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We are now down to 54 days until the midterm election. Over Labor Day weekend, the polling outfit YouGov conducted a pretty extensive poll of 1,500 Americans, inquiring about social concerns and voting plans. By any measure, it's pretty awful for Biden and Democrats.

For example, majorities or near majorities say the economy sucks, the economy is shrinking in addition to being in a current recession, prices are through the roof, prices will continue to increase, and Joe Biden is a weak leader and should not seek re-election. All in all, not exactly a rosy picture for the commies.

The problem for patriots is this overall national condemnation of the Dems and their policies isn't exactly translating into a big thumbs-up for Republicans. It's all pretty marginal, in fact.

Local issues and candidates are gonna win this — and there, because of the level of intensity required to break out those kinds of local numbers on national issues, it's anyone's guess. But nationally speaking, here is a ranking of the issues Americans appear to be most concerned about when asked, "what would you rank as the important relative to all other issues?"

And here is an interesting departure — all those previous issues were concerning to a majority of Americans. The last five issues scored less than majority concern:

In what could be a troublesome sign for Democrats, those last five issues are the bread and butter of Democratic Party rhetoric, and yet, compared to other issues, they are viewed as not as important.

When asked a more specific question — "Which single issue is the most important to you?" — still not a lot of good news for Dems. Coming in first was inflation/economy. Climate change was second. Health care placed third. Jobs was fourth. And taxes was fifth.

After that there was a log jam, a tie for sixth place among abortion, civil rights and immigration — all of which barely registered ahead of all the rest of the remaining issues. In fact, almost half of all voters pegged the four economic issues as the ones they are most concerned about. The other 11 issues divvied up the remaining half of all voters' concerns. Couple this with the week's earlier news that inflation actually rose, and, logically speaking, the Dems should get wiped out in the midterms. There's simply not enough time left for them — 54 days — to turn all this around.

What will be interesting to watch is what happens in states like Michigan, where abortion as an issue is directly, straight-up competing with economic issues. Church Militant will be monitoring this as a major point of our midterm coverage — coverage unlike any other media outlet.

So, given the current political climate, it will also be interesting to see what, if anything, the nation's bishops do or say. After all, it is their sheep who are being devastated by the horrible economy, not to mention abortion. If there was ever a chance to step into the political arena and side with normal, everyday American Catholics, this would be it.

So something else we will be watching: Will they talk about the deep concerns the average Joe has, or will they continue marrying themselves to Democratic rhetoric?

The slogan for the bishops' conference should be "We missed every opportunity we had."

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The so-called "Liturgy wars" are raging in the Church these days. Frankly, most Catholics don't have the slightest idea that they are even happening, or for that matter, what the Liturgy wars even are.

For the record, a decent way of understanding the concept is that the Liturgy — the Mass and other formal prayers of the Church — not only gives worship to God, but at the same time sums up and expresses what the Church believes. Therefore, the words, gestures and postures have a dual purpose. If you change or alter one, you necessarily change or alter the other. If, for example, you dumb down the words used to give glory to God, you will necessarily dumb down people's awareness of God's majesty, sovereignty and so forth.

Dumb-downed Liturgies, in short, dumb down people's faith because their intellects become dulled.

Now, why is there a war in the Church going on over this (perhaps best summed up generally as the raging battle between the Latin Mass adherents, a decided minority, and the supporters of the Novus Ordo Mass, translated as the New Order of the Mass)? In short, those who support and likely attend the Latin Mass, generally speaking, are aware that the New Mass has certain deficiencies in how it speaks to and about God. Those deficiencies do not cancel the efficacy of the Mass. They don't make the consecration not happen. They don't invalidate the Mass. But that's not the point, whether the Mass is valid or not.

With the exception of breakaway schismatic groups like the SSPX, which actually labels the New Mass "evil," no reasonable minds in the Catholic world spout that idiocy. However, that does not mean that just because it's valid, everything is OK and there are no problems with it. This is where things start to get somewhat into the weeds, because huge numbers of Catholics have a poor understanding of liturgy, both in its purpose and effect. However, for those who do grasp this extremely important point about the importance of liturgy, there is a massive battle raging.

In short, there are those on the spiritually bereft side who actively seek to water down the Faith and replace its objective meaning with a more emotion-based understanding. They don't like or support, and in some obvious cases don't believe, Catholic teaching. They want the Church to be something other than She has always been, and so, in an effort to water things down, they water down the Liturgy. It's a pretty ingenious way, in fact, to accomplish their means. 

Since Catholics who supposedly believe the Faith attend Mass, if they can present a dumbed-down Mass then they can create a dumbed-down laity. They have been largely successful. In clear terms, why would a Catholic attending watered-down Masses for most or all of his life develop any authentic sense of the Eucharist, the need for confession, and so forth?

Weak men, mostly gay, are the priests who run the show day to day or week to week. These men generally despise the Faith because it demands something of them they cannot do. So, in keeping with the old adage that misery loves company, they remake their congregations in their own images — people, laity, who simply do not believe all the teachings of the Faith. These weak and homosexual men eventually make the Mass about them and the people, and not about its true end, which, of course, is worship of God.

So they tell stupid jokes about themselves in the homilies, and relay personal stories from their own lives, all in an attempt to humanize the Mass and take the emphasis almost entirely off God. Theologically, what they have done is to change the emphasis of the Mass from being a sacrifice, which is oriented toward God, to a meal, which is oriented toward the people.

