The First and Last Labor Day Pandemic Games

Long holiday weekends have always been a scourge behind prison walls, but a Covid shutdown over Labor Day 2020 spawned the Corn Hole Pandemic Games. Guess who won …

August 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

In the image above, Max Moontri and friends tackle the construction of Corn Hole stations for the Labor Day Pandemic Games in September 2020.

Note: Over fifteen years in the life of this blog, a post before the long Labor Day weekend has always been a challenge to write — not least because few people really want to read it. Any post on Labor Day competes with the end of summer, a last day at the beach, or the annual back-to-school frenzy. The Labor Day weekend of 2020 was a special challenge for your friends behind these walls, so I decided to revisit a post first published back then. Though only four years ago, it was the week a global pandemic descended on us all to change the world, and this prison world especially.

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The origin of Labor Day is attributed to Peter J. McGuire, a New York carpenter and union leader who lobbied for a holiday to honor workers in 1882. He chose the first Monday in September to give workers a holiday between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. The first Labor Day observance was held with a parade in New York City on September 5, 1882. Thousands of workers marched from City Hall to Union Square, and then gathered in Central Park for speeches and family picnics.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed into law a bill to make Labor Day a federal holiday. That same year, railway workers in Pullman, Illinois went on strike to protest wage cuts. President Cleveland sent federal troops to end it. Some strikers were killed and their leaders jailed. So Congress and the President hoped a new holiday might pacify the union rank and file. A holiday contrived to calm the masses, however, has little such effect in prison.

In 2020, at the outset of the Covid pandemic, social distancing and other precautions was a real challenge in an overcrowded prison. Life here was already in a state of perpetual pandemic anxiety and lockdown with some prisoners living eight to a cell or in overcrowded dormitory settings. So a holiday weekend here is quite different from what you may experience. Once it became clear that all activities here would cease operation during the pandemic — including all visits, programs, religious services, all but essential employment, library and recreational access, and access to all but essential work sites — some ingenuity was required to keep an already agitated population from descending into Covid-induced chaos.

So in stepped the current prison warden with a dubious plan. She asked my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri and a few other woodcraft workers to design and build six “Corn Hole” stations for each of the three medium security prison units here. Each station consists of a pair of wooden platforms, each about 48 by 24 inches, with retractable legs on one end to elevate the platform 30 degrees off the ground. A 6 inch-hole was cut into the middle of the higher end of each platform. In the scene above, Max Moontri and a few of our woodworking friends were hard at work on the project.

Corn Hole? … Really?

Max showed me the design his crew came up with. Each Corn Hole unit would be placed 25-feet away from its mate. Contestants would then toss one-pound sewn cloth sacks of dry corn the 25-foot distance with a goal of getting them through the hole. I scoffed at this plan: “Give me a break!” I said. “No one will want to play this!”

Most prisoners here are under age 30 and grew up staring at video games. I dismissed Corn Hole as a monumental bust, but I went along and helped out anyway. Three sets of two Corn Hole units each were set up in the asphalt-covered prison yard in each of the three housing units here. In the one we lived in, most of the nearly 300 prisoners had already been subjected to weeks locked into the unit with no access to activities beyond its menacing high walls.

Younger prisoners approached the Corn Hole stations cautiously at first, many smirking just as I had predicted. Some wondered what their friends might think of them if they were seen actually trying it. A few did, and discovered that landing the one-pound sack in a 6-inch hole 25 feet away was a lot harder than it looked. Then, as though right on cue, local news carried a segment about the Boston Red Sox having to postpone playoff games due to Covid. One of the Red Sox pitchers had set up in his yard something identical to Pornchai’s Corn Hole units and was videoed trying to land his fast ball through the hole from 25 feet away. That was all it took. Competition for the Pandemic World Series of Corn Hole was on!

This went on for an entire week leading up to Labor Day, with teams taking turns practicing all day long. Max patiently explained the game to me. Each player was given four one-pound red or black cloth-covered sacks. The woodworking crew careful measured out the dried corn for each then meticulously weighed and sewed the sacks.

A player would get one point for landing the sack on the platform 25 feet away. However, an opposing player could steal the point by knocking the other players’ sacks off the platform with some of his own. Getting the sacks through the hole was much more difficult, and worth three points each. On the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day, Max dragged me out there for some practice. Having shown me all the intricate maneuvers for landing a sack near or in the hole, my first throw caught the corner of my shirt and went straight up. It smacked Max on the head on its way back down. He just rolled his eyes and patiently told me that we are supposed to throw the sacks at the platform and not at each other.

By then, news that I had condescended to play Corn Hole spread throughout the entire building. Picture the South Unit as a giant motel with four floors, each with a long railed concrete walkway. Along the levels of walkways are doors to individual pods each housing 24 men in small 60-square-foot rooms around its interior perimeter. From our vantage point from the courtyard down below, men were pouring out those doors like the mobs at Nero’s Circus Maximus in ancient Rome to watch me and Pornchai introduce the fine art of Corn Hole to gladiator school. To raucous cheers from the abhorring crowd, I actually managed to score a point with my very first throw. My second throw landed nicely on a platform near the hole, but it was the platform for the game underway next to us. I was mortified!

On Labor Day, a Corn Hole Tournament was underway with players vying for wins in 2-out-3 game sessions. One by one over the day players were eliminated only to become critical spectators. By late in the afternoon on Labor Day, only two finalists were left: Max Moontri and one of our friends, Jeff. I was selected by wide acclaim to be scorekeeper because no one trusted anyone else to do it. The competition rose to a frenzy. Dozens of raucous spectators lined the court while a hundred other watched, with cheers and catcalls, from the walkways above.

Since I was the scorekeeper, and the roommate of one of the contestants, I had a box seat just feet away from the action. The tension was brutal. Max lost the first game. Then he won the second. The third game ended in a tie (no pun intended). So now we were in Corn Hole Overtime Play and I was at the edge of my seat in the heat of nerve-wracking competition. The finalists were both very good and almost evenly matched. Every throw was met with a chorus of cheers or groans from the multitude.

The game was for 21 points. In the final playoff game, Max was losing 20 to 16. Jeff was one point away from the Grand Championship when Max, with a single masterful throw eliminated every sack Jeff had positioned around the hole on the platform. The crowd became silent as Max tossed his final sack high in the air. It went through the hole 25 feet away without even touching the wood for a decisive and spectacular win.

