The Schism started 6 years and 8 months ago, when the Cardinals seeing that Pope Benedict’s Act of Renouncing the “ministry committed to me through the hands of the Cardinals”, took advantage of his age and weak constitution by announcing to the world that he had resigned the Papacy. — If they had an ounce of respect for Our Lord, Who is Truth and Justice and His gift of the Office of St. Peter, they would have pointed out to him the numerous grammatical and legal and logical problems with the text he read.
Was he coerced or forced to renounce? Was he threatened? Was he confused? Did he just want to retire and not resign? Was he just utterly disgusted with the corruption of the Vatican?
Those are important historical questions, but THEY ARE IRRELEVANT, because as it stands HE NEVER RENOUNCED THE PAPAL OFFICE. And anyone who does not know this can simply read PPBXVI.org or the From Rome Blog to know it. And if any Catholic refuses this, they are either intellectually incapable of understanding that two words can mean different things, or they are volitionally indisposed to separate themselves from Bergoglio and thus must be presumed to be heretics and schismatics, regardless of what mass they go to!
So, let’s first ennumerate the massive crimes being committed on a daily basis:
Numerous Canonical Crimes committed by nearly the entire Hierarchy who knows this
Cardinal Sodano and everyone else who went ahead and pretended he did are guilty of violating numerous Canons of Church Law, among which are:
Canon 40, which declares NULL AND VOID any action taken by anyone before determining that the Act of one’s superior is authentic and integral — This act is full of errors and thus not integral.
Canon 41, which grants the exception to all subordinates in the case of an administrative act which is NULL — and there is none more null than announcing the renunciation of the ministry of an office without renouncing the office or the ministry! — and which precepts all subordinates TO CONFER with their superior about any inconsistencies in the Act. FAILURE TO DO THIS results in the USURPATION OF POWER, because the subordinate who puts into act an Act which is canonically NULL has in fact arrogated power to himself which he does NOT have.
Canon 1381, which forbids the usurpation of any ecclesiastical office, because if you proceed to elect another Pope when the present Pope has not resigned, you are collaborating in the usurpation of office.
Canon 1382, which punishes with latae sententiae excommunication ALL bishops who consecrate bishops without a Pontifical Mandate (when the Apostolic See is not impeded), which is what anyone who collaborates with the usurpation of the Papal Office does.
Canon 1384, which punishes all who are involved in the usurpation of any ministry, which kind of usurpation includes ALL the persons presently working in the Roman Curia, since the Roman Curia cannot operate without the express mandate of the Roman Pontiff, nor can any post there be filled except by express delegation of authority of Pope Benedict XVI. This also involves anyone who goes along with accepting Episcopal nominations or resignations after Feb. 28, 2013.
Canon 1386, which punishes all those who promise a quid pro quo to obtain or omit illegally an ecclesiastical act or function. This includes everyone who is pretending to grant jobs or offices so long as they go along with the coup d’etat.
Canon 1389 §1, which directly punishes ALL the Cardinals who participated in the Conclave of 2013, for an abuse of power, since Canon 359 forbade that they take any action so long as Benedict XVI had not resigned.
Canon 1389 §2, which punishes ALL Cardinals and Bishops for neglecting to address and resolve the problem of the Renunciation, by acting as if Benedict XVI is not the pope.
Canon 1390 §2, which punishes all Bishops and Cardinals for damaging the reputations of those who remain in communion with Pope Benedict XVI, when such calumny is brought to their legitimate superior (pre Bergoglian).
Canon 1391 §1, which punishes ALL involved in concealing the canonical invalidity of the Act of Renunciation through falsified translations, articles or canonical studies.
Canon 1391 §2 and 3, which punishes ALL who assert in ecclesiastical documents that Bergoglio is the Pope or that Benedict resigned validly.
Canonical Basis for taking Action against All of them
Now, from Canon 1399, it is clear that all these crimes are sufficiently grave as to require punishment. And Canon 1401 clearly puts these matters under the jurisdiction of the Church, in as much as regards faulting particular persons or imposing punishment. Nor does Canon 1405 prevent action against the Cardinals and Apostolic Legates for their part in this crime, because inasmuch as the resolution of the problem requires only a public confirmation of its existence and the removal of criminals from the claim to power which they have no right to, the Church has the right in ALL of Her members to take Canonical action, on account of the Apostolic See being impeded.
This is established by the principle, that the Salus animarum in Ecclesia suprema lex est (cf. Canon 1752). It is moved on the basis of justice in fulfillment of the observance of the Seventh Commandment of the Decalogue (Thou shalt not steal).
The example of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Norbert of Xanten shows the way. During the schism of Anacletus II who usurped the Papacy, they called on the Kings of France and Germany to convene imperfect Synods and declare in favor of Pope Innocent II the rightful Bishop of Rome. — Their example and their canonization means that the Church wants us to imitate them in this!
The solution of the problem does not require a Canonical judgment in Tribunal, however. And therefore any group of Bishops in any part of the world can hold an imperfect Synod and declare their position on the matter. Each Synod should be directed to petitioning the government of their nation state to recognize Pope Benedict XVI as the Pope. This will liberate the local Church from the malign influence of the Apostate Revolutionaries.
The mere enumeration of these crimes should induce any Bishop, priest, deacon, religious or layman or lay woman to take notice and examine the facts, and if not, they should be presumed to be simply too corrupt to care. Move on to the next Bishop, priest, deacon, religious or lay person and try to convince them.
Even if the Bishops of your locale will not act, this does not prevent Clergy, Laity and Religious to hold public meetings to declare the same thing, which the objective to urging their Bishops to act or reproving those bishops in the local for their complicity in the revolution.
SO LET US STOP SAYING THAT NOTHING CAN BE DONE. I have shown you that it needs to be done, How it can be done, and That it can be done without the violation of any Canon of Church law.
So I ask all Catholic bloggers, writers and website publishers, to take the first step and republish this article of mine, and join with The From Rome Blog in an alliance calling for action and the formation of action committees in every nation to do what we can do to stop the Apostasy. Each of you can start by declaring yourself for Pope Benedict XVI AND for the Canonical resolution of the Schism and punishment of the criminals. — Stop being wussies and lamenting each day that nothing is going to be done, or nothing can be done, as if you lived on another planet, had no personal responsibility, or are busy with something, in Heaven, Earth or Hell, which is more important!
And do not tell me that you are risking more than me. I live not a kilometer from the Vatican, at Rome, and the Vatican reads my blog daily. I could be arrested at any moment. — You know what? — I DO NOT CARE. I KNOW THAT THE CAUSE IS GREATER THAN MYSELF. I EXIST TO SERVE JESUS CHRIST!
The Feast of Saint Cecilia gave a sign from Heaven about all of this. Bergoglio being out of town in Thailand, the world capital of sex trafficking for minors: at Rome, the two weeks of clouds and rain broke, and God’s sun returned. The unnatural pairings which were so common in recent weeks disappeared and nature reasserted herself, in a way that gives hope, that if WE only collaborate to exorcise the darkness, the Church will return to Holiness in her members and rulers.
This essay appears in the forthcoming Fall 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
People capable of feeling shame would not have immediately followed up the Russiagate hoax fiasco with another transparently phony—and in “substance” nearly identical—attempt to remove President Trump from office, overturn the 2016 election, and shower deplorable-Americans with contempt and hatred. But our ruling elites have no shame.
That is not to say, however, that they are entirely cynical. The means by which they’ve so far tried to crush the Trump presidency may be nasty and illegitimate, but our overlords are 100% convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and of themselves. Hence they do not even need recourse to the cliché that the ends justify the means. The means are good because the end is sacred; they cannot countenance even the thought that the means might be suspect or (ahem) trumped up.
Near the beginning of his epic history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides distinguishes the “publicly voiced” causes of that conflict from the war’s “truest cause, though least in speech.” We may—indeed, must—subject the “impeachment” coup to the same bifurcated analysis.
Collusion?
The Democrats, the corporate-Left media (CLM), the permanent bureaucracy or “administrative state,” and the “deep state” (which is not precisely the same thing), along with a few Republicans, have “publicly voiced” many causes for removing the president—a few specific but most maddeningly, yet safely, vague.
From the beginning—that is to say, from November 9, 2016—impeachment has been a cause in search of a trigger, an occasion. The president’s enemies hoped they’d finally hit pay dirt when an anonymous “whistle blower” alleged that the president made, or attempted to make, foreign aid to Ukraine contingent on that country’s government investigating his likely 2020 challenger. Or, in other words, that Trump attempted to “collude” with a foreign power to influence an American election.
Where have we heard that before? It only took two years, $32 million, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents and other staff, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 witnesses for a special counsel to “not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” according to the Mueller Report. Yet here we go again?
But let’s drill down a bit. If we are to take the current “publicly voiced” cause at face value, then we may say that the entire Washington establishment, plus most of the country’s elites, are trying to remove the president from office on the basis of an anonymous individual’s private opinion of the content of one phone call he heard about second or possibly even thirdhand. A phone call, let’s remember, of which we have extensive notes that almost, but not quite, constitute a transcript—in other words, whose content everyone in the country can examine for himself.
That the “telcon” (national security geekspeak for what people are calling the “transcript”) does not support the “publicly voiced” cause is made plain by two facts. First, you can read it yourself and see that it doesn’t say what it is alleged to say. Second, if it did say what the president’s enemies want it to say, they could just quote it verbatim, which they never do, instead of deliberately mischaracterizing it, which they always do.
Only two substantive points make the phone call at all interesting. First, President Trump very plainly wants to get to the bottom of the entire, still-obscure “election-meddling” story of 2016. That includes not just “deep state” attempts to prevent his election and to set him up for removal should the first effort fail, but also allegations of Russian hacking against American targets, including the Democratic National Committee. It appears—and the Justice Department apparently agrees—that some actors within Ukraine may have had something to do with some of this, possibly colluding (there’s that word again!) with a shady, Democrat-linked tech firm called CrowdStrike, though we as yet know nothing like the full story. Trump wants to know and asked the Ukrainian president for his help in finding out. To some, Trump’s curiosity about this wild “conspiracy theory” is alone proof of his unfitness. Because, as we all know, the complete lack of evidence that anyone in the Obama White House, Justice Department, FBI, CIA, or Office of the Director of National Intelligence colluded with each other, with the Democratic Party, with the Clinton campaign, or with a foreign spy to tar Trump with the false charge of colluding with Russia definitively proves that all “conspiracy theories” are manufactured fever dreams.
