Quote of the Day

"It [the Resurrection of Christ] is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding: as already anticipated in the first section of this chapter, we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical 'evolutionary leap', in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011, pp. 273--274

ElectionWatch 2014: Primary Victory in Iowa

Two days ago, Tea Party candidate Joni Ernst won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Iowa. This is an important victory for the Tea Party movement in the United States which highlights the resurgence of this movement despite the attempts of the reigning political establishment to suppress it. It's an indication, albeit an early and a small one, of what is probably going to happen this November when we the American people go to the polls: We're going to take back the Senate!

Fox News and other mainstream media outlets are already admitting that the Ernst campaign could change the balance of power in Washington. Of course, corrupt establishment Republicans and Democrats alike will spread lies, use psychological warfare, spend millions of dollars on advertising, and probably even utilize voter fraud in some close races to try to defeat the Tea Party--all of which they have been doing for the past six years. Granted, some of these tricks may produce the desired result in a few isolated cases as happened in 2010, but on the whole the desperate efforts of establishment politicians to cling to power will fail to hold back the wave of national rebellion now gaining momentum (as they failed to do in 2010). We the American people are fed up with the corrupt Obama administration and its overreaching policies, especially ObamaCare and the HHS mandate. We are going to elect (and re-elect) a slew of Tea Party candidates to state governorships as well as the U.S. House and Senate--citizen statesmen and women of religious faith and moral principle who will strive to return our country to greatness by governing in accordance with the law of God and the Constitution of the United States as the Founders intended. I'm looking forward to the next revolution in American politics, and hoping and praying that the Tea Party reform efforts won't be stymied or derailed by the big corporate lobbyist parasites in Washington who have been corrupting most of our nation's leaders for many years now.

Let's keep supporting all the Tea Party candidates with our prayers, our financial assistance, and our votes. They deserve them. Our nation's future depends on their leadership. And let's also pray for the conversion of our incumbent establishment politicians who continue to put power, money, and prestige ahead of concern for human rights and the common good.

More information and commentary on the historic 2014 elections coming soon!

Quote of the Day

"We must tell the truth: Christian life is not just one big party. Not at all! We cry, we cry so many times: when we are sick; when we have a problem with our son, in the family, with our daughter, or wife, or husband; when we see that our salary does not reach the end of the month and we have a sick child; when we see that we cannot pay the mortgage on the house and we must somehow survive ... So many problems, we have so many. But Jesus tells us: 'Do not be afraid!' 'Yes, you will be sad, cry and people will even rejoice, the people who are against you.'...

"Be courageous in suffering and remember that after, the Lord will come; after, joy will come, after the dark comes the sun. May the Lord give us all this joy in hope. And the sign that we have this joy in hope is peace. How many sick, who are at the end of life, in pain, have that peace of soul.

“This is the seed of joy, this is the joy of hope and peace. Do you have peace of soul in times of darkness, in times of trouble, in times of persecution, when everyone else rejoices at your suffering? Do you have peace? If you have peace, you have the seed of joy that will come later.”

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

“Let us receive the special grace of this moment. We pause in reverent silence before this empty tomb in order to rediscover the grandeur of our Christian vocation: we are men and women of resurrection, and not of death. From this place we learn how to live our lives, the trials of our Churches and of the whole world, in the light of Easter morning. Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the basis of our hope! Let us not deprive the world of the joyful message of the resurrection! And let us not be deaf to the powerful summons to unity which rings out from this very place, in the words of the One who, risen from the dead, calls all of us 'my brothers.'"

--Pope Francis, Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem, May 25, 2014

Reflection for Memorial Day

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." --John 15:13

Every year on Memorial Day, we Americans take a break from our normal work routine to gratefully remember and honor all those men and women who have given their lives in military service to our country--those who have died defending our freedom. This annual holiday offers an opportunity to reflect on the true meaning of freedom, as our nation's great Founders understood this term.

Today we often think of freedom as the self-endowed, absolute and inviolable ability to do whatever we want to do, with no regard for an objective moral law. But this is an erroneous conception of freedom which is detached from any responsibility to God and to our fellow human beings, and if we all put it into practice it would result in social chaos and anarchy. By contrast, freedom properly understood is the ability to do what we ought to do--to choose good and reject evil, to live by the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ. Moreover, true freedom is a gift from our Creator, and it sets certain basic limits on human behavior for our own good. As Bill Donohue has clearly pointed out in his excellent book Why Catholicism Matters, our nation's Founders believed in "ordered liberty," that is, freedom to do the right thing in accordance with "the laws of nature and of nature's God."

We need to get back to this concept of ordered liberty anchored firmly in the objective and unchanging natural law established by our Creator. It is this concept and its implementation that has made us a great nation. Only if we understand and use our freedom properly will we return to greatness as a nation.

"Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen."

So Much for the "May Camelopardalids"...

...at least from my extremely limited perspective as a lone amateur astronomer who observed the night sky from about 8:45 PM to a little past 11 PM Friday evening from my home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Perusing my emails early Friday evening, I read an article from Astronomy magazine about a brand-new meteor shower predicted to occur that very night, so I jumped at the chance to witness it for myself. The new shower has been nicknamed the "May Camelopardalids" because the meteors would appear to radiate from a point in the northern sky in the large but faint constellation Camelopardalis the Giraffe (I can identify quite a number of the constellations, but haven't learned this one yet). The shower was caused by our planet Earth crossing through a stream of dust particles along the orbit of an obscure comet, 209P/LINEAR. The article predicted rates of anywhere between 100 and 400 meteors per hour in the early morning hours, which would have put it in a class by itself since the year's traditionally best meteor shower is the Geminids in December, which produce up to 120 meteors per hour under excellent conditions. So despite partly cloudy skies, I headed out to see if I could get at least a little slice of this spectacular show, keeping watch on the northern sky. However, I only saw two meteors radiate from the expected location, one at 10:18 PM EDT and the other at 10:23 PM.

Going to bed around midnight, I wondered what I would be missing in the early morning peak of the show. Apparently I didn't miss much, as other observers recorded just a handful of meteors early Saturday morning. See, for example, this image taken on the northern shore of Lake Erie from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website (note that the long bright streak across this image is not a meteor but the International Space Station passing through the field of view). So the expected show failed to materialize. But at least the astronomy professionals were correct that we would see a new shower, because we did. We mustn't be too hard on them for being so far off on the numbers, because even annually recurring meteor showers are notoriously fickle and hard to predict. They can be dazzling one year and boring the next, even if sky conditions are similar. More often, the opposite happens--an unusual outburst will occur entirely unpredicted, and only those who happened to be observing will see it. A good reason to observe on a regular basis, because you never know when you might be treated to something special.

So much for the "May Camelopardalids," at least for this year. Only time will tell whether this will develop into a major shower or sink into obscurity alongside the South Taurids and the Ursids. Despite the lackluster performance from this new meteor shower, however, I enjoyed looking at the stars and planets Friday evening. God's creation is magnificent and communicates to us His awesome power, glory, wisdom and intelligence, and above all His infinite love for us human beings, the masterpiece of His creative work, regardless of the occasion or time of year.

