Church Militant The Vortex Feed

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If you ever have the opportunity to speak privately with some bishops or senior clergy, and you get the chance to ask them why they are so lenient when it comes to dissidents or bad politicians or corrupt priests and so forth, you will more than likely get the answer like "We have to take the good with the bad." Well, that sounds all loving and kind and merciful and compassionate and understanding and virtuous on the one hand, but it's also easily dismissed as naive or self-serving.

First, self-serving: Many bishops simply do not have the intestinal fortitude to mix it up with their aberrant clergy or local, fake-Catholic, pro-abortion politician, so they hide behind the excuse and that is what it is — an excuse that some of what they do is good, and we have to honor that and be respectful of that — hogwash.

You don't accomplish a good by tolerating an evil you don't have to tolerate. And even if you do have to temporarily tolerate it, the Church teaches you must be spending yourself to bring that evil to an end but that always seems to be the part that never gets pursued. There is no spirit of confrontation among many leaders unless they are crushing tradition, then they're pretty confrontational.

It's something that must happen at bishop school. Get your miter in exchange for your guts because the lack of guts shown is exemplary on the part of so many. No courage, no nothing. They are merely content to float downriver pretending that they are in control and dealing behind the scenes in a most adroit manner, solving all things quietly in ways that mere laity can never understand — oh, the pressures of office. Can't be that much pressure when the office is never exercised again unless against tradition-minded clergy or laity. But the reality, despite protestations, is nothing ever gets solved. In fact, things get worse. More and more people become scandalized, become disillusioned, and began to weaken in their faith. If the leaders don't seem to really believe, then why should I?

Dang, it, this is the One True Faith established by Jesus Christ, His Holy Bride for whom He gave His life on the Cross — start acting like it. Stop pussyfooting around with people who are enemies of Christ, dang it all, call them out and call them to repentance like Our Lord and Master did. And this point is the other one which helps explain the current crisis and excuse making — naivete. It's pretty clear that if many leaders are not self-serving and choosing to keep their mouths shut so as to not damage their careers or tick off their most reliable donors then they are incredibly naive.

They simply don't believe that Christ has enemies, that the serpent has offspring and that their sheep are the targets of those diabolical entities. They just don't see the world that way, that way, of course, being the way in which God, Himself, presented it to us to stop us from being naive and start dealing in reality. You know, we are too sophisticated now to believe in that medieval stuff. It was fine then but no longer. Do you really expect us to believe that there exist forces that want to actually kill us? Those are the kind of behind-the-scenes responses and chatter and attitudes you get when you approach these killer subjects.

We need to look for common ground is a common phrase that gets bandied about. Do you look for common ground with a rapist, a serial killer, a slave owner, a child sex trafficker? Don't they all have some good we can encourage and work with, you know, accept and cultivate? Perhaps the serial killer or child sex trafficker is good with puppies. Sure, he doesn't want to throw in the towel on his evil just yet, so let's take a long, slow pass on that for now and talk about his favorite puppy food. Let's establish some common ground around the issue of puppy chow. Then perhaps we can compromise a bit, take the good with the bad and reduce the child kidnappings by, say, a third. See, that's progress, isn't it? Now, only 50 children will fall victim to him instead of 75.

What brilliant tacticians these statesmen-churchmen are — so deft, so adroit at moving people from evil to good. Compromise is for losers because when the man standing on 100 percent solid truth moves even one step both he and the Truth lose. The only common ground both sides find themselves on is quicksand.

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And this is Rebel, my new pup. He's a Siberian husky nearly 10 weeks old, and he's a little charmer. Over the last year or so of his life, my dad and I used to joke about me getting a puppy, and him taking care of it — a thought he used to respond to by saying, "Michael, I can't take of myself. I can't take care of a puppy." But he was very supportive of the idea for me after he died. So a short while after his death in January, I went on the hunt for a pup, and here he is.

As I watch Rebel goof around and play and waddle over to me in that "so cute you wanna' eat them" way puppies walk around, I got to thinking what a splendid example they are of the love of God — a manifestation of His loving simplicity. Saint Thomas More once said, "God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind." Is there anything more innocent bopping around than a puppy dog? All they live for is to make you happy. But the last thought from St. Sir Thomas bears a little further examination, especially in light of the so-called New Atheism.

Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. Indeed, He did. Here is where atheism completely falls apart and looking at a loving puppy is all you need to destroy atheism's insanity. Atheism necessarily by definition reduces man to a mere machine of the cosmos — a physical warehouse of some material organs and DNA and fluids with a somewhat more advanced brain than other species unless you're a liberal. Whatever "order" there might be to the universe is mere chance according to them, and since it is chance, it can disappear just as easily as it appeared. It has to be chance because admitting that something outside of the universe brought order to it would be admitting of a supreme being.

There really is, for the atheist, no rhyme or reason for anything when all is said and done which brings us to this little guy here. If atheism is true, why would humans be in awe and mesmerized over a furry little puppy? Kids are fascinated with them and want to play with them and establish some kind of little-kid, little-doggie relationship — why? Adults almost universally are captivated by them and recognize a sweetness in them, the innocence that St. Thomas spoke of — why? Why would human creatures have the capacity to behold something in awe, to appreciate beauty or sweetness?

