April 2000
CONSPIRATIO AND CONVERGENCE
THE EDITOR
For several decades alas, and especially in more recent years as the British subset of the universal Church has all but faded without trace into the twilight zone of Modernist pride, disobedience and self-destruction, this publication has perforce contained too many repellent words: treachery, hypocrisy, corruption, perversion, cowardice, negligence, complicity, de-facto schism, etc. And with the recent appointment of the Modernist Bishop of Arundel and Brighton to succeed his lamentable predecessor at Westminster, the immediate future appears to offer no relief. At a stretch, one might have held that all was not yet entirely lost and that Rome had one final chance to get it right. As a measure of how badly they have failed us we need only consider the Archbishop-elect's first public utterance to the secular press on the benchmark question of contraception: "people have to make up their own minds about it" [Evening Standard, 18/2/00]. Basil Hume lives!
So there you have it. In the person of Cormac Murphy-O'Connor we are merely being offered eight more years of the same. A man who will further ecumenise, bureaucratise, compromise, temporise, scandalise, protestantise and, ultimately, smile us all to death; who appears destined to turn the last sod on England's spiritual grave. And that because the present situation in England and Wales is so parlous that even if his resignation were to be accepted on his 75th birthday in 2007, at a continued annual "lapsation" rate of 30,000+ per year (and set to rise exponentially thereafter due to the high median age of practicing Catholics), this tiny local Church will have passed the point of no return, in the sense of its capacity to launch a meaningful recovery of orthodox, practicing membership. A truly remnant Church of present day Scandinavian proportions is nigh.
The Establishment sycophants who peddle their pens (and sell their souls) in the marketplace of Britain's irrelevant "Catholic" press have surpassed themselves with spurious, stomach-churning prose about the Murphy-O'Connor appointment, crawling on their bellies to laud this "affirmation of an inclusive [Catholic] future in British institutions" [Alleluiah! old chap]; this "powerful symbol of ethnic diversity and common civic identity" [his Anglo-Irish roots - geddit!?]; this "candidate with impeccable Roman credentials… open to the projects of the future papacy and more useful as an engine to drive the train of English Catholicism along tracks designed to get the best possible results from Britain's future in Europe" [er… pardon?]. But enough sycophantic drivel! Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Modernist wasteland Bishop Murphy-O'Connor and his army of newchurch clerocrats and bureaucrats have carved out of Arundel and Brighton over the past 23 years - exemplified in His Lordship's contraceptive sell-out above - knows better. As do those who recall how Murphy-O'Connor, as joint Chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, sold-out the Catholic side with one compromise after another, leaving the Vatican no option but to dismiss ARCIC's final report as severely deficient from a Catholic doctrinal standpoint. By any objective reckoning, the term 'ecumaniac' was coined for this languid episcopal diplomat. Meanwhile, the worst Modernist RE programmes blacken the souls of his schoolchildren and his seminary lies largely empty.
While there was understandable relief in lay and priestly quarters that Bishop Vincent Nichols, a Pascendi prototype, did not get Westminster and thus tie up that influential position for twenty years, his promotion to Birmingham is in fact far more significant and telling than Murphy-O'Connor's stop-gap appointment. Indeed, it tells us more about Rome than anything else. The curia had been supplied with chapter and verse about this decidedly un-Catholic prelate - considered even by the dissenting likes of the Duke of Norfolk to be "too obviously ambitious" for his own good [Daily Mail 16/2/00] - all to no avail. Thus we now have as head of one of the major sees in the land, a priest so ignorant of the claims of the one true Church he is consecrated under God to protect, that last year he categorically informed a national television audience that "God is not a Catholic!" So much for the Mystical Body of Christ and the conversion of England.
The other side of all this, of course, is that both these clerics are protégés of the man who took the "Roman" out of Catholic and turned false-ecumenism into a corrosive art form, the late Archbishop Derek Worlock. Given that damning link and especially what Rome knew about Vincent Nichols' heterodoxy before its decision to promote him, one can only turn again to Father Crane's common-sense thesis of conspiratio, the Latin word from which conspiracy is derived and which means a "breathing together". The distinction to be made between conspiracy in its narrow and simple sense and conspiratio is the difference between the manipulators and the manipulated. As Father explained it: "like-minded men - in an Establishment, say, or what we might call a peer group - will tend to move together in certain directions without conspiring - in the narrow sense of the word - to do so. At the same time, this in no way prevents the few, who are engaged in a real conspiracy, from working on the prejudices of these who are "conspirating" but not conspiring, and manipulating these to suit the basic interests of the manipulators and so of the real conspiracy itself… It has happened time and again in the history of the Church. I am very sure it is happening at the present time."
Without doubt the Church has been infiltrated over the years, as recently released KGB archives and various ex-Communists have attested, though just how many Marxist and Masonic infiltrators (conspirators) have risen to the upper echelons of the curia and national episcopates to manipulate those Modernists "'conspirating' but not conspiring," we may never know. At any rate, at least in terms of conspiratio, this unconscionable Vatican rewarding of an arch-Modernist with an archbishopric and a party line plodder with a probable red hat would seem to make sense only within the framework of Fr. Crane's understanding, which thesis ultimately is all about "convergence." Effectively, these appointments confirm and give fresh Vatican impetus to that ongoing psycho-spiritual convergence of a dissident Church with a neo-pagan world; presented in our February 1997 edition as the marriage of the Second Kulturkampf and the Second Reformation. Readers who prefer to delve beneath the surface of things might bear in mind this unholy convergence in terms of the broader, debilitating impact of such Modernist episcopal appointments vis-à-vis the simultaneous conspiracy and conspiratio at work outside the Church - for instance, in New World Order machinations as sketched in this edition.