This week on Faith On Trial: Daniel Schmidt, senior
litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel on the
continuation of church closings
in some parts of the United States; and Dr. Matthew Bunson, executive editor of
EWTN News on what the polls are showing about Catholic voting patterns.
Thursday at 10 a.m. Central and streaming on IowaCatholicRadio.com – or you can download our free app. The program will re-broadcast at 10 p.m.
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Homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A; Gospel; Matthew 22:15-21
Good Morning:
In
reflecting on the election we must understand that no matter how important the
races are, neither the Church nor any of its ordained ministers can or should
tell you who to vote for. That is not our role, and the decisions some bishops
made to curb their clergy from electioneering from the pulpit is not out of
line.
But what
we can advise you to do is to understand your duties as a citizen of God’s
kingdom in conjunction with your obligations as citizens of the United States.
So how do we determine how to vote? I think the obvious place to begin is with
this morning’s Gospel: Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God
what belongs to him.
“Render
unto Caesar” is a phrase we have heard a lot. In today’s gospel reading we see
another effort by the local Jewish establishment to trap Jesus. The tax he was asked about was a head tax
required of every man, woman and slave between the ages of 12 and 65 – it
amounted to about a day’s wage and was the price of being a subject of the
Roman Empire.
Now as you
heard, there were two groups involved:
the Pharisees, who would have opposed paying the tax because to do so meant
paying allegiance to the Roman emperor, and the Herodians who supported the tax
and the Roman puppet King Herod. Thus, between the two factions there was no
way in which Jesus could answer their question without condemning himself.
But, as he
had done before, Jesus gave an answer that was unexpected and told the crowd
what really mattered: our ultimate allegiance belongs to God, our allegiance to
the state is limited.
Fast
forward to today; what does this mean to us today in 21st century
America?
Well, for
many it was taken as an endorsement of the separation of Church and state. Of course, the separation of Church and state
is a modern concept; for much of Western history Church and state were
interwoven. But for the United States –
with our history of religious tolerance – it was probably not a bad
explanation; and in any event, few issues bridged the gap between Church and
state – or between God and Caesar.
Thus, we
have always had a very patriotic Church, one willing to support our nation and
willing to give its sons to protect it.
Our political involvement was limited to aspects of social and racial
justice, and defending the right of conscience and religious freedom and we
generally tended to adhere to the partisan beliefs of our parents, believing
that God and Caesar could coexist nicely in America – and indeed they had.
Times,
however, change, and with that change many moral issues have become political
ones. As the Freedom Riders of the 60s
found, when these issues arise it is our duty as Christians to bring Caesar to
God and if there is a dispute between them, to do as Jesus suggested in the
Gospel today: give our ultimate allegiance to God; for to do any less is to set
Caesar as a rival to God and to cloak him with the robe of divinity as did the
Romans – for the inscription on the coin given to Jesus read “Tiberius Caesar,
son of the divine Augustus, high priest.”
Thus as
Christians we cannot retreat to the mantra of separation of Church and state
and pronounce these issues “just politics” and evaluate them using the same
considerations one would give to questions of road use taxes, arts funding, or
monetary policy.
So the
question that is posed to us is this: Do
we render to Caesar these basic questions of morality, or do we render them to
God? In short, what is it that belongs
to God that must be reserved to him alone?
Let’s
start then from a simple, basic premise:
Life belongs to God; especially the innocent life of the child in the
womb … for if we render that life to Caesar we have, in effect, revoked that
right and have rendered every other human right contingent on the will of
Caesar, not God.
We are
today engaged in exactly that struggle.
For under the guise of claiming the right to life to itself, our modern
Caesar is now claiming the right to our conscience: dictating when and how
Catholic institutions must react to its dictates.
And it is
happening. In New York, the governor signed an abortion law that permitted
abortion of a baby even during the birthing process, before a crowd that gave
him a standing ovation for so acting. New York is not alone, and across this
great nation there are those who promise more liberal abortion laws, including
the call for employers, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, to be forced to
provide such services or to be forced out of business.
