seems to be total. They don’t have the first clue as to how many of us read and understand the Constitution, walk around with a copy in our shirt pocket, and can probably understand it better than they. Nor do they understand that, unlike them, we love it. We have got to get these bastards out of office.

There is nothing in the Constitution preventing impeachment of Supreme Court Justices, Senators or Representatives, as well as Presidents. Five members of this Court just flat-out opposed the clear English wording of the Constitution they all swore to protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic, in their oaths of office. If they so willingly oppose our Constitution, they have no business sitting on our Court. Show me where there is any prohibition or restriction in our Constitution against impeaching any Justice of the Supreme Court. If there were any such restriction, all I can say is that if Woodrow Wilson could amend the Constitution on one year flat, so can we, and if that is what we have to, we should do it.

I knew it would come to something like this with Comrade Obama, peace be upon him, but I never dreamed Roberts would pull a wild decision like this out of his ass. Look at the I told you so page and the right-column articles; before he was elected I predicted the need to impeach him. After the election, I said we needed to take the Senate in the 2010 election, because only the Senate tries cases of impeachment, and I knew what he intended to do to America. It was all easily predictable. Rush Limbaugh recently named Nancy Pelosi Queen of the planet Stupider, an absolutely apt title. But if she is the Queen, then Harry Reid is the King of the planet Stupider, and so long as he owns the Senate, no one is going to impeach anyone. I told you so, long ago. And here we are.

We need to take the Senate and the House and the Presidency, with big numbers. We need to repeal Obamacare completely, and not replace it with anything; just repeal it. Romney used the word “replace” twice in his speech; I’m not surprised; he’s a Progressive too. Once again, the Democrats picked our candidate for us, just like last time. We need enough Constitutional Conservatives in the House and in the Senate to see to it that he gets no “replacement” bill to sign. Repeal the whole damned thing, and do not allow any federal legislation to touch health care or health care insurance.

In the first place, the federal government is not qualified to practice medicine, or to practice medical insurance.

In the second place, the powers of the federal government are limited and enumerated; there is nothing in Article 1 Section 8 (or anywhere else) about medical practice, or about medical insurance practice. Therefore, the federal government has no business even addressing these topics.

The Congress legislates law; the Executive executes law; the Judiciary adjudicates law. None of them do medicine, and none of them do insurance.

At least not Constitutionally, which is to say legally.

Among the most stupid assed Court decisions, this one approving Obamacare has got to rank right up there with the Douglas “penumbras formed by emanations” decision spoken of in the Abortion page, and the Black decision spoken of in the Separation of Church and State page. In both cases, we called for legislation to set those decisions aside and remove the “legal precedent” they established in case law, because they had the effect of making new law, or, in the abortion case, of voiding legislated, representative law in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Making law is in the domain of the Congress, not the Court. The same sort of thing needs to be done now to Obamacare, so that no future government jackasses can use new tax laws to make us buy turnips, or Cadillacs, or solar panels.

The longer I live the more I am convinced that Washington is full of people with long resumes, advanced degrees out the ying yang, lots of class-room theory, but in the practical world, they can’t hit themselves in the butt with both hands.

Pray hard that America makes it to and through the next election and inauguration.

God help us.

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