Church Militant The Vortex Feed

TRANSCRIPT

It's become more than apparent that many quarters of the Church these days are simply corrupt. There are either financial scandals or sexual scandals and sometimes both and many of them going even a step further involving cover-ups and so forth. And all of this is on top of the near-complete collapse of authentic catechesis and the resulting loss of faith across the board. Things have gotten so bad, so desperate in many areas, that faithful Catholics are now becoming overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending torrent of scandals. This new reality is posing problems not just with regard to the scandals themselves but for faithful laity trying to sound the warning bells.

All over, various areas of the Church, there are simply bad men, badly formed or badly intentioned or whatever, who are involved in all kinds of schemes and plots and plans that have the result of causing people to lose their faith. These men and their plots need to be held up to scrutiny and exposed — their plans foiled — because what they are doing is not Catholic. Whether it's the homosexual network deeply embedded within the clergy or various bishops and chanceries whose chief concern is raising as much money as possible or covering up the latest scandal, whatever it is, it must be brought into the light because of the danger it poses to souls.

Now, Church Militant isn't alone in this view of things. So, in an effort to join resources and be more efficient in this work, we've reached out to some old friends and forged even tighter bonds of friendship and cooperation — to work together, to team up and get down to it. So, we are happy to announce, first, that our longtime friend Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute will now be a regular here at Church Militant as he works with us on our more exhaustive investigations. Michael will be helping with research and production of the more in-depth projects that need special attention paid to them, and Michael has developed that unique set of skills to fit the bill.

He'll still be doing his fine work for Lepanto Institute, no worries there. But he will also be contributing significantly to what we do here. And while Michael has worked with us many times before, here and there, we are happy to have him now be more formally part of the team.

Along those same lines, we are also happy to announce that none other the Dr. Alan Keyes is also coming on board here with the effort as a regular. Dr. Keyes was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Ronald Reagan, as well as a U.S. presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, as well as U.S. Senate opponent of the then, still somewhat obscure, community organizer Barack Obama in Illinois. And I'm proud to say that I voted for Dr. Keyes during his run for president. The ambassador obviously brings with him a truckload of experience and insights from his life, as well as a critical Catholic mind able to pierce through much of today's evil both in the Church and in the political/slash cultural arena, and we are fortunate to have him joining forces with us.

Lastly, we want to let you know that we have secured the regular services of a splendid canon law team, who is practically second to none in its expertise and experience. For privacy reasons, we are keeping much of that close to the vest so as to allow greater movement and exchange of knowledge from them to us, but trust us, in very short order, you are going to begin to see just how deep the corruption actually goes.

All these new additions to the Church Militant team are highly skilled, knowledgeable and fearless in their approach, but most importantly, they all love Holy Mother Church and have a burning passion to see affairs put back in order and have joined forces with us to accomplish that very goal — to contribute to it in whatever way we can. These new members of Church Militant are all experienced and smart heavyweights who know their stuff down cold. They know what a story is, where to go to unearth it and how to tell it. They have lots of contacts and sources both inside and outside the Church.

And let's be very very clear on this single point. The goal of this is not to win Emmy awards for investigative journalism. It's to expose the damage being done to souls on a multiplicity of levels within the Church which also spills over into the culture. We are talking about people's eternal lives — their eternal destinies — something you hear too little about in today's world and Church but which means everything in the end.

We, here, are very excited about these new members of the team and are anxious to get going with their contributions — for you to see their work and learn from it so you can help other Catholics, clergy and laity, get their minds around what's happening to our Church and start to do something about it. So, sit back and buckle in. However well you think we may have done in the past, bringing you this information and these insights, it's about to get a whole lot better.

Keep us and our new additions in your prayers.

Transcript

Cardinal Blase Cupich is a theological lightweight but a spiritual terrorist. He is, in fact, one of the most dangerous men in the Church because he is providing to the unsuspecting or unaware, a theological framework to dismantle authentic theology. To be certain and clear, something the cardinal is not very good at — his theology is fake theology. He is leading souls astray and presenting a theological framework for his evil. And it is absolutely evil. If he truly believes what he is saying, he shouldn't even be Catholic, much less a cardinal because what he is saying bears absolutely no resemblance to the teaching of the Church.

A month ago, the Chicago cardinal gave an address to the Von Hügel Institute, St. Edmund College, Cambridge, England. That's one of those intellectual gathering places where snobby members believe themselves to be smarter than God and certainly more than the common folk. In his address, Cupich completely gutted the Church's teaching, calling it a "paradigm shift, a revolution." That title of his talk was the only thing he said that was actually truthful. The rest was shameful Modernist rhetoric and heresy, where he says the Church must "re-envision the Church's engagement with couples and families and open a pathway for doing so." Here are just a few of the cardinal's supporting points.

"The core goal of formal teaching on marriage is accompaniment, not the pursuit of an abstract, isolated set of truths." Warning to the untrained observer in modernist double-speak — sounds good but is loaded with evil intention. Words like "accompaniment" have no real meaning; they are completely elastic and hide the truth that they can be interpreted in a hundred different ways — all bad. Essentially it means whatever the hearer wants it to mean. And the branding of the teachings of the Church as an "abstract, isolated set of truths" is insulting to Almighty God and should, therefore, inspire revulsion in Catholics. It was God, Himself, who revealed the truths of marriage and family to us. So for Cupich to put himself in opposition to them sets him in opposition to the Church and by extension God. But the cardinal was just getting warmed up.

