An Americanist/Globalist Stronghold: The United States Conference of “Catholic Bishops”

To no one’s surprise, the so-called United States Conference of “Catholic Bishops,” which has been a stronghold of Americanism, statism, and globalism in the past one hundred eight years under its various appellations (National Catholic War Council, National Catholic Welfare Conference, National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference), has sued the administration of President Donald John Trump for having paused Federal taxpayer funding to “help refugees”:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, asking a federal judge to order the State Department to restart the taxpayer money that the bishops say they need in order to help refugees.

The bishops said they were giving assistance to some 6,700 refugees when President Trump shut off the government spigot with an executive order putting federal grants on hold.

Now the bishops conference says it has had to dig into its own coffers and begin layoffs for 50 employees to make ends meet.

They said their “reputation” is on the line, as well as the well-being of the refugees.

“Refugees who have already entered the United States may soon be cut off from support, contravening the statutorily expressed will of Congress and making it more difficult for them to establish themselves as productive members of society,” the bishops argued.

They said the funding pause violates several parts of U.S. law, as well as usurps Congress’ power to control spending.

Refugees are those fleeing persecution from abroad. As part of America’s humanitarian mission, Congress sets aside money to pay nongovernmental organizations to help the refugees gain footing once they’re here. They’re entitled to 90 days of assistance.

The bishops say they’ve been working with the feds on refugees dating back to World War II, saying it’s a biblical mandate, found in the Gospel of Matthew’s admonition (25:35-40) to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger.

Upon taking office Mr. Trump suspended refugee resettlement, saying the U.S. had been “inundated” by too many newcomers over the last four years.

“The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” Mr. Trump said.

But the letter to the bishops shutting off money cited an executive order pausing foreign aid. The bishops said that was odd because the refugee program is domestic spending, going to those already here.

The bishops said the government assistance doesn’t cover all the costs of the refugee services and the USCCB and its affiliates spend their own money, too. But they said the federal funds are critical.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, asks a judge to restore refugee spending and reimburse the bishops for the costs they’ve already incurred while making up the shortfall.

America’s bishops have been at odds with Mr. Trump from his first days in office, with immigration serving as a major flashpoint.

El Paso Bishop Mark J. Seitz, who heads USCCB’s migration committee, complained that the president’s early directives “are specifically intended to eviscerate humanitarian protections” for illegal immigrants and would leave children to face “grave danger.”

He complained about Mr. Trump deploying more U.S. troops to the border — a move made by every previous president dating back to George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s — and urged the administration to be more relaxed in how it enforced the law.

That drew a rebuke from Vice President J.D. Vance, a self-described devout Catholic, who said he was “heartbroken” by what he saw as unfair criticism.

“Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” he said last month. (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sues Trump administration to demand restart of refugee money. Also see: Judge declines to reinstate refugee resettlement program funding for now.)

Remembering always that illegal immigrants are human beings made in the image and likeness of God and are not objects to be dismissed as somewhat not worthy of our prayers and concern, it is nevertheless true that most of what those who are referred by the United States Conference of “Catholic Bishops” as “refugees” have chosen to violate the just immigration laws of a sovereign nation knowing that they can receive all manner of social services while avoiding any consequences for breaking laws that had been passed by the Congress of the United States of America and signed into law by various Presidents. Many of today’s so-called “refugees” are victims of human trafficking and are endangered not by the polices of the administration of President Donald John Trump and Vice President James David Vance but by the so-called “social service” agencies affiliated with the USCCB and such satellite organizations as Catholic Relief Services and the “Catholic Campaign for Human Development.”

No one at the so-called United States Conference of Catholic Bishop can concede that members of such notorious gangs as MS-13 and Tren de Agua are interested only in drug trafficking, human trafficking, extortion, violence for the sake of violence, forced, violent home invasions and occupations and, as happened in Aurora, Colorado, the violent takeover of entire apartment buildings.

No one the so-called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops can ever let the names of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, or Katie Steinle pass from their lips.

The protection of American citizens means nothing to these apostates, but the indemnification of even violent illegal immigrant means everything to do them.

Moreover, yes, the USCCB, CRS, and CCHD have a long history of funding “social services” provided by agencies who promote the chemical and execution of innocent preborn children as well as sodomy and all its related vices in addition to serving as singular instruments of perdition to promote Communism under a number of guises, including environmentalism.

Consider the following report about Catholic Relief Services written over fifteen years ago by Mrs. Randy Engel:

On Thursday, January 7, 2010, the following e-mail concerning the “partnership” of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation was sent by the U.S. Coalition for Life to the Most Rev. Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of CRS, and Thomas Price, CRS Senior Communications Manager:

Can you tell me why Catholic Relief Services is in a partnership with two of the world’s greatest promoters of abortion and population control? Why the glowing promotion of two of the world’s most anti-life foundations? Randy Engel, Director, USCL

The next day, the USCL received a response from Mr. Price which reads in part:

Thank you for your letter of concern on the Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. As an official agency of the Catholic Church, Catholic Relief Services strictly adheres to the teaching of the Catholic Church and the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).  Our first Guiding Principle states that “all human life is sacred and possesses a dignity that comes directly from our creation and not from any action of our own, …” The Catholic Church often participates in humanitarian initiatives that include a large range of partners — and we do not always agree with everything they stand for. However, the work that is undertaken directly with any of our partners always strictly adheres to Church teaching. We do not provide or promote artificial birth control and would never accept funding from any donor that would compromise the agency’s adherence to Catholic teaching. …” Sincerely, Tom Price

THE SIN OF COMISSION AND OF OMISSION

According to the CRS official website (www.crs.org), the Gates Foundation is “guided by the belief that every life has equal value.” CRS praises the foundation’s work “to help all people lead healthy, productive lives,” and “to ensure that all people… have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. …”

In exchange for perpetuating this glorious deception and maintaining a silence on the Gates/Buffett world-wide killing machine, CRS has received in excess of $40 million for global and agricultural development and financial services for the poor from 2003 to 2009. Compared to the billions Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett and his family spend on their true passion – baby killing and. population control – it’s a drop in the bucket, of course, but I’m sure they consider their money well spent. 

In reviewing the anti-life record of the Gateses and Buffetts, one they have successfully keep out of the public eye, thanks to organizations like CRS, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that “they never met an anti-life, anti-family enterprise that they did not love (and eventually fund).”

A PROFILE OF THE DEATH PEDDLERS

Starting with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation directed by the Gateses and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, father of Howard G. Buffett., here is a sampling of the anti-life organizations and activities it has supported, with a brief commentary on each:

·        International Planned Parenthood Federation – $41,876,150 since 1998. Supports a total anti-life agenda world-wide. Organizes massive anti-life initiatives the world over.

·        Planned Parenthood Federation of America – $12,984,000 since 1998. Does not include millions for PP abortion centers in Gates’ home state of Washington and elsewhere. Performs over 200,000 surgical abortions per year and supports a full anti-life agenda including contraception, sterilization, abortifacients, live human embryo and fetal experimentation, sex education, divorce, fornication, infanticide, homosexuality, eugenics, infanticide, pornography, in vitro fertilization.

·        U.N. Fund for Population Activities and Americans for UNFPA – $56,681,272 in 2000. An indirect grant to UNFPA of $2,200,000,000 for “reproductive health” and mass population control programs.

·        Pathfinder International – $1,585,000 in 1999, 2009. Among top deadliest abortion providers, trains abortionists, procures abortion and sterilization equipment. Promotes “reproductive options” among adolescents. 

·        International Projects Assistance Services – Promotes “sexual and reproductive rights.”

·        Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Urban Reproductive Health Initiative – Pushes population control in Africa and South Asia.

·        Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – $9,864,398 (2009-2011). Sponsors world-class population control conferences which push modern fertility control techniques, abortion and sterilization including female condoms, injectable abortifacients, and “menstrual regulation” kits.

·        Population Communications International – $3,775,000. Specializes in population control propaganda for mass media.

·        Family Health International – Specializes in mass sterilization and abortifacients and “menstrual regulation” kits.

·        Family Care International – $14,643,712. Seeks to promote and defend “abortion rights” and mass population control projects.

·        Stem Cell and Cloning Research – $400,000 donation for California campaign in favor  of state supported programs of human embryonic stem cell research and cloning projects

·        EPF: The Inter-European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development – $1,598,245. To promote “reproductive health care” around the world. According to the EPF, “in February 2002 it signed up to the “See Change” campaign; an initiative started by Catholics For Free Choice with the objective of changing the status of the Vatican at the United Nations. Following this, the parliamentary groups in Sweden and Spain both held parliamentary hearings on the role of the Vatican City in UN decision-making and its obstruction of progress on reproductive health and rights issues.”

As a member of the elite Club of Rome, Bill Gates is dedicated to the war against the proliferation of people, but he has other side interests as well include the promotion of the vice of homosexuality. 

In 1989, Microsoft was one of the first companies in the world to offer employee benefits to same-sex domestic partners and to include sexual orientation in its corporate nondiscrimination policy. The company has supported and sponsored pro-gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues activities and programs including GLEAM, an organized employee resource group for homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender employees. As part of its Diversity Initiatives Program, GLEAM partners with Microsoft's executive leadership teams to define and implement corporate diversity initiatives company wide, such as the company's GLBT Pride Month celebration and GLBT-specific diversity training.

In July 2007, Bill Gates used part of his Microsoft fortune to purchase 56.3% of PlanetOut, a homosexual activist publishing company that runs a number of “gay” publications and services and is a major provider of hard core homosexual pornography.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the anti-life organization, services and research funded with the Warren Buffett billions:

·        Buffett money has funded important clinical trials for RU-486, (Mifepristone/Mifeprex), the so-called “abortion pill,” putting the lethal drug on the fast track in the U.S. and abroad.

·        Two million dollars to Family Health International helped finance mass experimental sterilization programs in third world countries using the dangerous chemical quinacrine hydrochloride. The drug is banned in the U.S. and Canada.

·        Population Communications International – Specializes in population control propaganda for mass media.

German Foundation for World Population – Population control programs directed at youth “as agents of change.”

International Projects Assistance Services – Promotes sexual and reproductive rights. Buffett gave IPAS $20,000,000 for the manufacturer and distribution of manual abortion suction pumps for use in poor countries.

·        Population Council – $3,500,000. One of the oldest population control and abortion research agencies in the United States.

·        Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice – $700,000. Recruits and engages churches and clergy in supporting abortion rights.

·        NARAL – $1,500,000. A promoter of abortion rights in the United States.

·        Catholics for a Free Choice – $485,000. Money used to challenge and undermine Catholic opposition to abortion.

·        Center for Reproductive Rights – $737,000. Carries out pro-abortion litigation. Helped strike down Nebraska's ban on partial-birth abortion/infanticide.

·        National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy – $250,000. A pro-abortion group that targets teens.

·        Family Health International – $20,000,000. Specializes in mass sterilization and abortifacients and “menstrual regulation” kits and abortion vacuum aspirators.

·        Family Care International – Promotes abortion and mass population control projects.

·        Pathfinder International – $582,000. Promotes abortion rights and services.

·        Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation – Provides millions of dollars for abortion rights groups including many of the above groups.

·        Access Project – $496,000. Promotes abortion rights and services.

·        GIRE – $485,000. Promotes abortion rights and services in Mexico.

The record is clear – the hands of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are soaked with the innocent blood of millions of unborn children. The only question that remains is  “Is the body count high enough for CRS to dump the death peddlers as donors?”    

THE TRAGEDY OF CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES

The objective of this mailing is to persuade the American Bishops, especially those who serve on the Board of Directors of CRS, to publicly reject any and all donations from the Gates and Buffett Foundations and any other corporation or government entity that funds and promotes anti-life, anti-family and anti-God programs, services, and research in the United States and abroad. The message is simple -  “Just say no”…. to the death peddlers. 

As with the scandal-ridden Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholics should withhold all funding of Catholic Relief Services until this blatant injustice is publicly corrected.  The CRS National Diocesan Campaign is usually held on the 4th Sunday of Lent. This will give CRS officials time to take action.       

Unlike the CCHD, which should be disbanded, CRS, founded in 1943, has a long history of legitimate service to the Church especially in regard to refugee settlement and emergency disaster relief programs. The tragedy is that it has become just another compromised entity of the American Bishops’ national bureaucracy which systematically poisons everything it touches. The removal of the Bill and Melinda Gates and Buffett Foundations from the roster of CRS partners/donors list is important, but the problems with CRS run much deeper and are unlikely to be resolved by the liberal, leftist establishment and staff that runs and controls the USCCB. 

As things stands now, faithful Catholics need to look elsewhere for legitimate Catholic charities and omissions to support. (Randy Engel on Catholic Relief Services.)

Another organization within the umbrella of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is the so-called “Catholic Campaign for Human Development” (one will note that human salvation is not a subject of the CCHD). Catholic researcher Mrs. Stephanie Block has been in the forefront of documenting the many ways in which even the “reformed” and renamed Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which was called the Campaign for Human Development for a long time, was still funding organizations committed to evil four years after the USCCB announced the results of “review” on September 15, 2010, (Review and Renewal of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development) to assure that such would not be the case in the future. The following excerpts from Mrs. Block’s report documented how those promises in 2010 rang hollow in 2015:

Hasn’t it undergone a major overhaul recently?

When asked to explain, in a nutshell, why a Catholic might continue to oppose the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) collection, despite recent protestations that the CCHD has put its house in order, there are four solid responses:

1. CCHD continues to make grants to organizations that directly support positions contrary to Catholic teaching.
2. Most of CCHD’s grants still go to organizations that advocate for a larger, progressive package (which consistently pushes for positions that are contrary to Catholic teaching).
3. Many CCHD-funded organizations are working to change Church teaching.
4. CCHD has no intention of reforming.

Let’s examine each of these points.

1. CCHD continues to make grants to organizations that directly support positions contrary to Catholic teaching.

The Lepanto Institute, under the direction of Michael Hichborn, who was formerly director of the American Life League’s Defend the Faith Project, has prepared two detailed reports for recent CCHD funding periods – one of them being 2014-2015.⁽¹⁾  

As CCHD claims to have undergone “reform” recently, the Lepanto report for 2014-2015 is of immediate interest.  Has CCHD changed its funding patterns in any significant way?

For purposes of comparison, reports for additional grant periods over the past decade can be examined at Reform CCHD Now.⁽²⁾  Even further back, one can read a 1997 report prepared by the Wander Forum Foundation.⁽³⁾  This latter report focuses particularly on ACORN which CCHD continued to fund for nearly ten more years, until allegations of ACORN’s embezzlement and voter fraud caused CCHD sufficient public embarrassment to withhold further support.  Further analysis can be read at the Capitol Research Center website.⁽⁴⁾  These three organizations have prepared their studies independently of one another.

To demonstrate that CCHD continues to fund organizations that directly support positions contrary to Catholic teaching, here are two examples from the Lepanto Institutes’ 2014-2015 report.  There are others.

The Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) is an affiliate of the National People’s Action network.  It received $35,000 from CCHD for the 2014-2015 grant period.

Complaints about this coalition are nothing new.  In 2012, Reform CCHD NOW reported that NWBCC was running a youth program called Sistas and Brothas United that promoted a philosophy about homosexuality among young people that was in contradiction to Church teaching.   The Church hierarchy acknowledged as much when Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of New York, responded to the report:

“After the most recent review of their CCHD grant request, prior to your letter, the NWBCC was not recommended for funding, and will not be receiving money from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.”