In a like
manner, today we are seeing forces of evil trying to use Caesar to close our
churches and places of worship, many finding an excuse to do so in the pandemic
that has disrupted our lives for the past nine months. Religious liberty is
being attacked in some quarters as violation of the separation of God and
Caesar. And I’m not thinking about isolated cases, these forces permeate our
political landscape.
Now many
of you know that I am an attorney and part of what is loosely referred to as
the Catholic media. I assist when I can on issues of religious liberty, I write
a weekly column for the national Catholic newspaper The Wanderer, and I host a program on religious liberty weekly on
Iowa Catholic Radio called “Faith On Trial.”
Every day
my in-box is filled with new reports of secular forces trying to wrest the
crown of divinity from God and to crown Caesar with it. Catholic and Christian
groups are being banned and thrown off the campuses of public universities;
local officials are using zoning laws to control access to churches and
Christian facilities, and, of course, secular politicians who are protecting
the chief architect of death, Planned Parenthood – some even going so far as to
prosecute reporters who uncovered its horrendous business practices of
illegally selling the parts of aborted babies.
The
problem can also be seen in those areas where Catholic adoption agencies have
been forced to close because men have given Caesar the right to determine what
a family is, and in hospitals where secular groups are trying to force Catholic
hospitals to perform abortions and other medical procedures that violate the
tenants of Catholic moral teaching. Here in the United States several courts
have already held parts of Sacred Scripture to be “hate speech.”
As you
know it is happening around the globe.
In Canada I could be arrested for the content of this homily; and in
Europe, as I’ve mentioned before, a Protestant pastor, Ake Green, was arrested,
tried and convicted for the crime of preaching against same-sex relationships
in a sermon he gave in his church to his congregation.
The point
is, once we have ceded the basic issue of life to Caesar, there is nothing he
will not be able to do. We, as
Catholics, must follow the example of Christ … he did not fear Pilate nor
Caesar … he spoke the truth. We cannot
do less.
Pope
Benedict, summed up this problem in what he termed the “silent apostasy” – the
inclination many of us have to stand back from the political fray – to look on
these issues as private, dogmatic views that we can take or leave at will; or
the fallacy that economic policies are somehow equivalent to or even trump the
issue of life.
We have
come a long way to this point. I do not think that our grandparents ever had to
face the moral choices we do today. And I think we have gotten here because
somewhere – maybe in the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, or our
support of costly overseas wars, or perhaps it was the abuse of capitalism and
the rush to accumulate personal wealth and secular goods.
But
somehow we have sunk into a cesspool of moral relativism, where we have
jettisoned the God who created us and placed the crown of divinity on a god which
we ourselves have created.
It’s time
for us now – for the sake of our own souls to return to him who caused us to
be. It is only then that our nation can be saved from the ravages of the
cesspool which we have helped create.
We are
told in Scripture “If my people humble themselves and pray, and seek my face
and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from Heaven and pardon their
sins and heal their land.” In the few weeks before the election I would urge
each of you to do just that. Come here, in our chapel, and sit with Our Lord,
humbly seeking his healing for our ailing nation.
And then
when you vote, remember what belongs to God and do not surrender it to Caesar.
That crown of divinity belongs to Jesus Christ and him only. And remember when
you appear someday, as we all will, before the great heavenly choir, sitting on
the throne of justice will NOT be the Divine Caesar.
Deacon Mike Manno
St. Augustin Parish, Des Moines, Iowa
October 18, 2020
As we noted before, this Thursday on Faith On Trial meet
the producers of the EWTN films, A Wolf
in Sheep’s Clothing, and A Wolf in
Sheep’s Clothing II – The Gender Agenda, Stephen and Richard Payne.
Wolf
in Sheep’s Clothing is the story of Saul Alinsky, the father of
community organizing, and the rise of his Cultural Marxism in the Catholic
Church and America.
A Wolf
in Sheep’s Clothing II – The Gender Agenda, examines the origins of
the so-called Sexual Revolution, with its current emphasis on gender dysphoria
and homosexuality, and explains how the battle over marriage and family will be
won.
