Church Militant The Vortex Feed

TRANSCRIPT

Before we begin, a small advisory that, given the nature of this episode, the topic is a little rough. Father Robert DeLand of Saginaw, Michigan is finally facing justice for his homosexual predation.

Earlier this week, he pleaded no contest to charges of various charges of sexual assault involving a 17-year-old male.

DeLand had, in fact, faced a series of trials for related activity, having been acquitted on one charge last week after the prosecution was unable to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt a previous sexual assault.

But now, after entering what amounts to a guilty plea, without actually admitting guilt, he is going to be facing years in prison with sentencing expected in the coming weeks.

DeLand's case raises loads of questions. In fact, his is a case in all that is wrong in the Church these days. He was ordained in 1973 for the diocese of Saginaw, Michigan.

Back in the 1990s, persistent rumors and allegations of his homosexual activity and grooming young males surfaced and he wrote a letter to the then Bp. Kenneth Untener denying everything.

Despite that history, he was elevated to judicial vicar in 2001. DeLand was a practicing homosexual, in fact, a predatory homosexual and this was not a deep dark secret at the Saginaw chancery.

However, since the legal age of consent in Michigan is 16, DeLand was hard to "get" for statutory rape because he made sure none of his victims, at least that anyone knows about, were "underage."

When any charges or accusations arose, they were not easy to pursue criminally because, if discovered, he could have always pointed a finger to the fact that the young men were of legal age.

His modus operandi was to hang around the local high school, for years, volunteering to be a hall monitor, where he befriended freshmen and sophomore boys.

He would use his interaction with them to identify the weak or vulnerable among them, and then he would begin his grooming, careful it seems to make sure that he never crossed the legal age of consent boundary.

This behavior went on for years, and no one in the diocese seemed to raise an eyebrow of concern. In fact, Bp. Joseph Cistone, who died late last year, acted oblivious to the impropriety of the whole situation.

DeLand was part of the liberal, modernist network of questionable clerics — mainly, but not exclusively, from the 1970s era — who had inserted themselves as fixtures in the local power structure of the Church, a very important fact for Catholic everywhere to understand.

As long as DeLand wasn't raping underage boys, he got a pass. Homosexuality among priests — active homosexuality — is no big deal, as long as it's not kids and a lawsuit comes as a result.

And if you think Saginaw is some isolated case of that philosophy, then you don't have a pulse. This is the rule, not the exception, across nearly every diocese in America.

And while we are at it, it extends into the world of bishops as well. At the very least — and we mean the very least — bishops don't want to tick off their gay clergy like was openly admitted to in the case of Abp. Allen Vigneron of Detroit by one of his own seminary faculty, Dr. Mary Healy.

Catholics have got to understand that this is how the Church functions today — across the board, from Rome on down — and how it has functioned for decades — active homosexual clergy, bishops as well as priests, who don't care about the immorality of homosexuality as long as it's not a minor. So, DeLand, exhibiting a high degree of cockiness in earlier court appearances, simply outwardly laughed off the charges, surprising various onlookers in court with his bravado.

That extended to last week's verdict of not guilty in the first trial where it turned into a case of he said, he said. And yeah, step back for a minute and take this all in — a Catholic priest not only doing the deed but then lying about it in court and refusing to face the music of his sins and crimes. Pay attention, you Catholics who find all this hard to believe, or don't want to process all this, this is the state of the clergy today in way too many instances.

The trial this week that was avoided by this no contest plea was only avoided because, after a series of charges by multiple victims, local police were able to wiretap and surveil his activity with a 17-year-old victim. He gave the young man money to buy drugs and come over to his residence — on and on, you get the picture.

And of course, without the crack work by the police and the young man's cooperation — difficult as that would have been — DeLand more than likely would have skated on that assault as well just like the first one — again, because it wasn't a minor, legally anyway.

DeLand should never have been ordained. Like so many other men who got into the system in the 1970s and 1980s, they are either actively gay, gay-friendly or complicit in their silence.

Some, some of them raped minors, and that is the only thing that has exposed the larger problem of the infestation of homosexual men in the seminaries. And to be very clear, active homosexual priests and bishops is still, right this very moment, an ongoing crisis in the Church.

Many of these men — like Fr. James Martin and the truckloads of homosexualist bishops and other priests in his heretic camp — just do not believe there is anything sinful about active homosexuality.

That is the problem. They are gay heretics, and their gay gravy train had to pull into the station once the secular media went wild, as they should have, with the child sex abuse coverage 18 years ago.

But having somewhat addressed that, the surviving clergy hopped back on the train and kept on having gay sex — and still do — with seminarians, each other, male prostitutes and so forth.

Even if homosexual predation of legal minors is not as prevalent — and there's some question about even that now as new studies begin to emerge — even if the predation of minor males is only the tip of the iceberg.

