Virtue’s first foe was pride – the failing of the fallen angels. On April 20, 2010 an intemperate sense of self-worth took its toll on Curt Kuchta, captain of the Deepwater Horizon, causing him to obsess about his rank as commanding officer of the oil rig. According to a Wall Street Journal report, not even extreme crisis could distract Kuchta from worrying about a slight to his authority. After the explosion, Andrea Fleytas, a 23 year old subordinate, had dared to take the initiative and broadcast a distress signal – an SOS which, in the chaos, the captain had neglected to issue: “Mayday, Mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon. We have an uncontrollable fire,” she announced over the airwaves.

In return for her presence of mind under pressure, captain Kuchta scolded her, “I didn’t give you authority to do that.” Minutes later, she ended up in the oily waters swimming for her life, and soon after the captain himself had to jump overboard.

Intuitively, deep water drilling contradicts the cardinal virtue of prudence. The imprudence of the operation is more obvious now that stopping the deepwater gusher in timely fashion has proven to be beyond human power. It seems that America’s vaunted technological prowess gave rise to pridefulness, and the capital sin of pride mixes with prudence about as well as oil with Florida’s white sand beaches.

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). As a reckless driver scoffs at risk, so prideful corporate executives and technocrats drilled into the ocean floor with abandon. They discounted dangers, and paid too little heed to the hazards of the unexpected. They underrated the potential for human blundering. This want of prudence, this scarcity of carefulness, was personified by BP’s “company man,” tentatively identified as Donald Vidrine, (who was onboard at the time of the explosion). First and foremost a profiteer, he overrode the insistence of some rig operators that the drilling process include more precautionary safeguards.

What prompted the foolhardy risk taking? At first glance it seems to have been the commonplace desire to cut costs and maximize profits. This natural (and economically laudable) principle of good business management became a vice, however, in proportion as greed or avarice canceled out the cardinal virtue of temperance. BP was so focused on financial gain that common sense caution got tossed overboard.

Temperance was also in short supply as regards the drug abuse widespread among the Federal inspectors of the drilling operation. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) was the government agency charged with enforcing safety regulations. But, according to reports, some of the inspections were performed while under the influence of drugs like cocaine and crystal methamphetamine. How does it affect your patriotic heart, O citizen, to know that our Federal taxes pay the wages of zonked-out druggies protecting our interests against corporate irresponsibility?

The sin of lust was also a factor in the intemperate behavior of some MMS inspectors, who had no scruples about downloading pornographic images onto their Federal Government computers at taxpayer expense. They also engaged in sexual trysts with oil company employees whom they were supposedly regulating. Cronyism, free hunting and fishing excursions, a trip to the Peach Bowl – this kind of fraternizing and gift exchange brought disaster upon our southern shore. According to acting Solicitor General, Mary L. Kindall, trading in favors appears “to have been a generally accepted practice” between the regulators and the regulated.

Could Titus 1:16 apply here? St. Paul excoriates some intemperate people of his own day, as follows, “…both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but by their works they disown him, being abominable and unbelieving and worthless for any good work.”

Another cardinal virtue stifled by lust – the lust for black gold – was justice. Reckless disregard for human life violates the Golden Rule, and cost saving shortcuts put the Deepwater Horizon’s crew of 146 in harm’s way. A number of workers were injured in the accident, and eleven died. Also, innumerable birds and other wildlife were killed, and thousands of fishermen and Gulf Coast residents lost their livelihoods. Flora and fauna will take years to recover, if not decades.

Nor is justice served in the democratic sense when BP can purchase millions of dollars worth of political influence. The scale of their plutocratic power reduces mere American citizenship to the status of an oil soaked seagull. Last year BP spent $16 million lobbying the Federal Government. Big oil was able to corrupt Federal regulators to such an extent that government forms used to document inspections got penciled in initially by oil company officials, and later traced over in pen by U.S. Interior Dept. inspectors.

Another cardinal virtue choked at the upper echelon by both BP and government officials was fortitude. Rather than answer questions in courageous fashion, BP obfuscated from the outset, underreporting the amount of leakage, and often refusing to grant interviews with representatives of the media. In his May 27th press conference, President Obama showed evasiveness about whether MMS head, Elizabeth Birnbaum, had been fired or resigned.

One of the few encouraging developments in this disaster is that everyone has pulled together to try and make the fix work, notwithstanding that it involves uncertain methods at unprecedented ocean depths.

There is general agreement in the nation about collective action to check the oil spill in the Gulf, but this is not the case when it comes to moral pollution. Powerful opposition emerges against every concerted attempt to cap the wellsprings of immorality in the country, and to stop its upsurge. The leaders and molders of public opinion seem hell bent to open gushers of immorality into every corner of society.

To cite one strikingly contemporaneous example: Even as the burgeoning masses of oil fouled the Gulf, the US House of Representatives was voting to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the longstanding compromise intended to check “unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.” In other words, the man-made assault on the environment in the Gulf isn’t bad enough. Simultaneously they want to downgrade the moral/spiritual atmosphere one must breathe as a soldier.

If only a collective cleanup of American culture could also be undertaken, without running into firestorms of rancor and resistance. Perhaps the array of black plumes in the Gulf, the repulsiveness of the oil spill might serve as a metaphor for the way society has been gradually but steadily despoiled.  The national decadence is a half-century long “sin spill” into the culture where our families must live, and in which our children have to grow up.

The PR challenge is to alert more citizens to the severity of the problem. Busy people can easily overlook or downplay the gradual pollution of culture. As Abigail Adams discovered after living for a while in the high society of Europe, “daily example is the most subtle of poisons” — David McCullough, John Adams.

To motivate a cultural cleanup, we need to be assertive and creative in making the point that stewardship over the moral/spiritual environment is as vital to national life as care for the physical environment. Our aim should be to expose moral abominations as gushers that are darkening our cultural waters, corrupting our kids, and turning Americans into an unhappy people. How desperately we need the help of a benevolent Providence! Only under Almighty God can we the people recapture the flagship of state. Then, with the cardinal virtues in mind, steer the national flotilla ­– the polity, economy, and culture – back toward concord with the Creator of clean waters.

Most of the attention in the media has been on our sins of commission.  But let me focus here on repentance in the Church for particular sins of omission.  We have good reason to be sorry for responding weakly and naively to the malice directed at Christians generally, and at Catholic clergy in particular.  With a wimpy defense we have emulated Neville Chamberlain at Munich, rather than deliver robust counterpunches a la Winston Churchill.

Scripture tells us to fight the good fight with the wisdom of a serpent.  Instead we have gone tiptoeing around the militant homosexuality movement, confusing timidity with the virtue of being guileless as doves.

At last, hopefully, things are changing as per St. Paul’s admonition (Titus 2:15), “let no one despise thee.”  Much to the chagrin and outrage of influential people in the so-called advanced nations (like the French Foreign Ministry), the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has decided to call a spade a spade, or rather to identify abusers of adolescent boys as homosexuals – a common sense association unmentionable in polite society.

