Church Militant The Vortex Feed

Three faithful Catholics discuss everything.

TRANSCRIPT

The Religious Education Congress is also known as the REC — R.E.C. — which is appropriate since it conjures up images of a theological train wreck, which is what this congress has been since Cdl. Roger Mahony took over the archdiocese back in 1985, where he was archbishop for the next 26 years — an interminable stretch of over a quarter of a century. During his reign of theological terror, the Faith went down the toilet here. From homosexual clergy sex abuse crimes which ended up costing the archdiocese $660 million to a massive drop off in Mass attendance, priestly vocations, baptisms, marriages, spending a quarter of a billion dollars to erect the ugliest cathedral in the history of the Church, you name it, the ultra-liberal, progressive-modernist Mahoney presided over it, ruling with an iron fist and smashing practically anything that even hinted at tradition. He even swelled the bloated bureaucracy to more than 16,000, yes, 16,000 employees.

Mahony was almost the prototype of a wolf in shepherd's clothing. If it was homosexual or dissident or heterodox, it had his full support, and no one had better challenge him. He even famously got into it with Mother Angelica where she told him off for his lack of support for the doctrine of the Real Presence after he issued a letter trying to pull a fast one by downplaying it.

One of the jewels in the Mahony crown was the REC, an annual weekend of hundreds of speakers spreading error and heresy to the 40,000 religious education personnel for whom it was mandatory to attend — fake and heretical catechesis shoved down the throat of poorly formed Catholics. This went on for decades. So when Mahony finally reached retirement age and was replaced by the current archbishop, Jose Gomez, who had a reputation for orthodoxy, the few remaining faithful Catholics who had weathered Mahony's reign of terror rejoiced. At last, they cried — liberation! The REC would either be corrected or done away with altogether — wrong on both points.

Seven years later, Gomez has done nothing about the dissent and heresy spewing forth from the stage here. It's almost like he's in a theological coma. Insiders, left and right, have begged him to fix this, and their pleas fall on deaf ears year after year. If there is something evil going on in the Church, you will find a conference on it here being passed off as something good — homosexuality, transgenderism, universalism, women's ordination, multiple workshops in liturgical dancing, more music from the Church of Nice gang which brought all the syrupy stuff in decades ago. In fact, the whole REC is like someone hit rewind on the Church in the 1970s. It's all back — dissent, heresy, malformation, all being passed off as revolutionary and up to date.

A brief scan of the speakers tells you all you need to know — James Martin, Bryan Massingale, Arthur Fitzmaurice, Ron Rolheiser, Greg Boyle, Sr. Kathleen Bryant, Sr. Carole Dempsey, Fr. Daniel Horan, Bp. Robert Barron with his "everyone goes to Heaven" nonsense.You will search high and low to find anything here even remotely respectful of the Church's 2,000-year sacred tradition. For this crowd, it's like the first 19-and-a-half centuries was a warm-up act, and the Church suddenly sprung into being in the 1960s and 1970s.

All of which begs the question, why is Gomez allowing this to continue? He even presides over the closing "Mass" which resembles a Broadway show much more than the representation of the Sacrifice of the Son to the Father. The answer to that question is a topic of constant urgency and concern among L.A.'s faithful community, and it has spawned all kinds of speculation. For example, Mahony still runs the show through either blackmail or intimidation; that's one theory. Gomez is not a true orthodox prelate but just pretended to be so he could rise through the ranks under Popes John Paul and Benedict. Or another one, he is being held hostage by an apparatus put in place by Mahony that he feels powerless to take apart — rightly or wrongly. But as his time here lengthens that last theory seems to hold less and less plausibility. He's been here seven years, and things have only gotten worse.

Insiders say they talk to him about orthodoxy, he agrees with them, and then he does nothing. But he does go on non-stop about immigration. And while he's writing and speaking about a man-centered issue, his flock continues to be eaten alive by heresy and dissent, some of which he officially sponsors each year here at the REC.

TRANSCRIPT

In case anyone needed any proof that the homosexualists within the Church see themselves as "on the march," all you need to do is read their own blogs and publications. Last week, we mentioned a posting in the little-read blog Daily Theology (DT), which had picked up on a New York Times piece maligning Church Militant for calling out Fr. James Martin's heresy. Well, in a response to that DT posting came another DT posting this week not only poorly thought out but also going through a virtual, top-20-type list of all things gay in the Church, in addition to, of course, bashing Church Militant.

