God Bless
The Greatest Nation in
History
Richard Salbato 5-1-1008 (
I try to write only about the
Faith of the Catholic Church and its relation to our daily lives: how we treat
God, how we treat each other, are we doing the right thing in each and every
action of our day. Over the years I have
seen that people really want to do the right things but emotions get in the way
of good thinking. I have also noted that
people think they can know what God wants of them without any real learning; in-other-words,
they do not want to learn or study. They
think God will teach them directly through their own uneducated
conscience.
This lack of knowledge has
opened up the abuse of conscience by cult leaders, who do not see the balance between
individual freedoms and the common good.
Within the Church there is a war between those who want no laws against
their self-created conscience and the written laws of God and the Church. The Church, on the other hand, teaches a good
and proper balance between personal freedoms and the common good.
This brings me to the subject
of this article: the obligations of
Catholics to get involved in the politics of the nation they live in, and not
just passively but actively. Before
you can know that you are doing God’s will, you must know what God said to the
world: the Bible and the teaching of the Church, even the early Church
Fathers.
Likewise, before you can be
active in the political world, you should know something about government and
even the history of government. You
should even know God’s ideas about government.
For this reason I have written a great deal about governments and what
both God and the Popes have written on this subject.
There are 75 documents by the
magisterium on governments. I have done
a 20 year study on the relationship of God and governments and the relationship
of Catholics and government. You can
find some of that study on my web site:
Pope Leo
XIII on Governments , Government
by the Popes , Government
by Saint Thomas , Government
by Jefferson , Government
by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle , Government
of Machiavelli , Government
of the Bible
It was of interest to me why Saint Peter
went to
I also studied
the
Now that brings
me to the reason I am writing about
Not only have I studied
governments but I have traveled the world over for the last 15 years, and have
been in 38 countries on ever continent except
I have not only concluded
that
Many Americans have different
opinions about this, and everyone can point out what they do not like, and I
hope to address these things. Some
people think of America as having being founded by Masons, and other think of
America as being founded by Protestants, but are these people looking at a very
limited view of history?
Parts of the East Coast were colonized
by people getting away from an English King, some were Protestants and many
were Catholics getting away from persecution.
The Central part of
What they wanted to end was
the oppression of the people by governments. They wanted the least amount of government possible, so that no one had
any real power over the people.
However, they knew that there had to be laws and some form of government
to keep the social order. These laws had
to be just and enforced. What they came
up with was a government of checks and balances that put no power in any branch
of government and limited the powers of the central government to basic things
that state governments could not handle.
They put everything into a
written document and called the new government a Constitutional Republic.
What was new about this government was that the written law had more
power than any of the different branches of the government. In
fact, the written document had more power even than the majority of the
people.
What makes the government of
the Catholic Church so great is that we have written law, and the basics of
that law cannot change. What makes
The same is true of
We have had corrupt Supreme
Court Judges, that totally corrupted the written law
that they swore to protect, by legalizing slavery, abortion, confiscation of
land, restrictions on guns, and many other things that are contrary to the law
they pledge to support. But as long as
we hang on to this constitution, these abuses will be corrected.
The biggest abuse of the
constitution is when we accepted Common English Law in our legal system, which
corrupted the concept of fixed law under the constitution. This also has to be corrected, but I am
confident that in time it will.
When I was a kid in school,
we had to read the Constitution and Bill of Rights and understand them. I wonder how many of my readers today have
ever read the Constitution, and among those who have, how many remember much of
what it says?
I do not want here to repeat what
our Constitution says, but I do want to say why it says what it does. A perfect government has to balance individual
freedoms with the common good. It has to protect me from you and you from me,
but not me from me. A perfect government
is not feared by the people but the government has to fear the people. The Bill of Rights gave that power to the
people and by giving them the right to bear arms it gave them the power to
protect itself from that government.
It divided the central
government into three different check and balance systems, who had some powers
over the other branches of government and back and forth. It
gave that central government limited power, and most of the power to the
individual state governments. It
created the greatest educational system in the world without being directly
involved in the system.
