Catholic, Apostolic & Roman

May 2014

The Hierarchy of Culpability

THE EDITOR

 

Several months ago, while searching online, I stumbled momentarily onto a homepage with a small "Question Box" in which someone had asked: "Can those of you who are opposed to same-sex marriage give me an actual example of the harm it can cause?" This fleeting 'encounter' spoke volumes at multiple levels of Western decline.

Most obviously, the query underlined the widespread crass ignorance of a public forever starved of fundamental facts. Of course, it may well have been more rhetorical snipe than serious enquiry. Yet it had the ring of authenticity; a simple request from an average browser looking for a straight answer. Increasingly, the same quizzical line is dangled by those who should know better; otherwise sensible types whose incomprehension can leave us open-mouthed. It just goes to show how the decades of damage done to civil and sacramental marriage by contraception, concubinage, no-fault divorce, and the explosion of Catholic marriage annulments, has softened heads and hearts for easy turning by perverse propaganda.

In response, we should provide genuine truth-seekers with the relevant psychological and physiological stats: which individually and as a whole reveal homosexuality as a destructive addiction with private and public ramifications far beyond its statistical insignificance. Just as graphic photos of aborted babies are an effective blunt instrument for smashing through "pro-choice" euphemisms, so publicising the naked truth always and everywhere is basic to tearing down the homosexual facade. 

At the same time, since our emotionally incontinent world is often averse to facts, perhaps the most elementary and compelling answer to queries about the harm done by same-sex 'marriage' is: blood-ties. As Professor Miller articulates in her ensuing letter, only the innate natural bonds of blood within the family created by sexual marital activity can provide the basis of stable identities and responsibilities required for the moral order and structure upon which the state depends. Even indoctrinated dumbos will perceive (however faintly) that neither homosexuality nor laws can create "brothers and sisters, [and] future marriages that produce cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, great grandfathers and mothers, as well as great uncles and aunts": viz., the familial lineage of "natural world-building!"

Pyramid of guilt

Opening minds to fundamental truths in this way is essential. The universal ignorance needs constant redressing. Yet it merely treats the effect of a deeper cause which also requires regular explication. For if the Question Box petition spoke to the blindness all about us, it also gave voice to the bottom-rung contributors in the Hierarchy of Culpability: the sincerely clueless who walk in lockstep with a fearful leadership, both under the sway of the subversive entertainment-media conglomerates.

The latter have turned Gramsci's neo-Marxist "cultural transformation" into a glossy Luciferian art form: feeding the proles a steady diet of deceit and decadence that reinforces progressive-socialist educational deceptions imbibed from kindergarten to college (notably the anti-Catholic "Whig" interpretation of history). Concurrently, their menacing Sword of Damocles hangs over the democratic process, muting honest political discourse and keeping everyone on godless message as they unpick the Christian legislative fabric. In this way, the purposeful blackmail the self-serving and blind the hapless; leaving entire nations in thrall to the degenerate narrative spun 24/7. [Cf. "Media World" and "The BBC & Big Media Betrayal," CO, Feb. 2008]

The Faustian quid pro quo in this coercive world is the pseudo-liberty to indulge base instincts, even in public. Accordingly, the "post-Christian vacuum" — the big black hole once occupied by moral consensus and theologically grounded public policy — has been filled with debased, unprincipled, robotic citizens who love their sexually anarchic servitude.

Aldous Huxley famously foresaw this particular turn of events. In 1958, shortly after the publication of his famous novel, he gave a television interview to America's ABC News (available online), in which he neatly summarised his dystopian vision:

Now I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find... that if you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do, partly by drugs, as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by these new techniques of [media/advertising] propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the rational side of man, and appealing to his sub-conscious, deeper emotion, and his physiology, and so making him actually LOVE his slavery. I think actually this is the danger. That people will be in some way HAPPY under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy. [Huxley's emphases]

Quite apart from Huxley's prescience, from his 1920s Italian jail cell Antonio Gramsci himself could scarcely have envisioned such thoroughgoing vindication of his cunning plan: the universal progressive-socialist-Marxist upheaval ("transformation") of the popular Christian consensus and its social mores — quietly, carefully, and over time. Overseen by the "change agents" — the 60s radicals and their fellow-travellers who rose to give intellectual and organizational leadership to New Labour-style New Leftists the world over — this revolution by stealth and passivity was about transforming "repressive consciousness into a liberating one that makes socialist politics at a mass level possible." But Gramsci's migraine-inducing theoretical babble hardly matters, since it is realised in Western headlines every day of the week.

