THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

On his blog today, Aldo Maria Valli calls attention to this analysis of what's happening in the USA these days, written by Julio Loredo, president of the Italian Traditione-Famiglia-Proprieta (TFP), one of several such traditional Catholic movements around the world inspired by the late intellectual-politician Plinio Correa da Oliveira, who founded the first TFP in Brazil in 1960. Loredo himself wrote a best-selling book on Liberation Theology which he called 'a lead-weighted lifesaver for the poor'.

A revolution by the book
by Julio Loredo
Translated from

June 23, 2020

What’s happening in the USA is a ‘revolution by the book’ (rivoluzione da manuale). [I’d say 'by the books'! – Starting with Barack Obama’s political guru, Saul Alinsky and his RULES FOR RADICALS, the homegrown manual underpinned and supplemented by older guides like the propaganda ABCs successfully wielded by Hitler’s Nazis, the Russian Bolsheviks and the Maoists!]

Although different in their historic concreteness, revolutions always have some elements in common. The French Revolution in 1789 was considered an emblematic event precisely because it was the paradigm for all the ingredients of a Revolution. [Contrast that with the American Revolution, which predated the French by 13 years,and was more simply a ‘War of Independence’ from the British colonizers, but which did realize a true revolution in the unprecedented Declaration of Independence and the Constitution framed by the Founding Fathers in 1776.] Perhaps in the future, historians will study what is happening in the USA now as an event with emblematic characteristics.

What are the ingredients of a revolution? And how do we see them in the USA today?

A frenetic climate
The first ingredient is a climate of electrifying frenzy, partly due to real circumstances which have been cleverly manipulated, and partly through artifice using well-studied techniques of psychologically manipulating masses. Not to mention a considerable and incontestable dose of preternatural [beyond natural, i.e., artificial] infestation.

During the French Revolution, the frenzy was such that even members of the nobility allowed themselves to be carried along the wave of inebriating enthusiasm of the sans-culottes [literally, ‘without breeches’, derogatory term used by the aristocrats to describe the lower classes who wore pants not the fashionable breeches].

In her memoirs, the Marquise de La Tour de Pin Gouvernet (1770-1853), who was a dame of honor in Marie-Antoinette’s court, writes that, against every personal conviction, she found herself so caught up by hearing the Marseillaise sung in the streets that her husband had to slap her so she could 'come back to her senses'. More than once, caught up by the frenetic hymn, she would find herself screaming with the crowds “Aristocrats to the gallows!”

Similarly frenzied was the climate in 1968. “The Revolution is here because there’s something in the air”, one of the famous rock bands sang. Describing that ‘something in the air’, TIME magazine spoke of “a wind of philosophical folly” that “the bourgeois values were overwhelmed with a youthful wave that was provocative, inebriating and irritating”.

And this wave intoxicated and sucked into its vortex an entire generation, including many representatives of that very bourgeoisie that it wished to destroy. [And many of the 68ers, of course, in time found their comfortable niches in the bourgeoisie and higher social and economic circles, even as not a few chose to encapsulate themselves in the Gen ’68 time warp and continue to do so today.]

In the United States, the climate has been charged for some time. The election of Donald Trump blindsided the liberal left [led by the Democrats and all their fellow travelers in academia and in Big Tech], who had become accustomed to reign uncontested.

[Not really, because there was always a conservative part of the American public, including those who voted for Trump rather than for ueber-liberal queen Hillary Clinton. Except that with Trump as President, almost all of mainstream media and the new online media founded by Big Tech, along with the diehard never-Trumpers, have since presented a united front that could and cannot see anything good in Donald Trump and anything he does, choosing to hammer on all his negatives relentlessly – his most unlikeable personal attributes driven by an unfortunately overweening narcissism - and ignoring all of his very real achievements in the first three years of his presidency.