Now this is important. The
power of the Central Government (
The Federal Government has no
constitutional right to be in the School business, nor the Medical business,
nor the housing business, nor the labor business. In keeping with their three mandates above, they
do have the right to regulate businesses, banks, and other companies that have
business that crosses state lines. They
do have the right to make tariffs or remove them because that deals with
Foreign Affairs. They do have the right
to build National Highways, Dams, electrical grids, and pipe lines because they
deal with more than one state. International harbors and airports are within
the Feds jurisdiction because of the same reasons.
State governments take care
of local law and order, interstate roads, utilities, and state and local
schools. They make zoning regulations and local business and labor regulations. State governments are supposed to take care
of everything except for the three duties above.
This entire system was
designed to give people the most peace, freedom and prosperity in the history
of the world. However, with freedom
comes corruption and often the government took too long to react with the
regulations that prevented that corruption, but it was not the fault of the
system.
In the early years large corporations
took advantage of workers. Then unions
formed to protect workers. Then the unions became corrupted and people had to
be protected from unions. States sometimes violated the personal rights of
people and the government at times was too slow to correct the abuse. One example of this was the “Right To Liberty” but some states bypassed that law by saying that
black slaves were not humans. We had to fight a hard war to free the slaves and
protect the Constitution but in the end the system worked. The difference between
Today we have the same
problem with “The Right to Life” in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
because Supreme Court Judges (who swear to protect the Constitution) ruled that
babies in the womb are not humans. In the end the Constitution will prevail and
that will be changed as all other abuses have slowly been corrected, because we
have written law.
Because this government gave
people the greatest freedom in history, people came here from all over the
world, often without a dime in their pockets.
This freedom not only produced the wealthiest nation in history but the
greatest in science, in technology, in medicine and in education. This freedom produced the inventions of electricity,
lighting, the auto industry, airplanes, jets, rockets, atomic power, atomic
bombs, computers, telephones, television, radios, the internet, and space
travel.
Freedom also brings some
freedoms we are not proud of but should not change. We have the greatest freedom of speech and
the press in the world. For that reason
we have pornography, the KKK, Masonic Lodges, and a legal Communist party. This freedom is almost unconditional, so long
as it does not force itself on others, advocate violence, cause violence or
infringe on others freedoms.
All the problems we have
today are because the government has violated one or more of the provisions of
the Constitutions. Before the Federal
Government got involved in the School System we were the best in the world, now
we are the worst in the main countries, and that is because we took away completion
and incentive.
Our medical care is the best
in the world but government intervention has made it four times as expensive as
it should be.
The housing mess we are in is
because of Federal Changes to mortgage laws.
In 1995 (under President Clinton) the Federal Government forced Banks
and Mortgage Companies to accept Sup-prime mortgages or be fined.
The Oil Shortage is because
of government’s interference in the free market, because the government does
not allow them to drill for oil off shore, in the oil shale deposits or in
Social Security should never
have been a government program. All these things that the government should not
be involved in have produced excessive taxes and taken away freedom. All are because the government violated the
constitution and we, the people, were not watchful.
America’s Wars
There are some today that say
we should not be involved in any foreign government’s problems. However, we
always have done this when it was in our interest to do so.
President Monroe and his Secretary of State, John
Quincy Adams, drew upon a foundation of American diplomatic ideals to write the
Monroe Doctrine that told Europe to
keep their hands off the new free American states in North and
We
went to war in the First and Second World Wars to protect our European friends
because it was in our interest to do so.
We wrote and implemented the Marshal Plan
to reconstruct
We protected
We are the greatest nation in
history because 98 countries have followed our system of freedom to have
similar constitutional democracies, just in the last 100 years. We have protected the world from all the
dictators of the last 100 years and continue to do so. Without American,
People in
Yes,
When in
He answered by saying, 'Over
the years, the
You could have heard a pin
drop.
Then there was a conference
in
He has sent an aircraft
carrier to
A Boeing engineer stood up
and replied quietly: 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat
several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore
facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 30,000 people
three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water
from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in
transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck.. We have eleven
such ships; how many does
You could have heard a pin
drop.
A U.S. Navy Admiral was
attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the
Without hesitating, the
American Admiral replied 'Maybe it's because the Brits, Canadians,
Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to
speak German.'
You could have heard a pin
drop.
A group of Americans, retired
teachers, recently went to
The American said, "The
last time I was here, I didn't have to show it."
