In like manner, this American spirit infected many in the priesthood and consecrated religious life. Contemplation was considered to take time away from "action," action which could redeem individuals and society. Meetings and workshops and update programs thus replaced holy hours and Rosary rallies and Eucharistic processions. Social work replaced prayer. An involvement in secular charitable organizations took the place of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.

   There are even some in the pro-life movement who are infected with this spirit. One woman, who shall remain nameless, made a gross generalization to the effect that traditional Catholics don't do anything to aid the pro-life movement except pray. Well, praying is not doing nothing! (And, obviously, many traditional Catholic are actively involved on the front lines in expectant mother care centers and praying Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in front of killing centers and in running for office on third party lines to advance the primacy of the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law as the basis of the just society.) Indeed, those who spend time in prayer help to build up the entire Mystical Body of Christ and actually aid by their prayers the people who believe they are called to be directly on the front lines. Prayer is not passive. However, even many pro-life Catholics believe that activity is going to somehow end abortion. Mind you, it is important to work hard in the midst of the world to stop baby-killing. However, there is no conflict between prayer and action. This is at the heart of where Pope Leo XIII saw Americanism leading Catholics further and further into error.

   A priest, for example, is ordained to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, administer the other sacraments, preach the Gospel, take Holy Communion to the hospitalized and homebound, and to be a salutary witness to Eucharistic piety and total consecration to Mary. He is the one who works as the intermediary to channel the graces won by Our Lord on Calvary to the laity so that they can, as Saint Paul exhorts us in his Epistle to the Ephesians, restore all things in Christ. Fortified by that grace, we have the obligation to remain steadfast in prayer ourselves and to do those things we can in our given states in life to plant the seeds for the conversion of individual hearts and thus of the nation we love and want to bring to Our Lord through His Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. A priest is not called to run for political office or to head some secular charitable foundation or to serve as the head of a non-denominational media project. He is called to lead by example, not to mislead by posing a false dichotomy between prayer and action.

TB: It is plain what is to be thought of such division of the virtues. There is not and cannot be a virtue which is really passive. 'Virtue,' says St. Thomas, 'denotes a certain perfection of a power; but the object of a power is an act; and an act of virtue is nothing else than the good use of our free will'; the divine grace of course helping, if the act of virtue is supernatural. The one who would have Christian virtues to be adapted, some to one age and others to another, has forgotten the words of the Apostle: Whom He foreknew, He also predestinated to be more conformable to the image of His Son. The master and exemplar of all sanctity is Christ, to Whose rule all must conform who wish to attain to the thrones of the blessed. Now, then, Christ, does not at all change with the progress of the ages, but is yesterday and today, and the same forever. To the men of all ages, the phrase is to be applied: Learn of Me because I am meek, and humble of heart, and at all times Christ shows Himself to us as becoming obedient unto death, and in every age also the word of the Apostle holds: And they are Christ's have crucified their flesh with the vices and concupiscences. Would that more would cultivate those virtues in our days, as did the holy men of bygone times! Those who by humbleness of spirit, by obedience and abstinence, were powerful in word and work, were of the greatest help not only to religion but to the State and society.

   Alas, the American bishops rely upon the pyschologists and sexologists who attempt to reprogram orthodox priests sent to them for Stalinist re-education while at the same time reaffirming sodomites who should never have been ordained to the priesthood in the first place. They do not understand (and, in some instances, have outrightly rejected) the horror of sin. Sin caused the God-Man to suffer horribly in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross. Sin wounds the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, today. How can a priest, of all men, persist in a life of unrepentant sin and the warfare against the Deposit of Faith that is the inexorable result of such persistence in unrepentant sin and still be considered fit to serve as a priest? How can a man who demonstrates a rejection of personal holiness and even one iota of the Deposit of Faith be considered fit for ordination to the holy priesthood? Priests must aspire actively to the heights of holiness, understanding that they are conformed to Christ Himself at the moment of their ordination. They have the obligation to imitate, not scoff at, the saints mentioned earlier. However, a contempt for holiness is part and parcel of the Americanist ethos, as Pope Leo XIII noted so clearly.

TB: "From this species of contempt of the evangelical virtues, which are wrongly called passive, it naturally follows that the mind is imbued little by little with a feeling of disdain for the religious life."

TB: "And that is common to the advocates of these new opinions we gather from certain expressions of theirs about the vows which religious orders pronounce. For, say they, such vows are altogether out of keeping with the spirit of our age, inasmuch as they narrow the limits of human liberty; are better adapted to weak minds than to strong ones; avail little for Christian perfection and for the good of human society, and rather obstruct and interfere with it."

TB: "But how false these assertions are, is evident from the usage and doctrine of the Church, which has always given the highest approval to religious life. And surely not undeservedly. For those who, not content with the common duties of the precepts, enter of their own accord upon the evangelical counsels, in obedience to a divine vocation, present themselves to Christ as His prompt and valiant soldiers. Are we to consider this a mark of weak minds? In the more perfect manner of life is it unprofitable or hurtful? Those who bind themselves by the vows of religion are so far from throwing away their liberty that they enjoy a nobler and fuller one-that, namely, by which Christ has set us free.