No other animals, which according to atheists is all we can possibly be, respond like this. No other animal looks at a sunset and is held spellbound by it or looks out over the vastness of the ocean and is moved in their soul by the beauty and vastness of it. Other creatures don't write poetry, they don't compose beautiful melodies to express some inner something. Yet, atheists insist that all this is mere chance and meaningless, something determined randomly with no significance whatsoever because there is no real significance to anything.

Not so, says the Catholic Church, not so. All the capacities we have as humans — wonder, awe, stillness, meditation — are all placed in us by God to find Him through His creation. The work of art always reflects something of the artist but beyond that, so too does the ability of the observer to reflect on the work, to think about it, to be moved by it, to appreciate it. Animals do not "appreciate" sunsets or music or even their own lovability. They are completely blind to such things. But we can and do.

This little fellow has some instinctual awareness that he is safe and grows in that awareness each day. He has instinctually identified me as his alpha and is learning to respond accordingly, and hopefully, when his little puppy bladder gets to be a good size, he will respond much better. That's what he sees when he looks at me. But when I look at him, I see much more because we humans have the capacity to see things beyond their mere physical material presence — why atheists, why? Why should we be able to consider beauty and be moved by it in our emotions? Why do we laugh and love and cry? Are we not just mere machines in your godless cosmos? And if we are something more than mere material beings with no real souls, then how would that be possible? How would a soul come into existence? How would the "mechanisms" of the soul be established, for example, the ability to recognize and respond to beauty?

To bring it all home, how is it possible that a slightly advanced animal like myself can look at a lower animal and take pleasure in its existence and see it as a source of joy? How am I even capable of experiencing joy in the first place? What purpose does joy serve in a mechanistic cosmos? Rebel has an answer to all that because the God who created him created him for this purpose — to show innocence. And that which is innocent elicits joy and wonder from humans.

Life is nowhere near as complicated for Catholics as it is for atheists. So many questions for them, with no real answers. Rebel and I are gonna' go enjoy each other. Atheists can be left to what for them is a meaningless existence. We hope they find the meaning though. Maybe, they should get a puppy.

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The outrage properly and justifiably vented against the bishops of England and Wales over the death of Alfie Evans needs to now be directed toward the bishops of Texas and their political arm, here in the United States. The reason — their strong support for a Texas law which allows the exact same situation in Texas hospitals that doomed Alfie Evans, as well the little baby Charlie Gard, both in England. While the details and rabbit trails are all long and winding and circuitous, the bottom line is this: There is a worldwide push among establishment elites to let doctors and hospitals be the final say when it comes to treatment of patients who cannot speak for themselves.

This was the foundational principle of Obamacare — that you lose your rights to make medical decisions and the state takes them over, a law, remember, that was largely supported by U.S. bishops with the exception of the employer contraception mandate. It was, after all, existing British law that a homosexual activist judge kept throwing at the parents of Alfie Evans, denying them their natural rights to make the health-care decisions for Alfie.

Same thing with the parents of little Charlie Gard last year — doctors said end the life support. The parents said they wanted to take him from the hospital to America for treatment. The legal battle ensued during which the U.S. Congress granted little Charlie U.S. citizenship, just as Italy did for little Alfie. The courts denied the parents their God-given rights to determine the medical care, and just like that, it was over — in the space of just 10 months, two cases from England which gained worldwide attention.

In the case of Charlie, England's bishops were mostly mum, not speaking up in his defense. In the case of Alfie, they actually weighed in publicly — in defiance even of the pope — and called for the little tot's life to be brought to an end, against the wishes and natural law rights of the parents to decide which Church teaching upholds.

Now, jump the pond, as they say, to the U.S. and specifically to Texas and that political arm of the Texas bishops who, just like their English counterparts, have thrown their collective weight behind a Texas law saying, in summary, that after 10 days, the family loses the right to make any further medical decisions in the life-saving care of a patient and the decision on if and how to proceed is purely the hospital's.

What the hell and we do mean "hell" is wrong with these bishops and their support of denying parents and patients their God-given rights to make these decisions in opposition to Church teaching? And unlike the bishops of England and Wales that issued a definitive statement saying the parents needed to back off in the case of Alfie, the Texas bishops have issued a statement saying they "strongly" back the Texas law, which has been in place since 1999 and which has already led to the death of hundreds of patients of all ages, including some infants like Alfie and Charlie all over the state.

In a cold, calculating move that we reported on earlier this year, the Texas bishops publicly defamed, slammed and attacked the Texas Right to Life through a parish advisory and by extension, the political candidates it endorses. But the bishops went a step further, actually endorsing two other half-hearted, lukewarm pro-life groups who actually soft-peddle the abortion issue, as well as back the Futile Care Law. That advisory has allowed establishment RINO — Republican In Name Only — candidates to club authentic pro-life candidates over the head and to distort the truth about the Futile care law and pro-life efforts.

One such race is Texas State House District 13 between authentic pro-life candidate Jill Wolfskill and Establishment RINO Ben Leman — a Catholic. Wolfskill is endorsed by Texas Right to Life. But Leman is leveraging the bishops' attack on Texas Right to Life and hence on Wolfskill and actually sending out mailers to voters and playing radio ads saying her positions are not Catholic and the Catholic bishops of the state have denounced her.