It's one reason, for example, that back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, priests stopped facing God and started facing the people. But tellingly, whenever this change is spoken of, the modernist elements in the Church never express it in those words. Their entire analysis is human-centric. They say it's better for the priest to "face the people" than to stand with his "back to the people," because in their willfully errant analysis, the perspective of the people is all that matters.

For clarity, the priest never stood with his "back to the people" the way they mean it. He stood with the people, all facing God, like the priests of the Old Testament did.

There is much to talk about and learn about all of this — way too much to cover in a Vortex or even a week of Vortex episodes. That's why we have produced a new Premium program we call "Reclaiming Tradition," where all of this is outlined in great detail — how it came to be, what were the motives, real as well as claimed, of all these changes, what the impact has been, and why, in the face of all the destruction of the Faith, there is now, more than ever, an overarching need to reclaim tradition.

If you were to sum up the major change the Liturgy has undergone, it would be the de-emphasizing of sin and its consequences. Hell is practically never acknowledged. Judgment of souls is almost never acknowledged. Sin, as in our personal responsibility, almost never gets addressed. Walking out of such a Mass, week after week, why would anyone feel any urgency to amend their lives? And while it's true that such an urgency is not the primary reason for the Liturgy, it absolutely is one of the "side effects," because that's necessary for our salvation — which, of course, is all bound up with the Liturgy.

Weak faith is the end result of irreverent, man-centered liturgy. And weak faith is an almost guaranteed ticket to Hell. That's why all this matters.

So we strongly urge you to watch and learn. Do not remain willfully ignorant about the deep spiritual realities surrounding this entire battle. Please become a Premium member and watch our very important program Reclaiming Tradition.

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Well, here's a little information that the Vatican is not going to like, not to mention the U.S. bishops.

When Pope St. John XXIII became pope, the very first encyclical he issued was called Ad Petri Cathedram, in 1959. It was written and published barely eight months after he became pope and addresses truth, unity and peace in the spirit of charity. The document consists of 150 paragraphs, and so it becomes an interesting point that one of the very first things the pope approaches as a major topic is the media.

For example, from paragraph 16 (again, near the very top of the encyclical): "Radio broadcasts, motion pictures and television shows which make error and vice attractive must be opposed by shows which defend truth and strive to preserve the integrity and safety of morals." From paragraph 15: "The weapons of truth, then, must be used in defense against these weapons of evil."

There are two things that, back in 1959, the Holy Father could not have foreseen: first, the internet becoming a dominant medium in the world of information; second, the massive corruption of the hierarchy and its cover-up by the Catholic establishment media. In fact, for the most part, the Catholic establishment media, as we understand them today, hadn't even been born, which was also the case, quite obviously, with the internet.

But when you combine the two factors of corruption and a complicit media actively covering it up, well, you get something no better than the Biden administration.

Think back on the extensive plotting and cover-up it must have taken for the Catholic media to simply ignore all the news about homosexual clergy sex abuse. Even though the Catholic media were much closer to the individuals involved — the bishops and priests — it took the secular media to uncover it. Then, once uncovered, the bishops took massive pains to skirt the actual issue of homosexuality in the clerical ranks, and the Catholic media were completely compliant.

Even as the secular media were investigating and uncovering stories as far back as the 1990s — like, for example, the Kansas City Star — about large percentages of priests dying from AIDS, the Catholic media sat on their hands, ignoring the voluminous information.

The financial scandals, the sexual scandals — most of each category, closely related, were never deemed sufficient to report about. Meanwhile, the Church was being attacked from within by all this, and still not a peep.

Even to this day — given the backing he gets from powerful prelates like Cupich and Tobin, not to mention the praise and accolades from Bp. Robert Barron — James Martin and his homoheresy is considered completely off-limits as a story.

So referring back to Pope St. John XXIII and looking at this crisis through his construct again — "The weapons of truth, then, must be used in defense against these weapons of evil" — allows us to ask the direct question, "Why would any Catholic turn to these establishment-media types for any information?"

Think of the enormous, massive harm and damage done to just the victims of all this, spiritually and bodily. Does all that not constitute evil? And yet, when organizations like Church Militant come on the scene and begin reporting on it all, we (and others) are completely vilified by the bishops and their lackeys in the so-called Catholic media.

It is just like the secular media shilling for Biden. The Hunter laptop story is just one example. The border crisis, Biden's dementia, inflation, changing the definition of recession — the list is endless.

So, people turn to other sources for their information because the establishment media cannot be trusted when what they are saying simply rings hollow — at the gas pump, the grocery store, public schools, you name it. It takes a long time to establish credibility in this business and just a few minutes to destroy it.

The Catholic media long ago lost all credibility owing to their participation in the cover-up of all the corruption. They are able to survive only because they never tick off the bishops and are therefore allowed to keep being parasites on the institution, as opposed to watchdogs of it.

The role of the media is to hold those in authority accountable. It is not to aid and abet them in crimes for financial gain.

You look over the current landscape and you ask yourself, "What on earth would Pope John write today in an encyclical about truth?"

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Catholic schools versus public schools — which is better? Sadly, the answer is not a slam dunk for Catholic schools. In fact, in many ways, Catholic schools are actually worse. Not only are students being deprived of truth, but faithful teachers are being dumped.