This is why men like Chicago Cdl. Blase Cupich cannot let this conversation arise publicly — same goes for Robert McElroy of San Diego. It was the fuel in the engine of Theodore McCarrick. It was the reason behind the stream of lies pouring out of the mouths of Tobin, Farrell, Wuerl and so forth.

These men may not, may not, protect homopredator child molesters in their clergy, but they sure as Hades protect homosexuality among their priests.

That's how DeLand was able to get away with stuff for so long — victim after victim, grooming incident after grooming incident.

These bishops and priests who either actually do this stuff or cover it up are sick in the head. They have no supernatural faith. They are on the road to damnation, and they don't care who they drag into the pit with them.

They must be fiercely resisted — their cover-up, their perversion of dogma and doctrine. They need to be laicized and go get a job in the nearest gay bar, if they refuse to repent, and stop sponging off the laity.

This is why Cupich jumped to his feet so fast in Baltimore and said consensual sex among the clerical ranks is a different issue and we can talk about it later — later, by the way, never comes.

Cupich is the Vatican's cover-up man for the real problem of, not child sex abuse, but gay priests and bishops who have adult lovers stashed all over the Church.

Don't give these perverts and cover-up artists a dime, nothing, not one red cent of your money, for anything. They don't care about salvation, the Church or your families. And one final point, they don't even care about their own.

In a couple of weeks or so, DeLand is going to be sitting behind bars for years, perhaps long enough to actually die in prison, if not be killed.

Will the sodomite clergy gang come to his assistance in preparing him for death, in encouraging him to repent? We already know the answer. They are a wicked bunch.

TRANSCRIPT

My father — God rest his soul — used to say to me that you can tell the quality of a man by who is on his enemies list when he dies.

Anyone who dies without enemies led a purposeless life, totally selfish, concentrating all their effort at never committing to anything sufficiently to earn them enemies — gliding through life concerned about nothing more than human respect.

But all of this goes much further than that. It's not just getting enemies that matter, but that you acquire the correct enemies. And we recall, Our Blessed Lord had an extensive list of correct enemies — they crucified Him.

If you don't have enemies owing to your faith and zeal and love of Our Lord, then you don’t have enough faith, zeal or love. In our go-along, never-give-offense-type culture, the most detestable thing in the judgment of men is to give offense — wrong. The most detestable, un-manly thing you can do is to never give offense.

Be careful when the whole world celebrates you. It's a mark of impending doom and probable damnation. You have not loved Our Blessed Lord sufficient to warrant any enemies.

This is all inspired by a little encounter a Church Militant supporter told us about that they had very recently with San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy. In a pretty benign manner, the Church Militant supporter brought up Church Militant and instantly McElroy shot back: "Church Militant lies."

As usual, no specific example of anything was given to support his spurious claim, just the usual episcopal claptrap by those in mitres who don't like their nefarious deeds being talked about publicly.

McElroy is a disgrace to his office, but then again, since he was promoted into that office because of the machinations of Mr. Theodore McCarrick, that can't come as a surprise.

McElroy has lied about the Faith, deceived the souls entrusted to him and has been part of the entire "revolution" inside the Church. That's why the commie McCarrick boosted him up the ladder.

So here we have the case of a bishop and layman each saying the other is lying. We give specifics; he blurts out emotional nonsense. But the dividing point is the issue of truth. Truth is what creates enemies — those who accept it and those who reject it become enemies.

That's why the man with no enemies has never been a lover of truth. Likewise, it's why you want to make sure that your enemies are the "correct" enemies, the ones who hate the truth.

No one, absolutely no one, attains salvation without being a lover of truth, and it is impossible to pass through this life loving the truth and not accumulate a string of enemies.

Given the cultural mindset, this needs emphasizing because people not liking you, or you being perceived as someone who gives offense, is deemed by many the most egregious thing on the planet.

It isn't. You aren't trying to give offense. You aren’t consciously going around trying to create and increase your enemies list.

If you are being a faithful Catholic, you won't need to do any of that — it will all happen naturally, all on its own.

A necessary ingredient to salvation is an extensive list of enemies, with all the correct names on it.

TRANSCRIPT

One thing you can say about the corrupt leadership in the Church: They sure are consistent.

It doesn't matter what happens, what gets reported, what gets exposed, this arrogant lot just keeps on plodding along and thumbing their collective noses at the faithful — and most importantly God. From financial corruption to sex abuse (mostly of the homopredator kind) to cover-up of the same, nothing — and we mean nothing — deters this crowd from their doctrinal, liturgical, financial or moral incompetence and filth, acting as though absolutely nothing has happened and life is normal.