The eyes of Texas are on this race because a lot hangs in the balance. Wolfskill and Leman are in the runoff because neither achieved 50 percent of the vote back in the primary race in March, although Wolfskill did win the most votes in a five-candidate field and beat out Leman 38 percent to 36 percent of the 23,000 votes cast. But since that time, the head-to-head race has grown more intense, with the lukewarm pro-life RINO Leman getting almost $200,000 poured into his campaign coffers from those who want toll roads through rural Texas and is using those funds to lie about Wolfskill who opposes the Texas Futile Care Law, unlike the establishment which supports it and backs Leman.

There are a number of theories as to why the bishops are supportive of the Futile Care Law, which again as a reminder, strips parents and families of their right to make decisions after 10 days and grants it to the hospital, and most of the theories boil down to finances owing to the Church's deep involvement in the healthcare industry. Wolfskill supporters are posing one simple question to voters in the 13th district: "Are you going to vote for a candidate who has the backing of the Establishment which says your natural law rights to make medical decisions for loved one should be denied after 10 days or are you going to vote against that usurpation of your God-given rights?"

The Catholic bishops of Texas are flat-out wrong on this issue, just like, exactly like, the bishops of England and Wales were dead, and we mean dead wrong, in the case of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard. Again, even the pope backed Alfie parents. If the pope backed Alfie's parents against the British law, then the pope would also back people trying to dismantle the Texas law, and sorry, Texas Catholic Conference, but the pope trumps the bishops.

God-fearing people all over the world are sick and tired, fed up with nanny-state, globalization politics where life and death decisions are taken away from citizens and handed over to the state. And for the bishops of Texas, who sound like liberal Culture of Death Democrats on nearly every single issue, these RINO-favoring bishops will cry and stampede over the death penalty, yet throw their support behind a law which kills many, more people.

Between the sexual abuse of children cover-up that went on for decades, and their near stone silence on the issue of abortion, and the British bishops' support of the killing of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard and now this disgrace in Texas, the question needs to arise in people's minds — and they need to get out and vote on it — do bishops harbor some animus against children who always seem to be their last concern?

It's getting harder and harder to square this circle. Are the bishops of Texas genuinely, authentically, unabashedly pro-life or are they simply political compromisers? And the answer to that question needs to come from looking at their actions, not listening to their words. They publicly denounce from the pulpits the only solidly 100 percent pro-life group in the state and throw their support behind groups and laws decidedly not pro-life and sit back silently when their words are used to beat up pro-life candidates.

Stay tuned for our Church Militant reporting on this, in what is a razor-thin tight race according to all indications. If you live in the 13th district of Texas, you have a chance to roll back this evil. Get out and vote.

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This Vortex is coming to you from our 6th annual Retreat at Sea off the Pacific coast. Many of you expressed a deep desire to come on board but for a slew of varying reasons were unable, so we decided to recap some of the themes we treated on board in these few Vortex episodes. The overall theme of this year's Retreat at Sea, owing to the fact that it was Easter week, was the "Glories of the Faith." The first of 10 different conferences was on the Eucharist, the centrality of the Faith, because it is Our Blessed Lord, and as such, it is the glory of the Faith because in Holy Communion we have direct access to the God who created us for Himself.

When you stop and consider, meditate, on that from all eternity God the Holy Trinity knew that the Second Person would unite Himself to us in the Flesh as an even deeper sign of love than creation itself — it is beyond our capacity to really comprehend. We can both possess that knowledge, while at the same time never possess it. It's like the ocean here that we are floating on. Yes, you can scoop up a handful of water and it posseses the substance of what the ocean is, even in this tiny amount, but you can never actually possess the ocean itself, only its substance — that which makes it what it is. And so it is by analogy with Our Blessed Lord. He is infinite but contains Himself — a prisoner of love — in the finite so that we finite creatures may possess Him as He is in His infinite glory.

At the Last Supper, Our Blessed Lord made explicitly clear to His Apostles that what He was doing or enacting in the Upper Room, as well as what He would do on the Cross the next day — both of these were sacrificial and one and the same sacrifice. In Judaism, bread and wine were extremely familiar sacrificial elements going all the way back to the high priest Melchizedek's encounter with Abraham on the mountain range of Salem that would be become Jeru-Salem where the sacrifice was offered. The very words at the institution which fell from the sacred lips of Our Lord when He spoke of the New Covenant of His Body which would be given up, of His Blood that would be poured out, of doing this in memory of Him — all of this has deep sacrificial implications — as Fr. John Hardon reminds us.

From the very first Apostles on, there never existed a shred of doubt that Christ intended that this sacrifice be perpetuated in a ritual manner until He returned. This is why, as Abp. Fulton Sheen says, He would not leave it to errant man to devise the ritual but rather He would enact it Himself and command that it be done this way. That the sacrifice would be perpetual, that redemption would be an enduring event, is the principal theme of the Letter to the Hebrews, that Christ's priesthood remains forever since He is living forever to intercede for all who come to God through Him.

Natural creation, even after the instant of creation itself, lasts and perdures as an event which continues, rolling through time, ever new and ever ongoing. How much more then supernatural creation, the reality of Christ's redemption made ever new, re-presented to all of humanity, rolling through time but always referencing back to the moment.