Abandoning virtue: redefining hypocrisy

Locally, the far-reaching Jimmy Saville sexual abuse scandal of recent years —  in which the Gramscian BBC was signally complicit — typifies the rot. Ditto current running reports about decades of still more heinous paedophilic and pederastic collusion and cover-ups perpetrated by all political parties and the highest levels of the British Establishment. What is all that if not Gramsci's goal of cultural transformation (read degenerate secularism) writ large?

The homosexual harassment and sodomising of young parliamentary researchers in the corridors of Westminster is just the latest offering from our Daily Theatre of the Grossly Absurd. Now dubbed the "Palace of Sexminster," the majority of its members voted only last year to destroy natural marriage in order to allow a small fraction of a sexually deviant 1% to play house, as the entertainment-media alternately cheered and bullied them on. Little wonder, therefore, that in voicing disgust over this latest scandal not a single self-righteous Lord, MP or journalist addressed the central problem: the bestial act itself. Quite the contrary.

One MP charged with multiple sexual assaults on young men, including a sodomitic rape, was exonerated, describing the alleged rape as "consensual sex." His post-acquittal interview in the Daily Mail concluded with a breezy desire, completely unremarked, to one day "marry" the man of his dreams. ... Nothing happening here folks... move along, move along....

Even the MP who raised the alarm about this political sodomite based on allegations made to her by a young man he buggered ("consensually," of course), at no point addressed the myriad problems with homosexuality per se. Yet she herself is both a GP and a member of the Commons Health Select Committee!

Beyond the fear-factor of going off PC message, at play here is the deconstruction of virtue. For this dutiful MP, virtue lay primarily in the righteous reporting of an allegation of "sexual harassment" because, she explained, her committee had called for doctors to be "struck off if they fail to report serious allegations about colleagues. It would have been rank hypocrisy to demand that standard from my fellow doctors while failing to be prepared to do so myself." True. And well done. But what about the "rank hypocrisy" of a doctor preaching national health while turning a blind eye to one of the most debilitating, not to say deathly sexual perversions known to man! One that drains the public purse of significant national health funds into the bargain, as a member of a select committee on health would be well apprised.

The point is this: the MP did not pause to consider virtue in the context of her political or medical duty to protect homosexuals themselves, and the public at large, from the effects of unvirtuous acts: in terms of what homosexuals do.

Still mocked for the duplicity of their "private vice and public virtue," at least the Victorians understood the value of Christian virtue as a protective benchmark by which to measure hypocrisy. Refashioned in Gramsci's godless image, their shameless successors have erased that Christian distinction. Private vice has now become public virtue. And in order to cope with this hedonistic inversion, duplicity has been redefined downwards. Today, only those who are 'not true to their true self' — i.e., who fail to act out their sins with sincerity —  are labelled as hypocrites.

The narrative goes like this: if you are sexually deviant, you were 'born that way,' and so not to embrace your sin and run with it would be contrary to your true character and natural behaviour: ergo, hypocritical. Even victims left in your wake (whether tax-payers who pick up the bill, those you infect, or infants softened-up for physical abuse by sex ed abuse) can be waved away as necessary "collateral damage": all part of promoting the greater goods of non-judgemental tolerance and self-esteem.

"O evil, be thou my good!"