In the archdiocese of Detroit, a prime example is De La Salle high school — totally faithless but typical. This is in an archdiocese where the archbishop, Allen Vigneron, never stops yammering on about how the Holy Spirit is transforming the archdiocese. Apparently, The Holy Spirit hasn't managed to find time to get around to the schools yet.

Former theology department chairman and religion teacher Kyle Kopy was canned from the phony Catholic school because he would not bow to the woke agenda and insisted on teaching the Catholic faith at a Catholic school.

Kopy explains, "They said I was being insensitive, and I asked them, 'What if I were to teach on homosexuality or transgenderism, and I were to present the Catholic teaching on that? Are you going to back me up on that?' And they could not give me a straight answer." 

"The Catholic school system in America is in shambles," according to David Gordon, another former Catholic school teacher spurned for adhering to basic Catholic teachings. According to Gordon, "If you aren't 100% positive that your kid's school is orthodox, then it's 100% not orthodox. Heterodoxy and scandal are the rule in modern Catholic education, faithfulness the exception."

Full disclosure — both Kopy and Gordon now work here at Church Militant, where they have had to take pay decreases, but are once again able to advance and promote the authentic Catholic faith.

And as the leader here at Church Militant, I — and the staff — are happy to say we are delighted they are here.

Imagine for just a moment the total clown-world craziness of this — faithful men canned by Catholic schools for teaching the Faith having to take pay cuts and come to work for a media apostolate so they can fulfill their professional vocations. Such is the state of the Church right now, and very likely well into the future. The vast majority of America's Catholic schools have become secularized. As such, they are too often spiritually dangerous places for a child, adolescent or young adult.

A personal note — when I was growing up in the 1970s, my parents, God rest their souls, made significant sacrifices to send me and my brother to Catholic schools, as many parents did. We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid. In fact, my parents would actually cash my dad's paycheck, and we lived using cash. We lived paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes there was no more money. My mom kept all the money — the cash — in an envelope series for budgeting. Since we were essentially poor, there was no envelope for my monthly tuition.

She would take $20 from this envelope and $20 from that envelope — meaning food and utilities and so forth — until it had totaled $100, the monthly cost for my Northern California Catholic high school in the 1970s.

But — and here's the point — every month she would bring me to the envelope pile and make me watch the cash being taken out of other areas so my tuition could be paid. She would say, "Your father and I want you to see the sacrifices we are making so you can get a Catholic education." Then she'd put those bills (and yes, many times even coins) into an envelope and put them in my satchel to take in and pay at the front office each month.

Catholic parents, who were being faithful and trusting back in the day, got completely screwed over and ripped off by the snakes — and yes, I mean bishops and their modernist cohorts, who essentially stole their money to produce future apostates and heretics.

Even Bp. Sheen knew about this back in the 1970s and publicly said so: "I recommend that my relatives send their college-bound children to secular colleges where they will have to fight for their faith, rather than to Catholic colleges where it will be stolen from them."

This is now the norm in Catholic schools, despite the glossy brochures and videos they run in place of homilies once or twice a year. Your children are not being taught the Faith. They are being taught anti-faith. There are a number of reasons for this that have all dovetailed to create an environment where your kids' faith is destroyed.

They sent Kyle on a three-day suspension and then fired him. Kopy relays: 

We even had a diversity/equity/inclusion person at the school, and word probably got around to people like them about my situation, and they said I need to be done away with. I got terminated through an email after working there for nearly a decade and never had a problem at the school, ever.

Kopy adds, "My experience has taught me that most run-of-the-mill Catholic schools are basically expensive public schools with poorly taught religion classes. Unfortunately, the Faith is not the most important thing to these schools."

Conservatives often complain about their children being exposed to evil ideologies in public schools. We hear the same complaints about Catholic schools. The public school system swears allegiance to the State, and a secular and godless State will have a secular and godless curriculum. No one should expect otherwise. But any institution bearing the name "Catholic" is obliged to honor that claim and should be held to it. 

In our very popular Premium show Mic'd Up, we aired an in-depth look this past week at this disaster and what parents could and should do. We are providing that episode for your viewing for free by just clicking on the provided link.

We want you to know about all this because you need to, but we also want you to see the work we do here with our Premium shows so that you will sign up. Your $10 a month goes to not only keeping the apostolate going but also helping pay the salaries of various "refugee" Catholics — smart people, dedicated people who ran into the buzzsaw of the modernist Church for simply telling the truth and trying to save souls.

Please click on the link below to see this Mic'd Up episode, and please sign up for a Premium account today.

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America is becoming less religious — no news there. It's the continuation of a decades-long decline, but it is now accelerating. But what few have recognized, at least in any formal sense, is that this trend is also present within politically conservative circles. This is a sea change from days gone by when Christians had a dominant influence.

Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, it was the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell, a largely Protestant presence that drove the agenda on the political right. That was the reality for roughly 20 years, until the era of George Bush in 2000–2008. By the time Bush was done and Obama arrived, what was once a dominant force was already greatly diminished in GOP circles. In short, the conservative political project had lost its specifically Christian character.