On the program we’ll also have Brenna Bird, formerly attorney for then Governor Terry Branstad, and now the Guthrie County attorney to discuss some of the issues surrounding the Supreme Court and the plan to “pack” the court. All at 10 a.m. Central on Iowa Catholic Radio.
WASHINGTON – Yitzchok and Chana Lebovits, who send their daughters to Bais Yaakov Ateres Miriam (BYAM) – an Orthodox Jewish school for girls– are taking New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio to court today over new COVID restrictions intended to close religious schools in Orthodox Jewish communities. In Lebovits v. Cuomo, with help from Becket and the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, Yitzchok and Chana are asking the court to end Cuomo’s unscientific and discriminatory targeting of the Orthodox Jewish community and allow their children to get back to the classroom.
On October 6, following an increase in COVID-19 cases that Governor Cuomo admitted “would be a safe zone” in many other states, the state imposed new indefinite lockdowns on a select number of zip codes in New York that target the Orthodox Jewish community. The new restrictions have completely banned in-person instruction at BYAM and other schools in Jewish neighborhoods in New York City—stripping parents of their right to direct the religious education and upbringing of their children. The restrictions come after months of Cuomo and de Blasio scapegoating the Jewish community for the spread of COVID while praising nearby mass protests. Last week, a federal judge in New York found the new restrictions to be specifically targeting the Orthodox Jewish community.
“We are devastated for our daughters and their classmates who are needlessly suffering because of the Governor’s policy,” said Chana Lebovits, mother of two Bais Yaakov students. “Governor Cuomo should not take away part of my daughters’ childhood because other people are afraid of Orthodox Jews. We hope the court will let our daughters go back to school so they can pray and learn together with their classmates.”
Beginning in March, BYAM voluntarily transitioned to remote learning to protect its neighbors and in compliance with the law. In the months that followed, the school spent thousands of dollars equipping teachers with the resources they needed to effectively teach over Zoom. Nevertheless, remote learning proved to be a poor substitute for in-person instruction. Students have suffered academically. Teachers have reported alarming regression in reading skills, had to reteach prayers, and are requesting last year’s math textbooks. Since reopening, BYAM has followed rigorous health and safety protocol, including masking, social distancing, and daily temperature checks—the result of which has been zero COVID cases in the school.
Since its founding in 2012 BYAM has worked to instill the value and tradition of Orthodox Judaism in the next generation of women. Religious education is a centuries-old tradition that is indispensable to practicing the Jewish faith and passing it on to the next generation. Communal prayer, participating in bible studies and engaging in group projects designed to instill ethical values are all just some of the vital activities BYAM provides for its girls. These opportunities simply can’t be fulfilled through telelearning and the new lockdown orders threaten the vitality of BYAM’s traditions and the religious messages they convey in the lives of the girls that attend.
“There is no place for bigotry in the Big Apple,” said
Mark Rienzi, president and senior counsel at Becket. “By Cuomo’s own
admission, schools are not significant spreaders of COVID-19, and the new
policy was not driven by science but was made from 'fear'—fear of Orthodox
Jews. Cuomo and de Blasio need to follow the science, follow the law, and
stop scapegoating Jews. The Mayor and the Governor should be ashamed.”
UPDATE:
WASHINGTON – Just hours after being ordered by a federal judge to explain his shutdown of Jewish schools in court, Governor Andrew Cuomo held a press conference in which he reversed course and agreed to allow the schools to open in Far Rockaway. The announcement came on the heels of the lawsuit filed by Yitzchok and Chana Lebovits, who send their daughters to Bais Yaakov Ateres Miriam (BYAM) – an Orthodox Jewish school for girls. The lawsuit alleged that Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio had illegally discriminated against the school, even though there had been no cases of COVID and both officials had previously admitted that schools have not been spreading the virus.
EWTN’s a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is the
story of Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, and the rise of his
Cultural Marxism in the Catholic Church and America.
EWTN’s new film, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing II – The Gender
Agenda, examines the origins of the so-called Sexual Revolution, with
its current emphasis on gender dysphoria and homosexuality, and explains how
the battle over marriage and family will be won.
