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What I did not know in my innocent youthful naïveté was the seeds for America’s self-destruction had been in place from the beginning. See, America at her core has always been at war with the Catholic Church. Few know that it was illegal to be Catholic in 10 of the original 13 colonies. Even after the War of Independence, hostility to Catholicism remained intense. But more importantly, it is the philosophical underpinnings of America that are the very heart of the problem.

America was born from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Those philosophers were driven by their hatred of scholastic philosophy — the mind of Aquinas, you might say. Aquinas expounded a philosophy as solid as rock: that God is the center of the Universe and man is bound to certain codes and creeds in face of that reality. In order to break away from those codes and creeds, Enlightenment philosophers set out to change the perception of reality. What sprang up in place of Aquinas and the Catholic Church was a new system of thought: that MAN was the center of the universe — or at least the functional center....

....America says man gets to decide. The Church says God gets to decide. Those two principles cannot co-exist. Either America will be converted by the Church, or the Church will be converted by America. We know how that turned out. Too many Americans who are also Catholic have twisted themselves into theological pretzels to insist a person can be a good Catholic while also being a good American. As long as America remained essentially Catholic in its morality, that tightrope could be walked, however gingerly.

But once Protestant-majority America — with all the diversity that description contains — realized it was living Catholic morality, without adhering to the underlying Catholic theology, it threw off the morality and turned secular. Catholic Americans took more pride in their country than they did their Church, always struggling for a place at the table, always ready to compromise or accommodate their Protestant neighbors.

The writer of the above screed, Michael Voris, wrote an related piece that was the subject of this FR thread: Catholic Government [Michael Voris video]. The video itself has since been pulled from the RealCatholicTV YouTube channel, but copies exist elsewhere such as the one featured on this thread. So that there is no mistaking the message, I took the time to transcribe the entire video. Here's the complete text for the Michael Voris/RealCatholicTV video episode titled "Catholic Government", dated August 12, 2010:

Hello everyone, and welcome to "The Vortex", where lies and falsehoods are trapped and exposed. I'm Michael Voris.
There's an inherent problem with democracy. Actually, it's definitional. It's this: everyone gets to vote. That's right, EVERYONE gets to vote.
Consider for a moment: the informed get to vote, those who have studied the candidates and issues, and consider the impact not only on themselves but the society at large. But in addition to the informed, the ignorant get to vote as well, those who have studied nothing and don't care about anything except themselves and their own narrow interests.
Imagine the scene: two voters, walking into voting booths side-by-side. One casts a vote with an eye to improving society at large, by rolling back abortion, defending traditional marriage, or reducing government's ability to crush families with heavy taxation, etc. Such a voter casts his vote with an eye to the common good - the authentic common good, what's best for the culture as a whole. Right next to his is a voter who doesn't give a hoot about society at large. All he cares about is his own selfish interests: insuring abortion stays legal so he can have sex with no consequences, or have his decision to have sex with another man celebrated as a right. Such a voter exhibits little else than an adolescent preoccupation with self-absorption. Imagine, he actually gets to vote! What a country! What a system! And it is a system that will end in self-destruction.
The nature of man is to be self-absorbed. That is because our nature is fallen. It no longer looks at God. Rather, it looks into a mirror. In fact, it stares into the mirror, totally absorbed, and can think of little else. This is why, if we're going to insist on a system where we're going to elect leaders - if we're going to insist on that system - only virtuous people should be allowed to vote. Ruthless men and women who, knowing human nature very well, and thereby the means to control and manipulate it, hold great influence over the selfish masses. They connive and scheme their way to power by appealing to the most base level of human ignorance, namely, to a false sense of liberty. They class everything in terms of "rights": a "right" to marry your homosexual sex partner, a "right" to kill your child, a "right" to have others in society pay for your lack of effort, your desire for contraception, food, housing, medical services, education, clothes - anything that can be imagined. Such societal parasites will cast their votes in such a way that will only hasten the destruction of a nation. It's like a cancer destroying its host. It enjoys ravaging the body, until the body is dead.
The cancer must be eliminated, and the only way to prevent a democracy from committing suicide is to limit the vote to faithful Catholics. Only a true Catholic nation in fact will survive, can survive, because only truly Catholic people will be the ones looking at God & not staring in the mirror. When they cast their their votes, they cast them with an eye to what God desires, not fallen human nature. But as the body politic continues to be ravaged by the cancer of ignorant self-centered voters, it becomes more and more clear that a national euthanasia is occurring.
But in truth, this is really the way the whole idea of democracy is little less than an experiment doomed to failure from the outset. Eventually, the evil in the heart of man overtakes him, when he dismisses God. No, the only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship. A Catholic monarch, who protects his people from themselves, and bestows on them what they need, not necessarily what they want, who protects their rights as human beings. It was this political system that caused Europe to emerge from the morass of marauding barbarians and create Western Civilization. A noble Catholic monarch advances the common good while loving and caring for his people. If you think about it, this is exactly how the universe is governed, isn't it? "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven."
God bless you, I'm Michael Voris.

And that said, I do wish that Catholics would make up their minds about assuming credit for the founding of this country:

...the core of the Declaration of Independence has its roots in Catholic thought....The following comparisons, clause for clause, of the American Declaration of Independence and of excerpts from the political principles of [Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine], evidence striking similarity and identity of political principle.
-- from the thread Fortnight For Freedom: The Catholic Roots of the Declaration of Independence
American Catholics, a very small percentage of the population of the 13 colonies, 1.6 percent, were overwhelmingly patriots and played a role in the American Revolution out of all proportion to the small fragment of the American people they represented....Figures on how many Catholics served in the Continental Army or the American militias is speculative as records of religious affiliations were not normally kept. From anecdotal evidence my guess would be at least five percent, far in exess of the Catholic percentage of the population. The foreign volunteers who came to fight for our freedom were overwhelmingly Catholic, including LaFayette, Duportail, Kosciuszko and Pulaski.
-- from the thread Fortnight For Freedom: Catholics in the American Revolution