It didn't seem that way during the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, but it was already in full swing — just undetected because of the strong support of Christians for Trump. What we are seeing unfold now is a social conservatism as opposed to a religious one. Trump certainly did not cause this, but probably without consciously realizing it, he tapped right into the "religion indifferent" crowd now becoming dominant in conservative circles. 

Check out some of the numbers:

In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump had much stronger support among those who attended church services less frequently.

Among those attending more than once a week, 32% supported Trump in the primaries. Of those attending a few times a year, 50% supported Trump. Rare attendees supported him at 55% and those who never attend provided 62% support.

In short, among self-identified political conservatives, the more they disregarded church attendance, the more inclined they were to vote for Trump. Underscoring all this, a 2020 Pew Research study revealed that fewer than half of Republicans said "being Christian" was important to them.

That helps explain the enormous change in Republican voters' attitude toward same-sex marriage. Their support doubled in just 10 years to what is now a majority. It went from 28% support in 2011 to a whopping 55% support in 2021.

This is no longer Ronald Reagan's Republican Moral Majority party. That cuts across every major narrative you can find, especially the White Christian nationalist fabrication that the Marxist media yammer on about nonstop. There is a definite nationalist streak, even a foundational one, among Trump supporters, but it isn't driven in any way by "Christians."

As for it being specifically "White," that too is not really true. Hispanics and Blacks turned out in record percentages to vote for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. It's true, of course, that among Hispanics and Blacks, Democrats are still predominant, but that is evaporating pretty rapidly. The conventional wisdom that increasing racial diversity would secure a Democratic stranglehold well into the future is being turned on its ear.

So if the conservative movement isn't really all that "White" and also isn't "Christian," then what is it? Well, we are left with the "nationalist" character. This is where the reality is.

Today's Right does not think in terms of religion or race, despite the heavy-handed claims of the Left. The truth of the matter is simply that the Right sees all this, ironically enough, in strictly Marxian terms: a class struggle between average-Joe Americans and a dominant government–corporate partnership actively hostile to them. Religion and race have very little to do with it.

The new social conservatism wants to overthrow this new dominant order. That is a complete turnaround, a 180-degree flip in convention, from the halcyon days when the Left was the one agitating against authority. Those firmly ensconced in the New Right are the ones embracing overthrow and unconventional tactics.

The reason is pretty obvious — the Left succeeded in winning and gaining everything it wanted. Now, with almost total power in its hands, the Left has become massively oppressive with the demand that everyone bow to its worldview. It used to be that the Left claimed all it wanted was a live-and-let-live approach. That was probably never true, but even if it was, it has changed drastically. Now, you offer a pinch of incense to the gods of the Left or you are actually punished.

You may even agree, at least in principle, with gay marriage, abortion in some cases, and so forth, but to be ordered to bow down has rubbed enormous numbers of Americans the wrong way, regardless of their views on religion or the color of their skin. In short, post-Obama cultural progressivism is being rejected by huge numbers of Americans.

So what does all this mean for Christians, specifically Catholics, on the political scene? Interesting question. Deeply religious people, especially Catholics, need to understand the new dynamic at play here. While, as always, it's a spiritual war because of the moral issues at play, it is not perceived that way at all by the vast majority of those who identify as political conservatives. In fact, they don't even think in those terms — completely off their radar.

True, there is an alliance around what could be called the new civic religion. There is a lot of overlap, certainly much more so than with anything on the Left. But, all this means that, for the moment, the choice Christians have to make is to either take their seat at the back of the bus, where they are welcomed by those in charge on the Right, or just not be on the bus at all.

Do the faithful simply withdraw support and likely ensure a win by the Marxists? Or do we stay in the game, fight this fight and then try to evangelize and convert, having to perhaps swallow hard at various moments? This is the new political reality, like it or not.

Catholics lost the possible initiative back in the 1950s and early 1960s, in what you might call the "era of Sheen." The 1970s and 1980s gave birth to the Protestant Moral Majority, the "era of Falwell," which had some influence owing to the sheer numbers of Protestants in America, but by 2000, was on the way out. We are now in the "era of Obama" and the entire, oppressive Marxist regime is being rebelled against by average Americans who are largely as unconcerned with religion as they are with race.

For those who decide to stay in the game, it will be a two-phase war, consisting of defeating Marxism and converting political allies. It's not clear at all that the U.S. hierarchy shares either of those goals. Interesting times, indeed.

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The world, the culture we are living in today, is essentially the making of Barack Obama. Aside from the obvious points that Biden was his vice president and Hillary was his pick to succeed him, there is much more at work in all of this.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing for Catholics about Obama's world is the high degree to which leading Catholics assisted him and still support his vision. The simple truth is that Obama won the 2008 Catholic vote with a whopping 54%. He didn't manage that on his own — far from it. This is one reason why it's so important for faithful Catholics to understand their role and the necessity for them to be involved at all levels.

Obama's progressivism was ushered in by phony Catholics who are essentially Marxists. They populated Catholic universities, political offices, think tanks and other influential positions, all while draping themselves in religious-sounding language and pushing the need for "taking care of the poor."

Most people wouldn't recognize the names of this corps of corrupt Catholics. Fred Rotondaro, for example, is the chair of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Fred, good Catholic that he is, wrote all the way back in 2010 that "gay sex comes from God." He made his observation in an article for The Huffington Post titled "The World Needs a New Vatican Council."

Synod on Synodality, anyone?