The author of the blog, Jason Steidl — himself an out-and-proud gay Catholic (with a small "c") and, of course, studying queer theology at Fordham — drew the picture very clearly of all the inroads his gay culture has made in the Church. He points to all the following groups, naming them specifically: his gay mentors in the academy, the educational field "who have employed public theologies in books, articles, lectures, workshops and conferences to affirm LGBTQ people for decades" — notice, decades. Practically none of these professor-types have ever been condemned for their books, articles, lectures, etc. by bishops in the Church. That's why they have multiplied at a sickening rate — because they are rarely admonished.

He praises two condemned organizations, New Ways Ministry and Dignity, "which have been doing public theology and queer ministry for generations." New Ways was officially condemned by the Vatican years ago, and Dignity Masses still go on routinely in various parishes around the country. Again, no action at all on the part of bishops. Here in Detroit, the oldest ever Dignity Mass has been going on for over 40 years — a Mass which the archdiocesan communications director lied about for years until it was finally exposed. It takes place every Sunday right here in the archdiocese and never a peep from Abp. Allen Vigneron, who will not dare kick the hornet's nest of his gay-loving senior clergy, even as he drains hundreds of millions from the faithful presenting a facade of orthodoxy. He allows it to go on and on and on. And while it's true that it isn't on archdiocesan property, it is held at a Catholic campus, and he could put a stop to it if he really wanted to. But the point is, he doesn't want to. All this from the same archbishop pushing Alpha down every priests' throats in Detroit.

Steidl continues in his blog, saying, "I thought of an LGBTQ-affirming friend and pastor of a Catholic parish," thus admitting that a pastor and many, many, more are supportive of the homoheresy. Of his priest friend, as well as others, he says, "His public theology has communicated spiritual life and reconciliation to hundreds of queer people. He has challenged and changed the local Church in visible and radical ways." Well, that part is certainly true. This priest and hundreds of other homosexual priests and prelates have certainly changed the Church in radical ways. Then, he moves onto another group: "I thought of my married LGBTQ Catholic friends, whose [public] presence at a Catholic parish prophesies against systematic homophobia and institutional prejudice."

Sure enough, more than any other single religious group, it is Catholics who lead the way in accepting homosexuality as normal, which can't come as a surprise when you consider they have been exposed to swarms of gay men who are priests who have been slowly conditioning them for decades to accept sodomy and effeminate men. Catholics continue to lead all other religions in accepting same-sex marriage according to every poll. Exactly what institutional prejudice Steidl is rambling on about is a little unclear. Numbers approaching half the clergy are gay, expressing absolutely zero shame in the gay hookup culture, rife with promiscuity and anonymous sexual encounters, Steidl goes on further, "I thought of my queer friends who wonder out loud about sexual experiences in light of their Catholic faith."

Enough said in this area because being gay is synonymous with dozens if not hundreds of sexual partners. Yet, he expresses no remorse and actually pines for the Church to allow this. Of course, he can't leave out the conditioning of young minds with the incessant propaganda: "I thought of young queer people in CCD asking their religion teachers why the Catholic Church hates LGBTQ people." This statement is very telling on two scores. One, it pushes the insane notion that the Church hates gays — completely untrue and Steidl, who is studying theology, knows that. Second, if he thinks it's true, it just goes to prove how no one in the gay scene can contemplate their lives without sex. The very notion of being chaste is so antithetical to the gay world that no one on that scene can even contemplate it. Note to the queer nation that Steidl praises and applauds — loads of people in the world are chaste. You are called to nothing more or nothing less.

And finally, in perhaps the richest comment in his whole article, Steidl claims the mantle of "being called." "I thought of my own calling as a theologian." Steidl has no more calling to be a theologian than the man in the moon. He, like so many others in his circles, uses that self-delusion as means to self-justify their desire to pervert the Faith to justify their perverted sexual lives. And, yes, they are perverted. Just as queers, as Steidl uses the term so freely, have penetrated into the deepest recesses of the Church. They have not spared the halls of theology where they can work their evil. These men suffer from psychological illness — homosexuality — which the Church teaches is intrinsically disordered. Their big push now, like James Martin and others are always saying, is to purge that vocabulary from the catechism to further normalize sodomy.

Contained in Steidl's article is a picture which says everything about their queer theology. Take a look at it. If you think this isn't disgusting, blasphemous and sacrilegious, then you don't know your Catholic faith — queer theologian or not. Still, think there's nothing to worry about or resist in the Church these days? Still think all this talk about a gay revolution in the Church is nonsense? Remember, none of this could have advanced to this point without the express help and aid of thousands of psychologically disturbed homosexual men in the clergy and the episcopate.