“Impossible. Americans always
have to show your passports on arrival in
The American senior gave the
Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained. "Well, when I came
ashore at
You could have heard a pin
drop
Other than food, the largest
export from the
American Catholics
American Catholics think that
even as Catholics we are the worst in the world, but after being in all the
major Catholic nations of the world, I think we are the best. We migrated here
because of the Catholic persecution in
Do you know – that the American
Catholic Church educates 2.6 million students everyday at the cost to your
Church of 10 billion dollars, and a savings on the other hand to the American taxpayer
of 18 billion dollars. Your Catholic graduates go on to graduate studies at the
rate of 92%, all at a cost to you. To
the rest of the Americans it's free.
The Church has 230 colleges and universities in the
More Catholics go to Sunday
Mass in
Let me give you some figures
that you as Catholics should know and remember. For example, 12% of the 300 Protestant
clergy surveyed admitted to sexual intercourse with a parishioner; 38%
acknowledged other inappropriate sexual contact in a study by the
If you go by percentages of
population, we are a Catholic Nation and our percentage is growing year by
year, now at 38% and the closest to us is 17%.
We publish more Catholic Books than any other country in the world. We collect more money as a Church than any
other country in the world, and we give more to the poor of the world than any
other Catholic body in the world.
The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
We are also pledged to the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in
Nothing with God happens by accident. On the same day, May 16, 1920 that Pope Benedict XV canonized the
"Maid of Orleans," Joan of Arc, at St. Peter's in Vatican City, Archbishop Giovanni Vincenzo
Bonzano blessed the site designated for the National
Shrine and in the same ceremony blessed a statue of Joan of Arc.
celebrating simultaneously with solemn ecclesiastical ceremonies
at
Just as Joan of Arc
(1412-1431) freed
The Object of All War is Peace
The above statement might
seem like an oxymoron, but it is not.
Throughout history the object of every war was peace, even by the
invading army. The concept is peace on my terms. An invading army
might say, we can have peace if you give us all your
land and become slaves to our people. To
the Christians, the Romans said we can have peace if you worship our gods, our
Cesar, and denounce your god. On the
brighter side,
The greatest danger to
About the time our original thirteen states adopted
their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor
at the
A democracy is always
temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until
the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the
public treasury. From that moment on,
the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse
due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest
civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During
those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From
bondage to spiritual faith; 2. From spiritual faith to great
courage; 3. From courage to liberty; 4. From liberty to abundance; 5. From
abundance to complacency; 6. From complacency to
apathy; 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From dependence back into bondage.'
Predestined
America is destined by God to
save the world again, and this is the only possible way I can see for there to
be a fulfillment of Our Lady of Fatima’s promise, that “in the end, My Immaculate
Heart will triumph and there will be a period of peace.” We dedicated our nation to Her,
and She will not let us down as orphans.
But we must first protect
I want these candidates to
say publicly, “I love
Richard Salbato
Note:
1.
Good Books:
1. Understanding
2.
3. Hole in Our Soul
4. Pete Domenici’s Energy Bill
from the Office of Senator Pete V. Domenici
Thursday, May 1, 2008
-- Legislation Seeks to Bring Lower Prices, Less Foreign
Oil --
Domenici backed by 19 cosponsors today introduced the American Energy Production Act of 2008 (S.2958),
which is intended to help lower energy prices and make America less dependent
on foreign sources of oil.
By expanding production offshore and in
“For years now, I have been trying to develop more
domestic production of oil and gas, and for years, with one exception in the
“The bill I’m introducing today will produce up to 24
billion barrels of oil through common sense measures to open up areas offshore
and in
Domenici pointed out that had President Clinton not vetoed
exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in 1995, when oil was
$19 a barrel,
The American
Energy Production Act will also lift the one-year moratorium on developing oil
shale in
The bill will allow petitions for leasing activities in
the
“Congress has spent billions to research and develop clean
sources of energy. I’ve been a leader in those efforts and I will continue to
be. However, we must face the fact that no matter what we do,
Among the original co-sponsors of the bill are: Senators
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Robert Bennett (R-Utah), Kit Bond (R-Mo.), Jim
Bunning (R-Ky.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), John Cornyn
(R-Texas), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Kay Bailey Hutchison
(R-Texas), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.),
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), John Thune (R-S.D.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio), and
Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).