Most people outside of the United States of America are unaware of the teachings of Mormonism. In recent years, some in the West might have grown more aware due to the popular TV show South Park and the musical The Book of Mormon (written by the same people) lampooning the religion and poking fun at it however.
What was there to poke fun at? Well for Mormons, Christ landed in the United States and will eventually return to it again. God Himself told Mormon founder Joseph Smith that ‘I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood’. The Constitution was of Divine Origin, according to their foundation myth.
A Mormon image of Jesus in the United States
The Christian identity of Mormons is up for debate, since they deny the Trinity, but they are a good reference point for explaining the conflation between the liberty promised in American culture and that promised in Christian theology. In the 1800s, this conflation became such a problem that the Catholic Church had to give this phenomenon a name, Americanism. Not only did they have to name the phenomenon, but they had to declare that it was a heresy.
What exactly was Americanism? It was the concept that American values (specifically the ones espoused by Mormonism) such as plurality of religion and American Exceptionalism could be held in syncretic fashion alongside Catholic theology. Such was its prevalence that Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in 1899. It was subtitled Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism.
Pope Leo XIII told Americans not to take offence to the name, defining the heresy as being one wherein the church in the United States, by virtue of its wider post Enlightenment society, was somehow different from the church in the rest of world, with that assumption leading to thinking that there could be exceptions granted to it as a result of its proximity to the Constitution:
From the foregoing it is manifest, beloved son, that we are not able to give approval to those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some “Americanism.” But if by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name. But if this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.
Leo XIII then advises that Christ, not the Constitution, should be America’s leading light:
But the true church is one, as by unity of doctrine, so by unity of government, and she is catholic also. Since God has placed the center and foundation of unity in the chair of Blessed Peter, she is rightly called the Roman Church, for “where Peter is, there is the church.” Wherefore, if anybody wishes to be considered a real Catholic, he ought to be able to say from his heart the selfsame words which Jerome addressed to Pope Damasus: “I, acknowledging no other leader than Christ, am bound in fellowship with Your Holiness; that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that the church was built upon him as its rock, and that whosoever gathereth not with you, scattereth.”
We having thought it fitting, beloved son, in view of your high office, that this letter should be addressed specially to you. It will also be our care to see that copies are sent to the bishops of the United States, testifying again that love by which we embrace your whole country, a country which in past times has done so much for the cause of religion, and which will by the Divine assistance continue to do still greater things. To you, and to all the faithful of America, we grant most lovingly, as a pledge of Divine assistance, our apostolic benediction.
The encyclical correctly foresaw that many were blending the belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States with the purpose of the church in the world, which will outlast the United States as it has done other civilisations and will do to other current ones.
In late 2020 and early 2021, this belief came to the fore once more. On one side, there were some American (and non American) Catholics who believed that President Donald Trump had been ordained by God to save the United States and the rest of humanity.
On the other side, was the idea that the United States had been faced with a fascist dictatorship for 4 years and had just now been liberated, by the militarised instillation of warmonger Joe Biden, elected in a disputed election ironically enough.
Both were preposterous. But the latter is the one that we have to deal with now since it is the prevailing one.
The new President is a ‘devout Catholic’, who is less devoted to following the Catholic faith than he is to abortion imperialism, unjust wars and officiating men marrying one another.
His followers and those Catholics who celebrated America’s triumph over ‘fascism’ are even more detached from reality.
One of them was the ‘poet’ Amanda Gorman who ‘recited’ a ‘poem’ at Biden’s inauguration.
Gorman’s ‘recital’ of her ‘poem’ was wildly celebrated by Catholic communities who hailed her as a ‘Black Catholic’. This is not a ‘Black Catholic’ like Cardinal Sarah but a confusing ethnic marking of an American subbranch of Democratic supporters, a bit like celebrities who refer to themselves as having been raised Irish Catholic as an ethno religious identification rather than alluding to a rite in the church as say Greek Byzantine Catholic is. In the Black Catholic Messenger, they celebrated her ‘poem’ entitled ‘The Hill We Climb’ which Gorman wrote, in their words, after ‘The DC Terrorist Attack’. If Ms. Gorman wants to see a ‘DC Terrorist Attack’ perhaps she should look at what her friend Joe did to Africans in Libya in 2011 from the comfort of his bunker in DC, helping to bring slavery markets to the country and beheadings to Catholics at Mass in Europe.
The language of that particular article is like nothing we have ever read:
Yes, despite the media and the masses alike being unaware, the best-dressed lady of the day, speaking the day’s best words, is herself a Mass-going practitioner.