The Sacrifice of the Altar and the Sacrifice of Golgotha are so intimately related that here and now in time and space the Divine Will is that we have access to the moment of supreme love and that time and space can be transcended as we find ourselves at the foot of the Cross. As is often the case, an analogy may prove helpful although always insufficient.

The water that we are floating on right here and now is the same water from which Caesar launched his navy 2,000 years ago, that Moses led the Israelites through on the way to the Promised Land and that Our Blessed Lord was baptized in by St. John. Time and space are no barriers for the God who created them, and He does not allow them to be barriers for us who wish to stand on Calvary with Him in His agony and participate in the moment of redemption.

Yes, you can hold the ocean in your hand.

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I'm Michael Voris, reminding you to log on directly to churchmilitant.com and not rely on social media giants to alert you to our productions.

As attempts to normalize homosexuality by high-ranking clerics roll along, it's worth noting that there is little else that could be done that would be less charitable than to "support" someone by telling them that their condition is normal and good. We don't tell alcoholics it's okay to get smashed because they want to and have solid reasons to. We don't tell people affected by other troubling sexual issues it's OK to act on them — at least we shouldn't — although Democrats and liberals do.

The very reference to a person as "gay" is a horrible thing. Each person is a creature made to the image and likeness of God; after that, we are all subject to the same set of pains and woes present in a fallen world. In the case of someone afflicted with same-sex attraction, we need to understand that something or some things happened in the person's life — more than likely their very young life and this is how their mind responded.

The canard being touted that someone is "born that way" is a lie because if they were "born that way," it also means they were conceived that way, and there isn't the slightest bit of data to even begin to suggest that is true. There are not gay fetuses floating around in the wombs of mothers. There are children in utero with all the flaws of a fallen human nature and who have personalities that leave them susceptible, as we are all susceptible, to the pitfalls and hurts of life and inadequate responses.

Before the American Psychiatric Association was railroaded by having its annual meeting stormed by homosexualists back in the early 1970s, homosexuality was considered as one, among many, psycho-sexual problems. As a quick aside, to see much more about this, please view our FBI on homosexuality, see the link below. The mind, the psyche, which has turned to acting out on homosexual desires, is a deeply wounded psyche. It, like many other psyches, has experienced a great pain, a rejection, an absence, an abuse or series of abuses and internalized all this into the need for affection from the same sex which ultimately becomes sexualized. The young mind has no mechanism for properly coping with unmet needs and so it turns inward, looking for some solace.

Some personalities are extremely sensitive and need more care and attention than mom and dad might recognize. If physical or social or emotional abuse — or at least what the young boy or girl perceives to be abuse — happens, then all feelings of safety are gone. If a child does not feel safe and loved, whether the reality is true in fact or not, if the feeling is present in the child, all bets are off. Psychologists pinpoint the age from 6 months to 2 years old as a rapid and template-forming "grid" of psycho-sexual development. If something or some things go "wrong," again either in reality or in the perception of the child during this time, it can cause problems well into adulthood and perhaps for the person's whole life.

Depending on the deep needs of the child, things which could go wrong could be as simple as a lack of affection or attention by dad or a perception that he is threatening, for example. In the case of a normal or reasonably healthy development, sudden abuse — physical or emotional — could alter that psycho-sexual "grid" and result in the same types of problems. None of this makes the acting out on this pain moral or good. In fact, just the opposite occurs. The acting out on all this actually reinforces the self-perception, resulting in increased and practically over-the-top need for acceptance and off-the-charts fear of rejection.

For the same-sex attracted man or woman, there is deep rage resulting from being a victim, truly a victim. The feeling of being robbed and cheated out of feeling safe and protected engenders deep animosity and envy and turns the victim — and this child was a victim — turns him in on himself. Life, oftentimes, becomes a continual struggle to achieve some measure of self-worth, overcompensating for the worth he was denied but in justice was owed. If that translates into multiple anonymous sexual encounters, then so be it, but the cycle is never broken.

For Catholic priests to encourage this pain by pretending it's okay, God-gifted and should be followed is horrendously evil. Likewise, Catholic priests who suffer from this personality disorder, like any other people suffer from many other disorders, these men should not be ordained. They don't have the outward-facing capacity to be "fathers" because their own fathers denied them something they are now spending their lives in endless pursuit of. They need to be helped out of the life, not out of the closet. They have been victimized, deeply victimized in their tender years. To now tell them to wallow in their victimization, physically and psychologically, is to victimize them all over again but now even to a greater extent because the weight of moral guilt now attaches.

Homosexuality is not from God. It is one of many many horrible refuges that damaged psyches go to seek relief. Welcome to a fallen world. It is not the mission of Catholic clergy to prevent spiritual growth and rescue. It is the mission of the clergy to show men the path to God and very frequently that means repairing deep damage the person is not responsible for in the first place. Recovery is painful, stark, frightening, looking at demons who seemingly have total control but whose death grip must be broken and can be broken. All it takes is truth and love which are one and the same.

For priests and cardinals to foster the lie that all this is fine and good is a horrible filthy rotten disgusting thing for a supposed "father" to do. Whatever happened in the past, this doubling down is even worse. It leads souls to Hell as if the Hell of feeling insufficiently loved in this life wasn't painful enough.

