Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, August 18

By Dr. David Pence 

THE WEEKLY BRIEF

CARDINAL WUERL AND CARDINAL BURKE

TWO FACES OF FATHERHOOD BETRAYED

God will raise up new priests and bishops to reform the American episcopacy. The Church in America needs new men in positions of authority.... not lay oversight of our Apostolic fraternity. Do not look to either of the pretenders above to evoke the masculine fraternity and fatherhood needed in the office of bishop. The huge homosexual network of clergy that Donald Wuerl built up in Pittsburgh is just coming to light and should result in his public degradation from office. This should include loss of all pensions and support from the Church.  A promoter of justice in Pittsburgh and the other dioceses in Pennsylvania is needed to investigate the ruling clergy there.

For Cardinal Burke who has distracted the faithful from the real sacrilege of the Eucharist by homosexual bishops and clergy, his time of honor and adulation should come to an end by the fawning anti-Pope Francis commentators in the Catholic intelligentsia. His disgraceful sham court performance judging homosexual predator Bishop Apuron of Guam to be "guilty of some accusations" and sentenced to "privation of office and prohibition of residence in the Archdiocese of Guam" is essentially moving the predator elsewhere. Not a word from his media fan club. Apuron had already been removed from his office by Pope Francis within a month of the charges surfacing.
Pope Francis sacked that predator just as he swiftly dealt with McCarrick. Burke came on the scene in judicial robes, employed a few technical rules of law he learned at the OJ Simpson trial, and got the monster out of town just ahead of a righteous lynch mob.
Raymond Burke and the liturgical  "Daughters of Trent" and the EWTN "neoCatholics" who have cheered his defiant  "orthodoxy" have had their era of misdirection and distraction in sowing the weeds of false divisions in the Church. We have a Pope who is not perfect but he is the Pope who is finally establishing rule amidst the hierarchy in the manly fraternal spirit of Vatican II.
Vatican II was a stunning display of the public fraternal church in Christ under the Father. It was an authoritative witness of the patriarchal  fraternity that unites men across color, class, and language barriers in the Body of  Christ. It was a reaffirmation of the Bishop as the Eucharistic leader of the local church. It will be public fatherly brotherhoods  that will expose and remove the wealthy episcopal bureaucrat and his sodomite ruling clique. It will be masculine brotherhoods in the tradition of  Benedict, Francis, Dominic and Ignatius who will clean the filth from the major male religious orders.  Our daughters have been raped and our sons humiliated. The true men of Galilee among  our priests and Bishops  must expose the scarlet pretenders and investigate the lavender networks in their ranks. Bishops and religious superiors who can not exercise their ruling offices should resign so that new bishops and promoters of justice will do their fatherly duties of protection, investigation, and punishment. Rise up, O men of God. Repent and Live.

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE FRANCIS: DO NOT ADMIT HOMOSEXUALS TO SEMINARY
The Pope is not Fr Jim Martin on this issue. He is better on this than almost all the superiors of male religious orders. He is better than at least half of the diocesan seminary admittance committees.  Almost all male religious superiors have said they admit homosexuals if they promise chastity and have  "affective maturity. " Seminary directors and religious congregations of the last 40 years have been in rebellion against the monastic tradition and clear directives of the popes. Let us seriously ask, "Should religious orders who allow homosexuals in their orders be allowed to recruit at World Youth Day?" They aren't after children. They want older teen males. This is a chicken hawk's dream--an International Signing Day for new recruits.  If homosexuals are not be in the seminary, how can we tolerate them in our religious orders and the episcopacy?

ARE CONSENUAL ADULT ACTS A VIOLATION OF CANON CODE? Ed Peters gives a very good history. Peters is a canon lawyer. Any act of sodomy by a cleric should "by the act" remove him from the priestly state. (This would be a similar type of excommunicative penalty  that the Church imposes on women who procure an abortion.) No subsequent sacramental act by a father who committed sodomy would be valid. This should be clarified in canon law though, as Peters shows, treating priestly sodomy as a notorious and deposable crime is nothing new.

CARDINAL SODANO, DEAN OF THE CARDINALS - POSTER BOY OF COVERUP: It is ironic that opposition to Sodano's role in favoring the rich and connected against the local bishop is one of the situations that made Archbishop Bergoglio befriend "progressive bishops" on matters of decentralization against this most corrupt keeper of the centralized powers of the Papacy under John Paul II. There is no cleric close to Pope Francis who remotely rivals the evil done by Cardinal Sodano under John Paul II or the sinister machinations of Cardinal Levada (CDF) under Pope Benedict.  This excellent historical journalism comes from Crux news agency with writers from the "liberal tribe" and conservative sponsors from the "orthodox tribe." Crux may become just the space in which a truly Catholic Logos is spoken and lived most clearly.