MGP. Mass going practitioner. Up there with ‘Easter Worshippers’ as a description of Catholics.
Amanda Gorman may attend Mass, but is she a Catholic? Her ‘poems’ are decidedly unCatholic both in form and matter. In form, because it is quite clearly an ugly diatribe of virtue signalling, lacking beauty and and even seeming devoid of the intent of beauty or truth. In matter, it expresses the idea that Democracy and Divinity are one and the same.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth,
in this faith we trust.
Of course it can be permanently defeated. Anyone who has studied history knows that. Poetry should serve beauty, beauty that stems from truth, the truth being that which leads us to God. To put one’s faith in ‘Democracy’ is demonic, it’s the type of behaviour that allows people to ‘recite’ a ‘poem’ about ‘Democracy’ in favour of a man who has caused millions to die around the world in wars that he carried out because he regarded himself as having the authority to invade them in the name of that very form of government.
Aside from this propensity for brutalising art to serve politics, Gorman is an avowed anti baby activist.
In another ‘poem’ (we put this in quotation marks because we do not accept that this spoken word propaganda style is a form of poetry in the same way we wouldn’t call some people architects or painters) Gorman claims that ‘Abortion is a human right’.
Gorman speaks of the woman’s ‘reproductive destiny’, as though having your baby sucked out with a hoover and dumped in a bin is what God intends for anyone. 33% of US abortions are to black women, despite them only being 12% of the population. Is Gorman implying that God wants there to be less black people? Only the most superficial person could take her ‘poems’ at face value.
In her devotion to American Exceptionalism, she discusses the cheap popular literature text ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and then states that ‘Roe vs Wade’ will not be allowed to ‘slowly fade’ as it is part of their promise of ‘tomorrow’ (promising the baby that it can spend tomorrow in a toilet or a bin because some oligarch would rather it dead than have to pay to feed it).
We had to turn…the sound off…sounding the alarm…of our alarmed sounding fear…lest…the least of us…lest we cringe like lemon zest…pardon, got caught up in her poetry there… we had to turn the sound off as the ‘poetry’ and the exaggerated motions were too much to observe together in that particular video. We are not mocking her style of poems just to be cruel, it is worth drawing attention to this because it underpins this Narcissistic Gospel. Gorman is part of a generation, like Lady Gaga who was also present at the event, who think that Catholicism will suffice as both habit and as a minority culture identity, but not as an objective truth or as the way to know God and His love for us. It assumes that Christ asks nothing of us other than to subscribe to America’s Constitution and occasionally mention him in the same breath as Martin Luther King and George Washington. That is what Neo Americanism is.
Another millennial who is pushing the same ideology, but in a far more problematic way, is Fr. Casey Cole.
Fr. Cole has rose to prominence through his Youtube channel Breaking the Habit where he regularly preaches from the Gospel of Woke, moreso than from the Gospel of Christ. Like the rest of the Americanists, Fr. Cole buys into some of the ridiculous hype about America’s role as the saviour of the world.
On the contrary, violence rises when America interferes. Or the American Globalists who get to control their foreign policy to be more exact.
Despite the fact that the USA is one nation and all of its citizens have equal rights, Cole also buys into the American foundation myth that it was redeemed by freeing the slaves and fighting in World War 2. As a result, for Fr. Cole, All Lives Matter is a statement of oppression.
It’s actually a clever lingual trick. By asserting that all lives don’t matter, Fr. Cole and others can wash their hands of their people in recent memory bringing slavery back to an African country like Libya, of the involvement of African Americans like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the illegal Iraq War or the large numbers of African Americans availing of abortion. Rather than face these difficult truths, it is much easier to go with the crowd. A dead thing can only go with the stream, as Chesterton said.
Fr. Cole went even further with this Americancentric focus, implying that perhaps Catholic churches and statues of Our Lady deserved to be desecrated because they did not portray her through the lens of his American understanding of what a minority is and of what the purpose of a statue is. Our Lady isn’t beautiful enough to Fr. Cole on her own, instead she should be altered according to whatever anarchist group is being sponsored by the Oligarchs that particular week.
Cole also suggests that the protest at Washington DC was from a ‘third world country’. Yet the church so often tells us these days that the West is outdated and third world countries are the future, because they focus on families and faith.
Prior to this event, he had lamented ‘Fascism’ rising in America. What is Fascism in the year 2021? Is it worse than invading other countries to ‘help’ them as he seems to agree with by virtue of his opposition to Nationalist policies?