TB: "What they add to this - namely, that religious life helps the Church not at all or very little - apart from being injurious to religious orders, will be admitted by no one who has read the history of the Church. Did not your own United States receive from the members of religious orders the beginning of its faith and civilization? For one of them recently, and it redounds to your credit, you have decreed that a statue should be erected. And at this very time, with what alacrity and success are these religious orders doing their work wherever we find them! How many of them hasten to impart to new lands the life of the Gospel and to extend the boundaries of civilization with the greatest earnestness of soul and amid the greatest dangers! From them no less than from the rest of the clergy the Christian people obtain preachers of the Word of God, directors of conscience, instructors of youth, and the entire Church examples of holy lives. Nor is there any distinction of praise between those who lead an active life and those who, attracted by seclusion, give themselves up to prayer and mortification of the body. How gloriously they have merited from human society, and do still merit, they should be aware who are not ignorant of how the continual prayer of a just man, especially when joined to affliction of the body, avails to propitiate and conciliate the majesty of God."

TB: If there are any, therefore, who prefer to unite together in one society without the obligation of vows, let them do as they desire. That is not a new institution in the Church, nor is it to be disapproved. But let them beware of setting such association above religious orders; nay rather, since mankind is more prone now than heretofore to the enjoyment of pleasure, much greater esteem is to be accorded to those who have left all things and have followed Christ."

TB: "But if it [the term Americanism] is to be used not only to signify, but even to commend the above doctrines, there can be no doubt but that the bishops of America would be the first to repudiate and condemn it, as being especially unjust to them and to the entire nation as well. For it raises the suspicion that there are some among you who conceive of and desire a church in American different than that which is in the rest of the world. One in the unity of doctrine as in the unity of government, such is the Catholic Church, and since God has established its centre and foundation in the Chair of Peter, one which is rightly called Roman, for here Peter is there is the Church. Wherefore he who wishes to be called by the name of Catholic ought to employ in truth the words of Jerome to Pope Damasus: 'I following none as the first except Christ am associated in communion with your Beatitude, that is, with the Chair of Peter; upon that Rock I know is built the Church; whoever gathereth not with thee scattereth.'"

   Catholics in public life who support the mystical destruction of Christ in the person of preborn children are not only not excommunicated, they are considered to be Catholics in good standing. Catholics who support special rights for sodomites are embraced as heroes in an important "civil rights" cause. Catholics who bring to the attention of ecclesiastical authorities the perverse behavior of priests are browbeaten and greeted by threats of lawsuits for even attempting to bring such matters to the attention of those authorities. A bloated bureaucracy, much of which is staffed by people at war with the Deposit of Faith, saps the resources of one diocese after another, to say nothing of the waste of resources caused by the financial settlements paid out to those whose abuse has been ignored by Church officials.

   One does not need to repeat old stories of scandals or to report those which have yet to be reported. It was my sad task to write about many of these things during the eight years I was associated with The Wanderer. And despite my disagreements with The Wanderer on several very important matters, it remains a vital source of news. The Church in the United States would look a lot different if bishops and the Holy Father took The Wanderer seriously and sought to correct the dreadful, scandalous situations it reports week after week after week. The same is true of Stephen G. Brady and Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc., which has, as mentioned before, done a tremendous job of exposing the nest of sodomites in the American hierarchy and presbyterate. Fathers Enrique Rueda and Charles Fiore, along with the murdered Father Alfred Kunz and a lay man by the name of Frank Kelly in Virginia, each have attempted to bring documented cases of the coddling of sodomites and the promotion of sodomy to the highest church authorities in this country and in Rome, to no avail.

   This is the true state of the Church in the United States, which, although less "progressive than the Church in The Netherlands and Canada, is still a laboratory for beliefs and practices that drive Catholics out of the Church and further institutionalize the hold that secular ideologies have on all aspects of our social life. The state of a country depends upon the state of the Church. However, bishops who are possessed of the Americanist and Modernist spirit will never understand or accept this at all. They must be removed posthaste for the good of the faith and the right ordering of society.

   There are some good bishops who understand these problems. Alas, the ultimate problem we face was pinpointed by the Bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, the Most Reverend Fabian Bruskewitz. The Holy Father is failing to remove the bad bishops. He told a meeting organized by Catholics United for the Faith in Dallas on June 14, 2002, that he sent the Holy Father a quote of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who had warned a Pope in his day that if he, that Pope, wound up going to Hell it would be because he failed to remove bad bishops. Bishop Bruskewitz said that while our Holy Father has given us nice words and noble sentiments, that he has failed to govern the Church. It is about time a bishop speaks so clearly.

   Remember, Pope Leo XIII saw a vision during Mass which prompted him to write the long form of the Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, which is still recited after Low Mass in the Traditional Rite. He saw a vision of the Devil having a field day in the Church for about a hundred years. And while we know the final victory belongs to Our Lord through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart ("In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph"), we need another pope like Leo XIII, a man who is unafraid to speak the truth and to discipline those responsible for undermining the Faith and putting into peril the salvation of souls.

   Our Lady, Queen of Mercy, intercede for the Church in the United States so that those who have coddled dissent, heresy, blasphemy, profanations and outrages will either be converted to the truth of our living tradition or removed as menaces to both the Church and the State. Men who have been so wrong for so long cannot be allowed to wreak their havoc with the impunity they have enjoyed in the past forty years.