June/July 2015
€ndgame Apostasy in €ire
THE EDITOR
The world is extremely antiquated and worn out. It has lost its strength, lost its faculties; ... it cries out its exhaustion; it bears all the symptoms of its end.... |
So thundered Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin after voters expunged the last vestige of nominal Irish Christianity last May! ... Just kidding. Unlike St. Peter Chrysologus, the 5th century Bishop of Ravenna who clearly recognised and bewailed godless rock-bottom when he saw it, Eire's Capitulator-in-Chief could not fall into PC line fast enough; to embrace the 'change,' the 'new reality,' the 'democratic process', blah blah, and blah.
Nobody captured the diabolic inversion of Catholic leadership better than homosexual Matthew Paris. Writing in the English Spectator of 30 May, he parodied the episcopal backsliding with a re-write of Exodus 32 (where Moses rails against the Golden Calf idolators after his descent from Mount Sinai with the Commandments):
And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the Irish referendum’s huge majority for gay marriage, and the dancing: and Moses’ alarm was palpable…
And he took a copy of the Pink Paper and, flourishing it, said, 'We have to stop and have a reality check, not move into denial of the realities.
'I appreciate how these naked revellers feel on this day. That they feel this is something that is enriching the way they live. I think it is a social revolution.
'We need to find a new language to connect with a whole generation of young people,' the prophet concluded; then, casting off his garments, Moses said, 'Hey, lead me to the coolest gay bar in the camp.'
"Don’t laugh," writes Paris. "With a couple of adjustments for updated circumstances, I am quoting the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, almost verbatim. The archbishop was responding last Sunday to Irish people’s endorsement of gay marriage by a margin of almost two to one."
One cannot fault his scathing take. Not so much the gloat of a victor revelling in the final scoreline (Mammon 2 - God 1), as bemused disgust at the spineless Martin; the embodiment of our unprincipled prelates, now mercilessly mocked by clear-eyed enemies for their worldly acquiescence.
Bishop Chrysologus, too, would have viewed these jelly-backs with righteous disdain: as successors of an alien apostolic line; the one emanating from "that man" so fearsomely denounced by Our Lord [Mk 14:21]. Like their patron Judas, they have all sold out for thirty pieces of silver: reminted as corporate capitalism.
To understand the workings of that insatiable monster is to better comprehend how the world is being re-fashioned before our very eyes; why the earth is trembling under our feet despite huge opposition to the revolution. To that end, analysing a recent American victory for Sodom Incorporated (i.e., the sort of corporations Francis hired to help steer his Vatican restructure [March 2014, pp. 57-60]), E. Michael Jones explains everything you need to know about how the corporate tail wags the statist lapdog. A lesson in the capitalist mechanics of our socially-engineered modern world, he describes the venal process whereby men have turned away from God, absolute truths, virtue, and the common good, to institutionalise atheism, relativism, legislated immorality, and suicidal self-interest.
Writing 15 years ago with the prescience of one steeped in first priniciples, the late great Joe Sobran further elucidates how the deviant Few dictate to the Many; normalising the abnormal. Penned around the same time, Robert Hickson's weightier piece repays the effort of careful reading, since it underlines the major weapon in the enemy's strategic arsenal: linguistic deception.
In this latter regard, the ubiquitous "g"-word immediately springs to mind.
A cheery descriptive antithetical to cheerless, desolate Sodom, "gay" has been used to such monumental effect that the Supreme Pontiff himself now mouths the Big Lie. Fearful of calling a sin that cries to heaven by its name, the likes of Diarmuid Martin follow suit: too scared to call out sodomites for what they actually do; too afraid to hold them to account for the baleful consequences.
Rick Fitzgibbons neatly summarises the science we have so often highlighted in these pages; homo facts that should inform and embolden a hierarchy that prefers, instead, to studiously avoid them. Mike Jones also addresses this aversion to moral and scientific realities.
The Francis Effect: Revolution as Evolution
In order to demonstrate Team Judas Ireland's affinity with the prevailing culture of lies and filthy lucre, I will not regale readers with a long litany of asinine clerical commentaries on the referendum. A few excruciating snippets from the International Business Times of 22 May will suffice. They showcase not only the secularised mind and spirit of many Irish clergy (even those who voted against same-sex 'marriage'), but also the false humility, false love, and false mercy they are now pushing harder than ever thanks to the Holy Father.
Parroting Francis, Diarmuid, and the dissident Association of 'Catholic' Priests, Father Seamus Ahearne assured the IBT that
"Religion and the Catholic Church have almost become irrelevant in people's lives. This pompous, pious, arrogant language we've used for so long — it's wrong. The church has to speak a different kind of language now, reaching into people's hearts."
