Catholic, Apostolic & Roman
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June-July 2012

APOSTASY & INSANITY

THE EDITOR


Europe is skirting the abyss of financial and social collapse. Already the extreme right and left are stoking the flames of discontent, not only on the continent but also in England where the race-baiting (anti-Muslim) "rallies" of the English Defence League effectively close down towns like Luton: costing millions to police; damaging harmonious community relations; and frightening the populace, especially the elderly and frail who become prisoners in their own homes.

As surreal as this jack-booted menace may seem in modern Britain, it is not so surprising. A hateful indifference to the plight of the vulnerable and innocent defines our workaday culture of death and decay. If the thuggish far right intimidate the elderly, government and mainstream society also betray them. Commenting on the soaring rates of malnutrition caused by rising energy bills that force many to choose between eating or heating, the charity Age Concern said "It is estimated that one million older people are malnourished. Every case is preventable." A spokesman for the National Pensioner's Convention added: "The way older people are looked after in the community is failing on a grandiose scale" [Daily Mail, 28/5/12]. This failure is a manifestation of the moral vacuum behind a selfish continuum that starts with societal disregard for the near 600 babies murdered in utero every passing British day. (A SPUC team accompanying the Olympic Torch journey through the UK calculated that 40,000 babies will be killed in that 70-day period alone).

The point here is not to address these matters in detail. It is just to say that normally we would expect a glut of epochal developments to fully occupy the minds of our political representatives and fill the pages of the press. Yet faced with such alarming realities we find politics and media gripped and dominated by a fantasy fiction called "gay marriage."

"Completely nuts"
It beggars belief that pressing matters of the day are trumped by a mere hobby horse pushed by a tiny "gay lobby" that hardly speaks for the majority of homosexuals, never mind the remaining 98% of society. Even with the single currency and Europe hanging by a thread, the Lavender Mafia effortlessly orchestrated a European parliamentary debate of a pro-homosexual/anti-family resolution: "Fight against homophobia in Europe." Subsequently passed on 24 May, it called upon all member states to legalize same-sex registered partnerships and “marriage.”

Like "gay marriage" itself, however, the European Parliament vote (430 votes in favour of the resolution to 105 against) was spurious; trumpeting an overwhelming support for the "gay" agenda that simply does not exist beyond incestuous ideological circles. In America, majorities of blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women, and Republicans and Democrats all oppose "gay marriage" (32 States have already endorsed natural marriage at the ballot box). Similarly, among the UK public as a whole it is widely opposed. A recent survey conducted for the Mail on Sunday confirmed the fact, as did a ComRes poll that found 70% of the public want to keep the current definition of marriage. Not that marriage can be redefined by votes or polls. But it puts the mendacious spin of the liberal commissars in stark perspective. As the Tory Minister for Children and Families, Tim Loughton, wrote to the single constituent who contacted him in May:

"I do not see why we need to change the law, especially at his time when there are so many other important matters for the Government to be addressing. Until now I have not received a single letter from a constituent pressing me to support gay marriage."

The fact that over half a million signatures have already been gathered by the Coalition for Marriage petition, the biggest active campaign in the UK, confirms Mr Loughton's understanding and experience. This is echoed by many other Tory MPs who refuse to support Mr Cameron's destructive urge to redefine the foundational unit of civilisation in fantastical terms. The defiance was captured by backbencher Peter Bone. In early May, during Commons questions about the (contrived) government consultation on "gay marriage," he bluntly declared:

"Wouldn't it just be very simple to write back and say: 'Marriage is between a man and a woman so this is completely nuts'."

Totalising Agenda
It would indeed be very simple to tell them it is all nonsense. That much is clear. What is not always so readily grasped is that it is dangerous nonsense — pursued with subversive intent and purpose far beyond the issue at hand. Atheistic political and media elites do not expend such ferocious energy on promoting this nutty issue for nothing. It is all about the insatiable quest for control: domination of the public square by demonising Christian thought and practice. As Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor railed during a 16 May talk in Leicester, supporters of secular values do not tolerate dissent and their ambition to eliminate religious belief is "very very dangerous." He said:

"In the name of tolerance it seems to me tolerance is being abolished....The propaganda of secularism and its high priests want us to believe that religion is dangerous for our health. It suits them to have no opposition to their vision of a brave new world, the world which they see as somehow governed only by people like themselves."

