Liberty, License, Corrective Punishment, Doorways to Evil Spirits
“One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”
Our Pledge of Allegiance proclaims and we affirm that these United States are “… one nation under God with liberty and justice for all” each time we profess it. Even more than Magna Carta, our Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Constitution stand for the fundamental human reality that life and the liberty to pursue happiness and the material means to achieve it are given to us by God. Our very lives and welfare being in God’s gift, our justice must comprehend God’s interests. He has revealed to us his Divine Will that we love Him with our whole selves and our neighbor as ourselves. Salvation history revealed in the Judeo-Christian bible teaches that both divine blessings and corrective punishments are consequent upon our humble obedience to God’s law of life and love. Only God can assert that “I am who am” (Ex. 3:14) because there is none other than Him and His creatures. His law of life and love is built by Him into the very nature of our being to lead us to happiness by choosing virtue and goodness as the way to perfection. On the contrary, our choices for self-indulgence lead to “…fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing,, and the like,” ( 1 Gal. 5:19-21) and ultimately death. Salvation history shows that this applies both to individuals and to nations.
When a people choose their leaders is that people not morally responsible for what their leaders do in the name of all, as well as for what is done by the government they form, and even the judges they appoint? A recent example is the issuance of licenses to marry to same-sex couples in California after the U.S. Supreme Court denied the legal standing of privately funded organizations to defend the constitutionality of a voter approved amendment to the California constitution defining marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, where the state officers charged with its defense refused to do so. More fundamental for all of us is this proud, insulting affront to God’s law of life and love written into our bodily and spiritual humanity for us to partner with Him in creating and raising new sons and daughters. Is this not to confuse liberty with license to ignore God’s law and to deny his authority? How is this not part and parcel with Satan’s rebellion which our first parents joined? Will the corrective divine punishment our elected officials and appointed judges are incurring for us by these choices not be on a par with that for forty years of killing God’s lambs in their mother’s wombs? Is it not likewise with the legalization of pornography that penetrates the entertainment industry and seduces our youth to lives of sin? Corrective punishment for unrepentant sin is certain, but not it’s only consequence. Less understood is that such deliberate sins open wide doorways to evil spirits to obsess us with deadly temptations.
God gives us angelic spirits to rule, guide and protect us from the unscrupulous demonic spirits of Lucifer’s rebellion. But by unrepentant sin we and our leaders consent to the presence of demonic spirits among us, and effectively order our angel guardians to “stand down,” compounding the evil consequences. Let us remember in this month of the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence that freedom is not free. But the deadly assault on our liberty today is not from military attack from without, but from moral decay and demonic attack from within. We must pray and support our holy Church and especially our Holy Father, Francis. The Blessed Mother waits for him to invoke her leadership in this final battle with Satan by solemnly consecrating with his bishops the country of Russia to her Immaculate Heart and leading the Church in the 1st Saturday Fatima Devotions. Let us join in prayer that the Holy Spirit lead Francis and that God’s holy angels protect him.