To any souls out there suffering from same-sex attraction, there is a way out. There is a way out. Whatever happened in your early years, you may not even be aware, but aware or not, whatever happened, it does not have to set the pattern for the rest of your life. Your identity is that you are a child of God — period. Everything else you are hearing is lies. Don't ask or pray or cry to God to make you not gay. Ask Him to walk the path with you, with all its scariness, back to how you were meant to be and someone or someone's robbed from you.

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The Church in America is doing splendidly — never been better, excelling everywhere, burgeoning at the seams, reason for great hope. Or as New York's Cdl. Timothy Cardinal Dolan so perfectly laid it out at the press conference back in 2010 when he was elected president of the U.S. bishops' conference, "It's not like we're in a crisis."

Yes, see, no crisis here, His Eminence even has said so, which begs the question, precisely what  does Dolan think actually constitutes a crisis? And further, if there's no crisis, then why is Cdl. Dolan shaking down the flock in New York for $200 million or the archbishop of Detroit, after having soaked the sheep for $130 million in a recently wrapped up finance campaign, now preparing another campaign for an additional $200 million? Sources close to the archdiocese of Detroit tell Church Militant that some of Abp. Allen Vigneron's closest allies actually wanted to unveil it this year but top brass thought it might appear too greedy after just wrapping up the previous campaign, uh, you think?

Then there is the still-secret plan in Abp. Jose Gomez's  Los Angeles archdiocese to unleash a half a billion dollar campaign on the unknowing faithful in Southern California — that's right, a $500 million shakedown of the faithful. In truth, there are many of these massive war chest gathering initiatives going on all over the country — money and power grabs before old Catholics die off and leave their bucks to their children who could give a hoot about the Church and will not share their inheritances with what they see as irrelevant bishops. The Los Angeles half-billion shakedown was revealed to us by sources in the archdiocese who are disgusted with the plans, again, not yet made public. But, wait for it ... and when these planned money grabs are eventually made public, they will come adorned with scriptural and mystical sounding names, upbeat sounding themes designed to make you think, well ... there's no crisis. For example, Detroit has a zippy sounding plan called "Unleash the Gospel," as though it has ever been leashed up to begin within, and if it was leashed in Detroit have those who were responsible for tying it up been kicked out, otherwise, why throw good money after bad?

Practically every diocese in the country is doing two things right now — grabbing money and closing parishes. Often the plans are related to each other and get great marketing names, which stands to reason because local bishops are calling in Madison Avenue-style marketing firms and giving them 10 percent of everything collected to assess the decline, draw up a list of parishes to annihilate and squeeze every dime out of you possible. And, yes, you heard that correctly — 10 percent! When you are collectively dealing with billions of dollars, 10 percent is quite the haul.

Newsflash to those looking for easy work and high pay — convince a few bishops that you know exactly how to manage the decline they have caused and get them as much money as possible at the same time, all the while, clustering as many parishes as possible. So, the companies draw up their campaign names, and print up cool flyers and glossy folders and produce a video or two to show parishioners sitting in Mass. In short, they roll out a phase-by-phase plan to get your money and build the parish hit list which thanks to generations of bad bishoping, is a reality. But don't think for a moment that the financial aspect of which parishes to close is not the sole factor in which ones get shut down. It most certainly is.

Here's a partial list of some campaign names dreamed up by deceptive advertising marketing firms paid 10 percent to come up with them or by chancery personnel:

The Church is being run like a business and a poorly run business at that. Hundreds of parish closings have been announced around the country and after these huge sums of money have been collected, you can bet the same storyline will play itself out again after this crop of bishops has moved on to retirement with nice pensions and healthcare packages no doubt, partially funded of course form these collections.

All of this has happened for the one solitary reason that leaders in the Church have abandoned the faith, the authentic practice of it, the teaching of it, the preaching of it, the boldness of it and have sunk to the depths of being Church of Nice social justice warriors who long ago checked their supernatural faith at the door. And now the obvious is happening. You can run, for a while, but you can't hide forever. The jig is up.

It's no longer possible to play "kick the can down the road" because the bishops have come to the end of the road. In diocese after diocese, the numbers of Catholics "on the books," doesn't even come close to the actual number who believe and practice the Faith. Take the diocese of Saginaw, Michigan, with its exploding scandal of sex abuse by the highest ranking clerical staff — a diocese that rumor has it may not have to worry about marketing campaigns with phony names because the diocese may very well be on the road to actually being suppressed and absorbed into already existing dioceses nearby. Private diocesan numbers in Saginaw indicate that of the 80,000-plus Catholics on the rolls, only roughly 20,000 ever darken the door of a parish.

But Saginaw isn't alone in this. Detroit Abp. Allen Vigneron, at his press conference a couple years back saying he was really going to shake things up, admitted that only about 15 percent of the Catholics in his archdiocese have any real relationship to the Church. You'd figure that at some point these men would want to fix this, if not for love of God, then out of sheer embarrassment.

Is there a marketing firm someone can hire to help with "embarrassment alleviation" and load it up with inside corporate jargon? If so, perhaps they can be negotiated down to a commission lower than 10 percent.

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Look around the world, and you see a resurgence in political conservatism. Look around the Church, and you see a resurgence in theological orthodoxy, also known as Tradition. Just as the political/cultural Left has aligned itself with dissidents in the Church, so too, many tradition-minded Catholics have aligned themselves, to a degree, with the more politically conservative agenda. It wouldn't be surprising, for instance, to find that most attendees at a Traditional Latin Mass would have also voted for Trump. Likewise, it would be no surprise whatsoever to see that many Catholics trapped in the Church of Nice were Hillary supporters — certainly many more than at a Traditional Latin Mass.