Then there is the largely unknown Tom Perriello, a former U.S. congressman from Virginia. He co-founded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, the same group of which Fred "Gay Sex / New Vatican Council" Rotondaro is chair. When Tom lost his congressional seat, he just mushed into the shadowy cabal of Marxist-minded Catholics and did a different job. In 2015, phony Catholic John Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, tapped him to oversee a U.S. government agency with a $50 billion budget aimed at coercing poor nations to get on board with the program.

Another group instrumental in getting Obama elected by subverting Catholic teaching, and making it "OK" for Catholics to vote for Barack, is Catholics United, founded by Chris Korzen. Back in the heat of the 2008 campaign, Korzen published a book titled "A Nation for All: How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America From the Politics of Division."

Those who pay careful attention to these things, like we do here at Church Militant, will note such things as specific language. The Left is brilliant at creating new vocabulary terms, or simply hijacking old ones and infusing them with new meaning. You will recall that the "common good" became a big-time catchphrase of Obama's. Later, as President Obama, he walked onto the stage at the University of Notre Dame and droned on about that theme.

Unschooled Catholics have no idea what that means, but since it sounds good and they hear it everywhere, they sign on uncritically. Also, notice who wrote the foreword to Korzen's book — Pennsylvania senator Robert Casey, yet another Catholic politician left completely undisciplined by U.S. bishops.

On close examination of how this scheme works, we see there are multiple partnerships. This shows how all this mind-rot gets into the public consciousness — with the aid of Church leaders and their phony, unsanctioned Catholic influencers.

It involves educators and political–academic types who form think tanks and political action committees, such as Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. These groups produce propaganda, the arguments distorting Catholic teaching. They are the ones who publish the books and write the articles in mainstream outlets. The think tanks always come up with initiatives, talking points and so forth, which then get carried far and wide by their surrogates on the ground, down in the trenches.

Then there is the next level — groups like the Tide Foundation and the Arca Foundation. They are the money funnelers — political "527" groups specifically set up to make sure the money keeps flowing to propaganda groups.

Then there are the real people behind all of this — the George Soros crowd. The shock troops in the Catholic world, the ones on the ground who are executing the same-minded policy, include the likes of Kathleen Kaveny. She is currently a distinguished scholar at phony-Catholic Boston College, where her bio reads in part, "A scholar who focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, serves as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, a position that includes appointments in both the theology department and the law school."

She is the first faculty member to hold such a joint appointment. Kaveny regularly teaches contract law to first-year law students. She also teaches a number of seminars that explore the relationships among theology, philosophy and law, such as "Faith, Morality, and Law," "Mercy and Justice," and "Complicity." In the heat of the Obama 2008 campaign, she was one of the leading "Catholic" apologists for Obama.

Perhaps the most notorious of the sellouts was Doug Kmiec. He was a Republican Catholic who nevertheless came out and endorsed Obama in 2008. He wrote articles and granted interviews, rationalizing how Catholics could vote for Obama, despite the abortion issue. He made the completely nutty argument that Obama's positions on the issues of wages, health care and the Iraq War should tip the scales in Obama's favor, despite his abortion stance.

Kmiec's sellout, which came in an article in the Marxist publication Slate, drew many eyeballs and massive controversy, but served its purpose in helping persuade Catholics that Obama was actually a pretty decent guy whose child-killing policies could be overlooked because he was "Catholic" on so many other things. The shocking summation of Kmiec's pro-Obama position was his one-liner, "One of the things I kept discovering ... was that Obama was sounding more Catholic than most Catholics I know."

For his treachery, Kmiec was made U.S. ambassador to Malta by Obama in 2009.

Why does all this matter? Because these same people are still around, working to undermine the Church and destroy the Faith. They haven't gone anywhere, not by a long shot. They are echoes of the very same filth spewed by James Martin and company — filth that the U.S. bishops and their staffs simply don't care to confront, for a number of reasons.

This means you have to. You have to understand not just big 60,000-foot concerns, but how this all works at colleges and parish retreats. Guest speakers are brought in, articles are published, TV interviews are granted and so forth.

It's a war conducted by a few generals, yes, but it's carried out by traitors all over the Church. It's Obama's world right now.

They must be confronted. 

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TRANSCRIPT

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

The world, the culture we are living in today, is essentially the making of Barack Obama. Aside from the obvious points that Biden was his vice president and Hillary was his pick to succeed him, there is much more at work in all of this.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing for Catholics about Obama's world is the high degree to which leading Catholics assisted him and still support his vision. The simple truth is that Obama won the 2008 Catholic vote with a whopping 54%. He didn't manage that on his own — far from it. This is one reason why it's so important for faithful Catholics to understand their role and the necessity for them to be involved at all levels.

Obama's progressivism was ushered in by phony Catholics who are essentially Marxists. They populated Catholic universities, political offices, think tanks and other influential positions, all while draping themselves in religious-sounding language and pushing the need for "taking care of the poor."

Most people wouldn't recognize the names of this corps of corrupt Catholics. Fred Rotondaro, for example, is the chair of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Fred, good Catholic that he is, wrote all the way back in 2010 that "gay sex comes from God." He made his observation in an article for The Huffington Post titled "The World Needs a New Vatican Council."

Synod on Synodality, anyone?