Before a cheering and adoring crowd, Max Moontri became the first (and last) Prison Corn Hole Pandemic Games Champion. I was beaming with pride!

But then, as the crowd calmed down, I advised Max against adding “Corn Hole Pandemic Games Champion” to his resume. Some things are just better left unsaid.

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Epilogue

The above story took place on Labor Day, September 7, 2020. On the next day, September 8, after 30 years in prison since age 18 and fifteen years as my roommate, Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up to take Max away for forced deportation to his native Thailand which he had not seen since he was taken from there at age 11. The rest is not a feel-good Labor Day story, but it does have a somewhat hopeful and happy ending. You can read both the story and its continuation in the following posts (If you don’t have time to read all three, we especially urge you to read number 3.):

Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

Free at Last Thanks to God and You!

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Kamala Harris, Knights of Columbus and Anti-Catholicism

Absent probing and honest media interviews, no one knows whether Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris still stands by her anti-Catholic rhetoric of 2020.

August 28, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

When I was 18 years old and a newly returned Catholic in 1971, I was invited by my friend, Father Anthony Nuccio, to membership in the Knights of Columbus where Father Tony served as chaplain. Along with the Civil Rights movement, the Knights were largely responsible for fostering in me a sense of Catholic community, service, and a vocation to priesthood. I was, and remain, a member of Valladolid Council #70 on the North Shore of Massachussetts. At the time I entered religious life and seminary in 1974, the Knights of Columbus bestowed on me an honorary lifetime membership. Time and distance diminished my active presence somewhat, but today I consider the Knights of Columbus to be a powerful influence on my life and vocation.

For those unfamiliar, the Knights of Columbus is an international fraternal organization of more than 2 million Roman Catholic laymen. The organization was founded in 1882 by Father Michael J. McGivney to promote ideals of charity, community, fraternity, and patriotism among first and second generation Catholic immigrants. Father McGivney’s cause for canonization was opened in 1997. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2008 and Pope Francis beatified him on May 31, 2020.

More than 10,000 local councils of the Knights of Columbus are presently active throughout the United States, Canada, the Philippines and the Caribbean where the Knights conduct and sponsor volunteer programs for Roman Catholics in service to the communities in which they live. The organization also conducts extensive Catholic education and scholarship programs, promotes Catholic identity, and assists in the support of seminarians and Catholic schools. Our friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri cites Knights of Columbus-sponsored free correspondence courses in Catholic and Biblical Studies as pivotal factors in his 2010 Divine Mercy Catholic conversion.

So, as you can imagine, Pornchai and I both reacted with umbrage to the misinformed and slanderous remarks of Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians while interviewing a judicial nominee in 2020 who happened to be a faithful Catholic and a member of the Knights of Columbus. There are over 73 million Catholics in the United States. That is 73 million potential votes that Ms. Harris does not deserve unless she recants or explains her views on Catholicism and those who practice it.

For the first time in my adult life, I am afraid for America. And not only for America. I fear for all of Western Culture as well. I feel little beyond dismal foreboding for the slide toward democratic socialism into which our democracy is in rapid descent. We cannot escape the truth of it. What was, in 2020, considered the “radical Left” in politics is now merely the Left. There is no irony or subtlety at all in what I am about to write. Our only hope is to halt this course and reclaim it.

This may seem a peculiar point of view from someone for whom democracy and its assurance of justice remains a dismal failure. The imprisoned place from where I write enjoys no distractions of the world in which you read these pages. I cannot escape into Netflix or some local bar to medicate my anxiety. I cannot escape at all. Just using that word in a sentence is risky.

My view of the outside world is limited to raw and sometimes hopeless coverage presented in the 24-hour news cycles. There is no place else to go. You may have heard similar words back in 2020 from Maximo Alvarez, a Cuban-American who fled to the United States forty-four years ago. He fled socialist Cuba for America because his father convinced him that there was no place else to go.

I may be the only person I know who sat through news coverage of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this year. I did so for the same reason that Maximo Alvarez articulated with such courage and clarity at the RNC in 2020 — because we are both afraid for America. We both know that there is no place else to go. I have not been so afraid for my country and culture since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when I was nine years old at the brink of nuclear war. Those of a certain age may remember the drills as grade school children across America were told to hide under their classroom desks with all the shades drawn. The anxiety and fear of a possible nuclear attack from the Cuban Missile Crisis left an impact on the psyche of every child.

When Russia embraced socialism following a cultural revolution, it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It malignantly spread its tentacles in a quest for global dominance. That included the establishment of a socialist state in Cuba followed in 1962 by the construction of a battery of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. For anyone who listened to Maximo Alvarez at the RNC in 2020, his revulsion and fear of the growing socialism in America was gripping.

Imagine how he felt when Senator Bernie Sanders referred to Fidel Castro as a humanitarian. Imagine the chill in his spine when Senator Tim Scott warned of the forces in America seeking an American cultural revolution and the establishment of the United Socialist States of America. Senator Scott was not referring to anarchists on the margins of American culture. He was referring to the presidential and vice presidential nominees on the Democratic ballot at that time. Now, history repeats.

Are Faithful Catholics a Threat to Democracy?

Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights heads this nation’s largest advocacy group in defense of Religious Liberty. His work was the subject of our post, “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” Most recently, Dr. Donohue and the Catholic League have demanded from the U.S. Department of Justice an investigation and explanation for recent documents launched by the FBI to investigate Traditioned-minded Catholics who are merely attempting to exercise their Faith.

Believe it or not, I am not writing a political post. As a lifelong Democrat, now an Independent, I do not oppose any political party. But my conscience requires me to oppose an ideology that is not only a threat to democracy, but a threat to Religious Freedom and my fundamental right to practice and adhere to my Faith.

In late 2018, as then-Senator Kamala Harris was preparing a presidential run, she sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where she screened federal judicial nominees put forward by then-President Donald Trump. Senator Harris asked a nominee about his Catholic faith, noting that he had been a member of the Knights of Columbus for over two decades. Her questions alluded to the K of C being some sort of politically suspect group. She demanded to know if his membership in such an “all male anti-choice organization” would cloud his judicial decisions. She referred to the Knights as an “extremist” group.