However, this past year, it received another CCHD grant.

Did Sistas and Brothas United change its focus?

No.  The Lepanto report states that Sistas and Brothas United continues to engage in activism that advances homosexuality, citing a March 2014 article by the Cardinal Newman Society titled, “Fordham Univ. to Host ‘IgnatianQ: Finding God in the LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer] & Ally Jesuit Student Community.’” In this article, one reads about a “seminar titled LGBTQ Activism 101 will be led by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. The website of the NBCCC links to an LGBT advocacy organization called FIERCE.”

Sistas and Brothas United’s Facebook page shows that Sistas and Brothas United have launched a Gay Straight Alliance that, among other things, is organizing in New York City’s high schools. Alliance initiatives include “Beyond the Binary,” to raise awareness in schools “about gender non-conformity and transgender issues”; implementation of LGBTQ-Inclusive Curriculum; and LGBTQ Visibility & Awareness, “so that LGBTQ youth, teachers, and staff will begin to feel safer to come out on campus.”⁽⁵⁾   

The Merced Organizing Project is another affiliate of the PICO organizing network, received a $50,000 CCHD 2014-2015 grant for “healthcare.”

Merced Organizing Project’s (MOP) lead organizer, acting as a representative of MOP, is part of California’s Leadership Academy for the Public’s Health (CaLAPH) Merced “team” – which also includes the Regional Program Manager of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.

CaLAPH is working “to address social determinants of health and to work towards health in all policies in their community.” According to a PowerPoint presentation created by its Merced team, the services being discussed include “preventative services for women, including pregnant women.”  The address provided on the PowerPoint to access more information about these services takes the reader to a website⁽⁶⁾ with information about where to obtain contraception and sterilization, as one might suspect, given Planned Parenthood’s involvement.

These are two examples of grants given by CCHD to organizations that are directly promoting abortion, sterilization, contraception, and/or homosexual “rights” activism.  Neither of these groups is forthright about its intentions. The Merced Organizing Project is not stating that it is working to assure contraceptive availability to local woman.  This can only be discovered by examining what it actually is doing.

Point #1 Summary:

It is not being suggested that CCHD is deliberately funding organizations that directly promote positions contrary to Church teaching – CCHD has, in recent years, attempted to create more stringent funding guidelines to prevent exactly these sorts of grants.

The fact remains that too many grants are awarded to organizations that have not been adequately scrutinized.  Considering the number of years that critics of CCHD have been pointing out these misappropriations, one would think CCHD would have figured out a way to avoid such embarrassments.

2.  Most of CCHD’s grants still go to organizations that advocate for a larger, progressive package (which consistently pushes for positions that are contrary to Catholic teaching).

CCHD’s funding of inadequately scrutinized organizations is not the primary problem with CCHD grants.  It is of far greater consequence that most CCHD grants go to organizations advocating for progressive systemic changes that contain within them the above-mentioned de-humanizing components.

In the 2014-2015 CCHD grant period, over half its grants went to organizations within the various Alinskyian networks.  These, as well as many of the other grantees, do not provide many direct services nor do they often support for economic development programs.  

Rather, their effort, as expressed by the PICO Merced Organizing Project, is:

“to develop, equip, and transform community and congregations to actively engage in the public arena to improve their community.

Through the collective voice of our leadership, we help set up policy priorities and protect the things that are important to us….

to be a catalyst for change and be the voice of the people by building a strong organization that helps provide solutions to pressing community issues and needs.”⁽⁷⁾ 

Because these are secular organizations, whose member congregations represent diverse moral understandings, the solutions, policy priorities, and public engagement initiatives they sponsor are generally focused on involving the government in increasingly invasive – and morally corrupt – programs.  Here are several examples of a CCHD-funded organization serving a larger, progressive purpose.  There are countless others.

San Diego Organizing Project is also an affiliate of the PICO network.  It received $35,000 from CCHD for the 2014-2015 grant period – despite having been awarded more than $31,000 in 2012 from Alliance Healthcare Foundation to help sell the Affordable Health Care Act to poor people, “moving hundreds” into its various health programs,⁽⁸⁾ including family planning provision.⁽⁹⁾

The San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP) isn’t directly encouraging poor people to contracept.   It doesn’t address the moral dimension of contraception one way or the other.  Its member organizations have very different opinions about abortion, artificial birth control, same sex marriage, euthanasia, etc.

But for that very reason, there is utter indifference to public policy, legislation, or programs that contradict Church teaching.  SDOP sees nothing problematic about pushing health coverage that supplies its clients with abortifacient chemicals…and the Catholic members of SDOP are expected to ignore these inconvenient facts.

Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation network.  It has been receiving CCHD grants since 1997, including $35,000 in 2014-2015.

GBIO was a member of the ACT!! Coalition (Affordable Care Today!! Coalition) that included NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts⁽¹⁰⁾ and fought for passage of Commonwealth Care, a state-run precursor to the nation’s Affordable Care Act, which includes coverage of abortion services.⁽¹¹⁾   It also assures that low-income people can obtain low or no-cost contraceptives and birth control counseling.⁽¹²⁾

Rev. Rosemary Lloyd, a GBIO “leader,” is also the adviser for the faith-initiative of The Conversation Project, an effort to get end-of-life discussions into religious institutions. While The Conversation Project doesn’t push assisted-suicide, it doesn’t rule out the possibility as an option.  Its Starter Kit treats “ordinary care” as if it were “extraordinary,” including the question: “Are there kinds of treatment you would want (or not want)?”  In case one might not understand what has been asked, the questionnaire gives examples: “Resuscitation if your heart stops, breathing machine, feeding tube.”⁽¹³⁾ Here, “passive” euthanasia has been suggested as a reasonable – and in the context of a religious institution, as a presumably “moral” – end-of-life “option.”

GBIO – and the legislation, policies, and programs it supports – gives progressives a foot in the door of its member congregations.  It has already acculturated abortion and contraceptives.  Now, it is midwifing acceptance of euthanasia.

The Gould Organizing Project, operating within the Diocese of Little Rock, was awarded a $35,000 CCHD grant for its 2014-2015 funding year.  It doesn’t appear to be associated with any of the Alinskyian networks but is, rather, a member of the Arkansas Citizens First Congress coalition, working “for progressive changes in state policy,” according to the Congress website.  The coalition also includes another current CCHD grantee, Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center (as well as Planned Parenthood of Arkansas).  Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center is an affiliate of the Alinskyian Interfaith Worker Justice and received a $50,000 grant.

So, what are these groups, bolstered by Catholic money, doing with the Arkansas Citizens First Congress coalition?   For one thing, in the spring of 2015, they pressured Arkansas governor to veto the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act – supportedby the Bishop of the Little Rock Diocese – legislation that would have increases “judicial scrutiny” in cases involving religious beliefs.

Point #2 Summary:

It is important to emphasize that the above-mentioned organizations are only a few examples of CCHD grantees working directly for systemic, progressive changes that contain within them elements that are objectionable to the moral truth.  The majority of CCHD grantees fit this description.

The explanation for supporting these progressive packages is that they serve a “greater good,” despite their immoral elements.  Thus, the “greater good” of a (progressive) universal health care system apparently excused the moral evils it contained.  A just political compromise, however, would have been a universal health care system without those elements.  People of good will, more concerned about health care provision than about challenging the moral truth, should have accepted such a compromise.

3. Many CCHD-funded organizations are working to change Church teaching.

Because the progressive political package IS engaged with challenging the moral truth and changing public consensus from generally accepted positions to novel ones, there is tremendous pressure on Catholics to reject Church teaching – or, preferably, to believe Church teaching is something other than it is.  Many CCHD-funded Alinskyian organizations have launched reeducation efforts to disseminate their philosophies, presenting them as Catholic/Christian/Judeo-Christian teaching when they are not.   Here are some recent examples:

Together Baton Rouge is an affiliate of the IAF.  It received a $75,000 CCHD grant during the 2012-2013 funding period.  During Pentecost of 2014, Together Baton Rouge brought together people from their various member denominations, including Catholics, “to study the Bible” together.

Together Baton Rouge is a secular, political organization.  So this isn’t Scripture as the Church teaches it but it’s scripture that has been reinterpreted “contextually” by the Alinskyian organizers to train Christians to “act on their concerns about the community” in the way that the organizers understand what those acts ought to be.⁽¹⁸⁾

The Catholic Commentator (newspaper for the Diocese of Baton Rouge) wrote about this new community Bible study, quoting one religious sister as saying, “I feel the spirit of Pentecost is in this room.”  Further on, Together Baton Rouge is compared to Peter getting out of the boat and walking in faith to Jesus in the storm.

Point #3 Summary:

Without belaboring the point, the fact is that many of the CCHD-funded Alinskyian community organizations are using their faith-based positions to not only engage member congregations in progressive political activism but also to inculcate theological ideas that contradict Catholic teaching.

4.  CCHD has no intention of reforming.

The history of the CCHD has been dogged by persistent criticism that a) it makes grants to organizations that directly work for the culture of death and, perhaps even more troubling because it is more subtle, b) it makes grants to organizations that advocate for progressive political politics which is highly partisan, promotes an extremely hurtful social construct, and is intrinsically collaborative with all the programs, policies, and legislation that serve the culture of death.

Several times, during its 45 year tenure, scandal has rocked the CCHD and forced “reform.”  However, these “reform” efforts have amounted to little more than defunding a few particularly “hot” grantees, such as ACORN which, after the 2008 presidential election, made headlines for embezzlement and voter fraud.

On the contrary, CCHD continues to fund organizations whose mission is to advocate for progressive purposes – social and political.  A sizeable percentage (over half, in the 2014-2015 grant period)⁽¹⁹⁾ of its grants go to affiliates of Alinskyian organizing networks such as Gamaliel, the Industrial Areas Foundations, National People’s Action, PICO, and DART.

Point #4 summary:

Given that CCHD has demonstrated no substantive change in its funding, despite decades of criticism, the philanthropic Catholic can only conclude that CCHD has no intention of changing its fundamental commitment to progressive politics, programs, and policies.

As these progressive politics, programs, and policies are linked to intrinsic evils such as abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, sterilization, and acceptance for euthanasia – and as many of CCHD’s funded organizations promote – among their member congregations, including Catholic congregations – theological positions that are contrary to Catholic teaching, there is more than adequate reason to withhold contributing to this fund. (Why Not Give to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development?.)

Mrs. Block’s research into this, as in all other related topics, is impeccable. Unfortunately, however, what is contrary to Catholic teaching matters not to Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has spent his entire career as a lay Jesuit revolutionary attacking the nature of dogmatic truth, the unicity of the Catholic Church, the necessity of seeking with urgency the conversion of non-Catholics to the Holy Faith, the very foundations of Catholic moral theology concerning Holy Matrimony as well as promoting every manner of vice, both natural and unnatural, while giving aid and comfort to globalists, statists, Communists, and pro-abortion, pro-perversity officials in public life in favor of those who believe in saving the ”planet” and not the sanctification and salvation of souls.

What is now called the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has a long history of cooperating with and caving to one anti-Catholic bigot in the Federal government of the United States of America after another, starting with the way that James “Cardinal” Gibbons fawned all over President Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the latter involved this country in the immoral and needless conflict taking place on the battlefields of once proudly Catholic  countries in Europe to make the “world safe for democracy” by breaking up the last vestige of the Holy Roman Empire and installing secular, anti-Catholic regimes in Eastern and Central Europe that paved the way, proximately speaking, for the rise of Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich.

The American bishops even formed the National Catholic War Council (NCWC) in 1917 to support the war effort and to convince the suspicious anti-Catholic Wilson that American Catholics could be trusted to support the war despite its being waged against some of the lands from which they and/or their ancestors had emigrated. The ad hoc NCWC was renamed the National Catholic Welfare Council in 1919, a name it retained until 1966 when Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI began to implement the “Second” Vatican Council’s call for permanently established national bishops’ conferences along the pioneering model of the NCWC, which became known until 2001 as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and the conference’s public policy arm, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC), which was an instrument of leftism, perversity, “social and economic justice, “pacifism,” feminism, environmentalism and pantheism from which emanated all manner of measures designed to “lead” Catholics into what has become Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s brave new world of sin and apostasy in the Twenty-first Century and that served as ready avenue of support for pro-abort Catholics in public life after the Supreme Court of the United States of America had decriminalized the surgical execution of children from the moment of conception up to and including the day of birth in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973. The NCCB and USSC became the United States Conference of Catholic “Bishops” in 2001.  From its very outset, therefore, what is now the USCCB supported the policies of a rabidly anti-Catholic president who, though not a Freemason himself, was completely imbued with the ethos of Masonry and was indifferent to the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico while pursuing a war against all traces of the Holy Faith in Europe.

Undermining Catholicism From Its Very Inception

The Protestant Revolt unleashed a violent, blood assault upon the true Church and her members. Although it is certainly the case that the Dutch Calvinists were brutal in the execution of the Martyrs of Gorkhum (see note below) and that the Swiss Calvinists hunted down and killed Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen for daring to contradict their heresies that come from the devil himself, the violent assaults against Catholics that were unleashed during the Protestant Revolt were the most harsh in England and Ireland. Over 72,000 Catholics were killed in England after King Henry VIII had himself declared "supreme head of the Church in England" by an act of the Parliament in 1534 and the time of his death of 1547 (this figure is found in Dr. Warren Carroll's The Cleaving of Christendom). Another violent outburst against Catholics took place during the reign of Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, who employed the notorious "priest-catcher," Richard Topcliffe, who had a private torture rack in the basement of his house that he used to "stretch" priests by as much as a much as a foot!

Weary of the persecutions and the heavy taxation and the suppression of the Mass, those Catholics from England and Ireland who fled to the United States of America in its infancy in the early part of the Nineteenth Century were "relieved" to find that they could practice their Faith openly and without persecution from the Federal government. To be sure, many of these immigrants faced unjust discrimination from Protestant and Masonic nativists. Much violence was done to them and to their persons on occasion. Various state laws discriminated against Catholics. Other state laws were designed to insure the "Americanization" of the Irish immigrants, which is why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the behest of the Unitarian named Horace Mann, created the first state department of education in 1837 as a means of "standardizing" educational standards in public schools so that the children of Catholic immigrants would learn the ways of religious indifferentism and egalitarianism and democracy.

One author, evidently not a Catholic, put the matter this way:

There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.

Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution. (Steven Yates, A Book Review of Bruce Shortt's "The Harsh Truth About Government Schools," The Harsh Truth About Government Schools by Steven Yates.)

Despite the persecutions and the attempts to neutralize their Faith, however, most Catholics in the Nineteenth Century , including most bishops and priests, were "grateful" to be able to practice the Faith openly and to have their devotions and processions. Very few saw the inherent dangers of the religiously indifferentist nature of the Constitution of the United States of America and saw it as a "virtue" to be able to live side-by-side with non-Catholics in a country that was said, albeit falsely, to be founded on some generic sense of "Christian" principles. Very few realized that the devil had raised up the bloodthirsty Protestant revolutionaries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries to make the "nice and tolerant" Protestants of the United States of America seem trustworthy by comparison, lulling many Catholics to sleep in the belief that the American Constitution, far from being a threat to the integrity to the Faith and an offense to the Sacred Rights of Christ the King, was a "model" of true "religious liberty" for the rest of the world.