Then there is the largely unknown Tom Perriello, a former U.S. congressman from Virginia. He co-founded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, the same group of which Fred "Gay Sex / New Vatican Council" Rotondaro is chair. When Tom lost his congressional seat, he just mushed into the shadowy cabal of Marxist-minded Catholics and did a different job. In 2015, phony Catholic John Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, tapped him to oversee a U.S. government agency with a $50 billion budget aimed at coercing poor nations to get on board with the program.

Another group instrumental in getting Obama elected by subverting Catholic teaching, and making it "OK" for Catholics to vote for Barack, is Catholics United, founded by Chris Korzen. Back in the heat of the 2008 campaign, Korzen published a book titled "A Nation for All: How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America From the Politics of Division."

Those who pay careful attention to these things, like we do here at Church Militant, will note such things as specific language. The Left is brilliant at creating new vocabulary terms, or simply hijacking old ones and infusing them with new meaning. You will recall that the "common good" became a big-time catchphrase of Obama's. Later, as President Obama, he walked onto the stage at the University of Notre Dame and droned on about that theme.

Unschooled Catholics have no idea what that means, but since it sounds good and they hear it everywhere, they sign on uncritically. Also, notice who wrote the foreword to Korzen's book — Pennsylvania senator Robert Casey, yet another Catholic politician left completely undisciplined by U.S. bishops.

On close examination of how this scheme works, we see there are multiple partnerships. This shows how all this mind-rot gets into the public consciousness — with the aid of Church leaders and their phony, unsanctioned Catholic influencers.

It involves educators and political–academic types who form think tanks and political action committees, such as Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. These groups produce propaganda, the arguments distorting Catholic teaching. They are the ones who publish the books and write the articles in mainstream outlets. The think tanks always come up with initiatives, talking points and so forth, which then get carried far and wide by their surrogates on the ground, down in the trenches.

Then there is the next level — groups like the Tide Foundation and the Arca Foundation. They are the money funnelers — political "527" groups specifically set up to make sure the money keeps flowing to propaganda groups.

Then there are the real people behind all of this — the George Soros crowd. The shock troops in the Catholic world, the ones on the ground who are executing the same-minded policy, include the likes of Kathleen Kaveny. She is currently a distinguished scholar at phony-Catholic Boston College, where her bio reads in part, "A scholar who focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, serves as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, a position that includes appointments in both the theology department and the law school."

She is the first faculty member to hold such a joint appointment. Kaveny regularly teaches contract law to first-year law students. She also teaches a number of seminars that explore the relationships among theology, philosophy and law, such as "Faith, Morality, and Law," "Mercy and Justice," and "Complicity." In the heat of the Obama 2008 campaign, she was one of the leading "Catholic" apologists for Obama.

Perhaps the most notorious of the sellouts was Doug Kmiec. He was a Republican Catholic who nevertheless came out and endorsed Obama in 2008. He wrote articles and granted interviews, rationalizing how Catholics could vote for Obama, despite the abortion issue. He made the completely nutty argument that Obama's positions on the issues of wages, health care and the Iraq War should tip the scales in Obama's favor, despite his abortion stance.

Kmiec's sellout, which came in an article in the Marxist publication Slate, drew many eyeballs and massive controversy, but served its purpose in helping persuade Catholics that Obama was actually a pretty decent guy whose child-killing policies could be overlooked because he was "Catholic" on so many other things. The shocking summation of Kmiec's pro-Obama position was his one-liner, "One of the things I kept discovering ... was that Obama was sounding more Catholic than most Catholics I know."

For his treachery, Kmiec was made U.S. ambassador to Malta by Obama in 2009.

Why does all this matter? Because these same people are still around, working to undermine the Church and destroy the Faith. They haven't gone anywhere, not by a long shot. They are echoes of the very same filth spewed by James Martin and company — filth that the U.S. bishops and their staffs simply don't care to confront, for a number of reasons.

This means you have to. You have to understand not just big 60,000-foot concerns, but how this all works at colleges and parish retreats. Guest speakers are brought in, articles are published, TV interviews are granted and so forth.

It's a war conducted by a few generals, yes, but it's carried out by traitors all over the Church. It's Obama's world right now.

They must be confronted. 

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TRANSCRIPT

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America is becoming less religious — no news there. It's the continuation of a decades-long decline, but it is now accelerating. But what few have recognized, at least in any formal sense, is that this trend is also present within politically conservative circles. This is a sea change from days gone by when Christians had a dominant influence.

Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, it was the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell, a largely Protestant presence that drove the agenda on the political right. That was the reality for roughly 20 years, until the era of George Bush in 2000–2008. By the time Bush was done and Obama arrived, what was once a dominant force was already greatly diminished in GOP circles. In short, the conservative political project had lost its specifically Christian character.

It didn't seem that way during the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, but it was already in full swing — just undetected because of the strong support of Christians for Trump. What we are seeing unfold now is a social conservatism as opposed to a religious one. Trump certainly did not cause this, but probably without consciously realizing it, he tapped right into the "religion indifferent" crowd now becoming dominant in conservative circles. 

Check out some of the numbers:

In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump had much stronger support among those who attended church services less frequently.

Among those attending more than once a week, 32% supported Trump in the primaries. Of those attending a few times a year, 50% supported Trump. Rare attendees supported him at 55% and those who never attend provided 62% support.