“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?,” Senator Harris asked. The judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, was blindsided. It only got worse. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii picked up on the line of questioning. “Do you intend to end your membership in this organization to avoid any appearance of bias?” The appearance of bias was already front and center, but it wasn’t on the part of the judicial nominee who was eventually confirmed. On January 5, 2019, I wrote this response to the story posted at The Wall Street Journal:

“The big question here is not what judicial nominee Brian Buescher believes, but whether Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono believe in anything at all that is worthy of belief. And the bigger question is whether such overt anti-Catholic suspicions render them unfit for public office. At best, they both need a refresher course in remedial Constitutional law. Their disregard for the Constitutional provision against any religious test for judicial confirmation is a serious flaw in their readiness to represent their constituents…”

What made this biased grilling of a Catholic nominee by Kamala Harris far more reprehensible was its déjà vu factor. Just six months earlier, the Judiciary Chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein, became the subject of public ridicule for openly applying the same unconstitutional religious test to President Trump’s nominee, Notre Dame Law Professor Amy Coney Barrett. Looking over her work as a law professor at a Catholic university, Senator Feinstein referred to her faith as a “cult” and said, “the dogma speaks loudly in you.” There was hell to pay.

But not so when Senators Harris and Hirona repeated the tactic just six months later. With the exception of Bill Donohue’s vigilant voice at the Catholic League, little was said to call attention to the newest anti-Catholic bias of Kamala Harris. When this bias was unmasked, Kamala Harris had defenders who argued that she could not be anti-Catholic because she was teamed up with Joe Biden “who carries a rosary everyplace he goes.” True. He carried it while promoting abortion without restrictions at every stage of development. He carried it while withdrawing his forty years of support for the Hyde Amendment that restricted taxpayer funds for the coverage of abortions.

He carried it when he vowed from his campaign headquarters to roll back religious exemptions in contraception coverage extended by the Supreme Court to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Mr. Biden responded to the Supreme Court decisions in favor of protecting Religious Liberty for the nuns and other conscientious objectors by restoring the mandate that both the nuns and the Supreme Court objected to. This would hit the Sisters with ruinous fines and a deeply felt conflict of conscience. The rosary in his pocket notwithstanding, Joe Biden’s threats to Religious Liberty were evidence of how much he was led and misled by the Left wing of his party, a position for which Kamala Harris has taken the reins and has now made it the mainstream of that party.

In just the six months between the anti-Catholic questioning of Notre Dame’s Amy Coney Barrett and that of judicial nominee Brian Buescher, a lot had changed. One distinctive change was the Senate Democrats’ assault on the character of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a devout Catholic.

Senator Kamala Harris reprised her role as a career prosecutor by grilling Brett Kavanaugh mercilessly on entirely uncorroborated rumors of drunkenness and sexual escapades in his high school years — rumors that not a single person could confirm.

It has also been lost in most of the news media coverage that before becoming the nominee for vice president on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris went on record to state that she also believes the sexual allegations against Joe Biden brought forward by Tara Reade in 2020. This is among the tough questions that most in our now-partisan news media will not ask.

Credits: Left, Addie Mena/Catholic News Agency; Right, Associated Press

Anesthesia for the Catholic Conscience

After publication of a controversial post, “Joe Biden, Cardinal McCarrick and the Betrayal of Life,” a priest whom I have known for some years “unsubscribed” from this blog in 2020. His reasoning was that any criticism of Joe Biden on moral grounds amounted to a tacit endorsement of President Trump. I do not endorse President Trump. What I endorse — and so should we all — is the lawful election that put him in office in 2016. I am among the many Americans who resent the notion that this “Basket of Deplorables” who cast their votes were too ignorant to be entrusted with the finer points of democracy.

From the moment the election results were announced in November, 2016, a relentless campaign was launched to nullify this lawful election by discrediting the elected President through any means possible. Most shameful of all for democracy, much of the news media abandoned its mission to report honestly on that partisan cause. One result of that betrayal was evident at The New York Times when young, progressive reporters in the news room revolted and brought about the resignation of a respected editor because he allowed “the opposition” to write an op-ed. “The opposition” in that case was the highly regarded Republican Senator Josh Hawley.

When New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan praised President Trump’s emphasis on Religious Liberty in a FOX News interview, two liberal groups of Catholic nuns sent letters of protest to the Cardinal asking him to retract his remarks. They cited Mr. Trump’s positions on climate change and capital punishment as evidence that he cannot be considered “pro-life.” The National Catholic Reporter published an editorial using the same reasoning.

In the Catholic conscience, some real moral gymnastics are required to measure a candidate’s concept of the value of life solely by a position on the death penalty. It entirely overlooks the moral apocalypse that resulted in the execution of 73 million human lives terminated in the womb at every level of development right up to birth. The awakening of the Catholic conscience to this is evident in my post, “The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life”

I am in sympathy with “Black Lives Matter” but there is much hypocrisy. African Americans constitute 12.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of U.S. abortions. That is by design and not merely a quirk of sociology. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger for the purpose of controlling the growth of the African American population. That fact is finally exposed in the public square. As monuments to historical figures are toppled across the land, no one has yet suggested that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi surrender their Margaret Sanger awards for their support of “reproductive rights.”

Whatever Kamala Harris believes about the morality of unlimited abortion on demand, she is falling lockstep in line with the platform of her party. In 2020, Kristin Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, reported that a third of Democrats considered themselves to be pro-life, but “top Democrats have gone out of their way to make it clear that we are no longer welcome in the party.” The DNC ignored the group’s request to testify before its platform committee. A major percentage of these pro-life Democrats are people of faith, Ms Day said, “but the much-hyped group, ‘Believers for Biden’ is a flop. It had only 26 followers on Facebook a week after being created” in 2020. One year later, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the platform stating, “The Declaration of Independence guarantees to every American the right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” By single-handedly eliminating the most basic of all human rights, the right to life, Kamala Harris set the Democrat Party on a road to hedonism.

As Joe Biden vowed to bankrupt the Little Sisters of the Poor with never-ending legislation and litigation, Kamala Harris did the same during her tenure as California Attorney General. In 2014, the Catholic Daughters of Charity Health System had six hospitals that were operating at an annual loss that could not be sustained. Prime Healthcare made a bid to assume their $300 million liability for worker pensions, but the United Healthcare Workers’ union opposed the deal.