The Cardinal noted how "conveniently" the secular humanists forget that secularism itself does not guarantee freedom or rationality, just as they forget that "in the last century, most violence was perpetrated by secular states on their own people."

Only several days before the Cardinal spoke, as if to underline his concerns, the Law Society revoked the booking of their premises for a major marriage conference hosted by Christian Concern and the World Congress of Families ("One Man One Woman - Making the case for marriage, for the good of society”). Although the conference was to feature a contribution by senior High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge, the Society claimed that the event was contrary to its ‘diversity’ policy. In a stroke, it effectively reduced ‘Diversity’ to 'Deviancy Alone' (i.e. to unnatural sex, its practitioners and advocates). In response, Christian Concern's David Skinner wrote:

The daylight appears to be drawing in when we will no longer be able to write or say anything that does nothing less than celebrate homosexuality. Perhaps we have only a matter of a few years or even months before the LGBT juggernaut silences us completely.

Stonewall would now seemingly exert almost total control of the judiciary, legislature and political machinery of our once-free nation. Let us not forget how Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission attempted to destroy Mr and Mrs Bull and their B&B business, Chymorvah, in Cornwall, because they refused to allow two men to have sex under their roof, in their beds. Here we are being denied access to a major event in the heart of London because we affirm the traditional view of marriage.

And just last month, our [Christian] advert, on 26 London buses, was banned by Boris Johnson, mayor of London, who abused his position to silence our voice. In my view, this is merely a rehearsal for a fast-approaching totalitarian state.

The primate of Belgium, Archbishop Léonard, who does not approve of government using the “majority rule” principle to decide issues of great social importance like the definition of marriage and the “difference between men and women,” concurs. He said his views on homosexuality are “the same as Freud: it is an imperfectly developed stage of human sexuality which contradicts its inner logic. Homosexuals have encountered a blockage in their normal psychological development, rendering them abnormal. I know that in a few years, I will risk prison by saying this, but it could offer me vacations.”

Secular Allies
In the wake of the Law Society ban, American Brian Brown, President of The National Organization for Marriage, wrote a 24 May despatch from London for his US supporters. Revealing how even hardcore liberals are reacting against this totalitarian push by their merciless brethren, it is worth reproducing at length:

I flew to Europe this week to spread the good news: marriage is a winning issue! I was in London. The Law Society had banned the conference. So the organizers switched the venue to the Queen Elizabeth II Center, which is actually owned by the government. The managers of the QE2 Center waited until the night before the event to ban the conference against gay marriage — again. We assembled at a London hotel instead. Here's what I told the crowd:

"I'm an American — so I'm a bit of a rebel. You guys have accomplished something amazing here. Six months ago you gave yourselves only a ten percent shot of derailing David Cameron's gay marriage bandwagon. Now it's a fifty-fifty battle, a result of a genuine rebellion of the people against the elites who looked at polls and were going to throw in the towel."

And I told them, that's exactly what has happened in the U.S., over and over again. Political elites try to shut down the debate, they tell us it's impossible to win. Then we win, over and over again.

Phillip Blond is an important public intellectual in Great Britain. He's behind David Cameron's emphasis on localism and the true diversity it encourages. He's not behind the Prime Minister's absurdly counterproductive embrace of gay marriage.

He's actually taken the position that gay marriage is "homophobic" for forcing gay people out of authentic diversity into an institution designed by and for opposite sex couples. Domestic partnerships, he says, offer homosexual people a chance to develop their own diverse cultural norms.

Philip Blond showed up at the conference, and sat there tweeting a response to all those who claimed he was hanging out with bigots, saying more or less 'I haven't heard anything homophobic, and the way to get me to show up at something is to try to ban it.'

Philip Blond is not the only rebel for marriage! Brendan O'Neil used to publish a Marxist magazine. He now edits his own progressive online journal Spiked.
After the amazing victory for marriage in North Carolina, he published an essay in The Telegraph chronicling the open hatred and insults directed at an entire state by elites:

The bile being spat at the people of North Carolina exposes the ugly elitism of the gay-marriage lobby.

This orgy of bile, from the mainstream branding of North Carolina's voters as 'ignorant' to the peripheral demands that they do the world a favour and kill themselves, shows what is behind the gay-marriage campaign. This is not about rights and equality, or love and happiness. Rather, gay marriage has become a tool through which the right-minded sections of society express their moral superiority over the dumb, the brainwashed, the insufficiently cosmopolitan, the churchgoing. Gay marriage has become a kind of weapon, wielded by the right-on to demonstrate that they are better—that is, less brainwashed and more caring—than your average redneck or country black. Supporting gay marriage has become a kind of cultural signifier, a way of distinguishing oneself from the ignorant throng.

