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A thinking reader of these “Comments” from the United States made several months ago some shrewd remarks. Here they are:— “Religious Liberty” is really coming home to roost over here in the colonies. A “Catholic” federal judge has jailed a Protestant county clerk, for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licences. The well-meaning defenders of the clerk keep citing “religious liberty,” not realizing that religious liberty is precisely the problem, not the solution. Amazing. We descend into moral chaos, and no one seems to understand why. “We descend into moral chaos, and nobody seems to understand why.” Well said, indeed! But “Traditionalists” who take Tradition seriously should be able to sort it out.

This is because if I take Tradition seriously, I understand that DOCTRINE comes first, in other words the Catholic religion is not mind-mush, morality and the Mass, but it is doctrinal realities that govern both morals and the Mass. These realities start with the existence of Almighty God, on whom all creation depends every moment for its being upheld in existence, whereas He could let it all drop out of existence without in the least way changing Himself. He creates every human soul by Himself at the moment of its body’s conception for the purpose that it will use the free-will with which he endows that soul to choose to live and die in accordance with His unchanging moral Law, so that it can spend in Heaven its eternity in bliss with Himself. The free-will, to be genuine, means that souls can choose to break His Law, and if they do not repent, they will be choosing to spend eternity defying Him in Hell. So they themselves will be broken, but not His Law. That Law is summed up in the Ten Commandments, and it is not an arbitrary law, but it fits the human nature for which it was made, just as the manufacturer’s operating manual for a machine corresponds to the machine for which it was made.

Now the Sixth and Ninth of those Commandments instruct human beings to make the proper use of the reproductive mechanism built into their bodies. This mechanism is not a toy, but a sacred instrument designed by God for the forming of human families here below to populate Heaven above. Neither two men alone nor two women alone but only a man and a woman together can have children and form a family, and since the populating of Heaven is a sacred affair, then any breaking of those two Commandments rapidly becomes grave enough to deserve eternal damnation. “God is not mocked” – Galatians VI, 7. Therefore same-sex frustration of the act of marriage is one of the four offences against God crying to Heaven for vengeance, as the Catholic Church teaches, and same-sex “marriage” is a mockery of God’s holy institution into the bargain. In all of this doctrine there is not one iota of chaos.

Then where does the chaos come from? From liberalism. From the false religion of liberalism. From making an idol of liberty. For in Romans I St Paul hammers home the point that this particular sin crying to Heaven for vengeance derives from idolatry. It is after men break the First Commandment that God gives them up to disgraceful practices against the Sixth Commandment, no doubt in the hope that the unmistakeable foulness of their breaking the latter will wake them up to the foulness much greater in itself, but less easy to recognize, of breaking the former. That our liberty has become from an ideal an idol is in our own day more and more difficult to recognize, because idolizing religious liberty has been going on now for well over 200 years, and nothing seems more natural. Men have lost all sense of the true God. On the contrary, religious liberty is the supreme liberty, without which all other liberties seem little.

And liberty ends by lifting people’s minds right off their hinges:—“Any truth or reality pretending to impose itself on my mind is a diminution of my liberty, so I refuse to recognize it, unless it suits me. Many moral rules do not suit me. I refuse them, in the name of liberty. I descend thus into moral chaos, convinced that I am exercising a sacred right of mine, so that I cannot understand why I end up in chaos, mental then social. But I have myself unhinged my mind, and cut my society adrift.” The chaos is wholly comprehensible.

Kyrie eleison.