The inculcation of this pagan worldview has not only cleansed the meaning of Christian moral virtues from young minds and self-centred adult memories, but their practical necessity for societal coherence and cohesion. The inevitable outcome has been the mainstreaming of debauchery and systemic malfeasance and misfeasance high and low (— from welfare cheating to the rampant tax evasion facilitated by British bankers and French lawyers, who help Russian Kleptocrats like Vlad Putin hide their mega-billions). And there is no bottoming out. In a world where breaking moral laws is now de rigueur — wherein Milton's "O evil, be thou my good!" has been adopted as a guiding principle — there is almost no conduct so perverse that it cannot be accommodated within the dominant liberal purview.

We can always rely on the Canadians to provide workaday examples of this degeneration. In early April, for instance, the Toronto Star duly reported that Toronto Trustees did not even debate a motion asking the city "to enforce no-nudity laws at Toronto's Pride Parade this summer. Instead, they took an immediate vote, and soundly defeated it." Sixteen trustees were against it and only six in favour. This plea to retain the most elementary public decorum was labelled "controversial" and the Trustee who proposed it labelled "homophobic." Among the Trustees, two grandmothers typified the capitulation to the zeitgeist; the abdication of all virtuous benchmarks by an ever increasing proportion of our erstwhile moral guardians. One perversely explained that public nudity would be tolerated "as a liberation protest that rejects shame, bias and judgments for people celebrating themselves for who they are." The other said she didn't understand the fuss — if people are uncomfortable looking at "dangly bits" then "avert your eyes." While yet another maternal figure noted that the Toronto District School Board has marched in the parade since 1996, stating that she had attended it many times with her two daughters "and they are just fine."

Perhaps most telling of all was the reaction of the Trustee who tabled the anti-nudity motion. He hastened to assure the Star that "he’s not a prude, and had visited nude beaches in Europe," adding for protective good measure that "he’s not opposed to homosexuality but rather the nudity at the parade."

Meanwhile, Western Christians not prepared to bend and lick the jackboots of their PC oppressors in this servile fashion are being kicked into submission for the most anodyne expression of their beliefs. Like Sarah Mbuyi, who worked as a nursery nurse at Newpark Childcare in Highbury, London, until a friendly homosexual colleague who often freely discussed Christianity with her could no longer bear the truth. A Christian Concern report of 20 April elaborates:

In January 2014, the colleague initiated another conversation with Sarah about Christianity. She said she was unhappy that she couldn't marry her female partner because of the church, and said she thought that God condoned homosexuality.

Miss Mbuyi explained: “When I said no God does not condone the practice of homosexuality, but does love you and says you should come to him as you are, she became emotional and went off to report me to my manager.

"I never ever condemned her, or accused her, but when she asked me directly what I believed, I was open about sharing the Bible’s teaching that homosexual sex (not the people) is
wrong. It's clear that this offended her and she was determined to get me sacked, simply because I expressed traditional Christian beliefs."

After a one-sided disciplinary hearing in which Sarah was falsely accused of starting the discussion on homosexuality, nursery directors dismissed her immediately for gross misconduct.
Presumably the directors were also aghast at Ms Mbuyi's calm response to their question about how she would feel if she was asked to read children’s storybooks featuring same-sex "parents." She replied that she would not be able to read such books. No serious Christian could answer otherwise.

Catholic Iron Law

With promiscuity, perversion and persecution now ingrained and institutionalised, the West is rushing to add its name to J.D. Unwin's list of over eighty extinct civilisations; every one of which, by transgressing their moral codes and repeating the "same situations... sentiments... [and] changes," produced the selfsame paganism and cultural suicide as its predecessors. [CO, June/July 2012]

On the purely material plane, Unwin's anthropological study demonstrates the fatal path trod by all societies which first disregard the natural law, soon deny its very existence, then turn transgressions of that innate rule of commonsense and self-preservation into a way of life: deconstructing and redefining Christian virtue and freedom in the process.

Ultimately, though, both the study and the daily evidence of our own eyes confirm the iron law of Catholic doctrinal, moral and social teachings: Christ or Chaos. To reject the former is to choose the latter: to opt for nature unsupported by Grace; the protective, transformative power flowing from the pierced side of Our Crucified Lord through the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments. Deprived of that supernatural source of resistance to the world, the flesh and the devil, Western peoples are easily herded into "happy servitude" to their insatiable appetites.