Why was disgraced Cdl. Roger Mahony given a platform at the archdiocese of Los Angeles REC this past weekend to talk about anything? Unless he was giving an up-close and personal account of how best to spirit homopredator clergy out of the country before law enforcement could arrest them, he shouldn't have been on stage.

Why did the "go along, get along," pathetic-excuse-of-a-leader Abp. Jose Gomez of L.A. permit it? Never mind; he's still coming knocking for $500 million from L.A.'s Catholics.

Why does the lying Fr. Thomas Rosica, who fabricated an advanced degree out of thin air after plagiarizing for decades — why is this man's name even mentioned in any capacity at all, other than as a defendant in civil suits? Yet there he is on the postcard mailing to the nation's priests, giving a talk for the heretic organization of clerics: the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP).

His topic: "Reclaiming the Priesthood of the Faithful" — which he himself is decidedly not. We should check to see whom he stole it from before he's allowed to present it.

But no bother; also on that same card is his buddy, Cdl. "Rabbit Hole" Cupich, who masterfully and skillfully completely diverted the attention away from the topics of both McCarrick and homosexuality among the clergy at Rome's phony sex summit last month — another guy who failed to report the full list of homopredators in his archdiocese.

Which brings up Donald Wuerl, a man so desperate to cling to power that even after he had to resign in disgrace continues to keep his bony fingers on the levers in D.C., as Rome just can't seem to come up with a replacement for the man. Cupich and Wuerl are in Rome just about every other week, flying first class and wining and dining on your money, while they ask you to pony up to the plate for their annual appeals.

Wuerl got caught lying — red-handed — but that doesn't matter. In fact, nothing matters with this wicked crowd — like Buffalo bishop Richard Malone, who had to pull out of the annual St. Patrick's Day parade out of embarrassment from the media glare. And small wonder; not only did he lie to abuse victims, not only did he lie when he published his list of homopredator clergy, but he just reinstated a priest with a pornography problem.

Moving further down the Empire State, we encounter Cdl. Timothy Dolan, with whom priests are completely fed up with his lies and guffaws. Whether it's trying to sweep the results from his own internal investigation under the rug, which cost a half million of your dollars, and determined that at least a half dozen current pastors should be removed immediately, or it's being featured in the N.Y. media for covering up homopredators, nothing deters Cdl. Timothy "excommunication is against gospel values" Dolan.

Then there is Lansing bishop Earl Boyea, another one caught red-handed lying through his teeth about what he knew and when he knew it about allegations against a weirdo priest who would box with young men and then begin masturbating in front of them. But when it was all reported to him, he said he couldn't do anything about it. Can't wait to see what his bishop's annual appeal letter will detail they need money for.

And of course there's Bp. Slick — Robert Barron — who has never met a hard teaching of the Church he couldn't completely smooth over, like Hell or gay "marriage." Bishop Cool is just so reasonable, we can only hope that the well-substantiated rumors are true and that he goes to Birmingham, Alabama shortly so he can have a say in furthering destroying Mother Angelica's life's work.

And when it comes to credibility issues, look no further than the bishops' collective undying support for CRS — Catholic Relief Services — recently busted for funding just about every immoral practice you can name, and supporting further funding of it all by Congress. That ought to play real well at the Judgment Seat.

Absolutely no other organization in the world would even begin to tolerate all this, much less condone it — cardinals resigning for sex abuse cover-up, the latest one just this past weekend in Chile. Not a single peep about the McCarrick file and the ongoing investigation because — oh wait — there is no ongoing investigation.

And of course, high above it all, the entire despicable crisis in the Church is the near-total silence from the supposedly good bishops, with very rare exception.

However, they are betting that there are enough stupid, uninformed, wimpy, "Church of Nice" Catholics still sitting in the pews holding hands and swaying around in an emotional frenzy that the few billion dollars they are trying to extract nationwide will still be achievable.

And speaking of the pews, one last thing. With the horrid state of affairs, Cleveland's Bp. Perez has issued a statement saying that beginning on Divine Mercy Sunday, all Catholics in Cleveland will now stand instead of kneeling from the "Our Father" onwards, including after reception. The reason? So we will all be uniform.

Well, how about being uniform in all kneeling?

And for the record, not a single Catholic is obliged to abide by that. Every Catholic has the right in the Church to kneel and receive, to receive on the tongue and to kneel during the "Lamb of God" and after receiving Holy Communion — no matter what the pastor tells you, no matter what book or document or paper from the National Conference is trotted out. Simply ignore it. Ignore them all. That has nothing to do with obedience because they don't have jurisdiction over Church Law.

The bishops continue to ignore faithful Catholics. Maybe it's time for faithful Catholics to ignore more meaningless directives from bishops.

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Michael Voris coming to you from the dining hall of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart at the St. Benedict Center in New Hampshire.