Cupich drones on and on about a "paradigm shift" — one of the newest modernist buzzwords that's again, sounds all lofty and smart and super-educated but means nothing less than a change. When there is a paradigm shift that means the former way of viewing and doing something is viewed as inadequate, incorrect or incomplete. Therefore a shift, a movement away from the former needs to be undertaken to arrive at the new and improved. If that wasn't the case, what would be the point of the shift to begin with? The very word shift carries that understanding by definition. If you shift your weight, you have changed position. If you shift lanes while driving, you are in a different lane. If the players in the backfield of a football team shift, they are now in different places as in not the old places — not the old places. So to speak of this as a shift and place the highfalutin word "paradigm" in front of it to take the theological sting out of it is deceptive and disingenuine. As an aside, this type of deceit that has become so commonplace among Churchmen these days is what angers so many faithful Catholics. Stop pulling the wool over people's eyes and state what you actually mean clearly. This is why so many of them hate clarity because it reveals their true scheme.

So follow his logic here: "Families are a privileged place of God's self-revelation and activity." Followed immediately by the assertion, "God's self-revelation is not restricted to those who meet the Church's marital ideals." Ah, cardinal, yes it is. God does not "reveal Himself" in sin. And couples who are homosexual or shacked up or divorced and civilly remarried are not merely failing to "meet the Church's marital ideals." They are committing mortal sin. The Church's teachings are not "ideals."

They are the means to Heaven because to live by them requires an embrace of Our Blessed Lord and His grace which must be corresponded to. But having established sinful sexual relationships and pretended they are "families," the wicked cardinal goes on to say that it is from "families," all "families" that God teaches the Church, not the other way around. Families do not learn from the Church. The Church learns from the family because that is where God reveals Himself to the Church. Now, that is quite the paradigm shift. It's so shifty in fact that it shifted itself right out of Catholic orthodoxy and into heresy. To wit: God reveals Himself and His Will in sin. And moreover, those in these mortally sinful situations are the ones from whom the Church learns. In theological speak, the terms are "the Church Learning" and "the Church Teaching."

For 2,000 years, the Magisterium has been the Church teaching. It's what the word Magisterium means, coming from magister — teacher. The individual members, learning from the Magisterium the sweet divine truths, conform their lives to these truths, over time, with the assistance of grace through the sacraments, to become more like Christ. Cupich is saying the Church has had it backwards for 2,000 years. The people, families specifically, in their mortally sinful situations, they become the teachers of the bishops.

First of all, if that's true, which it isn't, why is anyone listening to this bishop's pabulum? He should be listening while we teach him. But we suspect he would draw the line at being instructed by the laity himself. So which is it? Do we learn from them or do they learn from us? Can't have it both ways here Your Eminence. Cupich's vision does away with the hierarchy and replaces it with a synodal Church — one where things are decided on the local level — not the universal level. Which is why he is a spiritual terrorist and must be spoken out against and challenged at every step.

His view of the Church, the Catholic Church, the universal Church, shifts the Church to a non-universal Church where everyone makes the decisions for himself guided by his own interpretations of whatever the Holy Spirit sticks in his head. None of this is Catholic. In fact, it is the very definition of Protestantism. So yes, to go from being the Catholic Church to no longer the Catholic Church is the most prime example of a paradigm shift that could be imagined.

Cupich is a destroyer of souls, and what's dangerous must be warned of.

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The modernist crowd in the Church — and it's a pretty big crowd — are liars which of course stands to reason since their father is the devil, the father of lies. They lie by passing off their fake theology as merciful when in fact it couldn't be further from mercy because it keeps people in their sin.

The entire world is fallen due to Original Sin. This has had a dramatic impact, not just in the realm of the supernatural, demanding a Savior for us since we cannot save ourselves, but it has also created a devastating impact in the natural order of things. We are conceived and born flawed — the situations in which we are raised — the circumstances of our families and early environments, all surrounded with likewise flawed people, also damaged by the natural effects of sin.

There is no escape in the natural order of things. It's a bunch of patients each administering to each other — incapable of curing themselves or anyone around them. It would be laughable if it weren't so desperate and painful. Think of all the suicides and overdoses even among the not-so-happy famous people — the emotional pain, the psychological suffering, the hidden anger and rage, the warranted guilt, all the shattered lives. It is inescapable, all of it. All this hurt and pain develops into cheating spouses, rationalizations, abandonment of children, murder of the unborn, exploitation of minors, sexual license — all of which feeds right back into itself, creating even more psychological pain.

Down deep, and sometimes even not so deep, people know. They know their own miserable condition — their personality disorders, their uneven temperaments, the hurt they inflict, the damage they cause, the betrayal they inflict, the lives they help shatter. And it all has a multiplier effect, expanding with ever greater force. It is the tidal wave of human agony resulting from sin.