BISHOP BARRON GETS ONE RIGHT AND TWO WRONG: First, what Bishop Barron gets RIGHT:

"When I was going through school, the devil was presented to us as a myth, a literary device, a symbolic manner of signaling the presence of evil in the world. I will admit to internalizing this view and largely losing my sense of the devil as a real spiritual person. What shook my agnosticism in regard to the evil one was the clerical sex abuse scandal of the nineties and the early aughts. I say this because that awful crisis just seemed too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice. The devil is characterized as “the enemy of the human race” and particularly the enemy of the Church. I challenge anyone to come up with a more devastatingly effective strategy for attacking the mystical body of Christ than the abuse of children and young people by priests. This sin had countless direct victims of course, but it also crippled the Church financially, undercut vocations, caused people to lose confidence in Christianity, dramatically compromised attempts at evangelization, etc., etc. It was a diabolical masterpiece."

And what what Bishop Barron gets WRONG:

"The second negative strategy is the riding of ideological hobby horses. So lots of commentators—left, center, and right—have chimed in to say that the real cause of the McCarrick disaster is, take your pick, the ignoring of Humanae vitae, priestly celibacy, rampant homosexuality in the Church, the mistreatment of homosexuals, the sexual revolution, etc. Mind you, I’m not saying for a moment that these aren’t important considerations and that some of the suggestions might not have real merit. But I am saying that launching into a consideration of these matters that we have been debating for decades and that will certainly not admit of an easy adjudication amounts right now to a distraction."

It is Satan who has infiltrated the priesthood. He has not done this through celibacy or artificial birth control  but homosexuality by priests and bishops. It is not a distraction to say the problem in the episcopacy and priesthood has nothing o do with marriage and everything to do with incestuous relations among males. The fact that  we have been "debating that for decades" is the triumph of the Deceiver. He's been a Liar from the beginning and that includes "for decades". Homosexuality in seminaries like Mundelein, homosexual advocacy at the Los Angeles Religious Education Conference, and rampant homosexuality throughout the Los Angeles chancery and presbyterate are not distractions from understanding Theodore McCarrick. That is the line of the old Deceiver.

Bishop Barron has never been strong on the necessity of punishment or the masculine fraternity of the priesthood. In one of his books he said Jesus picked "twelve people" to be his apostles. It is hard to understand fatherhood, filiation, and fraternity if you were raised in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Bishop Barron will be an amazing ally and spokesman once he is knocked off his horse and sees more clearly. He is an honest man - He can learn.

The good bishop is also dead wrong to appeal to the Pope to set up an investigation committee. The bishops can investigate themselves. If a bishop doesn't resign when confronted with misdeeds from his fellow bishops, then an act of papal authority will be required. The corruption in the dioceses and bishop conferences is too widespread to ask Rome for investigative initiatives. This is what subsidiary and collegiality and synods are all about. Laymen and honest bishops and priests have to be sure that the investigative committees are headed by the right bishop and staffed with an army of competent lay investigators. If a bishop cannot openly confront the "gaying" of the episcopacy, the religious male orders, chanceries, and presbyterates of our dioceses; then he cannot lead the investigation. Bishop Barron has correctly named the Enemy - it is Satan. For now he has withdrawn his name from any committee to investigate by repeating the monstrous conclusions of the John Jay feminist study.

CARDINAL CUPICH GETS A LOT WRONG: From America Magazine:

When asked if the church needed new structures to report sexual misconduct not involving children, Cardinal Cupich said, “Yes, I believe that’s the case.”

“If there was a misstep in this, so that people did not have the means by which they could put forward a complaint with objectivity and security, [knowing] that it would be acted on, then we need to put [that] in place,” Cardinal Cupich said.

But, he said, there is no need to “invent any new machinery” in order to adopt policies for reporting such allegations. “An H.R. department would know how to help us do that, and we should learn from those best practices,” the cardinal said.

In the weeks since allegations were made against Archbishop McCarrick, some commentators and clergy have suggested that allowing gay men to be priests has created a culture ripe for the kind of abuse Archbishop McCarrick is alleged to have committed.

But Cardinal Cupich said he “would be very careful” in accepting that conclusion, noting that similar claims made during the height of the child sexual abuse crisis in the 2000s were refuted by an independent 2011 report compiled by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“I really believe that the issue here is more about a culture of clericalism in which some who are ordained feel they are privileged and therefore protected so that they can do what they want,” Cardinal Cupich said.