Lots of reaction so far to the plight of this small, faithful community being mercilessly attacked by the diocese — these are men and women who have sacrificed life in the world to engage in the work of evangelization and catechesis, dedicating themselves to bringing converts to the Faith, and the diocese of Manchester is gunning for them.

So we thought it would be instructive to let you hear from the brothers and sisters themselves.

What is happening here to these loyal sons and daughters of the Church is unconscionable, and Catholics need to be justifiably angry at this and rally to their cause.

All they want to do is save souls by bringing them to the one true faith.

That's the obligation before Almighty God of every single Catholic — no exceptions. If you would like to help the brothers and sisters, please just click on the link.

Wrapping up our coverage of events here at the St. Benedict Center in Richmond New Hampshire, this is Michael Voris for Church Militant.

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Michael Voris coming to you from the St. Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, where the small community here of faithful, committed Catholics is coming under attack from their home the diocese of Manchester.

These are the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart established by Jesuit Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J., in 1949, and this particular community was born in 1989.

The attack is centered around the group's adherence to the Catholic dogma "outside the Church there is no salvation" —  in Latin known as Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus or, in shorthand, EENS.

And yes, you heard correctly, a group of faithful Catholics is being attacked by the local diocese for believing and teaching a magisterially defined dogma of the Faith, reiterated even as recently as last year by Pope Francis and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Br. Andre Marie: What effect has that had on the community? The effect has been utterly devastating. Not only on the brothers and sisters but on our school children, our school teachers, all of the community members, because we have lots of people who would go to daily Mass and (which isn't allowed to be offered anymore) — no, we have an empty tabernacle that we have left opened just to remind us that Our Lord is not there.

In recent years, the climate in the Church has made a definitive turn away from tradition, and those concerned about this have serious misgivings about what's going on here at St. Benedict Center.

CJ Doyle: There certainly does seem to be an attempt to inflict all sorts of petty humiliations on them over the years. There seems to be an animus against their traditional beliefs and practices. And by the way, this is one of the few Catholic communities and few Catholic religious orders that have been completely untainted by any charge of sexual abuse or that kind of misconduct. So why are they going after a group of innocent, unoffending, traditional Catholics while they tolerate so much dissent, so much scandal and, frankly, so much corruption elsewhere.

CJ Doyle has no official connection to the center or the community, but he is a member of a group that supports their evangelization efforts and traditional expressions of the Faith: "Why would you go after a group of Catholics who are both faithful and who are effective in promoting the Faith when you have so much scandal and so much corruption elsewhere?"

The individual responsible for the attacks from the diocese is Fr. Georges de Laire, who shortly after being promoted to judicial vicar of the diocese about two years ago, began launching the broadsides against the center.

Diocesan insiders tell Church Militant the attacks are designed in part by de Laire to improve his image in Rome so he can climb the ladder and be promoted. So he whipped up some spurious claims of heresy against the community and began hurling weighty canonical measures against its members in an effort to gain attention.

That process became complicated by a misunderstanding of one of Br. Andre Marie's replies, and de Laire jumped on the opportunity, issuing a letter this past January stripping the community of its ability to have a diocesan-approved priest offer daily Mass, which had been the case for close to a decade.

Church Militant contacted Fr. de Laire, as well as other diocesan officials, asking for an interview about this whole situation, but that request unsurprisingly was rejected.

It's clear that de Laire wants the community to simply give up and move on, and he's making life very difficult for them in the meanwhile.

To be clear, the group does not preach heresy — not in the slightest — and in fact, de Laire could find himself in hot water for insinuating such a false and defamatory claim because he, in effect, is positioning the group as heretics for propounding a defined dogma of the Faith.

The diocese of Manchester launching these kinds of attacks is bringing an unwelcome spotlight on the diocese and its unpleasant history, something which likely doesn't sit well with the bishop, Peter Libasci.

CJ Doyle: The diocese of Manchester is a relatively small diocese, but it is one of the more troubled Catholic jurisdictions in the United States. More than 60 priests and religious order brothers have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. A former bishop and a former auxiliary bishop have been rather notorious for moving molesters around and protecting them. We had the chancellor of the diocese and the public face of the diocese Monsignor Edward Arsenault who went to prison for a few years ago for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in church funds to maintain a lavish lifestyle and to support the lifestyle of his same-sex paramour. And another priest who was a friend of Father Arsenault, Father Lower, committed suicide a few years ago after being accused of sexual abuse. This is one of the more really problematic diocese in the United States.

Brother Andre Marie is insistent that what is being charged is completely fallacious and that they are 100% faithful to the teaching of the Church.