The whole anti-Trump no-holds-barred offensive has been focused on seeking to nullify the 2012 presidential elections by all means at their disposal, reiterated 24/7 ad nauseam, mostly through fake news, monumental hoaxes such as the Russian collusion and the Flynn frame-up, and the rigged impeachment in January 2019 based largely on those manufactured hoaxes.

Anything, in short, that could possibly hound him out of office before his term is over, and failing that, prevent his reelection at all costs. Even if the only candidate they have come up with to pit against him is a visibly doddering, often incoherent and ridicule-prone late septuagenarian who has nothing to show in terms of concrete achievement after more than 40 years in Washington as a senator and as vice president. That is how little the Democrats think of their country and their people – to prefer a tried and tested incompetent to Trump who has not only managed to accomplish 90 percent of what he set out to do as President, despite all the obstacles in his way, but has outdone all his recent predecessors in terms of the real progress he brought to the USA on the economic, diplomatic, military and social justice fronts, always putting America first, but without oppressing anyone who has no legitimate right to avail of benefits that American citizens have a priority to receive.]

Trump has not reacted well to the attacks [because he can more than match their vitriol], provoking ever-new attacks in relentless propaganda blow after propaganda blow. 'The Donald’ has not allowed himself to be intimidated and has responded in kind [except that even when he exaggerates, he does not indulge in fake news – wrong conjectures, yes, unfortunately, as in his sideshow skirmish with MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and his ill-advised unconfirmed tweet that a 77-year-old Brooklyn man knocked down by the police during a protest rally was perhaps an agent provocateur of the rally organizers].

And so, there has been an escalation of the ideological division in the United States. Surveys show a divided America, with just a few centrists looking on. There seems to be an atmosphere now of civil war. [American ideological division has been deepening as the Democratic Party has increasingly advocated leftist liberal policies in the past two decades – culminating in the political leadership of such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, who have co-opted a weak-willed ideological weathervane like Joe Biden as the puppet through whom they hope to pull all the strings that matter if and when he becomes president. That is why the division was never more stark in terms of so-called ‘red’ (Republican) and ‘blue’ (Democrat) states seen in the 2012 presidential elections.]

To this has now been added a surreal atmosphere weighed down by nervousness, fear and uncertainties, that first arose with the Covid-19 pandemic that hit the United States severely. And the American left has not passed up any opportunity to blame everything on Trump, accusing him of incompetence in handling the health crisis [once again, ignoring all the things he did, from providing daily briefings to the nation during the first three months of the truly unprecedented pandemic and the social and economic havoc it has wrought, mobilizing heavy industry to produce ventilators much needed by US hospitals to deal with the most serious cases so that no hospital ever had to complain they did not have the ventilators, motivating other industries to gear up in order to turn out masks, gowns, gloves and sanitizers to meet the demand, deploying the armed forces to construct instant new hospitals where needed and to take care of distributing medical supplies to health facilities around the nation. His critics cry ‘incompetence’ but they cannot cite specific cases of incompetence – rather, it is as if they are blaming the whole global pandemic on him, criticizing him every day as being racist for calling the virus ‘the Wuhan virus’ or ‘the Chinese virus’ or, lately ‘the kung flu’.] And Trump, of course, has responded to them with his usual inflammatory tweets. So the atmosphere was already saturated.

It only needed one spark to make it explode. That spark was the death of George Floyd, a black man asphyxiated to death by a white policeman in Minneapolis who knelt on his throat for almost 9 minutes (though a review of all available videotapes showed he died after the first three minutes). This event, as horrifying as it was, would not have provoked this kind o explosion if the atmosphere had not already been saturated.

An atmosphere that distorts
the perception of reality
The first victim par excellence of this electrifying frenzy is the perception of reality.

Public opinion that is dominated by such a frenzy behaves in many ways like a psychologically labile person who is easy prey to paranoia. Psychiatry refers to "disturbances of sense perception”. - Perception of reality itself is changed, and consequently, its evaluation.
- Whereas marginal facts become sensational news, others that are perhaps more relevant tend to disappear from view.
- It then becomes very easy to disseminate not just fake news but also what we might call fake judgments, namely, false evaluations based on falsities presented as fact.
- It is a sort of collective paranoia in which, out of momentary excitement, persons lose the ability to think objectively and thus be able to judge a situation impartially in order to be able to react in an appropriate manner.