Luther's revolt coopted

In a post-Reformation world, desiccated protestant Cultures of Spiritual, Moral and Intellectual Death that mirror their ghastly progenitor, the rebellious and dissolute Martin Luther, are particularly susceptible to the temptations and machinations of spiritual and worldly powers. It has ever been thus, as testified everywhere by "national churches" which function as mere appendages of the state. German election patterns during Hitler's rise to power also attest to this easy accommodation with the prevailing zeitgeist: consistently revealing that Protestants voted for National Socialists in far greater numbers than Catholics in the same region. Similarly, the choice of Chaos over Christ unfolding in our time is, in very large part (millions of upright Protestant souls notwithstanding), endgame Protestantism: the final destination of the half-millennium trek to the abyss of sola scriptura Selfism. Antonio Gramsci merely piggy-backed and coopted it for his own long march to socialist revolution in capitalist countries. 

As the late Malachi Martin explained, it was precisely because he understood that Christian culture is the tie that binds people in all aspects of society, that Gramsci counselled his followers to join the capitalists in all aspects of life, from "their profession of ethical and religious goals" to their family needs and all social issues affecting their lives. The catch, said Martin, was that Gramsci admonished his followers to "let the entire effort be solely by man for man’s sake...." Above all else it was and remains, therefore, a Grace-less revolution: viz., Luther's revolt by other means (— latterly furthered by Paul VI's naturalistic "Civilisation of Love"; which man-centred vision, wrote Fr Luigi Villa, turns Catholicism into a fully democratised "super-Protestantism").

Consistent Death Ethic

"Cursed be the man that trusteth in man," cried Jeremiah. Apart from an attentive "remnant, chosen by grace" [Rom 11:5], however, he is still crying in the wilderness. And so the latest "evil and adulterous generation" [Matt. 12:39], of new pagans and CINOs of protestant pedigree, have mired us in the venal and venereal, holding us hostage to their virtual world: a place where Question Box Man not only doesn't laugh to scorn the Pythonesque absurdity of men "marrying" men, but cannot discern even one "actual example" of the danger posed by that fiction — never mind how it encapsulates the Culture of Sterility and Death.

On 8 April, just the day before the Toronto Star report about the "homophobic" attempt to clean up a pornographic Pride Parade, the New Zealand press featured two homosexuals and the baby girl they brought to an intimate play day with Prince George, who was in the country with his mum and dad. The Royal New Zealand Plunket Society invited 11 representative sets of parents with babies around George's age. As one of the sodomites bounced the child mother-like in his arms, Mercator.net commented:

Why should this little child be deprived of her mother? Nothing those men can do for her can replace the intimate bond between a mother and baby, or the uniquely maternal love for a child of whatever age. Is one of the men her natural father? If not she is doubly orphaned, and doubly wronged. She has been treated as an object of adult desire, not as a subject with the right to exist in a natural family. Once we start seeing other human beings as means to an end there is no limit to the evil any of us can do, and justify.

In that respect, "gay marriage" and "gay adoption" exemplify Gramsci's accursed man-centred philosophy and its ongoing corruption of Western life: manifesting as they do the same commodification of life that first rationalised killing babies en masse in utero, then the murder of anyone else under cover of "brain death" so that vital organs could be plundered from the living and recycled [Cf. CO, June-July 2004; April 2011].

That Britain's National Health Service has become an endless horror story is down to the same boundless means-justifies-the-selfish-ends mentality. If the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society sees no conflict between its institutional role of looking after the health of young children and condoning the adoption of children by men addicted to chronically unhealthy sexual acts, it is no more schizophrenic than a medical establishment that routinely murders its patients. Even the hospice movement, including Marie Curie, McMillan and other cancer charities, has dragged its staff and patients into this living hell. Commenting on the Liverpool Care Pathway — the notorious end-of-life 'process' (supposedly phased out but still operating under other guises) which has starved, dehydrated and/or drugged to death untold thousands of adults and children — ALERT and Distant Voices report that: "Case after case records [nurses] administering lethal doses with little regard for the protests of the patients or families and in full knowledge of the consequences. We need to ask the unimaginable of the Doctors, those Nurses and everyone involved: 'Did they who were carers become killers?'"

