U.S.'s Judeo-Masonic, French Revolution principles

[Geremia]

The Bill of Rights (1791) was modeled off the French Revolution's Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (1789), and Thomas Jefferson influenced both. Two major defects in them are:

• religious indifferentism (that all beliefs/sects are equal under the law): Déclaration des droits Article X:
  

  No one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.

  There are people (e.g., Muslims) who believe killing infidels is a virtue. Why should such a Muslim not "be disturbed for his opinions," even though the "manifestation" of his beliefs does indeed "trouble the public order established by the law"?
• freedom of press: Déclaration des droits Article XI:
  

  The free communication of [true and false!*] thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty,** in the cases determined by the law.

  *Why should one have the freedom to spread falsehoods and lies?
   **"[R]espond[ing] to the abuse of this liberty" is exactly what anyone who criticizes the dictatorship of the mainstream media does, yet this Article says they should be silenced! The Liberal press, lead by the Freemasonic philosophes (revolutionary French philosophers like Voltaire), is what instigated the French Revolution in the first place.

These Articles X and XI are combined in the U.S.'s 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, ...

There are some good parts of these documents (like real natural rights), but religious indifferentism (which says beliefs, esp. religious ones, don't matter) and freedom of press (which gives way to a dictatorship of the media, Hollywood, textbook publishers, et al., who know beliefs do matter and yet inculcate falsehoods) have been condemned (e.g., in Mirari Vosi §13 and §15, respectively).

Freemasonry has been exerting a poisonous influence on society since at least 1738, when Clement XII condemned it.

Leo XIII, who wrote the last encyclical condemning Freemasonry, Humanum Genus (1884), also condemned Americanism, the idea that the U.S. is a model for the government of the Church (with worked its way into Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanæ via the American Jesuit Fr. John Courtney Murray) and the idea that "active virtues" > "passive virtues" (related to Protestant work-ethic), in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899).

[Geremia]

The best argument I've seen against the tendency of the above assertions is The Strange Spirit of Solange Hertz.
So is Timothy Gordon's Catholic Republic.

[Paul_D]

I think Christopher Ferrara's 600 page book, Liberty: The God that Failed, actually refutes Fr. Hunter, since he actually goes into the history of the US after its founding, and shows that debts, taxes, etc. went up astronomically higher than anything George III did. Ryan Grant reviewed the book here: https://distributistreview.com/archive/liberty-god-that-failed and https://distributistreview.com/archive/review-liberty-god-that-failed-part-ii

[Geremia]

Christopher Ferrara's 600 page book, Liberty: The God that Failed

I'd never heard of that work by Ferrara before. Thanks!

Grant's CFN article "St. Robert Bellarmine: Herald of Republics? — Part II" mentions:

Phrases such as, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," or "Life, liberty, or estate," "more disposed to suffer than right themselves," are all found in Locke's Second Treatise.

[Paul_D]

I saw even now that Fr. Hunter is still defending the Founding Fathers as using Catholic principles, even using Robert O'Reilly's America on Trial (Ignatius Press, 2020) as proof. Michael Hanby refutes O'Reilly in this case: https://newpolity.com/blog/the-birth-of-liberal-order

[Geremia]

Fr. Hunter is still defending the Founding Fathers as using Catholic principles, even using Robert O'Reilly's America on Trial (Ignatius Press, 2020) as proof.

Where does Fr. Hunter cite Robert O'Reilly?
(He does cite Alfred O'Rahilly.)

[Paul_D]

My mistake, I think some one else did in a post concerning this, defending Fr. Hunter's viewpoint.

[Geremia]

I think some one else did in a post concerning this, defending Fr. Hunter's viewpoint.

Who is this "some one [sic] else"?

[Paul_D]

I think some one else did in a post concerning this, defending Fr. Hunter's viewpoint.

Who is this "some one [sic] else"?