Unless a person seeks freedom, he will never find it, for we are born as slaves to our fallen natures. Someone from outside our fallen world has to come into this prison and free us but those efforts — that salvation — will mean nothing if a person does not stand erect in the light of truth and walk through the door.

This is precisely where the modernist gang is so evil. They deny people the truth, deny them hope, authentic hope, of ever being saved because they tell them that they are good just where they are. They do not want people to follow a savior. They want the Savior to become as wounded as those He has come to save — as imperfect, as sinful. Getting up and walking requires nothing short of grace and to continue walking requires nothing short of continuing grace.

The modernist crowd lies to people and tells them to stay in their prison. They have no mercy, no forgiveness because they tell them their sin is indeed, no sin at all. It should be embraced and accepted and, in fact, not even seen as sin. The very notion of sin, they say, is an artificial construct meant to keep you down and guilt-ridden. If you feel bad or depressed or guilty about your sin or proclivities or passions or desires then go seek psychological counseling. And it should be noted that the goal of psychology today is to affirm you in your passions — to help you self-actualize — to be everything you want to be. This is a lie.

Saint Paul has the remedy when he says put off the old man and put on the new. But the modernist, dissident, heretic crowd says stay the way you are — the new man is an ideal that you can't reach. When Fr. James Martin, for example, pushes his evil of homosexuality being perfectly fine — that they should be affirmed in their sin, he is lying; and he is destroying their capability to ever experience freedom. When Cdl. Reinhard Marx of Germany says the Church should bless homosexual couples, he damns them and himself to Hell. When Bp. Robert McElroy or Cdl. Blase Cupich push for sacrilegious Holy Communions, they damn themselves and those who follow to Hell. Woe to you bishops who preach this heresy. You shut up the kingdom of Heaven against man. You do not go in yourselves, nor do you let others enter. You bar the way to freedom for others and damn yourselves in the process. Our Blessed Lord came that we might have life and have it completely. You offer death. But you disguise it as life. You are the fullest realization of the words of the Son of God — you brood of vipers, liars. People's lives are shattered by sin.

Fathers have lost relationships with their sons because they abandoned them for a woman who was not their mother or didn't provide for their sons because they were not provided for by their fathers. Mothers have become murderers because they have given in to their passions and refuse to accept the consequences. Children have embraced violence because adults have shown them the way.

Only Christ through His Holy Catholic Church is capable of providing the means to repair these wounds because after all is said and done — even though all these wounds are made visible in the natural world — their source is a radical break from the supernatural world. And only the supernatural world is able to fix things. Yet, the constant stream of lies and deceptions and ambiguities from the modernist clergy deprives souls of the supernatural.

A thing that is broken cannot repair itself. It does not have the ability. Only the maker of it can repair, restore it to its original beauty and function. All this chatter about mercy and so forth is one giant lie because their mercy actually denies the healing of true mercy which requires repentance. If only they would meditate on that this season of Lent.

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Coming to you from the ninth annual "Bringing America Back to Life Symposium" sponsored by the Cleveland Right to Life — a new report titled  "Going. Going. Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics" conducted by St. Mary's Press in Winona, Minnesota, has eye-popping information in it. And none of it bodes well for the Church in the future and, for that fact, even the present.

For example, the study which surveyed 15–25 year olds concluded that the median age for leaving the Church is — get this — 13. And children as young as 10 years old simply lose their faith and stop believing. The first of its kind, in-depth survey of teens and young adults reveals that 20 percent of baptized Catholic youth no longer believe in God. Another one in six said family experiences like divorce, death, illnesses and perceived "hypocrisy" added to their unbelief. Others rejected the Church's teaching on birth control and same-sex marriage. Once they leave the Church at their young tender years, a third completely abandon any religious faith and a little less than a third join some random Protestant group. And perhaps most revealing, 75 percent say they stopped believing between the ages of 10–20.

Here at the "Bringing America Back to Life Symposium," there are young folks of this very age here, so we asked them what they thought of all this. Church Militant has been reporting for the past six or seven years that the Church in America was about to be drowned under a wave of demographic disaster — a mass falling away from the Faith not seen in 2,000 years of sacred history. These children have lost the Faith because their parents have lost the Faith. And their parents lost the Faith because their parents were the first victims of a rogue clergy who refused to teach the faith en masse in the wake of the sexual revolution immediately following the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Fifty-plus years later, this is the tragedy unfolding in its completeness.

And the maddening thing for faithful Catholics, growing fewer in numbers every passing year, is the current leadership in the Church has done nothing to prevent this tragedy. In fact, they have doubled down on it, pandering to malformed youth with ridiculous liturgies and appeals to their emotions, instead of having serious engaging discussions with them about the realities of modern life. Too many leaders simply appear to act out of a belief that the Church really doesn't have the answers for what troubles the souls of men, even very young men or more precisely — boys.

The CCD programs are childish, the homilies have nothing to do with spirituality and so forth. On one level, given all the current realities and complexities of life in the Church, the tiresome drumbeat of the social justice warriors and the abandonment of truth by a homosexual-led clergy bereft of any value to souls, you can't really fault the young people for reaching the conclusion that there's "nothing here for me."

