BISHOPS BETRAINING THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Let me tell you a story. It is a story of wickedness and betrayal. It is a demonic plan I have witnessed personally.

It is a story you won't hear from the 700 media personnel who have converged on Dallas for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' June 13-15 meeting. Their task is to report on how the bishops of the United States address the clerical sex-abuse scandals. Not one in a hundred, however, will report what is really happening in Dallas because they simply don't know which dots to connect. When the set of concealed dots is connected, the picture within the picture is harrowing.

An invisible war is being fought for the life of the Catholic Church in the United States – and it is a fight to the death. The war is more than a century old now, and this is a key engagement. The war is not about pedophilia or homosexuality, as repugnant as those two symptoms are. It is about an attempted coup d'état within the Catholic Church – one of only two global institutions on this planet. Whoever gets the Keys of St. Peter walks off with the power to change the world – or so the betrayers think. I'll tell you why.

At the turn of the 20th century the popes had spoken out forcefully against socialism and communism. Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum novarum (1891) that acknowledged workers' rights but upheld the right to private property, a foundation of freedom.

The Christian worldview was under attack. A new worldview, Rationalism, was menacing all of Western Civilization. Rationalism had cut deep gorges in Christendom. Many no longer believed in Christian Revelation, that is, the scripture. If man could not prove a premise, man need not be bound by any given premise. The created order as given in the Bible could be re-ordered according to man's design; communism, utopia – fill in the blank. With the aid of science and technology, man did not need God or His musty old laws. A new order was coming of age.

In 1899, the pope also sent a weighty letter to the bishops of the United States, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, that warned against the dangers of "Americanism." Essentially, he warned the U.S. bishops that their primary identification had to be as Catholic shepherds. He cautioned against "new opinions" that some American bishops held that believed the gospel and doctrine should be accommodated to American culture: The Church must not "shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions …" or "to tone down the meaning. …"

Yet for a hundred years, many American bishops and theologians have believed that the American culture, dominant in the world, has something to teach the Church. They subordinated the command to evangelize the culture to their vision of an Americanized Catholic Church. For the first 50 years, these men were a small underground cadre of dissidents. By the close of the Second Vatican Council, the second generation of "modernists" had spread their Americanized vision of church in seminaries and universities.

Meanwhile, the American culture was growing ever more secular, and the sexual revolution, feminism and liberalism had a death grip on the foundational principles of the Christian worldview. Campus radicals and professors rebelled against authority – not parental or school authority, but the very idea of any authority with moral absolutes.

Catholic dissidents were swept up into the rebellion. They confidently talk of "structural change," meaning to shove over the Catholic Church and build a "democratic" church where "power is shared" and doctrine is determined by "consensus" rather than by scripture and Jesus' teachings.

These misguided "experts" would have us believe that if only the Church had been controlled by liberals, women priests and laity, this crisis would not have happened. Rubbish – they created the problem in the first place in an attempt to force changes in Church doctrine and discipline. If the U.S. bishops and theologians had been faithful to the teachings of the Church and their own vows, this crisis would be a footnote rather than a chapter in Church history.

It became fashionable for some American prelates to flaunt one's independence from the Church – to prove that they were not stodgy old time Catholics, but the sophisticated "American Catholics." Many of the bishops in Dallas today came of age in the '60s era of rebellion. They resent, as free Americans, being told what to do by the Vatican. As early as 1961, the Vatican issued an instruction, The Careful Selection And Training of Candidates For The States Of Perfection And Sacred Orders, prohibiting the admission of homosexuals to the seminaries. It was simply ignored by those bent on "changing the structure" of the Church to conform to the liberal American culture.

Others were weak and allowed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to push them into acquiescence. Soon, the internal committees of the NCCB were composed of homosexuals and modernists, feminists and even New Age devotees. They have a death grip on the levers of power within the Conference. An example is the pastoral letter from the U.S. bishops on homosexuality, Always Our Children. This flawed "gay positive" document was drafted by a committee – not by the bishops – and issued before the majority of U.S. bishops had even read the document. They did not vote on its contents (so much for "consensus"). The Vatican finally forced a revision of this squishy "pastoral" instruction. Even now, in Dallas, a similar committee set the agenda for the deliberations.

By the mid 1960s, the Rockefeller family had formed an alliance with Fr. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame University and sought an audience with Pope Paul VI in order to "advise" the pope to permit birth control. The Rockefeller interests were promoting population control. Hesburgh and others at Notre Dame, including Fr. Richard McBrien seen on "The O'Reilly Factor," worked feverishly to change the Church's teaching – if not in doctrine, at least in the practices adopted in millions of Catholic bedrooms. McBrien's book, "Catholicism" was so flawed it was – finally – censored by the U.S. bishops. But it is still on the shelf at Notre Dame University, infecting a new generation of graduates.