One of the many ironies in all this is that those Protestants who were manifestly intolerant towards Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century understood the obligations of the Catholic Faith that Catholics were supposed to fulfill, including seeking the conversion of their country to Catholicism. Protestant apologists such as Charles Marshall as late as 1927 were better versed in papal encyclical letters and in their actual meaning and binding nature that most Catholics, including the Governor of the State of New York, at the time, Alfred Emanuel Smith, who said “what the hades is an encyclical letter” after Marshall wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly discussing Pope Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885, and Longiqua Oceani, January 6, 1895; and Pope Pius XI’s Quas Primas, December 11, 1925. Smith’s formal reply, which was ghostwritten by the heroic Catholic chaplain of World War I, Monsignor Francis Duffy, denied that Catholic Social Teaching had any binding obligation upon Catholics in general and that it certainly did not apply to the United States of America. In other words, the Protestant understood Catholic Social Teaching better than Monsignor Duffy, who had been raised in an ethos of the celebration of the American founding by  men he did not realize hated the Catholic Faith, mocked Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother, and who believe that irreligion would triumph over “religious superstition” of the sort they believed characterized Catholicism. (For my detailed discussion of the Marshall-Smith (Duffy) colloquy, please see. Appendix C below.)

Many Protestants of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, up to the election of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the “Second” Vatican Council’s official “reconciliation” with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity, did not realize that most of the Catholic immigrants and their descendants wanted was to practice their Faith, which most of them did admirably well, and to have their own devotional lives while seeking to establish themselves as “good Americans” who posed no threat to “democratic values.” The Protestants knew what Catholics should have believed and how they should have acted. Imagine what the United States of America would have looked like if Catholics had been taught about Holy Mother Church’s Social Teaching and had acted accordingly?

Although fallen human nature is prone to seek self-interest at the expense of the common good and in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, it is also true that a system of pure naturalism that leaves no room for the pursuit of the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity, must devolve rather quickly into organized corruption founded in the false belief that to the "victors belong the spoils," meaning that moral right is determined by the outcomes of elections. Those who win elections are thus empowered to steal at will and to govern as they want without regard for the moment of their Particular Judgments, which can come at any time.

Pope Pius XI noted this phenomenon in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Aranco Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

This is even truer today than it was ninety-eight years ago.

From Overt Hostility to Upward Mobility Through the Democratic Party

Catholic immigrants to the United States of America, first those from Ireland and then, after the War between the States and during the Kulturkampf in Germany and the Risorgimento in Italy, those from eastern and southern Europe, plunged headlong into this spectator sport of electoral politics as it provided them with the fastest means of upward social and economic mobility at a time when there was overt--and sometimes quite violent--discrimination against them on the part of know-nothings and other assorted naturalists associated with Freemasonry.

Catholic immigrants to the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century faced overt hostility, up to and including violence, from thugs of Protestant and Judeo-Masonic nativists. Father Pierre Jean De Smet, S.J., who had to sneak away from his family in Belgium to study for the priesthood in the United States of America, where he was ordained and was especially beloved by the Indians of the Northwest, experienced the violent state of affairs facing Catholic immigrants in the Nineteenth Century:

The Carbonari, then numerous in America, received their orders direct from European lodges. They edited a paper, L’Eco d’Italia, and labored unceasingly to prejudice the people against the Church and trammel the authority of the Bishops. In the hope of recovering their waning influence, the Protestant ministers made common cause with the revolutionaries. This was the beginning of a vast conspiracy, which imperiled, for a time, Catholic liberty in the United States.

The Know-Nothings, a new society, began to be organized about 1852. Theirs was a secret order, which bound its members by a solemn oath. It was formed, ostensibly, to defend the rights of the poor against European invasion. “America is for Americans” was its slogan. With this object in view, they endeavored to have severe naturalization laws enacted against the new arrivals from Europe, and exclude citizens born of foreign parents from holding public offices. In reality, these fanatics combated not so much the foreign immigration as the fidelity of Europeans, especially the Irish, to the Church of Rome. To base calumnies they added murder, pillage, incendiarism, and, before long, found an occasion for opening the campaign. In the spring of 1853 the Papal Nuncio to Brazil, Archbishop Bedini, arrived in New York, bringing the Sovereign Pontiff’s blessing to the faithful in the United States. He was charged, moreover, to investigate the conditions of Catholicism in the great Republic.

The Know-Nothings saw in this mission a grave attack upon American liberties. Their newspapers denounced the perfidious and ambitious intrigues of Rome. The apostate priest Gavazzi came from London and placed his eloquence at the service of his follow-socialists and friends. For several months he followed the Envoy form one city to the other, vomiting forth lies, threatening him with dire reprisals, and through fiery denunciation endeavored to stir up the masses against the “Papists.”

From vituperation and abuse there was but one step to action. On Christmas day in Cincinnati a band of assassins attempted to do away with the Nuncio. Driven off by the police, they revenged themselves by burning him in effigy. This odious scene was enacted in several towns. Conditions pointing to renewed attacks, Archbishop Bedini was forced to depart after a short sojourn in the United States. But the hostilities did not cease with the departure of the Nuncio. The campaign lasted for three years, attended by violent outrages and attacks, and armed forces had presently to interfere to defend life and property. A witness of these disorders, Father De Smet draws a gloomy picture of existing conditions in his letters. “The times are becoming terrible for Catholics in these unhappy States. Nowhere in the world do honest men enjoy less liberty.”

“European demagogues, followers of Kossuth, Mazzini, etc., have sworn to exterminate us. Seven Catholic churches have been sacked and burned; those courageous enough to defend them have been assassinated.” “The future grows darker, and we are menaced from every side. If our enemies succeed in electing a President from ranks–until now the chances have been in their favor–Catholics will be debarred from practicing their religion; our churches and schools will be burned and pillaged, and murder will result from these brawls. During this present time [1854] over twenty thousand Catholics have fled to other countries seeking refuge from persecution, and many more talk of following them. The right to defame and exile is the order of the day in this great Republic, now the rendezvous of the demagogues and outlaws of every country.”

No laws were enacted for the protection of Catholics, and in some States the authorities were openly hostile. “The legislators of New York and Pennsylvania are now busy with the temporal affairs of the Church, which they wish take out of the hands of the Bishops. These States have taken the initiative, and others will soon follow. In Massachusetts, a mischief-making inquisition has just been instituted, with the object of investigating affairs in religious houses. In Boston, a committee of twenty-four rascals, chosen from among the legislators, of which sixty are Protestant ministers, searched and inspected a convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.”

While making a tour of the Jesuit houses with the Provincial, Father De Smet more than once braved the fury of the fanatics. In Cincinnati, a priest could not show himself in the street without being insulted by renegade Germans, Swiss, and Italians. In Louisville, thirty Catholics were killed in an open square and burned alive in their houses. Those who attempted to flee were driven back into the flames at the point of pistols and knives. Even in St. Louis, several attempts were made in one week upon the lives of citizens. The Jesuits were not spared. At Ellsworth, Maine, Father Bapst was taken by force from the house of a Catholic where he was hearing confessions, was covered with pitch, rolled in feathers, tied, swung by his hands and feet to a pole, and carried through the city to the accompaniment of gross insults. (Father E. Lavaille, S.J., The Life of Father De Smet, S.J. (1801-1873): Apostle of the Rocky Mountains, published originally in 1915 by P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, New York, and reprinted by TAN Books and Publishers in 2000 with the additions and the subtitle, “Apostle of the Rocky Mountains.” pp. 262-265.)

This was not taught in American history classes fifty years ago when I was in high school, and it is certainly not being taught today, is it?

Interestingly, the aforementioned-Know Nothing Party (or American Party), was actually formed in 1845 by the first Talmudist elected to Congress, Lewis Charles Levin. Levin formed the Know Nothings not to oppose immigration in general but to protest the influx of German and Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States of America. In other words, the Know Nothing Party was founded by a Jew to oppose the immigration of Catholics to this country because he wanted to preserve the "American way," which, of course, provides plenty of space for the devil and his false religions, starting with Talmudism, of course, while seeking to intimidate Catholics in this country from knowing anything about, no less proclaiming openly, the Social Reign of Christ the King over men and their nations. Americanism is thus an expression of the Talmudic ethos that celebrates error while scorning the truth including Truth Incarnate Himself. 

Part of the larger "Know Nothing" movement (named not for fictional Sergeant Hans Schultz of Hogan's Heroes, but for members of this movement saying that they "knew nothing" about its activities when questioned) that sponsored mob riots against Catholics in various areas, including the attacking and killing of individual Catholics and the burning of Catholic church buildings and schools. Know Nothings won control of the Massachusetts General Court in the elections of 1854, being successful as well in electing their candidates as mayors of the cities of Chicago, Illinois, and San Francisco, California. Ohio was a particular stronghold of the Know-Nothings, who nominated former President Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded to the presidency of the United States of America upon the death of President Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850, and served the remainder of Taylor's term (which ended on March 4, 1853), for president in 1856.

Political bosses and sub-bosses of the Democratic Party in major urban areas opened their doors wide to these Catholic immigrants out of pure political and pecuniary self-interest, not out of an altruistic concern for justice to be done to the persecuted immigrants. And it is out of gratitude to the Democratic Party machinery for its role in the socialization of Catholics into the American "mainstream" that explains the reflexive loyalty of many Catholics to what has become the organized crime family of the naturalistic "left" no matter its institutional support for all manner of moral evils.

Additionally, the many, although not all, of the Catholic bishops in the United States of America were allied with either the Democratic or Republican Parties The arch-Americanist Archbishop John Ireland, the Archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota, from 1884 to 1918, was one of those who as a rabid Republican who wanted to stamp out all vestiges of foreign influence upon Catholic immigrants, especially those who were of German origin. Ireland wanted all trace of German language, culture, and traditions eradicated from the minds of German Americans and from being express in their personal devotional lives in any way.

The late Dr. Justin Walsh, a superb historian, chronicled Ireland’s relentless efforts in behalf of Americanism and to suppress the influence of Germanic traditions and language upon German immigrants to the United States of America and as tried to exert his considerable Americanist influence in the Republican Party to his own advantage and that of one his ideological acolytes who was a priest in the Diocese of Rochester, which was headed at the by the anti-Americanist Bishop Bernard McQuaid. One can also see that Ireland sought to pave the road for what became conciliarism’s false ecumenism and de facto religious indifferentism:

In marking the centenary of John Carroll's installation as the first Bishop of Baltimore, 1889 also marked the centennial of the French Revolution. Perhaps Archbishop John Ireland had the latter in mind when he said at the celebration of the former, "It was the religion of Christ that first whispered into the ears of the world the sacred words: charity, brotherhood, liberty." Ireland's "sacred words" were suspiciously akin to the Masonic tripod of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" that had sparked the bloodbath in France a century earlier. Whatever he had in mind in reducing the "religion of Christ" to Jacobin sloganeering, Ireland was clear on one point. A few days before the formal dedication of the Catholic University of America (CUA), he addressed the question of why such an institution was needed. "This is an intellectual age," said the Archbishop. "Catholics must excel in religious knowledge [and] be in the foreground of intellectual movements of all kinds."²

In this manner John Ireland paid obeisance to the need for a national university built on the twin pillars of Catholicism and Americanism. The first building was dedicated in November 1889, and the CUA welcomed its first students in January 1890. The opening coincided with the unfolding of several unrelated events that brought the Americanist issue to the fore. We will discuss these in this two-part article.

First, John Ireland was trying to merge public and parochial schools in his diocese while simultaneously creating a new ecclesiastical province with himself at its head. If Ireland succeeded, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan would become a province [The words provinces, metropolitan, and suffragan are used frequently throughout this story. Their definitions are found at the end of the article.] headed by Archbishop Michael Heiss of Milwaukee while St. Paul would be elevated to metropolitan status with suffragan sees in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Archbishop Heiss had two good reasons to oppose Ireland: one, he led a knot of bishops in the Middle West who sought special privileges for German immigrants, privileges that Ireland believed would permanently retard the Americanization of German Catholics; and two, instead of merging public and parochial schools Heiss wanted the two absolutely separated. The Milwaukee prelate acted in the face of a state law that mandated criteria which parochial schools could not meet. According to Heiss Catholic parents had a "divine right" to ignore the requirements. There was more! In New York City Fr. Edward McGlynn, an outspoken champion of the Knights of Labor, endorsed Henry George, Labor's candidate for mayor. George had called for the abolition of private property in his book Progress and Poverty. In 1891 Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan condemned the book and tried to silence McGlynn. When the priest refused to submit he became a cause celebre in Americanist circles; Keane even suggested he might hire McGlynn to teach at Catholic University. At that point Corrigan, supported by his suffragan, Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, asked Rome to place George's book on the Index and condemn the Knights of Labor as a secret society forbidden to Catholics.

While the actions of Corrigan and McQuaid showed that not all Irish clerics were in lockstep with the Americanists, the Irish clique rallied behind McGlynn. Cardinal Gibbons, America's only Cardinal, sided with Ireland on the school question and endorsed O'Connell's effort in Rome to make St. Paul a metropolitan see. For his part, Ireland joined Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell in favor of McGlynn and the Knights of Labor. This was the general situation in the summer of 1890 when John Ireland addressed the annual convention of the National Education Association.

The teachers provided a platform so Ireland could explain what they saw as contradictory stands by the Church vis-à-vis public schools. In Wisconsin Heiss had all but endorsed a boycott of state schools; in Minnesota Ireland called for a merger of the parochial and public systems. Bishop Ireland's "Faribault-Stillwater Plan" was operative in two overwhelmingly Catholic communities where nuns were paid by the state for teaching secular subjects on condition that religious instruction be confined to "after regular school hours." In his address the Archbishop spelled out why he thought the plan could save "Christian denominations" from the specter of "irreligion." In implementing the plan, said Ireland, "I would permeate [state schools] with the religion of the majority of the children of the land, be this religion as Protestant as Protestantism can be." He justified his religious indifferentism on grounds that state schools "tend to eliminate religion from the minds and hearts" of youth.

I am Catholic...to the tiniest fibre of my heart [but] believe me, my Protestant fellow-citizens, I am absolutely sincere when I declare that I speak for the weal of Protestantism as well as that of Catholicism.

He ended on a pleading note:

Let me be your ally in warding off from the country irreligion, the destroyer of Christian life and...civilization. What we have to fear is the materialism that does not see beyond the universe a living personal God, and the agnosticism that reduces Him to an unknown perhaps.³

Ireland's plan went nowhere because the public schools adamantly opposed it. Also, the prelate's attention was diverted by the sudden death of Archbishop Heiss.