Br. Andre Marie: We believe that we're faithful to the teachings of the Church. We wouldn't be so confident about taching the necessity of the Church for salvation if we didn't have that on a divine assurance from the one institution on earth that is competent to teach man how it is we are saved. I believe we hold the Church's teaching on no salvation outside the Church as the Church has always taught it.

Church Militant has learned that in response to the canonical precepts imposed by Fr. de Laire in January, the members of St. Benedict Center have filed hierarchical recourse against the measures before the Holy See and prayerfully await a decision. They have also retained civil counsel should any litigation in the civil courts become necessary.

In the meantime, they continue their remarkable work through the suffering.

Br. Andre Marie: It's very tragic. It is utterly devastating to go into a place where you used to go to and kneel and pray to Our Lord in quiet prayer and now he's not there. I mean, he's everywhere by his omnipresence, but he's not there sacramentally in the tabernacle. So it's been devastating. It's been a real moral blow to the community.

Anyone who would like to support the exemplary brothers and sisters of the St. Benedict Center, please just click on the link provided to help them out. Fighting off the attacks is not only costly spiritually, it also can bring a hefty financial bill as well.

Coming to you from the St. Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, this is Michael Voris for Church Militant.

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Michael Voris coming to you from the St. Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire. The St. Benedict Center is home to a small but faithful community currently consisting of four brothers and eight sisters.

The community has been here since 1989 and is dedicated to living a humble life of prayer as well as action.

The founder of the original community in 1949 was Jesuit priest Fr. Leonard Feeney who defended the Catholic dogma Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus — "outside the Church there is no salvation.”

His community was called Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

In the years immediately following World War II, a great movement for interfaith cooperation and false ecumenism began taking hold in the West, and the Catholic dogma about the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation became something of an embarrassment for a number of senior Churchmen.

Despite the centuries and centuries of saints, doctors and fathers of the Church proclaiming this dogma, as well as the Church magisterially defining it, men like Boston's Cdl. Richard Cushing denied it, publicly calling it "nonsense."

Father Feeney was in Boston, and his preaching of this dogma earned him the dislike of men like Cushing despite the fact that his style and directness was used by Our Lord to bring a large number of converts into the Church.

He would, for example, often times preach publicly in Harvard Square, and many young students converted.

Like so many people who preach the unvarnished truth of the Faith, Fr. Feeney has gotten some bad press, not only in his own day but also after his death.

Various reports accused him, and still do accuse him, of heresy and then being subsequently excommunicated for it. The problem with those charges is there's not a word of truth to them.

Father Feeney never committed heresy nor was he excommunicated for heresy. In 1953, he was excommunicated for a while for failing to comply with a summons to appear in Rome, that is true, but he was never excommunicated for heresy.

Although he had been informed there were charges to respond to, officials in Rome refused to notify him in writing what they were. He had a right to receive written notice.

Being the firebrand personality, he refused to go to Rome with his right to due process being violated, so he was excommunicated — but excommunicated for that.

He was not excommunicated for believing and preaching the Church's dogma about there being no salvation outside the Church. He was excommunicated for disobedience.

Feeney ran afoul of the spirit of the age which various Catholic leaders were willing to embrace — a false ecumenism, a laying aside of the hard truths. And he ran afoul of the leaders as well who were gunning for him.

They wanted easy Catholicism — nice, socially acceptable, ruffle-no-feathers Catholicism. He preached authentic Catholicism, the real deal.

And, for the record, Feeney did not die excommunicated — far from it.

In 1972, six years before his death, he was asked to recite the Athanasian Creed, which he did three times in Greek, from memory, which contains within it the very doctrine of "no salvation outside the Church."

He was never asked to recant his position of there being no salvation outside the Church, because his position was in complete and total accord with the dogmatic teaching of the Church. In fact, a bishop even offered his very public requiem funeral Mass.

The background on Fr. Feeney is important to understand in light of a current controversy developing with the St. Benedict Center here in Richmond, New Hampshire where, again, the question of heresy is being brought up — again by Church officials.

After years of cordial relationships with the diocese of Manchester, suddenly things went south, and once again, the legacy of Fr. Feeney is being called into question as suggestions are made once again that his followers are not loyal sons of the Church. 

And the heat is being turned up on the community — the story on all that in the next Vortex episode.

Coming to you from the St. Benedict Center in New Hampshire, this is Michael Voris for Church Militant.

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Michael Voris coming to you from the middle of New Hampshire where a confrontation is shaping up over perhaps the most pressing question in the Church today: Is the Catholic Church necessary for salvation?

A large number of Catholics, including many clergy, are ignorant of this dogma of the Church owing to decades of watered-down catechesis and formation.

Add to that, the Church of Nice approach, like Bp. Robert Barron's preaching that we have a reasonable hope all men are saved, and we have a living breathing contradiction in understanding.