Quote of the Day

"In every human situation, marked by frailty, sin and death, the Good News is no mere matter of words, but a testimony to unconditional and faithful love: it is about leaving ourselves behind and encountering others, being close to those crushed by life’s troubles, sharing with the needy, standing at the side of the sick, elderly and the outcast...Love is more powerful, love gives life, love makes hope blossom in the wilderness."

--Pope Francis

ElectionWatch 2014: Gearing Up

With the big midterm Congressional and many state gubernatorial elections less than six months away, it's time to begin another ElectionWatch series here on my blog. Some readers may recall my previous ElectionWatch 2010 series that I ran four years ago leading up to the historic 2010 midterm elections, which resulted in a landslide victory for the Tea Party movement and for the traditional religious and moral values held by the great majority of the American people. Now it's time to prepare for another important election season that promises to be just as exciting and historic, if not more so, than the elections held four years ago.

Surveying the current American political landscape allows us to discern some striking similarities between now and four years ago. The red tide of Republicanism that swept America in November 2010 was largely driven by public anger and outrage with the Obama administration over its new healthcare reform law, the deceptively misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), colloquially referred to as ObamaCare, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama despite the loud objections of fully two-thirds of the American people. Thus the elections of 2010 became a referendum on ObamaCare, a massive and outrageously expensive piece of legislation that turned out to be little more than pork barrel for the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries and for our corrupt Democratic leaders who supported it. Just two years after Barack Obama had been elected to the White House by a landslide, Republicans took back the House of Representatives by a comfortable majority, increased their strength in the Senate, and took over more than half of all state governorships.

Now, four years later, the American people are once again angry with President Obama and his corrupt Democratic cronies, and for the same reason: ObamaCare. The difference is that now this disastrous law we never wanted is in effect and we the people are suffering all the consequences that President Obama and Senate Democrats persistently denied would ever materialize. Our freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to make our own healthcare decisions are under attack as never before. Catholic hospitals are being forced to either perform or provide referrals for abortions. Health insurance plans must now include such population control items as abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations, or they don't qualify as health insurance. Thousands of Catholic and Christian educational and charitable institutions, as well as secular business owners, are being forced to sue the federal government to avoid paying massive fines for refusing to violate their religious and moral principles. Many business owners can't afford to comply with the new health insurance regulations, so they're cutting back on employees and work time. Many good doctors are suffering pay cuts and can't afford the new insurance plans either. The states can't afford to administer ObamaCare, and those attempting to do so will soon be going bankrupt. Millions of us have lost our existing health insurance coverage and can't afford the ObamaCare premiums. Millions of us are in the "coverage gap" and don't qualify even for Medicaid, leaving us just one health emergency away from financial ruin. And tens of millions of us are watching our hopes for a decent and prosperous future fade away under the onslaught of higher healthcare costs, more taxes, new bureaucratic regulations and a national debt spinning hopelessly out of control.

Bottom line: ObamaCare is destroying America, and we know it. We've been lied to. We've been cheated. The truth is getting out and hitting home. If our country is to be rescued from annihilation, ObamaCare must be repealed. But it can't be repealed unless we have a majority of Tea Party leaders in both houses of Congress. We already have a Republican majority in the House, which we held on to and slightly increased in the otherwise disastrous (and fraudulent) 2012 election. Our job now is to take back the U.S. Senate. We're only six seats away from regaining control of the Senate. We must win at least those six seats. And we have a good chance of doing just that. Incumbent Democrats in the Senate are in big trouble precisely because of their unstinting support for ObamaCare. Their constituents of both parties are angry with them. Thus, barring massive voter fraud (which negatively affected the outcome of the 2012 elections), I think it's safe to predict that we will win a majority of seats in the Senate this November, and that most of the races will be landslide victories for the Tea Party.

Let's keep our nation in our prayers as we head towards the 2014 elections. While we have good reasons to be optimistic, we must remain vigilant. The corrupt Democratic politicians who have saddled us with ObamaCare won't give up without a fight, and they will certainly throw every dirty trick in the book at us in their desperate, last-ditch attempts to retain power. However, our country desperately needs better leaders--good Christian, pro-life leaders who will uphold and protect our God-given rights and liberties and govern our nation in accordance with the Constitution as the Framers intended. We have many such leaders in the House and state governorships already. We just need more of them in the Senate. The only way to get them in is to vote for them. And only American citizens can (legally) vote. So, if you're an American citizen, start preparing now for this important election. Make sure that you're registered to vote; that you clearly know the candidates' positions on the issues, especially on abortion, religious liberty, and ObamaCare; that you go to the polls on November 4, 2014; and that you vote pro-life, pro-liberty and against ObamaCare. We can't afford to lose this time!

Stay tuned for continnuing coverage of the decisive 2014 midterm elections.

Quote of the Day

“You can’t evangelize without dialogue. It’s impossible because you must begin from where the person who is to be evangelized comes from. And this is so important. ‘But father, we waste so much time because every person has his or her own story, he or she comes with their own ideas…’ And, time is wasted. More time than God wasted when he created the world and He did it well. Dialogue. Spend time with that person because that person is who God wants you to evangelize. It’s more important to give him or her the news about Jesus, but according to who he or she is -- not how it should be, but how he or she is right now.”

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"Throughout the history of the living, the origins of anything new have always been small, practically invisible, and easily overlooked. The Lord himself has told us that 'heaven' in this world is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds (Mt. 13:31-32), yet contained within it are the infinite potentialities of God. In terms of world history, Jesus' Resurrection is improbable; it is the smallest mustard seed of history.

"This reversal of proportions is one of God's mysteries. The great--the mighty--is ultimately the small. And the tiny mustard seed is something truly great. So it is that the Resurrection has entered the world only through certain mysterious appearances to the chosen few. And yet it was truly the new beginning for which the world was silently waiting. And for the few witnesses--precisely because they themselves could not fathom it--it was such an overwhelmingly real happening, confronting them so powerfully, that every doubt was dispelled, and they stepped forth before the world with an utterly new fearlessness in order to bear witness: Christ is truly risen."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), pp. 247--248

A Timeless Message from Our Blessed Mother

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, an optional memorial on the Roman liturgical calendar. Today we commemorate the appearances of our Blessed Mother to the three shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal in 1917, a private revelation recognized by the Church as authentic. We are coming up on the one hundredth anniversary of these apparitions, which offers an opportunity to reflect on the mixed bag of our contemporary world. A lot has changed in the in the years since then, but some things, like sinful human nature, have not changed. Many great technological changes and scientific advancements have completely transformed our world for the better, yet the widespread denial and rejection of objective moral and religious truth in the name of false ideologies and philosophies has caused and is continuing to cause great suffering and misery for millions of people--as was happening in the early twentieth century with World War I and the godless ideology of Communism.