The question needs to be raised precisely what it is that this revealing study is revealing? How can a 10-year old with no support in or understanding of the Faith actually decide to "leave" the Church? What exactly is it in a 10-year-old mind or even a teenage mind that he is leaving? Given that his parents aren't really active in the Church to any measurable degree can it be said that he is actually leaving that which he never substantially belonged to or had an association with beyond probably just baptism? And think about this: Things are so desperate in the Church right now, owing precisely to the lack of even a modicum of leadership, that we are actually conducting surveys of children, not teenagers, not young adults but children who just a year or so early figured out the truth about Santa Claus. Yes, things really are this bad. Fortunately, as all the handiwork of the Modernists is collapsing around us, signs of renewal are visible.

Reporting you from the "Bringing America Back To Life" with a dose of Bringing the Church Back to Life as well, this is Michael Voris from near Cleveland, Ohio.

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Coming to you from the ninth annual "Bringing America Back to Life Symposium" sponsored by the Cleveland Right to Life, events like this here in Cleveland, as well as many other pro-life rallies and conventions and so forth, are a kind of two edged-sword. It's awesome that they happen, and people come to them and great talks are given and ideas discussed and approaches to the latest evils figured out. But that's just it — the evil never stops coming. And, therefore, these conferences are a reaction, a response, to counter the evil of the Left. And that's just the way things are. The more conferences and so forth, the more indication that evil is pushing its case and must be pushed back against.

The Catholic life is just exactly this — a combat, a battle, a war, a never-ending story this side of death anyway, and that's just the way things are. Until Our Lord returns on the clouds of Heaven for the final Judgment, the war never ends, the fight goes on. Saint Paul told us this when looking back on his life as its end approached, he said, "I have fought the good fight." Our Blessed Lord, Himself, said only those who persevere to the end shall inherit salvation. And that's just the way things are.

So a true follower of Christ, while not happy that a war must be waged, must find happiness and joy in waging the war. You develop a love for the fight, not for itself but for the realization that without the fight, you lose. And in fact, the only way to win this battle is to die fighting up to your very last breath. It's why the Hail Mary concludes by asking for Our Blessed Mother's assistance "now and at the hour of our death." Fighting and the need to fight constantly in this life is just the way things are. But the quality of the battle and the underlying dynamics of the battle are something that can be altered through fighting. For example, the whole reason this symposium, as well as many other pro-life events, is even necessary is ultimately because leaders of the Church gave up the fight many decades ago. That gave evil the upper hand and whenever evil has the upper hand, it uses that momentum to crash through and destroy.

Only the Catholic Church has the power to fight evil and win. So when leaders in the Church send up the white flag, the world better brace itself for an onslaught of evil. This is the same message in essence delivered by Cdl. Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, in a recent speech and later interview. His Eminence said: 

From the moment that Catholics abandon the teaching of Jesus and the Magisterium of the Church, they contribute to the destruction of the natural institution of marriage, as well as the family, and it is now the entire human family which finds itself fractured by this new betrayal on the part of priests.

Shorthand ‚ if you want to know the condition of the Church, just look at the world.

Yes, boiled down to the local, this annual conference here on the outskirts of Cleveland is necessary because Catholic leaders have not defended their sheep. They rebelled against the Magisterium when it came to contraception. They rebelled by their silence when it came to abortion. They are continuing to rebel in their tacit approval of the homosexualism running wild in the Church, especially within the ranks of the clergy. Having put out down the weapons of war for phony-baloney excuses of accompaniment and meeting people where they're at, they have been bowled over by the rampant evil that has descended on the Church. And even now, many of the so-called good guys stand there with the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis while souls on their watch fall into Hell in the next life and lives are shattered in this life on the way to Hell. And that's just the way things are.

Church Militant has also brought up the point various times that the only plausible explanation for all this rot within the clergy is a loss of supernatural faith on the part of many members of the hierarchy and clergy. Cardinal Sarah had something to say on this point as well: "Faith has become lacking, not only on the level of the people of God but also among those responsible for the Church. Sometimes we can ask ourselves if we really have faith." Consider the profound reality of that thought: We can ask ourselves if the leaders really have faith. That's just the way things are right now, that is.

Of course, in the flow of 2,000 years of sacred history, there are going to be ebbs and flows of faith. But it would be pollyannaish to refuse to admit that right now the Church is in its nadir as every conceivable demographic points to the Church becoming essentially extinct in the next handful of years in the United States, naturally speaking? What this should inspire is not a discouragement but an encouragement, as in en–courage — a desire to join the battle, to become engaged, to sign up for duty and to rush headlong into the fight. The leaders have abandoned the people but that doesn't mean the sheep are left shepherdless.

Christ has left us His Church with every plan for battle that we need to increase in holiness — the goal of the Catholic life. And we have that Church even if the current leaders have left the Church in practice if not in office. It's clear from Cdl. Sarah's interview that he intimately understands the relationship between the condition of the world vis-a-vis the Church. Its why events like this are so necessary because what used to be able to be accomplished through the Church leadership, namely, the establishment of a moral society, is no longer achievable through the old means. So, now the battle has shifted from Catholic universities and chanceries and seminaries and cathedrals to engagements like this where the faithful may comfortably gather and join forces to combat the evil let loose on the world by the failure of leaders in the Church to retain their own faith.

