Your Excellency:

To illustrate how Christians must live in both this world and the next, our parish priest recently quoted a Jesuit who once said: “In our right hand we carry the New York Times.  In our left hand we carry the Bible.”

Another story underlines this Jesuitical observation.  An older couple were perplexed by the antics of their son, Michael.  Some evenings he spent drinking and partying, while others found him kneeling in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.  The baffled parents sought help from their priest.  “When he’s out tonight,” the priest advised, “I want you to put a Bible, a twenty-dollar bill, and a pint of whiskey on the kitchen table.  Then hide in the pantry and wait for him to come home.  Whichever object Michael takes from the table will reveal his direction in life.”

The couple followed these instructions and were watching from the pantry when Michael entered the kitchen.  He marched straight to the table, pocketed the twenty, took a long pull from the bottle of whiskey, picked up the Bible, and left the kitchen.

Flummoxed, the couple told their story to Father.  “Holy Mother of God!” the priest exclaimed.  “Your son’s called to be a Jesuit!”

Well, we’re all Black Robes now, aren’t we, Excellency?  Just like the Jesuits, we’ve got ourselves into one godawful bog, mostly by focusing on our right hand while ignoring our left.  Like some cranked-up celebrity on powders and booze, America is cracking to pieces; the empire is disintegrating.  Spiritually, too, our society is much diminished, with many citizens paying obeisance to a pantheon of secular deities: the state, mass entertainment, pleasure, and ourselves.

Our Church reflects this slippage in the practice of faith and morality.  To profess belief in the teachings of the Catechism and the Ten Commandments, to speak of evil and mortal sin, rouses a sneer among many Catholics, even priests and some bishops.  They regard dogma as old-fashioned, unsuited to a world demanding nuance and nicety.  Common sense also withers in this clash between doctrine and wiggly-squiggly emotionalism.  The American Church urges social justice for illegal immigrants, yet seldom speaks of justice for Americans who have lost their jobs or seen their wages cut competing against alien lawbreakers.  The Church condemns abortion, yet turns a blind eye to the shenanigans of Catholic pro-abortion politicians.  The Church claims to stand for traditional marriage, yet issues more annulments than the rest of the world put together.  The Church educates her own, yet produces multitudes of the dumbest practitioners of the Faith in Christendom.  The Church claims that Christ is truly present at the Mass, yet many celebrants often appear bored out of their skulls.

Illustrations of Catholic foolishness abound.  Take, for example, our diocesan newspaper of December 5, 2008.  On one page a Jesuit priest declares that “war is never justified.”  The Vatican, we read, has proclaimed that the Beatles wrote better pop songs than those written today.  One article, apparently aimed at really stupid Catholics, explains the basics of the Mass.  In another, the archbishop of San Francisco asks people on both sides of the “gay marriage” issue to “disagree without being disagreeable.”  A bishop in Mumbai urges Indians to forgive and hold hands after the terrorist attacks.

For darker illustrations of creeping moral turpitude, we need look no further than our own Catholic politicians: Home Depot Joe, Vice President of the United States; Tom Daschle, secretary of health and human services; and Nancy “Pope” Pelosi, speaker of the house.  Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Catholic pro-abortion, pro-“homosexual marriage” governor of California, told a Toronto press conference that “I always said you should not have your religion interfere with government policies or with the policies of the people.”  Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger’s Catholic pro-abortion wife, told Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, “I find I don’t spend a lot of time trying to square my daily life with the institutional church.  I pick and choose.”  (Did you know that during his presidential campaign Barack Obama met on three occasions with homosexual Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson?  How many times did Senator Obama meet with you guys to discuss traditional marriage?)

Are you bishops blind?  Can you not see that Holy Mother Church is being replaced by Holy Nanny State?  Smiley-Face Fascism is sitting right here in the front yard, staring at us like a gator in a golf-course pond.  Support for the major candidates this past election leave no doubt that Americans now worship the state, a Frankenstein’s monster spawned by Abraham Lincoln and brought to adulthood by Democrats and Republicans.

This New Fascism doesn’t depend on the jackboot, the raised fist, or internment camps but on persuasion.  Those few who oppose the new way are destroyed through media attacks, blackmail, or tax audits.  But like the old fascism, our new order does depend on fear.  You watch, Excellency: In the face of terrorism and economic chaos liberty will be shaken like a rat in a terrier’s teeth.

Yours for the Resistance,

Joe Ecclesia