Why the others will not fight back against this for the sake of the souls of the sheep will be a question they will have to answer for an accounting at their judgments.

TRANSCRIPT

The Church in America has never had a sterling track record when it comes to conversions. But whatever it had been able to accomplish in past decades looks amazing compared to today's dismal record. As America grows more irreligious owing to the ascent of millions of young people who have no interest in religion, this, coupled with the older people who are more religious dying off, conversions to the Faith have fallen off in a major way. The much-ballyhooed "New Evangelization" is proving to be pretty much a bust according to the bishops' own record keeping.

A couple of years ago, the overall number of Catholics in the United States began to drop for the first time ever, a result of the lack of any effective catechesis finally catching up to the institutional church. The raw number of Catholics will begin falling slightly at first but then increase in pace in the next three to five years and then go completely off the cliff as old people dying are not replaced in sufficient numbers. All this is to say that anyone interested in coming to the Catholic faith must be greatly encouraged because they will be far apart and few in between in the coming years.

A major concern for many of those who do approach the Church is the decidedly leftist lean its leaders have both politically and theologically. Those people looking for a deeper reality are not going to be convinced by Catholics who sound every bit as much like shills for the Democratic party and its leftist agenda as they do Catholic. In fact, many potential converts are greatly disturbed by all the leftist-sounding rhetoric they hear coming from inside the Church these days.

At a recent conference where Church Militant was speaking, one audience member asked how are they supposed to convince people to become Catholic when it sounds like the Church is so liberal and, in a word, un-Catholic? They said they had a Protestant friend who was a little put off from converting by all the pro-homosexual, pro-divorce and remarriage talk. This is a real concern — has been for a number of years in fact.  

Catholics who are helping friends or family either come to or come back to Catholic Church must be able to articulate the reality of the Church today. You must be able to answer their questions, and they are legitimate questions about why there is so much leftist, socialist-sounding claptrap in the Church these days. Most people who look at the Church — interested in sincerely converting — tend to be more orthodox and conservative. Owing to all the madness of the past 50 years, they look at the Church and quite often do not see the Bride of Christ but a worldly organization interested in leftist-political goals. For the sincere and conservative, this is not good.

So, you need to be able to explain the madness that has seized control of so many quarters of the Church these days — the various bishops and priests who support anything as long as it's not Catholic. These clerics are a turnoff to potential converts because they represent the exact opposite of what sincere men and women of goodwill are looking for. These heterodox and dissident bishops and priests have disfigured the Bride of Christ, and you need to be able to show that to people. Because of the presence of these dissidents, it's not merely enough anymore to just engage in apologetics.

You also need to explain to them the crisis in the Church — the why, when, how and who of it all. The last thing you want is someone converting and then a few months into it being exposed to all this dissent and then leaving. You need to warn them in advance. You need to lay it out for them in plain and simple terms.

The Church is a mess right now because of the dissent that has been allowed to foment and has been left unaddressed by leaders. Explain that to people of goodwill seeking the Truth. If you understand it sufficiently and can give examples, then their intellects will be better prepared to deal with the reality once they confront it. But this means that you have to understand it and be able to explain it — to have mastery over the topic yourself. Once you understand the big picture, it's not that hard to fill in the blanks and then help others see how they should not let the evil doings of others deprive them of the Truth — of the One True Faith.

These are indeed very weird times we are living in. It used to be enough to just catechize people. Now, you have to give them a crash course in traitorous Catholics right alongside instruction in the Faith. It's hard to believe that we have come to this point, but realize it, accept it, embrace it and get on with evangelizing people. This is our modern day reality, and there are plenty of writings and proofs from history and so forth laying it all out. This is a level of preparedness that Catholics never had to have before. As the saying goes, "That was then, this is now."

They need to know the truth — the whole truth, the truth of the Faith and the truth that many in that Faith are working to destroy it.

TRANSCRIPT

Some things that the Modernist Church of Nice does are so completely nuts, so insipid, so insane, that it's almost embarrassing to report on it. Yet, there it is — right out there for the whole world to see. Case in point, the Conference of Catholic Bishops in Iowa, formerly known as the Iowa Catholic Conference. They assembled together a Lenten reflection and meditation book that is 88 pages long for the faithful to read and pray over and reflect on and meditate on to heighten their spiritual awareness for Lent. It has something you can think about and then do for each day of Lent. And the overall thrust of it is not to make you holier, of bringing to mind a sharp awareness of your own mortality, which remember is how Lent begins on Ash Wednesday — nope. The geniuses at the Iowa Catholic Conference have put together a tome on how you can conserve water and develop an awareness of global water quality. Still, think the Church isn't in crisis?