We must pray constantly for Holy Mother Church. She is the Bride of Christ, established by Him as the sole means of salvation on earth. But owing to the hubris of leaders who themselves no longer believe that, then the laity must step up and assume their positions along the barricades of the spiritual war as it is fought in the culture until a new crop of leaders can arrive in the Church, and things can be set straight again. And that's just the way things are.

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Today is, of course, Spy Wednesday, the day Judas sneaked off to make his pact with the Jewish leaders to hand Our Lord over in exchange for the 30 silver pieces. His betrayal has echoed down the centuries, carried on to a remarkable degree today by various bishops and clergy. While we must recognize and admit that we all betray Our Lord each time we sin, there is a unique quality to selling Him out based on unbelief — a rejection of Him.

When followers of Our Lord, who do believe in Him sin, we fall from weakness, temporarily blinded by our desire for whatever sinful thought word or deed comes into our orbit. But when a measure of sin is taken which is grounded in a total rejection of Christ, refusing to believe who He is, this sin reveals itself to be not just of a higher magnitude but of a different kind.

Recall that Judas' betrayal began more than a year earlier at Capernaum when Our Lord announced to the masses that He was the Bread of Life and the physical eating of His Flesh and drinking of His Blood was necessary for salvation. It was that single announcement, the preaching of that great Eucharistic Truth to the masses, that lost Our Blessed Lord the masses. The truth of the Eucharist, of the Blessed Sacrament, is so deep, so stunning in its revelation of God's love for man that most refuse to accept it.

The reality of the Real Presence is both simple and, at the same instant, beyond comprehension that it is a stumbling block for many. But it is the Truth. It was guaranteed to us from the mouth of Our Savior Himself. Like so many self-professed followers of Christ today believe this is a bridge too far. That the Almighty would freely choose to hide Himself under the appearance of mere bread so that we could physically consume Him and become more like Him is inconceivable to more than half of those who are today baptized into non-Catholic congregations.

As St. John, who was an eyewitness to Our Lord's announcement at Capernaum, notes in his Gospel, those present said this is too hard to believe, and they got up and no longer walked with Him. This is a lens through which Protestantism can be viewed or understood — that system of beliefs places limits on the love of God. The Truth has destroyed whatever little faith the followers at Capernaum might have possessed because their faith was not authentic — it was self-serving — a point Our Lord accuses them of right at the start of this scriptural account.

Yet, this is also the case for many Catholics — obvious by their lack of reception of His Sacred Body and Blood. And yet even more devastating than a mass rejection of the depth of Our Lord's love for us among the sheep is the rejection of it among the shepherds. Judas was an apostle, a prototype of unfaithful shepherds down through history. And his model of treachery is repeated over and over again; first, comes a lack of or tossing aside of supernatural faith, then, the betrayal for mere natural gain. The fall from grace for a priest, and even more so a bishop, is something too distressing to contemplate for too long.

Yet, we see it all around us. The sexual scandals, the financial scandals, the theological scandals, the cowardice in clearly annunciating the Truth of Christ. It's as though leaders in the Church have descended into a perpetual Spy Wednesday where they're always in consort with the world, looking for a way to hand Him over. Beware of these Judas priests and bishops, for they are legion.

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Following up on yesterday's topic about the strategy by Facebook and other giant social media giants to limit conservative voices on the internet, we like to begin where we left off and urge you in the strongest possible terms to stop using Facebook to get your Church Militant content and start coming to us directly. Facebook and others want to control what you hear and see, just like their older brothers in the secular media world did for years by manipulating content at the major networks and newspapers. You, at least, have the opportunity to free ourselves from their socialist propaganda, so do so.

Facebook does not care about the salvation of you or your family: Church Militant does. Google doesn't care about you and your family getting to Heaven: Church Militant does. So, why would anyone, who cares about the meaning of life like we do, rely on hearing or viewing our content after it has been "screened" by people opposed to Church teaching? Come to us directly.

Now, why is all this coming up? Because whoever controls the media controls the game. And since the emergence of the internet, it has gone from being like the wild West to a more sophisticated propaganda tool by the same ideologues who controlled the old media. And they use clever language — clever because it is deliberately vague — to control and filter what you see and hear. Here is the whole point being played out last week before a U.S. Senate panel questioning Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook who was very coy in how he answered some questions. Notice the word "hate." It keeps coming out of Zuckerberg's mouth, as well as many people's mouths who love to throw it around to lampoon conservatives — political and theological.

Their working definition of hate is simple — anything you say that disagrees with them. If you disagree with abortion or same-sex marriage or whatever, then you are a hater and must be silenced. This was the whole line of questioning taken up by Nebraska's Senator Ben Sasse, who drove home this very point leaving Zuckerberg pretty exposed. Now stop for a cotton-pickin' minute here Mr. Zuckerberg. You tell Senator Cruz that you don't allow "hate" on Facebook, then you turn around and tell Senator Sasse that defining "hate" is really a hard thing to do. So how is he preventing something to be on Facebook when he can't or won't give a solid definition of it? And notice when he answered Cruz he included that nutty liberal idea about people feeling safe — another flaw in his argument that Sasse zeroed in on. Well, he may not want it to be the case, but it has been the case.