Still, you might think that those railing loudest about “foreign interference” over the last three years would also want to know, but of course we all know what a howler that is. The loudest railers are precisely those most responsible for, and most involved in, the illicit effort to spy on and sabotage candidate Trump, set him up for a non-crime he didn’t commit, abuse their power to destroy lives, and much else. So, no, they don’t want to know—or, more precisely, they don’t want you to know. The more that becomes known, the more legal—and possibly criminal—jeopardy they may face.
Though I admit to being somewhat puzzled by their evident alarm. Many others have called Russiagate the “biggest political scandal in American history” and, Lord knows, I agree. The amazing thing about it, then, is how little accountability there has been. From what I can tell, two individuals—Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe, the latter on the cusp of retirement—were removed from their jobs. That’s it. No criminal charges or anything else. What are these “deep-staters” so worried about? They run everything and take care of their own. Even with a president in office who, they allege, hates them and routinely abuses his power, they’ve—as yet—faced no consequences at all.
Just to (re-)ask one question: who leaked the highly classified details of General Michael Flynn’s December 2016 phone call with the Russian ambassador? That’s a felony. The universe of people with access to such sensitive information is very small, and the timing ensures that the crime was committed by a very senior member of the Obama Administration and/or very senior operative of the national security state. Yet I see no sign official Washington is the least bit interested in this question. Nor, despite the Trump Administration’s nominally running the federal government for almost three years (more below on who really runs it), have I seen indications of any action being taken to find answers. I hope that Attorney General William Barr, Special Counsel John Durham, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz will reassure me that American law has not become a tool for elites to enforce, or not, at their discretion and in their interests.
Back to the Ukraine call. The second question President Trump asked the Ukrainian president is another “publicly voiced” cause to seek his removal. That question regarded a specific instance of a well-known Washington-insider phenomenon. It is a measure of how insouciantly our elites accept and even welcome the immense corruption of our government that they raise not a single eyebrow at the phenomenon that underlay the president’s question: exactly how is it that well-connected Americans with no particular or relevant skill sets can “earn” enormous sums of money for doing, essentially, nothing?
We all know how, of course. They’re not, exactly, doing “nothing.” They’re providing access—in some instances directly, in others prospectively. When a company or bank or hedge fund or real estate developer or foreign government slides big payments over to someone close to someone who might soon be president, they know what they’re doing, and they know—from experience—that the investment is sound. Tom Wolfe coined the term “favor bank” to explain how “the law” really works in the Bronx County criminal justice system. You do favors expecting to have favors done in return. There are no written contracts or enforcement mechanisms, but the system “works” because people know it’s in their interest to honor it. In modern international politics, to pay someone a few million to do “nothing” is to expect to be paid back somehow. The payees know this, and endeavor to make good, lest they risk future payments.
Understand this plainly: Trump may well be impeached, ostensibly, for asking about this corrupt arrangement. But no one is ever impeached for engaging in it. Nor can our elites, who almost all benefit from this system one way or another, muster the integrity to do, or even say, anything against it.
Cover-Up?
Though currently central to the “publicly voiced” case, this charge is not the only one levelled. It is also insinuated that the administration somehow acted improperly by not making the telcon available within the government to a wide enough range of bureaucrats. But that’s preposterous.
Such documents are inherently products of the executive branch. They may be shown to, or withheld from, absolutely anyone the president and his senior staff want. To argue anything else is to presuppose that bureaucrats whom the president doesn’t know and likely will never see somehow are entitled—have a “right”—to review anything and everything they wish. Does this sound reasonable to anyone not out to get Trump? Would you run your business this way? Or would you try to limit information—especially sensitive information—on a “need-to-know” basis? Formally, the U.S. government insists that it operates according to the latter principle, but in reality, everyone in Washington believes himself so important that he becomes indignant when not allowed to see what he believes by right he ought to see.
Then ask yourself: assuming the president and his team did try to limit access to this or other documents, why would they do that? Perhaps to prevent illegal and damaging leaks? What could possibly give rise to thatconcern? I dunno—maybe because this has been, and continues to be, the most leaked-against White House and administration in the history of the United States government?
When one thinks for a second about the impact this particular document has already had—the president may well be impeached over it, on the say-so of precisely such a bureaucrat from whom his team allegedly tried, but evidently failed, to withhold it—can one blame Trump or his team for trying to limit the dissemination of internal documents? A saner response is to wish they had restricted the circle even more. The detail, alleged in the press, that the “whistleblower” (more on him below) heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend, etc., does not, to say the least, suggest any kind of cover-up. Apparently, the Trump Administration’s practice of information dissemination is far closer to the Washington ideal than to the hyper-secrecy alleged by the president’s enemies.
“Cover-up” is the latest “publicly voiced” charge. A member of the National Security Council staff alleges that he attempted to include language in the telcon that others insisted on excluding. This is held to be a very serious charge.
Here’s what they’re not telling you. The document, as noted, is not a transcript; there’s no stenographer on the line and such calls are not recorded. Several people, however, will be listening and taking notes for the express purpose of creating the telcon. These will include duty officers in the White House Situation Room, who are not necessarily—and are not expected to be—experts on the country being called; rather, they are covering the call simply because it takes place during their shifts. These duty officers, with the aid of impressive but not infallible voice recognition software, prepare a first draft of the telcon. Since neither the voice recognition software nor human notetakers can catch every word perfectly, sometimes “Inaudible” appears in brackets. But ellipses—about which much is currently being made—represent not omissions but natural pauses in the conversation. This is before we even get into the thorny issues raised by sequential translation, which is necessary for most foreign leader calls.
After the first draft of the telcon is prepared, the duty officer hands it over to the National Security Council’s (NSC’s) executive secretary (ExecSec), the office responsible for all NSC paper flow and records management (among other things). ExecSec then routes the telcon to specific individuals, whom the national security advisor has personally authorized to review it, for their “chop” or edits. The person responsible for shepherding the document through this phase of the process is the “country director,” the NSC staffer who coordinates policy and handles documents with respect to a given country or countries. The country director will, in almost all cases, have been listening to the call. He will check the draft telcon against his notes and make corrections, even as others cross-check against their own notes. These will include the relevant senior director (the country director’s boss) and others, up to and including the national security advisor.
The key takeaway here is that the country director is the not highest or final authority on the content of the call. He’s one person who heard it; others may have heard it or parts of it differently. And the country director does not have the final say over what the telcon says. He works in a chain of command and has superiors. His senior director—who presumably was also on the call—can overrule him. If other “equities” such as classification or legal issues are affected, the senior director for intelligence programs and the legal advisor can as well. Ultimately the final say falls to the national security advisor—who, in almost all cases, would also have been listening to the call.
The person alleging a cover-up, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Vindman, was, at the time, the country director for Ukraine. But the way he’s being presented—and has presented himself—is meant to convey a much grander impression. No less than the “whistleblower,” he is being sold as a patriotic, dedicated, impartial, non-partisan, career officer simply standing up for what’s right. And he may well be all or most of those things; I have no doubt that he sees himself this way.
But he is also, unquestionably, a mid-level officer in the U.S. Army working a mid-level staff job at the National Security Council, i.e., someone who as such has no standing even to serve as the final arbiter of a telcon, much less make policy or remove a president.
We actually don’t know what language the country director was prevented from including in the telcon, but we do know—from those who leaked an anti-Trump account of his testimony to the New York Times—that “[t]he phrases do not fundamentally change lawmakers’ understanding of the call.”
What a marvelous sentence! And how obviously, tautologically, base-coveringly true! Those who want to use the call as a basis for impeaching Trump are not deterred from doing so based on this testimony, and those who never thought the call amounts to what the Democrats say it does are not now persuaded otherwise. The only way, of course, to judge whose interpretation is right would be to make public the allegedly excised phrases. But if they were actually helpful for impeachment, they already would have been leaked. So don’t expect to read them any time soon.
But at least the country director was actually in the NSC chain of command and so had some standing to weigh in on the issue. This cannot be said of the so-called “whistleblower,” who of course is nothing of the sort—not as defined by law nor in any commonsense understanding. As to the former, the statute is clear: officials qualify for legal protection if they blow the whistle on activities within their own organizations and relevant to those organizations’ official duties. There is no possible way to interpret this particular “whistle” as consistent with that standard. By definition, the president’s phone call was not conducted under the auspices of the “whistleblower’s” “home agency” (reportedly the CIA) nor did it have anything to do with intelligence matters. Which the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a sort of federal Nocturnal Council for legal matters, affirmed in an official opinion.
As to the latter, ask yourself the following question. As noted, the “whistleblower” reportedly wasn’t on the call and never saw the telcon. Given that several—probably at least a dozen—others were and did, why didn’t one of them lodge a complaint? One—our country director—did complain to the NSC’s top lawyer, who could find no wrongdoing. The others? Nothing. Is it possible most of them also saw no wrongdoing? Or were too cowed to complain?
But then the question arises: complain to whom? Neither the NSC nor its parent organization, the Executive Office of the President (EOP), have a formal whistleblower process. If one wishes to make a complaint, one has five options: complain within your chain of command, complain to the lawyers, complain to the White House chief of staff, complain to Congress, or complain to the press. Even our country director declined four of these five avenues, and all the others apparently declined them all. Why? Perhaps someone calculated that the optics would be better—more “disinterested,” less nakedly political—if the complaint came from somewhere else, a “patriotic career civil servant just doing his job.” This would also explain the Democrats’ head-spinning bait-and-switch about the “whistleblower,” from “This brave soul is the federal Frank Serpico of our time” to “Who? Oh, no, we don’t need to hear from him, move along” in a matter of nanoseconds. The “whistleblower” was just a tool, witting or not (I’m betting on the former) to get something new going after the ignominious collapse of Russiagate. His usefulness over—indeed, his presence in the drama now counterproductive—we are instructed to forget he ever existed.
Changing Policy?
Another, deeper cause for the current show trial is less “publicly voiced” than beclouded with pretentious misdirection, because the president’s enemies know that, were they to state it clearly, the American people would scoff in their faces. Our foreign policy priesthood is 100% certain that the United States must take the side of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. President Trump has expressed skepticism about the wisdom of such a commitment. He wonders why the conflict is our problem, when a not-inconsiderable number of European countries closer to the issue demand action from us but do very little themselves. He worries about the possibility of the United States getting drawn into war with Russia. And he’s concerned that, given historic corruption in Ukraine, American aid there may not be well spent.