The holy season of Lent — meant to prepare us through mortification and fasting for our deaths as well as be ready to rejoice in the great celebration of Easter — has been converted to a social justice initiative concentrating on water. If you are finding this hard to believe, we've attached a link to the idiotic document. And don't get us wrong, water quality and availability are important issues, but they are wholly inappropriate for Lent. Lent is about a spiritual journey, not a social awareness campaign. But this is just further proof of how the modernists in the Church have simply taken over and co-opted all things Catholic and converted them to their use to take your minds off the things of Heaven and turn them to the things of earth.

In electing the Church of Nice, the modernists have done this in every facet of Catholic life — liturgy, prayer, music, education, devotion, art, architecture — you name, they haven't left one stone unturned. And to make the point more clear, we've put together a little chart of normal terms you would expect to come across in a Catholic document given to Catholic faithful by Catholic bishops about the Catholic liturgical season of Lent — terms like Jesus, Cross, mortification, Heaven, Hell, salvation, damnation, penance, death, sacrifice, offering, fasting, prayer, almsgiving, soul and divine. In any normal reflection of Lent presented in a normal Catholic manner, it would be extremely difficult to provide anything of substance to the faithful without using most or all of those words. Well, in the 88 pages of this document, here's how many times each of those terms was used:

So, we scoured through the document and looked for social justice buzzwords such as global, carbon (either footprint or emissions), environment, water, ecology, ecosystems, world, nature, human and man. Here was the number of times each of these terms appeared:

The document was signed on behalf of his brother bishops by Richard Pates, bishop of Des Moines. The bishops of Iowa believe that during this holy season of Lent that it is much more important for you to consider and meditate on worldly things than spiritual things — sometimes dozens of times more. This document is called "Caring for Our Common Home — a Lenten Reflection for Iowans," and it is ridiculously inappropriate for Lent. But understand, this is what the Church of Nice is all about; Jesus did not come to redeem us but to make sure we all had clean water.

This fake Lenten document could have been written by the United Nations. We keep saying things are going to get much worse before they get better. Need any more proof?

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There was a time in America and other parts of the world where liberalism probably had good intentions. Here, in the States, for example, liberalism saw what we could call the "sins" of America's past, like slavery and rightly railed against them, as well as the effects of those sins carried into contemporary times. But liberalism itself became infected with the capital sin of pride, assuming a kind of moral superiority and condemning as inferior anyone who would not agree with its agenda. It has since become the immediate knee-jerk reaction to label or stigmatize every non-liberal as racist.

We saw this in abundance during the Obama reign. Anyone who simply disagreed with Obama on anything was taken to task for being a racist. We see it today with college kids — brainwashed for decades now with the effects of liberalism that they are special, unique and superior, as they take to the streets to protest violently a conservative speaker.

Once liberalism became infected with pride, it ceased to be an ideology and became instead an identity. It has become personal. When you challenge and attack the system of beliefs of a liberal, they perceive it not as an attack on the ideas but as a personal attack on them — their indentity— thus the completely unhinged response wrapped up in a cloak of superiority. And since they are superior, you, by definition, are inferior. You are a racist, a sexist, a homophobe (which isn't even a real thing anyway; there is no mental illness of homophobia). It's all about calling you names, demonizing you, stigmatizing you.

On the political scene, this is why the passions and hatred against Trump run so high, so intense. Trumpism — the whole MAGA, Make America Great Again platform — is viewed as a personal attack against not just an ideology but as the prevailing identity of those on the Left. This includes the mainstream media, virtually every institution in the Establishment. Even many of Trump's own party view themselves, not just their ideas and policies, as superior to Trump. Whenever anything horrible happens such as the Florida shootings by Nikolas Cruz, the entire Liberal world immediately starts looking to blame the conservative gun-toting hick from flyover country who is morally inferior because he is a white supremacist.

This approach accomplishes two things. One, it keeps the narrative rolling about the need to be a liberal because, two, "we" are superior. "We" don't believe in guns. Only racists believe in guns. Church Militant speaks so frequently about politics and the culture and Trump and the reaction to Trump because we recognize how this liberalism has set up camp in the Church.

Liberalism is fueled by pride. Whatever its past intentions might have been, it has now become incoherent and violent because it has become personal.

Conservative and orthodox talk about ideas and notions. Liberals and modernists just boil over with emotion. Rage has replaced logic because liberals long ago lost the logic contest. No, higher taxes do not save an economy. No, birth control does not improve the culture. No, freedom of sexual expression does not liberate people. No, exalting one's own self over God and the laws of nature does not improve your lot. No, keeping entire populations on institutionalized welfare does not help them succeed.