Pro-lifers, orthodox Catholics, political conservatives have all been "algorithmed" into virtual disappearance in Facebook-land, and it does not appear to be coincidental. Even the internet sensations and political conservatives Diamond and Silk were labeled as a threat by Facebook. Here's what faithful Catholics need to understand very clearly: It is the same song, different verse when it comes to powerful media forces opposed to Catholic truth having control over what you see and hear. It's just as simple as this: If you want the real McCoy, then go to the real McCoy.

Don't let other media groups that have a track record of being opposed to Church teaching decide for you what you are going to hear and see from Catholic outfits like Church Militant. It's called censorship, and hate is being used as an excuse to implement it, even when the leaders can't give you a definition of what hate actually is, so they lump it in with violence and terror speech — defending the Church's teaching, proclaiming the glories of the Faith, telling Catholics what they need to know is not hate or violence or terror. But Facebook and other social media outlets think so and act accordingly.

Don't play their game. Come directly to Church Militant, even make us your homepage. Remember that we care about your salvation and saving the souls of your loved ones. Social media giants don't believe that so why submit to their rule?

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Father James Martin is an enemy of the Pope — publicly slamming Pope Benedict back in 2010 with rhetorical and nonsensical questions in response to Pope Benedict saying abortion and same-sex marriage were insidious threats to humanity. Here is specifically what Pope Benedict said at Fatima on May 13, 2010:

I express my deep appreciation for all those social and pastoral initiatives aimed at combating the socio-economic and cultural mechanisms which lead to abortion ... Initiatives aimed at protecting the essential and primary values of life, beginning at conception and of the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today's most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good.

That clear and non-confusing statement got stuck in Fr. Martin's throat, and he could not restrain himself responding in the Jesuit rag America Magazine, calling the Pope's words bizarre, against Catholic teaching and against the Gospel:

Pope Benedict XVI's comments last week in Fatima, Portugal, in which he stated that abortion and same-sex marriage, were 'some of today's most insidious and dangerous threats' to the common good seemed oddly discordant. The equation of abortion, something that clearly is about a threat to life, with same-sex marriage, which no matter how you look at it, does not mean that anyone is going to die, is bizarre.

"Why aren't 'abortion and war' the most 'insidious and dangerous' threats to the common good? The great danger is that this increasingly popular equation will seem to many as having less to do with moral equivalency and more to do with a simple dislike, or even a hatred, of gays and lesbians.

"And that goes against not simply Catholic teaching, but against the Gospel..."

This is a favorite tactic of heresy lovers. They slam the tradition of the Church and feel no qualms about publicly attacking the Vicar of Christ — his words are "discordant, bizarre, against Catholic teaching, against the Gospel," seriously? Likewise, Pope Francis has openly condemned same-sex marriage numerous times, calling it "demonic" and saying "we do not joke around with truth." The current Holy Father also offered his public support for demonstrations in Mexico against same-sex marriage back in late 2016.

So where does Fr. Martin, homosexualist Jesuit, come off denouncing the popes? In so doing, he has made himself an enemy of the pope. He tries frequently to turn people against the teachings of the Church, hiding behind theological hair-splitting. None of that hides the reality that he has established himself as an enemy of the pope — not just Francis, but also Benedict, as well as John Paul. That's a pretty solid alignment to attack, Fr. Martin, to call the Church's teaching as enunciated by the popes bizarre, against the Gospel? Seriously?

Yet, he is allowed to continue unchecked because there are many prelates in the Church — cardinals who are also enemies of the pope and by extension, enemies of the Church, and of course by the most important extension, enemies of Christ. These men, like Cdl. Marx who last week said the Church needs to bless sodomy between two committed men, are enemies of Jesus Christ, regardless of if they are cardinals or not.

Judas was an apostle until his treachery caused him to lose his apostleship as St. Peter tells us. Why should anyone be shocked by the Fr. Martins and the Cdl. Marxs of the world? Their line traces straight back to Judas himself. Yet such is the state of affairs in the Church these days — treachery, deceit, malfeasance on the part of a few influential types and near complete silence on the part of those who know better but will not speak for fear of messing up their ecclesiastical careers. They have more fear of men then they do of God.

One of the great puzzlements in this particular age in the Church is whether bishops and cardinals, who allow these evils to continue unchallenged, actually believe their own silly preachings. For example, do they really believe all religions are pretty good, and there's not that much of a difference between them, at least not enough to ever talk about why the Catholic Church is the only means of salvation? We could also ask the same questions of those who peddle the stupidity that we have a reasonable hope that all men are saved. Do they really believe that non-Catholic nonsense? Or are they just afraid of the consequences of telling the full truth, and so they hide behind this doublespeak and so forth? If they don't reverse course publicly, it won't matter if they actually believed it or not. They will join Judas.

Father Martin is an enemy of the pope — period. He must be called out for that by superiors and prelates or they run the risk of creating grave scandal among the faithful or better stated even more grave scandal. All of this matters not as some list of talking points or winning some debate points but because all of this influences the final destiny of souls. But see, it isn't clear at all if many of the clergy, most especially many members of the hierarchy actually believe that. They never speak in those terms. They only ever speak in terms related to earthly matters. In fact, it seems the only time Hell ever comes up is to say that we have a reasonable hope no human is in it.

