On migration, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, rights and privileges of truth, tolerance of error.
After a six-week pause, paid subscriptions are now enabled again.
If you already had a paid subscription, Substack resumed deducting from your linked account starting today. If you didn’t already have a paid subscription and want to financially support Bailiwick, you can.
All content is free for all readers, and I’m grateful for all reader support: reading, sharing and financial.
For now, the comment section remains disabled. I’m thinking through how to set comment guidelines in a constructive and manageable way.
Update July 27, 2023: Comment section now open.
Notes:
As I read and write more about pre- and post-1959 Catholic teaching as they relate to current geopolitical events, I want to emphasize that I’m on a learning curve, and my views are developing as my knowledge base deepens.
Prior to Covid, my foundation for this work included my upbringing in a mixed family (traditional Catholic, American father and Protestant, European mother) in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a basic education in philosophy and natural sciences at Penn State University, followed by work in journalism, civic activism (community organizing) and as a paralegal doing legal research and writing for attorneys practicing constitutional, civil rights and environmental law.
My interest in the relationship between pre- and post-1959 Catholic teaching and current geopolitical events began around 2003, when I read Malachi Martin’s The Keys of This Blood for the first time.
My interest intensified in early 2020 once I realized that 1) the intrinsically-evil Covid-predicated global crime spree was built on the corruption of civil law during the preceding decades, and 2) the corruption of civil law, especially in the Western world, was enabled by the dis-integration of Catholic teaching and erosion of Catholic faith during and since the Second Vatican Council.
Those realizations prompted me to read Fr. Martin’s book a second time in 2021, and then led me to papal encyclicals by Pope Leo XIII, Pope Pius IX, Pope Pius X, Pope Pius XI, Pope Pius XII and the writings of Josef Pieper, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, among many other Catholic works.
The point being: the accuracy and clarity of my work will develop as I continue to learn and better grasp and apply definitions and concepts.
Reader question sent by email under subject line “Quick opinion requested:”
Do you agree or disagree with this statement that was made today by Robert Malone?: “Migration is NOT a human right.”
My reply, revised and expanded.
Quick response: I don’t know.
Long response:
Declaring that people do not have rights to freedom of movement, while goods and information do, is an important part of the UN-WEF enslavement project.
At the same time, the UN-WEF enslavement project is also about dissolving national borders and making it impossible for people to protect their cultures from invasion, corruption, dilution and impoverishment through reduction in the relative power of labor against capital.
In these ways, migration is another one of the double-bind traps they’ve built for us.
Because I’m digging into Catholic teaching pre-1959 on a wide variety of issues, my views are changing and becoming more complex in some ways and simpler in other ways.
The best example right now is that I’m no longer the free speech absolutist that I was previously, because Catholic teaching is that truth has rights and privileges, but error does not have either, because error tends to lead people away from truth and to damnation.
My father used to say, when I was a child, “There is no right to be wrong.” I didn’t understand what he was getting at. It makes far more sense to me now, in a way it did not prior to the Covid project, which is built on lies — error — that have been granted rights and privileges by the State, while the State has simultaneously stripped rights and privileges from truth, through the mechanism of falsely characterizing truth as mis-, dis- and mal-information.
Catholic teaching on these issues is nuanced.
As I understand it so far, upholding unfettered freedom of speech means, at minimum, tolerating error. But error in itself can never be regarded as a good. And there are thresholds past which tolerance becomes compromise with, endorsement of, and eventually participation in error, which is a form of sin.
If tolerance of error — including religious tolerance of non-Catholic sects and religious cults — helps a society avoid even greater evils, such as civil war, or attain greater goods, such as peace between nations and peoples, then the error of non-Catholic cults can be tolerated by the State, according to pre-1959 Catholic teaching.
What a Catholic State cannot do, and still be well-ordered to Catholic teaching, is give error rights and privileges on the same level as the rights and privileges held by truth, because if the State does so, the State is actively endorsing error as morally equal to truth.
Yet that is what the formerly Catholic States of Western Europe and the Americas have been induced to do, under the influence of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions derived from them both, and the Second Vatican Council.
The result is the confusion, among the priests and the people, of truth and error as being equal in some way, and religious faith and salvation as being matters of indifferentism. Indifferentism, as I understand it so far, is the view that one religion is just as good as another, and all are as good as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic faith founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
This is the false ecumenism that Vatican II set in more intense motion in the 1960s, and what the Synod on Synodality is bringing to more complete form 2021-2024, in parallel with the United Nations Our Common Agenda process and, I think, the 2021-2024 World Health Organization pandemic treaty + International Health Regulations amendment process.
The obvious problem is that, if error has no rights, and people’s access to truth must be protected lest they be swamped by the sheer volume of circulating error, then censorship of certain ideas, books and other publications is required.
According to Catholic teaching pre-1959, the censor could be either a legitimate State or a legitimate Catholic Pope, to the extent that either, or both working together, are truly looking out for the common good under the guidance and protection of God through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.
For the State in a non-Catholic country, they’re protecting the public order from vice and corruption of public morals.
For both the State and the Church in a Catholic country, they’re protecting the public order and also protecting the rights of the Catholic faithful and potential converts to hear the truth and thus have the opportunity to respond to it with voluntary consent and obedience of the will.
A few years ago, many people were outraged by Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others, and firmly in favor of them and others being deplatformed, censored and banned from giving public lectures.
In discussions with people who called for censorship of these voices, I drew on the position attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” You may not agree with those specific people, but if you call for or consent to censorship of those you disagree with while people you like are in charge, then later, when someone who doesn’t like your ideas is in power, you’ll be the one shut down.
Again, accepting the premise that there are and have always been dangerous ideas that should be censored to protect human souls from corruption and temptation to sin, means confronting the problem: which human beings can be trusted to make those calls wisely, soundly and truly for the good of human souls and through which mechanisms?
The predicament is all the more difficult under the circumstances that we have now, where the legitimacy of the State and the legitimacy of the institutional Catholic Church are simultaneously in grave doubt, such that the censoring power cannot be wielded with credibility.
State and Church are both estranged from God, Who is the source of truth and the source of the wisdom and discernment that would help rulers and popes distinguish truth from error, promote the true common good, protect truth, and censor error.
Public understanding of the ‘common good’ itself has been perverted. This is another key double-bind confusion promoted by the Luciferians through promulgation of error (lies) regarding public health, climate change, resource scarcity and population overshoot to coerce self-destructive, sterilizing, suicidal and homicidal human behaviors.
Under the circumstances, which will hold only until the terrible disorders in the State, civil law, Catholic Church and the Church-State relationship are brought more in alignment with the divine order established by God, I think very broad freedom of speech is necessary, along with very strong prohibitions on censorship, which nowadays is the merged State + Church + corporate + NGO censorship program described by Matt Taibbi and others as the “censorship-industrial complex.”
Free speech, and the promulgation of error that free speech permits, must be tolerated, because maintaining information channels as fully open as possible is the only way for people to have any access to truth at all.
So long as the Luciferian globalists who devise, circulate and promote error (in service of their enslavement and killing program) control the world’s information channels, without any restraints on their action, they will move toward banning truth and truth alone, leaving only error to propagate as widely and destructively as possible.