In short, among self-identified political conservatives, the more they disregarded church attendance, the more inclined they were to vote for Trump. Underscoring all this, a 2020 Pew Research study revealed that fewer than half of Republicans said "being Christian" was important to them.

That helps explain the enormous change in Republican voters' attitude toward same-sex marriage. Their support doubled in just 10 years to what is now a majority. It went from 28% support in 2011 to a whopping 55% support in 2021.

This is no longer Ronald Reagan's Republican Moral Majority party. That cuts across every major narrative you can find, especially the White Christian nationalist fabrication that the Marxist media yammer on about nonstop. There is a definite nationalist streak, even a foundational one, among Trump supporters, but it isn't driven in any way by "Christians."

As for it being specifically "White," that too is not really true. Hispanics and Blacks turned out in record percentages to vote for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. It's true, of course, that among Hispanics and Blacks, Democrats are still predominant, but that is evaporating pretty rapidly. The conventional wisdom that increasing racial diversity would secure a Democratic stranglehold well into the future is being turned on its ear.

So if the conservative movement isn't really all that "White" and also isn't "Christian," then what is it? Well, we are left with the "nationalist" character. This is where the reality is.

Today's Right does not think in terms of religion or race, despite the heavy-handed claims of the Left. The truth of the matter is simply that the Right sees all this, ironically enough, in strictly Marxian terms: a class struggle between average-Joe Americans and a dominant government–corporate partnership actively hostile to them. Religion and race have very little to do with it.

The new social conservatism wants to overthrow this new dominant order. That is a complete turnaround, a 180-degree flip in convention, from the halcyon days when the Left was the one agitating against authority. Those firmly ensconced in the New Right are the ones embracing overthrow and unconventional tactics.

The reason is pretty obvious — the Left succeeded in winning and gaining everything it wanted. Now, with almost total power in its hands, the Left has become massively oppressive with the demand that everyone bow to its worldview. It used to be that the Left claimed all it wanted was a live-and-let-live approach. That was probably never true, but even if it was, it has changed drastically. Now, you offer a pinch of incense to the gods of the Left or you are actually punished.

You may even agree, at least in principle, with gay marriage, abortion in some cases, and so forth, but to be ordered to bow down has rubbed enormous numbers of Americans the wrong way, regardless of their views on religion or the color of their skin. In short, post-Obama cultural progressivism is being rejected by huge numbers of Americans.

So what does all this mean for Christians, specifically Catholics, on the political scene? Interesting question. Deeply religious people, especially Catholics, need to understand the new dynamic at play here. While, as always, it's a spiritual war because of the moral issues at play, it is not perceived that way at all by the vast majority of those who identify as political conservatives. In fact, they don't even think in those terms — completely off their radar.

True, there is an alliance around what could be called the new civic religion. There is a lot of overlap, certainly much more so than with anything on the Left. But, all this means that, for the moment, the choice Christians have to make is to either take their seat at the back of the bus, where they are welcomed by those in charge on the Right, or just not be on the bus at all.

Do the faithful simply withdraw support and likely ensure a win by the Marxists? Or do we stay in the game, fight this fight and then try to evangelize and convert, having to perhaps swallow hard at various moments? This is the new political reality, like it or not.

Catholics lost the possible initiative back in the 1950s and early 1960s, in what you might call the "era of Sheen." The 1970s and 1980s gave birth to the Protestant Moral Majority, the "era of Falwell," which had some influence owing to the sheer numbers of Protestants in America, but by 2000, was on the way out. We are now in the "era of Obama" and the entire, oppressive Marxist regime is being rebelled against by average Americans who are largely as unconcerned with religion as they are with race.

For those who decide to stay in the game, it will be a two-phase war, consisting of defeating Marxism and converting political allies. It's not clear at all that the U.S. hierarchy shares either of those goals. Interesting times, indeed.

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Catholic schools versus public schools — which is better? Sadly, the answer is not a slam dunk for Catholic schools. In fact, in many ways, Catholic schools are actually worse. Not only are students being deprived of truth, but faithful teachers are being dumped.

In the archdiocese of Detroit, a prime example is De La Salle high school — totally faithless but typical. This is in an archdiocese where the archbishop, Allen Vigneron, never stops yammering on about how the Holy Spirit is transforming the archdiocese. Apparently, The Holy Spirit hasn't managed to find time to get around to the schools yet.

Former theology department chairman and religion teacher Kyle Kopy was canned from the phony Catholic school because he would not bow to the woke agenda and insisted on teaching the Catholic faith at a Catholic school.

Kopy explains, "They said I was being insensitive, and I asked them, 'What if I were to teach on homosexuality or transgenderism, and I were to present the Catholic teaching on that? Are you going to back me up on that?' And they could not give me a straight answer." 

"The Catholic school system in America is in shambles," according to David Gordon, another former Catholic school teacher spurned for adhering to basic Catholic teachings. According to Gordon, "If you aren't 100% positive that your kid's school is orthodox, then it's 100% not orthodox. Heterodoxy and scandal are the rule in modern Catholic education, faithfulness the exception."

Full disclosure — both Kopy and Gordon now work here at Church Militant, where they have had to take pay decreases, but are once again able to advance and promote the authentic Catholic faith.

And as the leader here at Church Militant, I — and the staff — are happy to say we are delighted they are here.