Kamala Harris attached dozens of previously unheard of conditions to the deal such as requiring the Catholic hospitals to provide 24-hour nursing, surgery, anesthesia, radiology and pharmaceutical services for five years. This crippled the deal.

Prime Health sued Kamala Harris for violating its due process rights. The Catholic Daughters executives said that Ms. Harris blocked the deal at the behest of the union with “financially crippling conditions.” The lawsuit alleged that in return the union pledged $25 million in political financial support for Ms. Harris. The lawsuit ended in 2017 when a federal judge ruled that as Attorney General, Ms. Harris had “qualified immunity” from lawsuits. It is ironic that in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a resolution in the Senate to abolish qualified immunity for police officers while retaining it for herself.

What are American Catholics left with? Back before the election of 2020, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was more likely than any nominee in history to assume the Office of President of the United States at some future point due to the age of Joe Biden at that time. And yet she dropped out of the Democratic process with only a pitiful percentage of votes in the primaries. She has declared the 2 million members of the Knights of Columbus to be a subversive organization and has joined the new Democrat Party in its march toward socialism and its inevitable suppression of religious liberty.

But another voice, that of Representative Tulsi Gabbard, caught onto all this duplicity early on during the presidential debates of 2020. Before ending her own bid for the White House, Ms. Gabbard courageously unloaded her views on the suitability of Kamala Harris for the highest public office in the land. Kamala Harris dropped out of the primaries after receiving only two percent of the Democrats’ votes in Iowa in 2020. I’m giving the last word to Tulsi Gabbard:

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Editor’s note: Please share this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

• The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

• Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

• Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

• Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis by Bill Donohue is a tour de force about our culture in decline and what we need to stem the encroaching tide.

August 21, 2024 by Bill Donohue, Catholic League President

Introduction by Fr Gordon MacRae:

Speaking at the “Essence Festival of Culture” in 2023, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris described what culture means to her:

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment and our time. Right? And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy. Because, you know … it comes in the morning. We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way, too.”

That quote from the current Vice President at a symposium on culture, was followed by her signature outburst of raucous laughter. I found it cited (without the laughter) in the June, 2024 edition of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in “Kamala Wins Race to the Bottom.”

Fortunately for America, Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a more nuanced view of culture, what it means for a society to survive, and the price we pay if it fades away. I believe the United States would face even greater cultural decline if not for the brakes applied by honest and vocal prophetic witnesses like Bill Donohue. Among the many accolades of his newest book, Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis (Sophia Institute Press, 2024) Catholic Encyclopedia editor Russell Shaw wrote, “Like the prophets, Donohue skewers bad guys — doers of evil and sowers of confusion — with consistent vigor and style.”

Cultural Meltdown (the book) is riveting, and in equal parts alarming, hopeful, and culturally uplifting. Donohue holds nothing back. His discussion of the roots and fallout of “Transgenderism” spans 58 pages, an education unto itself. It is a deeply troubling exposition of where we are and how we got here. The sheer madness of gender transition treatment for children is distressing. I recall hearing President Joe Biden casually say that “If an eight-year-old boy decides he wants to be a girl, his parents should have no say in it.” Pope Francis, no staunch defender of cultural traditions, called transgender ideology “demonic.”

In June, 2024, the Pew Research Center released results of a nationwide cultural survey. Sixty percent of respondents on the political left reported that being a man or a woman is merely a matter of personal preference and choice. Only nine percent of those on the conservative political right believe that. The lines of demarcation have permeated our politics. A recent Wall Street Journal news report analyzed the evidence of an ideological shift toward the right in young men under the age of thirty. The experience of one man, age 22, is an eye-opener:

“Harrison Wells said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction from teachers and students to Trump’s [2016] victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students. ‘People were crying, upset,’ he said. ‘Everyone was hysterical.’ The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park CA which organized lectures about the importance of access to contraceptives and abortion and celebrating transgender visibility.”

— “ElectionTriggers Battle of the Sexes, “ WSJ, July 30, 2024

No one involved with the article raised a question about how or why a California Catholic high school sponsored lectures on “the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrating transgender visibility.”

In the July/August 2024 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, Bill Donohue wrote a brief essay entitled, “We Are Badly Divided.” As evidence for his title he wrote, “Those who love Biden hate Trump, and vice versa. The hatred of Trump, often called Trump Derangement Syndrome, is so bad that 86 percent of Democrats reported in a recent survey that the Justice Department should have authorized ‘the use of deadly force’ in its retrieval of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.”

This comes from the same people on the left who have gone on record, as Vice President Kamala Harris has, to advocate for defunding police. Such attitudes lured a hapless 20-year-old at a recent rally in Pennsylvania to the destruction of his own life while trying to end the life of Donald Trump. There is a way out of this cultural madness, and the prophetic Bill Donohue charts its course. What follows is Bill Donohue’s own explanation of why he wrote Cultural Meltdown. I could not improve upon it, so with his permission I am reproducing some of it here:

From Bill Donohue: “Why America Is in Trouble”

“The principal reason I wrote my new book is to address why America is in trouble. We live in a topsy-turvy world and most people, especially older adults, can’t seem to make sense of it. It is my hope that after reading Cultural Meltdown the reader will have a better handle on how this happened. We are a country torn between two conflicting visions of man and society. There are those who accept the religious vision and there are those who accept the secular vision. These perspectives are not only different, they are irreconcilable.

“Right now everything is in flux. As someone who favors the religious vision, I see signs of optimism, but not always. At some point, one side will win. We can’t go on indefinitely living as if we are living in two different worlds. The religious vision acknowledges belief in God, truth, human nature, the natural law, moral absolutes and Original Sin. It recognizes the limitations of the human condition. While it believes in progress it manifestly rejects the idea of human perfectibility.

“The secular vision promotes exactly the opposite view: God does not exist; truth is a mirage; human nature can be changed; there is no such thing as natural law; there are no moral absolutes; and the idea of Original Sin is fanciful. Furthermore, as the secular vision considers the human condition to be infinitely malleable, it champions the idea of the perfectibility of man.

“Left-wing intellectuals epitomize the secular vision. They are the ones who have had the greatest influence on the young, liberals, Democrats, and the well educated. As survey research shows, these are the most secular people in our society.

“The Catholic Church epitomizes the religious vision. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Men and women are biologically different, but possess equal dignity. We are expected to conform our behavior according to the tenets of the natural law. The faculty of reason is important, but it should complement faith, not oppose it.