The modernists were in lock step with American culture. Worse, they adopted Marxist strategies to achieve their goals. Msgr. Jack Egan, Chicago icon of liberalism in the '60s and '70s, befriended Marxist Saul Alinsky, author of "Rules for Radicals," a manifesto for tearing down a community or institution and rebuilding it in the communist image. The Marxist vision of androgynous masses, where the State is Father and families are those who share a domicile portioned out by the State-Father, appealed to those who cry for "justice." This "justice" is enforced by an all-powerful state that would erase any distinction between groups of people; they call it "power-sharing." These rules were promoted as "liberation" and applied to major issues in the Church, such as "liberating" women from "patriarchy" or "liberating" homosexuality from homophobic old men in the Vatican.

They no longer believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church, but like communist moles, they burrow in to make changes from within. They are instructed to "defect in place" as feminist nun Miriam Therese Winter advises. Prominent theologians have taught that those who control religion control the culture. Defrocked theologian Hans Kung promotes a "Global Ethic" (not the gospel) that mirrors the agenda of world ideologues. He and American Catholic dissident organizations want a "Vatican III" where new structures will include a constitution for the Church and a lay co-pope. Those who have grand visions for a re-ordered world based on Rationalism rather than Revelation seek a means of global governance to enforce their vision of "peace and justice."

These and others, pernicious men and women, promote abortion as a "choice" and applaud population control as a religious duty that preserves the environment (they love the Earth Charter). They accept euthanasia as "merciful" and do not object that nations like Sweden have moved to make it a crime to preach or teach against homosexuality.

The liberal media in the U.S. understand this point. They also defend homosexuality in the culture. They do not want to use this crisis in the Church to advocate against homosexual activity but to promote changes in the Catholic Church: married priests, women priests and acceptance of homosexuals.

That's why CNN trots out folks like Anthony Padavano to advocate for married priests. But Padavano is also keynote speaker for the dissident organization Call to Action that promotes homosexuality in the Church. Or CNN's guest "expert," Sr. Bridget Mary Meehan, who calls for "structural changes" that allow laity greater say. Meehan and others of her ilk expect that once the laity is given control of the Church, it will relax sexual morality and resemble the Democratic Party, that is, liberal American culture. Because the American bishops have worried more about their independence from Rome than allegiance to the gospel, they have become more easily controlled by the liberal agenda – often without realizing it. The media has hushed up past foibles, but the price now is high – a lesson learned too late. The American bishops are a means to an end: The titanic battle is for the Keys of St. Peter – to control the structure and doctrine of the Church. The issue isn't homosexuality, it is to empty the Church from within of the truth of Revelation. But why?

To silence the lone international voice for morality, that's why. Hate the Catholic Church or love it, it must be admitted that it publicly teaches and preaches against the totalitarian, utilitarian worldview. The Catholic Church insists on the dignity and value of every person, born and unborn. The world ideologues howl when the Church stands up for life as sacrosanct. At Cairo, at Beijing, at the World Summit for Children and behind the scenes in nation after nation, the Church parries those who would impose a utilitarian global vision on us all.

The moral voice of the Catholic Church stands between modernists and their New World Order vision that is opposed to the old order of Revelation. What the ideologues need is to put a cork in the mouth of the Church and control the Keys of St. Peter in the near future. To use the Church and her universities and schools and hospitals the world over – to use them for their diabolical agenda.

Notice the timing of the Boston Globe's "breaking" story. The Globe and others have known for over a decade about the growing gay sub-culture in the Church, but the Globe and others simply winked – they are no less guilty of a cover up than Cardinal Law. It did not seem worthy of print. Until, that is, Pope John Paul II, the disliked "reactionary" pope faltered during Christmas masses and seemed so frail that new teams of correspondents were dispatched to Rome in anticipation of a papal conclave.

The goal among modernists, clerical and secular, is to use this crisis to create chaos so large that a new pope will have to deal with the crisis as his first order of business. If a momentum is built that insists that the old order is the problem, perhaps the cardinals can be stampeded into electing an unusual pope: a candidate approved by the New York Times and the United Nations.

Mary Jo Anderson is a contributing reporter to WorldNetDaily and a contributing editor to many Catholic publications, including Crisis magazine.

This is indeed a very good article. I did not realize that the Holy Father had written the Pastoral letter in 1899 to the American bishops warning them not to try to accomodate the Faith to American culture. From my limited knowledge of pre-1950 America, I do not believe that there were any concrete manifestations of this drift. I really wonder if Leo XIII, the author of this letter and a mystic, did not foresee the confusion which has befallen the Church in America in the latter half of the 20th Century.

