February 13, 2001
Deceived by the Adversary in the
Garden of Eden, human beings from the time of the Fall from Grace to the
present have deluded themselves that they are the equal of their Creator.
Contingent beings who did not create themselves — and whose bodies are
destined for the corruption of the grave until the Last Day — come to
believe quite pridefully that they can do whatever they want with utter
impunity. No one is to have any authority over them, not God generally, not
His true Church particularly, not any of their fellow human beings. And no law
is superior to the dictates of their own disordered wills, not God’s law
inscribed on the flesh of human hearts and by His very finger on the stone
tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai, and not any human law made in
recognition of the binding precepts of God’s immutable laws and in
subordination to them. We are rebels by our fallen nature, creatures who believe
that we are never in need of any direction or correction from others.
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins that
affect all human beings. However, pride affects those in positions of power
more than others. Those in positions of power and influence have a pronounced
tendency to think of themselves as virtual demigods whose lives and actions fall
outside any limits external to their own designs. Historically that has been true
of those who have held positions of temporal authority in civil government. It
has been true of those who have headed organized-crime families. It has been
true, sadly, of a number of ecclesiastics over the years. (The Devil uses that to
try to discourage the practice of the Faith by those who do not recognize that
the bad example given by bishops and priests is simply that — bad example
— and that we do not use the bad example of others to commit spiritual
suicide by ceasing the practice of the Faith.) And it has been true of those in
corporations and labor unions, men and women who come to view their little
fiefdoms as birthrights that authorize them to act as they see fit in whatever
circumstances they find themselves.
The likes of Caligula and Nero and
Diocletian and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and Herod the Great and Henry
VIII and Napoleon and Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Castro and Mao and
Capone and Gotti, although separated by centuries, have had one thing in
common: a belief that they were “special” people whose very
acquisition and retention of power justified every means they employed to
accomplish their ends. Niccolò Machiavelli even gave philosophical
respectability to such lawlessness and pride in his Discourses on Livy.
The powerful believe that other human beings are objects for their own
aggrandizement or pleasure, and that the property of others belongs rightfully
to them as a matter of personal privilege befitting their high station in life.
Thus, it is a minor matter for people possessed of such a notion to reward their
friends, punish their enemies, loot the treasuries of others, and arrogate unto
themselves possessions and privileges that feed into their narcissistic world
view.
Former President Bill Clinton is merely
one in a long line of petty tyrants and thieves who believes in his own
exemption from the laws of God and those of man. Although quite symbolic of
his own narcissistic and indulgent generation, Clinton would have felt very
much at home in John Gotti’s Mafia crime family. He would have been
quite comfortable with Lenin and Stalin, whose essential ideology and
methodology of rule he adapted for his own purposes. And he would have had
the time of his life with Caligula and Nero and Henry VIII. Boy, the three of
them would have had a number of belly-laughs about how easy it is to
intimidate people and to make off with that which is not your own.
The number of Clinton apologists,
however, is dwindling somewhat. Interesting to note, though, that most of
those who still defend Clinton are black liberal leaders, many of whose own
people live in poverty as the victims of the destruction of the black family
engineered by Margaret Sanger and Rexford Tugwell in the 1930s — and
implemented by Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society in the 1960s. Many black
Americans have been made wards of the state through the promotion of
contraception and divorce, and through entitlement programs created to deal
with the state-administered breakdown of the family — programs that
create constituency groups who must be convinced that it is impossible for
people living in poverty to live without the beneficence of the state. The
incongruity of blacks’ poverty and the opulence and naked greed of Bill
Clinton does not register for a single moment in the mind of the District of
Columbia’s nonvoting member of the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton.
It makes not a whit of difference to Fidel Castro’s favorite
representative from south-central Los Angeles, Maxine Waters, who defends
almost everything Bill Clinton says and does (while refusing to vote in the
affirmative to wish former President Reagan a happy ninetieth birthday).
Harlem’s Representative Charles Rangel continues to minimize all of
Clinton’s contempt for the law and contempt for the dictates of simple
decency. Still, more and more of those who have defended Clinton have come
to realize that the man they have defended for so long is nothing more than a
self-aggrandizing crook.
Indeed, the man who admitted to giving
deliberately “misleading” information in his January 17, 1998,
deposition in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit still likes to live on the
edge of legality, defining terms as he sees fit. His pardon of fugitive financier
Marc Rich was defended by his own former White House counsel (now the
lawyer for Rich), Jack Quinn, partly on the grounds that Rich wasn’t
really a fugitive because he had never been convicted of a crime and partly on
the grounds that no crime had been committed at all. That is just another
application of “it all depends on what the meaning of is
is.” It all depends upon what the meaning of “fugitive” is.