Yet despite these eminently reasonable misgivings, the president has, for the most part, gone along with elite opinion in supporting Ukraine. It’s worth pausing to note the brazen hypocrisy of Democrats on this point, given that the Obama Administration did far less for Ukraine, refusing to provide the so-called “lethal aid” that Trump, however reluctantly, approved. But apparently the latter’s efforts have been insufficiently eager for permanent Washington, which finds his lack of enthusiasm and speed outrageous. How dare this man question our strategic alliance with Ukraine!
Here are some relevant—and revealing—quotations from the country director discussed above, from his publicly-released opening statement before the secret, closed-door congressional hearing:
[A] strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.
This may be true, though—nothing against Ukraine—I don’t think so. The country just isn’t that important to usfor the same reason that Canada and Mexico are not that important to Russia. But even if I’m wrong about that, the above statement is still fundamentally an opinion—the opinion of someone not entitled to make policy. He is surely welcome to state his opinion, when appropriate to do so as part of his official duties and within the chain of command, but that’s it as far as his opinion goes. Actual policy—the question of whether “a strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests”—is well above his paygrade, properly decided by the president, his cabinet and senior advisors, and members of the Senate who advise and consent on cabinet secretaries and treaties. At least, that’s how the parchment on which the charter of our liberties is written says it’s supposed to work.
The U.S. government policy community’s view is that the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity.
What on earth is “[t]he U.S. government policy community”? This is not made clear in the statement, but from the context it would appear to be something like the “deep state” we are elsewhere told does not exist except in the minds of fevered “conspiracy theorists.” Elite conventional wisdom appears to have evolved into: “The deep state is not a thing—and thank God it’s there to save our democracy!”
I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.
Now we’re getting somewhere! The “interagency” refers to the process through which various officials from different government departments get together to debate issues, raise concerns, hammer out differences, try to reach consensus and—when and if they cannot—crisply and accurately frame their remaining disagreements for decision by higher-ups. But this last happens less often than you might think, and we may say that the whole process is designed to prevent that outcome and instead to produce “consensus” at the lowest possible level and on up the chain. Which it mostly does: what else would you expect from a bunch of bureaucrats with similar backgrounds, educations, careers, and outlooks? Hence this “consensus” is often indistinguishable from “groupthink.”
But whether epistemologically unassailable or complete madness (in the real world, it’s more likely than not to be incoherent mush), “interagency consensus” is not policy—or at least it’s not supposed to be. It may help inform policy, but elected and appointed officials—and in a unitary executive, that ultimately means the president—alone get to make policy. The presupposition of our country director—and his like-minded peers in the deep state—is the opposite: policy is made in and by the “interagency,” whose decrees are holy writ that it is illegitimate for the president to challenge. Hence:
The United States and Ukraine are and must remain strategic partners, working together to realize the shared vision of a stable, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine that is integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.
But in the immortal words of Jeff Lebowski: “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man.” Actually, more accurately, that’s a perfect distillation of national security groupthink, replete with all the buzzwords you’d expect but easy to unravel if only you think about it. In what sense are the United States and Ukraine “strategic partners”? What interests do we really have in common politically, culturally, economically, or militarily? To what extent do we really “share” a “vision” or even see the world the same way? And why is it so important to us that Ukraine be “integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community,” which seems to get more fragile and fractured every year, a process that accelerates the larger it becomes? Finally, try listening to that sentence through Russian ears. You don’t have to be a Putin sycophant to grasp its alarming character. “Integration into the Euro-Atlantic community” sounds to Moscow like “extend anti-Russian Western alliance to 2,300 kilometers of my southwestern border.” Would a neoliberal NatSec geek tolerate similar language from Russia about Canada or Mexico? Russia may be a bad actor in many ways, but to take up a cause that’s not really important to us but that Moscow considers a threat to a vital organ is pointless folly.
Yet this is the “U.S. government policy community consensus” that we’re supposed to follow uncritically and impeach a president for questioning. Do the American people feel any such urgency to arm, finance, and otherwise yoke themselves to Ukraine? Not that they necessarily feel any ill will toward Kiev. But with a broken immigration system, porous southern border, wage stagnation, rising health care costs, declining living standards and lifespans, and nearly two decades of war from which they have, to say the least, not much benefited, is aid to Ukraine on anyone’s top ten list? Top 100? As blogger Steve Sailer put it:
[J]ust wait until the public realizes that this brouhaha is about the president delaying foreign aid payments to Ukraine. There’s nothing more sacred in the eyes of American voters than our national duty to pay foreign aid promptly.
If this isn’t proof positive that the “deep state” is real, then what would be? Here we have an unelected cabal trying to take down the elected president, ostensibly over an issue that the American people have never voted on and don’t care about but which the “the U.S. government policy community” insists is so important that a democratic election must be overturned for its sake. Actually, to the extent that the American people havevoted on this issue, in electing a man who very clearly promised to reduce American commitments abroad, they voted against the “U.S. government policy community consensus.”
Yet the “interagency” somehow believes that its decrees are democracy and that it’s somehow “undemocratic” to question them. This is how it’s possible for so many of Trump’s enemies to impugn him as an enemy of “democracy,” sanctify their patently undemocratic attempts to unseat him, and portray themselves as democracy’s saviors. As Christopher Caldwell put it recently in these pages, according to this understanding
democracy [is] a set of progressive outcomes that democracies tend to choose, and may even have chosen at some time in the past. If a progressive law or judicial ruling or executive order coincides with the “values” of experts, a kind of mystical ratification results, and the outcome is what the builders of the European Union call an acquis—something permanent, unassailable, and constitutional-seeming. [“What Is Populism?” Fall 2018]
Aid to Ukraine has been decided! Debate over! No more votes and no changes! That would be “undemocratic”!
Challenging the Consensus
The man who best sees right through this thinking is, of course, Professor John Marini. Because I have spoken at length of his thought in the CRB (“Draining the Swamp,” Winter 2018/19), I here offer the barest summary of the most relevant points. Beginning in the late 19th century and intensifying in the mid-1960s, elites inside and outside our government have centralized authority in a “fourth branch,” the executive branch’s agencies and bureaucracies. Marini refers to those institutions, the people in them, and their governing philosophy and methods as “the administrative state.” Administrative state rule is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, intended to be rule by “expert consensus.”
The experts don’t like to be challenged—especially by non-expert voters or the politicians they elect to limit administrative state power. Here, finally, we come to the “truest cause, though least in speech” of the impeachment freight train: the administrative state is striking back at a mortal threat. As Marini explained in a recent speech,
Many great scandals arise not as a means of exposing corruption, but as a means of attacking political foes while obscuring the political differences that are at issue. This is especially likely to occur in the aftermath of elections that threaten the authority of an established order. In such circumstances, scandal provides a way for defenders of the status quo to undermine the legitimacy of those who have been elected on a platform of challenging the status quo—diluting, as a consequence, the authority of the electorate.
And the chaser:
The key to understanding how this works is to see that most political scandals, sooner or later, are transformed into legal dramas. As legal dramas, scandals become understood in non-partisan terms. The way in which they are resolved can have decisive political impacts, but those in charge of resolving them are the “neutral” prosecutors, judges, and bureaucrats who make up the permanent (and unelected) government, not the people’s elected representatives. To resort to scandal in this way is thus a tacit admission that the scandalmongers no longer believe they are able to win politically. To paraphrase Clausewitz, scandal provides the occasion for politics by other means.
It is no accident or coincidence that the only three presidents who have fundamentally challenged the administrative state—and questioned its song sheet, the “U.S. government policy community consensus”—have been dogged by “scandal” and threatened with impeachment: Richard Nixon by Watergate, Ronald Reagan by Iran Contra, and now Trump. (Whatever you think of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was emphatically not driven or supported by the administrative state, which protected him at every turn.) Trump would likely take this as small consolation, but it’s a measure of how much he’s feared that his enemies are running this play against him now, rather than simply trying to defeat him next year. Which more than suggests they doubt they can.
Simply based on what we know so far, the whole thing looks engineered, like those “lawfare” cases in which clever lawyers and activists find sympathetic plaintiffs, carefully choose friendly venues, and file lawsuits not to redress specific, genuine injustices but to force changes in policy—anti-democratically, it goes without saying. That’s the real reason nobody with firsthand knowledge came forward but left it to a distant “whistleblower” to get this train started: because those driving it understand that, by pitching the matter out to an agency covered by a whistleblower statute, with a formal whistleblower process, they could begin the transformation of this inherently political process into a technical, legal matter. This supposition only gains support from reports of “collusion” (what else can one call it?) between the “whistleblower” and Democratic congressional staff. The parade of witnesses in secret testimony also looks carefully orchestrated.
The secrecy has partly ended—but only after the Democrats gathered its fruits and shaped them into a “narrative” to spoon-feed to the public. The playbook is the same one that failed with the Russia hoax: selectively leak to create a fog, a miasma of vaguely negative-sounding “facts” or allegations that seem ominous but also too complex and in-the-weeds for ordinary folk to follow. Then publicly “confirm” those leaks as the authoritative account of the “scandal.” None of the actual facts adds up to any actual wrongdoing, but the hope is that regular people won’t notice and won’t listen to those who do. Leave it to us experts: we know wrongdoing when we see it! If the actual specifics of what we’re alleging don’t actually appear to you to amount to “treason, bribery, [or] other high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution’s Article II, section 4 requires, that’s only because you’re not an expert.
Three Possible Outcomes
The worst charge thus far alleged against President Trump is that he attempted to make $400 million in aid to Ukraine contingent on that country’s government investigating possible corruption by the Bidens. This is the much hoped for “smoking gun,” the “quid pro quo”—as if the foreign policy of any country in history has ever been borne aloft on the gentle vapors of pure altruism.
The central question would appear to be this: suppose that charge were abundantly substantiated by witnesses and documents—as it is not by the telcon—would that be sufficient to convince a majority of Americans, and a supermajority of senators, that Trump should be removed from office? In the latter case, possibly—Republican senators tend to be wobbly, and many want Trump gone for reasons that have nothing to do with this specific allegation, which merely offers a convenient excuse.
But in the former case, I don’t see it. Especially since a) no aid was actually withheld; b) no investigation was actually launched; c) the American people don’t care about Ukraine and would probably prefer to get their $400 million back; and d) they would inevitably ask: so were, in fact, Joe Biden and his son on the take from a foreign government? And if it looks like they might have been, why, exactly, was it improper for the president to ask about it?