A crisis arose in April, 1890, when Bishop Frederick Katzer of Green Bay, Wisconsin, became the likely choice to fill the vacancy in Milwaukee. Ireland, who once said that Katzer "knows as little about America as a Huron [Indian]," moved to prevent such an eventuality. He saw that Katzer's elevation would increase German influence in the Church and threaten St. Paul as a metropolitan see. Or, as Ireland put it in a letter to Cardinal Gibbons, the Bishop of Green Bay was "a man thoroughly German and thoroughly unfit to be an archbishop." He added that "This Milwaukee question is a most important one for the American Church, and I will rely on your enlightened co-operation in solving it." Within a month Ireland wrote to Denis O'Connell in Rome to suggest his own candidate: "John Lancaster Spalding is the only man for Milwaukee. We may as well decide that at once and work up to it."⁴

John Ireland and his allies lost Milwaukee because they alienated a sufficient number of Churchmen to swing the contest to Katzer and because John Spalding dropped out of the running for personal reasons. The fight had pitted Americanists against Germans in a bitter ecclesiastical brawl that spanned 15 months. It ended in August, 1891, with Katzer installed as Cardinal Gibbons preached the sermon. "Woe to him...who would destroy or impair [the] blessed harmony that reigns among...the fair fields of the Church in America," the Cardinal proclaimed. He ended with a veiled warning to the Germanizers:

The Author of our being has stamped in the human breast a love for one's country and therefore patriotism is a sentiment commended by Almighty God Himself. Let us glory in the title of American citizen. We owe our allegiance to one country, and that country is America. We must be in harmony with our political institutions. It matters not whether this is the land of our birth or our adoption. It is the land of our destiny.⁵

As 1891 ended the Germans had Milwaukee. Gibbons had delivered a speech that he intended as a coup de grace to Germanizers. Ireland had won metropolitan status for his see city thanks to Denis O'Connell's effort in Rome. And the Americanist heresy was preparing to move to a wider stage at the Chicago World's Fair.

In 1890 Congress passed a bill allowing cities to compete for the right to host an exhibition in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. Chicago won and in 1893, 12 million people visited a Columbian Exposition devoted to "the material and artistic achievements" of America that was in fact a display of crass materialism unlike anything the world had yet seen. Edison's recently-invented electric light literally changed night into day along a carnival-like "midway" featuring such exotic attractions as "Little Egypt" performing her "dance of seven veils." Also featured was the first "ferris wheel." For those inclined to more sedate attractions, there were numerous congresses scheduled to examine "pressing literary, scientific, and religious problems of the times." The gathering that generated the most excitement was the so-called "Parliament of Religions," scheduled for two weeks in September and at which Rome inexplicably agreed to let Catholics "exchange ideas" with Protestants, Jews, Confucianists, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and "representatives of many other sects."

As rector of the CUA, John J. Keane orchestrated participation in a display of unrestrained religious indifferentism, long held by the Church to be dangerous to the Faith. Cardinal Gibbons, the highest-ranking prelate in the United States, offered the opening prayer on September 11. Overflowing with ecumenism, he recited the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors....For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever! Amen [emphasis on characteristically Protestant words added]." Bishop Keane seemed awestruck describing how "representatives of the principal religions...passed in procession down the central aisle" for the solemn opening: "A marvelous spectacle it was—that grouping of all races and tongues, that variety of national costumes and religious insignia, with the purple robe and gentle figure of our beloved cardinal for center piece."

The "marvelous spectacle" was reprised at the closing ceremony on September 28 when Gibbons again offered the Protestant Lord's Prayer. During the congress the Cardinal spoke on "interdenominational co-operation" and John Ireland delivered an address on his favorite theme about how much America meant to Catholicism. John Keane seemed especially pleased, lauding the proceedings in a souvenir volume as an "assemblage of intelligent and conscientious men, presenting their religious convictions without minimizing, without acrimony, without controversy, with love and truth and humanity."⁶

Bishop Keane spent much of 1894 urging Catholics to broaden their participation in such events. He started in January with an article in the Bulletin de l'Institut Catholique of Paris. The article advocated a kind of worldwide replication of the Columbian Exposition so that Catholics might evangelize the modern world.

The great discovery [of America]...inaugurated a Providential revolution, a progress in the condition of society and in the whole organization of human life....A distinctive feature in the mission of America is the reunion of the long-divided children of God by the destruction of barriers and enmities which separate race from race. Why could not something of the kind be done with regard to religious divisions and enmities? Why should not religious congresses combine in an international congress of religions where all might meet in mutual tolerance and charity, where all forms of religion might rise up together against all forms of irreligion?⁷

In an address before the International Scientific Congress of Catholics in Brussels the following September, Keane expanded his vision to encompass the whole world.

When we studied a map of Europe we saw it marked with little divisions—lines that represent not merely territorial boundaries but jealousy and hatred and hostility and division of hearts, expressed in God knows how many millions of men armed to destroy the world. Now, from all these nations God has permitted emigration to us. All nations...among us...live together fraternally without enmity. God has privileged America to destroy those traditions of national jealousies, which you in Europe perpetuate, to mold them all in American unity....I have but to look round me and see how the human race is setting itself more and more to hate hatred and enmity. Humanity is beyond question striving for gentler manners and a greater extension of charity. But is it not the aim of religion to unite man with God and his fellow brethren? Religion is charity! Even though we could not agree about creeds, is it not possible to [agree] about charity?

Keane concluded with the amazing statement that, "because of certain prejudices," the Church would never convene a Parliament of Religions. But, "since it is absolutely decided that the Congress will meet, Catholic Church or no Catholic Church, our participation is a matter of necessity" [emphasis added].⁸

Orthodox Catholics considered Catholic participation in religious congresses occasions of scandal and therefore sinful. Other events of 1894 heightened anti-Americanist sentiment. John Ireland's reckless intervention in the ecclesiastical and secular politics of New York state was one. The dismissal of conservative professors at the Catholic University was another.

The trouble in New York originated at the Plenary Council of 1884 when Bishop Ireland defended Catholic membership in the Grand Army of the Republic and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He had served as a chaplain for both groups in spite of the fact that Rome had barred the faithful from joining either. In the late 1880s Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell opposed Archbishop Corrigan and Rome on behalf of Fr. McGlynn and the Knights of Labor. By then promotion of secret societies had become endemic to the Americanist heresy, putting it at odds with orthodox Churchmen.

Rome's policy, of course, was based upon statements by Leo XIII in Humanum Genus [On Freemasonry, 1884]  in which the Pope specifically warned the faithful to beware of organizations associated with Masonry that "hide their real character under the mask of universal toleration, of respect for all religions, of the mania of reconciling the maxims of the Gospel with those of revolution." Regarding the unity of all secret societies, Leo added:

There are several organized bodies which, though differing in name, in ceremonial, in form and origin, are nevertheless so bound together by community of purpose and by the similarity of their main opinions, as to make in fact one thing with the sect of the Freemasons, which is a kind of center whence they all go forth, and whither they all return. Now, these no longer show a desire to remain concealed; for they hold their meetings in the daylight and before the public eye, and publish their own newspaper organs; and yet, when thoroughly understood, they are found still to retain the nature and the habits of secret societies. There are many things like mysteries which it is the fixed rule to hide with extreme care, not only from strangers, but from very many members also; such as their secret and final designs, the names of the chief leaders, and certain inner and secret meetings, as well as their decisions, and the ways and means of carrying them out.⁹

In 1894, after Rome added the Knights of Pythias, the Elks, and the International Order of Odd Fellows to the forbidden groups, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore was so incensed he refused to publish the decree. Francesco Cardinal Satolli, the apostolic delegate to the United States, reported Gibbons to Rome for "insubordination" but no action was taken against the Cardinal.¹⁰

In the spring of 1894, the Archbishop of St. Paul intervened to defeat Bishop Bernard McQuaid when the latter ran for the so-called Catholic seat on the State Board of Education. While the legislature which would make the selection met, John Ireland "busied himself in writing letters from far Minnesota" in favor of McQuaid's opponent. Fr. Sylvester Malone, an outspoken supporter of suspended priest, Edward McGlynn, said that he would work for the disappearance of parochial schools which he termed "un-American." The election "was none of [Ireland's] business" said an irate McQuaid. "He [knew] that the Archbishop of New York and his suffragans wanted the election of a candidate [McQuaid] having the power and the will to protect the interests of the Catholic schools." But Ireland persisted, and a Republican-controlled legislature elected Fr. Malone.

During the next October John Ireland went to New York City and spent a month prior to Election Day lambasting Democrats for being "wet" on the liquor question whereas the Archbishop and Republicans were "dry." The climax came at a giant rally featuring Benjamin Harrison. Ireland seated himself next to the former president "who was flattered by my presence. As I saw for myself, in attending the rally I had done a deed with happy results for the Church." William McKinley, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, and Theodore Roosevelt, a New York State Representative, were also present. Although neither sat next to Benjamin Harrison, both future presidents had the pleasure of meeting the Archbishop of St. Paul.¹¹

On the First Sunday of Advent in 1894 (the third Sunday after Election Day) Bernard McQuaid, "mitered and with crozier in hand," rose in his cathedral to denounce the interloper from Minnesota. "John Ireland was guilty of unseemly action contrary to episcopal dignity, and one which is a scandal for right-minded Catholics," McQuaid began. He continued:

If we are to believe the newspapers, Minnesota stands in great need of being purified and His Grace might have found ample scope there for the exercise of his political zeal. But...it was not love of good government which induced Archbishop Ireland to spend so many weeks in New York, away from his diocese, where the law relative to residence obliged him to be.

No, McQuaid insisted, Ireland came "to acquit himself of a debt to the Republican party [for electing Fr. Malone to the board of regents]." McQuaid added that an appeal to Rome might be necessary to teach the "conspirators"—his term for Ireland, Gibbons, Keane, and O'Connell—to stay home and tend their respective flocks. To forestall action by Rome, Ireland wrote to Propaganda [i.e., the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, established for dealing with all ecclesiastical affairs in missions of the Latin rite throughout the world and having jurisdiction over all foreign missions—Ed.] about McQuaid's pique: "My letters had...more effect than all the effort he and his friends made in their own state. He was defeated, and he won't forgive me for that."¹²

It was clear by 1895 that Americanist views were incompatible with orthodox Catholicism. In the spiritual realm Keane was hell-bent on fostering interdenominational congresses. In the temporal realm Ireland, and to a lesser extent Gibbons, had peculiar penchants for meddling in things better left alone by Churchmen. In such a situation action by Rome was inevitable. It came on January 6 when Leo XIII addressed Longinqua Oceani to American bishops.

The Pope began by noting that the United States had a "good Constitution" and as a result Catholicism was unhindered, protected alike by law and the impartial administration of justice. Nonetheless the Holy Father warned that "it would be an error to conclude that America furnishes an example of the ideal condition for the Church or that it is always lawful and expedient that civil and religious affairs should be disjoined and kept apart." According to the Pope, in a formal letter addressed to all American bishops, it would be an error to say that religious liberty and the separation of Church and State were beneficial to the Catholic Church. In explicit refutation of Gibbons's notion that American liberty caused the Church to "blossom like a rose," the Pope asserted that if the Catholic religion "is safe among you and is even blessed with increase" it was "entirely due to the divine fruitfulness of the Church." He concluded tellingly that "the fruit would be still more abundant if the Church enjoyed not only liberty but the favor of...laws and...protection of the public power."¹³

Few, if any, heeded the Holy Father's warnings. They redoubled their efforts, with immediately dire consequences for Denis O'Connell and John Keane. O'Connell fell first when, in the summer of 1895, he was removed as rector of the North American College. His cohorts unsuccessfully defended him, although Gibbons did succeed in keeping him in Rome as rector of the Cardinal's titular church. From this vantage point O'Connell became "a kind of liason officer of the American hierarchy, and more particularly its left wing" until he returned to the United States in 1903.¹⁴ Catholic liberals claim that "the suppositious liberalism of the Catholic University" was responsible for the dismissal in 1896 of John J. Keane. In fact the liberalism of neither the CUA nor its rector was "suppositious." As the California Volksfreund noted, "It was clear enough from the beginning that Americanism was interwoven with the plan for the...University." This newspaper called instead for something that Keane could never provide: "a Catholic University with Catholic professors [where] the doctrine of the Catholic, and not of an American Church, is taught."¹⁵ (Heresy Blossoms Like a Rose.)

Pope Leo XIII’s concerns about the influence of Americanism upon Catholics—and through them upon Catholics in the rest of the world—were quite justified as our fourth to last true Holy Father thus far understood full well that Americanism, if left unchecked, would result in a situation where Catholics would look at the Church through the distorting lenses of naturalism and “democracy” that lead to constant agitation and irritation rather than seeing the events of the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith and thus remain calm in the midst of all personal, social or ecclesiastical storms.

It is not for nothing that Pope Leo XIII concluded that Americanism, if characterized by the ethos that he had critiqued and condemned in Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899, would signify that the heresy was meant to serve as an inspirational model for the rest of the world:

But, beloved son, in this present matter of which we are speaking, there is even a greater danger and a more manifest opposition to Catholic doctrine and discipline in that opinion of the lovers of novelty, according to which they hold such liberty should be allowed in the Church, that her supervision and watchfulness being in some sense lessened, allowance be granted the faithful, each one to follow out more freely the leading of his own mind and the trend of his own proper activity. They are of opinion that such liberty has its counterpart in the newly given civil freedom which is now the right and the foundation of almost every secular state. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

In other words, Pope Leo XIII understood that Catholics were being converted by the ethos of Americanism to view Holy Mother Church through the eyes of the world rather than to view the world through the eyes of the Holy Faith even though they did not realize that this was the case, making the matter all the more grave to souls and even for the common temporal good of the nation itself. The Americanist bishops believed that there had to be an “accommodation” with the spirit of the world, a point, of course, that has been made on this site endless numbers of times and is the thesis of volume one of Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics.)

Monsignor Henri Delassus documented Americanism's beliefs concerning the "universal" mission of Americanism to "evangelize" the Church, if you will, by quoting one of the early biographers of the proto-Americanist, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, Abbot Klein:

“American Catholicism" is not, in the thought of is promoters, a way of thinking and of practicing Catholicism solely in the contingent and changing things that would be common to the United States, in accordance with the particular conditions that are found on American soil. If this had been so, we would not have believed it incumbent upon us to be concerned with it.

No, their pretension is to speak to the entire universe: "The ear of the world is open to our thinking, if we know what to say to them," Msgr. [Bishop of Richmond, John] Keane had written to the Congress of Brussels. And in fact they are speaking, and their word has not been without echo upon each part of France. If, at least, they had not put into the ear of the world anything other than what the Church leaves to our free discussion; but, no, as we shall see, we shall come to understand that their words are more or less imposed upon that which belongs to the very fundamentals of the Catholic faith.

The Abbot Klein had said in the preface he gave to The Life of Fr. Hecker: "His [Fr. Hecker's] unique and original work is to have shown the profound harmonies joining the new state of the human spirit to the true Christianity." "The American ideas that he recommended are, he knew, those which GOD wanted all civilized people of our time to be at home with  ..."

"The times are solemn," Msgr. Ireland had said, in his discourse, The Church and the Age. "At such an epoch of history ... the desire to know is intense ... The ambition of the spirit, fired up by the marvelous success in every field of human knowledge ... The human heart lets itself go to the strangest ideals ... Something new! Such is the ordered word of humanity, and to renew all things is its firm resolution.

"The moment is opportune for men of talent and character among the children of the Church of God. Today the routine of old times is dead;  today the ordinary means lead to the decrepitude of the aged; the crisis demands something new, something extraordinary; and it is upon this condition that the Church shall record the greatest of victories in the greatest of historical ages" (Discourse given in the Cathedral of Baltimore, October 18, 1893, on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Episcopal consecration of Cardinal Gibbons.) (Monsignor Henri Delassus, Americanism and the Anti-Christian Conspiracy, available from Catholic Action Resource Center, pp. 9-10.)