So much for polite society.  As Admiral David Farragut put it at Mobile Bay, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”  This is exactly the correct contradiction to infiltration, especially infiltrators into the priesthood.  Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines the word, infiltrate, as follows:  “To move into an organization… surreptitiously and gradually, esp. with hostile intent.”  Surely we have the right and duty to defend the sacred ranks of the clergy against the entry of practicing sodomites.  Relevant here is St. Paul’s admonition (1 Corinthians 5:13), “expel the evil man from your midst.”

St. Paul had no qualms about calling out seducers who infiltrate households, to “capture silly women” (2 Timothy 3:6).  Or as Matthew 23:14 quotes Jesus, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers.”

The influx of practicing homosexuals into Catholic seminaries too involved a sin of omission.  Lowing our guard against the intrusion allowed gay “comrades in harms” to become priests who preyed on vulnerable people, including children.

Bishops, including the Bishop of Rome, are besieged for being too slow in defrocking pedophiles after the fact.  (I’m not sure we can do anything about the stubborn ignorance of the media insisting that a priest has to be “defrocked” in order for his active ministry to come to an end.) But the critics of the Catholic Church say little about our guarding the gates with vigilance beforehand.  What about preventing homosexual rakes from infiltrating the clergy in the first place?

The infiltrators are guiltiest of committing abominations against adults and children.  To them the principal blame is due.  Humanly speaking, they are the chief culprits.  And yet whenever the Church applies just discrimination against practicing homosexuals (in adoptions, for example), it gets labeled “bigotry.”

Our cultural commissars urge us to worship at the altar of a much-touted triune ethic – tolerance, diversity and choice. This secular trinity militates against the influence of righteous indignation.  It demands that people who express disgust at sexual sins be reprogrammed.  Teach them to reconsider their negative attitudes.  Show them that a tendency to look down on homosexual sex is wrong in itself.  Brow beat them with the notion that such a critical attitude is condescending and judgmental.

Of those who would thus revamp our spiritual instincts, the Sermon on the Mount warns: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15).   In the spirit of St. Paul (Titus 2:15), let us “speak, exhort and rebuke with all authority.  Nemo te contemnat.”

In addition, Vanderboegh cites a famous historical precedent in the somewhat similar vandalism in Boston by the Sons of Liberty just prior to the American Revolution.  The plea to “modern Sons of Liberty” has apparently inspired a number of attacks on congressional and Democratic Party offices.

Vanderboegh’s manifesto has already generated demands that he be arrested for inciting sedition.  See, for example, a Facebook site entitled, “Arrest Mike Vanderboegh.”  Though reduced to disability at the age of 57, MBV strikes me as a citizen willing to put principle as he perceives it over his own personal safety and economic security.   If he gets arrested, Social Security may stop his monthly pension.  With mixed feelings, therefore, I have emailed him the following open letter.

Sir:

Let me begin this open letter by noting my appreciation of your readiness to put your country’s plight above personal and economic well being.  Furthermore I am not altogether unsympathetic to your political position as expressed in your blog March 19th.  Indeed, my fifth chapter in Treatise on Twelve Lights, examines the possibility and the morality of armed insurrection in the United States – provided all peaceful alternatives are exhausted beforehand.

However, chapter four, entitled “Insurrection of Suede,” emphasizes the primary importance of care and patience, and of following through on the peaceful options bequeathed to us by the Framers.  Once we cross the Rubicon into the realm of violent resistance, a series of escalations might lead to outright armed insurrection.  But Americans are currently in quite a different position than armed revolutionaries like Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins during Ireland’s Easter Rising, April 1916.  Their political options against British occupation had long since been exhausted, whereas the written U.S. Constitution allows us to eschew bullets and employ ballots of a kind reserved for exceptional circumstances.

The Article V “convention for proposing Amendments” provides the political means at the national level that is closest to the initiative and referendum process employed with effect at the state level.  Thus the Constitution itself offers us a revolutionary process that is legal.  Inherent in this process is the means potentially to accomplish a counterrevolution that restores the Republic to beauty, health, and balance.

Notwithstanding provocations by the Feds as described vehemently in your web page, my own moderation, as you (not I) might term it, is based on an overriding consideration, i.e. God.  Surely insurrectionists cannot fight to victory without His blessing, any more than our Forefathers could have won the American Revolution against the mighty British Empire without a “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” (Declaration of Independence).  I believe all Christians contemplating violent resistance to the beltway abomination, and against economic and cultural aspects of the postmodernist regime in America, should heed the council of the Roman Catholic Church on this issue.

Articulating the position of America’s largest and oldest religious denomination, the Catechism of the Catholic Church lists five preconditions for armed insurrection to be morally justifiable (CCC, 2243).  These checkpoints are worthy of pondering carefully if we want Almighty God on our side.  Otherwise hotheads recapitulating the firing on Ft. Sumter may catapult us into a losing civil war that, like the 1861-65 version, ends up centralizing power still further in Washington, D.C., and nullifying what remains of the Tenth Amendment.  I believe, therefore, that violent civil disobedience is premature at this point, unless one supposes pridefully that your “Three Percenters” are so formidable that they can do it without the help of the great Helmsman of history.

Rather, let us abide by the dictates of wisdom.  To be sure, citizens must look to counterrevolution against what has been inflicted on this country since approximately the assassination of JFK.  But, sir, if such a counterrevolutionary enterprise is to succeed, we must at all costs avoid impulsive or precipitous revolt.  Instead I propose that the fight against the regime proceed realistically and morally.

First we must acknowledge that the electoral process has been so corrupted and co-opted at the Federal level that traditional political campaigns can no longer serve the primary interests of the citizen body at large.  Our once enviable democracy has been diverted to the service of the few (oligarchy) and the rich (plutocracy).  They bribe, buy and manipulate all but a weak minority of the incumbent politicians inside the D.C. beltway.  In other words, put no stock in the predictions based on wishful thinking, i.e. that the 2010 or 2012 elections will turn things around enough to reverse our nation’s decline.  Pursuing chimerical expectations will only sap our energies and further demoralize our citizenry.

Having disabused ourselves of delusional political hopes, we can then refocus our political efforts and energies.  Let our focus at the national level be the sort of campaign which the Framers recommended for the very purpose we face today.  The writers of the Constitution foresaw the possibility of a Federal power structure impervious to the will of the people.  And so under Article V and its convention option, they empowered the people to organize through the States, thereby to circumvent the Federal oligarchy.

If the foregoing effort is blocked or somehow compromised, then (and only then) let us escalate to the level of physical confrontation.  Passive civil disobedience as per Mahatma Gandhi worked for Martin Luther King and his civil rights movement.  “Through the centuries,” as the recent Manhattan Declaration indicates, “Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.”

Or as the late Mario Savio put it compellingly in 1964, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

In conclusion, sir, if the aforesaid constitutional convention drive gets thwarted, and if we the people attain little more from passive resistance than an outlet for our frustrations; then the issue of active resistance will come naturally to the fore.  At that point it will be timely to consider your window war, and/or the possibilities discussed in my fifth chapter.

Again, the key is to solicit the interposition of Providence on our behalf.  With Divine blessing and our own careful planning, we might yet restore America the Beautiful under God and the written Constitution.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Notice the word “all;” also the omission of any words prescribing or implying legislation from the bench.  Furthermore, usurping or stealing power by elites bedecked in their black robes is contrary to the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.  Three times it mentions usurpation as justification for the American Revolution.