A godless world awash with information but little connected thought is not about to join all these dots. Yet doing so reveals "gay marriage" (Russian Roulette-by-mutual buggery) as a seamless part of this Consistent Death Ethic. The late Cardinal Bernadin sought to cover over that ugly truth with his disorienting Consistent Life Ethic, also known as the "Seamless Garment," which placed major life issues like contraception and abortion on a par with war, opposition to the death penalty, welfare reform and civil liberties. At a stroke, the insidious policy undermined Catholic teaching and enfeebled the pro-life movement. But it also entrenched the Gramscian agenda within the Church: for as Randy Engel points out, pro-life offices in the U.S. (and elsewhere) subsequently became "part of social justice offices which were mostly staffed by homosexuals."

Culpable hierarchy

As the mastermind of that diabolic inversion of reality, Bernadin was at the forefront of the episcopal march to the apex of the Hierarchy of Culpability; subverting the one religious Body with the universal ways and means to confront and confound civilisational decay. And his purposeful spirit lives on in the fading Western light. "If Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing," chortled Archbishop Fiorenza of Texas as the new Pope channelled Bernardin's Consistent Death Ethic to the world. With the homosexual network and its entertainment-media strike force tightening their chokehold on nations, Francis embraced, and was embraced in turn, by both parties. Finding "Common Ground" with the enemies of the Church (yet another Bernadin contrivance), he disqualified himself from hearing the case against them: "Who am I to judge?" he shrugged — instantly making a desperate situation within and without the Church immeasurably worse.

Pre-Francis, local hierarchies like those in the US and England had already approved homo-ministries. "Almost every major [American] city has 'homosexual parishes.' Run by homosexuals for the homosexual agenda," confirms Mrs Engel. That would include the "Rainbow Ministry" at St Cecilia's in Boston, whose Facebook page promotes the LGBT "lifestyle," as well as the radical PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) which boasts of its "official policy statement [opposing] any attempts at either the federal or state level to introduce constitutional amendments restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, rendering GLBT people second-class citizens." Reporting this unspeakable yet routine state of affairs on 24 April, the Angelqueen website posed the same question regularly addressed to the likes of Vincent Nichols, George Pell and so many other Western prelates: "Cardinal O’Malley: Why do you tolerate a ministry within the Archdiocese of Boston which promotes homosexual sex?"

Post-Francis, this episcopal complicity has deepened and broadened. Cardinal "Apeneck Sweeney" Dolan, America's guffawing Compromiser-in-Chief, leads the treacherous charge. Consider this transcript of his appearance on NBC TV's Meet the Press of 9 March 2014:

David Gregory: "Michael Sam, from your home state, the football player, revealed that he was gay, first in the NFL. And you saw the celebration from the president, the first lady, and they were saying what a courageous step that was. How did you view it?"

Cardinal Dolan: "Good for him. I would have no sense of judgment on him. God bless ya. I don’t think, look, the same Bible that tells us, that teaches us, well about the virtues of chastity and the virtue of fidelity and marriage also tells us not to judge people. So I would say, ‘Bravo'."

Effectively toasting a young man to an early grave and eternal damnation on national television, His Boorish Eminence is clearly emboldened. Almost overnight he has gone from presiding at the "gay" Mass at St. Francis Xavier's in Manhattan, to cheering on the perversion championed by all such Masses; an act so foul, revealed St. Catherine of Sienna, that even the demons who incite it depart the scene in disgust once the deed is done. Commented blogger Ann Barnhardt:

WHY does Dolan now feel fully liberated to ratify sodomy and increase his own worldly popularity by his complete indifference to sin, manifested in this sick permissiveness of objective evil?  Because Pope Francis has thrown open the barn door. Dolan – like the Advocate magazine and every other tool and mouthpiece for satan on the planet – quotes Pope Francis Bergoglio specifically:  Who am I to judge?