Gestures that in ordinary times would have been considered weird now are considered normal, even sympathetic. An example would be the ‘baciapiedi’ (kissing the feet) which are occurring more often in the USA – a black man on the street holds out his foot, and white men near him line up to kiss it. Or, here in Italy, the leaders of the Partita Democrata (PD) kneeling down in homage to George Floyd. A grotesque gesture, one would have said, were it not for the climate of revolutionary frenzy that inspired it.

That is why it has become so difficult for the defenders of order to oppose the revolutionary hurricane and its impetuous winds. Their ‘weapons’ – truth, logic, tranquility and good sense – are completely useless in a climate of collective paranoia.

A typical example of the false perception of reality is the manipulation of the term ‘racism’, claimed by the American left as the trigger for the current revolution, as the enemy to be defeated. All protesters appear convinced they are protesting ‘racism’. But one simply has to look at some relevant figures to realize that it is based on fake news [fake ‘facts’] leading to false judgment.

Official statistics from the Bureau of Justice in 2018 reported 547,948 cases of black-against-white violence, and 59,788 of white-against-black violence (National Crime Victimization Survey 2018, Table 4). In which it appears that the whites are ten times more the victims of racism.

Another example: From 2017 to 2019, US policemen had killed, in line of duty, 1,398 whites and 755 blacks – twice as many whites as blacks. Is that racism? [NB: For context, by Census Bureau estimate, blacks constituted 13.4% of the US population in 2019, and whites 76.3%.] In April 2015, the Washington Times published a well-documented report headlined “Police kill more whites than blacks, but only black deaths appear to arouse indignation”.

These past few weeks, statements have been made by prominent African-Americans like Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington and the rapper Lil Wayne, refuting the claim that racism is a dominant problem in US society today. But in the current climate, such statements were hardly reported or quickly passed over [as they go against the Dominant Thought] while the racism key is pounded over and over.

A side observation: The true ‘executioner’ of blacks in the USA is abortion. It is estimated that 44% of all abortions carried out in the USA victimize black babies(“Abortion: The overlooked tragedy for black Americans”, Arizona Capitol Times, 25 Feb 2020). [i.e., 44% of all US abortions take place among African-Americans who only make up 13.4% of the US population.] In short, a real holocaust of African Americans takes place every year, but the media never speak of this.

The role of propaganda
Another necessary element of revolution is propaganda.

Let’s start from the premise that those who create revolutionary propaganda know very well that a population in the grip of an electrifying frenzy is much more easily manipulated than public opinion that is reasoned and peaceable. But in times of revolution, one can wage all-out psychological war- unthinkable in normal times.

[Really? Since the global left gained ascendancy after their temporary setback with the collapse of communism in Europe, they have not stopped their psychological warfare, or more bluntly, their mass brainwashing of a captive population through the schools and the media. Just as the Masons decided back in the early 19th century that the way to bring down the Catholic Church was to subvert it from within, so that priests and prelates who think like them would eventually rise to the top – as they have succeeded since 2013 – so has the liberal left succeeded in coopting at least half of the American population to their politically correct One Thought, through the educational system and the media, reinforced in recent years by the rise of the Big Tech companies that made online forums the single most influential information tool ever employed in history. Perhaps, even the most shamelessly overt technique of global brainwashing that there could ever be.]

Manipulation is done in many ways:
- by the simple choice of what to publish and what not to publish
- reporting facts [and mis-facts] in an openly tendentious way
- by coloring the news in such a way as to strongly impress the reader emotionally rather than rationally
- or, presenting selected ‘news’ flatly and without calling any attention so that certain facts which would normally cause ‘excitement’ [or more than usual interest] in the reader, are instead read with indifference.