Behold the "fruit" of this accommodation.

Indeed, behold a "church," albeit a false one, that exists in the entire world after having been tested in the laboratory of Americanism in spite of Pope Leo XIII's prophetic warning about it more than one hundred eleven years ago now:

For it [an adherence to the condemned precepts of Americanism] would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive of and desire the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. (Pope Leo XIII, Apostolical Letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, January 22, 1899.)

As noted in a recent commentary, Archbishop John Ireland himself was a rabid supporter of the unjust and immoral Spanish-American War (see The Heresy of Americanism and the Spanish-American War) and his fellow Americanist, James Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore from 1877 to 1921, worked very hard in support of President Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s decision to intervene in the unjust, immoral and needless “Great War” that pitted many formerly Catholic nations against each other as Wilson sought to “make the world ‘safe’ for democracy,” by which he meant the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the elimination of all traces of Catholic influences upon governmental policy, public law and popular culture. In other words, Wilson was a more refined version of former Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff (see Kamala Harris's Threat to Religious Believers ).

The American bishops even form

The "identification" of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that a story was told in the 1930s of a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, who was praying a Novena to Saint Monica for the return of her son to the Faith. A friend asked her what had happened to her son. The woman praying the Novena said in great distress, "He's become a Republican!" Yes, being a Democrat and being a Catholic were considered to be inseparable by the lion's share of Catholics in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries.

This alliance of Catholics with the Democratic Party was such that they overlooked the blatant anti-Catholicism of the likes of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt time and time again. After all, it was the "party" that mattered. Oh, it was too bad that Wilson supported the slaughter of Catholics in Mexico. Catholics just voted for the Democratic Party, which permitted Franklin Roosevelt, who, unlike his statist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he worked as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, cultivated friendships with Catholic prelates in order to coopt them into supporting his own statist plans, to unleash a veritable campaign team of Catholic bishops and priests to denounce any "conservative" Catholic who dared to criticize his policies. As noted in We're Not in Kansas Any More in 2009, Roosevelt unleashed the "Right Reverend New Dealer," Monsignor John A. Ryan, to denounce the courageous Father Charles Coughlin for him during his re-election campaign in 1936. And Francis Cardinal Spellman was known as "FDR's errand boy in a miter."

It was, however, after World War II that fissures began to break in the solid Catholic support for the Democratic Party. The threat posed by the spread of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and the fall of China to the forces of Mao Zedong in 1949 led some Catholics to turn more and more to the Republican Party, convincing themselves that they could purge that stronghold of anti-Catholic Masons and nativists and transform it into a bastion of "conservatism" to turn back the New Deal and to win the Cold War. Additionally, American pluralism made matters that are beyond debate subjects for endless debate that were subject to the whims of plebiscites, executives, legislators and judges, thus manifesting more clearly the cracks in the Masonry, shall we say, that had existed amongst the American hierarchy prior to the “Second” Vatican Council that became very pronounced as Montini/Paul the Sick appointed one like-minded leftist and sodomite-friendly, if not sodomites to the conciliar “hierarchy” before and then after the implementation of conciliarism’s invalid rite of episcopal consecration in 1969.

Researcher Stephanie Block published an article in 2018 containing the testimony of another Communist Party of the United States of America defector, Manning Johnson, that was given to the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities:

“Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the ‘new line’ was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself.

The Communist leadership in the United States realized that the infiltration tactic in this country would have to adapt itself to American conditions and the religious makeup peculiar to this country. In the earliest stages it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools. The practical conclusion, drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”

In general, the idea was to divert the emphasis of clerical thinking from the spiritual to the material and political — by political, of course, is meant politics based on the Communist doctrine of conquest of power. Instead of emphasis towards the spiritual and matters of the soul, the new and heavy emphasis was to deal with those matters which, in the main, led toward the Communist program of “immediate demands.”

The plan was to make the seminaries the neck of a funnel through which thousands of potential clergymen would issue forth, carrying with them, in varying degrees, an ideology and slant which would aid in neutralizing the anti-Communist character of the church and also to use the clergy to spearhead important Communist projects.

This policy was successful beyond even Communist expectations. The combination of Communist clergymen, clergymen with a pro-Communist ideology, plus thousands of clergymen who were sold the principle of considering Communist causes as progressive, within 20 years, furnished the Soviet apparatus with a machine which was used as a religious cover for the overall Communist operation ranging from immediate demands to actually furnishing aid in espionage and outright treason.”

In the early 1930’s the Communists instructed thousands of their members to rejoin their ancestral religious groups and to operate in cells designed to take control of churches for Communist purposes. This method was not only propounded, but was executed with great success among large elements of American church life. Communists operating a double-pronged infiltration, both through elements of Communist-controlled clergy, and Communist-controlled laymen, managed to pervert and weaken entire stratas of religious life in the United States.

Communists in churches and other religious organizations were instructed to utilize the age-old tradition of the sanctity of the church as a cover for their own dastardly deeds. Through Reds in religion, we have a true living example of the old saying: “The Devil doth quote the Scripture.”

The Communists learned that the clergyman under their control served as a useful “respectable face” for most of their front activities. In this way the name of religion was used to spearhead the odious plots hatched by the agents of anti-religious Soviet communism.” (emphasis added) (Stephanie Block, The Marxist Core of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.)

We have seen the results of this infiltration all too clearly as the seeds planted in the 1920s and 1930s produced priests and bishops who trained others and came of age during the “Second” Vatican Council after having engineered the “election” of a fellow traveler, Angelo Roncalli, on October 28, 1958, the Feasts of Saints Simon and Jude. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is simply the end product of such global infiltration.

Fissures Among the Americanists in the Conciliar Hierarchy

1960: Demonstrating their desire to do everything possible to assure the election of United States Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Richard “Cardinal” Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, and Francis Cardinal Spellman, travelled to Puerto Rico to campaign against the efforts of the Puerto Rican bishops to work against a referendum in support of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s draconian birth control program:

In 1960, the Puerto Rico hierarchy decided to make one last concerted effort to drive the Sangerite forces from the island. The Catholic resistance was led by two American Bishops--James F. Davis of San Juan and James E. McManus of Ponce. The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico helped to organize a national political party--the Christian Action Party (CAP). The new political front was composed primarily of Catholic laymen and its platform included opposition to existing permissive legislation on birth control and sterilization.

When increasing numbers of CAP flags began to fly from the rooftops of Puerto Rico's Catholic homes, the leaders of the opposition parties, who favored turning Puerto Rico into an international Sangerite playground for massive U.S.-based contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization experimental programs, became increasingly concerned for their own political futures. Then unexpected help arrived in the unlikely person of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

One month before the hotly contested national election, Spellman arrived in Puerto Rico ostensibly to preside over two formal Church functions. While on the island, Spellman agreed to meet with CAP's major political rival, Governor Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and a supporter of federal population control programs for Puerto Rico.

In an interview that followed his meeting with Munoz, Spellman, known for years as FDR's errand boy with a miter, claimed that politics were outside his purview. The cardinal's statement was interpreted by the press as an indictment of the partisan politics of Bishops Davis and McManus. To underscore his message, as soon as Spellman returned to the States he made a public statement in opposition to the latest directives of the Puerto Rico bishops prohibiting Catholics from voting for Munoz and his anti-life PDP cohorts. Catholic voters in Puerto Rico should vote their conscience without the threat of Church penalties, Spellman said.

Boston's Cardinal Cushing, John F. Kennedy's "political godfather," joined Spellman in expressed "feigned horror" at the thought of ecclesiastical authority attempting to dictate political voting. "This has never been a part of our history, and I pray God that it will never be!" said Cushing. Cushing's main concern was not the Puerto Rican people. His main worry was that the flack caused by the Puerto Rican birth control affair might overflow into the upcoming presidential campaign and hurt John Kennedy's bid for the White House.

The national election turned out to be a political disaster for CAP. Munoz and the PDP won by a landslide. Bishop Davis was forced to end the tragic state of confusion among the Catholic laity by declaring just before the election that no penalties would be imposed on those who voted for PDP.  

Two years later, with the knowledge and approval of the American hierarchy and the Holy See, the Puerto Rican hierarchy was pressured into singing a secret concordat of "non-interference" in government-sponsored birth control programs--a sop being that the programs would now include instruction in the "rhythm method." While insisting on their right to hold and express legitimate opposition to such programs, the Puerto Rican bishops promised they would "never impose their own moral doctrines upon individuals who do not accept the Catholic teaching."

When the Sangerite storm hit the mainland in the late 1960s, AmChurch would echo this same theme song, opening the floodgates to a multi-billion dollar federal-life-prevention (and destruction) program. (Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 647-649)

One can see that the anti-liturgical Sillonist, Jansenist, Modernist and Rosicrucian named Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII, a lover of Latin, you understand, was already hard at work effecting his “aggiornamento” in Puerto Rico of the sort that that has made possible Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s own “aggiornamento” to pro-aborts, sodomites, lesbians, transvestites, mutants and all out-and-out Marxists.

1964: Relieved that they no longer had to work behind closed doors and that Roncalli’s “window” open to the world was in the process of being smashed by Montini/Paul VI and the “Second” Vatican Council, some fully uncloseted Modernists and unabashed moral relativists, including the notorious Father Charles Curran of the Diocese of Rochester and the uber-notorious “Father Death, Robert Drinan, S.J., advised the Kennedy family how to support the surgical execution of the innocent preborn in public life while maintaining their “good standing” as Catholics:

For faithful Roman Catholics, the thought of yet another pro-choice Kennedy positioned to campaign for the unlimited right to abortion is discouraging. Yet if Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of Catholics John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is appointed to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton, abortion-rights advocates will have just such a champion.

Ms. Kennedy was so concerned to assure pro-abortion leaders in New York, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Dec. 18, that on the same day Ms. Kennedy telephoned New York Gov. David Patterson to declare interest in the Senate seat, "one of her first calls was to an abortion rights group, indicating she will be strongly pro-choice."

Within the first week of her candidacy, Ms. Kennedy promised to work for several causes, including same-sex marriage and abortion rights. In responding to a series of 15 questions posed by the New York Times on Dec. 21, Ms. Kennedy said that, while she believes "young women facing unwanted pregnancies should have the advice of caring adults," she would oppose legislation that would require minors to notify a parent before obtaining an abortion. On the crucial question of whether she supports any state or federal restrictions on late-term abortions, Ms. Kennedy chose to say only that she "supports Roe v. Wade, which prohibits third trimester abortions except when the life or health of the mother is at risk." Presumably Ms. Kennedy knows that this effectively means an unlimited right to abortion -- including late-stage abortion -- because the "health of the mother" can be so broadly defined that it includes the psychological distress that can accompany an unintended pregnancy.

Ms. Kennedy's commitment to abortion rights is shared by other prominent family members, including Kerry Kennedy Cuomo and Maryland's former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Some may recall the 2000 Democratic Convention when Caroline and her uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, addressed the convention to reassure all those gathered that the Democratic Party would continue to provide women with the right to choose abortion -- even into the ninth month. At that convention, the party's nominee, Al Gore, formerly a pro-life advocate, pledged his opposition to parental notification and embraced partial-birth abortion. Several of those in attendance, including former President Bill Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had been pro-life at one time. But by 2000 nearly every delegate in the convention hall was on the pro-choice side -- and those who weren't simply kept quiet about it.

Caroline Kennedy knows that any Kennedy desiring higher office in the Democratic Party must now carry the torch of abortion rights throughout any race. But this was not always the case. Despite Ms. Kennedy's description of Barack Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, as a "man like my father," there is no evidence that JFK was pro-choice like Mr. Obama. Abortion-rights issues were in the fledgling stage at the state level in New York and California in the early 1960s. They were not a national concern.

Even Ted Kennedy, who gets a 100% pro-choice rating from the abortion-rights group Naral, was at one time pro-life. In fact, in 1971, a full year after New York had legalized abortion, the Massachusetts senator was still championing the rights of the unborn. In a letter to a constituent dated Aug. 3, 1971, he wrote: "When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."

But that all changed in the early '70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church's teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda.

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that "distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue." It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians "might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order."

Father Milhaven later recalled the Hyannisport meeting during a 1984 breakfast briefing of Catholics for a Free Choice: "The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they all concurred on certain basics . . . and that was that a Catholic politician could in good conscience vote in favor of abortion."  ( See WSJ.com - Opinion: How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma. David Paterson, a pro-abortion Catholic, ultimately chose another pro-abortion Catholic, Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been the junior senator of the State of New York since January 26, 2009. For a review of David Paterson's moral corruption, see Little Caesars All (Pizza! Pizza!)

Thus began process of soothing the consciences of Catholic in public life who wanted to remain au courant and not pose as a sign of contradiction by their complete fidelity to the Sign of Contradiction, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church has deep roots in the heresy of Americanism, as the ground work for groundwork for moral relativism had been laid at Hyannisport the year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, invalidating a long unenforced Connecticut statute banning the sale of contraceptives to married couples.

1965: Emboldened by his success in Puerto Rico, Richard “Cardinal” Cushing, the Kennedy family’s principal ecclesiastical enabler, said that he had no business interfering in the legislative judgments of Catholics who served in the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the state legislature), thus giving a fully developed apologia for the “I’m personally abortion to [name moral evil: contraception, abortion] but can’t ‘impose’ my morality on non-Catholics”:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. (As a matter of historical interest, the repeal effort was sponsored by a young state representative named Michael Dukakis, who would be the Democratic Party's candidate for the US presidency 23 years later.) In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, "An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,” and effectively scuttled the opposition.

Cardinal Cushing announced:

“My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position—moral beliefs or religious beliefs—upon those of other faiths.”

Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that "I could not in conscience approve the legislation" that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, "I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others."

So there it was: the "personally opposed" argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to "impose" his opinion.

Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. "But my thinking has changed on that matter," he reported, "for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."

(Notice that the Catholic position is reduced still further here, to a matter of purely sectarian belief—as if it would be impossible for a non-Catholic to support the purpose of the Birth Control law. The cardinal did not explain why that law was enacted in 1899 by the heirs of the Puritans in Massachusetts, long before Catholics came to power in the legislature.)

Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: "If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church."

Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the "personally opposed" politician had his rationale. (Cushing's Use of The "Personally Opposed" Argument.)

Today’s Pontius Pilates had lots and lots of help from true bishops and true priests in the 1960s and the 1970s as their consciences were massaged to make it possible for them to support each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance without any semblance of ecclesiastical sanction whatsoever. Quite instead, the “peace and justice” bishops and faux bishops gave their full support to their liked-minded adherents of their true shared religion: leftism.

It is no accident that the “peace and justice” crowd at the now-named United States Conference of Catholic Bishops associated with one pro-abortion and pro-sodomite group after another, many of which received funding from both Catholic Charities and the “Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

1973: The fissures in the American conciliar hierarchy opened up wider than the Grand Canyon immediately following the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, as the “peace and justice” crowd reaffirmed Catholics in public life to take Cushing’s “personally opposed” position and while the “conservatives” were divided amongst themselves between incrementalists and absolutists in their efforts to reverse those Court decisions and to restore full legal protection to the innocent preborn without exception. The incrementalists advocated doing what they deemed subjectively to be “possible” while the absolutists sought to evangelize in behalf of a firm no exceptions policy that had to be reflected in public law, although neither set of divided “pro-life” Catholics in the conciliar structures at time understood that the very fact the surgical assassination of the innocent preborn was even up for debate was the result of the Protestant Revolution’s overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and their own false church’s “official reconciliation” with the foundational anti-Incarnational principles of the modern civil state.