In another video, he tells people that he ‘almost nevers pray the Rosary’, which is not untrue of a great many priests, but imprudent to brag about. They ‘hey whatevs’ mentality is not how priests should operate.
This aversion to tradition is also evident in the comments that he has made regarding the Latin Mass, which it appears as though he does not value because it is not the one most widely currently celebrated in the United States of America.
The inclination to conflate American political and popular culture has become apparent in other ways now too, with many American Catholics treating Pope Francis like a politician of an opposing political party that is to be spoken about disparagingly as thus. The same went for Pope Benedict XVI before him.
There are also those pernicious groups such as Catholic For Choice who have been created to manipulate the church towards the ideals of American political parties.
Far from liberty given by the US Constitution, or liberty from being invaded by the United States or even liberty from ‘Democracy’, our. liberty comes from Christ.
Finally, not to delay too long, it is stated that the way and method hitherto in use among Catholics for bringing back those who have fallen away from the Church should be left aside and another one chosen, in which matter it will suffice to note that it is not the part of prudence to neglect that which antiquity in its long experience has approved and which is also taught by apostolic authority. The scriptures teach us that it is the duty of all to be solicitous for the salvation of one’s neighbor, according to the power and position of each. The faithful do this by religiously discharging the duties of their state of life, by the uprightness of their conduct, by their works of Christian charity and by earnest and continuous prayer to God. On the other hand, those who belong to the clergy should do this by an enlightened fulfillment of their preaching ministry, by the pomp and splendor of ceremonies especially by setting forth that sound form of doctrine which Saint Paul inculcated upon Titus and Timothy. But if, among the different ways of preaching the word of God that one sometimes seems to be preferable, which directed to non-Catholics, not in churches, but in some suitable place, in such wise that controversy is not sought, but friendly conference, such a method is certainly without fault. But let those who undertake such ministry be set apart by the authority of the bishops and let them be men whose science and virtue has been previously ascertained. For we think that there are many in your country who are separated from Catholic truth more by ignorance than by ill-will, who might perchance more easily be drawn to the one fold of Christ if this truth be set forth to them in a friendly and familiar way.
From the foregoing it is manifest, beloved son, that we are not able to give approval to those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some “Americanism.” But if by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name. But if this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.
With his reversal of the Mexico City Policy, which forbade US funding of Abortion Colonialism across the world, Joe Biden has declared war on every baby and every ounce of Catholic culture across the world. By advocating for abortion and supporting Biden, Gorman is now complicit in that war against the unborn as is any Catholic who enables Biden. Those ‘Conservative’ figures touting a middle ground on Catholic teaching are merely sophists, nothing that they can do will mean anything so long as abortion is spread in this manner.
In the wake of Biden’s inauguration, the New York Times published a piece that exhibited this Disneyland Catholicism, in a piece entitled ‘An Ascendant Liberal Christianity’ with the the line that Biden’s Aborto Imperialist Globalism was ‘built on love, rooted in justice and propelled by our moral imagination’.
Christ never set foot in the United States during his earthly life, as the Mormons claim, but He did live in a womb for 9 months, which is why abortion is such a pressing issue. And He has set foot there in the form of His Mystical Body since the arrival of Christopher Columbus heralded the arrival of the Catholic faith to the Americas, which is why it is so important to emphasise the Catholic rather than Masonic identity of the States.
Despite their short history, the United States has had a remarkable history of influential Catholics such as Archbishop Fulton Sheen, but it should not conflate its increasing demographic share with a rise in holiness, especially with prominent Catholics as Joe Biden citing their faith in causing incomparable harm to Christians throughout the world, those born and unborn.
Whether one is left wing or right wing, Traditional or Modernist, it is important to let go of the idea that the United States has a manifest destiny as anything other than to a nation destined to serve Christ, rather than the false god that is called Democracy. America will be the better for a fuller conversion to the true faith, so will the rest of the world.
‘Catholic’ Nancy Pelosi, the pro abortion Democrat has worded his better than we could, in a speech decrying the ‘attack’ on the ‘Temple of Democracy’ and a human being who was ‘sacrificed’ for it.
We’ll leave you with this excellent video from Archbishop Fulton Sheen discussing what it means to be ‘Free’ and what it means to be ‘American’.
‘When we produce a civilisation in which everyone does what he pleases, a totalitarian system which will arise which is a forcible organisation of a chaos produced by everyone doing his own thing without care for his neighbour. This is the Communist Freedom’.