NON SERVIAM
The Rebel’s Gospel and the Damnation It Purchases
St. Paul did not mince words. He rarely did.
“Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.” (Romans 13:1–2, Douay-Rheims)
Purchase. To themselves. Damnation. Not inconvenience. Not imprudence. Not a regrettable tactical error. Damnation. The Apostle uses κρίμα — condemnation, judgment — the same word used for the verdict rendered at the last hour. And he says the rebel brings it on himself. It is self-purchased. Self-willed. The logical terminus of a soul that has decided it knows better than God’s providential ordering of the world.
Keep that word in mind. We’re going to need it.
THE REBEL’S ONE MOVE
Every rebel, in every age, makes the same move. He does not simply oppose a specific unjust act. He delegitimizes authority as such. He declares the institution itself void — the papacy corrupted beyond recognition, the state criminal in its very existence, the bishop forfeited, the council invalid — based on his own private judgment, his own reading of history, his own moral calculus.
This is the move. One move. Dressed in a thousand costumes.
The sedevacantist makes it when he declares the Chair of St. Peter empty because the man sitting in it has disappointed him. The liberation theologian makes it when he teaches peasants that the Church’s hierarchy is a colonial imposition to be dismantled.
Different costumes. One move. One spirit.
And Saul Alinsky was honest enough to name that spirit on his dedication page.
Different costumes. One move. One spirit.
THE DEDICATION
Rules for Radicals, 1971. Before the first rule, before the first tactic, before the first word of instruction in the art of community organizing — Alinsky tips his hat to his inspiration.
Lucifer. “The first radical known to man,” who “rebelled against the establishment so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”
This is not a joke. It is not irony. It is a statement of first principles. The father of the Alinskyite method is telling you exactly what the method is for: not justice, not the common good, not the relief of the poor — but the winning of one’s own kingdom. Carved out of the ruins of delegitimized order. Built on the rubble of whatever authority stood before you declared it void.
Every one of Alinsky’s thirteen rules is a refinement of this single satanic principle: no authority is real. Every institution is a fraud or entirety corrupt. Every structure of order is merely illegitimate power in disguise. The organizer’s job is to strip the mask away, to make the community see that nothing above them has any genuine claim — so that the organizer himself can step into the vacuum.
Non serviam. I will not serve. Lucifer’s word. Alinsky’s method. And — God forgive us — the operating principle of a great deal of what passes for the intellectual life since 1965.
“No authority is real.” — The satanic principle behind every Alinskyite move.
TWO KINGDOMS, ONE SIN
Romans 13 has no asterisks. St. Paul does not write: “Be subject to higher powers, unless their origins are disputed,” or “unless a theologian you admire has raised doubts about their legitimacy.”
Every soul. Every power. Ordained of God.
Not because every ruler is just. Not because every government is holy. But because God governs the fallen world through secondary causes, and constituted authority — however imperfect — is one of those causes. St. John Chrysostom said it plainly in his Homilies on Romans: the institution is ordained even when the person is corrupt. St. Augustine said the earthly city’s peace, however broken, participates in divine ordering. St. Thomas Aquinas called willful contempt of legitimate governance contumacia — a sin against the virtue of obedience that disorders the soul from its proper place in the hierarchy of being.
St. Thomas More did not void Henry VIII’s kingship. He refused one order (which opposed the Supremacy of the Pope), yet submitted to the judicial verdict, and died. That is what faithful resistance looks like. It looks nothing like what the rebel does.
The Vatican. The Catholic who has decided — based on his reading of canon law, his comparison of papal statements, his assessment of doctrinal drift — that the current pope is no pope, or that a council was fraudulent, or that his bishop has forfeited jurisdiction, has not found a higher fidelity to Christ. He has enthroned his own private judgment above the authority Christ established when He said “He that heareth you, heareth me.” He has become, functionally, a Protestant — and a particularly dangerous one, because he wears the vocabulary of orthodoxy while enacting the principle of private interpretation. St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Ephesians to regard the bishop as the Lord Himself. The sedevacantist has made himself the bishop’s judge. The Alinskyite move, in a cassock.
The rebel has not found a higher loyalty to Christ. He has substituted his own will for Christ’s.
THE PURCHASE
Here is the terrible thing about self-purchased damnation: the buyer always thinks he’s getting a bargain.
The sedevacantist believes he is preserving the Faith. The radical "social justice warrior" believes he is serving the poor. And Lucifer — according to Alinsky’s own account — believed he was winning a kingdom.
He was. His own. That is precisely the problem.
The saints did not operate this way. Not one of them. They suffered under unjust authority. They appealed. They endured. They died. They did not declare the authority corrupt or
void and organize against its authority. They trusted that God, who ordains every power, would vindicate truth in His time and by His means — not by the rebel’s rules.
There is a spirit loose in the world — and increasingly in the Church — that has learned to dress rebellion in the language of prophecy, to call Non serviam by the name of "conscience," "social justice," "resistance," or "sedevacante."
St. Paul is not amused.
“They that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.” — Romans 13:2
The price has not changed. Neither has the Apostle’s word.
Choose carefully what you buy.