“Those who ascribe to the religious vision reject the moral relativism that secularists promote. Moral relativism holds that what is moral is a matter of opinion and that there is no such thing as an act which is inherently immoral. Intellectuals very much believe this to be true. So did Hitler.

“I mention Hitler because he rode the waves of moral relativism right into office. There were political and economic reasons why he succeeded, but it was the moral collapse of German culture during the Weimar Republic (between the two world wars) that left the masses without a clear understanding of right and wrong. He capitalized on this cultural meltdown.

“Secularists are fond of saying that as long as two people agree on what constitutes proper moral behavior, that’s all that matters. It all boils down to consent. Those who believe in the religious vision know this to be false. It could justify incest. Without an understanding that God has given us Commandments to live by — and the moral absolutes they entail — all kinds of monstrosities are possible. History has shown exactly that.

“If there is one intellectual strain that is creating mass confusion it is postmodernism. For this we can thank French intellectuals in the 1960s. It is the most extreme expression of the secular vision. At bottom, it regards truth to be a fiction. Once this idea takes hold, look out. Here’s how postmodernism plays out in real life:

“David Detmer is a philosopher who knows how absurd postmodernism is. He interviewed one of its practitioners, fellow philosopher Laurie Calhoun. He asked her a simple question, one that any preschool child could answer: ‘Are giraffes taller than ants?’ ‘No,’ she replied. It is ‘an article of religious faith in our culture.’ In an earlier time, we would house people like her in an asylum. Today they are working in the academy.

“There is a chapter in the book on libertinism, or sexual license. Normal people regard people with perversions as sick and in need of help. Many left-wing intellectuals — who do not want to be regarded as normal, and who indeed reject the idea of normalcy — not only disagree that perverts are abnormal, they want to celebrate them.

“In 2022, Indiana University erected a large bronze sculpture of Alfred Kinsey, the zoologist-turned-sexologist. School officials celebrated his years of work there. There is also a Kinsey Institute on campus. They are proud of his writings and research on sexuality. They shouldn’t be. As I point out [in Cultural Meltdown, p.107] Kinsey was ‘a scientific fraud, a pervert, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a gay-bar-hopping homosexual (even though he was married) and a child abuser. Oh yes, he also had sex with animals.’ Guess which institution he hated? The Catholic Church.”

More from Bill Donohue: Christianity and Transgenderism

“The secular vision, especially postmodernism, explains the existence of Transgenderism, or gender ideology. If truth does not exist, then it is entirely possible for boys to think they are girls and vice versa. It does not matter what our chromosomes are. All that matters is what we feel is real.

“The tenets of Christianity and Transgenderism are polar opposites and cannot be reconciled. Pope Francis understands this as well as anyone. He calls gender ideology ‘one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations’ of our time. ‘Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs the differences and the value of men and women.’ So upset was [Pope Francis] with this ideological madness that he once called it ‘demonic.’

“Anti-science transgender activists are among the most intolerant people in our society. They believe there are more than two sexes (which they falsely call genders) and anyone who disagrees with them — which is to say most normal people — is dismissed as a bigot.

“The damage being done to young people — 80-percent of those who ‘transition’ to the opposite sex are girls who want to be boys — is incalculable. The long-term physical and psychological problems that they will experience have yet to be determined. We already know that puberty blockers, chemical castration, and genital mutilation have created enormous suffering. Indeed, this is the greatest child abuse issue of our day.

“The last two chapters [of Cultural Meltdown] explain why we are so divided as a nation. To take one example, we are treating racial and ethnic groups as if they were different tribes, pitting one against the other. Robin DiAngelo, the author of the best-selling book, White Fragility likes it that way: ‘People of color need to get away from white people and have some community with each other.’ They teach this racism — in the name of combating it — in many colleges and corporations. No doubt the Klan would agree with her. So does Harvard. That is why it designated ‘an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members’ when an adaptation of MacBeth was performed in 2021.

“Welcome to the world of the new apartheid. That much-condemned South African practice of separating the races is now very much in vogue in the United States. We have separate dorms on college campuses based on race, as well as separate graduation ceremonies. Part of the problem is the tendency of left-wing intellectuals to compare the tenets of the American Creed — the belief in freedom, equality and rule of law — to existing conditions. Inevitably, we come up short. But the Creed is the ideal; it is not reality. It gives us something to shoot for — holding out the potential that some day we will make good on this promise. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this. Why can’t intellectuals?”

Back to Father MacRae:

I came of age as a young adult in the middle of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was deeply affected by it, and in some ways the roots of my vocation to priesthood were inspired by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. We have come a long way since then. It is doubly tragic for those who gave their lives to promote racial equality to see the deterioration of their work today. It is deeply sad that some in the Democratic Party of today choose to foment racial and ethnic divisiveness instead of promoting unity. For me, it feels like a giant step backwards in our culture. Bill Donohue concludes his book with a caveat:

“The Catholic Church — along with evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and Muslims — must hold the line and not bow to secular opinion. Secularism is the heart of our moral crisis; it is responsible for our cultural meltdown. We need to proclaim and defend eternal truths about man and society and the moral imperatives that make for the best of all possible worlds on Earth. We don’t need to re-create anything. We need to repair to our religious moorings.”

We are at a crossroads. As we face another presidential election in 2024, we stand at midnight in the garden of good and evil. Even some facets within our Church have quietly ventured over to one side of that garden — the “woke” side. Cultural Meltdown is our wake-up call.

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Bill Donohue is President of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and served for twenty years on the Board of the National Association of Scholars. The author of ten previous books, he has appeared on thousands of news, television and radio programs including EWTN, Fox News, CNN, NEWSMAX and other national media.

Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis by Bill Donohue is published in 2024 by Sophia Institute Press. His most recent guest post for Beyond These Stone Walls was, “The Ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae.” He was also instrumental in our recent, highly acclaimed post, “A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free.”

Digital billboard just outside the United Center in Chicago, the venue of the Democratic National Convention.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.