I saw in a SSPX supporter blog post that he recommended Robert O'Reilly's book "America on Trial" for defending the "Catholic" founding of America here and Locke as well: https://aaambrosetti.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/does-god-really-hate-the-first-amendment/#comments

[Paul_D]

Also, I find this excerpt from Hanby pretty telling from the article I linked:

I have always understood the thought of the Founders as a complex amalgam of Protestant Christianity, Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy, Baconian and Newtonian natural philosophy, and the Renaissance tradition of civic humanism. It is hardly an accident that we have a senate and a capitol, or that the young nation filled its new Rome along the banks of the Potomac with Greek and Roman temples. Nor is it an accident that the Founders did not build in Gothic; this fact alone ought to call into question Reilly's inordinate stress on the medieval Christian origins of the American Founding. "If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century," Gordon Wood writes, "it was ancient Rome—republican Rome—and the values that flowed from its history."[38] If anything, Reilly's account of the Founding's Christian, natural law origins understates the Founders' neo-classicism in forming their republican imagination. The warnings of of Cicero, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus against the corrosive effects of luxury and decadence fueled the Founders' own suspicions of the corrupting effects of "interest"—defined, in Madison's words, as "the immediate augmentation of property and wealth."[39] Roman history would also provide the archetypes after which they patterned themselves: Cato, sacrificing his life for his country; Cincinnatus, laying aside his commission to return to his farm.[40] Jefferson hoped, rather romantically, that the yeoman farmers he imagined would populate his empire of liberty would be such high-minded, disinterested men." " 'Ours,' he informed Crevecoeur in 1787, 'are the only farmers who can read Homer.' "[41] Though the radical liberty advanced by Jefferson and Thomas Paine would contribute to the dissolution of this republican vision even within the Founders' lifetimes, in their minds it also served as the precondition for any possible realization of that disinterested ideal.[42] " 'Interest,' many of them said, 'is the greatest tie man one man can have on another' ";[43] by contrast, the "classical ideal of disinterestedness was based on independence and liberty. Only autonomous individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, were capable of such virtue."[44] The demise of this neoclassical vision and the dramatic transformation of the new nation into "a scrambling business society dominated by the pecuniary interests of ordinary people" prior even to the adoption of the Constitution, raises the enduring question of whether the Founders' republican ideal could survive the corrosive effects of Lockean liberty and its metaphysical underpinnings.[45] That it has not survived is beyond debate.

And this, too:

Ben Franklin's Autobiography would've done, or Jefferson's Bible, which he hoped would "prepare the euthanasia for Platonic Christianity."[49] Apparently, Jefferson forgot that "Nature's God" "reveals himself as the divine Logos."

In extracting the pure principles which [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to them. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites, and the Gamelielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their Logos and Demi-urgos, Aeons and Daemons male and female with a long train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once, of Nonsense.[50]

[Paul_D]

I am afraid one of the conclusions Hanby has made in his article is true of many American Catholics, even within the SSPX (and Fr. Hunter is one of them, at least, IMHO):

This is why Lockean liberalism—with the mechanical world it presupposes and the Baconian world it sets in motion—more perfectly realizes Hobbes' absolutist ambitions than Hobbes himself does. Why repress the Church when you can entice Catholics to think like Protestants, or even like atheists, without knowing it?

They all think that because America was very prosperous and the Church in the US gaining converts greater than anywhere else in the period before Vatican II shows how great America is, when in fact the period after Vatican II showed how shallow that faith was. They also ignore very inconvenient truths, such as the continued persecution of the Church after the US' founding, and the attempt to attack Canada in 1812 to try to force liberty there against Catholics (which failed).

[Geremia]

Grant's CFN article "St. Robert Bellarmine: Herald of Republics? — Part II" mentions:

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," [...] [is] found in Locke's Second Treatise.

This isn't correct. Locke pp. 103-4:

To be sure, Jefferson's formulation [in the Declaration of Independence] is by no means entirely Lockean in content. Locke would, for reasons we will examine presently, be more inclined to speak of rights to one's "life, health, liberty [and] possessions" (T II.6), though the pursuit of happiness is not entirely outside the range of his concern.