Yet today the basic direction of American society is decided more by courts than by the polarized and paralyzed U.S. Legislative Branch.  As has often been said, “Power abhors a vacuum.”  That a usurping Judiciary pushed into the void should surprise no realistic student of politics.

The role of the Federal courts as a battering ram in the culture war is a well-documented process covering the years 1962/63 to date.  A relatively recent case of judicial activism, took place on the eve of John Roberts’ September 2005 appointment as Chief Justice, [Kelo v. New London, Connecticut (6/23/2005)].  The Kelo decision tore down protections for small land holders against corporate developers.

As outgoing Justice O’Conner argued in her Kelo dissent:

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.

Thus, government may now seize private property not just for public use — as in long-accepted eminent domain proceedings — but for private profiteering.  Our judicial oligarchs permit city hall to level your neighborhood or tear down your parish church, in order to make space for condos or a shopping mall or an office building.

The latest windfall for the wealthy concerned the prerogatives of voters as against corporations seeking to influence elections [Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010)].  Issued on January 21st of this year, the edict facilitates the manipulation of elections by curtailing restraints on corporate campaign financing.  Overturning longstanding limits on campaign contributions by transnational and domestic mega-corporations, the Court announced glibly that decades of restriction on big money had “‘muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’”  Do not worry about public reaction, the Court comforted the moneyed class, for “the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy”  (Citizens United v. FEC, pages 5-6, 38).

Their reassurances notwithstanding, enhanced opportunity for the companies with large political war chests will certainly diminish populist influence in elections — whether progressive populism like some three million donors to the Obama campaign in 2008, or conservative populism like today’s Tea Party movement.  Populist efforts to upgrade morals in our culture on such issues as life, marriage and pornography will also be swamped by a tide of corporate spending.

Although the ethics at stake in this latest case of judicial usurpation were political /economic more than cultural, one of the “Catholic” Justices, Anthony Kennedy, could not refrain from a backhanded swipe at enforcement of morals.  Writing for the neoconservative majority (Citizens United v. FEC, p. 24), Kennedy put earlier efforts to censor pornography [citing US v. Playboy, 529 US 803 (2000)] on a par with censorship of political speech in the mass media when financed by mega-corporations.

This is characteristic of much neoconservative dogma favoring laissez faire capitalism.  After all Playboy, inc. is an American corporation, and the Court is obliged (they say) to put the free market at liberty to do its thing.  Too bad for you, O Christian citizen; because the oligarchy’s overriding ethic is to subject citizen/consumers to the moral sway of unrestrained capitalism with its driving force — the profit motive.

Mind you, the main culprits here are not businessmen themselves, but the big corporations in league with corruptible Federal officials.  As individuals, some CEOs are brave enough to go against the flow of corporate culture, and in such cases they may band together in organizations like Legatus.  With some 4500 Catholic business leaders internationally Legatus’ stated mission is to “study, live and spread the Faith in our business, professional and personal lives.”

It is obtuse and foolish, however, to look to corporate America generally as an ally in advancing the culture of life.  Pope John-Paul II addressed this problem after the fall of Marxism from power after the Revolution of ‘89.  While celebrating the demise of Communism in Europe, he warned also against the perils of capitalism, with its “viruses” like secularism, consumerism, and hedonism.  “Unfortunately,” said he in an understatement, “not everything the West proposes as a theoretical vision or as a concrete lifestyle reflects Gospel values.”

For example, big pharmaceutical cartels reap billions in profits by bilking us, the poor and the middle class, when we get sick.  One of their strategies is to oppose competition from less pricey pharmaceuticals in Canada, Latin America, and overseas.  During 2008, the two biggest American pharmas, Johnson & Johnson and Phizer/Wyeth, earned annual revenues totaling $135 billion.  These two American firms, and others not quite so large, have big bucks galore — enough to blitz Congress with an army of lobbyists advocating the equivalent of tariffs on prescription drugs.

As regards the tide of pornography that engulfs the nation, who has financed and pushed this obscenity upon our culture if not corporate America?  Annual pornography revenues have reached $13 billion / year in America [more than the combined revenues per annum of ABC, CBS, and NBC (2006 statistics)].  To be sure the courts adroitly opened the floodgates.  But it was CEOs like Hugh Heffner, Larry Flint and their followers who created the reeking tsunami.

Another sort of obscenity is the trade that rakes in profits by making other nations’ wars more destructive.  High tech corporations headquartered in the United States do a multi-billion dollar business every year in arms sales, making the USA the leading nation in the international arms trade.  Much of the exportation of American weaponry goes to countries labeled undemocratic by the U.S. State Dept., and often to third world countries.  The military-industrial complex, against which President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, is now a pervasive and gargantuan reality.

Examples abound of why it is fallacious to see corporate America as inclined to assist in the restoration of Judeo-Christian standards.  Consider the likes of Ford Motors, Levi Strauss, Pepsi, US Bank, Wells Fargo, IBM, and Motorola.  These and a host of other large firms employ money and boardroom policy for the purpose of mainstreaming same-sex sodomy into the culture.  See, for example, the long list of powerful corporate partners in the national GLBT Chamber of Commerce.  Among the corporations working against traditional marriage in California (Proposition 8 ) were Apple Computers and Google.  Proponents for the GLBT agenda (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) are not so much small businesses, as politicized mega-corporations.

On the abortion front, Planned Parenthood is itself a billion dollar corporation.  Its funding comes in part from Warren Buffet, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Chase Manhattan Corp., Hershey Corp., Prudential Insurance, and many such foundations financed by corporate America.

Corporate America frequently brings political power to bear against the interests of churches and religious citizens.  Like arsonists suddenly set at liberty in the Capitol Building, too many corporations are conflagrating what our Christian forefathers and foremothers took generations to build.

If we are to extinguish these fires, we cannot confuse friend with foe.  We the people must disabuse ourselves of the notion that corporate America is a likely ally in the fight against moral decline.  On the contrary, gigantic corporations and multinationals are intrinsically amoral.  Their overriding interest is the bottom line.  The impetus for a cultural upgrade must be sought elsewhere.

The aim of fasting and abstinence is not to suppress the appetites totally, but rather to become practiced in checking our passions, in affixing a bridle.  Lately a lot of news coverage has focused on the passion of anger.  We’ve seen the expression of civic anger in the new Tea Party movement.  Some critics in the media have obtusely compared the angst of Tea Partiers to an angry software engineer turned domestic terrorist, Joe Stack.

On February 18th, after a long and festering rage, Stack flew his airplane into an IRS building in the capitol of Texas.  In his more than 3000 word screed, posted on the internet, Stack described the extent of his anger as “the storm raging in my head.”

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, when anger gets so immoderately fierce as to blind reason and destroy its rectitude, it is “sinful anger.”  It becomes a capital vice because, via impetuosity, it precipitates the mind into inordinate action. (Summa Theologica II-II,158.1-2)

But “zealous anger” is not sinful, according to the Angelic Doctor.  On the contrary, “if one is angry in accordance with right reason, one’s anger is deserving of praise.” (Summa, II-II,158.1)  Aquinas continues:

Anger may stand in a twofold relation to reason. First, antecedently; in that it withdraws reason from its rectitude, and has therefore the character of evil. Secondly, consequently, inasmuch as the movement of the sensitive appetite is directed against vice and in accordance with reason.  This anger is good, and is called “zealous anger” (Summa, II-II,158.1).