The progressives and modernists and heretics and dissidents in the Church have been able to reset the terms by which the Truths of Jesus Christ are spoken of. They have drained them of their spiritual realities and replaced them with the concerns of mere man. They are leading souls to Hell by their silence and by their machinations. This is about eternal life; those are the stakes here, and these shepherds who allow heretics and enemies of the pope free access to the faithful will suffer their same fate if they don't turn back now.

Fr. Martin is an enemy of the pope. The modernists like Cdl. Wuerl of Washington D.C. and Blase Cupich of Chicago were very quick to throw that charge around when millions of the faithful were weirded out by what was going on at the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family in Rome. But, here, we have a priest, Fr. James Martin, openly criticizing and ridiculing the pope's words, and he gets a free pass, well, until he dies that is if he doesn't repent.

Father Martin is an enemy of the pope. Don't forget that and make sure you repeat it. Father Martin is an enemy of the pope. Pray for him, certainly, for all these wicked minded clerics, but keep uppermost in your mind, they are enemies of the pope.

TRANSCRIPT

The entirety of the theology of the Church of Nice revolves around one silly principle that sounds all nice and wonderful. It's the principle of "don't be mean," and it resounds especially with young people who are more sensitive to being treated meanly, owing to their young tender lives, not having been batted around life very much and developed a thick skin. In fact, not being mean is precisely the motto of the Church of Nice, just stated negatively. You know, "Be nice. Don't be mean." And so it goes, over at the Church of Nice parish of Our Lady of Never Giving Offense even when it's necessary because truth is more important than someone's feelings.

The whole theology of the Church of Nice appeals to the juvenile mind because feelings are the level on which so many young people operate, some almost exclusively. And it is a faulty grounding, indeed. For example, so many young people are pro-life because, well, it's mean to kill the babies. But that same principle is extended to the question of same-sex marriage and a completely different moral conclusion is reached, as in "Let them love each other, don't be mean."

Today's youth has been systematically taught to move on nothing but emotion, and they have responded in kind. The education system, Catholic and secular, has been corrupted in that critical thinking is never taught, and the results are in. The self-styled pro-life generation is also completely down with homosexuality, and the underlying reason for both points is exactly the same — don't be mean. If someone, anyone apparently, cries or their feelings are hurt by the Truth, then the Truth is mean, and you are the enemy. This is a morally bankrupt way to good and evil. It empties the Cross of any meaning, precisely what the demon wants.

More than anything, the demon desires that man not think, not use his intellect, which is ordered to the Truth. So what more clever way of capturing an entire Church by a crafty theology of not being mean. Style the Truth as "mean" and then preach about rejecting it, fighting against it. Down with meanness, after all, Jesus said don't be mean, right, or something like that anyway? Oh yes, oh yes,  "Love thy neighbor." That's it. And love is all about feelings. It's not about objective truth. It's not about ordering our lives to the Truth through the exercise of our intellect and our wills. Yes, it's just about feelings and not being mean. Which is why this year's synod on the youth in Rome has so many Catholics disturbed in their souls as to the outcome. It's being styled as a "listening event," not to merely understand what kids don't understand about the Faith which is practically everything thanks to adults but what teenagers can teach the Church. Why do you get the feeling that the fix is in like it was with the whole gay thing at the synods in 2014 and 2015?

There seems to be a little cyclical thing going on here to wit: For the past 30 or 40 years, generations have been deprived of not only the Truth but this generation, in particular, deprived of the ability to even know how to reason to the Truth. This has been engineered by craft clergy bent on sowing confusion among the children and their children's children. And now that that goal has been achieved — a woefully, horribly catechized generation of youth whose only guiding star is "don't be mean," the Church is to sit back and listen and learn about the Faith from children who know nothing about it. That's is a brilliant plan.

Along the way, it will have been arranged that the small number of youths who are traditional-minded and understand the Church is falling apart precisely because of all this, that group will be frozen out, their voices mostly muzzled and underrepresented if represented at all. And of course, the final step will be to produce a document pointing to the voices of extremely confused children without calling them that and issuing a vaguely worded final report where anyone can draw whatever conclusion one wishes from it.

If you think there's been a lot of confusion and debate over Amoris Laetitia, wait until you get a load of the bombshell that will go off when this thing gets published. And of course it will have some splendid sounding name to deflect from its real goal, call it "Young Prophets Cry Out" or "A Little Child Shall Lead Them" or "Let the Children Come to Me" or some such other twisting of Scripture or scriptural themes. It's all fine and good to learn from youth, precisely where many of them are suffering from lack of information or formation. That's a good thing, as long as you set about the work of helping them out of their ignorance like St. Don Bosco. But to style this as the Church, the Bride of Christ, "learning" from young people how the Church should change is beyond absurd.

The Church "learning" from anyone about how to change is preposterous enough but exactly how much is the Church going to "learn" from young people who have almost no life experience in any area except suffering the curse of a super-sexualized society which was able to come into existence at all by failed or malicious Churchmen, who will now pretend to look to children for the answers to the problems they intentionally created.