Given all this, it is possible that the voters of North Carolina were not only voting against gay marriage, but were also sticking two fingers up at the sneering cultural elite which has been hectoring them for weeks to do "the right thing" and embrace "liberal values." In the intensively divided America of 2012, being against gay marriage can now be seen almost as an act of political rebellion, against a faraway elite which fears and loathes anyone who is not like them.

A New York progressive named Sean Collins was inspired (I suspect in part by Brendan's courage) to rebel and come out as another progressive opponent of gay marriage:

In this environment, those who disagree with, or have questions about, gay marriage will feel tremendous pressure to start conforming. Opposing gay marriage has become a view that "dare not speak its name". Following Obama, expect more public figures to be called upon to recant and say 'I now believe'./p>

Well, count me out. I will not join the cultural elite's bandwagon, a bandwagon that runs on self-flattery and the demonisation of 'backward' voters. Critics of the same-sex marriage campaign are here, and we're not all bible-thumping Christians — get used to it.

[...] At some point even the Manhattan liberals are going to start questioning a movement that seeks to brand the majority of the black and the white working class as "bigots."

What is left of progressivism as a movement of the working classes against the elites? What is left but open disdain for the views and values of the people whose interests progressives claim to champion?

An Associated Press reporter this week rebelled against the directive that all portrayals of people who oppose gay marriage "MUST" be unsympathetic.

Another opponent of gay marriage, April Brown of Lewisville, Texas, told the AP "I was evolving, definitely, just like [President Obama]," said Brown, the mother of four. But not in the same direction!

Until a few years ago, Brown said she was heading toward acceptance of the idea of civil unions for gay couples. But she was troubled after reading about a lawsuit filed by a gay man against the eHarmony dating site, demanding it provide matchmaking for gays and lesbians. That struck a chord because Brown knew two straight couples who had met through eHarmony and gotten married. While same-sex couples might argue they had a right to be together, what gave gays or lesbians the right, she wondered, to demand a private business change its ways to suit them?

"I just began kind of questioning, what do they really want?"

Useful Idiots
The answer to Ms Brown's query depends on which "they" is in question. We know that militant homosexuals "really want" the sexual free-for-all denied them by their bête noire: the infuriating little man in white who guards and proclaims divine and natural law. Their New World Order facilitators, on the other hand, want absolute power. Insofar as "gay" ideologues help them reach this objective, these higher powers will pander to their obsessions, assisting their mutually beneficial war against the Catholic bulwark and nature itself.(1)Ultimately, when they have outlived their usefulness and the powers have got what "they really want," the homosexual collective will be summarily discarded, like all "useful idiots."

Until that fateful day, the "gay"-driven PC oppression engineered by the secular elite intensifies, betraying its essentially Marxist pedigree. Among 45 Communist Goals exposed in the US Congress by Hon. A.S. Herlong Jnr on Thursday, Jan. 10, 1963, as listed on pp. A34-A35 of the Congressional Record, we find the following entry:

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

Fifty years on, the cultural Marxists have moved beyond the presentation of the abnormal as normal, to the penalisation of critics. A grab bag of daily headlines tells the tale:

This manic drive to criminalise the Christian conscience with a view to total control of our thoughts and lives is utterly self-defeating: not only alienating many liberals but fuelling resentment among ordinary citizens towards peaceable homosexuals perfectly content with their lot. It is also contributing to the rise of nasty reactionary movements. Yet far worse than opportunistic neo-fascists are the aforementioned NWO powerbrokers; the self-serving Rockefeller brigade for whom chaos of any kind — social, political, economic or financial — whether unintended or engineered by proxy, is always a win-win situation. “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste," President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, smugly opined. "It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” Indeed. Like curtailing more freedom and centralising more power.

Suicidal Trajectory
Meantime, as myriad opportunities to capitalise on economic and financial cataclysm open up (at the further expense of national sovereignty), the complacent West continues on its fateful path; the way of all decadent civilisations.

It was the same story in Ancient Rome, during the decline of the republic, writes Pitirim A. Sorokin in The American Sex Revolution [1956]. “The growth of sexual anarchy, divorces, desertions and orgies; of emancipation and ‘masculinization’ of women and effemination of men, together with radical changes in marriage and family laws, which largely dissolved their sacredness and inviolability, and an attendant decrease of birth rate, proceeded hand in hand with a growth of irreligiosity and of vulgar sensualist ethics and frame of mind.”