Reason, deliberation, and recourse to a well formed conscience, must then precede anger.  Otherwise it may take the form of blind rage.  Again, St. Thomas quotes Pope St. Gregory the Great to emphasize the leader/follower relationship between right reason and anger:  “We must beware lest, when we use anger as an instrument of virtue, it overrule the mind, and go before it as its mistress, instead of following in reason’s train, ever ready, as its handmaid, to obey.’”  (Summa, II-II,158.1; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1765, 1772-3, 2302)

Stack’s screed was perhaps an attempt to make his anger seem reasonable as well as understandable.  I’ve talked to a number of people who say they understand why Stack was so incensed.  None, however, see it as a reasonable response to the political/bureaucratic nightmare many of us face in 21st century America.

Thirty years ago, the IRS put Mel, my old friend, through two years of hell on earth until, at long last, he was completely exonerated of liability for the business malpractices of his boss.  But the IRS gave him no apology, no monetary compensation for stress or for countless hours wasted, and nothing but the political insight that goes with being considered guilty until proven innocent by your own anguished efforts.

Mel’s anger was most assuredly justifiable, but he kept his head and remained reasonable.  He recognized that he had no way of exacting a just vengeance on the IRS.  Mel never seriously entertained the idea, I’m sure.  Any right minded Christian who reflects on such a course of action must conclude that killing a few IRS agents would be wrong morally, not to mention inexpedient for everyone concerned.

The inexpediency is another negative aspect to unbridled anger.  It fails to produce the desired result.  In his essay, Joe Stack indicated that he hoped “Mr. IRS man” would lose some sleep.  Stack’s daughter, Samantha Bell, criticized the American tax system as “very faulty;” and she expressed hope that things might change for the better because of her father’s well publicized attack.  By Christian criteria, neither Joe nor Samantha had hopes that accord with right reason.

Four days after Stack’s “supreme sacrifice”, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman spoke to the press in Austin.  Secretary of the US Treasury, Timothy Geitner, stood at his side.  Applauding IRS agents’ “hard work on behalf of the American citizens,” Shulman added that “an act like this won’t stop us from doing our jobs with dignity and respect for Americans.”

I doubt that the IRS Commissioner’s statement would have filled my friend Mel with warm feelings of patriotism.  Nor would it have caused informed citizens to forget that our tax burden today is far greater proportionately than the level of taxation which provoked Americans to revolt against the British in 1776.  Note that neither Shulman, nor Geitner, nor the statement he carried from President Obama, addressed the justifiable anger felt by millions of Americans concerning the corrupt and oppressive condition of the Federal Government.

Beltway politicians and bureaucrats tend to be prideful, obstinate, and opposed to fundamentally changing the system.  No displays of unreasonable anger, no high-tech temper tantrums, will inspire or force the Feds to clean up their act.  Rampages of revenge may well backfire, provoking crackdowns (like the Patriot Act), which reduce our freedoms.

This is not to say that the government is any less culpable than irresponsible citizens.  In fact corrupt politicians are guilty of evildoing on a grand scale.  They risk unleashing the dogs of civil war by blocking salutary reform.  As JFK put it in 1962, “Those who made peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Compared to the criminals in Washington, D.C., Joe Stack was small fry.  The hope in Luke 1:52, “he (God) has put down the mighty and exalted the humble,” does not refer to Mr. Stack’s ilk.  Joe expressed the storm raging in his head in a manner that does nothing to solicit the favorable interposition of divine Providence.

Similarly with Marvin Heemeyer, whose rampage in 2004 with a homemade tank destroyed 13 buildings in Granby, Colorado.  His high profile act of vengeance, followed by his self-inflicted death, did little if anything to shame the petty tyrants who wrecked his business, or to cause their repentance.  Heemeyer’s stated objective was “to sacrifice my life, my miserable future that you gave me, to show you that what you did is wrong.”

A less personal desire for revenge seems to have motivated Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to destroy the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  In the process he killed 149 adults and 19 children, and injured over 680 innocent people.

The decorated ex-army man was understandably outraged at the deaths of scores of people in Waco, Texas, including 20 of the Branch Davidian children.  McVeigh was but one of many Americans to ask the question:  Since when does the Federal Government execute people for holding bizarre religious beliefs?

The ferocity of McVeigh’s anger knew no bounds, however, and he decided to avenge the massacre at Waco in an impetuous and atrocious way.  Evidently McVeigh, a lapsed Catholic, had never heard of, or certainly had not taken to heart, the Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on anger:

[I]n conformity with the prescriptions of balanced reason, anger is not a sin. It is rather a praiseworthy thing and justifiable with a proper zeal. It becomes sinful when it is sought to wreak vengeance upon one who has not deserved it …. The sin is then in a general sense mortal as being opposed to justice and charity.

And so our Lenten theme here is that spiritual exercises empower us to bridle passions like anger; also to help us choose mortal sin’s alternative, namely zealous anger, which we ought to manifest as tough love.

Lech Walesa showed tough love to the United States in a speech delivered this year (January 29th).  Polish hero and compatriot of John Paul II during the Revolution of 1989, Walesa pointed out to his audience in Chicago that the world used to look to the USA for hope.  But today, said he, America no longer leads the world politically or morally.  “The U.S. was always the last resort, the hope that when something was going wrong we could count on the United States.  Today we have lost that hope.”

In 1953, President Eisenhower paraphrased Tocqueville’s epic Democracy in America: “America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”  Since Eisenhower’s day, our country has indeed declined morally, spiritually and politically.  The devolution derives partly, I submit, from the failure to make the distinctions as discussed above in regard to anger.

Furthermore, many Americans have lost the will to display righteous indignation at all, i.e. by employing zealous anger as peer pressure against vices in the culture.  In this sense, St. Thomas cites the lack of angry passion as a vice in itself.  Aquinas quotes the maxim attributed to St. John Chrysostom: “He who is not angry where he has cause to be, sins.  For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices; it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”  Anger is useful, says St. Thomas, as “conducive to the more prompt execution of reason’s dictate” (Summa, II-II,158.8).

Alas, America has become an increasingly unreasonable nation, embracing the passions that demean us, and disavowing the passions that might lead to restoration of the country and the culture.  But a sizeable remnant remains passionately angry in a virtuous way, as evidenced by persevering resistance to abortion.

Indicative also of zealous anger were the 2008-09 victories for traditional marriage in Maine, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida and California.  Unlike Dick Cheney, many Americans are far from nonchalant about letting the nation become a postmodern version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And so, our Lenten reflections should not overlook civic duty.  In contemplating the plight being inflicted on our country, do we feel and express sufficient anger?  To the extent that “vice prevails and impious men bear sway,” do we discipline the passion of anger, or are we prone to let it degenerate into rage?  Lastly, in laying plans for civic action, does anger lead the way?  Or do we will to follow right reason?