That papal green light opened the floodgates. On 10 March the Archbishop of Lucca (Tuscany) received a group of journalists for his annual chat. The talk, moderated by a renowned Vaticanist, Raffaele Luise, was reported by Lucca in diretta:

The evening concluded with a debate in depth on the matter of homosexuality. Both Luise and the archbishop praise, in substance, the opening of the Church regarding gays and de facto couples. Particularly for Luise, ... "a cultural revolution [is necessary], that contemplates the fact that homosexuality is not a deviancy, but a human attitude, and not just that, considering that almost 500 natural species display homosexuality." "The new paradigm" - says Bishop Castellani - "is that every diversity is richness. In my life as a parish priest, I saw and lived so many situations [he describes a few]; and I am convinced that the time has come for Christians to open up to diversity."

Rorate Caeli threw up its hands: "From 'who am I to judge' to 'bravo' to 'every diversity is richness'... Is it pointless? Have we arrived at a point where it is pointless to argue? Is much of the hierarchy willing to leave us alone defending what the Church (the Apostles whose successors they are!) has always taught? Is that the situation of the defense of Christian faith and morals today: every man for himself...?" A few months earlier, in an open letter to the Programme Director of Radio Maria Italy, who sacked him for criticising Pope Francis, the late Professor Mario Palmaro decried the hierarchical dereliction at greater length:

The point is however, whether we want to admit this [situation], dispute and denounce it, or whether we want to play smart and hide behind the "Who am I to judge". The point is also whether this worldwide Sodom and Gomorrah merit the language of mercy and comprehension.

Well, then, I wonder, why don’t we also reserve the same mercy for the traffickers of chemical weapons, the slave-traders and financial embezzlers? Aren’t they also poor sinners? Right? Or do I have to ask [Cardinal] Schönborn to meet them for lunch and evaluate their purity?

Dear Director, the situation by now is very clear: any Catholic politician, intellectual or journalist even if he wants to fight on the homosexualist front, will find himself spiked in the back by the mysticism of mercy and forgiveness. We are all completely de-legitimized, and any bishop, priest, theologian, director of a diocesan weekly or politician of the Catholic-democratic-type can shut us up with that “Who am I to judge”. We would be riddled with shots like a farm pheasant in a hunting chase ....

Dear Director, our problem is not Matteo Renzi [now Prime-Minister and in favour of homosexual civil unions].

Our problem, my problem, is that the other day the Holy Father said the Gospel "is not proclaimed with doctrinal beatings, but with sweetness." Also here, I would please ask "normalists" and timewasters to abstain. Even I know that effectively the Gospel is announced like that – apart from the fact that John the Baptist had rather brusque methods himself, and the Lord defines him "as the greatest among those born of woman".

But you know very well that with that little sentence, we have both been spiked like codfish.

We have ... been fighting against legalized abortion, divorce, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, homosexual unions and cunning politicians like Matteo Renzi, who are promoting and spreading all that stuff. But there you have it, we are both irremediable doctrinal bashers, people without charity, ethicists, "theologians". ... as some [Catholic] journalist calls us.

[O]ur problem and the problem of Catholics and ordinary people is not Matteo Renzi.

The problem is our Mother Church, who has decided to abandon us in the jungle of Vietnam: the helicopters have taken off and we have been left where we’ll let ourselves, one at a time, be spiked by the “Vietcong relativists.”

[...] However, I still have the problem of that seven-year-old son of mine and theree older ones too. ... Because last night I couldn't sleep. And because I’d like to understand – and ask the readership ... a question: What more has to happen in the Church for Catholics to stand up, once and for all, and shout their indignation from the rooftops? Attention: I am addressing individual Catholics, not associations, secret meetings, movements, sects which for years have been managing the brains of the faithful for the benefit of third parties, dictating the line the followers have to take. ... No, no: here I am making an appeal to individual consciences, to their hearts, their faith and their virility. Before it is too late.