My only criticuism of the article would be its failure to acknowledge the receding influence of modernist influences in the Church. All articles which refer to any potential for "hijacking the Keys of Peter" should contain the mandatory qualifier that Christ established His Church on the Rock of Peter and that we have it on His Authority that the Gates of Hell will not break that rock. The idea that a few modernists, whose ranks are dwindling, will succeed in capturing the See of Peter(as if it were some Chicago precinct) should be dismissed as an impossibility. The Church in America has floundered, and the Church in the world is under attack in many quarters, but the See of Peter will not only survive as the visible representative of Christ on earth. It will prevail. As the Holy Father has said, we are even now "crossing the threshhold of hope."

Well, I've been trying to figure out how to answer your question other than just typing "EVERYTHING!!!" in caps followed by a lot of exclamation points.

Everybody else on the thread has done a pretty good job of posting some terrifying glimpses into the post-Catholic, Catholic Church. But something someone posted on an unrelated thread--(although all these threads are probably related somehow)--provided me with a chance to express why I think the two-hundred-million-dollar Turd on the Freeway is more horrifying in the long run than even the sexual scandal currently vexing the faithful.

A freeper commented that wars are often fought over aesthetics rather than for logical reasons. That really got my antennae twitching, because I, of course, believe that aesthetics are one of the few truly just causes over which to go to war and that the logic of aesthetics is at the very heart of reason.

This is from George Santayana's The Life of Reason:

".....Of all reason's embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived, would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went with no actual remodelling of the outer word, to render men's dwelling more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible. Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day's rain will last and keep out to-morrow's rain also; the sign that once expresses an idea will serve to recall it in future....."

So, my objection to Mahoney's Prison Monument is a combination of fury over what it signifies is the Am Church hierarchy's true internal vision; and fear over the complacency, collaboration and passivity of the Faithful as this structure slowly and cancerously grew on it's construction site.

I've only seen it by examination of several internet sites (one of them offering three-dimensional views), pictures in magazines and from the testimony of a friend who did happen to have the misfortune of viewing it with his own eyes. This friend is one of the most mild-mannered human beings I have ever met. In the time I have known him I have never heard a curse word pass his lips no matter how hot the discussion or how horrible the subject. I don't think I've ever heard him raise his voice, in fact. So you can imagine how surprised I was to hear his voice choked with rage, nearly inarticulate--except when a few really juicy curses were flowing out--as he described his initial reaction to the Thing.

The Turd is a monument to the values of our present Church Leadership. Which are, of course, hostile to traditional Catholic ideas of transcendence and other-worldliness; even to the cult of the saints--with their transcendent messages; and totally alligned with the materialist view of human nature held by the post-modern Western welfare/police state. Most of the Church heirarchy believes that the "good" of the Catholic Church is as a servant of the State. For example they like to brag that the Church "educates" disadvantaged children--and doesn't oppress them with distasteful Catholic dogma. Bascially, I think most American men who have become priests did it because it seemed like a more dignified form of social work.

But, its resemblance to a prison is the most revealing thing about it. Because, after all, that is the great achievement of modern Western progressivism--to have turned all of society into a prison of one sort of another; prison schools; prison work cubicles; prison legal code (if we pass enough laws then everybody will be an outlaw, whether they have been detected yet or not.)

In its rejection of the traditional playfulness, humanism and transcendence of the Catholic Church of Greco/Roman and European pagan influences, it has embraced the sterile, massive look of that culture of death--Ancient Egypt; mere bigness and solidity is the fundamental architectural comment.

At the dedication Mahoney mentioned that his Turd was specifically meant to convey the image of the survival of the Church through its many travails. But he is either too stupid, or too evil, to realize that the Chuch did not survive by erecting fortresses or prisons. That is how the Leviathin earthly States in history have attempted to survive. Not coincidentally they have all failed, so far.

The aesthetic sensibility that built Chartres Cathedral--and kept rebuiding fire after fire--was maintained for centuries right up to my parent's time. So much so that when I--a post Vatican II baby-- entered Chartres, I instinctively understood the who, what, when where and why of the anonymous, inspired guildsmen who built it. It was all so beautiful and reasonable. It was my culture, you see.

I recognize the enemy in Kosovo as it tears down ancient orthodox monasteries and replaces them with rows of male bottoms. Just as instinctively, I know that Mahoney's Turd is the inspiration of an enemy, alien culture.

We may inflict a few wounds upon the "foreign" foe. but only where the global interests of that foe clash (or, is it really "intersects") with the economic and cutural interests of our leaders.

But we won't raise a finger against our most dangerous enemy--the one among us. Contrary to our mythological image we are the most passive people on the planet. Look how helplessly Americans accepted the destruction of so many of our mid-west and western cities by the architecture of a hostile, alien culture.

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