For the past 60 years or so in Catholic theological circles, an emphasis has been placed on union and reconciliation between various faiths and religions and beliefs, so much so that the uniqueness and very identity of the Church has become obscured and almost completely lost, certainly in the minds of the average Catholic.

Catholicism is often viewed as one choice among many, preferable only insofar as it also enjoys some cultural connection or long-standing familial nostalgia.

But that the Church is unique, superior to all other faiths and absolutely necessary for salvation, this dogma of the Church has been lost in the practical sense.

Owing to many years of brainwashing by malformed clergy, the laity now simply assume everyone they know goes to Heaven when they die.

In fact, so remarkably poor has the instruction from malformed clergy been that even the dogma of purgatory is skipped over. So not only when nearly everyone dies do they go to Heaven, but they go straight to Heaven.

This is the condition, the state of affairs in the Church today, and it must be admitted, faced up to and corrected. It is the concerted opinion of the vast weight of tradition, the fathers, the doctors, saints, mystics, popes and so forth that the vast majority of humanity is damned.

True, there is not a definitive Church teaching on the matter, but the weight of 2,000 years of deep reflection and meditation by the holiest and greatest minds in the history of the world should not be so easily discarded.

Yet in the last half of the 20th century and the first years of this one, many in Church leadership have decided to simply ignore the weight of tradition and begin speaking as though nearly all that preceded our contemporary days was wrong or, at best, insufficiently understood.

And that approach is applied to a wide range of teachings and practices in the Church, from liturgy to devotion to education.

Specifically, in the case of the necessity of the Church for salvation, there has been a fantastic ignoring of this, so much so that a virtual smearing of the doctrine now exists. But the truth of the dogma remains: Outside the Church there is no salvation.

What this means is the Catholic Church, being established by the Son of God, was established by Him to be the sole vehicle by which men may be brought to the Beatific Vision.

There is not another way, or other ways or religions. God is one, and there is, therefore, only one way. And that way produces a full unity with Him for eternity, a unity which begins here on earth in the Church.

So for priests and bishops to try and or sidestep the reality of the Church, the only ark of salvation, is spiritual terrorism.

We live in an age where tolerance and non-judgmentalism rule the day, where the highest moral good is to never give offense or inadvertently hurt someone's feelings — in short, being nice.

But being nice is not a virtue. Telling the truth when appropriate is a virtue — it is, in fact, a sin not to. To downplay, ignore or massage the teaching in such a way that it no longer has any relevance is wicked.

This dogma goes straight to the heart of the spiritual life. Is a person called to the Catholic Church to participate in the sacramental life of the Church to increase in sanctity by cooperating with the grace of the sacraments or is he not?

Can a man walk through life and by himself, unassisted by grace — all of which flows from the Church directly or indirectly — fight off the demonic attacks sufficiently to obtain his salvation?

Since the demons, by their very nature, are more powerful than humans, how would it be possible without not only the cooperation with grace but the constant spiritual maintenance afforded by constant access to grace?

This is the very reason Our Blessed Lord established the sacraments and the Church which administers them: to provide a sacramental life of grace accessible to His followers, to maintain in a state of grace so that they may leave this life in a state of grace and attain the Beatific Vision.

To deny this, either outright or by sidestepping it, or nuancing it, is a wicked thing to do because it reduces the very vehicle for salvation established by Christ to a personal preference.

This teaching is the very reason missionaries by the hundreds of thousands throughout our sacred history risked life and limb to bring the Church to the four corners of the world.

They were motivated by a love of souls and a desire that they should enter the Church — which, again, is necessary for salvation.

Supernatural faith and baptism are necessary as taught and affirmed in the Catechism and even again by Pope Francis, just last February.

In this letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled Placuit Deo and addressed to "the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Aspects of Christian Salvation," it states clearly:

The place where we receive the salvation brought by Jesus is the Church, the community of those who, having been incorporated into this new order of relationship begun by Christ, can receive the fullness of the Spirit of Christ. ... [S]alvation consists in being incorporated into a communion of persons that participates in the communion of the Trinity.

It says at the conclusion, "The Sovereign Pontiff Francis, on February 16, 2018, approved this letter ... and ordered its publication." The publication was done on Feb. 22.

There is no getting around the necessity of the Church for salvation. Everyone who is saved is incorporated into the Church Triumphant.

There are not different religions in Heaven. There are not different faiths in Heaven. That would be nothing different than what we have here on earth right now.

The Church Triumphant that the saved are each incorporated into for eternity is the Catholic Church — not the Presbyterian, nor Mormon, nor Lutheran; likewise, not other religions like Islam or Hinduism, nor philosophical constructs like Buddhism.

The Catholic Church and She alone is the sole means of salvation, so ordained by Jesus Christ and repeated by His Church.

