receives its sanction from the Church, which is the pillar of the State and of its ordinances. He, therefore, who heeds not the Church, shakes also the principal supports of every well-ordered constitution. He who incites the citizen to unbelief, and in this manner to disobey his spiritual mother the Church, inclines him to become a traitor to the law and to his native land.
And this is what we especially experience in the present day. While the Church preaches obedience, the godless world, which is separated from her, proclaims treachery against the ruler, the laws, and one's native land; and wherever the Church is ignored, obedience to law and authority is ignored likewise. The Catholic Church will always oppose anarchy and every kind of socialism which ignores God and which is inimical to the eternal interests of man.
2. It behooves you, my friend, to be ever on your guard that you may not be entangled in the net of the degenerate spirit of the world.
The Church itself cheerfully serves the lawful secular authority in upholding law and order in the State. The best safeguard of your interests, both temporal and eternal, is obedience to the Church.
Let your obedience to the Church be as a sharp sword that will cut to pieces every net which is attempted to be drawn around you by the false principles and specious sophistry of the spirit of evil as manifested in modernism, rationalism, naturalism, and. godless socialism.
Keep perpetually engraven on the tablets of your memory the words of the apostles :
In the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (xiii. i, 2, 4, 5) we read: "Let every soul be subject to higher powers; for there is no power