What do the youth know or rather should they know? They should look around them at the shattered families, the fixation with sex, the disillusion they feel from an increasingly isolated existence, the spiraling suicide rates and the rest of the mountain of evidence that they have been lied to and betrayed. There should be a synod for the youth alright — a synod where they stand up and demand answers for why they are now bearing the brunt of the machinations of their elders, in particular, elderly church officials who have laid the groundwork for their misery and feelings of being disconnected. They should tell the bishops and their pastors, you drilled into us to not be mean, but you were the mean ones depriving us of truth and wrecking our world.

TRANSCRIPT

Last week's Congressional hearings and testimony of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was history in the making. It was an indication that the internet and social media have truly come of age, meaning Facebook has gotten so big that it now requires regulation to protect users' information from being abused. When you stop and consider that reality for a moment, it is not only amazing but also very chilling — chilling because Facebook controls precisely what information is able to be shared, a decision made by roughly 20,000 liberal-minded techies sitting in Silicon Valley. And for faithful Catholics, here's a warning: watch out!

As we know from during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, a lot of attention and analysis by liberal media gnomes was being focused on the impact of social media during the primaries and general election. Facebook and other platforms began changing their internal algorithms in such a way that the net effect was less conservative news making it onto your Facebook feed and other sites. Facebook claimed the reason for the algorithm change was to prevent personal pages from becoming flooded with news sites posting articles, but a funny thing happened. It appears only conservative news was actually blocked — the bad actors who support abortion, same-sex marriage and so forth seemed to have gotten a pass, a point raised by Cruz to Zuckerberg.

One conservative GOP candidate running for Congress even had his political ads blocked by Facebook, and when news of that spread, Facebook apologized and said it was a mistake, which was the topic of a Tucker Carlson interview with the candidate. Every time something is blocked or given dramatically less exposure owing to its moral or political or theological stand, it always seems to be conservative information.

Now, it's no secret in the world of political vote counters that political conservatives have a lot in common with orthodox Catholics and vice-versa. So, it has apparently become necessary for the gatekeepers at Facebook to greatly limit the spread of conservative news, and they have lumped together social and Catholic conservatives. We know exactly what we are talking about, here, because it happened to us. Up until August of 2016, Church Militant's Facebook page likes were increasing at a clip or roughly 3,000 a week, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. It's how we were able to garner the close to 194,000 likes our Church Militant page currently has. But after Zuckerberg and his group "changed the algorithm," all of a sudden our 3,000 likes a week suddenly plummeted to somewhere between 50–150 and have stagnated since.

One week in August 2016, suddenly it all hit, and we have never ever picked up steam since. One week, after about 65 weeks of roughly 3,000 likes a week, it changed overnight and has never recovered. What many people are either ignorant of or just waking up to is the ideological bent of those who control what information you get has not changed one iota. The mediums have changed but the same ideology persists. In days gone by, it was major newspapers and networks that controlled the type and flow of information you received. This was to keep you propagandized and mind control you into throwing your lot in with a socialist vision of America. Then when the internet arrived and the old media got sort of blindsided by the new social media, lots more truth started getting into people's minds.

That transition, when the old guard media were reeling and the new social media giants hadn't yet fully realized how their platforms were being used by the good guys to spread the word, that gap created an opportunity which conservatives took advantage of, even electing a president. But since that time, the new social media gurus have realized the truth and have started doing what the old guard media giants used to do and still do, they have begun manipulating information to once again keep you in the dark.

This is why we are making this direct appeal to you.If you follow us on Facebook or any other social media platform, fine, but you need to start coming to churchmilitant.com directly, every day, because loads of our info — shows, articles and so forth that used to be allowed by Facebook are now routinely blocked, ignored or shoved to the bottom of your news feed deliberately. Make Church Militant your homepage and check us out a few times day, just like many of you do for Drudge Report or Fox News, etc.

Liberal news outlets like The New York Times  were not hit very hard by the resetting of Facebook algorithms for two reasons: one, they weren't especially targeted from the outset, and, two, their followers don't rely on social media platforms, they just go directly to the source, the homepage of those leftist propaganda sites. Conservatives need to start doing the same thing, and they need to do it now in droves.

Keep Facebook for friends and stuff if you want but do not rely on it to get you solid Catholic news and information. It won't come to you, you have to actively go and get it just like liberals do. And if you want alerts and notifications of what we are doing and our analysis, just sign up for those in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage.

Liberals, socialists, Communists — really all the same crowd — always get control of the information stream and use it as a means to limit resistance and brainwash citizens. They did it in America for abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, school, sex-ed curriculums and so forth. Until we faithful Catholics understand the game and then get in it, we risk the loss of the souls of our loved ones. There must be an alternative voice to the socialist dominance of the media, and we want to be that voice for you.

Please, don't just trust liberal anti-Catholic media giants to give you our news. Bypass them and just come to Church Militant yourself. Make Church Militant your homepage and get our notices delivered directly to you from us, not through a secular outfit ideologically opposed to the Church. Why would you do that? The hearing last week on Capitol Hill exposed the whole truth of what's going on. Now, what are you going to do about it for yourself and your family? Come directly to churchmilitant.com every day.