Both films this Saturday starting at 8:30 ET on EWTN – The Eternal Word Television Network.
By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD
(The Wanderer) -- I
am not a constitutional scholar. I was a simple next-door lawyer who made my
living by helping people out of fixes, purchasing homes, adopting children, and
plodding through the vexations of life. Nothing special; I graduated, passed
the bar, took all my continuing education classes, and paid my bar membership —
when I remembered.
But there is something
that really scares me about where the law and our courts may be headed. In two
and a half weeks, when the election is over, I’ll either feel relieved or on
the verge of political despair. So I would like to know the answer to what I
consider the most important unanswered question of the year: Mr. Biden, will
you pack the Supreme Court?
As I write this, the
Democratic nominee has refused to answer this question, although senior members
of his party have promoted the idea. It’s a fair thing to do, they say, because
the number of justices is left to Congress; besides, it’s been done before.
Well, maybe, sorta. I
think we need to look a little deeper first.
The Constitution,
article III, section 1 simply states: “The judicial power of the United States,
shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the
Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” That’s about it. No
numbers, no qualifications listed, just that one sentence which is followed by
the sentence stating that judges have no set terms of office, they “shall hold
their offices during good behavior” which basically means for life.
So how did we get to
the number nine and what is so magical about it? Well, the proponents of
court-packing are correct about the court’s history. The current number was
settled on in 1869 but prior to that the court membership fluctuated to as few
as five and as many as ten. But what the proponents miss in their “what’s in a
number” argument is that there were legitimate historical reasons for the
number fluctuation.
The first Congress set
the court at six justices. District courts were established to hear cases in
the various states. However, in appeals from the district courts, justices from
the Supreme Court would sit with district court judges to resolve the case
before appeal to the top court. Rather than creating a new level of courts for
each geographical circuit, Congress ordered that two Supreme Court justices and
one district court judge would sit on the circuit panels.
This necessitated the
Supreme Court justices to travel to different venues to hear these cases. Thus
the justices would spend most of their time traveling the circuit to which they
were assigned. Supreme Court justices would then schedule and meet in
Washington, D.C., to hear the cases that were still being appealed by one of
the parties.
Now as the nation
expanded, there developed a need to expand the geographic boundaries of the
circuits and as they were expanded it was necessary to add a judge or two to
the High Court so that they could continue their function of “riding the
circuit” with the judges from the local area. In 1837 with the admission of
eight new states, Congress added two new circuits and two more justices,
bringing the total to nine.
The admission of
California added a new circuit and caused the addition of the tenth justice in
1863. In 1869 Congress set the number of justices at the current number, nine.
In 1911 Congress created a distinct level of courts to hear the initial appeals
from the district courts and the nexus between circuits and the number of
justices was finally cut.
That’s how we
ultimately got to nine. However, in 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
unhappy with the Supreme Court striking down so many of his New Deal programs
on 5-4 votes, began discussing the concept of increasing the court to fifteen.
During that term, however, one of the associate justices drawing the
president’s ire, Owen Roberts, took a legal left turn and upheld a Washington
minimum wage law. The court packing plan then flopped with even Roosevelt’s
supporters rejecting it.
It died in the Senate
by a vote of 70 to 20, its defeat helped by Roberts’ “switch in time that saved
the nine.”
Now, just as
Roosevelt’s plan was aimed at shifting the ideological balance of the court by
changing its composition, now the Democrats have suggested the same thing.
During the primary campaign last year, Mayor Pete Buttigieg suggested the idea
of a 15-member court composed of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five
chosen by the first ten. Obviously that would require a constitutional
amendment. However, the idea of just adding more justices became an easy option
for Democrats and many party leaders, as well as rank and file members, have
endorsed it.
And what a dream for
them. A party controlling Congress and the White House could pack the court at
a whim. Easy, simple, and a cute way to get around the conservative bloc and
show Amy Coney Barrett who’s really in charge.