One of the most maddening phrases around is the "pro-life" slogan, which is meant to convey that someone is opposed to the surgical killing of innocent babies in their mothers' wombs. The slogan, however, is precisely that, a slogan. As I have tried to communicate endlessly in the past two decades or more since refusing to apply the slogan to careerist politicians of the naturalist "right" in the organized crime family of naturalism that is the Republican Party, the phrase "pro-life" is misused in the realm of partisan politics and public discourse, usually by leaders or representatives of "establishment" "pro-life" organizations such as the National Not So-Right-to-Life Committee and its state affiliates, who actually support the chemical assassination of children in all instances and who support the surgical slicing and dicing of children in what they call the "hard cases."

The National Not-So-Right-Life Committee itself, being a completely secular organization, although it grew out of the work Monsignor James T. McHugh, that notorious protege of a notorious criminal against the innocence and purity of children, Mary Calderone, who helped to devise and promote the rot of explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandment (see Origins of Classroom Instruction in Matters of Purity in Catholic Schools and  The McHugh Chronicles), at the Family Life Bureau of the so-called United States Catholic Conference in the late-1960s, takes no stand against contraception and actually supports the nonexistent "right" of mothers to kill their innocent preborn children in the event that their own lives are said to be in jeopardy from carrying their babies to birth. What is thus considered to be the "leader" of the "pro-life" movement in the United States of America actually supports direct, intentional surgical abortion in cases where it is alleged that a mother's life is in jeopardy as a matter of principle, not as a matter of what they would consider to be legislative expediency.

Indeed, the American “bishops” have long spoken empty words about the surgical killing of the innocent preborn. They have also indemnified and emboldened every Catholic pro-abortion politician and office-holder by refusing to excommunicate them from their non-Catholic sect that poses as the Catholic Church, starting with how the likes of two formerly “pro-life” Catholic United States Senators, Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware), were able to switch their positions after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, without having been warned and then excommunicated. The “bishops” worried about a backlash, although the truth is that they emboldened the forces of bodily death in the United States of America just as surely as the “Second” Vatican Council turned them into active agents of spiritual death by the promotion of propositions condemned by our true popes and by staging a liturgical abomination that has convinced most baptized Catholics that they might as well belong to the world rather than bother to go to the community fellowship meeting posing as a the “Eucharistic celebration.”

Even the conciliar “bishops’” weak-kneed efforts to oppose surgical baby-killing was based upon the false premise of the "life of the mother exception” that they have embraced as an integral, indispensable part of every legislative proposal introduced in Congress without even attempting to pressure supposedly pro-life members of various legislatures, including those in both houses of the Congress of the United States of America, believing that doing so will help to convince "reasonable" people that they and the politicians they support are not "radicals" or "extremists," that such concessions are "necessary" to make in the realm prudence.

This is, of course, the exact same moral casuistry that gave us "natural family planning" and explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that has corrupted what passes for Catholic moral theology in so many places that high level officials in the Vatican itself can speak of "therapeutic" abortions as being within the moral law (see So Long to the Fifth Commandment and Rotten To The Very Roots).

Some tried very hard to warn the "bishops" as early as the first years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, that the acceptance of "exceptions" would lead to the further institutionalization of baby-killing under the cover of the civil law in the mistaken belief that some killings would be prevented.

One of those who did so was Mrs. Randy Engel, the Director of the U.S. Coalition for Life, who testified in 1974. before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the United States Senate Committee for the Judiciary. Mrs. Engel saw things with prophetic clarity: there could never be any compromise with the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, and for this, of course, she has been hated by the "pro-life establishment" ever since:

I am Randy Engel, National Director of the United States Coalition for Life, an international research center and clearing- house specializing in domestic federal anti-life programs within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Agency for International Development. Thank you for your invitation to appear before the sub-committee today in order that I may express the views of the Coalition, its distinguished national and international board of advisors, some of whom have already testified at earlier Senate hearings on the Human Life Amendment, and that of thousands of grassroots people whom we have had the honor of serving on a day to day basis since the Coalition opened its offices almost two years ago. 

Mr. Chairman, about four months ago, the Coalition filed with your office, the transcript of a speech made by Louise Tyrer, M.D., Family Planning Division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, before the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians' 12th Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16, 1974, on the status of the various Human Life Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. (Attachment A) According to Dr. Tyrer' s assessment of the Congressional scene there are two basic approaches. One - a "state's rights" approach which would return the power of lawmaking in the area of abortion to the individual States. The second - which would guarantee the full protection of the law to the unborn child from the moment of fertilization. The "State's rights" approach she states, and correctly so, is unacceptable to the majority of Pro-Life people yet very attractive to the legislators because "it sought of takes the ones off their backs from making any decisions."

The remainder of her talk stresses the necessity of stalling the hearings of this sub-committee by having Planned Parenthood physicians flood the sub-committee with requests to testify. This, Dr. Tyrer suggests would be politically expedient and politically NECESSARY for you Mr. Chairman, in order to keep the amendments bottled up in sub-committee until you had gone through the election process in the Fall. Now, Mr. Chairman, I have no desire to embarrass you in any manner. Not because I fell Dr. Tyrer was incorrect in her judgment of the political realities of the Senate and House Committees dealing with the abortion issue or her assessment that stalling these subcommittee hearings by dragging them out month by month would be politically expedient for you and others who might prefer not to have a roll call vote on a Human Life Amendment before election time. But rather, because with few exceptions, almost every Senator and Representative in Congress would like nothing better than to get rid of the abortion issue tomorrow, if not before, or at least dump the matter back into the lap of the State legislatures.

This is not our affair - they say.

The massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent unborn children is not a federal matter - they say.

We are not responsible for the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973 which is now the law of the land - they say.

Well, I am here Mr. Chairman to tell you and every other Senator and Congressman that like it or not - Abortion IS your affair. That the massive slaughter of unborn children in this country IS a proper matter of federal concern. Moreover that this Congress IS directly responsible for the almost inevitable Supreme Court decision which stripped unborn children of their inalienable right to life. Congress IS responsible because over the last ten years it has permitted an anti-life philosophy and anti-life programs and policies to become matters of NATIONAL POLICY, promoted and supported by tax dollars.

It is the Federal Government - at all levels - Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches - which has posed the greatest threat to unborn children in recent years. The Executive Branch because it has failed to correct the anti-life abuses primarily within the bureaucracies of HEW and AID and has permitted key anti-life leaders such as Dr. Louis Hellman the Office of Population Affairs and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director Population Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Affairs [and the man who coined the phrase "Natural Family Planning"] to remain in office. The Legislative Branch, because it has authorized legislation and appropriated funds year after year to initiate, promote and sustain anti-life programs in virtually every conceivable federal bureaucracy including the Office of Economic Opportunity, Office of Environmental Education, Office of Education, Department of Defense Office of Population Affairs (HEW), National Institutes of Health, Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, Public Health Service Social Security, MedicAID, Aid to Dependent Children, U.S. Information Agency Population Office(AID). Contraceptive Research Branch (NIH) Federal Communication Commission).

As I said the Supreme Court abortion decision was an inevitable one. All the cliches of that decision - terms like "unwanted children", "a woman's right to control her own body.", the population explosion stem from the Sangerite ethic. It represented the culmination of more than half a century of dedication and tireless efforts by the Sangerites and the Malthusians to convince the American public of the righteousness of the CAUSE and to elevate the SANGERITE-MALTHUSIAN philosophy to that of Public Policy .

This final achievement is portrayed quite candidly in this book Breeding Ourselves to Death - the Story of the Hugh Moore Fund by abortion leader Lawrence Lader. In the section on gaining Congressional Support, former N.Y. Senator Kenneth Keating, then newly appointed National Director of the Population Crisis Committee tells about eating in the Senate Dining Room where he could spread the gospel of family planning among old friends, particularly among the Republican leadership. This fight to influence by other population control leaders in Congress goes on today.

But what does all this have to do with this subcommittee hearing on the Human Life Amendment? Simply this:

For more than a year the Hogan-Helms Human Life Amendment and similar bills have been buried in the House, where Representative Don Edwards has refused to hold hearings, and in the Senate - hearings are dragged out month after month to get Senators and Representatives through the November watershed without a floor vote on such as the HLA.

Obviously there is no sense of urgency about the matter, with the exception of a handful of dedicated men, the Congress doesn't appear to be the least concerned that its inaction will result in the death of hundreds of thousands of unborn children. The fact that millions of federal tax dollars are used to promote a myriad of anti-life schemes- from direct abortion payments (Medicaid-ADC; to the research development and promoting of new abortion techniques to the indoctrination of young children of an anti-life ethic appears to raise no particular concern at family planning authorization or appropriation hearings.

Equally obvious is the fact that under these conditions we will have a difficult time getting a Human Life Amendment passed by both Houses of Congress and on its way to the states for ratification. My purpose here today is to point out the current commitment of the Federal Government including this Congress to the anti-life establishment, and briefly how such a commitment was obtained and at what price.

Mr. Chairman, this Congress OWES its vigorous support for a Human Life Amendment which would protect Human Life from conception until natural death to the American people. The Coalition would agree that the Hogan-Helms Amendment or the newer Roncallo Amendment would provide such protection.

Apart from the merit of these amendments themselves, we feel that Congress should recognize the fact that through its indifference, ignorance and its inability to withstand the pressures of the anti-life movement, it must bear its share of guilt for the 1973 Abortion decision, and its share of responsibility in seeing a Human Life Amendment is passed to protect the unborn child.

Your responsibility, Mr. Chairman, in this matter is very plain. As for our part, I believe the Coalition and the Pro-Life Movement in the U. S. will continue to fight at all levels - including the Halls of Congress and yes, even in Senate dining rooms - to educate and to promote an ideal that is as revolutionary in our day as the Sangerite ideal was fifty years ago. That ideal is based on the sanctity and innate goodness of all human life. (Full text of "Abortion : hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.)

Even though the efforts made by Mrs. Engel and others, including the efforts of the indefatigable late United States Representative Angelo Roncallo (R-Massapequa, New York), were valiant, we can see now with perfect hindsight that which was not understood by very many at the time: that these noble efforts were doomed to failure precisely because the "pro-life establishment," headed by the National Not-So-Right to Life Committee, rallied around the constitutional amendment that had been proposed by United States Senator James Buckley (C-New York; the "c" reflects Buckley's election in a three-way race in 1970 as the candidate of the Conservative Party of the State of New York) that permitted the "life of the mother" exception. Only four American bishops, Timothy Cardinal Manning of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, John Cardinal Krol of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Humberto Medeiros of the Archdiocese of Boston and John Cardinal Cody of the Archdiocese of Chicago testified against the Buckley Amendment on the grounds that the civil law could never permit the direct taking of a single, solitary innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until natural death. These cardinals, however, although part of the conciliar church by that time, were opposed by the entire "pro-life" establishment whose machinations were being orchestrated, at least to a very large extent, by the then Monsignor James Timothy McHugh of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. McHugh did not have a qualm of conscience whatsoever about the "life of the mother exception" as a matter of legislative expediency or as a core moral principle of the National Right to Life Committee his work at the then named Family Life Bureau of the United States Catholic Conference helped to launch.

No, the well-intentioned efforts of Mrs. Engel and her associates were doomed from the start as, unbeknownst to them, a false church had arisen filled with men who had lost the Catholic Faith, men who had surrendered to the prevailing ethos of Judeo-Masonry, a surrender that has devastated the world in which we live and that must be considered nothing other than one of the worst chastisements of our time for neither Popes Pius XI or XII consecrating Russia collegially to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops. Treasonous priests/presbyters and their leftist apparatchiks and toadies worked against efforts to provide full constitutional protection. And this is what must happen when men who claim to be Catholic make their "reconciliations" with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity.

Just as Democrats and Republicans agree on the basic naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of the American founding, disagreeing on the specifics as to the conduct of public policy in light of those principles, so is it the case that "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics accept those same false principles as they diverge on the specifics of public policy according to the political "camp" which they believe represents the best means of achieving various goals. Both "liberal" and "conservatives" Catholics are as one in rejecting these simple truths of the Catholic Faith as binding upon their consciences and that they apply to the concrete circumstances to be found in the United States of America, believing that their naturalistic or non-denominational ideas and plans and strategies can "win the day" for their respective causes:

. . For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

No one in the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s officialdom believes a word of these statements of Catholic truth that had been made by Pope Saint Pius X. Instead, the American “bishops” viewed conciliarism as an advantage that could be used to retard evils they refused to recognize were the result of logical consequences of the Protestant Revolution and thus proceeded apace with an incrementalist approach that divided the “pro-life” movement beyond repair.

1974: Realizing that they would never be sanctioned by anyone what they believed to be the Catholic hierarchy in the United States of America, one Catholic in public life after another, including those who had once been “pro-life,” began to mouth the “personally opposed” slogan that had been developed in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, a decade earlier and then endorsed by Richard Cushing himself a year after that.

As I have noted on this site in the past, the late Mario Matthew Cuomo said in a debate held in Albany, New York, on August 25, 1974. among the three individuals vying for the Democrat Party lieutenant governorship nomination (State Assemblyman Anthony Olivieri and State Senator Mary Anne Krupsak were Cuomo's opponents), that he would have voted against the 1970 bill that decriminalized surgical baby-killing in the first trimester of life in the State of New York if he had been a member of the New York State Legislature at that time. And it was the case that Cuomo, then an attorney with an office on Court Street in Brooklyn, New York, had been called upon by the Diocese of Brooklyn to speak against abortion to various parish organizations and other groups as its official representative.

Defeated in his bid to be the Democrat Party lieutenant governor nominee in 1974, Cuomo learned to parrot the line that had been mastered by his political mentor, then United States Representative Hugh Leo Carey, who was elected as Governor of the State of New York in 1974 and served two terms, that he was "personally opposed to abortion, but would never impose" his "morality upon others." Cuomo, was appointed by Carey to be the Secretary of State of the State of New York in January of 1975, used this line repeatedly when he ran unsuccessfully for the Democrat Party nomination for the Mayoralty of the City of New York in 1977 and when he ran in the general election that year as the nominee of the Liberal Party of the State of New York against the pro-abortion Democrat nominee, then United States Representative Edward Irving Koch, and the Republican Party nominee, the pro-abortion New York State Senator Roy Goodman, and the Conservative Party nominee, radio talk show host Barry Farber.

Defeated by Koch in the general election for Mayor of the City of New York in 1977, Cuomo won the Democrat Party nomination for lieutenant governor in 1978 (then Lieutenant Governor Krupsak, also a pro-abortion Catholic, challenged her pro-abortion Catholic Governor, Hugh Carey, unsuccessfully in a primary that year), and was Carey's heir apparent in 1982 when the latter chose not to seek a third term. Cuomo turned the tables on his old adversary Koch, defeating him in hard fought primary in 1982 for the Democrat Party's gubernatorial nomination, going on to defeat Rite Aid magnate Lew Lehrman, the nominee of the Republican and Conservative parties, and the Right to Life Party nominee, Robert Bohnar. Cuomo loudly defended "abortion rights" during that 1982 general election campaign and was known to telephone priests in various conciliar parishes if he got wind of any criticism uttered about him from pulpits during sermons.