Propaganda is an authentic ‘art’. Sometimes called ‘Real Art’ by master propagandists – that revolutionaries have mastered to perfection.

An important aspect of revolutionary propaganda is to manipulate all elements of the environment that could possibly have an impact in individual sensibility especially at the subconscious level. It is what [Brazilian traditionalist philosopher] Plinio Correa de Oliveira calls the 'tendentious depth’ of revolutionary propaganda: colors, spaces, forms, music, fashions, etc which all combine to convey and reinforce the propaganda message. Thus, the skillful propaganda use of photographs, videos, symbols, gestures and key icons of the revolution du jour.

A concrete example of propagandistic discrimination in recent events: While the media has gone to great lengths to publicize the killing of George Floyd and later that of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of policemen, hardly anyone in the leftist media even reported the killing of David Dorn, 77, a retired policeman in St. Louis, Missouri, who was killed by looters while he stood guard at a friend’s jewelry store.

An interesting study of how propaganda has been manipulating the narrative on the ongoing ‘revolts’ in the USA comes from Danielle Kilgo and Summer Harlow of the University of Indiana, who observe: “The opinions of the public at large on the protests and the various movements animating the protests are largely formed by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists an immense power to shape and guide the narrative on the revolts”. (“Riot or resistance? How media frames unrest in Minneapolis will shape public’s view of protest”, Women’s Agenda).

Leaving aside the question of how the propaganda is financed [it all costs millions of dollars to launch and sustain], how have the media managed to coordinate among themselves such that they all report the same ‘news’ in the same way while they all ignore (silence or hide) news that does not fit their narrative? Here we get into the study – as fascinating as it is sensitive – of the mechanisms through which revolutionary forces organize among each other.

Suffice it to say that to think that so many players (as many as there are media outlets) could all move simultaneously in the same direction and in the same way to achieve the same end would be like thinking that by throwing out hundreds of alphabet letters from a window, they could all fall to the ground in such a way as to compose a poem. As the Americans would say, ‘it simply does not happen’.

The fear-and-sympathy binomial
Revolutionary psywar is baaed on the manipulation of what Correa de Oliveira called ‘the fear-and-sympathy binomial’: “A binomial of forces – let us call it ‘fear and sympathy’ – is at work in the psyche of numberless persons” (Trasbordo ideologico inavvertito e Dialogo (Inadvertent ideological transfer and dialog), 2012).

On the one hand, public opinion in the USA fears an eventual explosion of racial violence, with blood and destruction in its wake. On the other hand, it has a natural sympathy for racial equality and favors the peaceful integration of ethnic minorities into the national system. Specifically, public opinion fears pillage and violence while it demonstrates support for the peaceful manifestations carried out in the name of George Floyd.

With this psychological background then, revolutionary propaganda uses what Correa de Oliveira calls ‘talisman words’ – in this case, ‘racism’ – capable of arousing a whole constellation of impressions and emotions, of sympathies and revulsions, which act to direct the individual into new ideological paths.

A talisman word is loaded with great propagandistic efficiency. It also has a great elasticity, enabling it to be abused, so that it is presented in an ever-increasingly radical sense. Thus, from a rejection of ‘racism’ in its strict sense, namely, discrimination for reasons of race, it has gone on to rejection of the ‘racist’ society, which really means going on to fight every perceived discrimination – political, economic, cultural, moral, etc- ostensibly directed at persons of the ‘wrong’ race’. By using this psychological technique, revolutionary propaganda carries public opinion from an ideal that everyone can share to an anarchic ideal.

It would be useful to reread the cited essay byPCorrea da Oliveira, replacing the talisman word analyzed by him (‘dialog’) with ‘racism’.

An organizing structure
Is there an organizing structure behind these uprisings in the USA? Or are these spontaneous popular movements which are not coordinated among each other?

An organizing structure, often invisible, is an essential element for every revolution. It stimulates, coordinates and guides the uprisings.