Problem is, of course,
both sides can play that game as well as plenty of others with the make-up of
the court. Congress could add requirements that required the appointment of a
percentage of non-lawyers, or subject the court to a racial or gender balance,
or even a political balance, as Mayor Buttigieg suggested.
And what kind of
stability would that create? One of the hallmarks of the law should be its
predictability: People want to lead their lives assured that they and their
affairs will be safe and legal. How is that to happen with a permissive court
that would be willing to curb property rights, First Amendment expression,
religious tolerance, and other rights we’ve become used to?
The great debate over
the court today is not about health care or abortion. It is about two differing
judicial philosophies. In one the court is obligated to consider the words of
the Constitution as understood by the authors of those words. The other sees
the Constitution as a living document in which the courts breathe life into it
by interpreting the words to give meaning to modern ideas, thus unofficially
amending it by redefining concepts and terms.
Without a doubt there
are things today that were not contemplated by the framers. But that does not
mean their words were imperfect because of a change in time, as suggested by
some.
Let me give you a quick
example: The First Amendment grants the right to freedom of the press. In 1789
when the Constitution was adopted, “press” referred to a printing device by
which people could use to communicate. There was no thought of radio,
television, or the Internet. Yet they all fall under the freedom of the press
because the concept of “press” was communication.
On the other hand,
there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. Yet in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 case in which Connecticut’s
Comstock Law, banning the sale of any drug or device that prevented conception,
was struck down as violating the right to privacy. So how did the court find
that right? Well, in the penumbra, of course. That then brings up the question,
what the heck is a penumbra?
A penumbra is an area
of partial illumination, a place between a shadow and full light. Get it? A
penumbra is a twilight area where constitutional rights that were never seen
before hide until needed.
As I’m sure you are
aware, Griswold’s progeny includes Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell v. Hodges, among others. Penumbras live!
In 2020, just as in
2016, the Supreme Court and the judiciary are front and center in the
presidential election. Mr. Trump has not only shown us what kind of
jurisprudential theory he is looking for in picking judges, he has given us a
list from which he will pick. Mr. Biden refuses to do so, and as of this
writing he even refuses to tell us if he supports the Democratic court-packing
plan.
His response to the
question is that he doesn’t want to make an issue of it. He’s running for the
presidency of the United States. It’s already an issue; plain meaning vs.
penumbras. He can’t kid himself out of this question. As the newspaper ad once
said, “inquiring minds want to know.”
And there are a lot of
inquiring minds asking the same question. So, Mr. Biden, please tell us, do you
support packing the Supreme Court? A simple yes or no will do.
(You can reach Mike at DeaconMike@q.com, and hear him every Thursday at 10 a.m. Central on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)
Nick Reaves from the Becket Fund for Religions Liberty will give us a look at the arguments being readied for the Supreme Court over an anti-Catholic and anti-Christian rule adopted by the City of Philadelphia that adoption and foster care agencies must follow. Then Logan Spena from the Alliance Defending Freedom on a Florida ruling against Florida State University for removing a Catholic student senate president from his post for comments he made defending Church doctrine in a Catholic chat-room.
Faith On Trial airs every Thursday morning at 10 a.m. (Central) on Iowa Catholic Radio, and can usually be heard during a rebroadcast at 10 p.m. See the “Program archive / About us” page for more information on listening and contacting us.
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
(The Wanderer) Ten years ago, Dr. Angelo Codevilla wrote America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. His best-seller analysis of our country’s bipartisan elites quickly formed the foundation for the fledgling Tea Party and, later, for the unprecedented coalition that elected Donald Trump in 2016.
The Ruling Class has never accepted Trump’s victory. It was — and is — illegitimate, they insist. To employ Thomas Sowell’s term, they view themselves to be “anointed” as our natural betters to tell us how to live our lives. For them, those millions of us whom Hillary Clinton labeled as “Deplorables” belong in the class described by Aristotle as “natural slaves.” Our lives will be better if we are ruled by those naturally superior to us than if we lived according to our own lights.
Deplorables disagree. We “believe that the system is rigged,” Codevilla wrote. We want to “drain the swamp.”