How Coakley slipped into complacency after winning the December 8th Democratic primary is easy to understand.  Since I lived on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the early 1970s, Massachusetts has remained a decidedly one party state.  The idea must have seemed preposterous that a little known state senator from the marginalized GOP could defeat the Democratic machine and claim Ted Kennedy’s seat.  And yet Brown managed to ride a wave of anger and resentment against the D.C. establishment.

“Here the people rule,” the motto engraved at the Capitol Building, is likely to produce chortles or sneers nowadays, rather than patriotic heartthrobs.  In rating Congress, public approval for job performance has long been abysmally minimal.  Nauseating spectacles issuing from inside the beltway do not help, like last December’s “Cornhusker kickback” to Sen. Ben Nelson.

In 2006 the Democrats rode another wave of ire, generated by widespread loathing for the modus operandi typical of homesteading Federal politicians.  Two years later, riding such a wave of disgust, young Senator Barak Obama made history from astride his surfboard of hope.

Since Vietnam, beginning with Jimmy Carter, one election cycle after another has seen adroit political operatives capitalize on electoral angst.  We the indignant voters are expected to play our role in a democracy limited to ping-ponging back and forth between two fraudulent and dysfunctional political parties.

For those of us who have not lowered our expectations to the point of despair about the nation’s future, our civic horizons need to broaden.  We must first recognize the futility of trying to put a derailed political system back on the tracks by alternating between a Democratic and a Republican version of the Federal Government — which (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan) comprises not part of the solution, but part of the problem.  A political system demeaned by bad leadership from corrupt political parties is worse than worthless for the purpose of restoring America the Beautiful under God and the written Constitution.

Can mental illness afflict a collective?  Maybe so.  If the American electorate really believes that a GOP surge in 2010 will turn the country around, then the populace is suffering from that form of insanity defined as repeating the same process over and over and expecting a different result.

If Catholics believe that we can start reestablishing the Judeo-Christian character of America by electing a pro-abortion politician from the Bay State who wants to waterboard helpless captives, then we need a reality homily.  Our real situation is this:  With the Democrats in power, the country declines at a steep angle; while the Republicans lead us down a slope sometimes less steep.  Indeed there is much to be said for tactical delay.  But neither the steep nor the gradual rate of national decline offers rational hope for the country’s long-term future.

There is some consolation in the fact that ours has not been the only democracy subject to deceptive hopefulness.  In ancient Athens, where democracy began, orators lacking wisdom mislead the people into an almost fatal act of folly in 215, B.C.  Locked into the epic Peloponnesian War with Sparta, the Athenians bolstered their hopes via a novel but irrational adventure: they voted to invade the distant island of Sicily.

Likewise Senator elect Brown wants to use enhanced interrogation techniques to defend the American Empire, while doing little to stop the abortion holocaust here at home.  In Congress, most members of his party are gung ho in foreign affairs, but exhibit Laodicean lukewarmness in fighting the all-important culture war.

Even the great theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are subject to distortion.  And yet, in its unsullied form, hope is an exceptional and meritorious quality of American populism.  In the United States we have higher expectations than, say, the body politic in France, Germany, Italy or the UK (the big four of the European Union).  There, citizens tend to be more cynical and jaded about their countries’ susceptibility to salutary reform.

In the early 1990s, for example, a great populist upsurge coalesced in this country around the principle of rotation in office (a reform movement unique to the USA among post-WW II Western democracies).  Our hope was that by forcing new blood into the U.S. Congress, we could cleanse and democratize the Legislative Branch.  Until struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 (U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton), the term limits movement constituted the most realistically hopeful initiative from the grass roots since Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.  Prior to that, the Populist / Progressive reforms of pre-WWI showed the nobility in our national character.

As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, we can draw hopefully from the wellsprings of fundamental reform.  But the forlorn hope associated with ping-pong politics, is a snare and a fraud.  Instead of table tennis as a metaphor for hope, perhaps football will cast a brighter light for our political reflections, given that the upcoming Super Bowl is currently impressing itself upon our national consciousness.

Football is a game often won in the fourth quarter.  Unlikely scenarios for victory provide the suspense that makes the gridiron like a Shakespearian stage.  Alas, however, reform that restores the country and brings our nation back from sin and apostasy, is looking about as likely as the old “Hail Mary pass” in the last seconds of the game.  But the chanciness of success is academic for the team that is running out of time but still hoping to score the winning touchdown.  It is surely worth the effort.

As the postmodernist regime consolidates its grip on America, it is a waste of effort to look to Congress for solutions, or to the Federal Courts which constitute a major portion of the problem, or to the Presidency, as the dashed hopes associated with Obama and his immediate predecessors indicates.  Tempus fugit, time is flying, while one last legal recourse remains.

The Article V “convention for proposing amendments” has been in the play book (in the  Constitution) for more than two centuries.  It is time for the convention to come off the bench and enter the game.  The convention, bequeathed to us by the Framers, is our best hope of circumventing the plutocracy and oligarchy which dominate and deprave the nation’s Capitol City.

Nor should the pedagogical implications be scorned.  In stark contrast to incumbent reelection schemes, a constitutional convention would be a temporary assembly exhibiting the beauty of real representative democracy to our posterity and to onlookers world wide.  As observed in the Cooley Law Review, by the founder of one of the nation’s top law schools, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Michigan, Thomas E. Brennan:  “In an Article V amendatory convention the people of the states are brought together in their most sovereign capacity.  Such a convention would be an awesome and august assemblage.  It would bring a new, responsible dimension to American politics.”

[For more on the constitutional convention as a genuine hope for radical turnabout in the nation's course, see "Insurrection of Suede," the fourth chapter of Treatise on Twelve Lights, 2010 edition.]

It was a different story in Washington State where just 47 or 48 percent of the voters were of like mind with their counterparts in Maine. A 52 or 53 percent majority of Washington voters endorsed the full equivalency of same sex partnerships to marriage, minus only the title of marriage itself. Informed observers now expect that the Washington State Supreme Court, in its usurpatious way, will mandate marriage licenses as well on constitutional grounds. The “Justices” will draw the newly enacted bill from their jurisprudential quiver to kill the concept of marriage affirmed throughout our history. Thus they will continue the deconstruction of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Because Washingtonians cannot amend our constitution directly, we the people cannot overturn constitutional rulings by the court. There can be no California style Proposition 8; no amending of the Washington State Constitution to declare marriage exclusively between one man and one woman. It appears, then, that the majority has effectively (if inadvertently) disenfranchised us on the question of same sex marriage per se, and that Washington is slated to become the sixth state to legalize it without having put the exact terms of so radical a change to direct decision by the people.

As in Washington, misinformation was a hallmark of the campaign to redefine marriage in Maine. Four years ago, during the 2005 election cycle, activists employed prevarications and misleading reassurances in persuading voters to add sexual orientation to Maine’s anti-discrimination statutes. Marriage was not at stake, they insisted; and yet in the very next legislature they introduced gay marriage, passing it into law by May, 2009. Happily, the people of Maine got their say this November.

On the moral level as distinguished from the political, precious little inclination exists in the homosexual community to heed “the laws of nature and nature’s God” (Declaration of Independence ). In defending such natural laws, activists immersed in sexual practices which are “intrinsically disordered,” and “contrary to the natural law” (Catechism of the Catholic Church , 2357), are generally weak or entirely unwilling to uphold the prerogatives of nature in the culture. They may go green on ecological issues, even as they advocate moral pollution that sullies society.