The core message of Fatima--prayer and fasting for the conversion of sinners and for peace in the world--is even more pertinent for us today than it was when first delivered nearly one hundred years ago. Our twenty-first century world, marked by selfish individualism and the "globalization of indifference," is in desperate need of prayer, fasting, conversion, and peace. Let this feast day be a reminder to us to heed Our Blessed Mother's request to pray our Rosaries and give little things up each day for the conversion of sinners and for peace in the world. And let's remember that this all starts right inside of each one of us; we must look honestly into our own hearts and identify the areas in our own lives where we ourselves need conversion. Only when human hearts change will our world really change for the better. Prayer and fasting are the means God uses to change hearts in every age. He can do it again in ours. So let's get to work!

Have a blessed feast day!

Quote of the Day

"The essential condition to preserve this gift [of counsel] is prayer. We always come back to the same subject: prayer! But prayer is so important. To pray with the prayers that we all know from childhood, but also to pray with our own words. To pray to the Lord: “Lord, help me, counsel me, what must I do now?” And with prayer we make room for the Spirit to come to help us at that moment. To counsel us on what we must all do. Prayer, never forget prayer! Never! No one, no one is aware when we pray in the bus, in the street: we pray in silence with our heart. Let us take advantage of these moments to pray, to pray that the Spirit will give us this gift of counsel."

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II were not afraid to look upon the wounds of Jesus, to touch his torn hands and his pierced side. They were not ashamed of the flesh of Christ, they were not scandalized by him, by his cross; they did not despise the flesh of their brother (cf. Is 58:7), because they saw Jesus in every person who suffers and struggles. These were two men of courage, filled with the parrhesia of the Holy Spirit, and they bore witness before the Church and the world to God’s goodness and mercy.

They were priests, bishops and popes of the twentieth century. They lived through the tragic events of that century, but they were not overwhelmed by them. For them, God was more powerful; faith was more powerful – faith in Jesus Christ the Redeemer of man and the Lord of history; the mercy of God, shown by those five wounds, was more powerful; and more powerful too was the closeness of Mary our Mother.

In these two men, who looked upon the wounds of Christ and bore witness to his mercy, there dwelt a living hope and an indescribable and glorious joy (1 Pet 1:3,8). The hope and the joy which the risen Christ bestows on his disciples, the hope and the joy which nothing and no one can take from them. The hope and joy of Easter, forged in the crucible of self-denial, self-emptying, utter identification with sinners, even to the point of disgust at the bitterness of that chalice. Such were the hope and the joy which these two holy popes had received as a gift from the risen Lord and which they in turn bestowed in abundance upon the People of God, meriting our eternal gratitude."

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"In the life of every Christian, after baptism there is also a more existential Galilee: the experience of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ who called me to follow him and to share in his mission. In this sense, returning to Galilee means treasuring in my heart the living memory of that call, when Jesus passed my way, gazed at me with mercy and asked me to follow him. It means reviving the memory of that moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me.

"Today, tonight, each of us can ask: What is my Galilee? Where is my Galilee? Do I remember it? Have I forgotten it? Have I gone off on roads and paths which made me forget it? Lord, help me: tell me what my Galilee is; for you know that I want to return there to encounter you and to let myself be embraced by your mercy."

--Pope Francis

Four Victories

The last three weeks, including Holy Week, have seen four significant victories for the American people and their God-given inalienable rights against the fierce onslaught of their twin enemies, Big Government and Big Business.

Here in Virginia, earlier this month, for the first time in our state's history, our governor, Terry McAuliffe, had denied a permit to hold a prayer service on the National Day of Prayer at noon in front of the state capitol, using the excuse that this is the hour when people eat their lunch on the capitol grounds. This prayer service has always been held at noon, which allows people who work to participate in it during their lunch break. In a break from this longstanding tradition, the governor allowed the prayer service to be held at 1 PM instead, which would have prevented many people from participating. The Family Foundation raised a storm of protest, rightly pointing out that this was a blatant case of discrimination against religious believers that could not be tolerated. Republicans, Democrats and even the ACLU joined us in denouncing the governor's move. As a result, on April 11 Governor McAuliffe relented and announced that the prayer service could be held on the capitol grounds at noon as usual. This was a victory for religious liberty and a defeat for radical secularism.

In Colorado, a terrible abortion bill that would have repealed all state restrictions on the barbaric practice was defeated on Holy Thursday, just two days after Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver rallied Catholics across his diocese to pray in front of the state capitol on Tuesday, April 15 at 3 PM. Kudos to Archbishop Aquila for being a true leader and demonstrating the courage of his convictions by challenging the culture of death head on. This was a victory for the right to life of the innocent unborn in Colorado and a defeat for the abortion cartel, led by Planned Parenthood, which is desperate to stay in business as long as possible while public demand for abortion continues to decline steadily.

On April 16, Vermont became the first state in the Union to pass a law requiring all food products sold in the state that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be labeled as containing GMOs. GMOs artificially alter the genetic structure of food crops, messing with the Creator's perfect design to produce bigger yields or make them resistant to chemical fertilizers. Although the purveyors of GMO crops claim that they are safe and healthy, a mass of troubling evidence is accumulating that tells a very different story: GMOs are harmful and destructive to human and animal health and the environment. Deep down, most Americans are rightly wary of GMO food products; surveys confirm that more than 80 percent of them want GMO food products labeled so that they can avoid purchasing them. We certainly have the right to know what's in our food and how it was grown. But Monsanto, America's leading producer of GMO food crops, has been fighting tooth and nail to protect its massive profits, spending millions of dollars on advertising campaigns to defeat GMO labeling legislation in California and other states and corrupting the FDA to ensure that GMOs remain legally hidden in thousands upon thousands of U.S. food products every year. The passage of this GMO labeling law in Vermont was a victory for American food safety, public health, and the right to know what's in our food--and a defeat for Monsanto, whose unscrupulous abuse of technology for profit and utter disregard for public health and the environment are finally getting the attention they deserve.

And finally, on April 22, Tuesday of Easter week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that an unborn child is a person, fully entitled to the same protections of the law as persons who have already been born. Such a ruling by any U.S. state or federal court is long overdue. Unborn children are persons with the same basic rights as born persons, and all courts and branches of government have a serious obligation to uphold that fact and protect those inalienable rights. Thank God there are at least a few good judges and one good court in this country that have enough common sense to render a just decision and have not been corrupted by Planned Parenthood and NARAL! This is a completely rational and logical decision that simply recognizes the objective truth of the matter—now well established by science—that the unborn child is a human person. This is a landmark decision properly grounded in natural law that protects the human rights of the innocent unborn in Alabama. Hopefully, other state courts will begin to follow suit with similar rulings to protect the right to life of the innocent unborn children in their jurisdictions as well. Moreover, this significant ruling marks the first time since Roe v. Wade that any U.S. court has explicitly acknowledged the personhood of the unborn child. Thus it signals a turning point—the beginning of a trend toward the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The misguided judges who saddled us with that horrible travesty of justice back in 1973 admitted that if the personhood of the unborn child could be established, then the rights of the fetus would be specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids depriving any innocent person of life. Such personhood being now definitively established, the conclusion is obvious: Roe v. Wade has no legal foundation in the Constitution.