Of course, the elites fought back. Their power, wealth, and status were on the line. The “revolution” Codevilla predicted in the 2010 title was coming to pass. By 2017, he described the conflict as a “Cold Civil War.”
“Well-nigh the entire ruling class — government bureaucracies, the judiciary, academia, media, associated client groups, Democratic officials, and Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — have joined in ‘Resistance’ to the 2016 elections,” he wrote. For a time, they embraced “politics as war,” using every power, legitimate and otherwise, to resist. By 2019, however, he saw violence as inevitable. “At a certain point, the other side shoots back,” he wrote — and that was before the riots that still ravage America’s urban areas.
With the prospect of revolution so close at hand, we turn to Edmund Burke. Russell Kirk calls Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France “one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.” And there are ominous parallels with our own time — too many, alas. Consider: Burke visited France three times, Kirk writes, “returning to London dismayed at the rise of atheism among the French.”
If Burke visited the United States today, would he be dismayed to see our Ruling Class’ repudiation of The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God? Is the rise of atheism nothing short of a pandemic?
The Qualm Before The Storm
Joe Sobran limned that phrase to depict the precarious uncertainty that precedes the inevitable conflict. History doesn’t repeat itself, we are told, but it rhymes. The present moment finds us in the midst of a tsunami of lies, ideology, venom, and hate. Reason, logic, and history itself lie undefended on the precipice of ruin. The preambles of Revolution can span a long period of time, Codevilla observes, and the timeline of our own civilization’s collapse is long indeed. But the moment the “spark” (to use Lenin’s term) ignites, the “shock of events” takes over. That stage of the revolution never takes long.
“The presumption of the ‘Age of Reason’ roused Burke’s indignation and contempt,” Kirk writes.
“Indignation and contempt.” Doesn’t that describe our own response to the elites’ gaggle of grifters and powermongers of our own time?
Kirk continues: “Endowed with the prophet’s vision, [Burke] marvelously foresaw the whole course of events which would follow up on the French attempt to reconstruct society after an abstract pattern.”
Today’s “pattern” is no longer a mere abstraction. It is a cauldron of chaos.
Burke’s vibrant vision belongs as much to our own time as to his. “The
revolution,” writes Kirk, “after careering fiercely through a series of stages
of hysterical violence, would end in a despotism.”
On this point, Codevilla cites Aristotle, who “points out that oligarchies born
of violent revolution tend to succumb to the very violence that births them,
quickly degenerating into some kind of tyranny or one-man rule.”
And it doesn’t take long. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” observed royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan. Dictators are able to consolidate their power because they first eliminate those who once served as their fawning enablers.
The hangers-on, the sycophants, the slobbering lapdogs who preened for those
pirouetting pomposities will no longer be required. In fact, they will now be
the competition. Soon they will be sent to the Gulag or to the gallows.
Machiavelli proposed that the Prince deal with them all at once, with all of
them. Many tyrants since have tipped their bloody hat to the master.
The tyrants will also deal with the Deplorables, of course. Including us
Catholics. We all know what happened to the Church and the faithful in
revolutionary France, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and China, to
name a few. So it’s especially daunting to discover that that the Vatican isn’t
leading the resistance. Nor is the USCCB. In fact, they both seem to be
cheering the revolution along.
What Is To Be Done?
So we Deplorables are going to be on our own. Branded by our shepherds as “racists,” “bigots,” even “Pharisees,” the faithful too will be sent underground or worse, as our brothers and sisters have been dealt with in Communist China, which seems to be the working model of “Catholic Joe” Biden, with the glowing imprimatur of the Vatican’s scandal-tainted insider Bishop Zanchetta.
But wait — what about reform? Isn’t that what the Jacobins, then and now, promise to deliver? Here Burke delivers a warning that was too late for France but not for us:
“Is it then true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or
undeserving of reform? So that it was of absolute necessity that the whole
fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of
a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place?
“All of France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789,”
he writes. “The instructions to the representatives to the Estates-General,
from every district in that Kingdom, were filled with projects for the
reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to
destroy it.”
No one in early 1789 wanted to destroy the Ancien Régime, he writes. “Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they would never have permitted the most remote approach.”