August 14, 2024 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII solemnly defined as a dogma of faith the bodily Assumption into Heaven of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The precise words of Pope Pius are found in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, “The Most Bountiful God,” defining what much of the Church already believed, and now holds as a matter of truth:

“We pronounce, declare and define it to be a divinely revealed truth that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

It was not without controversy. Pius XII thus became the first pope in a century to define a new dogma of faith. Five papacies earlier, in 1869, Pope Pius IX sought, cajoled, and in the end imposed, the doctrine of papal infallibility. In his book, Making Saints, former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward described the doctrine of infallibility as a “sheathed sword” (Making Saints, p. 314). He described it that way because, from the time of the doctrine’s inception in 1869, a declaration of papal infallibility has only been invoked once: a century later in 1950 when Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary to be an infallible tenet of faith.

This was not just a unilateral pronouncement from on high. Before defining the dogma in 1950, Pius XII sought and received an amazing response of affirmation from the “sensus fidelium,” the assent of the faithful from throughout the world. The Our Sunday Visitor Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine describes this beautifully:

“Infallibility in belief pertains to the whole Church. ‘The whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (the ‘sensus fidei’) of the whole people when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent to matters of faith and morals.” (Lumen Gentium)

“To understand properly how the whole people of God is infallible in its sense of the faith (sensus fidei, sensus fidelium) it must be born in mind that the body of the faithful goes beyond limits both of place and, especially, of time. The People of God always includes those of past generations as well as those in the present moment. The former are in fact the vast majority, and it is easier to ascertain what they believed. It is that belief that marks the sensus fidelium and points infallibly to the truth." (p. 334)

To help in understanding this concept of the Universal Church that includes the faith of all generations past, see my post, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead” (linked again at the end of
this post). It is evidence of the ongoing connectedness of the faithful departed to the life of the Church.

I found this concept to be a stunning affirmation, not only of what we believe, but of why we believe it. The idea that infallibility includes the unwavering faith of the vast majority of the People of God taken as a whole over the span of millennia is mind-boggling truth.

The faith of the entire Church, from its birth at Pentecost to the present, points to a belief in Mary as Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the New Ark of the Covenant. Pope Pius XII strongly considered this before defining as infallible the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950. From the Chair of Peter, Pius XII sought the assent of the faithful in the present through his encyclical, Deiperae Virginis Mariae, to inquire whether Mary’s bodily Assumption should be defined.

As a result, an amazing number of petitions reached Rome from every corner of the Church. The petitions included those of 8,000,000 laity, 50,000 religious women, 32,000 priests, 2,505 archbishops and bishops, 311 cardinals, and 81 patriarchs of the Eastern Church. If this demonstration of assent had been able to span the entire life of the Church the result would have been immeasurable.

From the earliest days of the Church many considered the Assumption of Mary — centuries before it was defined as a tenet of faith — to be, in the words of Pius XII, “the fulfillment of that most perfect grace granted to the Blessed Virgin and the special blessing that countered the curse of Eve” — original sin. In the Eastern Church, a “Memorial of Mary” was already being celebrated on August 15 in the Fifth Century. It spread from the East and came ot be known as the koimesis in Greek and the dormitio in Latin, both of which mean the “falling asleep.” By the Eighth Century, belief in the bodily Assumption of Mary was widely accepted in both the East and West.

In the 19th Century, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote that both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary are implicit in her identification as the “New Eve,” a title given to Mary since the Second Century. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus was the essential element of His victory over sin and death, Mary shares that victory in her designation as the New Eve, and in the words of Jesus at the foot of the Cross as the spiritual Mother of all. Seeing His Mother at the foot of the Cross, Jesus said ot her, “Woman, behold your son.” And then to the Disciple John, “Behold your Mother.” It was an adoption arrangement (John 19:26-27).

Among the earliest titles of Mary is Theotokos, Greek for “The Bearer of God.” For the Scriptural foundation of this belief and its implications, see my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

“What Will Become of You?”

In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2), Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus at Mount Tabor. Both Moses and Elijah, according to Scripture, entered heaven in both body and soul. The appearances of Mary at Fatima, Lourdes, Tepeyac Hill in Mexico, and others all point to an understanding of Mary as existing still in that same form. I wrote of the details of one of these visits in “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

There is no saint of modern times with a stronger and more dedicated devotion ot Mary than Saint Maximilian Kolbe who seemed to live with a perpetual presence of the Immaculata in his field of view. Long before he was the Saint of Auschwitz and Founder of the Militia Immaculata, Saint Maximilian Kolbe was simply “Raymond,” a highly intelligent and gifted boy born into poverty in a rural farming community in Poland.

Like me, Raymond Kolbe was fascinated by the sciences of astronomy and cosmology and actually once built a working rocket as a boy. Also like me, he exasperated his mother at times. One day his frustrated mother scolded him, “Raymond! Whatever will become of you?” Filled with grief, young Kolbe went immediately to a local church and turned to the Mother of God with the same question. According to Kolbe’s own words as reported by my friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC in his wonderful book, 33 Days to Morning Glory,

“Then the virgin appeared to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white and one red. She looked at me with love and she asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure, and the red meant that I would be a martyr. I answered, ‘yes, I want them.’ Then she looked at me tenderly and disappeared.”

Father Gaitley went on to describe that what was meant by “pure” in this sense was that Kolbe would never allow evil or dishonesty to take root in his heart. And it never did. On August 14, the date this is posted, the Church honors Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He also happens to be my own Patron Saint as well as that of my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and the Patron Saint of this blog. To the best of our ability, we follow in his spiritual footsteps, but his footsteps took him to an ultimate sacrifice. The nature of that sacrifice, along with Maximilian’s Auschwitz prison number 16670, now a badge of honor, is expressed on Pornchai’s T-shirt atop this section of our post. Our friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, described the footsteps of Saint Maximilian in brief but familiar prose in 33 Days to Morning Glory :

“In 1941, after decades of incredibly fruitful apostolic labors in Poland and Japan, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Before his arrest, his brother Franciscans had pleaded with him to go into hiding. He said he was grateful for their loving hearts but couldn’t follow their advice.

“He later explained why: ‘I have a mission to fulfill.’ That mission was fulfilled on the eve of the Feast of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven when, after he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner condemned to starvation, the impatient Nazis finished Kolbe off with a lethal injection. Thus, St. Maximilian died a martyr of charity and received the red crown from his Immaculata.”