So, there is a marriage of sorts being formed between orthodoxy and conservatism, just as there has been a long-standing marriage between political liberals and dissidents and heretics in the Church. It's not always a stark bright line, but there's enough of a reality there to speak of it and examine it. What are the uniting forces in both camps? What's the glue that holds each side together? Ultimately, the question of God. Pretty straightforward.

The Left hates God. They hate the divine, the authentic supernatural and anything that even approaches these realities. You'll find many, many more atheists on the political Left then you will on the political Right, for example. Same is true of agnostics and people who attend church at least once a week. None of this is especially surprising on one level — that level being political. But what is disturbing, if not surprising, is the vast numbers of dissidents within the Church who also happen to align themselves with the political and cultural Left. It's hard to imagine a MAGA bumper sticker on Cdl. Blase Cupich or Cdl. Joseph Tobin's limos, right? And see, each side has staked out issues near and dear to them.

The Left whines on and on about social justice, gun control, illegal immigration, animal rights, the death penalty, climate change, cigarette smoking, gay rights, womens' rights, soda pop drinking to make themselves feel good and appear morally superior. They even present evil things as good, dressing them up in flowery language which hides the truth of the matter — abortion is a woman's right, sodomy is "love wins," and so forth. All these efforts to replace absolute morality with subjective morality are their way to soothe their consciences, which are made for the Truth which they have denied.  

In rejecting God and the absolute morality which necessarily flows from living in accord with the Divine, they have created a whole new "morality" and so disturbed are their consciences that they must force everyone else to live by their new moral code. This has been escalating for decades now. Anyone under 35 years of age has no living memory of the world before the politically correct new morality crowd took over. They think abortion is just normal, as is pornography, violence, homosexuality and the whole pot of filth that destroys civilizations.

Sadly, very sadly, many of the people supportive of these evils are bad Catholics. You know many of them in politics and entertainment, but you don't know the vast, non-famous crowd of them. But they are all around you. It's why the country is in the condition that it is in. They shack-up, view pornography, engage in the hookup culture, contracept, divorce and abort at the same rate as the rest of the culture. And they are baptized Catholics who have received little to no instruction because many of their leaders have thrown their lots in with the political Left because — like their political allies — they too have no real faith, certainly not supernatural faith.

If the Trump victory in 2016 revealed anything, it is that political conservatives were finally fed up with political correctness. And many of those conservatives were also orthodox Catholics. And what they contributed to in the election, they are also contributing to in the Church. They want Tradition back in the Church, more than they wanted a restoration of sanity in the political order. Just consider that 10 years ago, there was almost no organized voice of opposition to the dissidents in the Church. They ran everything it seemed. In truth, they still pretty much do, but — and it's a big "but" — back then, there was very little vocal opposition to their schemes, largely because there was no way to communicate opposition on a large scale.

Enter the internet from stage right, please. Now, tradition-minded Catholics are finding each other through various websites, blogs, social media pages etc. A great groundswell has begun which, while not quite ready to restore sanity in the Church, is laying the groundwork for it. Just in the case of Church Militant alone, 10 years ago, we were essentially ignored. These days we are vilified and talked about non-stop by all the "right" people, both in the Church and outside the Church and often those groups are the same individuals.

So what's happened? Why is Trump in the White House and Latin back in so many Masses? Because truth has a very cool attribute of always finding a way. It's like water. Now, this does not mean that the fight is easier. In fact, in some ways, it has become more difficult, more intense, because the Left senses the sea change and is now acting like a wounded animal. How wounded the Left is — both in and out of the Church — is still an unknown, but they are definitely wounded, and you can tell that not just how they are responding but that they are responding.

The world created by the godless Left is crumbling apart, as everything without God always eventually does. And this is why the battle is intensifying. Those on the Left have given their entire lives to an idea — the idea being that man is supreme and can create a world ruled by him. That is manifestly untrue, but nonetheless, they have pored every bit of themselves into this notion from their earliest days. Think no further than Hillary or Obama.

Now, as this all begins to crumble, men in the Church and out of the Church who believe all this godless nonsense are scrambling. They are going on the attack, correctly sensing that all they have invested themselves in is vanishing. It will be some time before it's all gone, and they are shoring up every foundation they can, but in the end, God wins, not them.

This is never more important to realize than in the Church. For decades now, wicked or duped Churchmen have spewed Church of Nice nonsense, largely echoing the views of their political allies on the Left and their political correctness. The Mass has become a communal meal where we have equal rights in the sanctuary with women lectors and "girl" altar boys and Holy Communion in the hand and everyone holding hands during the Our Father — a complete break with Catholic Tradition across the board.

And now, at last, we have reached the point of Tradition rising as more and more people are attending Traditional Latin Masses or at least reverent properly-offered Novus Ordo Masses. All the noise is coming from the orthodox crowd and the dissidents and heretics are on defense, an almost perfect reflection of the political scene. Each year, one diocese after another closes down a bunch of Church of Nice parishes, schools, convents etc. And each year, another traditional parish or community or independent Catholic school opens up.