That teaching has created something of a firestorm in the current culture, and a religious community here in New Hampshire has unwittingly become a flashpoint for that firestorm.

In the next couple of Vortex episodes, we are going to bring you details of this controversy and explore some of the internal politics of the Church fueling this all-important issue.

TRANSCRIPT

No matter how you look at it, religion in America is dying.

In fact, the number of people who now say they have no religion has almost tripled since 1991 and now stands at just about the same level as the number of Catholics and Evangelicals.

According to the General Social Survey, a long-established metric of Americans' opinions and practices across a wide spectrum of topics, the "No Religion" crowd is 23.1% of the population, Catholics are at 23% and Evangelicals account for 22.5% as of 2018. That is a statistical tie.

Mainline liberal Protestants have taken a massive hit since the day of the WASP establishment, a two-thirds decline to just roughly 11% of all Americans.

So look at the board, with everything on it at the same time.

Together, that represents four out of every five Americans in one of those categories. The remaining Americans are scattered across other religions like Judaism or Islam.

Catholicism has seen what appears to be a steady erosion, decreasing 4% since 1972.

While that rate of decline is somewhat small, certainly compared to mainline Protestantism with a whopping 68% decline, it still does not bode well for the Church.

While it is true Catholicism is the single largest religious body in the United States, it is not on track to maintain that pace. Less and less are becoming or remaining Catholic, a fact borne out in the drop of the overall percentage of U.S. Catholics from 27% to 23%.

Now, two very troublesome points looming on the horizon.

First: For the past roughly 10 years, hapless U.S. Catholic leaders have been putting all their eggs in the New Evangelization basket with non-Catholic programs like Alpha. That has obviously failed, as even Lansing Bishop Earl Boyea confessed in a letter to his diocesan priests last year.

Secondly: With the constant stream of illegal aliens into the United States, again, another focus of the U.S. bishops, reports indicate that whatever percentage arrive here as Catholic, half of them leave the Faith within one generation.

Something is seriously sick in the Church.

If you look deep into the numbers, a tsunami can be detected picking up huge force. Young Catholics are jumping ship at a frightening rate, with a huge percentage deciding to leave between the ages of 10 and 18.

Older Catholics — mostly those born before Vatican II — are the most likely to have stayed, but they are dying off, and within 10 years, there will not be many left.

All this points to the reality that the Church is undergoing an enormous change — shrinking, becoming less relevant overall and having very little appeal to future generations.

Between sex scandals — mostly homosexual in nature — and now a string of ongoing state and federal investigations, the much-talked-about possibility of a U.S. Justice Department RICO investigation could be what finally pushes the Church over the edge.

It's taken decades of corruption and dissent to arrive at this point. The treachery of many leaders — treachery against the faithful, the Faith and ultimately Jesus Christ Himself — is finally catching up.

Many of those — in fact, most — of those responsible for this have either died, are retired or approaching retirement in the next handful of years.

They have left behind a trail of tears. When they were in grade school or high school back in the 1950s or so, there was much talk about how America was on the verge of becoming a Catholic country.

But with the infiltration of Communists, homosexuals and theological dissidents, almost all of which was unknown at the time to rank and file Catholics, that possibility never got out of the gate.

It was sabotaged by the demon and his human offspring before it ever got off the ground. For those remaining faithful Catholics, the challenge is enormous.

Only the Catholic Church was established by Christ, and, therefore, only it can lead to salvation.

The forced retreat of the Church on the cultural scene, its movement toward being irrelevant, is going to have to be countered with an even greater resilience than was needed when Catholics first came ashore during the mass migration from Europe.

But for that to happen, the purification inside the Church must happen. The treachery, the cowardice, the incompetency, the emasculated men, the politically minded men in charge, all of it needs to be faced down.

Those are the very elements that have caused this meltdown, which is about to go over the cliff in the next handful of years.

We need to realize that for all intents and purposes, we will essentially be starting over — not quite, but pretty darn close.

Most Catholics sitting in the pews — the one in five who still do — either don't know or don't agree with the Church's teachings, and emasculated, non-offensive, theo-babble garbage like Alpha is not the silver bullet.

When it comes time to finally say goodbye to the squishy, whiny Church of Nice Catholicism, it won't be a minute too soon. Stalwart Catholicism, as it has always been, is how a culture is won in the long run.

We know. We did it before, and the world was given Western civilization.

We did it once, and though it took centuries, we can do it again.

TRANSCRIPT

As the issue of homosexuality comes more and more to the forefront of so much that is wrong with Church leadership, there are a number of nuances that need to be known as well as correctly understood.

First off, just because a bishop or a religious community is orthodox doesn't mean that they aren't members of the hive. Too often, faithful Catholics simply see gay clerics as liberal and liberal clerics as gay or gay-friendly.