Two hours before his arrest, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe penned what Father Gaitley called “the single most important theological reflection of his life. It was nothing less than the answer to a question that eluded him for many years, the question he had pondered over and over throughout his life was: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”

In the document, according to Father Gaitley, Kolbe raised a key point. In the appearances of Mary at Lourdes, Mary did not say to St. Bernadette, “I am immaculately conceived,” but rather she said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It was thus clarified for Maximilian that through a special grace from God, Mary was in fact immaculately conceived in the womb of her own mother with no stain of original sin and that grace became her very identity by the as yet unseen merits of her Son. Understanding this means stepping out of conventional time and space for a moment into the mystery of the “nunc stans” the "Eternal Now" in which God dwells and in which He envisions all time and space as one. It is a difficult concept for our linear existence to ponder, but I have pondered it for my entire life.

Father Gaitley asks (p. 52): “Why does Mary make the grace she received at her conception her very name?” Clearly, Mary is not a divine being. Kolbe wrestled with this divinity problem for decades, and it ultimately led to a solution.

There are two Immaculate Conceptions, one created (Mary) and the other uncreated (the Holy Spirit). Before Mary, there was the uncreated Immaculate Conception, “the One Who for all eternity springs from God the Father and God the Son as an uncreated conception of love, the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the universe. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is the 'conception' that springs from their love. The Holy Spirit is the “Immaculate Conception” b e c a u s e, being God, He is without sin.

Is Mary then a personification of the Holy Spirit? The truth of this union between the Holy Spirit and Mary is found in a somewhat difficult passage in Maximilian’s own writings as reported by Father Gaitley:

"What type of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the ‘essence’ of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.” ( Gaitley, p. 53)

“In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves Himself, the very Love of the Most Holy Trinity ... . In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the depths of her very being” (Gaitley, p. 53-54)

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, henceforth all generations shall call me
blessed.”

— From the Magnificat of Mary, Luke 1:46-48

In “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God,” I explored a similar Marian theology, and from it I think I can finally make sense of what Saint Maximilian has proposed. Mary, Theotokos , the Bearer of God, is an eternal repository of the Holy Spirit. Both my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I owe her a great debt — not for saving us from Earthly Powers of destruction, because they actually mean little, but for preserving us in faith despite them.

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“Remember that those who ask for Heaven of the Immaculata will surely achieve it because she is unable to deny us anything nor is the Lord God able to deny her anything. We shall shortly know exactly what it will be like in Heaven. Surely in a hundred years none of us will be walking on this Earth. But what are a hundred years in the face of what we have been through? Soon, therefore, provided we are well prepared under the protection of the Immaculata.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe, 1941

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please spend some time in prayer and thanksgiving at the live feed of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s own Adoration Chapel featured below after all our posts at Beyond These Stone Walls.

You may also like these related posts:

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Maximilian Kolbe: The Other Prisoner Priest in My Cell

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

One Nation under God: The Future of the U.S. Supreme Court

‘One Nation under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. Today some forces want it gone, and God gone with it.

August 7, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Editor’s Note: We are revisiting a post originally published before the U.S. presidential election of 2020 and its many unresolved issues.

The title of this post should be recognizable to just about every resident of the United States over the age of fifty, citizen or not. It comes, of course, from the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath with a storied history. The idea for such an oath began with an editor of The Youth’s Companion, a magazine published in the United States from 1827 to 1912. The first official use of the Pledge was in a ceremony honoring Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1892 by a proclamation of President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican.

In 1954, by a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the words, “one nation under God” were added to the Pledge to wide popular acclaim. Now, 66 years later, some members of Congress refuse to include those words in any recitation of the pledge. Some decline to recite the Pledge at all. Rioting mobs are tearing down any statue that even looks like it might represent Christopher Columbus. The name of God is the prey of activist judges.

Thus comes the beginning of the end of “one nation under God,” and perhaps even of the nation itself. In the midst of all this chaos, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 leaving the administration of President Donald Trump with a third nomination to the nation’s highest court and a reshaping of the Court unprecedented in modern times. This mirrors the real priority of the election of 2016, a fact that I wrote about then in “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” It opens eyes now just as it did then.

There is a lot at stake in this upcoming election [and especially in the current administration that has vowed to radically reshape the Supreme Court along ideological lines through term limits and stacking the Court with additional justices.] If you find it a challenge to read such a political position from a Catholic priest, well, “For Zion’s sake I cannot keep silent. For Jerusalem’s sake, I will not rest” (Isaiah 62:1). At the heart of all this there are urgent considerations for human rights, religious freedom, and Catholic moral teaching.

At least consider the unfiltered voices of your fellow Americans that have not been strained through the sieve of the mainstream news media’s surrender to the deep political left. In 2020, the fourth year of the current President’s first term in office, the highly respected Gallup Poll conducted a broad scientific survey of the level of trust Americans invest in the institutions of government and civil society. This survey came in the midst of a global pandemic and the high anxiety of a highly contentious election year. The results are very different from what you are hearing from CNN or MSNBC.

Churches and organized religion ranked near the top in overall public trust with 42-percent reporting a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust. Only 28-percent reported having “very little.” The U.S. Military came out at the very top with 72-percent of Americans who report having “very high” trust and only 8-percent having “very little.” Despite all the bad news, the nation’s police also fared better than expected. 48-percent of Americans reported having “very high” trust while 33-percent reported “very little.”

Political institutions were the most interesting. In 2020, four years into President Trump’s first, and so far only term, 42-percent of Americans reported having a “very high” trust level for his office while 32-percent reported having “very little.” A look at the same Gallup Poll in the fourth year of Barack Obama’s first term revealed lower numbers with 32-percent having “high” trust and 35-percent “very little.” You won’t hear this on CNN.

Nancy Pelosi’s Congress Tipping Further Left

In the image above, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is seen dramatically tearing up the President’s 2020 State of the Union address. The lower House of Congress had capitulated to the progressive left and handed over unprecedented control to the newer members who self-identified as socialists. Their unofficial voice has been Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who announced in a news conference in 2020 that “We are confident that President Joe Biden can be guided further left.” [The decision not to run for reelection in 2024 made his turn left a moot point. With the current Vice President now running in place of Joe Biden for a second term, the threatened push to turn further left is no longer necessary because she is already much further left than the president Americans elected in 2020.]