The report explains that
Ahearne voted no on Friday to amending the country’s constitution to grant same-sex marriages equal status with those between opposite-sex couples, but he said he would not mind if the bill were legalized. Indeed, he pointed out that nearly 50 percent of the membership of the Association of Catholic Priests, of which he is a member, actually support the legislation. "I think the yes side will win and that's fine. I don't see that as a failure on the part of the Church," he said. "I think the Church came in fairly gently and came out of this fairly well."
This easy accommodation of sodomitical vice, in pastoral practice if not in law, emerges from "a desire by many priests to transform the institution [of the Church] and become relevant through a new focus on teachings that emphasize compassion and simplicity, along with economic equality, a shift he said echoed what Pope Francis has promoted more broadly":
"We have to express ourselves with humility," he argued. "[Francis] is a man who speaks about ordinary things: about mercy, about love, fun, smiling. Not about condemning this or that. He sees above all the complexity of life, and that matters deeply."
Ahearne said that this attitude has become increasingly common among priests in Ireland, to the point where it is now "the conventional wisdom." As a result, he said, a victory for same-sex marriage in Ireland will not be a blow for the church but, rather, the latest reminder that the institution has to find a way to connect to people on a personal, human level that transcends the traditional "narrow" focus on moral issues.
What outcome does Father envisage after 'connecting' to grave sins that cry to heaven; after 'transcending' Catholic Truth and Tradition that calls sin by its name? "Out of that," he pontificates in all humility and mercy, "I see an evolution for a different church, a church of God, of love."
And here we all were thinking we inhabited that very Church. Silly us.
Writing on the Wall
With due respect to the very large minority of "No" voters (to include our Irish readers!), the referendum sell out reminds me of an article I had in mind twenty years ago.
Following my first visit to the Republic, the editor of an Irish Catholic journal asked me to pen my impressions. I never found the time. But I did draft this title that captures the gist of my unwritten thoughts: Emerald Isle? Or Eurodisney? For what I encountered, effectively, was a dinky little island-theme park in thrall to Mammon. New cars, new houses, new shopping centres... spanking new everything at every turn, even in the rural backblocks.
'Where did they get the money for that?!' I asked one taxi driver or stranger after another. "Brussels," would come the airy reply. Large signs taking credit for every other project confirmed the fact. Several years before the single currency cemented the Irish sell out, EU handouts were already dictating terms in spectacular fashion.
Doubtless overdue, necessary, etc. etc., the 'modernisation' was nonetheless excessive; the material obsession and dash for cash palpable. Bought off by their EU handlers, flattered by endless paeans raised to the "Celtic Tiger," the writing on the wall was pretty clear and it was Matthew 6:24: "No man can serve two masters. ... You cannot serve God and mammon."
My foreboding only intensified with the blasphemy on the streets. I had never heard the Second Commandment so casually and commonly broken in public. Not even in Australia and England! On the wall next to Matthew 6:24 ran a simple, very familiar equation: Blasphemy + Greed = Apostasy.
Raised in an Irish missionary Church, where the distant Emerald Isle of saints and martyrs held a special place in Aussie hearts and minds, as it once did everywhere, this came as a shock. I had not counted on Eire caving in quite so rapidly — so eagerly.
There was, of course, much to enjoy on both natural and spiritual planes. Not least packed churches with plentiful youngsters; a joyful change to the sparse and ageing congregations back home.
Alas, it was largely tribal Catholicism, masking the deep-seated spiritual and moral rot I sensed but could not explain.
Yet by the time Eurodisney officially morphed into €urodisney, I had long discovered the sordid truth: how the likes of then-Bishop Cahal Daly had set the de-Christianisation in process decades before, attuning innocent souls to the secularisation of faith and morals. Hence Ireland’s top billing in our February 1999 number dedicated to the toxic leak of sex education into Catholic classrooms; several thousand extra copies of which were distributed by Irish parents forever at loggerheads with their complicit shepherds.
Youth Betrayed
My editorial and lead essay in that edition (Wake up Ireland; Sensual Catechesis: Irish Bishops in Bed with the State), addressed the nuclear fusion of corrupt catechetics and explicit sex-ed — Children of God, Alive-O, Love Matters, Relationships and Sexuality Education et. al., which descended even to occultism (CO, March 2010, pp. 22-23) — by which the Irish hierarchy sowed the seeds of the generation that took to Irish streets on 22 May 2015 to cheer "Yes!" to the wiping out of natural marriage as the bedrock of Irish society; "Yes!" to effacing God and His Commandments from Irish life; "Yes!" to the short, brutal, disease-ridden lives that define homosexuality.
"The youth vote was crucial in the outcome of the referendum, with estimates that up to 90 percent of those under 35 voted 'yes'," reported Our Sunday Visitor on 3 June. "The ironic thing facing Church leaders is that the overwhelming majority of these young adults will have attended Catholic schools for at least 12 years."