The attitude of moral superiority which powers liberalism is what is responsible for things falling apart and that attitude exists so they can excuse their personal sins. There is an intense crossover between the liberalism in the culture and the 'liberalism' in the Church. In the Church, we call it modernism, heresy, and it is rampant.  And just as in the culture, in the Church it, too, has become an identity shot through with the sin of pride. So anything from the past is bad, mean, evil, must be annihilated.

Reverent liturgy, for example, is seen as impersonal and must be overcome by a more person-centered show. Talking about dogma and doctrine harkens back to the past when we spoke of sin and damnation and threatens my world of being superior. So that kind of speak must be replaced with the talk of being "pastoral." You see this "liberal" response immediately when you speak of the sin of active homosexuality as a thing, as in a thing in the world of ideas, propositions, teachings, a notion and the response immediately becomes a personal attack — you are a hater, a homophobe, non-integrated, whatever.

This is life today in the Church. The heretics have taken over — the theological equivalent of liberals in the culture — and just as in the culture, liberalism is destroying it, so too, the heresy of modernism is destroying the Church. God is under no duty to ensure the culture remains viable. But He has placed Himself under the duty to ensure His Church does. And He will. We need to get ourselves in the right frame of mind to be able to see what will be the coming correction and embrace it — make sure we are on the correct side of things.

Put more simply, be sure you are in the ark when the rain starts.

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So last Wednesday, lots of Catholics traipsed up the aisles in parishes all over the world and received ashes on their foreheads as they heard the words "repent and believe the Gospel." Now, that's certainly true; of course, every day we should repent of our sins and believe the Gospel more deeply and live it out in our lives. But for many who have either forgotten or more likely have never known the traditional words expressed as the ashes are being traced on your forehead, remember "man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return," spoken by the Lord God and directed toward Adam as he was being cast out of paradise for his sin. That is a lot more in your face, and it should be.

Lent is a season to mortify ourselves and remember our last end. In fact, it is a time to remember the four last things — death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. But the Church of Nice is not really concerned with you thinking along those lines. They don't want you thinking about anything serious or somber or sobering like damnation, sin and so forth.

No, for the Church of Nice, the only point is to suck out anything and everything that reminds you of the seriousness of life — of the intensity of the spiritual battle you are supposed to be waging — and let you hop and skip along not worrying or bothered about much. The interest of the Establishment Church is not, mark this down, not in the salvation of your souls and the souls of your children but of making you comfortable or as little uncomfortable as possible. So, you never hear the hard truths. Excuse after excuse is offered for your sins — they don't even really call them sins anymore — they're just bad choices.

Church of Nice clergy say all kinds of things that are, well, nice. There isn't a lot wrong in fact with what they do say. The problem is they don't tell you enough — they never finish the thought sufficiently. It takes a well-trained ear to know what you aren't being told. And for three generations of poorly formed Catholics, how are they supposed to know what they don't know? What father such and such says is okay, not much wrong with it, but there isn't much right with it either, and the vast majority of the few people who still attend Mass have no idea what they should be hearing. Again, they don't know what they don't know — just like the words used when the ashes are being traced on your forehead. Nothing wrong with "repent and believe the Gospel." Except it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. The phrase doesn't have contained in itself any sense of urgency, any notion of consequence or punch in the face. In fact, it sounds like something Oprah would advise one of her groupies. It simply lacks any sense of importance or urgency, and as such, it is a butchering of the original Gospel passage it is derived from.

In Mark 1, where the passage comes from, the whole passage presents Our Blessed Lord urgently expressing the need for repentance. The entire passage reads, "This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel." You get a much greater sense that the time is decisive. You must act now. But since so many leaders in the Church of Nice don't believe all that the Church teaches, there is never a sense of urgency, unless they are running their annual financial campaign throughout the diocese — then, there is an urgency.

The passage about "remember that you are dust" is much more pointed and appropriate for Lent because it immediately focuses the mind on the last reality which is the most important. You are going to die — all in this life will come to an end, and you had better be prepared. It's seeming subtle and little differences like this that separate the Church of Nice from the Church of authentic Catholicism. And those in the Church of Nice are being cheated and blinded little by little until the whole purpose for the Church and them being Catholic has been slowly drained from them by a thousand different ways.

Remember, "Man that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return."