Of interest, the 2020 Gallup Poll Trust Survey responded to this. Only 13-percent of Americans reported having “high” or “very high” trust in Congress while 48-percent reported having “very little.” American’s trust level in the Congress of 2020 controlled by Democrats was even lower than trust in the mainstream news media which was at its historical all-time lowest point. Newspapers earned the high trust of only 24-percent of Americans while “very little” trust came in at 35-percent. Television news fared even worse. Only 19-percent reported having “high” trust while 43-percent reported “very little” or none at all. You won’t hear this on CNN either.

The 2020 sharp leftward tilt of Congress toward socialism is of grave concern if it drags the Supreme Court along with it. President Trump’s 2020 conservative nominee had been met with threats by Congress to retaliate if Democrats remain in control and gain the Senate and the White House as well. The most vocal threat is that they will “pack the Court” by increasing its number and filling the additional seats with liberal judges. [That is no longer an idle threat. The present Democratic nominee for president has already identified it as an urgent goal.]

This would be disastrous for America. The first Supreme Court was seated with five justices in 1789. In 1837, Congress increased the number to nine. That number was arrived at to make political stalemates very unlikely. The nine-justice Court has been a fixture in Washington for nearly two centuries. One of the most vocal criticisms of the Court in recent years has been the presence of “activist judges” in the lower courts who “legislate from the bench.”

The Supreme Court’s most important responsibility is to decide cases that raise questions of Constitutional interpretation. This is called “Judicial Review” and it places the Supreme Court in a pivotal role in the American political system. It is the ultimate authority for applying the Constitution in the most important issues facing the country. It is disastrous if activist judges find their way onto the Supreme Court. Examples of “Legislating from the Bench” came in two cases before the modern Court.

In 1973, the Supreme Court did not find a right to abortion in the Constitution, and so it invented one and placed it there, usurping the role of Congress and the votes of the American people. This happened again in 2015 in “Obergefell v Hodges,” the same-sex marriage ruling. In the (5-4) split decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a blistering dissent accusing the liberal judges of placing a constitutional right to marriage in the Constitution when it simply is not there.

Sheldon Whitehouse and the Judiciary Committee

Shortly after [then-]President Trump announced his decision to put forward a nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some in Congress and the Senate went into high gear to denounce it. The players knew very well what the real issue of precedent was. When President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy in his last months as President in 2016, a vacancy left by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, the Republican controlled Senate declined to consider it. The Republicans were in the right (no pun intended) on the matter of precedent.

The controlling authority in 2016 was the precedent that, since 1888, the Senate does not confirm a nominee in an election year with a divided government. In 2016, the White House was occupied by a Democrat while the majority in the Senate was Republican. The Senate Democrats know, but hoped you did not know, that it was Joe Biden himself who popularized this exception. As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, Senator Biden urged President George H.W. Bush to refrain from making a Supreme Court nomination during that election year because the “divided government” meant there was an “absence of a nationwide consensus.” Without such a consensus on constitutional philosophy, Senator Biden insisted, “action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election is over.”

A divided government was the case again in 2016 so the “Biden Rule” applied. It was not the case in 2020. Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself argued that in the final months of a president’s term in office, “the president is still the president,” and he has a constitutional mandate to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, had the most suspect response:

“Though we [n Congress] strongly believe this is a matter of the gravest importance for our nation, for life, liberty, and the pursuit of our agenda, it would be wrong to fill this with just a few months left of this presidency.”

Even overlooking the fact that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of our agenda” is not exactly what the Bill of Rights had in mind, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have concluded that the election is already over and your voices have already been heard. In “Ginsburg Succession Battle Shows Hypocrisy Is an Enduring Norm,” Wall Street Journal Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker was as put off as I was:

“The reason millions of voters swallowed their doubts about Donald Trump in 2016 was that they believed their voices had too often been ignored… It has been clear all summer that there is an emerging progressive consensus [in Congress] that considers the nation’s institutions, traditional values, and even its history to be fundamentally illegitimate.”

— The Wall Street Journal, Sep. 22, 2020

But no one left me more uneasy about the road ahead in 2020 than Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fox News Anchor Bill Hemmer asked him a pointed question (Sep. 22) about the obliteration of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s due process rights in the his confirmation hearing. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse responded that Kavanaugh had “a credible accusation” against him that overshadowed those hearings in what I could only conclude to be a sham trial. In welcoming the newly seated Justice Kavanaugh to the Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to that process as “a highly partisan show.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of no more than being accused. I, for one, can relate to such an albatross around my neck. The uncorroborated and unsubstantiated allegations were exploited by Senator Whitehouse and others on his committee in a vicious partisan display that voters have not forgotten.

What made these claims “credible” in the eyes of Senator Whitehouse? Sheldon Whitehouse spent his high school years at St. Paul’s School, an elite prep school in Concord, New Hampshire with historic ties to the Episcopal church. Its alumni list looks like a who’s who of Washington politics. The school has been the subject of multiple grand jury investigations for alleged sexual assaults by both students and faculty dating back several decades. I wrote about the fallout from this in “Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester.” If Sheldon Whitehouse were to be accused today, should that fact alone make the claims “credible?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh might be among the first to defend his due process rights.

So what sort of witch hunt were we in for when [then-]President Trump put forth the name of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for nomination in 2020? The fact that she is Catholic had already become an unconstitutional religion test applied by members of the Judiciary Committee in 2020. In 2018, a non profit progressive organization called “Demand Justice” spent $5 million building opposition to Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court. How much of this money paid for false accusations? The Wall Street Journal reports that when asked if the group donated to Senator Whitehouse, he responded, “hope so!” In “Questions for Senator Whitehouse,” (Review & Outlook, Sep. 22, 2020) the Journal concluded:

“Mr Whitehouse is trying to stifle the donations and speech of his political opponents. The least he can do is set an example by disclosing his own dark money network and its plans to undermine judicial independence.”

Epilogue

Jumping back to 2024, President Joe Biden and presidential candidate Kamala Harris have both announced a plan to form an exploratory committee to reform the Court through term limits, additional seats on the Court, and the same threats that would re-make the Supreme Court into just another political action committee. Joe Biden, the proponent of term limits for the Court spent 48 years in Congress. For those who care about the state of Justice in America, I believe this effort must be halted.

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Editor’s Note: Please share this post. You may also like these related posts:

• Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, Diocese of Manchester (2019)

• The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

• Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

• The Last Full Measure of Devotion: Civil Rights and the Right to Life
  

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”