Indeed. Yet throughout those twelve years, even while moulding corporate consumers with Heinz-57 'liturgies', how many schools bothered to teach them — in season and out — about the fundamental Catholic understanding of conscience and principles? To give them the intellectual means to withstand a world awash with relativism and amorphous 'values'? How many provided clear, concise, protective guidance along these lines:
To help clear the confusion, [about freedom of conscience] we draw attention to two vital principles. the first is that a Catholic does not fashion his own moral principles, but inherits them, receiving them from the Church, and it is never the role of his conscience to challenge these principles; his conscience comes into play in their application. To reject one of these moral principles is to exercise not freedom of conscience but Luther's private judgement.
The second is this: conscience has in the past come into collision with authority — usually civil authority when Caesar ordered Christians to do what was contrary to the Church's doctrine, and theologians have elaborated, in this regard, the rights of conscience. But it is a sin against truth to attempt to justify, in terms of this theology, defiance of the Church when it does not command something sinful but condemns an action as sinful. A Catholic's conscience is bound to work within the Church's moral code and principles and not declare itself free from them.
So wrote the late Father John McKee, a Scottish parish priest and seminary lecturer, in The Enemy Within the Gate (1974). Nourished by such truly Catholic fare for a dozen years, former Catholic pupils would have baulked at the homo propaganda. That they bought it hook, line, and sinker in such overwhelming numbers redounds to the eternal shame of a Pharisaic episcopate.
Shedding crocodile tears on behalf of his culpable brethren past and present, Archbishop Martin responded: "It’s very clear that if this referendum is an affirmation of the views of young people, then the Church has a huge task in front of it to find the language to be able to talk to and to get its message across to young people, not just on this issue, but in general."
Enough already with the self-exculpations, Your Grace! Your compatriot, Venerable Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, knew better. "An inert laity is only two generations removed from non-practice," he wrote. "Non-practice is only two generations away from non-belief."
And so it came to pass.
And pray tell, who might be responsible for this apostasy?
"Unfortunately," said Sister Lucia of Fatima, "in religious matters, the people for the most part are ignorant and follow where they are led. Hence, the great responsibility of those who have the duty of leading them." Yet rather than lead them away from the slaughter, most Irish shepherds have led their flock towards it!
Thus, stripped of their spiritual birthright and set adrift without a Catholic compass by their Fathers in the Faith, clueless Irish youth are mere bread-and-circus fodder for the homo-corporations who rule the roost. Forever distracted, manipulated, and corrupted, their mendacious media mentors won't tell them the plain truth: that the so-called homo lifestyle is in fact a 'deathstyle' (akin to "swimming in a sewer," admits homosexual broadcaster Simon Fanshawe). Hence their insouciance towards sodomy and sodomitic child-recruitment programmes (aka 'gay adoption') that condemn babes and infants to share this malignant cesspit.
Youthful ignorance, however, is only part of it. Like their secular 'role models', their malformed conscience has taught them to revel in degeneracy. Never mind Gen X and Gen Y. Effectively, the Irish episcopate has raised up Gen ET — the End Times Generation described by St. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:12–4:6:
Know also this, that, in the last days, shall come dangerous times./Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, ... wicked,/Without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness,/Traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasures more than of God: ... /Ever learning, and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth./ ... men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith./ ... And all that will live godly in Christ Jesus, shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall grow worse and worse: erring, and driving into error.
St Peter Chrysologous, too, might have been addressing Gen ET when he warned that
We are being towed along by a world that passes away, forgetting the world to come. We are greedy for present things but do not take into account the coming judgment. We will not run to meet the Lord as He comes...
On cue, hapless adolescents and young men and women ran to the welcoming arms of Satan instead. The deathly spirit of Antichrist filled Irish streets as they laughed and danced and draped themselves in the rainbow flag: mocking God's rainbow of hope, like an upside-down cross.
Pehaps the best End Time-indicator of all is the nefarious figure these hapless products of 'Catholic' schooling chose to emulate. For as the Lepanto Institute points out, "the first ruler of the Western World to have legitimised same-sex ‘marriages’, participating in at least two himself," was none other than the Emperor Nero, "largely regarded by the Church Fathers as a prefigurement of the Anti-Christ."
Apostolic Alien
While St. Peter Chrysologous would disown Cahal Daly, Diarmuid Martin, and all the apostolic aliens largely responsible for this hellish legacy, he would instantly recognise the true succession resonating from Cardinal Raymond Burke. "I mean, this is a defiance of God," he told the Oxford Newman Society in a post-referendum homily. "It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage." In similar Chrysologian tone and terms he warned of "various ideological currents" and of "human deception and trickery which strives to lead us into error" — the sorts of dangers underlined by Dr Hickson, in fact.