These four victories for the unborn, for religious liberty, and for food safety underscore the importance of active involvement in the political arena by concerned citizens. Powerful corporate interests may increasingly dominate state and federal policies today and many bad things are happening as a result of ever more widespread government corruption, but that is no excuse to throw in the towel and say, "There's nothing I can do to change things." That's a lie from the Father of Lies, the Devil, and one of his choice strategies to further his wicked agenda is to convince good people to do nothing to stop it. There are two crucial things we can do to make a difference: 1) pray and 2) take action. Prayer is powerful and can change the course of history; it has done so many times. And timely and concerted political action can halt the march of destructive policies that would infringe on our God-given rights; it has done so many times. Praying and getting involved in the political process do make a difference. These are our duties as good Catholics and good citizens, which we should perform out of love for God, our neighbor, and our country both in good times and in bad. The fact that our nation today is a shell of its former self makes it more imperative, not less imperative, that we its citizens daily unite in offering our prayers, sacrifices, words and actions in service to our country to help restore its former greatness. As long as we continue to do that, there is hope for our nation’s future.

Someone once wrote that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Today our liberties are under attack as never before by an unholy alliance between Big Government and Big Business, driven and justified by the anti-God and inhuman ideologies of radical secularism and insatiable materialism. We must remain vigiliant in defending our inalienable God-given rights and liberties--including the right to life of innocent unborn children, our right to pray and worship God publicly, and our right to safe and healthy food--against the attacks of these twin enemies of the American people, and we must not rest until those rights and liberties threatened and denied us are fully restored and protected.

Let freedom ring!

Copyright © 2014 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

Quote of the Day

"Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind. Then he becomes the criterion on which we can rely. For then God has truly revealed himself."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 242

Easter Reflection

"What was a simple act, done surely out of love – going to the tomb – has now turned into an event, a truly life-changing event. Nothing remains as it was before, not only in the lives of those women, but also in our own lives and in the history of mankind. Jesus is not dead, he has risen, he is alive! He does not simply return to life; rather, he is life itself, because he is the Son of God, the living God (cf. Num 14:21-28; Deut 5:26; Josh 3:10). Jesus no longer belongs to the past, but lives in the present and is projected towards the future; Jesus is the everlasting "today" of God. This is how the newness of God appears to the women, the disciples and all of us: as victory over sin, evil and death, over everything that crushes life and makes it seem less human. And this is a message meant for me and for you dear sister, for you dear brother. How often does Love have to tell us: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness... and that is where death is. That is not the place to look for the One who is alive!

"Let the risen Jesus enter your life, welcome him as a friend, with trust: he is life! If up till now you have kept him at a distance, step forward. He will receive you with open arms. If you have been indifferent, take a risk: you won’t be disappointed. If following him seems difficult, don’t be afraid, trust him, be confident that he is close to you, he is with you and he will give you the peace you are looking for and the strength to live as he would have you do."

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"We have heard many names, many names. The group of leaders, some priests, some Pharisees, some teachers of the Law, who have decided to kill him. They waited for the opportunity to seize him. Am I like one of them?...

"Am I like Pilate? When I see that the situation is difficult, do I wash my hands and not know how to accept my responsibility and let people be condemned, or condemn them myself?

"Am I like that crowd that did not know whether it was in a religious meeting, a trial or a circus, and chooses Barabbas? For them it was the same: it was more entertaining to humiliate Jesus.

"Am I like the soldiers who strike the Lord, spit upon him, insult him, have fun humiliating him?

"Am I like the Cyrenian who was returning from work, tired, but who had the good will to help the Lord carry the cross?

"Am I like those who passed in front of the cross and joked about Jesus: “He was so courageous! Let him come down from the cross and we will believe in him! Joking about Jesus...

"Am I like those courageous women, and like Jesus’ Mother, who were there, suffering in silence?

"Am I like Joseph, the hidden disciple, who carried Jesus’ body with love, to put him in the tomb?

"Am I like the 2 Marys who remain at the tomb crying, praying?

"Am I like those leaders who on the following day went to Pilate to say: “Look, he said that he would be raised. Make sure that more deception does not happen!” and hold back life, block the tomb to defend doctrine, so that life does not come out?

"Where is my heart? Which of these people am I like? May this question accompany us this whole week."

--Pope Francis

Reflection for Palm Sunday

"Jesus is indeed making a royal claim. He wants his path and his actions to be understood in terms of Old Testament promises that are fulfilled in his person [cf. Gen. 49:10-11; Zech. 9:9]. The Old Testament speaks of him--and vice versa: he acts and lives within the Word of God, not according to projects and wishes of his own. His claim is based on obedience to the mission received from his Father. His path is a path into the heart of God's word. At the same time, through this anchoring of the text in Zechariah 9:9, a "Zealot" exegesis of the kingdom is excluded: Jesus is not building on violence; he is not instigating a military revolt against Rome. His power is of another kind: it is in God's poverty, God's peace, that he identifies the only power that can redeem."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), p. 5

Quote of the Day

“I fervently implore all to join in my prayer for peace in Syria and throughout the region, and make a heartfelt appeal to the Syrian authorities and to the international community: set down your weapons and bring an end to the violence! No more war! No more destruction! Respect human rights, take care of your people who are in need of humanitarian assistance, and pursue the longed-for peace through dialogue and reconciliation."

--Pope Francis

Article Heritage Series #3: Revisiting the Twenty-Second Amendment

It's time for another installment of the quarterly (or so) "Article Heritage" Series here on my blog, which features selections from my early days as a writer. This time I present an article I wrote back in late 2007 entitled, "Revisiting the Twenty-Second Amendment." On one level, this essay was driven by my nostalgia for the fact that the Bush administration would soon be ending, and by my apprehension that our country would be governed by a worse president once Bush left office. (Turned out to be true.) But on a deeper level, the prospect of the end of a presidential administration led me to reflect on the whole concept of legal term limits for American public office and whether such constitutionally imposed term limits are necessary, desireable, or even beneficial for the good functioning of our federal government.

Our nation's Founders counseled against setting term limits on any public office, arguing that it should be left up to the voters to decide whether a given public official should be re-elected for another term. If an official has served well and won the people's approval, so goes the argument, they will naturally re-elect him; if, on the other hand, he has served badly and won public disapproval, he will be voted out of office. Also, eschewing term limits leaves public officials free to decide whether to run for another term or not. For almost 150 years, following the example of George Washington, U.S. presidents voluntarily restricted themselves to a maximum of two terms in office. There was nothing wrong with that; on the contrary, this praiseworthy practice reflected the character and nobility of our nation's earlier leaders, who were selfless public servants rather than opportunistic politicians. Leaders were free to decide whether to run for another term or not, and the people were free to decide whether to re-elect them or not. The thinking was that term limits should be voluntary, not imposed by law. The Founders' rejection of constitutionally mandated term limits was thus a sign of their respect for the freedom of both leaders and people.