Trump’s enemies’ answer to the last question is: because the president was asking a foreign government to investigate a political opponent for purely personal gain. Really? Is potential corruption by a former vice president—and potential future president—and his family a purely private matter, of no conceivable import or interest to the public affairs of the United States? That’s what you have to insist on to maintain that the request was improper. That’s the line we can expect the Democrat-CLM axis to flog, shamelessly and aggressively. But will a majority of Americans buy it? Especially since career officials at the Department of Justice already determined, and anti-Trump witnesses appearing before Representative Adam Schiff’s secret star chamber reluctantly conceded, that nothing Trump did or is alleged to have done was technically, you know, illegal.
It’s both infuriating and amusing to read the intellectual Left, led by the New York Times, pivot from Project 1619—that racist, white supremacist founding!—to founders-as-paragons-of-democratic-integrity, whose wise Constitution reserved impeachment just for such dire but foreseeable emergencies.
Impeachment, we are often reminded, is a political, not a legal, measure. That’s true to the letter of the Constitution of course, but not to the way “impeachment” is being used now. If Trump’s enemies had sufficient political strength—which means the support of the people—they would have already impeached him. As it is, they’ve held but one narrowly procedural vote and are hinting that another may not happen until next year.
They need—and they know they need—the intervening time to further the transformation of this fundamentally political assault into a legal matter, and to find, assert, or manufacture some technical violation of the law. At the end of the day, “high crimes and misdemeanors” means whatever you can get 218 representatives and 67 senators to vote for. So long as the phrase is understood politically, the latter threshold—at least—is out of reach. The hope is that forcing the public to accept a legal understanding will bring both within reach.
And it might. It worked against Nixon. It almost worked against Reagan. But let’s be clear: if it works this time, there are only three possible outcomes:
First, deplorable-Americans will meekly accept President Trump’s removal, in which case the country as a self-governing republic will be finished; the elite coup will have succeeded, their grip on power cemented. With all due respect to the vice president, this is not the way—these are not the people on the backs of whom—he should wish to enter the Oval Office. And I am confident he will not.
Second, deplorable-Americans will revolt at the ballot box and punish the elites in a series of elections that put in power serious statesmen intent on rooting out corruption and reestablishing democratic accountability.
Or, third, deplorable-Americans’ attempt to set their government aright via ballots will not avail, as it has not so often in the past; they will realize that it has not, conclude that it never will, and resolve by any means necessary to get out from under the thumbs of people who so obviously hate them and wish to rule them without their consent.
Only one of these possibilities is healthy for the continued survival of republican government as currently constituted.
Oh, and let’s also be clear about something else: if the Republicans “collude” with this sham and force the removal of a president whose approval rating within his party hovers north of 90%, and whose voters scarcely understand—much less agree with—the “case” against him, they will destroy the party forever. I don’t often make predictions, because I’m not good at it, but this one is easy. They will have removed all doubt that they are anything but ruling class apparatchiks, adjuncts, and flunkies of the administrative state from which they take orders.
And let none of them dare gaslight us with the trite dismissal that Trump’s removal would not overturn the 2016 election results because the president’s replacement was also elected. Trump’s intraparty enemies hate him, and wish to be rid of him, precisely because he is not one of them, because he stands for, and represents, something fundamentally different. Getting rid of him is, for them, a way to get back to business as usual. But there is no going back. A few of them in safely anti-Trump states or districts may survive the president’s removal but the vast majority will not. A new party—a Trumpian populist-nationalist party—will arise from the Republican Party’s ashes. More blue collar in economic orientation and less in hock to coastal and financial elites, it will do a better job of attracting Democrats and independents—possibly pointing the way to the first real national majority coalition since the Reagan era. And that new party will not welcome the traitors, who will have to make do with contributorships on CNN and MSNBC. Assuming any slots are available.
“Within five years,” said former French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, “the situation could become irreversible.”
He was referring to the rising tide of violence resulting from Muslim immigration. His comment was from an interview that took place almost two years ago. If Collomb’s calculations are correct, France only has a few years “to avoid the worst.”
Significant social change usually takes place over the course of many decades, but sometimes gradual trends enter into an acceleration phase, and massive social transformations take place in a matter of years. A few years ago, who would have imagined that the demands of the transgender “community” would become the determining factor in the decisions of school boards, corporate boards, and athletic associations? Who would have thought that the “right” of boys to enter the girls’ locker room, or the “right” of drag queens to conduct story hours in public libraries, would someday outweigh all other considerations? Yet, here we are.
Thus far, the Islamization of several major European states has been a gradual process. But there are signs that this trend is now set to accelerate. After a 9/11-style plot was recently foiled by French intelligence services, the new Interior Minister, Christophe Castaner, revealed that 60 such attacks had been foiled since 2013.
Meanwhile, 235,000 complaints for rape or attempted rape were filed in 2018; this was 62,000 more than in 2016, and an astonishing 225,000 more than in 2005. In 2018, there were also more than a thousand anti-Christian attacks (mostly, the desecration of churches), and 541 anti-Semitic acts—up 64 percent from 2017, and a shocking statistic when one considers that Jews make up less than one percent of the French population.
Charles Gave, an economist who published an article on “The Demographic Suicide of Europe,” wrote that within thirty years, France will submit to Islam. In response, the mainstream press denounced him as “Islamophobic.” Likewise, when journalist Eric Zemmour wrote that he fears that the fight for the survival of France is “a battle already lost,” he, too, was accused of “Islamophobia.”
While anti-Muslim attacks are much fewer than anti-Christian or anti-Jewish attacks, and while only a few journalists dare to criticize Islam, French leftists have managed to create the perception that the nation is endangered by a wave of Islamophobia. On November 10, a coalition of left-wing groups organized a 13,000-strong march in Paris against Islamophobia.
While the French are engaged in their quick-time march to Islamization, a similar phenomenon is occurring in the U.K. The British have been in appeasement mode for a long time. For more than a decade, police and other authorities turned a blind eye to the activities of Muslim grooming gangs who were responsible for the rape and prostitution of thousands of teenage girls in towns and cities across the English Midlands. On the other hand, authorities were quick to prosecute the handful of “Islamophobes” who called attention to the crimes. Tommy Robinson, for example, was arrested on at least four occasions.
Islamophobia now seems to be a hate crime in England. On October 22, a Jewish blogger who goes by the name Fahrenheit 211, and who has been critical of Islam, was handcuffed and arrested at his home by at least a half-dozen police. The constables were led by a Muslim officer who is attached to the ‘hate crime and hate speech’ unit organized by Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London. The blogger was jailed on suspicion of Islamophobia; as Fahrenheit notes, it’s increasingly common in Britain to be arrested for such crimes of “wrongthink.”
The blogger is just the latest in a long line of British citizens who have run afoul of the law for saying the wrong thing about Islam. There is reason to believe that the Islamization of England could soon accelerate to warp speed. This is because there’s a chance that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party’s hard-left candidate, could become the next prime minister.
In a recent piece for Gatestone Institute, journalist Con Coughlin suggests that a Corbyn government would jeopardize Britain’s security and intelligence-sharing relationship with Washington because of Corbyn’s open association with “regimes and groups that are utterly hostile to the West and its allies.”
This, according to Coughlin, would include Corbyn’s close association with members of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranian regime. A Corbyn government would not only pose a danger to the U.S.–U.K. security relation, it would also endanger the citizens of the U.K. His pro-Islamist sympathies make it highly likely that the pace of Islamization in Britain would shift into high gear.
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How about America? As Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Nowadays it might be more accurate to rephrase that to “never more than one election away.” If the Democrats should regain the presidency, and possibly the Senate, in next year’s election, we can expect a marked increase in Islamic influence over our government and our society.
President Obama famously said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” Many of his policies and appointments seemed geared to ensure that critics of Islam would have no future. On September 27, 2012, in a nighttime raid, federal authorities arrested Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of a short YouTube video that mocked Muhammad. Mr. Nakoula was found guilty of probation violation and was sentenced to one year in prison. Of course, his real crime was that he had slandered the Prophet of Islam.
During President Obama’s eight-year tenure, he developed close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood—an organization that has been labeled as the “mother of all terrorist groups”—and he actively facilitated the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt under Mohamed Morsi. Meanwhile, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, worked closely with the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on plans to criminalize criticism of Islam. At around the same time, it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton’s top aide and close confidant, Huma Abedin, had family members who were deeply enmeshed in Muslim Brotherhood organizations. As it turned out, Ms. Abedin herself worked for several years as a managing editor for a Muslim Brotherhood journal.
No matter. When five members of Congress asked for an investigation of Ms. Abedin, they were treated like pariahs.
The Obama administration also channeled huge sums of money to Iran’s Islamist regime—money which not only advanced Iran’s nuclear program, but also enabled it to supply weapons to terrorist groups across the world.
Back on the home front, Islamic activist groups such as CAIR, ISNA, and MAS made a great deal of headway under the Obama administration. At the behest of Muslim pressure groups, John Brennan ordered the FBI (then headed by Robert Mueller), the Department of Defense, and other agencies to purge their training programs of any materials that might suggest that Islam was anything other than a model cultural-religious system. At the same time, many Muslim activists were placed in influential and sensitive government positions, including some in Homeland Security. And many are still embedded in the Deep State.
If Democrats should retake the government, it’s a sure bet that the promotion of Islam which took place under Obama, and which suffered a partial setback under Trump, will once again become a top priority. The party is now much more radical and left-leaning than it was under Obama, and, like leftists everywhere, party members will be tempted to ally themselves with forces that are subversive of American freedoms.
That said, it is not out of the question that America could suddenly find itself on the fast track to society as beholden to Islamic interests as Britain and France. An emboldened leftist-Islamist alliance, abetted by leftist legislatures and leftist judges, would go after critics of Islam with a vengeance. Once legitimate criticism of Islam becomes a hate crime punishable by imprisonment, opposition to the Islamist agenda will quickly dry up. And the pace of change will continue to speed up.
The West seems set for political turmoil that could greatly expand the power of Islam in France, England, and America. Is there any way, to stop it? Well, here are two suggestions: don’t forget to pray, and don’t forget to vote.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on YOU DO NOT LOOK LIKE AN OSTRICH, WHY DO YOU ACT AND SPEAK LIKE AN OSTRICH. GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND AND LOOK AT WHAT IS HAPPENING TO EUROPE, ESPECIALLY FRANCE AND ENGLAND. WITH THE FEW MILITANT MUSLIMS IN CONGRESS SET TO BE JOINED BY MORE IN NEXT YEAR’S GENERAL ELECTION THE United States IS SET TO FOLLOW IN THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF EUROPE.
Churches Ever Emptier. Two Shocking Surveys in the United States and Italy
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In Japan, where Pope Francis will land tomorrow, those baptized into the Catholic Church are just 0.4 percent of the population. Without any sign of numerical growth.