Naturally, Diarmuid was none too pleased with Raymond. "Irish archbishop distances himself from Cardinal Burke's criticism of Irish voters," headlined CatholicCulture.org on 3 June. "I wouldn’t use that language," His Cowering Grace pouted during a radio interview. Unlike Burke, the Irish bishops had done their best to "ask people to try to be respectful and inoffensive in language." Ah yes, 'respect' and 'tolerance': the weasel words du jour for rationalising episcopal flight from the street fight that was needed to put both Catholic and scientific truths front and centre of a real referendum debate: one that would have saved souls and lives, and perhaps even rescued €ire from Sodom Inc.!
Forever walking on eggshells — to avoid 'hurting' enemies of faith, truth, and life! — this would have required gumption and a level of direct speech quite beyond the Archbishop of Dublin. Pandering to the Gaystapo, he didn't have it in him to demand discussion of its totalitarian nature and brutal methodology: to plainly state, after the fashion of C.J. Doyle, director of Boston’s Catholic Action League, that
Organised homosexualism is an aggressive, neo-totalitarian movement which seeks to censor, silence, and punish anyone opposed to it, drive out of political life and public employment all those who support traditional morality, demonize as bigots, haters, and homophobes anyone who expresses the slightest reservation towards homosexual behaviour, and use state power to coerce, oppress and penalize individuals and businesses who refuse to service so-called same gender marriages. We need to organize a resistance to this growing thuggery, rather than make pandering banalities about their so-called gifts.
With a couple of shots of Dutch courage, even Diarmuid might have roused himself to say that much. And who knows, after a few benzodiazepines to calm his nerves, he might have withstood the ensuing storm and upped the ante even further — to include the disproportionate homo-child abuse link.
Was that what held him back? A dearth of Guinness and drugs? Whatever the case, if he'd only found a key to unlock the fortitude he was gifted at his Confirmation all those years ago, it could have been a game-changer. And not just in Ireland.
Apostolic Leaders
Meanwhile, passing the unrecognisable Diarmuid to embrace the manifestly Catholic Raymond, Bishop Chryologus would have also recognised many other prelates and priests now standing up and speaking out.
Such as retired Archbishop Lenga whose bracing Open Letter we ran in April. Or the several hundred English clergy who urged fidelity to Truth and Tradition in a letter published last March; one of whom was Fr Ray Blake, whose biting critique of the Irish sell-out we reprint herein.
Or Father Tom Doherty of County Mayo, who left his congregation in no doubt about the "immorality" of the referendum: frankly stating from the pulpit that those among the congregation who had voted "Yes" to sodomitic 'marriage' had given "two fingers" to the Church, and likening the result to "barbarians at the gate." (Oh merciful 'hurt'! Oh salvific 'intolerance'! Oh Diarmuid take note!)
And how St. Peter would have lauded Father Linus Clovis!
A renowned defender of the Faith (and keen subscriber to this journal!), the doughty West Indian spoke truth to power last May at a pro-life meeting held in the very shadow of St Peter's basilica. Both a spiritual work of mercy (CCC #2447) and a dutiful execution of John 7:24 ("Judge not according to the appearance, but judge just judgment”), the video of his considered, uncompromising, respectful address, "The Francis Effect," is a powerful tool with which to awaken friends, family, fellow parishioners, and papolators everywhere.
There is no point waiting endlessly for 'a better time' to engage the ignorant and lukewarm. The October Synod approaches. Kasperian storm troopers are looking to capitalise on the Irish perfidy. Even as we pray for better papal (and so better episcopal and priestly) days ahead, we must work to limit the ongoing damage under Francis by publicising the steadfast words and example of truly Catholic leaders like those above.
Indeed, we all need constant reminding of how very far the majority of shepherds and clergy have fallen below the standards we should expect and demand, always and everywhere, from priests of Jesus Christ. Just consider the two posthumous examples of episcopal and priestly solicitude and conviction which follow. Once the norm, how abnormal their pugnacious and virile witness now seems before the faith-sapping anti-spirit of Archbishop Martin & Co.!
Corporate Dhimmitude
In our February number, speaking of a "badly led interreligious dialogue" that serves "the invasion of Islam," the Benedictine Abbott of Le Barroux urged us to pray for God's Spirit of "fortitude and love" so that He protect us "from all intellectual and emotional dhimmitude." That includes protection from all the supine ecclesial dhimmis allowing the Corporate State to peddle sodomy to their flock without a voice raised in righteous anger. Abbot Louis-Marie's concluding exhortation speaks equally and directly, therefore, to this Mammonistic subservience; embodied in craven, apostate €ire:
Let us insistently ask the Lord for competent ministers, of which the Church has the greatest need: persons of courage and culturegifted with a solid mental structure and enlightened judgement.
Ministers, in other words, like Michael Gonzi and James Morrow!