A paradigmatic case was the so-called Grande Peur (Great Fear) in July 1789: “On the same day, at the same hour, and in the same manner, throughout France, emerged agitators who screamed for revolt, sowing fear and anxiety among the citizens who were driven to take up arms in the belief that 'The Germans are coming!' And so, uprisings arose everywhere. On the pretext of defending France, Jacobin clubs obtained guns from the Army. A few days later, people found out that it was all a great hoax, bringing the commotions to an end. But the Jacobins were now armed, further sharpening the climate of electrifying frenzy which had been fuelling the French Revolution.

Something similar is happening in the USA. “When protests are transformed into uprisings which take place everywhere at the same time, and using similar tactics and slogans, it is not the work of a few persons in revolt,” John Horvath comments. “When pallets of bricks appear near places where shortly pillage and violence will start, this is not the work of random opportunists. And when the protestors have the universal support of the media, of politicians, of celebrities, of corporate executives and the clergy, there is something much more in play. This seemingly universal uprising is led by persons who know how to direct and articulate events towards specific objectives. These revolts are neither spontaneous nor random. Movements like this require organization, planning and a narrative. They require expert militants”. (John Horvat II, “Facciamo attenzione alla regola seguita dagli artefici delle sommosse” (Let us pay attention to the rules followed by those who create uprisings), Tradition Family Property, 12-06-20).

A subversive and revolutionary goal
We come to the central and final point of this analysis.
What characterizes – I would say, what defines - a revolution is its ultimate goal to radically subvert the established order.

Revolutionary elements are not really there to protest this or that situation nor to resolve this or that problem. Given situations or problems are merely instruments, pretexts. Revolution means to derail established order.

“Rioters need violence because they are writing the narrative for everything that will follow,” Horvat writes. "It is the old narrative of the left according to which history is an eternal struggle between oppressors and oppressed. But rioters do not want social harmony because that would impede the advance of revolutionary progress. The American Left is exploiting the disorder to foment class war on a vast scale. All the known personages in this drama continue to be the same groups: abortionists, LGBT activists, socialists, feminists, even Satanists, all take part in this revolution against the established order.”

It is not by chance that the American left - amplified by the headline-making megaphonic screams of the protesters - has been characterizing these protests as a ‘systemic crisis’. In other words, the problem is not ‘racism’. They want to overturn the entire American system.

[Significantly, the so-called leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Greater New York admitted as much in even stronger words in an interview last night when asked about the goal of his movement: “If our demands are not met, then we will burn down the system and replace it with our own”.

[And how do they think they will do that, even with the millions from George Soros and company that is financing their revolt? Replace a system that has been evolving since 1776, sometimes in fits and starts, to produce what is widely recognized, with all its imperfections, as the best democratic system in the world that offers equal opportunities for everyone? With what and with whom?

Does anyone believe that anyone of these rioters could possibly be a budding George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt – to mention just some of the historic names who have contributed to America’s greatness, many of whom have been the target of ignorant iconoclasts in the past few days of desecrating and/or pulling down historical monuments?]

For their purposes the Left uses any group which is angry and wishes to change the system in some point or other: abortionists, LGBT activists, socialists, feminists, etc. [He forgets the professional ‘community organizers’, such as Barack Obama started out, according to his guru Alinsky’s program, who would be, in some probably principal way, the organizers of this chaos, to use an the oxymoron.]

Revolutionary theorists speak of a New Proletariat committed to the struggle for what Herbert Marcuse defined as “a diffuse and total disintegration of the system”. The uprisings in the USA fall under a new type of revolution- which scholars call “diffuse molecular revolution” – diverse results serving as warning, such as in Chile at the end of 2019.

It is an anarchic revolution which seeks a general dissolution of the system and which uses any minority or social group willing and ready to rebel against any point of the established order. This, however, is for another article.