But also in two Western countries with a solid Catholic presence the statistics are heading decisively lower. These two countries are the United States and Italy.
IN THE UNITED STATES
In the United States there is a noteworthy survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, to which on November 13 “L’Osservatore Romano” also dedicated an article:
On the whole, Christians of all confessions have dropped from 78 percent of the population in 2007 to 65 percent in 2019, while during the same years those who identify themselves as atheist, agnostic, or without religion – the “nones” – have increased from 16 percent to 26 percent.
Separating the Christians into Protestants and Catholics, the former have dropped over the past twelve years from 51 to 43 percent, and the Catholics from 24 to 20 percent.
Christians who said they had gone to church for Mass or another ceremony at least once a month fell from 54 percent to 45 percent. While those who said they had done so a few times a year or never, apart from marriages or funerals, grew from 45 to 54 percent.
This drop in religious practice almost across the board involves both men and women, whether white or black or Hispanic, college graduates and the less educated. What marks a strong difference are above all age and political proclivity. The “millennials,” meaning those born in the 1980s and early 90s, together with those who vote for the Democratic Party are the Americans who show the strongest drop in religious practice and the most decisive growth of the “nones.”
Among the “millennials” today Christians are 49 percent and the “nones” 40 percent. Those who go to church at least once a month are 35 percent and never or almost never 42 percent.
Among American citizens of Hispanic origin, ten years ago Catholics were the majority, 57 percent. Today they are less than half, 47 percent, with the “nones” rising in the meantime to 23 percent.
The area in which the drop in Catholics is most pronounced is the Northeast, where over the past ten years they have fallen from 36 to 27 percent of the population. Almost unchanging, instead, is their slight presence in the South, where they were 17 percent ten years ago and are 16 percent today. In the South, however, there has been a more marked drop among the Protestants, who have fallen in ten years from 64 to 53 percent of the population.
Among the Protestants, the only index on the rise is that of the “born again” and “Evangelicals,” who went from 56 to 59 percent of the total over the last ten years.
While among Democratic Party voters the most glaring change is the growth of the “nones,” who jumped over the past ten years from 20 to 34 percent.
IN ITALY
In Italy as well, Catholics are on the decline. This is proven by the most recent of the periodic investigations of the IPSOS, the president of which, Nando Pagnoncelli, reported on them in the latest issue of “Vita e Pensiero,” the magazine of the Catholic University of Milan.
Compared with ten years ago, the committed Catholics, who attend religious functions at least weekly and are involved in volunteer work, have fallen by 2 points and are today 9 percent of the population.
The observant Catholics, who attend religious functions at least weekly but do not do volunteer work, have fallen from 21 to 14 percent.
The lukewarm Catholics, who attend religious functions occasionally, have fallen from 39 to 34 percent.
Non-practicing Catholics are holding steady, around 12 percent.
While those who identify themselves as non-believers have almost doubled, from 14 to 27 percent of Italians, with the biggest spikes among young people – 46 percent between the ages of 18 and 24, and 39 percent between the ages of 25 and 34 – and among the most dynamic and educated classes, especially in the North.
In the European elections of the spring of 2019, Lega Nord was the party most voted for by practicing Catholics, both observant, with 32.7 percent of the votes, and lukewarm, with 38.4 percent.
After this comes the Partito democratico, with 26.9 percent of the votes among the observant and 20 percent among the lukewarm, and the Movimento 5 Stelle, with 14.3 percent among the observant and 18.9 percent among non-believers.
If one adds together the votes given to Lega Nord, to Forza Italia, and to Fratelli d’Italia, among Catholics the center-right is decisively in the lead, with 48.2 percent among the observant and 55.9 percent among the lukewarm.
The elevated appreciation expressed by Catholics for the leader of Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini, turns out to be predominantly connected to the issues of migrants and security. Pagnoncelli writes:
“As much as the Church and the pope have explicitly and fervently spoken out for a policy of welcome, albeit ‘tempered,’ among the more observant Catholics as well there prevails an attitude of endorsement of more restrictive policies. At the times of the strict closure of ports practiced by Salvini, a relative majority of committed Catholics, 44 percent, espoused the strict stance of blocking all disembarkation, a consensus that arrived at an absolute majority among observant Catholics, with 51 percent.”
It must be noted that the migratory phenomenon is influenced by a largely distorted perception. It should be enough to consider that on average Italians maintain that foreigners represent 30 percent of the resident population, against the 10 percent in reality, and that Muslims are 20 percent of residents, against the actual 4 percent.
In any case, the refusal of new arrivals is accompanied by serene and civil relations with foreigners already present in Italy. “This basic ambivalence,” Pagnoncelli comments, “is represented well by the moms of a parish in northern Italy who typically spend Sunday afternoon sewing clothes for the children of disadvantaged foreign families, but say they are in favor of the tough stance and of the closing of the ports, and speak out enthusiastically about Salvini. Or by the Lega Nord activist who went to great lengths to find a nightgown and a robe for a Nigerian woman who was alone and about to give birth.”
So in Italy, between the Church, the pope, and Catholics opinions are not aligned, even in the most practicing segments. This is a phenomenon that concerns the entire Western world, where individual opinion counts more and more. Even when one listens to what the Church says, the decision is made alone. Pagnoncelli concludes:
“Faith and politics are two fragments of a multiple individual identity, fragments that shape less and less the opinions and attitudes of believers who appear to be far from a unified and consistent vision of themselves. This passage, and the necessity of relating to it, is also central for the Church. And Catholics are part of this changing society.”Condividi:
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on HERE IS A SNAPSHOT OF THE Catholic Church IN AMERICA AND ITALY TODAY. WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE IN THE FUTURE IF FRANCIS THE MERCIFUL I IS SUCCEEDED BY FRANCIS THE MERCIFUL II, AS SEEMS LIKELY???
The Hollywood actor seems to know how to keep his priorities straight.
Actor Mark Wahlberg is very vocal about his faith, and often shares inspiring posts on his social media. But a recent post on his Instagram account provided a little more insight into his prayer life and made many of his fans admire him a little bit more.
The photo posted by Wahlberg shows the film star relaxing on a sofa next to a couple of friends, with a smiling Fr. Eugene sandwiched between them, who had just celebrated Mass for them. Wahlberg was happy to share his thanks to for the whole world to see. He wrote:
“No matter what’s happening we never miss Mass,” followed by a little prayer emoji and a message of thanks to the priest.
The post was not only a lesson in good manners, but a reminder of the gift of the Mass, and how we should try and fit it into our busy schedules. Wahlberg’s faith-affirming words are a powerful witness in a culture that doesn’t always value devotion to God.
Listening to the pearl-clutching from State Department foreign service officers; and looking at the circular laundry operation where DC politicians send taxpayer funds overseas and then use networks, friends and families to capture those same funds for their own personal financial benefit; while overlaying how much Hillary Clinton corruption the U.S. Justice Department, State Department and intelligence community hid in the 2016 election; the big picture emerges.
When politicians in Mexico or Afghanistan accept bribes we call it corruption, but when DC politicians participate in the exact same process we call it “lobbying”. It is no wonder the Clinton Foundation starts losing money as soon as the political influence over policy no longer exists. It is also no surprise why those same donors hate President Trump.
In the larger picture it is clear the Obama administration weaponized institutions of government to target their political opposition. It is also increasingly clear a Hillary Clinton administration would have further monetized the U.S. government.
President Obama’s team used the IRS, DOJ, CIA, FBI and State Dept. to target their opposition. The intelligence apparatus was weaponized; one small example that scratches the surface is the FBI/NSA FISA(702) database exploitation. Black files on DC politicians, private sector groups and individuals facilitating leverage, and we are still seeing the ramifications.
When business executive Patrick Byrne discussed his role within the “political espionage” operations, he was describing this exact process; not coincidentally he also seems to have retreated into a safe-space.
Big multinational interests, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Global Banking interests, etc, were exclusively supporting both President Obama and candidate Clinton. The domestic politics of the U.S. were/are tools toward an end; and, so long as the person occupying the oval office did not interfere with multinational objectives, they too would benefit financially.
It is also obvious the opposition to President Trump, those who are really coordinating and manipulating the grassroots sheeple, are funded by these same multinational interests.
The college kid wearing a pink pussy hat is oblivious, but the executive offices of the Deep State FBI and Intelligence Community under James Comey, Andrew McCabe, or even Christopher Wray and AG Bill Barr are not; they know.
Additionally, the current occupants must also know that we know. Likely a great many more people are aware of the bigger issues than ever before. Perhaps this explains the dynamic of DC resistance angst amid those same occupants.
Think about how much the DOJ and FBI did to protect candidate Clinton.
Obviously, in their down-time discussions, they would have discussed and recognized some benefit would be forthcoming.
No entity would go so far out on an obvious limb of corruption if they did not perceive some personal benefit on the horizon.
Think about how much leverage James Comey would have held over the institution of the Office of the President if they had succeeded. If the sum total of dirt on Trump filled a bucket, by comparison Hillary Clinton owns a landfill.
Thousands of bills written by the multinational lobbyists were awaiting her arrival. Think of the scale of multinational effort behind TPP (Asia), TTIP (Europe), Paris Climate Treaty (Global), etc. Literally tens of trillions of graft and scheme within reach of those global financial networks; at the fingertips of the multinational Big Club,… until Donald Trump.
Think of the scale of wealth headed to the top of the pyramid that President Trump halted. Domestically, all of those lobbyist-written bills worthless on November 9th, 2016. All of the DC politicians, sales people indulged to sell those bills, left teetering on the border of functional obsolescence…. It’s quite stunning to think about.
Thus, after the initial shock, all of those interests lashing out in rage; weaponizing every group they can muster. Dispatching urgency to the corporate media forces. The pure unmitigated hatred that started immediately becomes much more understandable in this context.
Years of leftist planning led to President Obama’s ability to weaponize government without being held accountable in the process. Years of assistance by corporate media allies, all building toward the same end goal. How rich would Hillary and Bill have become by simply allowing phase two, “the monetization“, to proceed?
Remarkable to contemplate.