It's clear where all this is going and why Church leaders refuse to see it and respond to it warmly only speaks to their stubbornness of heart in the face of the chaos they have allowed to come about. However long and sad and destructive they are, fads pass. Tradition lasts because truth never goes out of style.

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A custom from the old days of Catholicism was to post above the doorway of the entrance into the nave, "The House of the Lord; The Door to Heaven." Catholicism, always rich in its symbolism until the last 50 years or so of the Modernist insanity and heresy, the Faith was steeped deeply in symbolism. Not one movement of the liturgy, not one stone, not one window or Station of the Cross, not one line in the Mass, or vestment, or one line from the sacred music was not practically drowning in deeper meaning. That meaning, those signs and symbols, were pointers to the greater reality — the truth of Almighty God and His covenant with His people.

Yes, the parish revolved around your eternal life, preparing you to be saints — a saint factory as it were. Even the schools often attached to parishes were cognizant of this mission and set about quite ably fulfilling it. And of course, the sermons of the priests during Mass were to give you the necessary instruction to keep in the front of your mind that your primary responsibility was the salvation of your soul and to whatever degree you could help others with their duty. My, oh my, how parish life has changed.

True, the sacraments still have the same validity and effect, but so few Catholics understand that. They do not see their parish as the place where they are to go in sinners and come out saints, being prepared for Heaven. They don't see it that way because their priests no longer understand it that way. They have become places of boring religious insignificance. The very notion of salvation is so far removed from people's minds because it is not seen as something that must be worked on daily.

Sin is disregarded as an antiquated notion from the Middle Ages, from before the Second Vatican Council and therefore we no longer teach about it. And having abandoned the teaching on sin, we have certainly given up the teaching on the eternal consequences of sin — damnation. We never dare breathe a word about our enemy, the Devil. We keep quiet to the point of atrophy on all things controversial and sinful. And as a result, one of the sacraments that should be attended with much more frequency is not, and the one Sacrament which should never be approached without great scrutiny and care is treated with less concern leading to sacrilege.

For a parish, and listen closely good Fathers, for the pastor and clergy to not keep salvation and damnation, good and evil, virtue and sin in the uppermost of your parishioners' minds is a complete abandonment of your sacred duties. You are there to sanctify, make holy, the lives of your sheep and that is not happening. So is it any wonder that diocese after diocese is shuttering parishes by the dozens and dozens, the most recent large scale shutdown announced being Pittsburgh, where the current 188 parishes will be busted down to just 48, and yes you heard that right, a chainsawing of 75 percent. The ultimate bottom line for all these closings is that the parishes were not fulfilling their duty of making saints, so really, why are they needed?

You, young men in seminary, listen very carefully. It is falling to you to break this cycle of the heresy of modernism that has forced the Church in the West onto Her deathbed. You must not follow the course laid out by your liberal professors and posts and priests' councils and bishops. You must preach with all boldness the truths of the Faith and make your parishes doorways to Heaven. If you can't do this, then leave seminary now before you have the stain of enormous sin on your souls. This is not a game. The parish is either a door to Heaven or slide to eternal damnation.

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If you haven't noticed, probably because you don't really care, good for you, Hillary is still barnstorming around the country blaming everyone except herself for losing the election. As a sidebar, it must have been quite the gobsmack on election night there in New York as she and her team sat in their plush quarters expecting a crushing defeat of "The Donald," only to watch one blue wall state after another turn red. Inside reports are she was out of her mind in that room that she hurled a $100,000 bottle of champagne into a $5 million giant monitor, a gift from a Saudi prince to watch the returns on. She was so plastered and enraged according to some former staffers that she couldn't even talk, so she sent bad Catholic John Podesta down to tell the crowd of liberals to go home and she'd talk in the morning, which she did after showing up about an hour late. All this is to point to the fact that she still can't believe she lost — she hasn't been able to process it — so we are collectively watching her going through the grieving process.

She's still in the denial stage apparently. In that light, the two-time Democratic loser's latest appearance to assign blame for her loss was at the Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York on last Wednesday. She's blaming another group but listen to the little truth that slips out just as she first starts talking. 

You know, every now and then the truth sneaks out. Truth always finds a way, but it's especially revealing when it falls from the lips of those who hate the truth. The truth that Hillary revealed was the enormous percentage of Democrats who are actually socialists. She was speaking in her response specifically about Iowa Democrats, but there's nothing in the farms of Iowa that would make Democrats there any more socialist than Democrats in, say, New York or California.

What's all this mean for Catholics? It's simple. Catholics need to realize who is on the other side. Socialism is condemned by the Church — period. Pope Leo XIII roundly condemned it in the late 19th century. It was, in fact, the reason for his groundbreaking encyclical Rerum Novarum in which he said that private property holding is necessary for a well-functioning society and a human right for the worker. But Socialism wants to take away individual reward and hand it to the state to dispense. This was, in fact, the campaign stump speech of Bernie Sanders who at one point in the election had a 52 percent favorability rating among Catholics, yes, Catholics! A man flying all over America, touting a governing system actually by name condemned by the Church, was highly thought of among Catholic voters.

Pope St. John Paul II also had something to say about it. And well he should, having been brought up under the oppressive socialist regime of Marxist Communism in his native Poland. In his encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialist, he said that "Experience shows us that the denial of this right [of economic initiative] or its limitation in the name of an alleged 'equality' of everyone in society diminishes or in practice, absolutely destroys the spirit of initiative."