Talk about déjà vu all over again! Having explained the familiar cause, Sorokin goes on to explain the very contemporary effect:

“Since a disorderly sexual life tends to undermine the physical and mental health, the morality, and the creativity of its devotees, it has a similar effect upon a society that is composed largely of profligates. And the greater the number of profligates, and the more debauched their behavior, the graver are the consequences for the whole society. And if sexual anarchists compose any considerable proportion of its membership, they eventually destroy the society itself.”

The proof is in the repetitive pudding. In his 1934 classic work, Sex and Culture, British anthropologist J.D. Unwin studied 80 societies, analyzing their cultural beliefs and practices, especially as related to sex and marriage. This study included the primitive societies of history and his own time, as well as ancient cultures like the Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, English, and others.

Whether or not a society had moved from an uncivilized state to a civilized state, and whether it was manifesting creative energy, was a direct product, Unwin said, of how sexually permissive the culture was. He defined this by identifying various degrees of “sexual opportunity.” The more sexual opportunity a society’s people had — that is, the fewer restraints placed upon sexual habits — the less energetic it would be.

Penalties for breaching the moral code might take the form of cultural disapproval, punishment, banishment, or even death. Together the variations of social reproach limited sexual opportunity. These restraints were normally tied to marriage, and the historical evidence showed that absolutely monogamous cultures were the strongest. “In the records of history, indeed, there is no example of a society displaying great energy for any appreciable period unless it has been absolutely monogamous,” Unwin said.

Thus, if "gay marriage" guarantees physical extinction, Unwin's findings also confirm its destructive cultural effect — since 'monogamous homosexuality' is an oxymoron, Typically, among a UK sample of 252 coupled "gay" men, 56.3% were in relationships that allowed for outside sex [Hickson et.al., 1992]. In a 1984 Danish survey of homosexual men in the towns of Copenhagen and Aarhus, just "8% and 9% respectively reported that they had been monogamous during the past year, but 5% and 2% claimed to have had at least 100 sex partners during the same 1-year period." German homosexual author Martin Dannecker ran his own survey among young homosexuals and found 80% admitted to more than 20 partners since their first sexual experience, while "more than one in seven turned out to have had sex with more than 50 men in the previous year."

Ergo, a vote for any form of "gay" partnership is a vote for regression to paganism and cultural suicide. For whenever a people began to transgress their own moral codes — when sexual opportunity was extended in both pre-marital and extra-marital sexual freedom — across the board, Unwin found, such cultures began to decay. “In every case the same situations arose; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions.”

Posturing Prelates
Although Sorokin stated that a society undergoing this corruption “rarely succeeds in stopping the catastrophic drift, and is usually carried on to gravest catastrophe,” he also noted that “by the law of polarization … a minor part of the population tends to become more religious, morally heroic, and sexually continent in the periods of disorders and great calamities.” Bearing witness, this minority may help the dissolute majority to "‘discover’ the minority’s creative achievements, which then grow in influence and often become the dominant factors in the recuperation of the society from its madness."

Sorokin credited the Christian faith with doing just that within the Roman Empire. “Salvation and regeneration [in Roman culture] came from Christianity with its anti-materialistic, anti-sensualistic, and anti-erotic system of values and moral commandments. … Christianity was able to curb greatly the prevailing sexual anarchy and to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family, and the normal or lawful forms of sex activity.”

Thus, per usual, the Church is our only hope. Yet that list of 45 Communist Goals gives us pause. For immediately after the injunction to promote homosexuality, the comrades are urged to:

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."

Judging by the secular response to homosexuality by Social Gospel prelates like Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, the Comintern can tick off point "27" as done and dusted!

Patron and protector of the notorious "gay" Masses held at the church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory in Soho, Archbishop Nichols has ignored local protests and refused repeated Vatican requests to stop these blasphemous parodies of the Holy Sacrifice. A video clip of the 3 July 2011 Soho bidding prayers revealed his vile complicity. Posted online and forwarded to him, it showed a drag queen on the sanctuary praying for God to bless "various communities ... of gender and diverse sexual orientations [who] find means to celebrate this diversity, and strive for greater social justice, and civil liberties for all people."