I have taken the Founders' position on this matter in this article. I contend that the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution, adopted in the early 1950s following the lengthy administration of FDR, should be repealed. Supporters of term limits on federal public offices claim that such limits provide a healthy and necessary check on corruption, careerism, and excessive centralization of power in the hands of a few leaders. However, the two-term limit imposed on the presidency by the Twenty-Second Amendment has not resulted in a less corrupt presidency since the days of FDR; on the contrary, we are now living under the most corrupt president in American history. Legally imposed term limits simply force corrupt and unscrupulous leaders to confine their corruption to a shorter time period, while preventing the voters from re-electing a good leader who deserves more than two terms. Moreover, power-hungry tyrants never allow legally imposed term limits to thwart their ambitions; they simply abrogate them, changing the laws to suit their agenda.

In other words, legally imposed term limits can never guarantee honest, responsible, and limited government. Only honest and responsible leaders of good moral and religious character can provide that. The core issue here is personal responsibility vs. legal and political structures. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in his encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), man is always free and must always make his decisions anew; therefore, good structures alone cannot guarantee good government. That depends on the personal character of those who govern. Many Tea Party activists are attempting to compensate for the increasing corruption of our federal government by legally restricting the number of terms senators and representatives may serve. By so doing, they are applying a political and legal solution to a moral and personal problem. A government is only as good as the people who run it. As long as we have corrupt, irresponsible, and tyrannical leaders, we will have corrupt, irresponsible, and tyrannical government regardless of what the Constitution says or of what term limits may be on the books. The Tea Party activists who favor imposing new term limits on Congress should listen to the wisdom of the Founders in this regard and attack the problem of corruption at its root by focusing on personal responsibility rather than espousing a top-down solution that won't fix the problem and will further restrict the liberties of the American people.

Okay, enough said--here's the article.

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REVISITING THE TWENTY-SECOND AMENDMENT: A THIRD TERM FOR PRESIDENT BUSH

by Justin Soutar
December 21, 2007

I am not particularly a fan of President Bush. As an American Catholic, I certainly applaud our president’s sustained defense of the right to life of all innocent human beings from conception to natural death, and I generally approve of the measures he has taken to help eradicate the curses of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research involving abortion, and euthanasia in the United States and around the world. President Bush’s continued defense of traditional marriage against the enormous pressure of a few misguided social activists is similarly refreshing. I have been proud to hear this president mention God in his speeches without fear of retaliation by anti-Christian groups such as the ACLU. Moreover, I also generally approve of the USA PATRIOT Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation which he signed in 2001 to facilitate governmental action against terrorism. I have steadily supported the war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2007. Bush’s appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court met with my satisfaction. In addition, I was pleased with Bush for signing the Broadcast Decency Bill into law in 2006, which raised by ten times the FCC fine for instances of indecent pictures and language in the media. Finally, I agree with the president’s principles on taxes, affirmative action, and gun ownership.

However, beyond these important areas I have tended to disagree strongly with President Bush’s policies. I find myself at odds with our current chief executive over federal spending levels, global laissez-faire economics (so-called “free” trade), energy policy, Social Security, the minimum wage, immigration policy, certain sections of the PATRIOT Act, the “War on Terrorism,” the Iraq war, torture of prisoners, America’s nuclear weapons program, our relationship with the UN, foreign aid, and environmental policy.

Yet despite all of my momentous differences with President George W. Bush, for some time now I have been considering the idea that he should be able to run for a third consecutive term. Why? Why would someone who so strenuously opposes the neoconservative ideology favor granting President Bush another four years in office? Perhaps I have gone crazy? If our highest public servant has violated the Constitution and wreaked significant havoc to our country both domestically and overseas as I believe he has, why wouldn’t I be in favor of impeachment instead?

All of these good questions depend upon and point to a broader issue: Why revisit the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution, which stipulates that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”? Nearly everyone knows the reason for the passage of this amendment in 1951. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to four consecutive terms in office stretching from the midst of the Great Depression in 1933 to the end of World War II in 1945. Many Americans felt that in this twelve-year-long tenure, a single president accumulated an undue amount of power and influence over the federal government. Indeed, the United States had distinguished itself from other nations in the late 1700s by deciding to check government power through the holding of periodic elections for all members of the legislative and executive branches of government.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Americans have generally come to understand democracy as a system in which no single public servant holds very much power for very much time. They point to the example of founders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who voluntarily departed office after serving two terms, as evidence that no president should ever be allowed to remain in office longer than that. By and large, Americans support the Twenty-Second Amendment without question as a beneficial curtailment of executive authority and an accurate reflection of the intent of our nation’s founders that we maintain a limited government, that we be “a nation of laws and not of men.”

However, I have come to believe that this amendment, far from being beneficial and traditional, is harmful to our country and represents a serious misunderstanding of what our nation’s founders actually intended. In a series of articles which advocated ratification of the Constitution and which were printed in several New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788 entitled The Federalist Papers, founding father Alexander Hamilton argued convincingly against setting any sort of term limit on the “office of the chief magistrate” (the presidency). In this argument, which is several thousands words long, Hamilton offers five distinct reasons to support his position. We will review this rationale briefly and then focus mainly on the one overarching reason I find most compelling. The Federalist No. 72 (ed. Garry Wills, Bantam Books, New York, 1982, pp. 367-370) reads as follows:

Nothing appears more plausible upon first sight, nor more ill founded upon close inspection, than a scheme, which in relation to the present point has had some respectable advances—I mean that of continuing the chief magistrate in office for a certain time, and then excluding him from it, either for a limited period, or for ever after….

One ill effect of the exclusion would be diminution of the inducements to good behavior. There are few men who would not feel much less zeal in the discharge of a duty, when they were conscious that the advantages of the station, with which it was connected, must be relinquished at a determinate period, than when they were permitting to entertain a hope of obtaining by meriting a continuance of them….

Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government, to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?....

A fourth ill effect of the exclusion would be the banishing men from stations, in which in certain emergencies of the state their presence might be of the greatest moment to the public interest or safety. There is no nation which has not at one period or another experienced an absolute necessity of the services of particular men, in particular situations…How unwise therefore must be every such self-denying ordinance, as serves to prohibit a nation from making use of its own citizens, in the manner best suited to its exigencies and circumstances!....

A fifth ill effect of the exclusion would be, that it would operate as a constitutional interdiction of stability in the administration. By necessitating a change of men, in the first office in the nation, it would necessitate a mutability of measures…And we need not be apprehensive there will be too much stability, while there is even the option of changing; nor need we desire to prohibit the people from continuing their confidence, where they think it may be safely placed, and where by constancy on their part they may obviate the fatal inconveniences of fluctuating councils and a variable policy….

There is an excess of refinement in the idea of disabling the people to continue in office men, who had entitled themselves, in their opinion, to approbation and confidence…

Often our perception of what our nation’s founders intended is distorted by our own contemporary ways of thinking. Hence the importance of returning to the actual writings which those esteemed men have left us. The text above may be somewhat difficult reading for a twenty-first-century American, but even the casual reader can tell that Hamilton was definitely not in favor of a term-limited presidency.

The first reason Hamilton gives is based on the principle of positive incentive. When a person knows that he will be forced to leave office within eight years whether the people approve of him or not, he will tend to not care so much about performing his job well. On the other hand, if a president’s continuance in office depends entirely on popular satisfaction with his administration, he will be motivated to fulfill his duties well in order to gain and retain that satisfaction. This is the same rationale on which a free market economy exists: incentives to productivity, efficiency, quality, and frugality are built into the system. No one would suggest compelling a successful, popular and respected CEO to step down simply because he has spent a certain amount of time in the same post.