So why did Bernie Sanders garner so much support, enough so that Hillary operatives at the DNC actually had to submarine his primary campaign to ensure she won the nomination? Because Leftists want to appear good without actually having to do good. It's called virtue signaling, throwing off the appearance of being all moral and concerned but supporting a system where someone else actually does the heavy lifting.

The Democratic Party is split today over the Hillary crowd and the Sanders crowd or at least those views of the world. Come 2020, it's very likely that a Democrat may get the nomination who supports a system that the Catholic Church actually condemns. It will be curious indeed to see how the American bishops, many of them secret Socialists themselves, publicly respond.

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Unless something changes in between the time this Vortex was recorded and Saturday, October 21, a Lutheran female "bishop" will have her installation ceremony at the Catholic Cathedral of St. Peter's in Marquette, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula. The Catholic bishop who has granted permission for this is the ordinary for the diocese of Marquette — John F. Doerfler.

By all accounts Doerfler is a decent man, who cares about the Church and his flock, defending traditional teachings of the Church and so forth. When the story started circulating around the Catholic world, he issued a letter explaining his actions, which are permitted according to Vatican guidelines. The last line of his letter says, "Let the warm hospitality that we show our Lutheran brothers and sisters be a public witness of how people can and should love each other even when we are divided."

That sounds good and all that, but here's the issue for so many faithful Catholics: It seems like everyone is always being accommodated, everyone's needs and desires and feelings and thoughts and concerns — except faithful Catholics.

Frankly, many people are shocked by this action, greatly disturbed, despite whatever good intentions. Speaking plainly, this is just a bad move. Every time you turn around these days in the Church, it's faithful Catholics who are taking it on the chin. If it's not clergy who are generally younger and more tradition-minded, then it's laity being told they cannot kneel for Holy Communion, must hold hands, must receive Holy Communion in the hand, are too rigid, too doctrinal, unloving, not caring — you name it. It's always the few remaining faithful who are completely overlooked, taken for granted and disregarded.

For a bishop, Doerfler or any others, to not understand that this perception is the reality actually makes the situation even worse. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. All of this is having a cumulative effect. It starts to feel like piling on, and at some point that feeling becomes the reality. It discourages the faithful.  

Consider in this case a female who thinks she is a "bishop" (she's not) is going to be installed as one, accompanied by two females pretending to be "priests" (they aren't) in a cathedral built by the first bishop of the area, Frederic Baraga, who came from Europe to ensure that the Catholic faith would be preserved in the mission territories. He even wrote a catechism in 1837 in a local language to promote the authentic faith. He was declared venerable by Pope Benedict in 2012 for his intrepid work to promote and preserve the Catholic faith, even earning the nickname the "Snowshoe Priest" because he traveled hundreds of miles over the snow-covered countryside of upper Michigan to bring the sacraments to Catholics.

This is the patrimony, the glories of the Faith that faithful Catholics see being squandered for the sake of "unity" and so forth. It's a slap in the face, intended or not, to so many faithful who have had to endure and still do the watering down of the Faith and the presentation of the teachings at every turn. This is a bad move, period. Faithful Catholics again feel like they are thrown under the bus for the sake of what? Ecumenism, false ecumenism, sending the signal that all religions are essentially the same. No insult intended here, but for the Catholic bishop to refer to the female being installed (and it doesn't matter if it was a male) as "bishop" is completely wrong. He actually calls her "bishop" in the first sentence of his letter. That has the effect of sounding like other faiths and their offices have equal value. She is not a bishop, and the other Lutheran women standing in the Catholic sanctuary pretending to be priests are not priests, either.

The title "bishop" is reserved for those who are successors of the Apostles. It is not a term of office handed out to whoever calls themselves by that name. The office of priest, as the name implies, is one who offers sacrifice. These Lutheran women have no authority or power to offer sacrifice, and they should not be accorded that honor — that pretense — because to do otherwise implies they do. They most certainly do not.

Yet once again, here we are, the faithful, being smacked in the face. For the sake of "feelings" and "emotions" — the only thing powering the engine of the Church of Nice these days — we are to sit down, be quiet and pretend this is all nice. It isn't. It's wrong, whether it's technically permitted by ecumenical guidelines or not. It completely disregards the current climate of psychological abuse so many faithful Catholics have to endure continually within the walls of their own church.  

In the Church of Nice, where feelings reign supreme, everyone's feelings it seems must be taken into account except those of faithful Catholics. To the point here, couldn't the Lutherans go find another building? Think about this: This branch of Lutheranism accepts that abortion (child murder) is permissible in various circumstances. Additionally, they support active homosexuality, even "ordaining" active gays.

So this is quite the conundrum here, isn't it, for Bp. Doerfler? He preaches the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage yet opens up his cathedral for the installation of a woman to be a bishop who isn't a bishop, and once she leaves the cathedral will be working directly against what the Catholic bishop is trying to uphold and support. What "unity" precisely are we talking about here?

If the bishop can't see how completely cock-eyed and confusing and hurtful this is to faithful Catholics, an act perpetrated against them, whether he intends it or not, then we're not sure what would make him realize this — another in a steady line of episcopal belts in the face to faithful Catholics.