In this, today’s Jacobins are ahead of the curve. Do they really want only reform? No way. Revolution is in the air — although admittedly, our radical Democrats want only to destroy parts of the Constitution, not all of it.
Historian Carl B. Cone writes that, before the French Revolution, Burke’s view of the French Enlightenment had been theoretical, cautious, and indecisive. But in short order, “the shock of events transformed it. Events clarified his thinking, removed his indecisiveness, and enabled him to make up his mind about the evils and dangers of the revolution.”
Will the “shock of events” transform our own view of today’s Jacobins? Will we
reject them with scorn and horror? Because, in Russell Kirk’s words, they want
to finish the job of “[bringing] down in ruins most of what was fine and noble
in traditional society.”
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, OMI, was hopeful, but he wasn’t an
optimist. “I expect to die in bed,” he wrote, “my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as the Church has done so often in human history.”
Holy Martyrs of the Vendée, pray for us!
By Catholic League President Bill Donohue
It is being reported that the Biden campaign is bragging
about the support the Democratic presidential candidate is getting from 1,600
faith leaders. They shouldn’t. Vote Common Good is a motley crew of left-wing
activists who are more a liability than an asset to the Biden campaign.
For example, there is an embarrassing letter to pastors,
clergy and faith leaders featured on the website of Vote Common Good that is
anything but the kind of statement we would expect from religious leaders. It
is a vicious ad hominem attack on the president.
Instead of praising Biden or criticizing President Trump’s
policies, the letter speaks with derision about Trump’s supporters and descends
into an assault on his alleged “amorality.” It also encourages religious
leaders to play the race card by using the pulpit to hammer the “white
Christians” who voted for Trump in 2016.
The executive director of Vote Common Good is Doug Pagitt,
a left-wing Christian who has worked closely with Jim Wallis, the former
Marxist who founded Sojourners. In August, this mainline Protestant
publication was forced to pull an article effectively calling U.S. bishops
racists.
Under Pagitt, his organization has given much profile to
the subject of race. It claims to be anti-racist and even sponsors something
called the “Racism Allyship Certification Program.” But no one takes them
seriously, not when they learn that its members rallied outside the White House
at Black Lives Matter Plaza (named after the racist group) before joining with
Al Sharpton. Sharpton is one of the most polarizing race-baiting preachers in
the nation.
Vote Common Good has won the support of two Catholic
notables. Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus” fame and Patrick Carolan,
another Catholic dissident. Both of them vigorously disagree with the Catholic
Church’s teaching on abortion. They implore us to keep it legal.
If this isn’t enough to discredit Vote Common Good,
learning who funds it finishes the job. Yup, they get their underwriting from
George Soros, the self-hating Jewish billionaire who funds anti-Catholic
organizations. And yes, Soros also greases Sojourners.
Biden is in deep trouble with the faithful and this gambit doesn’t help. He would have been better advised not to seek the endorsement of any religious leaders if this is the best he could do. Meanwhile, most people of faith voted for Trump last time, and they are likely to do so again. Joe will have to depend on mobilizing the atheists.
By Catholic League President Bill Donohue
With the impending battle over Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court, many reporters are focusing on a charismatic Christian organization, People of Praise, to which Barrett reportedly belongs.
Much of the coverage has been negative. The media and left-wing activists have tried to present this group as a fringe cult. These claims are bogus. People of Praise is comprised of many well-educated Christians. Indeed, they are a vibrant community that makes the Church stronger. Consider what those who know the organization have said about it.
If any senator wants to vote against Barrett, he or she will have to come up with something more credible than trying to paint People of Praise as some kind of nutty organization.
In a new report, "Critical Condition," the Public Interest Legal Foundation refutes claims of many on the left and in the mainstream media that vote fraud nationwide is negligible.
By Hans von Spakovsky and Kaitlynn Samalis-Aldrich, The Heritage Foundation
One
of the constant refrains from those who oppose election reforms designed to
protect the security and integrity of the voting process is that serious vote
fraud is a myth.
But
as a shocking new report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation
shows, those naysayers could not be more wrong.