Well, the FBI quite regularly puts people on its Ten Most Wanted list who are
wanted for crimes for which they have not yet been tried. Such folks are
fugitives from justice precisely because they do not want to be tried. If the case
against Marc Rich was so inconsequential, why did he flee the country?
Naturally, none of that matters to
Clinton. Rich’s former wife, Denise Rich, has given millions of dollars to
the Democratic Party, including loads of money to Bill Clinton and Hillary
Rodham Clinton, the newly minted junior senator from New York. It has now
been documented that Denise Rich has given at least $400,000 to the Clinton
presidential-library fund, and the actual figure may be far in excess of that
amount. Marc Rich and his ex-wife have money. Bill Clinton likes money. He
believes that he deserves to have the money of other people. Never mind the
fact that Marc Rich made profits dealing with Iran and Libya when this nation
had imposed economic boycotts against those terrorist states. What should a
little thing like treasonous activity mean when Rich had renounced his American
citizenship? After all, you can’t accuse a man of “trading with the
enemy” if he is no longer a citizen of a country from which he is not really
a fugitive, right? And what’s the big deal about making a few dollars off
the enemies of the United States when you yourself denounced your own
country in no uncertain terms while “studying” abroad at Oxford
after you had maneuvered to dodge your country’s military draft?
In November 1973, President Richard M.
Nixon said, “The people have a right to know whether their president is a
crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” A liar and an obstructor of justice,
yes, but not a crook. Bill Clinton is a crook and a liar and a perjurer and an
obstructor of justice. Through it all, however, he just skates above the fray,
giving his usual obfuscatory answers to direct questions, refusing to admit
publicly that anything he does or says is in the least bit corrupt or suspicious. He
has long believed that no one has any right to judge him or question him or hold
him to objective standards of conduct founded on the binding precepts of the
Divine positive law and the natural law. He is so arrogant that he believes that
he can not only grant pardons to fugitives from justice but also take whatever
he wants out of the people’s house, even though many of things he took
had been given to the White House in perpetuity, not to him or his wife
personally.
As I noted in last month’s issue of
my newsletter, Christ or Chaos, Bill Clinton’s contempt for the rule of
law and for the property of others is a relatively minor matter when you
consider his contempt for the sanctity of innocent human lives in their
mothers’ wombs. He has no regard for others because he, like the legions
of the powerful before him, has no regard for God. Indeed, Bill Clinton has
nothing but contempt for God’s true Church, the only sure foundation
for order within souls and within societies.
The antidote for the poison of pride is to
look at the instrument upon which the God-Man suffered to redeem us: the
Holy Cross. It is by constantly fixing our gaze upon the Crucified Redeemer that
we can come to exercise the virtue of humility, recognizing that we must
subordinate every aspect of our lives under the authority of Christ the King as
He has revealed Himself through His true Church. Those who fix their gazes
upon the wood of the Holy Cross come to realize that we must work out our
salvation in fear and in trembling, as Saint Paul reminds us, knowing that we
will face Christ the King in the Face at the moment of our own Particular
Judgments. The Particular Judgment is rendered upon the souls of the mighty
and the weak, upon the powerful and the powerless, upon the rich and the poor.
Christ the King is no respecter of persons. Each man will find the sum total of
his life reflected in the standard of justice Who is Christ Himself, and there will
be no bevy of attorneys present to make rationalizations or to spin reality into
something it is not. The fact that a man had political or financial or cultural
power in this life will not mean a blessed thing in the next. There is no
affirmative-action program in Heaven for the rich and the famous and the
powerful.
As always, we pray for the conversion of
all people, starting with ourselves. It is one thing to sin and be sorry. It is quite
another to persist arrogantly in sin and to pridefully assert that everything one
does is right because one asserts that is so. While we pray for the conversion of
the former president and his wife, it is important to point out that their
insistence on being exempt from the laws of God and man in this life may very
well wind up costing them dearly in the next. May we understand that it is so
easy for any of us to follow in their perverted wake.
Our Lady, Mirror of Justice, help us to
look always to the standard of your Divine Son’s Holy Cross, finding in
It the symbol of humility we need to remind ourselves that we must be about the
business of obeying God and not to feed the siren sound of our own egos.
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