James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, Denis McDonough, Valerie Jarrett, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and many more, including the aforementioned foreign service officers, all knew and anticipated the professional power and personal financial benefits that would have followed…
JohnCasper says:November 21, 2019 at 4:55 pmDear AG William Barr, cc.John Durham Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. – Justice Brandeis, Olimstead v. United States 277 U.S. 438 (1928)LikeReply
@ChicagoBri says:November 21, 2019 at 4:47 pmThe irony was not lost on me when our elected and unelected bozos were tut tutting about how corrupt Ukraine was. Their is a timber in DCs collective eye.Liked by 2 peopleReply
Sparty says:November 21, 2019 at 4:53 pmThank you SD. Everything I’ve been thinking, not yet verbalized, and much more with respect to Ukraine being the epicenter of international Democrat money laundering and policy for plunder. The minions In State Dept would no doubt, in their mind, get a small slice of cheese hence the lash back from twerps paraded in this impeachment fiasco.Liked by 1 personReply
JohnCasper says:November 21, 2019 at 4:53 pm“President Obama’s team used the IRS, DOJ, CIA, FBI and State Dept. to target their opposition.”And the DOD. Maybe a lessor player compared to the rest, but a player none the less. And now, the DOD may be moving up in that pack of jackals and hyenas as some of the others fall back. And no, I don’t robotic PC like say to them all, “Thank you for your service”.LikeReply
burnett044 says:November 21, 2019 at 4:54 pmScum always covers for scum…. Ukraine is a yuge corrupt money teat for all the corrupt….PT was about to shut that teat off.. he is not of the Big Club….they must be rid of him…any way they can….they have the CIA,FBI, the courts. judges ..many Military Leaders…the media…endless money…LikeReply
Nom de Blog says:November 21, 2019 at 4:55 pmThese same issues on a smaller scale were the reason Scott Walker faced a recall election. He stopped the corruption of unions/politicians in Wisconsin. But that was a petty system of corruption compared to the worldwide corruption of NGOs and foreign entanglements.The Department of Education is a similar system. It uses tax dollars to employ people with no obvious skill sets and no value added. And Democrats reap votes and campaign donations from the industry that would not exist in its current form without tax dollars.Statewide, nationwide, or worldwide these programs are money laundering operations.LikeReply
Elvis Newton says:November 21, 2019 at 4:55 pmIt really is up to Barr to prosecute. PDJT can expose it all but …. And somehow, it HAS to move to a court outside beltway, they can never find unbiased jurors there – just ask Roger Stone.LikeReply
William Schneider says:November 21, 2019 at 4:55 pmSundance .once again thanks for sharing the dept of the abyss we stare into when we look at the deep state and monsters who inhabit it. In God we must trust- and in Donald, Barr and many other warriors for the truth. Today I prayed publicly at my catholic church that our leaders would act with courage to do the will of God always. I remain hopeful that Barr and Durham will do their job and begin the major cleanup of the swamp of DC.LikeReply
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on THERE SEEMS TO BE A RACE ON BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE United States AND THE GOVERNMENT OF THE VATICAN STATE TO SEE WHICH CAN BECOME THE MOST CORRUPT AND STILL SURVIVE. IT IS ONLY THE PROMISE OF OUR LORD REGARDING THE GATES OF HELL THAT INCLINES ME TO BELIEVE THAT THE CHURCH WILL SURVIVE; I AM NOT SO SURE ABOUT OUR TWO-PARTY SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
Every November since 2016, my thoughts return to the incidents – the demonstrations, the slanders – that ruined the evening of my career at Providence College, where I’d taught for twenty-seven years, and where I’d been the school’s most prolific author and its most energetic booster among the faculty. It all went to smash, with breathtaking speed.
My friends at the time laid a great deal of the blame upon clericalism. As they saw it, the Dominican priests hung together, even though they knew that two among their number were much in the wrong. And the bishop’s chargé d’affaires also provided cover, discouraging his superior from getting involved.
My friends were correct. I wonder what might have happened if a few priests had allowed justice to trump fellow-feeling or the unwritten rules of the club, and had called me up and said, “Get your coat on, because we’re seeing your president right now.” Anger in a just cause can move mountains. It can sometimes move a bureaucrat. It’s tempting to believe that clericalism is a disease of the clergy, and that if only laymen were given greater authority, we would not be beset with so many scandals. If only. I don’t see it that way.
The more aggressive among the secular laymen at Providence College have formed a clerisy that is just as tight as the one with the rosaries, but without the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel. That is the case everywhere, I think.
C.S. Lewis described the phenomenon in his essay, “The Inner Ring.” Lewis saw that in every human organization, there are going to be the few deep insiders who get most of the work done, for good or for bad. We are social beings, created for membership in bodies, especially the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.
*
Clericalism is sociability gone wrong. There may come a point, says Lewis, when you are near that inner ring, and you are called to do something wrong. It’s usually a little thing. So Mark Studdock in Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, writing newspaper reports for the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), comes to realize that for the first time he is writing something he knows is a lie.
Why would his superiors want him to do that? It’s not simply that they want the lie to spread. They want to bind Studdock to them. They are tempting a capable but insecure man with what he longs for most, to be with those who know, who have power, who are important.
Laymen in my experience are as clerical as the clerics. The clerics catch a more virulent form of the disease, you may say, because they believe they are holy. Perhaps; but they also have the remedy more readily available, in the examination of conscience, in the clear teachings of the Church, and in the fiery words of Jesus, who brooks no play-acting.
There may be a nickel’s worth of difference between the clerical cleric and the clerical layman. A nickel, but not a dime. Archbishop Rembert Weakland rifled the goods of his diocese to pay blackmail to a homosexual lover.
Am I to believe that such things never happen among laymen? I do not believe that the laymen in Weakland’s own chancery were ignorant of his propensities. They winked. People outside of the inner ring might take the Catechism seriously on this point, but the people who really count know better.
Is empathy the answer? No, I don’t think so. How does empathy, simply speaking, protect you against the desire to belong? Empathetic people feel with those they are near. They catch every bug that goes around. They are so quick to feel the feelings of their crowd, they have nothing left for the outsiders, for “bad” people like me.
Jesus suffered with those who suffered, but we never sense that he was an easy man for grown people to be near. When the social world is fallen, or corrupt, or downright wicked, empathy by itself does no good. You can empathize your way to Hell.
I can think of two partial remedies for clericalism. Both are paradoxical. One is to be a loner. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” says God, before He creates Eve to be a helpmate for Adam. We are made for friendship. But there must be a right ordering of friendships, too. Aristotle said that he was a friend of his teacher Plato, but a greater friend of truth.
Jesus often retreated from the crowds and even from his friends, to pray more intimately to the Father. For such imperfect stuff as we are, a resistance to easy sociability, even a difficulty in making close friends, may protect us against the urgency to belong. Bureaucracy is greased with sociable ways. We need that steel bar of the unsocial to grind its gears to a halt.
The second remedy is law. I don’t mean severity of punishment. That must depend upon the patient and the disease. I mean law as a bulwark against the temptations of empathy and the social. Law keeps the club honest. It is not the law of the club, the usually unwritten law, as I have said, that is a part of the club’s life and that allows it to accomplish things. It is the law outside of the club, to which the club submits.
The law in my case was simple: you do not bear false witness against your neighbor. Or: you do not use political demonstration to shut down discussion at a university. That’s it.
Some things a club member does will warrant a punch to the jaw. Think of the abusive priests. No sociability, but a punch. Had there been a few broken teeth, there may have been a lot fewer broken lives. But a club gone bad will be for itself first and last, as we see in education, politics, business, entertainment, and – alas – the Church.
*Image: “The Road to Hell” by Hieronymus Bosch, 1516 [Museo del Prado, Madrid]. This is the right panel of Bosch’s Haywain Triptych.
Note: We’re getting there. But I need more of you to realize the challenges we face and to step up in support of the many responses we need to undertake. Professor Esolen tells a sad tale today about just one part of the problem – and that at what was once an exemplary Catholic college. I’ve always said that I have faith in readers of The Catholic Thing because I know you are adult believers who take seriously your responsibilities. So I don’t – and won’t ever – harangue. The button’s below and you know what needs to be done. – Robert Royal
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on ANTHONY ESOLEN IS ONE OF THE BEST CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC AUTHORS. HIS SHAMEFUL PERSECUTION AND DEPARTURE FROM PROVIDENCE COLLEGE IN Rhode Island IS A BLACK MARK ON THE REPUTATION OF THE DOMINICAN PRIESTS OF THAT COLLEGE AND OF THE COLLEGE ITSELF.
Pope Benedict XVI, who has been lauded by many as a brilliant theologian, is in my opinion, a more brilliant chess player, for he has defeated the AntiChurch with the most incredibly subtle and effective manuever which could ever be conceived, and which takes a great deal of study to recognize, if you, like myself, took at face value the hearsay which has been put out for the last six years.
Admittedly, the honor and glory for it belong first of all to God, Who enlightens all men and inspires them at times to do things mere mortals could never conceive of. But also, thanks goes to God for sending Our Lady to Fatima to reveal to Sr. Lucia a secretwhich has until this day remained hidden, so as to give sound counsel to the true Successor of Saint Peter in the End Times.
How Pope John Paul II strengthened the Bulwark of the Church against the AntiChurch
I believe that with that knowledge, Pope John Paul II did 3 things: first, he chose Joseph Ratzinger to come to Rome and prepared him to succeed him (perhaps because he sensed that Ratzinger had the gift of prophecy); second, in 1983, he added the term munus to canon 332 §2, to constrain all of his successors to the obligation of renouncing the Petrine Munus so as to resign the papacy; and third, in 1996, he promulgated a new law on Papal Elections, which would nullify any attempt of the AntiChurch to usurp the Papacy or elect successors to AntiPopes (by requiring that all valid conclaves meet within 20 days after the death of valid popes).
Pope John Paul II warned the Church of the AntiChurch which was rising. He beatified Ann Catherine Emmerich (on the Vigil of St. Francis of Assisi, in 2004) to give papal approval to her own visions in this regard. It should not be surprising then, that in secret, or I should say, in the bright light of day, in papal acts he prepared the Church against that Evil to come!
By these three acts, Pope John Paul II set the chess board and enabled his chosen successor, Ratzinger to enact a stratagem of deception to defeat the forces of darkness.
The Forces of the AntiChurch struck quickly
No sooner than Pope John Paul II had died that the St Gallen Mafia, which had been meeting in that Swiss town for some years, mobilized to put Bergoglio on the Apostolic Throne in the Conclave of 2005. Bergoglio, as is now known, garnered the most votes after Ratzinger. In his campaign to get elected he promised radical financial reforms in the Vatican, so he could pose as a savior and reformer, though his agenda was that of Cardinal Martini, to make the Church into the Bride of the Anti-Christ.