TRANSCRIPT

There is nothing better in this world than to be baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Faith — nothing! Hear that Modernist Church of Nice clerics and prelates — nothing! The reason is quite simple because being Catholic in this world, affording the opportunity of necessarily dying in a state of grace, is the guarantee of everlasting life in the next world. If the Church of Nice clergy won't say that then we have to because it's true.

Saying this truth out loud really ticks off the Church of Nice crowd, and we mean really. In fact, it was the official reason given the first time Church Militant was officially banned from speaking on Church property and for the record that was by homosexualist Bp. Joseph Bambera of Scranton. He said saying the Truth was offensive to other religions so Church Militant wasn't welcome to come and speak on Church property. But this is just it — it is the truth. And anyone who has questions about it or isn't clear why it is the truth and wants to have an honest open discussion why it is the truth is certainly welcome to engage with us on it. In fact, we do quite frequently in private phone calls and emails and many of those engagements turn into conversions. That's how it's supposed to work, bishops. You are supposed to engage, you know, meet people where they're at and bring them to the Truth.

Some people might take offense — so what? As long as the intent is not to give offense for its own sake then no big deal. Do you really think what Our Lord said didn't offend some or many of his hearers? In fact, in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, it says exactly that: "They took offense at Him."  Why? Because for someone who does not want to conform their lives to the Truth, the truth is offensive and blaming the person is just what a weak man or woman does so as to try and avoid the demands the Truth places on them.

If you are sexually active for example with a boyfriend or girlfriend or cheating on your spouse, of course, you are going to object to the Catholic Church and take offense. But all of this is neither here nor there for this Vortex. Here, we want to talk about the glories of the Faith — the graces that flow to you both in this life, as well as the next.

People begin their hell, here on earth. It just becomes complete once they die. The same is true of those who are saved — that process begins here on earth — and is just completed when you die. So while the glories of the Catholic faith are fully realized in Heaven, they are begun to be realized while we are still in the flesh.

The glories of the Faith is the subject of this year's Retreat at Sea — our sixth annual Retreat at Sea, yes, hard to believe, but it's true — six years. All the details are available by clicking on the link but just a quick summary, it's being held from L.A. to Vancouver over Easter week which is the perfect time to talk on the Glories of the Faith. This is a perfect opportunity to enjoy spending a week with like-minded faithful Catholics from all over.

Sick of the Church of Nice nuttiness? Bored with bad bishops and weak men who refuse to announce the Truth and glories of the Faith? Come spend a week with a couple hundred other Catholics on board a nice ship, going to talks, having Mass, sharing stories with one another, having great laughs and deep moments.

Things are pretty bad in the Church these days. This is the way to get away from it all if only for a week and let your Catholic hair down and just enjoy the party and have fun being Catholic. Remember when we used to do that?

We set sail Easter Monday and look forward to seeing you on board. Again, just click on the link.

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It's always a little awkward when the Establishment gets egg on its face — awkward for them that is. Case in point, the diocese of Lansing, Michigan, headed by Bp. Earl Boyea, who used to be an auxiliary bishop, here in Detroit until he became the bishop in Lansing in 2008. His diocese is sponsoring a men's conference and as is the usual run of events at these affairs, various Catholic groups who have merchandise to sell can apply and then set up a booth to sell their books or whatever.

So, at the suggestion of a Church Militant supporter, we applied to be not just a booth selling our books but also to be a $500 gold sponsor. At first, the preliminary people we dealt with were all very happy and enthusiastic. But once it worked its way up the approval chain, all of a sudden, the great Church of Nice "chill" set in as in cold shoulder. Unsurprisingly, Church Militant's application for having a booth was rejected as was our bid to give $500 to be a gold sponsor. Again, we expected nothing less, but our supporter was insistent we give it a try — so we did — and the expected result happened.

When the staff, here, called to ask for the specific reason we were rejected from the "all are welcome" Church of Nice, the calls, at first, were not returned. Eventually, the woman in the chancery who made the call to reject us, Deborah Amato, Bp. Boyea's chief of staff, called back with a line of malarkey about why we were rejected. She claimed they investigated our website and found it failed their test in three major areas: we are not "uplifting," we have no "integrity" and we have no "charity."

When asked by our staffer what all that meant, the official curtain, complete with tone and attitude came crashing down: "I am not going to debate this with you." Informed that we weren't getting into a debate but just asking a question, again, the Church of Nice was not nice, and we got the "I am not going to debate this with you" party line of avoidance. Once more we said, "We are just asking a simple question, not debating," and as they say — the third time's the charm — then the truth came out, to wit, "We both know the reason why."