Cuomo's support for "abortion rights" came to the national forefront in 1984 after the conciliar "bishop" of Scranton, John Joseph O'Connor, was appointed to be the conciliar "archbishop" of New York. Even before his "installation" at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Monday, March 19, 1984, O'Connor told longtime WNBC-TV newsman Gabe Pressman that he, O'Connor, "was sick and tired" of politicians who say that they are "personally opposed" to abortion while supporting a nonexistent "right" of a woman to choose to kill her preborn baby. This inflamed Cuomo, who has quite a temper, who started a war of words with the new "archbishop." Things escalated rather rapidly, and O'Connor refused to recognize Cuomo's presence at his installation "Mass" on March 19, 1984, while recognizing Mayor Koch of the City of New York, the Mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, William Wilson. Cuomo was livid. I know. I saw him process out of Saint Patrick's Cathedral as he walked right in front of where I was sitting in the right transept. He was not a happy camper.

Cuomo sought to provide "intellectual muscle" to the "I'm personally opposed to abortion" position in the address that he gave at the behest of Hartford's Mark of Apostasy, Father Richard P. McBrien, then the Chairman of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, on Thursday, September 13, 1984:

The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose.

We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experience in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a persuasive and dominant concern. . . .

As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created. We thought church doctrine was clear on this. Life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine justices of the Supreme Court and my neighbor disagree with me. A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils. At the very least, even if the argument is made by some scientists or some theologians that in the early stages of fetal development we can’t discern human life, the full potential of human life is indisputably there. That—to my less subtle mind—by itself should demand respect, caution, indeed . . . reverence.

But not everyone in our society agrees.

And those who don’t—those who endorse legalized abortions—aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards. In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out in papal encyclicals: the American Lutheran Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, B’nai B’rith Women, the Women of the Episcopal Church. There are just a few of the religious organizations that don’t share the church’s position on abortion.

Certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics, however sincere or severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers, no pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the church from criticism.

But if the breadth, intensity, and sincerity of opposition to church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability—our realistic, political ability—to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the believers who reject it.

And it is here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion—an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality— that we encounter controversy within and without the church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else’s, and to what effect.

I repeat, there is no church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals.

And so the Catholic trying to make moral and prudent judgments in the political realm must discern which, if any, of the actions one could take would be best.  (American Rhetoric: Mario Cuomo --"Religious Belief and Public Morality) 

Apart from the disregard of the facts of biology that young attorney Mario Matthew Cuomo used to provide to groups before which he spoke as a representative of the Diocese of Brooklyn in the 1960s, Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo--Mario Pilate/Pontius Cuomo, an admirer of the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., had the audacity to refer to "our" morality when referring to the immutable and eternally binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law that proscribe the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being. God's laws apply to everyone without regard to whether anyone accepts them. Civil law must be conformed to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls, and Catholics have the positive moral obligation to work in behalf of such a conformity. Catholics are not permitted to privately hold one thing while publicly speaking and acting in a contradictory manner.

Pope Leo XIII made this abundantly clear in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885: 

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

Along with other Catholic pro-aborts in public life, Cuomo supported the legal "right" of mothers to support the execution of their babies under cover of law, attempting to cover himself in a mantra of not seeking to "impose" "his" morality upon others, while doing precisely that when it came to the issue of capital punishment. Cuomo said that it was his moral duty as a Catholic to oppose capital punishment even though a majority of the citizens of the State of New York desired its restoration. What hubris. What incredible arrogance to consign the innocent preborn to cruel, merciless deaths under cover of law while criminals convicted of heinous crimes after the exhausting of the levers of due process of law are considered to be above the ultimate punishment for their crimes.

1977-1983: The first alleged success of the pragmatists in the pro-life movement came in 1977 when Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) was able to attach an amendment to the funding of Medicaid that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions for poor women except in cases where a mother's life was said to be endangered. The legislation containing the Hyde Amendment, which was "liberalized" in 1993 to include the rape and incest exceptions, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. Far from being a success, however, the Hyde Amendment conceded the false idea that innocent human beings could be put to death under cover of law and that American taxpayers could licitly pay for their savage murders. The flawed nature of the single exception contained in the original Hyde Amendment was the basis of its eventual, if not inevitable, expansion sixteen years later.

The principal legislative effort during the administration of President Ronald Reagan centered on efforts to pass a constitutional amendment that was introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). The Hatch Amendment would have reversed Roe v. Wade by establishing the principle that the right to permit or restrict abortion was held solely by the state legislatures, not by Federal or state courts. This fatally flawed piece of legislation conceded that a human institution, a state legislature, had the authority to permit something that was proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. If it had been approved by a two-thirds majority in Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the nation's state legislatures, the Hatch Amendment would have enshrined abortion as matter of legal right whose exact parameters were subject to the deliberation of state legislators. This morally repugnant legislative initiative was "hatched" by the then Monsignor James T. McHugh of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and endorsed very strongly by the full body of American bishops, save for Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Baton Rouge, and the National Right to Life Committee, which lobbied very hard for its passage in Congress.

The failure of the Hatch Amendment led to the pragmatists to adopt "incrementalism" as their buzzword. As legislative efforts to reverse Roe v. Wade had proved unsuccessful, the only thing that could be done was to limit abortion around the margins. Thus, such initiatives as "parental consent" legislation at the state level became the focus of the National Right to Life Committee and its state affiliate organizations. Again, this was and remains a morally flawed effort. No one has the right to give his consent to his daughter to murder his grandchild inside of her womb. The legal "experts" at the National Right to Life Committee have contended ad nauseam that parental consent laws have been crafted so as to pass the scrutiny of constitutional challenges in Federal and state courts. Well, not only are these laws morally flawed of their nature, they include a judicial bypass provision whereby a minor woman can get a judge's order to kill her child without the "consent" or her parents. Planned Parenthood and related organizations are more than willing to fill out the boilerplate forms necessary to secure the judicial bypass for one of their "clients."'

1983: Meanwhile, the social justice crowd at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference were busy opposing President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s nuclear arms modernization and buildup, the intervention of the United States of America against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the placement of Pershing II Cruise Missiles in Europe, and Reagan’s economic policies.

Although drafted principally by minions in the USCC with the assistance of “social justice” “bishops, the NCCB issued its Challenge of Peace “pastoral letter” in 1983 as a rebuke to Reagan’s defense policies and then “Economic Justice for All” in 1986 to express opposition to the president’s “supply side” economics that had revived the American economy from the economic doldrums into which it  had fallen under President James Earl “The Appeaser” Carter, Jr.

Not to be outdone, Joseph “Cardinal” Bernardin, who was a true bishop, developed his “consistent ethic of life” (seamless garment) to provide a specious justification for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion candidates for public office if those candidates and/or officeholders were in favor of statist programs of economic redistributionism based upon confiscatory taxes and massive regulation of private property, opposed to the death penalty and opposed to Reagan’s foreign and defense policies. As will be seen below, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has expanded the scope of the “consistent ethic of life” to include opposition to “global warming” and support for illegal immigration.

It was no accident that Bernardin gave his address, “A Consistent Ethic of Life,” at Fordham University in the Borough of the Bronx, New York, on December 6, 1983, at a time when the aforementioned Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo was being discussed as a possible Democratic Party presidential candidate. Bernardin desired to give Catholic voters a moral “green light” to vote for Cuomo or some other Catholic on a pro-abortion national ticket. That “someone else” turned out to be Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccaro in 1984.

Here is part of what Bernardin said thirty-seven years ago:

The substance of a Catholic position on a consistent ethic of life is rooted in a religious vision. But the citizenry of the United States is radically pluralistic in moral and religious conviction. So we face the challenge of stating our case, which is shaped in terms of our faith and our religious convictions, in non-religious terms which others of different faith convictions might find morally persuasive. . . . As we seek to shape and share the vision of a consistent ethic of life, I suggest a style governed by the following rule: We should maintain and clearly communicate our religious convictions but also maintain our civil courtesy. We should be vigorous in stating a case and attentive in hearing another's case; we should test everyone's logic but not question his or her motives. ("A Consistent Ethic of Life: An American-Catholic Dialogue".).

To what must a Catholic listen on the issue of the taking of innocent human life? Those who support the chemical and/or surgical taking of innocent human life in the womb do not have a "case." They have lies. Such people, if they are non-Catholics, must be converted to the Catholic Faith. Those who are Catholics must be told that they excommunicate themselves from the Church's maternal bosom by supporting willful murder, one the four crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

The Bernardin approach to "life issues" contrasts, of course, very sharply with that of the true popes of the Catholic Church, who taught clearly and unequivocally that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. We do not speak in "non-religious" terms. We make proper Catholic distinctions when speaking about moral issues, remembering always to speak as Catholics at all times without ever dissenting from anything contained within the Deposit of Faith at any time for any reason, something that Pope Leo XIII made clear Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

The very reason that contraception and abortion are part of our culture and protected by civil law is because the Protestant Revolution overthrew the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century in many parts of Europe and the revolutions and movements inspired by the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry finished the job in the rest while creating entirely new nations elsewhere, such as in the United States of America, whose people were to celebrate religious "diversity" as a "protection" against tyranny and a "guarantee" of individual liberties rather than as the means by which the devil can propagate and then institutionalize Every Error Imaginable.

Pope Leo XIII warned us about how the toleration of evil out of a legitimate concern for public comity winds up increasing the amount of evils that wind up being tolerated over the course of time:

These evils have become accepted, mainstreamed, institutionalized in law and heralded in popular “culture” because the more people get accustomed to the spread of evil incrementally out of the fear of its spreading more rapidly is the more that it becomes impossible to reverse their institutionalization as to fight evil with means merely human results in its triumph of the course of time.

Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way in Libertas Praestantissium, June 20, 1884:

But, to judge aright, we must acknowledge that, the more a State is driven to tolerate evil, the further is it from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires. Wherefore, if such tolerance would be injurious to the public welfare, and entail greater evils on the State, it would not be lawful; for in such case the motive of good is wanting. And although in the extraordinary condition of these times the Church usually acquiesces in certain modern liberties, not because she prefers them in themselves, but because she judges it expedient to permit them, she would in happier times exercise her own liberty; and, by persuasion, exhortation, and entreaty would endeavor, as she is bound, to fulfill the duty assigned to her by God of providing for the eternal salvation of mankind. One thing, however, remains always true -- that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.

And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless license of which We have spoken, they exceed all limits, and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty. And because the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, and the unerring teacher of morals, is forced utterly to reprobate and condemn tolerance of such an abandoned and criminal character, they calumniate her as being wanting in patience and gentleness, and thus fail to see that, in so doing, they impute to her as a fault what is in reality a matter for commendation. But, in spite of all this show of tolerance, it very often happens that, while they profess themselves ready to lavish liberty on all in the greatest profusion, they are utterly intolerant toward the Catholic Church, by refusing to allow her the liberty of being herself free. (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, June 20, 1888.)

This is not a matter of ethereal speculation having nothing to with the real lives of human beings. Not at all. The heresy of religious liberty, which is at the heart of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, devastates souls. The belief that those who belong to false religions have a "civil right" to propagate themselves and that their false beliefs can contribute to the betterment of society make it impossible to exclude those false religions from making their presence felt everywhere in society, especially in "educational" institutions, where the tender souls of the young become ready prey to false ideas that are propagandized by charismatic professors. This is true in the United States of America and elsewhere in the allegedly "free" world of "democratic republics.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ does not want us to spend our lives in endless agitation as needless debates about those things that are beyond debate as they are part of Divine Revelation and/or the Natural Law.

How can social order be established and maintained upon a welter of religious, philosophical, cultural, social, economic and moral errors in a land where most people are, objectively speaking, steeped in states of Mortal Sin that wound their ability to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus choose wisely in accordance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law?

The Homosexual Collective's Capture of the "United States Catholic Conference"

Apart from applauding those who reaffirm those living lives of unrepentant perversity, Jorge Mario Bergoglio meant to take a very decided swipe against his nonagenarian neighbor who lives near him within the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River, and he meant to flush the following history, provided by Mrs. Randy Engel, who has documented the evil ways of New Ways Ministry more singularly and definitively than anyone else alive today, down the Orwellian memory hole:

In his classic work New Lies For Old — The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation, ex-KGB Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn defines "strategic disinformation" as "a systematic effort to disseminate false information and to distort or withhold information so as to misrepresent the real situation, in, and policies of, the communist world and thereby to confuse, deceive, and influence the noncommunist world, to jeopardize its policies, and to induce Western adversaries to contribute unwittingly to the achievement of communist objectives."

Over the last 40 years, a similar program of strategic disinformation and deception has been waged against faithful Catholics in America by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/U.S. Catholic Conference (NCCB/USCC), known today as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

From day one, with malice and forethought, the NCCB/USCC, a creature of the Second Vatican Council (although its roots go back to the pre-Conciliar era), has been systematically attacking and undermining Catholic dogma, faith, and morals, thereby creating a climate of confusion, deception, and apostasy among rank and file Catholics.

And there is no area in which the USCCB's disinformation program has been more successful than in the realm of Catholic sexual morality as it applies to homosexuality and pederasty — the main driving forces behind the clerical sex abuse scandal in AmChurch today.

USCCB disinformation on New Ways Ministry

A recent case in point is the March 11, 2011, statement by the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the USCCB Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, which was issued in response to a booklet titled "Marriage Equality: A Positive Catholic Approach," by New Ways Ministry Executive Director Francis DeBernardo.

The USCCB joint statement signed by Chairmen Donald Cardinal Wuerl and Bishop Salvatore Cordileone for their respective Committees reaffirmed an earlier statement made on February 12, 2010, by USCCB President Francis Cardinal George, OMI, concerning the non-Catholicity of New Ways Ministry, a pro-homosexual organization.

Cardinal George's February news release issued by the USCCB Media Department was prompted by New Ways' attack on the Catholic Church for its opposition, limited as it was, to homosexual and lesbian "marriages."

It was a masterpiece of deception and disinformation.

George stated that since New Ways' founding in 1977 (actually 1978) by Sr. Jeannine Gramick, SSND, and Salvatorian priest Rev. Robert Nugent, "serious questions have been raised about the group's adherence to Church teachings on homosexuality." He also noted that in 1984, Archbishop James Hickey of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., ordered New Ways out of the Archdiocese, and Rome instructed the dynamic duo to separate themselves from the organization. Further, he explained that in 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) permanently prohibited both Gramick and Nugent from any pastoral work dealing with homosexuals.

All these statements are true.

So, if they are true, why do I say that the Cardinal's remarks served as a vehicle for disinformation? Because it was what the Cardinal failed to say that was critical, not what he did say about New Ways.

Not only did Cardinal George fail to explain the true political and subversive nature of New Ways, he also failed to acknowledge the role that the USCCB, the organization of which he was president, has played in the meteoric rise of New Ways in AmChurch. This column is intended to make up for this sin of omission.