Recently an Argentine Priest revealed, that Pope Benedict, soon after his election in 2005, had asked Bergoglio to be Secretary of State (see report here). Benedict intended by this offer to diffuse the conflict which arose in the Conclave, and to draw out the real intentions of Bergoglio. Bergoglio’s refusal manifested his deceit, because all the reasons given in the Conclave for his election, which in truth could be done by a Secretary of State, if honest, would have spurred him to accept Benedict’s offer. But without the papal authority, his evil and malign agenda could not be advanced. — By this sign of offering the olive branch of peace, Benedict signaled to his own supporters, that after himself there would come an Anti-pope (cf. Prophecy of St Malachy).
With the threefold knowledge of the future had from the Third Secret, from Pope John Paul II and from his own experience in the CDF, Pope Benedict now knew what he had to do. He knew Bergoglio wanted power and would be blinded by its offer. He took preparations to defend the Church with tradition and as the pressure built from the St Gallen Mafia, he crafted their defeat in secret. At the same time, he openly warned the faithful, that the Message of Fatima was about to be fulfilled (On May 13, 2010, saying “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete…”).
Benedict knew that removing the Lavender Mafia from the Vatican was key to defending the Church. But as court documents revealed, in the WikiLeaks controversy, as that effort led to the destruction of the careers of many sodomites, they moved against Benedict to have him removed. His Pontificate had removed hundreds perverts from the clergy.
As I have written before, there was in my estimation a formal attempt at a Coup d’etat (see report here). And this was actually put in motion, with the intent to effectively imprison Pope Benedict (see Report here). — The Conclave pact in 2005 among the warring factions of Ratzinger (Church) and Bergoglio (Anti-Church) also prepared the way (see report here). But, with their cause lost at that conclave, the St. Gallen Mafia would have to wait for Benedict to resign, because being old, he revealed that he was inclined to resign in a few years, anyhow. As he lingered on, however, their rage and impatience exploded.
The restoration of the Ancient Mass (July 7, 2007) and the expansion of the permissions for its use (April 30, 2011) caused a general outburst among the wicked clerics. I myself know this took place in the Italian Bishop’s Conference in 2011, because a Bishop who attended told me how Cardinals and Bishops stood up, one after another, and said the most vile things against Benedict. I also know personally, from the testimony of a Sicilian Businessman, who was in Shanghai, that the Cardinal of Palermo had warned that Benedict could die within a year from poor health. The St Gallen Controlled Media expanded this and reported it as if the Cardinal has said that Benedict had a year to live or else. That report was published around Feb. 11, 2012! (note the date)
Benedict’s Master Stroke
Pope Benedict XVI then played his master stroke. In the Summer of 2012 he indicated to Cardinal Bertone that he was going to resign. He discussed the matter with no one but his secretary Ganswein and a few others. I believe that he wrote the text of abdication in the Fall of 2012. I also postulate that he intentionally showed the Latin text (the invalid one) and a faulty German translation (which makes it appear the Latin is a valid formula) to members of the St Gallen Mafia, to obtain their consent to it. By that act he sealed their doom.
Because only one who was fluent in Latin and knowledgeable about Canon Law and who accepted the traditional metaphysics of the Church would be able to see that the resignation by that formula would be invalid. Ratzinger further prepared the ground by emphasizing for years before, that his favorite theologian was Saint Bonaventure. This caused scholars, like myself, to start studying St. Bonanveture’s Scholatic method for textual analysis of the signification of expressions, which is unparalleled among all the Doctors of the Church.
The only thing is, that Benedict began to give signs of the truth, not only for the sake of the Faithful, but to annoy the St Gallen Mafia. He kept wearing the papal cassock, retained the titles of Your Holiness and signed with PP. Benedictus XVI, and continued to give the papal blessing. He did these things to get faithful Catholics to examine the text of resignation and discover it was invalid. — He did this also, because, I believe, he was obeying Our Lady’s word at Fatima, in which She had revealed that there would come a time in which the Catholic world thought there were 2 popes, but only one of which was the true pope. The one who was the true Pope would continue to wear white, the other would usurp the office; and that the Anti-Church would attack the true Pope and the faithful gathered about him.
By an invalid resignation Pope Benedict has canonically invalidated everything Bergoglio has done, can do, and can ever do! Bergoglio is now an AntiPope because of the clever trick Benedict played on him. And Bergoglio is so entangled by this stratagem of Benedict that he cannot admit its existence, because if he does, he must give up his claim to the papacy.
If Benedict should die, then there will be no valid Successor of Saint Peter unless the pre-Bergoglian Cardinals meet in conclave within 20 days. Otherwise, as Pope John Paul II declares in the promulgation of Universi Dominici Gregis, at the end of the text, any action the Cardinal Electors take will be invalid. If they fail to do this, the Church will not be bereft of a pope, because, as Pope John Paul II taught in UDG’s prologue, the institution of the College is “not necessary for a valid election” of the Roman Pontiff: there is still the ancient Apostolic Law regarding the right of the Roman Church to elect the Pope.*
Benedict has defeated “Francis”!
Note: I wish to publicly apologize to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for anything I have said in criticism of him, since it was not until today that I understood what he had did and why he had done it, nor that as Pope he was acting for the good of the Church in the best and only way he could see to do, acting on the basis of the counsels of Our Lady and Pope John Paul II. — Finally, I entertain the possibility that some Cardinals know of this grand stratagem of Benedict and that is why they act so dumb when asked about the question of validity or invalidity of the resignation.
FOOTNOTE:
* The right of election will fall to those Catholics of the Diocese Rome, who recognize that Benedict always was the only true pope, and that Bergoglio was always and is only, and nothing more, an Antipope. See my Disputed Question on Defecting Cardinals, here.
Above, an artist’s conception of a night-time aerial view of the “Abrahamic Family House” in Abu Dhabi. Each building is dedicated to one of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam“The World Neo-Religion Will have its Temple”
Above, an artist’s conception of a night-time aerial view of the “Abrahamic Family House” in Abu Dhabi. Each building is dedicated to one of the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Introductory note: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 78, has just published a brief essay via the Italian website “Duc in altum” (“Set out into the deep”), maintained by Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli, a friend of the archbishop. (Link)Archbishop Viganò, who is almost 79 and is retired from the Vatican diplomatic service, is living a quiet life of prayer in a safe place. He is studying the current issues facing the Church, reading articles and studying the recent history of the Church while immersing himself, through the breviary (the daily official cycle of Church prayer) in the mind and spirit of the Church Fathers.
He has decided to write brief reflections on the issues of the day from the perspective of a faithful son of the Church. His desire is to explain and defend orthodox Church teaching because he is persuaded it is the way of salvation, that is, of human blessedness — human happiness — not of misery and the frustration of all human hopes — a blessing, not a curse. He feels called to offer these reflections, he says, because the power of secular thought today is so great that it is influencing many Church leaders, and ordinary faithful, creating confusion and opening the way to a loss of that faith which he, as a bishop, vowed to protect and defend. He hopes that his thoughts — offered as the fruit of his prayer and meditation — may help others to see more clearly the contours of the present battle — and the goodness of the Lord, who has called all Christians “out of darkness, into His marvelous light.”Here is his latest reflection.
CM Viganò: “Thus the world Neo-Religion will have its temple. With the Pope’s approval”
by Aldo Maria Valli
Dear friends of Duc in altum , I received an article from Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò that I gladly propose to you. It concerns the Abrahamic Family House project, a structure that will host a synagogue, a mosque and a church in Abu Dhabi.
“In the garden of Abu Dhabi,” writes Viganò, “the Temple of the world syncretistic Neo-Religion is about to rise with its anti-Christian dogmas. Not even the most hopeful of the Freemasons would have imagined so much!”
By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
“To the Venerable Brothers … who have peace and communion with the Apostolic See in the defense of the Truth revealed by Jesus Christ, health and Apostolic Blessing.
Perhaps in the past it never happened that the heart of human creatures was taken as today by such a lively desire for fraternity… One easily understands… how many are those who yearn to see more and more united among themselves the various nations, led to this by this universal feeling of brotherhood. “This is how the Supreme Pontiff Pius XI expressed himself at the beginning of his encyclical Mortalium animos in 1928, signed precisely on the day of the Epiphany, when the Church recalls the three wise Magi from the East, leaders of an ceaseless processional caravan guided by a shining star that appeared in the firmament, when on earth the Son of God came in the flesh, the One Savior, center of the cosmos and of History.
Ninety-one years later, last Friday, November 15, 2019 — as reported by Vatican News — Pope Bergoglio received the Great Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb (link), accompanied by various personalities and representatives of the University of Al-Azhar and the Superior Committee, all animated by the desire to give form and substance to the contents of the Document on Human Brotherhood for World Peace and the Common Cohabitation, agreed upon last August in the wake of the historic Emirate Declaration, signed by the pontiff and by the Imam during the Year of Brotherhood.
About the document mentioned above, His Excellency Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, as the representative of the United Arab Emirates, had previously stated (Vatican News, September 21, 2019) that “in a world where there are so many things that divide, the Emirates are committed to unite. Like a beacon of light, they want to bring light into a dark world, bringing to light this Document, the most important signed in recent times”; as if to say that “the Light from the East” which came to visit us from on high like the sun rising (Lk 1:7-8) is now eclipsed by a new “Bright Lighthouse.
“The talks of the Vatican meeting were cordial, with words and expressive gestures of a by now consolidated friendship: we recall that this is the sixth meeting between the Pope and the Great Imam. Thus the Latin American warmth has prevailed over the long and rigid “frost” that formerly marked the relations between the Apostolic See and the highest leadership of Sunni Islam. The meeting also offered the opportunity to present the Pope with a singular project of which it is possible to get a certain idea through floor plans and 3D reconstructions.Sir David Adjaye Obe is the creator of this architectural project, which will be built in the opulent and extravagant Abu Dhabi.
It will be called the “House of the Abrahamitic Family,” a sort of New Tent of Universal Brotherhood evoking that other Tent of Hospitality in which the Ancient Patriarch (Abraham) hosted three mysterious Angels (cf Genesis 18), prefiguration of the Trinitarian God fully revealed to the legitimate Abrahamic posterity, through faith in Jesus Christ.”Abrahamic Family House” is therefore the name of this structure that will house a synagogue, a mosque and a church, naturally dedicated to the Poverello (St. Francis of Assisi).
Sir David’s project envisages that the three different places of worship should be joined together by a single foundation and placed within a garden, evocative of a New Eden, a re-evocation in a gnostic and Masonic key of the paradise of the First Creation.As explained to Pope Bergoglio, this “structure… will serve as a place of individual worship, but also for dialogue and interreligious exchange.”
In fact, a fourth building is also planned, home to the Center for Studies and Research on Human Brotherhood, whose objective, which can be seen from the Abu Dhabi document, will be to “make the three religions known.” In this same venue will also take place ceremonies to hand out a Human Brotherhood Prize.