Right about this same time, Bp. Boyea sent out his weekly email update to his priests who share it with loads of people who share it with loads more. Church Militant is also shared on this. In this edition, the bishop lamented the failure of evangelization efforts in his diocese of Lansing, Michigan. He says, "Eleven of our parishes have no one in RCIA this year, and six of them have had no one for at least three of the past five years." He goes on to further lament the dismal numbers of people becoming Catholic on his watch in his diocese. "As a diocese, we are continuing our decline in this area with 571 folks, 20 fewer than last year, and down from 786 in 2008 and 1,342 in 2000." And the big "oops" moment, he confesses that he had pinned his hopes on the protestantized Alpha program to reel in the fish: "I guess, I had hoped that with all the Alpha programs we would have seen a surge."  

So, now back to the question of "integrity" raised by his chief of staff, the very condescending Deborah Amato. Prior to being elevated in the chancery system, Amato had a very significant role in the entire evangelization effort of the whole diocese, actually having been named the chair of the Department of Evangelization and Lay Formation. Having done such a stellar job at recruiting new Catholic converts, she, of course, was promoted to be essentially the bishop's right-hand woman. So yes, questions of integrity to pop up everywhere. Should Amato have accepted even greater responsibility when she had produced little to no results in her prior position? Is she the appropriate person to be talking down to lay Catholics — lay Catholics who love the Church and are not "professional Catholics" as Pope Benedict coined the term — accusing them of lacking charity and integrity?

Kind of a big disconnect there. And to extend the question of integrity, is it right for Bp. Boyea, having placed his hopes for Catholic evangelization on a Protestant program, is it right for him to continue pushing this disaster of a program even after the results are in, and it has been proven the predictable failure faithful Catholics knew it would be? Shouldn't he just level with his flock and say, "I was wrong and misinformed by my senior staff, Ms. Amato and others, who pushed Alpha. It does not work, and I am immediately ordering the discontinuation of it in this diocese." It seems that would be a stellar example of integrity, as well as demoting Ms. Amato for poor job performance.

The Church of Nice fake and phony emotions and feelings ways do not work in bringing people to the Faith. Yet, people in the chanceries — the professional Catholics — continue to make a living pushing this stuff. And lastly and perhaps most importantly, when Bp. Boyea was still here in Detroit, I met with him in his office one day. This was 11 years ago in 2007. I'm sure you are watching this Your Excellency, and you will recall the reason I met with you was to express my deep concern over numbers and data and polls all showing a looming demographic storm for the Church in the next 10–15 years.

Many of you know my background is in TV news and reporting and a large portion of that time was being deeply involved in political coverage, which requires a pretty firm knowledge of polls and research data. I shared that with Bp. Boyea as I met with him. As I told him my concerns, he seemed completely uninterested, sitting with his leg crossed, picking lint from the knee of his trousers and not looking at me. For a few minutes, I went through a rather frightening litany of the wipe-out facing the Church in America. Again, this was 11 years ago.

When I was done, unable to miss the completely dismissive body language, he finally looked at me and said. "Well, yes, Michael, you can't believe every poll you read," and that was that. This is how the Church of Nice reacts to problems, criticisms and suggestions. I went there to help. He couldn't have cared less.

Well now, 11 years later, he is sending notes to his priests lamenting the very same disaster, and now it's too late to do anything about it. He, like many bishops, have surrounded themselves with professional Catholic "yes" men and women, whose main job function is to keep the machinery going. By Bp. Boyea's own reckoning in his email, he admits that in just one generation the number of converts to the Faith in his diocese has been cut by almost a whopping 60 percent. And like so many bishops who will not face the reality that their half-baked "God is love, no one goes to Hell" catechesis appeals to no one except the feeble minded. The whole lot of them prove the Proverb, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."

Just exactly who is lacking integrity in all this? Why can't the systemic deep problems in the Church be spoken of openly? Why do lay people with a vested interest in keeping up the veneer of nice who are so duplicitous when dealing with you in private, why should such people have so much authority invested in them? Something, as we and many others have said a million times, something is deeply wrong in the Church, and this generation of bishops has simply abdicated their responsibility to sheep. Seems to us that that is not very uplifting, is lacking in integrity and is not very charitable.

Owing to all this, the Church in the United States — as we now know it — has roughly five years left.

TRANSCRIPT

So, here we are about a third of the way through Lent and the big question, "How's it goin'? Been faithful to your increased prayer, fasting and almsgiving efforts? Don't worry if you're not but do step it up. Remember the point of this is to prepare for death and perhaps even by means of martyrdom and not about doing your part to keep water clean like the bishops of Iowa think you should do or decrease your carbon footprint.