Defund the THOUGHT POLICE!
By Charles Lipson

June 24, 2020

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion, or disagreement. These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities, and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally. Anyone who dares push back, perhaps with a mild tweet saying “All lives matter,” faces immediate censure. If the mob is successful, any offenders will lose their jobs. Feckless employers are all too eager to appease the mob and hope it turns on another target.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square.
- They monopolize it by silencing dissent.
- They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control electronic discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news.
- Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free and open discussion.
- Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding and better decisions.

The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences.
- Imagine applying for a job in Gender Studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, Week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.”
- Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure in political science, sociology, anthropology, or history. Bad career move. There is more robust political debate at the Academy Awards.
- University administrations are equally rigid. Rejecting affirmative action, questioning the implementation of Title 9, or opposing Black Lives Matter would end your chances of being hired by the admissions office or dean of students at nearly every American university.
- Yet all of them proudly tout, with no sense of irony, their “office of diversity and inclusion,” fully staffed and generously funded.

For them, of course, diversity never includes diverse viewpoints. It’s all about DNA and gender identity.
- Modern universities are now well-oiled machines to stamp out dissenting views. That’s been true for decades.
- What’s new, and disturbing, is seeing this orthodoxy spread to K-12 education, corporate HR departments, mainline churches, and newsrooms.

The “thought police” are on patrol and ever-vigilant, twirling the twin batons of guilt and moral superiority.
- Dissent from their approved views is not just considered an error, much less an innocent one.
- It is considered immoral, illegitimate, and unworthy of a public hearing.
- Although both left and right have moved steadily toward this abyss, the worst excesses today come from the left, just as they came from the right in the 1950s.
- Opponents are seen in religious terms, as dangerous apostates who deserve to be burned at the stake, at least symbolically.
You never expect the Spanish Inquisition. Yet here it is. That is the powerful iconography behind torching police cars and neighborhood stores.

The last time we saw this frenzy (without the arson) was during the dark days of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist. Audiences flocked to Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” because it likened the moment to the Salem witch trials. Today’s audiences would be appalled to hear the same critique now applies to them. Alas, it does.

Suppressing free speech is not the same as violence, but the two are invariably intertwined.
- The threat of violence not only underscores the intensity of particular views — it heightens the danger of voicing any disagreement.
- Large-scale violence, whatever its source, whatever its purpose, undermines social stability and assails democratic procedures.
- It won’t stand for long because the public won’t tolerate it. They will demand leaders who restore order. The only question is what kind of order and at what cost.

The first duty of any government is to establish public order and safety, ideally with popular support.
- In constitutional democracies, we have well-defined procedures to establish that order, determine its content (such the speed limit or right to carry a weapon), proper ways to enforce it, and penalties for violating it.
- In the United States, we have one additional constraint, a fundamentally important one: personal rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, cannot be overridden, even by large majorities.
- This social and political order is not static — it is always evolving — but there are well-established procedures to make those changes, ensure all voices are heard, and protect each citizen’s inalienable rights. (Even using the term “citizen” is contentious these days. The language police don’t like it because it excludes some people.)

Calls to “Defund the police,” if they are serious, attack the very idea of establishing this peaceful public order. Cities foolish enough to attempt it will unleash violence, arson, and predation and meet a predictable backlash from citizens determined to protect their lives and property. They will either stand and fight or flee to safer spaces.

Although mobs are not always violent, rule by mobs is always a threat to constitutional democracy.
- Even peaceful protests can morph into mob rule when they stamp out dissenting voices or quash democratic procedures.
- We are seeing some of that today, where peaceful protests, guaranteed under the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and assembly, attempt to suppress others’ speech, demand obedience from public officials, topple symbols they claim to hate, and smear anyone bold enough to disagree.
- Corporations and universities have folded under these attacks as quickly as a cheap umbrella, or Seattle’s city council.

To preserve our democracy, we must resist the mob.
- That begins with understanding the gravity of the threat and standing up to it.
- They have no claim to moral superiority and no right to use violence to achieve their ends.
- Yielding the public square to this “thought police,” however powerful and intimidating they are, is the road to tyranny.
- It leads away from our country’s hard-won achievement of ordered liberty and constitutional democracy.
Remember, the mob aims to do more than pull down statues of the Founding Fathers. It aims to pull down their historic achievements.