On 9 March, two months after he posted this plea online, Palmaro passed away,aged 45. Before he died, Pope Francis had telephoned him to assure him that he knew the strong criticisms Palmaro had made in a similar co-authored article titled "We do not like this Pope" [Il Foglio, 9/10/13], were made with love, and that it was important to receive them.

A nice gesture. But it did not address Palmaro's cast-iron condemnations of Dolan, Castellani. Kasper, Ackermann et. al., or his fears about the frightening leadership vacuum embodied in "Who am I to judge?"

Indeed, one easily imagines Francis hanging up after comforting Palmaro, pausing to reflect on humility and mercy, then opening up his laptop and responding to our original Question Box query with yet another catastrophic question, tilting the Barque of Peter even further portside.

Identity and purpose

The hierarchical 'list to the left' under Francis is gratefully received by a flock steeped in sin and stripped of its Catholic persona. With all parties happily compromised, complicit CINOs the world over continue to receive Holy Communion from acquiescent bishops and clergy; all blithely contributing to the Consistent Death Ethic killing off the West.

Politicians are among the worst offenders. The British MPs who insisted that their vote for "gay marriage" was in perfect accord with magisterial teaching personify this Church Convergent and its Counterfeit Gospel. Apoplectic when their erroneous understanding of the formation and role of Catholic conscience was expertly pointed out and corrected by the Editor of Catholic Truth, Pat McKeever (M. Theol.), they were succoured by the "Catholic" press which allowed them to vaunt their ignorance while issuing ad hominem attacks against a righteous accuser. All the while, their studied desire not to knowthe truth was matched by the determination of bishops and clergy not to call them to account.

This degradation of the True Faith which raised up the West is a gift to the enemies of that hard won Christian culture. It saves them the trouble of storming ramparts and all that messy medieval stuff that went on in the bad old days: when Catholics knew who they were, what they were defending, and why. Nowadays this self-assured boot is well and truly on the other foot.

Commenting on the latest rabid attack by the homosexual collective which forced out the pro-marriage CEO of the Mozilla web browser, the editor of Catholic World Report, Carl Olson, noted the crystal clear declarations of intent by leading homosexual activists. Such as author Urvashi Vaid, who boldly declared: "We have an agenda to create a society in which homosexuality is regarded as healthy, natural, and normal. To me that is the most important agenda item." While lawyer Paula Ettelbrick has stated: "Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and ... transforming the very fabric of society. ... We must keep our eyes on the goals of providing true alternatives to marriage and of radically reordering society’s view of reality."

Before these demonic goals expressed with supreme self-confidence and commitment, Olson ponders rhetorically: "Do most Catholics understand what is going on?" Answering:

I don’t think so. When you congratulate a football player for "coming out" and announcing that he is "gay," you are playing by the rules of the new "morality", regardless of how kind and upbeat you want to be. When Catholic parents rail against a Catholic school for having a Catholic nun present Catholic moral teachings about marriage and sexuality, you are not just waving the white flag — you are completely unaware of the battle or the stakes involved.

Even worse than the ignorance, unawareness and weakness, is the sheer lack of interest in their robust ancestors and the sense of identity and purpose that defined them. Echoing the fears of Mario Palmaro, the former President of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, recently noted this apathy: "Christianity is so consubstantial with the West that any surrender on its part would have devastating consequences. But will the Church, the clergy and the faithful, be able to and want to be purified of the relativism that has almost erased their identity and weakened their message and witness?"

As ever, the onus is on the informed remnant to stand firm: to remain faithful in word and deed and burst the perverse bubble of unreality. In a Church and world so thoroughly dumbed-down and comfortably enslaved it is an overwhelming task and responsibility. But whatever the cost, it is infinitely preferable to the alternatives: forever answering questions with questions; sharing the culpability for tearing up the Christian foundations; leading souls to Hell. We should heed Our Lord's perfect counsel and leave such ignominy to complicit popes and prelates and those who follow them, lest we share their ignominious fate:

Let them alone: they are blind, and leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit. - Matt 15:14

 

 

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