“People, whether heterosexual or homosexual, need to live by the Gospel,” he said, adding that he “would not want to reduce this simply to the fact that there are some priests who are homosexual.” I think that is a diversion that gets away from the clericalism that’s much deeper as a part of this problem,” he said.

A DOMINICAN WITH THE BEST ESSAY ON WHAT IS THE PROBLEM AND WHAT IS THE SOLUTION: Dominic Legge OP tells the truth.

WHAT ABORTION IS TO MOTHERHOOD, SODOMY IS TO THE FATHERHOOD OF THE PRIEST: "Since abortion is the purposeful murder of an innocent, unborn child, the Church indeed imposes the most severe penalty of excommunication for this heinous action. A person who successfully procures an abortion receives this penalty automatically (Code of Canon Law, #1398). Unlike some offenses that require the competent authority to impose the penalty of excommunication (technically termed ferendae sententiae), the penalty here is automatic (technically termed latae sententia)."

We would advocate that Canon law should stipulate that sodomy should latae sententia make a cleric unable to perform any of the duties of the clerical state and remove him from the apostolic sacral brotherhood...by the act itself.

IF YOU THINK STRONG MEN ARE A PROBLEM... Wait till you see the evil of weak men.

TAYLOR MARSHALL THREE REASONS FOR SCANDAL: 1)loss of faith; 2)Homosexuality in priesthood and Episcopacy; 3)Megadioceses.

PATRICK ARCHIBOLD ON DEFEND CARDINAL WUERL WEBSITE: So a website defending the reputation of Cardinal Wuerl appeared. The domain was registered August 8th by MarkMonitor.com, a reputation and brand defense firm. We wonder who is paying for that? (ED NOTE: The website was withdrawn shortly after this expository article)

DONALD WUERL AND EPISCOPAL SODOMY: A short video.

NEWARK HOMOSEXUAL SUBCULTURE IN PRIESTHOOD: This is excellent reporting and can be done with 3 or 4 sources from any diocese. There is usually one level of flagrant homosexuality that "everybody knows about". Then the stories get more and more depraved and are known by fewer and fewer.

FROM SPELLMAN TO WRIGHT TO McCARRICK--A SORDID TRADITION
of American homosexual clerics

II. ISLAM AND THE MIDDLE EAST

ISLAMIST PARTIES IN NORTH AFRICA: Good review of parties and movements in Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt.

INDONESIA ELECTION: Islam and Economic Nationalism.

ERDOGAN ON TURKEY-US RELATIONS: His NY Times essay.

III. R&G ROUND UP

GAY PRIDE AND CORPORATE POWER: The culture of bounded obligations vs materialist consumerism.

LOOKING AROUND - AMERICA IN THE WORLD: A growing list of enemies says Buchanan.

DEEP WEB: YouTube is the new talk radio and it is neither leftist nor feminist.

THE COLD WAR - WHAT WAS IT? Historian Andrew Roberts gives a very concise well visualized (Prager U) story of the Cold War which he says could be called the Third World War. His telling: Democracy, freedom, and capitalism of the West vs. totalitarian Communism of the Sovietized Russia. He then cites Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II as the ultimate closers in an epic battle of Good vs Evil. (Mikhail Gorbachev and the muhajedeen that defeated the Red Army were missing from the credits.) This seems to us exactly the inadequate narrative of what was the Cold War that has plagued the baby boomer Presidents from "winning the peace". Was it the West and individual rights that men died for or God and country? Who wants to die for a direction?

WHO'S MORE PATRIOTIC - THE KOCH BROS OR MIDWEST FARMERS? Laura Ingraham recently contrasted the Koch brothers' opposition to Trump's trade policy with American farmers. These hardworking Midwest men have much more to lose in a trade war than the billionaire brothers refusing to support GOP candidates who agree with Trump. The Koch brothers bailed on Trump after the risk of losing pocket change, but when the farmers are asked how long they will support Trump and their nation, one farmer responded: "To the death." Who sounds more patriotic to you?

THE HERO'S JOURNEY: Originally described by Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey describes the process through which a story's protagonist transforms from an ordinary character into an ennobled hero. This video offers a brief description of the process as one of departure, initiation, and return, highlighting the problem that many of today's super hero movies focus so much on the initiation - fighting the villain - that they fail to depict the hero as ennobled in his return home. The great complaint against the Lord of the Rings films was that they didn't include the Scouring of the Shire - the return of the ennobled Hobbits their subsequent ordering of their local civic fraternity. The video offers today's film writers a groundbreaking film from 1999 as a much-needed example of the Hero's Journey. The movie in question was undoubtedly the greatest movie experience of my (A. Joseph Lynch) teenage years.