An unrepentant transvestite let loose in full kit before the Body and Blood of Christ, in a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to petition God to bless sexual deviancy, is not an image one associates with Catholic worship! Yet Archbishop Nichols remains steadfast in his false charity: preferring this blasphemy and sacrilege reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah, or Dante's voyage through the nine circles of hell, to the exercise of genuine compassion towards these poor souls. Left to wallow in their sins, what will become of them? Could he care less?

This is why the Archbishop's objections to "gay marriage" do not ring true. In keeping with his studied capitulation to the "gay" agenda in general (cf. CO, Nov. 2010, pp. 9-53), his bloody-minded support of the Soho outrage against all the damning evidence (cf. CO, Nov. 2010, pp. 38-53) disqualifies him as a plausible guide.

Nor is this betrayal the least surprising since he continues to laud the pro-"gay" line of his dissident mentor, Cardinal Hume, who brazenly misrepresented the Catholic position articulated by Rome in its 1992 document, Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons. That rank subversion convinced Fr Michael McCarthy that "Basil Hume is acting as a cardinal of the homosexual lobby teaching their ideology to the Church, not as a cardinal of the Church teaching Church doctrine to others, including homosexuals" (CO, Feb 1997).

Likewise Vincent Nichols, who has made this accommodation with the world his own, as flagged by his favourite mantra — "stable relationships"; an insidious phrase he championed as a worldly compromise during the "Section 28" fracas over the teaching of homosexuality in schools. Other prelates follow his hypocritical lead; decrying the homosexual advance while making common cause with it. Despite his "conservative" tag, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, for one, has long sponsored similar "gay" Masses. And like Archbishop Nichols, he too has aired his worldly compromise on national TV. Asked about "gay marriage" during a live debate with atheist Richard Dawkins, the Cardinal said: “We believe that marriage is between a man and a woman; that it’s for the continuity of the human race. We believe that men and women are made for one another spiritually, psychologically, physically… But for a homosexual couple to have a union? Well and good and there’s no reason they shouldn’t” [Q&A, ABC TV, 9/4/12]. In fact, as the ensuing catechetical clarification explains, there is every salvific reason why they should not!

On the one hand, the Church is all that stands between freedom and the criminalisation of our Catholic conscience by a sinister elite in cahoots with the Lavender Mafia; a "legalistic persecution" which Pope Benedict attributes to the orchestrating work of the Masons (CO, Oct. 2011, p.7). On the other, posturing prelates fuel the diabolic assault, capitulating to the zeitgeist instead of standing firm before it.

Apostasy & Insanity
We've seen it all before: the Catholic fort not breached but betrayed; its protective ramparts abandoned by "watchmen... all blind ... all ignorant: dumb dogs not able to bark, seeing vain things, sleeping and loving dreams" (Isaiah 56:10). This is the treacherous truth behind the Holy Father's apocalyptic lament that "In vast areas of the earth, faith is in danger of being put out, as a flame that finds no more fuel." For the spiritual exhaustion of a world bearing all the symptoms of its end is not fuelled by "gay marriage" and other perverse fantasies. Rather, it is fostered by lukewarm shepherds being towed along by a world that passes away. Forgetting the world (and Judgement) to come, they have ushered in the plague of Apostasy: emboldening the wicked; imperilling civilisation itself.

So, while persevering in prayer for our diabolically disoriented bishops, entrusting all to Jesus through Mary, let us work as if the "recuperation of society from its madness" depends on us. Buffeted by raging apostasy and hurricane force insanity, let's resolve to bear unyielding Catholic witness: avoiding every seductive snare and heady compromise, as exhorted by Blessed John Henry Newman, who wrote with prophetic clarity:

Surely there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it. Whether this very Apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, as he has already been delayed so long, we cannot know; but at any rate this Apostasy, and all its tokens and instruments, are of the Evil One, and savour of death. Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison! Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against Truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, — he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.

Shall we Christians allow ourselves to have lot or part in this matter? Shall we, even with our little finger, help on the Mystery of Iniquity which is travailing for birth, and convulsing the earth with its pangs? "O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." "What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate," ... lest you be workers together with God's enemies, and be opening the way for the Man of Sin, the son of perdition.

FOOTNOTES

(1) The homosexual movement's power and influence is not generated from within the movement itself, but from without — by the Rockefeller Foundation, its various "charitable" fronts like the Population Council, and other entities that rule from behind the scenes. For chapter-and-verse documentation see "Homosexuality and the New World Order,"
CO, Jan. 2010.


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