The building of the House of the Abramitic Family seems to be a Babelic enterprise, concocted by the enemies of God, of the Catholic Church and of the only true religion capable of saving man and the whole creation from destruction, both now and in eternity, and definitively. The foundations of this “House,” destined to give way and collapse, arise where, by the hands of the builders themselves, the One Cornerstone is about to be incredibly removed: Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord, on whom is built the House of God. “Therefore,” warns the Apostle Paul, “let everyone is careful how he builds. Indeed, no one can lay a foundation other than the one already found there, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:10).
In the garden of Abu Dhabi the temple of the world syncretistic Neo-Religion is about to rise with its anti-Christian dogmas. Not even the most hopeful of the Freemasons would have imagined so much!Pope Bergoglio thus proceeds to further implement the apostasy of Abu Dhabi, the fruit of pantheistic and agnostic neo-modernism that tyrannizes the Roman Church, germinated by the conciliar document Nostra Aetate. We are compelled to recognize it: the poisoned fruits of the “Conciliar springtime” are before the eyes of anyone who does not allow himself to be blinded by the dominat Lie.
Pius XI had alerted and warned us. But the teachings that preceded Vatican II have been thrown to the winds, as intolerant and obsolete. The comparison between the pre-conciliar Magisterium and the new teachings of Nostra aetate and Dignitatis humanae — to mention only those — manifest a terrible discontinuity, which must be acknowledged and which must be amended as soon as possible. Adjuvant Deo (“with God’s help”).
Let us listen to the words of the Supreme Pontiff Pius XI, when the Popes used to speak the language of Truth, chiseled with fire in diamond. “They usually hold congresses, meetings, conferences, with wide public intervention, to which all are invited to discuss: infidels of all grades, Christians, and even those who miserably apostatized from Christ or who with obstinate pertinacity deny the divinity of his Person and his mission.
Such attempts based on the false theory that supposes all religions good and laudable cannot certainly obtain the approval of the Catholics, since all, albeit in different ways, manifest and equally mean that congenital sentiment to which we feel led to God and the acknowledgment of His dominion. Now, the followers of such a theory, not only are they in deceit and error, but they repudiate the true Religion, depriving it of its concept, turning step by step towards naturalism and atheism; whence it clearly follows that those who adhere to the advocates of such theories and attempts move away completely from the Religion revealed by God…
“The mystical Bride of Christ over the centuries has never been contaminated nor will she ever be contaminated, according to Cyprian’s words: “The Bride of Christ cannot be made false to her Spouse: she is incorrupt and modest. She knows but one dwelling, she guards the sanctity of the nuptial chamber chastely and modestly.” (Mortalium animos, 10)“Today more than ever … the Church needs strong and consistent doctrines. In the midst of dissolution… the compromises become more and more sterile, and each of them takes away a piece of the truth…
Show yourself then… who in the end you are, convinced Catholics…! There is a grace linked to the full and complete confession of faith. This confession, the Apostle tells us, is the salvation of those who make it, and experience shows that it is also the salvation of those who understand it.” (Dom Prosper-Louis-Pascal Guéranger, The Christian Meaning of History ).The Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI recently broke his silence by making public his sorrowful plea for the Church in this hour so troubled in its history: “Even today our faith is threatened by reductive changes to which worldly fashions would like to subject it to take away its greatness.
Lord, help us in this time of ours to be and to remain true Catholics — to live and die in the greatness of Your truth and in Your divinity. Give us always courageous bishops who may guide us to unity in faith and with the saints of all times and may show us how to act adequately in the service of reconciliation, to which our episcopate is called in a special way. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!
“Carlo Maria Viganò
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on The building of the House of the Abramitic Family seems to be a Babelic enterprise, concocted by the enemies of God, of the Catholic Church and of the only true religion capable of saving man and the whole creation from destruction, both now and in eternity, and definitively. The foundations of this “House,” destined to give way and collapse, arise where, by the hands of the builders themselves, the One Cornerstone is about to be incredibly removed: Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord, on whom is built the House of God. “Therefore,” warns the Apostle Paul, “let everyone is careful how he builds. Indeed, no one can lay a foundation other than the one already found there, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:10).
I keep reading statements made by those who support Texas’ draconian 10-Day Law – which I have often referred to here as TADA (it is Texas Health & Safety Code Sec. 166.046 of the Texas Advance Directives Act) – as a “dispute resolution process.” They describe it as if it is a give-and-take, back-and-forth dialogue between a patient and their doctor with equal consideration given to all viewpoints and an agreed upon resolution. That is NOT how it is used; that is NOT what it is by the very language of the statute itself.
I have described how the process works as well as the Constitutional due process violations inherent in the law most recently here. In this post, I also explained TADA in great detail including why it deprives patients of their rights to due process. You can see similar posts throughout this blog.
Nothing defenders of this law say contradicts any of this. It simply cannot be contradicted because that is literally how the law is written. That is the effect of the law. It is both facially unconstitutional and unconstitutional as applied to patients. That there is a “procedure” in place does not mean that there is due process. Due process is a particular legal term with certain requirements, e.g., the right to be heard, to have counsel, to be heard before an impartial tribunal, to appeal, etc. Not a single one of those exists in TADA. You may attend the hearing, you may or may not be allowed to speak. You have no right to speak. You are not entitled to counsel, you may be allowed it, but you have no right to it. And so forth and so on as I described in the links above.
Important for you to know is that those that describe it this way do not in any way help patients navigate the system at all. They have little to no firsthand knowledge of how this law actually works in the real world and certainly not from the patient’s point of view. They don’t help place patients in a new facility. They do not understand the special challenges involved in trying to save lives under these extraordinary circumstances. They do not retain lawyers to help anyone attempt to get a Temporary Restraining Order to try to get more time to transfer a patient
Again, they do not know how the system works in this context. Texas Right to Life certainly does. To a much lesser, but growing extent, so do I. So do many of us that oppose it. In fact, no one that supports it is involved in how it actually works for the patient. Keep that in mind.
With no hint of irony, they like to claim that any media entity or anyone criticizing this law is “uninformed” or “confused” about it. I’ve been watching this for years. People asking these questions are not confused or uninformed. In fact, they are digging into it. I’ve been asked dozens of questions in the last two weeks about it. As intellectually honest people learn more about this little known risk to their lives, they are horrified. They cannot believe that their right to life could be taken so hastily and with no recourse.
What they actually do is work to keep this law in place and continue to deprive patients and their families of their Constitutional rights to life and due process under the law. And they ally with pro-abortion entities to keep this law in place. The result of all of their efforts is a continuation of involuntary passive euthanasia.
Here is a reminder of why some of us call it that:
Let me begin with a note about terminology. I’ve discussed this before but let me recap. Why do I refer to TADA as “involuntary passive euthanasia”? First, TADA allows a hospital to withdraw your life-sustaining care against your will; it does not require anyone to consider your thoughts on the matter at all. Thus, if it is used against you against your will, you are subjected to something that is involuntary.
Second, “passive euthanasia” is distinguished from “active euthanasia.” “Passive euthanasia”is death brought about by the denial of something without which you will die. It can be air (ventilators), nutrition, hydration, etc. “Active euthanasia,” on the other hand, is that which Jack Kevorkian promoted – a shot or pills, etc. are administered – to directly and quickly bring about your death. TADA allows for passive, but not active euthanasia. But allowing the one sets up a slippery slope. There have already been calls to allow active euthanasia in Texas.
The primary pro-TADA faux life group releasing press statements – in which they admit that they have only second-hand information – also claims it does not support euthanasia. Interestingly enough, it does just that by supporting this law. Indeed, it’s own staffers have written in support of euthanasia (although they did not actually call it by that name, what they described is the very definition of it).
They also like to say or heavily imply that the Courts have rejected a Constitutional challenge to TADA. That is inherently, demonstrably false. I explained that here. The Courts have never addressed the merits of the law. In other words, the Courts have not said it is Constitutional. They have just not ruled on that at all. The appeal was rejected because the Court decided that the entire case became moot upon the person’s (Chris Dunn’s) death. That is not a correct holding and it has been appealed. The Texas Supreme Court initially rejected the Petition for Review, but a Motion for Rehearing has been filed and it has not decided that at this time. As I mentioned in that post, I am one of the attorneys on the case and I will say no more about it right now other than that. But what I have said is all a matter of public record. You can easily pull the briefs and opinions and read them yourself.
One other thing the Usual Suspects like to claim is that this law is about protecting doctors’ consciences and that to continue caring for a patient is to “force the hand of the doctor.” I – and many others – have repeatedly said that different doctors have different consciences and the solution here is to transfer care to another doctor or facility, but with sufficient time to do so. I have never received an answer as to why the only solution they will contemplate is killing a patient by withdrawing their life-sustaining care against their will if a person cannot be transferred in 10 days. (See, e.g., here and here.) The amount of time here is not enough. Full sets of documents cannot even usually by acquired by then. Often, much of that 10 days falls on weekends, as in the case for Tinslee.
Remember, also that the Usual Suspects still inexplicably opposed an amendment to TADA that would extend the time to transfer to 45 days.
One would think that after the Carolyn Jones debacle, and the amount of egg on so many faces, that these types would back off at least from publicly trying to glom onto a case to attempt damage control and try to gain their own publicity without firsthand information. They really never learn.
So there you have it: a few clarifications of some of the things you may see floating around out there. Trust the information coming from those with firsthand information about Tinslee’s case, how this law works in the real world, and those who are truly pro-life from conception to natural death with no exceptions. There is only one such group in Texas: Texas Right to Life. They will be putting out updates from time to time that I will try to link here just to keep the record up-to-date, so to speak. Often times it is useful to come back and review things. Please keep praying for Baby Tinslee and all involved. Pray for the conversion to life of all people.
Texas Right to Life has this update on Baby Tinslee:
Baby Tinslee Lewis, the 9-month-old at the center of a 10-day dispute with Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, will be protected until December 10, 2019. Texas Right to Life’s lawyers and Cook Children’s agreed to extend the temporary restraining order, allowing our patient advocacy team more time to secure a transfer. Originally, the TRO was set to expire this Friday, November 22. We praise God for this extension of time, which grants Tinslee more than a month of life after the hospital was initially set to pull the plug on the baby on November 10. We call on Governor Greg Abbott to convene a special session to end this deadly 10-Day Rule. Please keep praying as this process continues…for everyone involved on all sides. And, do please call the Governor and ask for a Special Session to end this law.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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