Nor are they likely champions of other virtues — like honesty and fair play, or the justice of first securing “the consent of the governed.” In Washington State our opponents employed an array of stratagems to keep the issue off the ballot, and avoid securing the consent of the electorate. Once we thwarted them on that score, they showed themselves disingenuous in public debates by denying that marriage was even at stake.

Furthermore, they disavowed fair play by destroying or stealing some 90% of our 6000 yard signs displayed around the state. Larry and Polly Stickney, who headed-up the Protect Marriage Washington campaign, had their family harassed in a manner reminiscent of the persecution inflicted on Californians who supported Proposition 8. I myself was stalked by a shrieking, self-proclaiming homosexual, because I dared to hand out our campaign brochures on a Washington State ferry (with official permission). In Maine the defense of traditional marriage campaign reported similar tactics, including “consistent awful rhetoric” and widespread vandalizing of yard signs. The spokesman in a television ad for Stand for Marriage Maine, Don Mendell, was threatened with loss of his job as a high school guidance counselor. This, mind you, from the same people who worship at the altar of the secular trinity of tolerance, diversity and choice.

In regard to religious faith in Maine and Washington, a 2008 study for Trinity College found both states equally irreligious, tied at 25% of the population (compared to 15% for the US as a whole). In other words, one-fourth of these citizens adhere to atheism, agnosticism, or deny having any religious preference.

The question therefore is this: Should the country as a whole, bow before the reality that an increasing portion of the American population is in spiritual decline, and is ever more hostile to Judeo-Christian ethics and morality? Should we reach an accommodation with citizens eager for a thoroughly pagan America? Or, on the contrary, should we draw courage from what happened in Maine, and carry on the fight with renewed vigor? In other words, should we contend fervently on behalf of an agenda which millions of Americans – mainly denizens of densely populated areas like Seattle WA and Portland ME – are sure to loath and despise?

As one involved in debates and public appearances around Washington State against proponents of the same sex agenda, my view is that we should take heart from the state of Maine and earnestly fight the good fight. Although we lost narrowly in the Evergreen State, we did give our opponents a run for their money – several times more money than our backers were able to raise. We won 29 of 39 counties, notwithstanding that most politicians, big corporations, and mainstream media were arrayed against us. We lost by only about five percentage points in a state where, due primarily to Seattle’s King County, the political climate is foul – possibly the worst environment for cultural conservatives among the 50 states. Last year, some 58% of Washington voters approved an assisted suicide law, and in 1998 a ban on partial-birth abortion was rejected by 57%.

In my ten debates around Washington State, I found my opponents’ arguments about as lavish as gravel in a jeweler’s display case. There was little sociology or political science; but a lot of the anecdotal approach predicated, presumably, on the assumption that most Americans are susceptible to a sob story. I believe postmodern pagans can be defeated soundly, for their ideology is fundamentally impoverished. We can win decisively if we determine to fight vehemently and imaginatively. We have truth, righteousness, and tradition on our side. Like our country’s Founders (and unlike our foes), we may proceed “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

Here in Washington, we feel profound gratitude for the hard fought win in Maine. Let us all use that victory to redouble our resolve as defenders of our country’s cultural heritage. The state of Maine in 2009, with California, Arizona, Arkansas and Florida in November 2008, and half the 50 states prior to that, gave ample proof that most citizens are still somewhat conservative culturally.

These victories showed also that, at the state level, corruption has not yet reduced our political process to futility. Alas, the same cannot be said for indirect democracy at the Federal level, where the corruption in Congress, in the Executive and Judicial Branches, together with dysfunctional political parties and an electoral process dominated by incumbency and plutocracy, leads almost half the eligible voters to eschew voting altogether. But direct democracy is politically viable in 27 of the states, through the initiative and/or referendum process, so that the existing system is not without utility and worth at the state level.

In the fight against same-sex marriage, we can use direct democracy, together with election and lobbying of the 7400 state legislators, to prevent another postmodernist breakthrough. The great majority of states still confine marriage to one man, one woman. That should hold firm for a while; unless, God forbid, the Federal Government trumps the states on this issue, as happened with Roe v. Wade a generation ago.

But for the long run, a defensive, hold-the-line strategy will not suffice against a militant, well-financed, devious and sometimes vicious adversary. We must transform the Federal Government from a fiendish force to a friend. We do not show genuine love of country, if we acquiesce while Washington, D.C. promotes political, economic and cultural decadence.

As a proactive strategy, the closest thing we have that resembles direct democracy at the national level is an option set forth in the written U.S. Constitution itself. Article V contains the Framers’ written recommendation, the “convention for proposing Amendments.” On how the Article V convention offers at the national level something of what the initiative and referendum process provides at the state level, see my earlier articles in Catholic Exchange; also my interactive, online book, Treatise on Twelve Lights.

A situation as dire as we face today indicates, as Abraham Lincoln said, that “we must disenthrall ourselves” — think outside the box in which a sound bite culture tries to trap us –  ”and then we shall save our country.” Let us recognize that only radical solutions can really address our radical problems.

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country” — Lincoln’s second annual address to Congress, 12/1/1862.

A consensus of the Framers saw the matter as absolutely obligatory. In the Federalist Papers , #85, is Hamilton’s observation that if two-thirds of the states ever apply to Congress for a convention, then under Article V the words shall call a Convention are “peremptory" and in the particular of whether Congress issues such a call, “nothing is left to the discretion of that body. ”  In 1789 Madison wrote to a Virginia clergyman, “the question concerning a General Convention, will not belong to the federal Legislature.  If two-thirds of the States apply for one, Congress cannot refuse to call it:…”  A few months earlier another Framer, John Dickinson, wrote that, “whatever their sentiments may be, they must call a convention for proposing amendments, on application of two-thirds of the legislatures of the several states.”

Once Congress issues the call for a convention, more issues arise. Might Congress itself appoint the delegates? Russell Caplan, a leading authority on the convention, says no. But he is more worried about another tactic: Suppose in hopes of hamstringing the convention, Congress tries to regulate the convention’s internal rules ­– say by requiring a supermajority? Says Caplan: “If Congress were able to raise the convention’s majority vote, it could choke the convention and thereby do indirectly what article V forbids it to do directly.”

If after the opening gavel the convention defies Congress and insists upon the right to make its own rules, it would, Caplan insists, be quite in conformity with the Constitution. A supermajority requirement “can be imposed only by the convention itself, not from without by Congress.” And yet in the Ervin Bill of 1973, the Senate voted to require a 2/3 supermajority in any Article V convention. Happily, Senator Sam Ervin’s bill failed in the House. But evidently we cannot take for granted that a future Congress will honor the lex majoris partis as regards the freedom of a convention to determine its own rules.

Another widely advertised concern is popularly termed the “runaway convention.” If the convention acts ultra vires , i.e. exceeds its power by going outside the subject matter described in the state applications that caused Congress to call a convention, what then? The answer seems apparent from a practical standpoint, namely that three-fourths of the states (38 states) would not likely ratify something controversial which they had never proposed in the first place. Indeed it might not get that far. Caplain contends (p. 152, cf. 148-49) that ultra vires amendments proposed by a convention “can be withheld from the states by congressional refusal to assign a mode of ratification.”