The
foundation’s report, “Critical Condition,” highlights the severity of the
problem: inaccurate voter rolls, duplicate registrations, dead voters, and
incomplete registrations—all of which allow fraud by those willing to exploit
vulnerabilities in the system.
The
foundation discovered more than 140,000 instances of potential election fraud
in the 2016 and 2018 elections, ranging from individuals illegally voting in
multiple states to someone voting in the name of a deceased person.
How
are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn
more now >>
The
Public Interest Legal Foundation created the type of database that President
Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity wanted to
create, but was prevented from doing so by numerous frivolous lawsuits filed by
the left.
Many
state governors and election officials also refused to provide data to the
commission, which is why it was shut down before it could even do any research.
The
foundation obtained voter registration and voter history data from 42 states.
It had to sue three states—Illinois, Maine, and Maryland—to get what is
supposed to be public information after they refused to comply with their own
laws.
All
of this information was put into the Safeguarding America’s Votes and Elections
database. It was then supplemented with information from other commercial and
government data sources, such as credit agencies, obituaries, and the Social
Security Death Index.
By
supplementing the voter registration information, the Public Interest Legal
Foundation was able to sift out as many “false positives” as possible.
A
false positive in data comparisons occurs when two different individuals have
the same name and birthdate. For example, “John James Smith” born July 4, 1976,
appearing on two state voter registration lists may actually be two different
people.
By
leveraging other identifying information, such as commercial data, Social
Security numbers, and credit address histories, one can eliminate most, if not
all, false positives that have plagued prior reports from other entities.
The
foundation now has what it says is “the best platform ever constructed to
analyze the health of voter rolls and catalog potential vote fraud vulnerabilities.”
So,
what did the Public Interest Legal Foundation uncover?
There
are currently 349,773 deceased registrants on the voter rolls in 41 states. The
worst states in this regard are Michigan, Florida, New York, Texas, and
California, which account for roughly 51% of the dead voters who are still
mistakenly registered.
Even
worse, state records show that 7,890 of these deceased voters cast ballots from
the grave in the 2016 presidential election and 6,718 did so in the 2018
congressional elections.
If
that weren’t bad enough, the foundation also found that:
—
8,360 individuals registered and voted in two different states during the 2018
election.
—
43,760 individuals were registered more than once at the same address and cast
second votes in the 2016 election, while 37,889 individuals appeared to have
voted twice from the same registration address in 2018. (Thousands of these
apparent double votes were exclusively mail-in
ballots.)
—
5,500 voters cast ballots twice in the same state from two different
registration addresses in 2018.
—
34,000 voters appeared to have used nonresidential, commercial addresses—such
as gas stations, casinos, and restaurants—to register to vote.
That
last problem—registering at a commercial address—is a serious issue. In fact,
Rep. Steve Watkins, R-Kan., was charged with election fraud in July for
claiming a UPS store as his residence when he registered to vote, and then
voting in a 2019 municipal election in Topeka, Kansas.
In
2018, the foundation’s research found that 17 ballots were cast from a
self-storage facility in Compton, California, and four ballots were
cast from the NPR headquarters in Culver City, California.
The Heritage Election
Fraud Database of almost 1,300 proven cases of fraud is just a
sampling and not a comprehensive list of election fraud cases. As we note, it
“does not capture reported instances that are not investigated or prosecuted.”
Those reported cases are likely just the tip of the iceberg.
As
the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report shows, there are 144,117 other
potential cases of election fraud, just from the last two federal elections.
These should be investigated by election officials and prosecuted by law
enforcement officials if the information it uncovered is correct.
Downplaying the
risks and vulnerabilities for
fraud in the current system only exacerbates existing problems and compromises
the most sacred right a free people have.
As
the Heritage Election Fraud Database and the latest Public Interest Legal
Foundation report show, the threat of
vote fraud is real—and it could make a difference in a close election.
Editor’s note: Hans von Spakovsky discussed these matters on our radio program, Faith On Trial, on September 3. Check our “Program Archive – about us” page to find a link to that interview.