New Ways not a "ministry"

The essential thing to remember about New Ways is that it is not a "ministry" in any sense of the word. It is a political entity that is only incidentally religious — that is, it uses religion solely for political ends designed to subvert Catholic opposition to sodomy and other forms of sexual perversion.

According to Gramick and Nugent, New Ways exists "to explore and develop those areas that for many remain formidable obstacles to an acceptance of homosexual identity and expression as potentially morally good and healthy as heterosexuality in the Judaeo-Christian scheme."

Both founders were working for the homosexual group Dignity and the pro-Marxist Quixote Center when New Ways was incorporated in 1978.

In 1974, William Cardinal Baum had withdrawn Nugent's faculties for the Archdiocese of Washington. At this point, Nugent left the diocesan priesthood to join the "gay-friendly" Salvatorians.

In 1984, Cardinal Hickey kicked New Ways out of the D.C. Archdiocese, and the Holy See attempted to force the superiors of the School Sisters of Notre Dame and Salvatorians to make Gramick and Nugent relinquish their leadership position in New Ways. It did not work.

Both continued to work behind the scenes of New Ways. Together, Gramick and Nugent helped set up several front organizations including the Center for Homophobia Education, Catholic Parents Network, and the Catholic Coalition for Gay Civil Rights, one of the most powerful "gay" lobbying organizations in AmChurch, funded largely by Catholic religious congregations including the SSND and the Salvatorians.

DeBernardo, an avowed homosexual, was hired as Executive Director to replace Gramick and Nugent. He was a former reporter for The Tablet, the diocesan weekly for the Diocese of Brooklyn, headed at the time by homosexual Bishop Francis John Mugavero. Mugavero, who gave his blessings to a diocesan religious order of sodomites called the St. Matthew Community, was credited with inspiring the name — New Ways Ministry.

Among the politically-savvy serving on the Board of New Ways was another avowed homosexual, Xavieran Brother Joseph Izzo, who kept tabs on sodomites in the American hierarchy — knowledge that proved helpful in gaining access to the corridors of power at the NCCB/USCC, which already had a large contingent of homosexual prelates in key organizational positions dating back to its creation decades before.

Rev. Paul K. Thomas, a self-identified homosexual priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, was, and remains, a New Ways Board member. For many years he resided at 637 Dover Street, Baltimore, which just happened to be Nugent's address up until 2001.

New Ways gains access to the NCCB/USCC

From its earliest days, New Ways, unlike its Catholic opposition, routinely had access to AmChurch's national bureaucracy and its resources.

For example, Nugent was appointed a consultant for "sexual minorities" by the NCCB/USCC. He was also credited with writing the section on "Single Young Adult Sexual Minorities" found in the USCC's Department of Education publication Planning for Single Young Adult Ministry: Directives for Ministerial Outreach. New Ways has been permitted to distribute its "gay" propaganda at official NCCB/USCC conferences.

Nugent was one of three homosexual clerics who helped draft the infamous pastoral letter "Always Our Children." Before the Administrative Committee of the NCCB released the pro-"gay" document on September 30, 1997, Gramick bragged that she had seen the highly secret minutes of the bishops' November 1997 executive session during which the document was discussed and it seemed to her that "most bishops are behind the pastoral." Access is the name of the game, and New Ways has always had access to the NCCB/USCC and the USCCB.

AmChurch bishops back New Ways

Nor has New Ways ever lacked for support from the American hierarchy.

Among the well-known backers of New Ways have been Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and Bishops and Auxiliary Bishops Joseph A.. Fiorenza, Thomas Gumbleton, Walter Sullivan, Matthew Clark, Kenneth J. Povish, John J. McRaith, Thomas J. Costello, Charles Buswell, Joseph Symons, Kenneth Untener, Francis A. Quinn, Leroy T. Mattheisen, Gerald O'Keefe, Joseph L. Imesch, Lawrence L. McNamara, William A. Hughes, Robert F. Morneau, Raymond A. Lucker, William Friend, John S. Cummins, John J. Snyder, Francis P. Murphy, Frank J. Rodimer, Peter A. Rosazza, and last but not least Donald W. Wuerl, former Bishop of Pittsburgh and current Archbishop of Washington, D.C., mentioned earlier in this article.

Wuerl's open door policy for Dignity and New Ways

When Wuerl became Bishop of Pittsburgh, replacing Bishop Anthony Bevilacqua, who become Archbishop of Philadelphia, he permitted Dignity/Pittsburgh homosexual "Masses" to continue for eight more years in not one but two parishes — St. Elizabeth in the Strip District and St. Pamphilus in Beechview. According to Ann Rodgers-Melnick, a besotted reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Banning Dignity was a sad moment for Wuerl."

Under Wuerl's watch, the Pittsburgh Diocese became a stomping ground for nationally-known doctrinal and moral miscreants, including Matthew Fox, Raymond Brown, and howling feminists Rosemary Radford Ruether and Monica Hellwig.

New Ways road show comes to Pittsburgh

In mid-October 1991, Gramick and Nugent brought their "Homophobia in Religion and Society" road show to four Catholic dioceses in Southwest Pennsylvania, including the Pittsburgh Diocese.

They came armed with letters of recommendation to the Ordinaries of the Dioceses of Pittsburgh, Greensburg, Altoona-Johnstown, and Youngstown (Ohio) from five AmChurch bishops who wanted their names kept secret. Here are their names:

• Bishop Kenneth J. Povish, Diocese of Lansing, Mich. (deceased)
• Bishop John McRaith, Diocese of Owensboro, Ky.
• Aux. Bishop Thomas Costello, Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y.
• Bishop Francis A. Quinn, Diocese of Sacramento, Calif.
• Bishop Eugene J. Gerber (deceased), head of the Wichita Diocese, who provided a letter of recommendation to Gramick and Nugent in 1990, but it was later withdrawn from circulation.

USCL opposes New Ways

Opposition to the Gramick/Nugent pro-homosexual presentation in the Pittsburgh Diocese was organized by the U.S. Coalition for Life, directed by yours truly. The USCL media blitz attracted the attention of the secular press, and in a pre-conference interview with the Pittsburgh Press, an unhappy Nugent whined to a reporter that USCL Director Randy Engel was exhibiting "a classic case of homophobia." Nugent assured the reporter that he and Gramick intended to uphold the positive things that the Church says about gay and lesbian people and that they would present the views of revisionist theologians right alongside official church teachings.

The New Ways Pittsburgh workshop was scheduled for October 12, 1991, at St. Mary's Convent on the Carlow College campus operated by the Sisters of Mercy.

The President of Carlow College defended the workshop on homophobia. In a curt letter to the USCL, Sister Sheila Carney, RSM, declared, "Our hosting of this program constitutes neither 'a violation of Vatican directives on homosexuality' nor a 'homosexualist scandal at St. Mary's Convent in Pittsburgh,' as your [USCL] memo suggests." "It is, rather, reflective of our community's commitment to promote the dignity of all persons," she concluded. The public relations director for the college stated that every member of the Mercy community was behind Nugent and Gramick, and that "Randy Engel is the only one who has objected to it."

Bishop Wuerl backs New Ways

Father Ronald Lengwin, the official spokesman for Bishop Donald Wuerl, told a Wanderer reporter that Wuerl was not convinced the workshop would violate Church doctrine. "We have been assured," said Lengwin, "that the presentation would not be contrary to the teaching of the Church. We live within that level of trust."

"Level of trust?" You've got to be kidding.

By 1991, when the road show came to Pittsburgh, the pro-sodomite activities of New Ways were so notorious that the Vatican's Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes had already established a special commission in the United States to "render a judgment as to the clarity and orthodoxy" of Gramick and Nugent's presentation on the Church's teaching on homosexuality.
Lengwin added that Bishop Wuerl could not cancel the program because it was being held on property owned by the Sisters of Mercy and it was not church property.

This is, of course, sheer nonsense. All religious orders remain in a diocese at the good pleasure of the Ordinary of the diocese and it was within Wuerl's power, had he chosen to exercise it, to tell the Sisters of Mercy to cancel the event or, at the very least, relocate the workshop off campus.

In any case, the New Ways road show came and went, and Bishop Wuerl remained silent... until his March 11, 2011, statement issued on behalf of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine. 

The Maida Commission and beyond

Although it was created in March of 1988, the Maida Commission was not reactivated until January 24, 1994 — a period of five years and nine months, during which time Gramick and Nugent were running footloose and fancy free throughout numerous U.S. dioceses and abroad, peddling their doctrinal and moral poison.

The Maida Commission's ill-conceived and ill-fated investigation concluded in early 1996, when the Final Commission Report was filed with the Holy See. The Report praised Gramick and Nugent's "courage and zeal" and "love and compassion," in their "important and needed ministry," but alas, the Commission found their works "problematic" and doctrinally ambiguous, deficient, and erroneous.

In the meantime, because of unresolved grave doctrinal questions related to Gramick and Nugent's writings, the case had been transferred from the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life to the CDF, headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

The Vatican finally acts

On July 13, 1999, twenty-one years after Gramick and Nugent had created New Ways, and the homosexual colonization of AmChurch's male and female religious congregations was complete, the CDF publicly released its "Notification" concerning the final disposition on the matter.

Gramick and Nugent were permanently prohibited from any and all pastoral work with homosexuals (emphasis added).

Nugent, who unlike Gramick, the more "manly" of the two, agreed to make a "Profession of Faith" supporting the Church's teachings in opposition to homosexuality, was permitted to retain his priestly faculties, but was forbidden to preach and administer the sacraments for homosexual gatherings.

Today, Nugent resides at St. John the Baptist Church in New Freedom, Penna., although he spends much of his time abroad in England and Ireland, and visiting the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, an international ecumenical institute for theological research and pastoral studies. His latest book, Silence Speaks: Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, and Thomas Merton, was recently advertised in the Harrisburg diocesan paper, The Catholic Witness.

Gramick joins Sisters of Loretto

In August 2001, Gramick announced that she had left the School Sisters of Notre Dame and joined the equally liberal Sisters of Loretto based in Denver, which has its own homosexual ministry. The sisters established a "Sr. Jeannine Gay Ministry Fund," to enable Gramick to continue to campaign for the legitimization of sodomy, lesbianism, and an ever-expanding litany of sexual perversions.

On January 14, 2005, The National Catholic Reporter ran a story by Gramick titled "Finding empathy for Shanley — Nun says Christian response goes beyond guilt or innocence," an apologia for the notorious criminal pederast and homosexual Fr. Paul Shanley, who for more than 30 years was able to live out his NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Lover Association) fantasies with immunity, with the blessings of three Boston princes of the Church — Richard Cardinal Cushing, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, and Bernard Cardinal Law.

Gramick's bombshell did not sit well with victims of clerical sexual abuse, who, if the truth be known, have never been the object of any real concern by New Ways or its founders.

More recently, Gramick has been traveling the world campaigning for homosexual rights, including the "right to marry," and pushing a documentary on her life and mission called In Good Conscience: Sister Jeannine Gramick's Journey of Faith.

Any faithful Catholic who has been holding his breath waiting for the USCCB or the Vatican to rein in the rebellious nun has long since died and been buried.

The USCCB continues to support pro-homosexual "ministries," with many larger dioceses like New York and San Francisco having established actual homosexual parishes such as St. Francis Xavier Parish in Manhattan and Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro District. The Ordinary for New York is the USCCB's new President, Archbishop Timothy Dolan. The Ordinary for San Francisco is Archbishop George H. Niederauer, former housemate of the Prefect for the CDF, William Cardinal Levada.

As for Cardinal George, his continued scandalous support for the pro-homosexual ministry Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach program (AGLO) — which he permitted to extend into the suburbs of Chicago in 2004 — makes his criticism of New Ways ludicrous, to say the least.

Ratzinger smiles on Gramick

As for Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XV, what can I say? Perhaps, it's better if I let Gramick explain his position on the matter.

On Sunday, 2008, the Malta Times ran an interview with Gramick titled "The Unlikely Rebel," by Ariadne Massa. The overseas interview was later reprinted in the Spring 2008 issue of Bondings, the official publication of New Ways, with an appropriately provocative sado/masochist title. [14]

Gramick told Massa that she was a member of the National Coalition of American Nuns, which backed marriage and all the sacraments for gays. She denied that Natural Law prohibits sodomy and lesbian acts. "These arguments are based on plumbing... one sexual organ fits in another... that's ridiculous! This is a very male-based theology," she said.

When the Maltese reporter asked Gramick if she feared being excommunicated by the Vatican for her radical pro-homosexual agenda, the sister replied, "No."

Gramick then told Massa about an incident which occurred during the CDF's investigation into her and Nugent's controversial ministry. She said that her provincial with the School Sisters of Notre Dame recommended that she and Gramick make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the foundress of the order to pray for a miracle. "Through sheer coincidence, travelling on the plane between Rome and Munich was Cardinal Ratzinger himself," Gramick said.

"My superior went up to him and said, 'Sr. Jeannine is a very good sister. We're very afraid she's going to get excommunicated.'" And he replied, "Oh, no no... it's not that level of doctrine." "She (Gramick) laughs, admitting that her miracle had happened on the plane," said Massa.

Now it is a matter of public record that the doctrinal problems of Gramick and Nugent concerning the morality of homosexuality were so grave and complex that the matter had to be transferred from the Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes to the CDF. But, Gramick tells us that, Ratzinger, the future pope, said that "it's not that level of doctrine." (New lies for old -- The USCCB and New Ways Ministry.)

"It's not that level of doctrine."

Yet it is that many within the conciliar strutures still believe in the mythology of the "restorer of tradition" as contrasted with the lay Jesuit revolutionary when the truth of the matter is the the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI was a Girondist/Menshevik conciliar revolutionary while Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a Jacobin/Bolshevik conciliar revolutionary. Both men believed and taught propositions contrary to the Catholic Faith, which is why that, as bad as the problems within the NCWC/NCCB-USCC/USCCB have been for the past one hundred eight years, the fish rots from the head down. The problem is not principally with the national episcopal conferences but with the fact that those conferences are but instruments of false religion whose precepts have been condemned dogmatically by various of Holy Mother Church's true general councils and by various encyclical letters of our true popes.

We believe in miracles, including that God has favored his saints, especially those who were particularly devoted to His Most Blessed Mother, with prodigious feast attesting to His power over the elements and attesting to His loving mercy for us erring sinners at the same time. Why, then, do we permit ourselves to be so steeped in naturalism as to think that there is something short of Catholicism that can unite men and restore social order?

We must remember that we have no permanent dwelling here in this mortal vale of tears. We are meant to suffer the chastisements of these times in which it has been within the Providence of God to place us so that we can work out our salvation in fear and in trembling as the consecrated slaves of His Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. We have not been left as orphans in this time of apostasy and betrayal and in this time of the triumph, albeit temporary, of the combined forces of Antichrist in the world as Our Lord Himself has sent His Most Blessed Mother to us to clothe us with the shield of Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel and to provide us with the weapon against all the enemies of our own salvation and of truth in the world,  her Most Holy Rosary.

Our Lady has told us in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph, which should give us great encouragement in these troubling times as her Divine Son, Christ the King, has chosen us, unworthy though we are, to be the imperfect instruments by which we can make a bit of reparation for our sins and those of the whole world and to plant a few seeds for the restorations of all things in Him, Our Divine Redeemer and King.

It is time to pray a Rosary now, is it not?

Vivat Christus Rex!

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother, pray for us.