Hamilton warned that a term limit on the chief executive office of the nation would encourage unscrupulous men to take advantage of the short-lived tenure for their own personal benefit. With a two-term limit that effectively renders the president a lame duck (unaccountable to the public) for half of his administration, we would expect corrupt, unethical or immoral behavior to surface mainly during those latter four years. Unfortunately, this has proven true in the cases of Richard Nixon (Watergate in 1973), Ronald Reagan (Iran-contra scandal in 1986), Bill Clinton (Lewinsky scandal revealed in 1997), and the younger George Bush (role of Vice President Cheney’s petroleum firm Halliburton in Iraq war; the continuing New Orleans disaster; Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals in 2005; Scooter Libby indictment, Karl Rove scandals, and warrant-less wiretapping revealed in 2006). Corruption has infested the presidency with increasing vigor since the Twenty-Second Amendment came into force almost sixty years ago. Presidential approval ratings during a second term have routinely plummeted for almost every two-term president since Lyndon Johnson, as well as for many single-term presidents, usually because their concern for the good of the people became distorted or overshadowed by personal and corporate interests.

Another reason Hamilton put forward against a term limit is that our nation may desperately need the continued services of one particular executive during a time of war or other national crisis. The long presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a fruit of such circumstances; Americans chose to reelect him three times because they were passing though the wrenching experiences of economic depression and world war. Voters intuitively understand that the nation needs continuous leadership during such a challenging period. For this reason, every American president who served during an officially declared war was reelected. The people should not be barred from keeping in office for upwards of eight years a single individual whom they believe will guide their country safely though a difficult time.

The final reason Hamilton advances against “exclusion” is that a term limit harms the stability of the nation by ordering a change in presidents after every few years. A president who knows that he will be in office for no more than eight years will not be too inclined to pursue policies that require more than a decade to develop, or that will benefit the nation twenty or thirty years from now, as he knows that the next president can soon undo whatever he tries to accomplish. This compulsory turnover of chief executives, Hamilton observed, would result in “fluctuating councils and a variable policy,” which he terms “fatal inconveniences” to the country. There is no doubt that occasionally a particular president might pursue some detrimental measures which need to be corrected by a future president. But Hamilton was not discussing that; rather, he was warning of the threat to American stability posed by recurrent, massive, radical paradigm shifts in government policy in general, such as from isolationism to interventionism, from overregulation to laissez-faire economics, from a weak central government to a federal police state, and from insufficient national defense to large and permanent standing armies. Continuity should be the norm, while change should be the exception. The Twenty-Second Amendment represents a rejection of this wise counsel.

I confess that I am totally enamored of Hamilton’s logic concerning this issue. Yet for me the most compelling argument against term limits is implicitly present in all the reasons which Hamilton listed. It is this: The people should be free to decide whether to keep a particular president in office or to elect a new president. They should not be forced to automatically elect a new head of government either every four or eight years.

The threat of a corrupt, power-hungry demagogue, which the Twenty-Second Amendment was passed to protect us from, can be dealt with just as easily by having the people vote him out of office in the next election. Some people might remind me that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected by an unsuspecting German populace, that he legally enacted a constitutional amendment allowing himself to serve as chancellor for life, and that he became the infamous genocidal warmongering egomaniac we remember today. They might point out that with a term-limiting amendment at least we are insuring ourselves against such a dangerous dictator. However, this line of reasoning is flawed in one important respect: determined absolute dictators do not allow constitutions, amendments, or laws to stand in their way. Hitler suspended the constitution of Germany altogether and imposed martial law as soon as he wished. If the American people ever become gullible enough to elect a Hitler-like president, he would laugh at the Twenty-Second Amendment and proceed to ignore it for his own purposes. In other words, the main reason why most Americans like the amendment turns out to be completely insubstantial upon closer examination.

And while each American president can choose not to seek reelection, as our leaders for the first one hundred fifty years were accustomed to do after serving two terms, this in no way demands that such custom become the unchanging law of the land. The Twenty-Second Amendment unnecessarily restricts the freedom of both electors and the elected. Hamilton notes that any perceived benefit from a law which can expel bad presidents from office is far outweighed by the disadvantage that the same law will also force from office excellent and much needed presidents. Many Americans think that the two-term limit is among the guardians of our democracy, when in fact it is the opposite—it prevents the people from maintaining in office a wise and capable president whom they admire and trust.

It is remarkable how all the “ill effects” of a term limit on the presidency have manifested themselves just as Hamilton predicted more than two centuries ago: instability, insecurity, and corruption. The latter deserves a little more attention.

Evidently, the CEOs of mega-corporations love the current presidential system because it gives them enormous opportunity for profit and allows them to routinely select new presidential candidates who will further their own narrow selfish interests. The cost of bribing even several dozen candidates is trivial compared with the financial rewards to be reaped when one of those candidates reaches the highest office in the land. Under pretext of national security, or free-market economics, or freedom and democracy, or some combination of these excuses, the president allows the mega-corporations a broader sphere of influence and then, by the time the people figure out what has happened, he is a lame duck anyway. The Clinton and Bush administrations have been excellent examples of this corporate corruption of the presidency. The abortion industry thrived under the care of President Bill Clinton, and it’s no coincidence that he and Wal-Mart both came from Arkansas. Under President Bush we have witnessed a war in Iraq for the defense manufacturers and oil tycoons, low foreign trade barriers and amnesty for illegal immigrants for all the transnational corporations, neglect of New Orleans levees and Minnesota bridges, inattention to the Sudanese genocide, the birth of a new nuclear weaponry program (Complex 2030), compulsory voting machines with deliberate design flaws—the list goes on and on.

So now that I have explained the disadvantages of the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution in general, I turn to the question of why I favor permitting President Bush to run for a third term in particular. Several factors have combined to lead me to adopt this opinion.

For one thing, this president is sincere. In stark contrast to President Bill Clinton, a habitual TV liar who knew he was deceiving, President Bush believes what he says whether it is true or not. This sincerity remains refreshing for me despite all of the damage Bush has done. I would rather have a sincere president who knows what he believes than an insincere president who deliberately deceives the public.

A second major factor in my opinion is the sorry state of the 2008 presidential campaign. The high-profile candidates being fawned upon by the corporate-owned media range from mediocre to appalling at a time when the need for a truly great president has never been more painfully felt.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion and plans to increase American defense spending above already ridiculous levels. The dangerous, power-hungry former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani adamantly supports the unrestricted legalization of abortion and sodomy and would have no qualms about starting a nuclear war in the Middle East. Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson is a practiced lobbyist and wealthy trial lawyer who opposes everything I stand for. California Representative Duncan Hunter and Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo do not represent me on most of the issues either. Texas Representative Ron Paul would make a truly great president, but it is highly unlikely he will win the Republican nomination. Arizona Senator John McCain and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hold praiseworthy moral values, but the odds are against both men. On the Democratic side, all of the candidates support abortion, and the currently leading contender—-New York Senator Hillary Clinton—-makes me sick to my stomach.