This safeguard is, however, a two edged sword. It could be used against a dutiful convention, rather than a runaway. In which case, the best defense would be to borrow a tactic from the grand Convention at Philadelphia, by stipulating in the text of the arch-amendment that ratifying conventions are the indicated mode.

In Article V of the Constitution, which governs the amending process, the Framers indicated no difference in how to ratify a constitutional amendment proposed to the states by Congress, vis-à-vis an amendment proposed by a Convention. Either way, there are two methods to ratify what is proposed:

(1) Ratifying conventions elected in the states. This is the procedure used to ratify the Constitution itself in 1787-1788; also to ratify the 21st Amendment (anti-Prohibition) in 1933. Insofar as delegates to ratification conventions are elected democratically in the respective states, the conventions collectively approximate a national referendum on a specific constitutional proposal. In his thorough study of the convention issue (p. 215, fn. 57), Russell Caplan notes that “since Congress would claim the power to select the mode (of ratification), and likely choose the invalid method, a convention bent on peaceful revolution would have to take it upon itself to stipulate ratification by state convention….” Ratification conventions would also be a surer way to secure the consent of the governed, than the alternative method which Article V specifies for ratification, namely the way more commonly used in American history, as follows:

(2) Three-fourths of the state legislatures . This method of ratification accounts for 26 of the 27 ratified Amendments to date. To be sure, the 7400 state legislators are closer to their constituents in many ways, than are the 535 members of Congress homesteading back in Washington, D.C. Though ratifying conventions appear to be the preferable method, the second method of ratifying the work of a convention has potential too, especially if a sweetener is included in the arch-amendment.

My Treatise on Twelve Lights , concludes with a prototype text for a convention agenda. Included is a plank which constituents might obligingly point out to state legislators. Most solons will be favorably disposed to the idea of enhancing their own status and power, by restoring some of the national influence which state legislatures lost almost a century ago. In 1913 a constitutional Amendment took away their power to appoint U.S. Senators. As proposed in my prototype, the arch-amendment would empower state legislators to initiate recall action against members of the U.S. House.  This would not only democratize the House, but would hold U.S. Representatives more accountable to the people after another reform, term limits, goes into effect against incumbent Congressmen.

Again as to the sweetener: Only the voters at the polls might actually recall a Congressman, but the power of state legislators to put a Congressman’s continuance in office up for a popular vote, will afford our state legislators far more voice and clout in national affairs than they have had since the eve of World War I.  This renewed political link between the states and Congress will decrease the isolation of the D.C. beltway, and will increase the prestige and potency of a seat in the state legislature. State solons should hear about this idea before and after the convention – both during the campaign to secure 34 state applications for a convention, and then during the effort to secure 38 state ratifications.

If all the above, including reversing the damage inflicted on our country since c. 1963, sounds like an impossible dream; then look to the reality of history. In the early 1780′s the thirteen United States faced a distinct possibility of dissolution into several independent republics.  It must then have looked politically impossible, or at best highly improbable, that before the decade ended the states would repudiate their opportunities for full sovereignty and would yield many powers to a central government.  Yet the great concession was about to take place, and without war or by dint of surprise.  Within a year after the constitutional convention – which historian, Catherine Drinker Bowen, has called "the miracle at Philadelphia" – eleven of the thirteen states were to deliberate in ratifying conventions and decide in favor of the U.S. Constitution.

As 18th century Americans took risks and sought what may have seemed humanly out of reach; so too the idea of achieving a “Radical Turnabout ” in postmodern America may have the appearance of an extremely long shot.  Yet we know it is possible, because something as singular and rare did happen in the days of the Framers.  Indeed the sense that the events prerequisite to the Constitution had an element of the supernatural was acknowledged in official gratitude by Congress, upon passing the Bill of Rights (1789), and by President George Washington.  Without the intervention of Divine Providence, they said, the Constitution could not have come into existence in the first place.

America has, therefore, a debt of gratitude along with a divine Source of hope.  These are documented in the Declaration of Independence, made "with a firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence," and in the Great Seal motto: Annuit Coeptis (He has favored our cause). Historians will have a sublime and fitting junction to describe if citizens employ the legacy of the Framers, the Article V convention, as a means to revive the American miracle.

As for safeguards, the ratification or refusal to ratify whatever a convention might propose is a procedure well defined in the written Constitution. It is an easy and straightforward process for states to check anything that emerges from the Convention. The Article V Convention can only propose. Nothing it proposes is more than a scrap of paper unless three fourths of the states (38 of 50) ratify it. The fate of the ERA as proposed to the states in 1972, but still unratified by the ten year deadline in 1982, shows how measures must run a formidable gauntlet of the states before going into force.

The Article V convention thus offers opportunity tempered with safeguards. Contrast this system with the exceedingly dangerous process of amending from the bench, where judicial edicts require no ratification at all before going into effect. This latter process is responsible for a host of evils, such as expelling religion from public education after 1963. In place of prayer exercises and Bible reading, our schools now have metal detectors.

Since our radical problems will require radical solutions, the Convention offers a unique opportunity like nothing else politically available. Since little of help can be forthcoming from the Executive, Legislative or Judicial Branches at the Federal level, then by process of elimination we must look to the states.

The number of state applications required for an Article V convention is two-thirds, or 34. Only the state legislatures may apply for a convention. The 7400 state legislators in the fifty states can be approached, however, by the general electorate through lobbying, campaigning, and in nine states by indirect initiatives . We can use all these methods and others of exercising leverage on our state legislators. Without question, however, this will be a formidable task politically.

In the second chapter of my book, Treatise on Twelve Lights , I propose a left-center-right coalition that would muster enough political clout to secure applications from 34 state legislatures. Whether such a coalition can be formed, and held-together long enough to win one arch-amendment to the Constitution, remains to be seen. But such is the only way, in my view, to overcome the well-financed and highly placed opposition that will surely mobilize against a genuinely populist agenda for a convention.

A sizeable remnant of Americans favor cultural reforms like reasserting the sanctity of life, defending traditional marriage, restoring religion to the public square, & etc. But in being “wise as serpents and guileless as doves,” we cannot be naïve or oblivious to the fact that ours is a polarized and now largely paganized nation. In such a political/cultural environment, the remnant needs more allies than just those positioned to the right on the political spectrum. To win over citizens who are less than conservative culturally, I propose an exchange of quid pro quos . In return for Judeo-Christian planks in the prototype agenda for a convention, let us offer reforms that address warmongering, ecological responsibility, and full-employment of labor. Such issues enthuse the left, and will hopefully bring a critical mass of left-leaning Americans into the coalition. We can also recruit the center by offering popular planks like term limits and other reforms to clean up and re-democratize the Congress, recasting the Legislative Branch according to the oft cited but no longer honored axiom, “here the people rule.”

And so, having once put together a coalition of conservatives, centrists, and liberals; the challenge will be to lobby the 7400 state legislators on behalf of a single subject matter. The planks in our platform would constitute a predesigned convention agenda, or constellation amendment, that addresses left-center-right concerns.