What you are doing during Lent should be something the effects of which will follow you into the next life, not end when you die. The Church is about your salvation, not lessening your contribution to fake man-made climate change idiocy. See, what we do here at Church Militant is two-fold — different sides of the same sword. People's ability to recognize the glories of Holy Mother Church is severely diminished because of all the heresy and dissent that has now just become institutionalized. And then there is the even greater problem, yes, greater than heresy and dissent, and that is the subtle re-defining of the Church that is taking place in a million little, almost invisible ways — almost invisible.

It is a presentation of the Church and the Faith never before done in our 2,000-year sacred history, and it has been going on for so long now that the average Catholic has simply accepted this "new" Church as the Catholic Church. It is a Church with no anchor to speak of to its own past. Tradition has become so marginalized, so sidelined, so forgotten for so long now — almost for complete generations — that Catholics now think what they see before them is the Church — how it's always been. And for them, it is. And you can't really blame them, but you can warn them. In fact, you are duty bound to warn them, alert them, make them sit up and pay attention to you.

You can certainly inform a bishop or your pastor what they are saying is wrong or ill-advised — that their prudential decision is going to have negative effects, and they are being short-sighted. And as affairs run, the superiority complex will immediately become evident, and you will be brushed aside. But that is just by the self-interested Establishment of professional Catholics.

Average people around you can be spoken to and engaged with because for people who aren't married to the institutional rot — who don't have a dog in that fight — some of them are much more likely and willing to give you a hearing. That's because many of them, many are men of goodwill and as a consequence of their goodwill, they are able to look around and observe the disaster that has befallen the Church.

They are asking questions. Even if they are only momentary or infrequently occurring, they are asking questions inside their minds. Questions like "Boy, sure seems like there used to be more people at this 10 a.m. Mass, where did they go?" Or "That's strange. How come almost everyone who graduated with me from St. Francis High School is no longer Catholic?" Or "Sure seems like I hear a lot about parishes closing up all over the place."

Many people see these things and don't have enough knowledge to answer their own questions. To them, a loss of supernatural faith on the part of many clergy wouldn't enter their minds just as it didn't when we, here, at Church Militant first started seeing these problems. We did figure out the answer like many good Catholics before us, and now we tell everyone and anyone who will listen so that they'll tell two friends about it, and they'll tell two friends and so on and so on.   

But these are dangerous waters indeed. While telling the truth about the devastating corruption of the clergy which has dragged many souls away from the One True Faith, you also have to explain the glory of the Faith. You have to encourage people to be Catholic to become as converted to Our Blessed Lord as is possible for them in their lives and situations.

This requires many things but chief among them is prayer. This is precisely why we went to the time and expense and continual man-hours of live streaming our Morning and Evening prayer every weekday from our beautiful chapel — a chapel by the way that many visitors who come by remark is more beautiful than their home parish which sadly, for the most part, isn't a very high bar, but we digress.

Since we began our live streaming, we have refined our video feed and have now made it easier to follow along in the Christian Prayer book by posting all page numbers for every feed. Most Catholics are woefully unaware of the Liturgy of the Hours and many of the few who are aware, find the book very confusing with its constant flipping of ribbons and going backwards and then jumping forward a couple hundred pages, seemingly randomly.

It is a little difficult to begin with but since Holy Mother Church strongly recommends to the laity to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, we have set up our feed to make it as easy as possible until you catch on yourself. It does take a little time, but it certainly isn't impossible. If we can do it, you can.  Perseverance and patience — that's all it takes. In the meantime, you are praying. And you are praying with other faithful Catholics all over the world who are praying with us.

All you have to do is just come to the site on weekday mornings at 8 a.m. EST and/or 4:45 p.m. EST on weekday afternoons for Evening Prayer. If you are looking for a way to increase your prayer life a little during Lent and then hopefully afterwards, this would be some great encouragement for you.

Likewise, if you do not own a Christian Prayer book, we have them for sale, as well as many other places online as well. We also use our own St. Michael's Media/Church Militant prayer book for the specific prayers we do around the Liturgy of the Hours. That is available only through us since it is exclusive to us, but it's only a few dollars.  

We deliberately priced it low so we could to make it easily affordable for people who want to pray with us. Both books are available by just clicking on the link to our store provided here on this page.

Want to be a part of helping to save souls and steer the Church back, then prayer and personal holiness are absolutely essential to this mission, not to mention, of course, the mission of our own salvation. We make these available to you so you can join us directly in our work — a kind of peering in each day to gather with us in prayer. But whether you join us specifically or not, pray and increase your prayer for Holy Mother Church.