Charles Lipson is Emeritus Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security.

And where is the ´Church´ in all this? The American bishops, with probably 2 or 3 exceptions out of more than 200, has been abject as ever, as shameful in their submission to blatant civil violation of the freedom of worship and their Pavlovian reflex of kowtowing to anyone they consider to be ´victims of society´. In which they mirror exactly what their pope in Rome and his Italian bishops have been doing. They would all make letter-perfect Muslims! (´Islam´ means submission, and that is what that faith demands of its subjects - unquestioning submission, faith without reason.

The Church collaborates in its own destruction
when it allies itself with anti'religious movement
by George Neumayr

June 21, 2020

One might think the Catholic Church would stand against the orgy of iconoclasm that we are witnessing across the country — toppled statues, defaced churches, and the like. But, no, the feeble voices of priests and bishops join the creepy chorus of the mob.

In California, the mob has targeted statues of Junipero Serra, the saintly Franciscan who spread the faith through a system of missions. Where is the Church to protect the statues? Nowhere. In Ventura, where the mob demands the removal of a Serra statue in front of its city hall, the Church has gone along with it, the Ventura Star reports.

In a joint statement released Thursday, Ventura Mayor Matt LaVere, Father Tom Elewaut of Mission San Buenaventura and Tumamait-Stenslie say they agree the statue should be removed from the public property.

The statue is a designated historic landmark, the statement says.
“We have listened and we have heard the calls from those in the community and believe the time has come for the statue to be taken down and moved to a more appropriate non-public location,” it says.

“We all believe that the removal of the statue should be accomplished without force, without anger and … without uncivil discourse, much less vandalism,” the statement says.

According to its website, Black Lives Matter seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”

It also seeks to build “a queer‐affirming network” and says, “When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of hetero'normative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”

These and other odious positions, such as “defund the police,” should generate condemnations from the Church. Instead, the bishops are tripping over themselves to praise the group’s movement.

The same bishops who wouldn’t dare attend a pro-life demonstration turn up at Black Lives Matter protests.
- Bishop Mario Dorsonville, who used to live with the rapist Theodore McCarrick, marched in one in Washington, D.C.
- After El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz took a knee with Black Lives Matter, he was rewarded with a phone call from the pope, commending him for his activism.
- Seitz even softpedaled the seriousness of the mayhem that followed George Floyd’s death, saying, “My brother bishop in Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, suggested we should be less quick to judge the proportionality of ‘their’ response and start talking about the proportionality of ‘ours.’ We also need to remember what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, that ‘a riot is the language of the unheard.’”.

In this politically correct frenzy, priests are expected to ratify the lying narrative ripping the country apart. Woe to those who don’t.
- Witness Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s acceding to the sacking of the MIT chaplain Fr. Daniel Moloney, who failed to bow to the propaganda of Black Lives matter by writing, “In the wake of George Floyd’s death, most people in the country have framed this as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that. Many people have claimed that racism is major problem in police forces. I don’t think we know that.” He will have to be sent off to the bishops’ re-education camp.

Under Pope Francis, the Church has a death wish, conferring its blessing upon a revolution that will consume it. In all the bishops’ blather about the “failures” of the Church, they never mention one of the failures at the root of the revolution: the Church’s inability to transmit faith and virtue to rising generations.

For decades, the Church has preached politics instead of holiness, which has just added to the woes of our anti-religious age.
- Out of her secularized schools have come pro-abortion “Catholic” pols who de-Christianize society and poison young minds.
- Nancy Pelosi and company cheer on the mob as they crush the last symbols of civilization.
- On the toppled statues of Junipero Serra, among others, are the fingerprints of Church officials who were too cowardly or faithless to defend them. The future chroniclers of this age will find it remarkable that they came down not in spite of the Church but in part because of her.