While the second part of that is more true than not, the first part is not. Not all gay clerics are liberal, not by a longshot. There is an acronym in Church circles, D.O.T.

It stands for Daughters of Trent and refers specifically to homosexual men in the priesthood and episcopate who give all the appearances of orthodoxy, may in fact even be orthodox on a wide range of issues — that's the "Trent" part — but are still homosexual — that's the "Daughters" part.

Recall that when all this madness overwhelmed the Church back in the 1960s, virtually every bishop was, or at least had the reputation of being, orthodox. No one would have breathed a word about out loud, for example, about New York Cardinal Spellman being an active homosexual.

Nor would they have considered even privately suggesting that Detroit Cardinal John Dearden was favorably disposed to homosexuality, certainly among his seminarians like the future Bp. John Nienstedt.

What appears on the surface in the world of orthodoxy should never — especially as the information now gets more out there — never be given a pass.

It's insane, but orthodoxy — real or pretended — is absolutely no guarantee that a priest or bishop is not homosexual.

These are the "nice" bees in the homosexual hive. Whether they are chaste or not, whether they are pretending to be orthodox or really are, except on this issue, it cannot be taken for granted that these men are simply "good" bishops.

I have been told to my face by a bishop that many faithful Catholics respect that he personally knows a number of gay bishops and that they are all orthodox.

My thought is: so what? How do you know that? And how do you know they won’t, at some point down the road, go off the rails? There is a deficiency, probably not their personal fault, probably, that exists within them.

Understanding oneself as "homosexually oriented" immediately presents the difficulty that you now see yourself, and the world, through that lens.

They simply cannot go through life day to day, seeing themselves "that way" and not struggling with it. And that includes not even acting on it — we're talking about the chaste ones.

For example, how has it come to pass that the bishop I spoke with who revealed this to me, how does he know? Obvious answer: because the gay bishops revealed it.

And so the question arises: Why would a homosexual man who has been consecrated a bishop feel the need to reveal that about himself to other bishops? The answer, again, is obvious: because the internal pain, conflict, struggle has to come out, in some way.

They simply cannot keep it bottled up. They have a deep, dark, secret identity crisis, and they have to reveal it somehow. And it is that somehow where things potentially become explosive. What happens in the case where an "orthodox" gay bishop needs to deal with his secret, internal conflict even more?

Does he turn to gay porn, as some have? Does he start hiring gay prostitutes, as some have? Does he act on his attracting to good looking young men in seminary?

Does he appoint handsome young priests in his chancery or seminary staff who are otherwise completely incompetent, but because he finds them physically irresistible, they get a pass?

This stuff happens every day, and again, it is the faithful who ultimately pay — the faithful and the Faith itself.

Does the "nice" bee gay bishop go ahead and ordain another man who is gay, feeling some of kinship to him that in his mind he rationalizes as some spiritual thing? Gay men like surrounding themselves with objects of their desire. Gay men in power do surround themselves with objects of their desire.

And again, as a warning to the faithful, we are not talking about the James Martins here. We are talking about the quietly disturbed who appear to or even actually believe the Faith.

They are walking kegs of dynamite and should not remain in their consecrated roles. If they truly believe and accept the Faith, for the good of the Faith, they should step down.

As long as they have not been involved in sins of this nature, they have no reason whatsoever to announce their reason. That is their own private affair. But too many of them rationalize that they are chaste and, therefore, all is good. And since they are orthodox in a Church in desperate need of orthodox bishops, then that makes it imperative for them to remain in office.

That's wrong. There should not be homosexual men in the ranks of the ordained. Even the chaste ones would be liable to blackmail or coercion — especially the chaste ones. Even nice bees can become dangerous given the right circumstances.

There absolutely exists a homoclericalism in the Church, and it extends way beyond just liberal and active homosexual bishops. It all has to end.

TRANSCRIPT

Church Militant recently enjoyed the honor and pleasure of a studio visit from Stephen Brady of the group Roman Catholic Faithful.

Stephen gained wide notoriety in the Catholic world back in the 1990s when he was the driving force behind the takedown of Springfield Bp. Daniel Ryan, an active homosexual who was cruising parks late at night and paying young males for sex.

Likewise, his priests were not immune from his advances as he leveled threats against them if they refused his advances.

Bringing down bad bishops is his mission, and right now, Cdl. Blase Cupich of Chicago is right at the top of his list as Stephen travels the country holding various conferences in Cupich's former dioceses, gathering information on the Pope's man in the United States.

We sat down with Stephen here in our Church Militant studios a few days ago to hear all this directly from him.

The entire interview with Stephen will be available on an upcoming episode of Mic'd Up — you'll want to watch the whole thing.