In formulating the state applications for a convention, it would be a major blunder to “give Congress the alternatives of calling a convention or itself proposing an amendment on the same subject.” In that case, says Russell Caplan, “Congress may take advantage of the offer and propose the amendment, rendering the petitions obsolete.” As Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, observes, “‘Congress, logrolling across its special interests…, would provide the weakest possible version ….’” [From Russell L. Caplan’s definitive work, Constituitonal Brinksmanship, Amending the Constitution by National Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 127, quoting J.M. Buchanan].

Having once secured the requisite 34 applications for a convention to consider, our next step is to elect convention delegates who are open to our prototype arch-amendment. Here the parameters cease to be so explicitly predefined. Russell Caplan , chapters 5-7, has delineated the range of possibilities in far more detail than this short article can attempt. Let me summarize briefly both the good news and the bad news.

The Framers did not bureaucratize the Article V convention. They left much of its form for the present generation to decide. The good news is this: With regulations still undecided on the number of delegates, on the amount of their pay, and on procedural rules that will govern the assembled delegates after the opening gavel; high priced consultants Carl Rove, Dick Morris and their ilk, will ply their trade on uncertain terrain. In other words, big money will face difficulty deploying its well oiled machine whereby to inundate legislators with hoards of lobbyists sent to purchase prized legislation.

The bad news is that concerned citizens will be posing some questions for which convention advocates cannot offer exact answers. For example, how to treat convention advocates like FOAVC ? Their leaders reject Russell Caplan’s informed conclusion (pp. 98-99) that the Framers intended applications to be counted according to subject matter. FOAVC argues to the contrary, that a convention call by Congress is long overdue, given that fifty states have already submitted some 750 applications during many decades on a wide variety of subjects.

Or, more gravely, what happens if Senators and/or Congressmen stonewall, in order to keep the amending process in their own hands? What if Congress disregards or finesses 34 contemporaneous applications on a single subject matter? Suppose the Senate or the House simply refuses to issue the convention call? Would a court order be forthcoming, and would the Legislative Branch obey the Judicial Branch? Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska (1904-1999) stated in 1967 that if a court order is ignored by Congress, the Supreme Court itself could order the convention.

If the Court refuses to help, could the states organize the Convention on their own, without the consent of Congress? If they proceed without the constitutionally indicated call by Congress, would the courts declare any ratified Amendment that issues from the Convention null and void? Yes, according to Russell Caplan. If Caplan’s scenario comes to pass, might thwarting of the convention lead to armed insurrection?

Clearly, we the people will be proceeding along a wilderness road that is obscurely mapped and, as it were, unpaved. But at least, like an unearthed treasure map, the legacy of the Framers shows us a road. Pressing forward along a primeval trail is preferable to trench warfare that is going badly in the postmodern political desert.

[I]t is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards
for their future security.

Christians have occasionally argued that, especially in its early stages, the American Revolution ran contrary to Sacred Scripture (esp. Romans 13). For example, Gene Fisher and Glen Chambers, The Revolution Myth (Grenville, South Carolina: Bob Jones University Press, 1981) is a study of the Prohibitory Act , with the theme that until December 22, 1775 (eight months after Lexington & Concord) Americans remained in the sort of rebellion forbidden in Romans 13.

But careful Catholic thought takes account of the Almighty’s intervention in history and how the Church solicits Divine Providence. Might not what the continental congress had to say a few months after Yorktown, Annuit Coeptis (He has favored our cause), articulate God’s truth more closely than the theological notion that divine disfavor, even eternal damnation, is the sure consequence of resisting “legitimate rulers” who have descended into tyranny?

Consider whether in the most recent quarter century, the evident blessing bestowed upon prayerful Pilipino, Polish and East Timorese patriots offers us object lessons. In East Timor, a guerilla operation led by Portuguese speaking Catholics began in 1975, when the world’s largest Islamic nation, Indonesia, occupied the former colony of Portugal militarily, annexing it politically in 1976. Under the leadership of Bishop Carlos Belo , the support of the Catholic Church was indispensable in the fight for independence, achieved in 2002 after a long and bloody struggle.

Meanwhile in the Philippines, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in 1986, in the “People Power Revolution.” Here the Catholic Church, under the direction of Cardinal Jaime Sin , played an instrumental part in making this insurrection not only successful but also non-violent.

In Central Europe, in the blessed “revolution of 1989,” the process of liquidating the Soviet Empire began with Poland. A native son, Pope John Paul II, played a key role in overthrowing the “lawfully constituted authorities,” namely the Communist Party leadership headed by President Wojciech Jaruzelski. No one should be very surprised that it was during John Paul’s papacy that the Church indicated five preconditions for “Armed resistance to oppression by political authority” [Catechism of the Catholic Church , sect. 2243 (1994)]. Conditional is as unlike forbidden as charging a toll differs from closing the bridge.

Among the five catechetical preconditions, one applies in a special way to the United States, “all other means of redress have been exhausted.” In 1776, our Founding Fathers exhausted their last option when the King and the British Parliament rejected our overtures for reconciliation by means of compromise. Faced with the choice between resistance or abject submission to usurpation and oppression, they made their stand at Lexington and at the Concord Bridge, where they “fired the shot heard round the world.”

Some 3½ centuries earlier, St. Joan of Arc had fought against a similar occupation of her country by the English. She too had exhausted her peaceful options, as she testified at her trial: “…but as to the English, the peace they need is that they may go away to their own country, to England…. First, I begged them to make peace; and it was only in case they would not make peace that I was ready to fight.”

A millennium previous to the exploits of the Maid of Orleans, Constantine and his fellow Christians had revolted against the pagan government of Rome. In 303 with Christians numbering perhaps ten percent of the population in the Empire, though with a disproportionate influence , the Emperor Diocletian presided over the tenth and most terrible wave of persecution the Roman government had inflicted on followers of the Savior. It was designed to reverse conversions and crush the flourishing religion at every level of society. Diocletian’s policy was reminiscent of the Hellenization program against Jewish society in the days before the Maccabean revolt; except that initially the Maccabees fought back with guerilla tactics, whereas under Constantine Christian forces fought a great pitched battle at the Milvian Bridge, 312 AD.

This bellicose approach was dictated by the lack of any peaceful alternative. “Pray and obey and everything will be ok” was not what nearly three centuries of persecution had taught pious citizens of Rome to see as realistic. Moreover, in Constantine’s day they enjoyed no constitutional option like ours in America, for rule of law did not extent to the top of Rome’s political pyramid, not even in theory. Official state doctrine proclaimed the divinity of the roman emperor. No earthly law could bind his regime. The only ordinance that might depose the divine emperor was military force.

In contrast to imperial Rome, where warlords styled Caesars held sway, in the USA the “supreme law of the land” is the Constitution. By its fifth Article, the written Constitution authorizes the people to conduct an insurgency legally and peacefully through a “convention for proposing Amendments.” A concerted effort for just such an insurgency — an “Insurrection of Suede ” — is also part and parcel of the aforesaid catechetical precondition.

Thus, our moral obligation is this: Exhaust the convention option before escalating the insurgency in the spirit of the Continental Army of our forefathers.