On the other hand, when compared with any one of the Republican or Democratic hopefuls, I find President Bush to be the lesser of two evils. No, Bush may not be the “truly great” leader America desperately needs at this time. But I believe that having George Bush continue in office would be far superior to having Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards, or Barack Obama, or Dennis Kucinich, or Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, or Fred Thompson take over the presidency and make an even bigger mess of it.

Thank goodness Mrs. Clinton cannot muster much more than a 30 percent public approval rating despite glossy coverage in the media. Of course, this highlights the point that moving from President Bush to President Hillary Clinton would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. As much as Americans are disenchanted with President George Bush, I believe that they are even less enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton. In fact, the approval ratings of presidential candidate Mrs. Clinton and the incumbent President Bush in late 2007 were statistically tied at 30 percent.

Of course this startling result is a reflection of America’s disapproval of Bush and its disconnection from Hillary, but it also should give pause to those who claim that Bush is finished. Isn’t it remarkable that, after seven long years of Bush administration, an experienced, first-ever female candidate from the opposite political party with money to burn and media attention that won’t quit cannot rank any better than the incumbent in the public mind? If a presidential contest between Bush and Mrs. Clinton were held at the time of these poll results, a third Bush victory would have been a distinct possibility. So a third factor in my belief that George Bush should be eligible to run for a third term is that, contrary to general perception, he actually would be a viable repeat candidate.

Finally, my last significant reason for advocating a third Bush run is to comfort the president and to give him a third chance. In recent years, I have become dismayed and disturbed to witness such a flood of vile, rude, offensive and obscene personal attacks unleashed against President Bush. It’s one thing to disagree with and even to firmly oppose various domestic and foreign policies of an administration; it’s another to throw hateful insults and pointless abuse. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be the most attacked, ridiculed, disparaged, and insulted president in American history, not just in America but around the world. Certainly President Bush has been responsible for numerous illegal actions that provide ample grounds for impeachment, as his critics declare. Yet I do not favor impeachment because President Bush has a good heart and he has accomplished the commendable things I mentioned at the beginning of this article. The next president may very well bring neither a good heart nor good actions. By proposing to allow George Bush another campaign, I am making a little statement that I am appalled at the deterioration of our public discourse; that I desire to retain a leader who is committed to the pro-life philosophy; and that I wish the president well.

Realistically, I do not expect the Twenty-Second Amendment to our Constitution to be repealed anytime soon. Nevertheless, it is interesting and healthy to ponder the hypothetical possibility of a third Bush term, just as it is instructive to discuss the merits and demerits of a term-limited presidency in general. I believe that in this chaotic and uncertain period of our nation’s history which began with the 9/11 attacks, the need for a chief executive office unrestrained by term limits is greater than when Alexander Hamilton espoused it at the dawn of our history. A term-unlimited presidency would be a better, more accountable, more responsive and more democratic institution for the United States.

Copyright © 2007 by Justin Soutar. All rights reserved.

Quote of the Day

"Christ has not resigned himself to the tombs that we have created with our choices of evil and death, with our mistakes, with our sins. He does not resign himself to this! He invites us, he almost commands us, to come out of the tombs in which our sins have buried us. He insistently calls us out of the darkness of the prison in which we have shut ourselves, contenting ourselves with a false, egoistic and mediocre life. “Come out!” he tells us, “Come out!” It is a beautiful invitation to true freedom, to let ourselves be seized by these words of Jesus that he repeats to each one of us today. It is an invitation to remove the “burial shroud,” the burial shroud of pride. Pride makes us slaves, slaves to ourselves, slaves of many idols, of many things. Our resurrection begins here: when we decide to obey this command of Jesus, going out into the light, into life; when the masks fall from our face – often we are masked by sin, the masks must fall! – and we rediscover the courage of our true face, created in the image and likeness of God."

--Pope Francis

Quote of the Day

"'I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.'"

--St. John 11:25--26

An Unnecessary Disaster: The Federal Anti-Life Earthquake Is Upon Us

The United States of America is now being shaken to its foundations by a devastating earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and proportions. The powerful shock waves of this tremendous seismic event are unleashing a flood of damage and destruction unlike anything the United States has ever experienced in its 238-year history. Never before have the timing, magnitude, cause, casualties, and effects of such a massive national emergency been predicted with such certainty and precision. Our elected officials were duly informed of the date this quake would occur, the severity of the event, what would trigger it, what it would destroy, and the consequences that would ensue. And the certainty of this foreknowledge conferred a corresponding obligation on our elected representatives, who are responsible for protecting the common good of all American citizens. But since appropriate action has not yet been taken by those in authority to halt this catastrophe, our nation is now beginning to suffer traumatic and incalculable loss.

This great earthquake was triggered by the collision of two massive tectonic plates on which our country rests—the Constitution and our federal government. The resulting shock wave is destroying our religious liberties and moral conscience rights. And the long-lasting moral, social, economic, and environmental effects of the quake will include millions upon millions of innocent unborn children slaughtered in their mother’s wombs; millions of families torn apart by immorality and love of pleasure; low birth rates and population decline; social chaos; record poverty rates; pollution of our rivers and farm soil by large quantities of toxic artificial chemicals; tens of thousands of hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages, nursing homes, soup kitchens, and crisis pregnancy centers, as well as thousands of businesses and scores of colleges and universities, shut down; thousands of lawsuits; financial instability; economic collapse; and a nationwide healthcare crisis that is already impacting every corner of America, leaving not a single community unharmed.

The worst part of this tragic ordeal is its unnecessary and preventable nature. Rather than a natural disaster, this horrendous and destructive earthquake is an unnatural disaster—-an entirely artificial event, deliberately inflicted upon our country by the godless, immoral, corrupt, irresponsible, and arrogant administration of President Barack Obama. That administration has decreed that ALL employers (except narrowly defined “religious employers”) MUST purchase health insurance coverage for their employees that includes abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilizations (pills and surgical operations that murder the unborn child or prevent parents from conceiving children); furthermore, ALL charitable agencies MUST provide these filthy anti-life drugs and procedures or referrals for such drugs and procedures to their clients. The massive law enforcement apparatus of our federal government will soon be slapping huge tax penalties on all American employers and charitable directors who fail to comply with this outrageous and draconian new law known as the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate.

This abominable law flagrantly violates the law of God, the Constitution of the United States, our fundamental rights and liberties as American citizens, and our dignity as human persons. It violates the Fifth Commandment by ordering employers and charity workers to help their employees and clients murder their unborn children; it also violates the Sixth Commandment by requiring the purchase and distribution of drugs that prevent married couples from conceiving new children. It violates the First Amendment by forcing religious believers and organizations to act contrary to their sacred beliefs. It violates our fundamental God-given rights of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. And it violates our dignity as human persons created in the image and likeness of God by reducing us to mere objects whose sexuality and fertility are arbitrarily controlled by our government for its own benefit.

