Posted by
Michael Scotto on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 11:24:42 PM
John Adams warned us this might come 240 years ago.
The nuance will come. The cries of "bigot!" and "ignorance!" will come (the tactics of the Left). But John Adams knew of the dangers inherent in a system that claims power over civil governments (Unam Sanctam) and claims the authority to threaten souls with eternal condemnation.
"Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce laws inspired by values grounded in human nature,... respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built on marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.” -
Pope Benedict XVIBenedict is not threatening them for their
individual beliefs or practices, rather he is threatening them for political (Constitutional) positions they may take. It is one thing to teach the individual that adultery is a "
grave [mortal]
sin" but quite another to
command politicians and judges (with threats of eternal punishment) to ignore civil law and rule (or vote) that adultery should be made illegal. Substitute whatever issues you'd like into that equation. This is the danger presented by the historic and official decrees from Rome.
Governments should govern at the consent of the governed
not at the behest of the priest. It should be Constitutional orginalism that guides our judges and politicians
not Canon Law.
I have warned
of this danger for years (most recently:
here ).
Everybody on the right is happy when the Pope threatens Democrats and Catholics with separation from the Eucharist (a means of sanctificaton in their system) and with the label "
formal cooperation with evil" when they don't toe the line on the issues of abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage, but what happens if and when he comes after Rightist judges and politicians on other issues (e.g. the death penalty)?
Five of the current nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholic.
The Catholic Church makes claims over civil governments that no other church makes (i.e. the civil authority wields the sword at the whim of the priest). It has made it clear that the US and the "American Church" are no different than any other part of the Church or the Catholics in any other nation. These doctrines, by decree, cannot be "reinterpreted" over time (Leo XIII).
The Popes agree with me here. Catholics must bow will and intellect to their Pope and to their bishops.
American Catholics are no different than anyone else.
"For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention to be perfected by human ingenuity, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence that meaning of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared, nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them." -Constitution de Fide Catholica, Chapter iv. (Vatican I, Quoted by Pope Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae -1899)
"If anyone holds to one single one of these (heresies) he is not a Catholic." -- Pope Leo XIII (from Encyclical Satis Cognitum : 28)
One of those "heresies" (among scores) is the belief that the Catholic Church should not be the state religion "to the exclusion of all other forms of worship" (Pius IX - Syllabus of Errors).
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no room here to list the vast number of beliefs pronounced to be "heresies" by pope after pope after council after council. The only difference today is the Pope no longer commands an army. Today he enforces the will of the Church by threatening the eternal state of American politicians.
These Papal warnings pose a grave threat to our Constitution and to the rule of law.
If you don't like it, you're not a Catholic (not my argument, but Leo's) and
separated from the only vehicle of salvation on earth, outside of which there is no salvation.