Besides being immoral, unconstitutional, coercive, and anti-human, the HHS mandate is also impractical and downright foolish. Abortion has done irreparable harm to the physical and mental health of more than 56 million American women over the past forty-plus years. To keep it legal and make it even more widespread is irresponsible in the extreme. To encourage Americans to kill their own children and refrain from conceiving them is a recipe for national suicide. Furthermore, artificial contraceptives are destructive to our environment; they pollute our nation’s waterways and eventually work their way into our farm soil and our food supply. To make them a product that all insurance carriers must supply is to invite further degradation of our natural resources. In addition, the mandate will deal a fatal blow to our fragile economy (still struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression) by imposing unsustainable tax burdens on thousands of business owners and charity leaders; discouraging the establishment of new businesses and charities; further reducing the available spending money of the average working American individual and family; and adding to an already grossly hyperinflated national debt.

The Obama administration has been patently dishonest and deceptive in its cleverly sanitized presentation of the “healthcare” mandate to the American public. For one thing, abortion, artificial contraception, and sterilization have nothing whatsoever to do with “health care.” Killing unborn children in their mother’s wombs is not health care; on the contrary, abundant research testifies that abortion is dangerous to female health. Preventing women and married couples from having children is not health care either. Abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilizations are designed to kill developing human life in the embryonic and fetal stages or to prevent its originating altogether. They are methods of population control entirely devoid of any health benefits. Were the Obama administration to more accurately designate its cherished decree the “life kill mandate”; the evil nature of this law would be clearer to the American people, who already oppose it by a substantial majority.

The Obama administration is also being dishonest about why it is forcing coverage of abortifacient drugs, birth control pills, and sterilization surgeries by all health insurance providers. The official reason for the compulsion is that the public health interest requires unlimited access to such anti-life drugs and procedures. This is ludicrous. Inexpensive artificial contraceptives are already widely available and purchased by millions. The real reason why the Obama administration is forcing coverage of immoral population control items by nearly all insurance providers is that it is aggressively pursuing a radically anti-life agenda driven by the money-hungry abortion, pharmaceutical and insurance industries that back it. In particular, the deceptively titled Affordable Care Act is the brainchild of Planned Parenthood and its loyal allies in the White House and the Senate, designed chiefly to subsidize the abortion cartel in the face of declining public demand for that horrific practice.

At the core of the mandate lies a twisted logic of injustice and selfishness. The duty of our federal government is to promote the common good of all Americans based on fundamental principles of justice and charity that come from God—principles that form the very foundations of human society, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in Caritas in Veritate. The HHS mandate is a direct violation of those fundamental principles: unjust because it encourages the murder of innocent unborn children and forces individuals and institutions to violate God’s law; and uncharitable because it leaves tens of millions of low-income Americans without health insurance and is forcing the closure of thousands of charitable institutions upon which millions of people depend for basic necessities of life. By issuing its pro-death mandate, the Obama administration has criminally abused its rightful authority, turned the power of government against the people, and sacrificed the common good to the “wealth care” interests of giant abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies.

As unbelievable as it sounds, here in a Christian nation whose official motto is “In God We Trust,” in a “nation under God…with liberty and justice for all,” those employers and agencies who refuse to purchase and distribute gravely immoral products and services are being punished by their own elected representatives for obeying God’s law, their moral consciences, and their religious beliefs. The longer the HHS directive is allowed to remain in force, the more widespread, severe, and lasting chaos, distress, and human misery this artificial earthquake will unleash, dwarfing previous national crises such as the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, and even the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

No government has the right to compel anyone to act contrary to the moral law, to their moral consciences, or to their religious beliefs. We the citizens of the United States have the right and the sacred duty to work hard for the full repeal of the HHS mandate as soon as possible. Not only for our own sake but for that of our children and our grandchildren, we must hold our elected representatives responsible for this unjust law accountable for the mischief they are unleashing in violation of the law of God, the Constitution of the United States, and our fundamental rights and liberties as human persons and as American citizens.

Unlike any other law in our nation’s history, the HHS decree is inherently destabilizing for our country because it officially prescribes immorality as the law of the land. It turns the moral order established by the Creator upside down by punishing good and rewarding evil. As Father John Corapi used to remind us, “Immorality is un-American and a threat to national security!” The HHS mandate is a direct assault on religion and morality, the very foundations and “indispensable supports” of our nation’s liberty. It remains to be seen whether these twin foundations will prove strong enough to withstand the enormous assault now being unleashed upon them by the Obama administration.

Looking beyond the tragic events currently unfolding across our nation to a less than encouraging future, two glimmers of hope beckon on the horizon. The first is that the U.S. Supreme Court, which is currently hearing a case brought by Christian and Amish business owners against the HHS mandate, may rule it unconstitutional this coming June. Let us pray that our justices on the High Court will do their duty to strike down this flagrantly unconstitutional law and protect our religious liberties and moral conscience rights. However, given recent seriously flawed decisions by the Court such as its wholesale upholding of the Affordable Care Act in 2012, we should not be overly hopeful that this will happen; corruption has clearly infiltrated the High Court and is now influencing its major decisions.

The second glimmer of hope is that with the Congressional and gubernatorial elections this coming November, we the people will be given an important opportunity to bring a halt to the havoc being wrought by this great earthquake and to restore our cherished freedoms of religion and conscience. We must seize this opportunity to rescue our nation from the appalling crisis into which it has been so needlessly and recklessly thrown by the Obama administration. We will have both the opportunity and the responsibility to choose our governors, senators, and representatives. We must exercise that responsibility properly by voting only for true defenders of freedom who pledge to repeal the mandate, and by voting out of office every single elected official responsible for enacting and enforcing it. No enemies of liberty are fit to govern a free people.

As this great earthquake rocks our country, I find myself trembling for its security and survival. As I write this, a black curtain is being drawn across our Constitution and our cherished freedoms of religion and conscience for which our nation’s Founders laid down their lives are being crushed under the heavy boots of a tyrannical and totalitarian government. By arbitrary federal fiat, the United States of America is being transformed into a different country from what it was prior to the mandate. We are moving from being “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” to being one nation under Obama, indivisible, with tyranny and injustice for all enemies of the state. I shudder to think what it would be like to live under this regime of evil, frighteningly reminiscent of Communist China or the Soviet Union, for any length of time.

Although our elected representatives in the White House and the Senate have the duty and the power to halt this tremendous catastrophe, they are leaving our country exposed to dreadful ruin because they are corrupt and have little or no concern for the national well-being. Before laws and policies can change, hearts must change. Our Lady of Fatima said that many souls go to Hell because there is no one to pray and sacrifice on their behalf. We must continue to pray and fast for the conversion of those in the abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance industries and in our government who are responsible for the HHS mandate and its damaging consequences. In the meantime, may God have mercy on our nation—-and may the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, Patroness of the United States of America, pray for us.

Copyright © 2014 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

Quote of the Day

“Imitating Christ, he was, for the world, a tireless preacher of the word of God, of truth, and of goodness. He did good even with his suffering. This was the teaching of his life in which God’s people responded with great love and esteem.”

--Pope Francis