Imagine for just a moment the total clown-world craziness of this — faithful men canned by Catholic schools for teaching the Faith having to take pay cuts and come to work for a media apostolate so they can fulfill their professional vocations. Such is the state of the Church right now, and very likely well into the future. The vast majority of America's Catholic schools have become secularized. As such, they are too often spiritually dangerous places for a child, adolescent or young adult.

A personal note — when I was growing up in the 1970s, my parents, God rest their souls, made significant sacrifices to send me and my brother to Catholic schools, as many parents did. We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid. In fact, my parents would actually cash my dad's paycheck, and we lived using cash. We lived paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes there was no more money. My mom kept all the money — the cash — in an envelope series for budgeting. Since we were essentially poor, there was no envelope for my monthly tuition.

She would take $20 from this envelope and $20 from that envelope — meaning food and utilities and so forth — until it had totaled $100, the monthly cost for my Northern California Catholic high school in the 1970s.

But — and here's the point — every month she would bring me to the envelope pile and make me watch the cash being taken out of other areas so my tuition could be paid. She would say, "Your father and I want you to see the sacrifices we are making so you can get a Catholic education." Then she'd put those bills (and yes, many times even coins) into an envelope and put them in my satchel to take in and pay at the front office each month.

Catholic parents, who were being faithful and trusting back in the day, got completely screwed over and ripped off by the snakes — and yes, I mean bishops and their modernist cohorts, who essentially stole their money to produce future apostates and heretics.

Even Bp. Sheen knew about this back in the 1970s and publicly said so: "I recommend that my relatives send their college-bound children to secular colleges where they will have to fight for their faith, rather than to Catholic colleges where it will be stolen from them."

This is now the norm in Catholic schools, despite the glossy brochures and videos they run in place of homilies once or twice a year. Your children are not being taught the Faith. They are being taught anti-faith. There are a number of reasons for this that have all dovetailed to create an environment where your kids' faith is destroyed.

They sent Kyle on a three-day suspension and then fired him. Kopy relays: 

We even had a diversity/equity/inclusion person at the school, and word probably got around to people like them about my situation, and they said I need to be done away with. I got terminated through an email after working there for nearly a decade and never had a problem at the school, ever.

Kopy adds, "My experience has taught me that most run-of-the-mill Catholic schools are basically expensive public schools with poorly taught religion classes. Unfortunately, the Faith is not the most important thing to these schools."

Conservatives often complain about their children being exposed to evil ideologies in public schools. We hear the same complaints about Catholic schools. The public school system swears allegiance to the State, and a secular and godless State will have a secular and godless curriculum. No one should expect otherwise. But any institution bearing the name "Catholic" is obliged to honor that claim and should be held to it. 

In our very popular Premium show Mic'd Up, we aired an in-depth look this past week at this disaster and what parents could and should do. We are providing that episode for your viewing for free by just clicking on the provided link.

We want you to know about all this because you need to, but we also want you to see the work we do here with our Premium shows so that you will sign up. Your $10 a month goes to not only keeping the apostolate going but also helping pay the salaries of various "refugee" Catholics — smart people, dedicated people who ran into the buzzsaw of the modernist Church for simply telling the truth and trying to save souls.

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Well, here's a little information that the Vatican is not going to like, not to mention the U.S. bishops.

When Pope St. John XXIII became pope, the very first encyclical he issued was called Ad Petri Cathedram, in 1959. It was written and published barely eight months after he became pope and addresses truth, unity and peace in the spirit of charity. The document consists of 150 paragraphs, and so it becomes an interesting point that one of the very first things the pope approaches as a major topic is the media.

For example, from paragraph 16 (again, near the very top of the encyclical): "Radio broadcasts, motion pictures and television shows which make error and vice attractive must be opposed by shows which defend truth and strive to preserve the integrity and safety of morals." From paragraph 15: "The weapons of truth, then, must be used in defense against these weapons of evil."

There are two things that, back in 1959, the Holy Father could not have foreseen: first, the internet becoming a dominant medium in the world of information; second, the massive corruption of the hierarchy and its cover-up by the Catholic establishment media. In fact, for the most part, the Catholic establishment media, as we understand them today, hadn't even been born, which was also the case, quite obviously, with the internet.

But when you combine the two factors of corruption and a complicit media actively covering it up, well, you get something no better than the Biden administration.

Think back on the extensive plotting and cover-up it must have taken for the Catholic media to simply ignore all the news about homosexual clergy sex abuse. Even though the Catholic media were much closer to the individuals involved — the bishops and priests — it took the secular media to uncover it. Then, once uncovered, the bishops took massive pains to skirt the actual issue of homosexuality in the clerical ranks, and the Catholic media were completely compliant.

Even as the secular media were investigating and uncovering stories as far back as the 1990s — like, for example, the Kansas City Star — about large percentages of priests dying from AIDS, the Catholic media sat on their hands, ignoring the voluminous information.

The financial scandals, the sexual scandals — most of each category, closely related, were never deemed sufficient to report about. Meanwhile, the Church was being attacked from within by all this, and still not a peep.

Even to this day — given the backing he gets from powerful prelates like Cupich and Tobin, not to mention the praise and accolades from Bp. Robert Barron — James Martin and his homoheresy is considered completely off-limits as a story.

So referring back to Pope St. John XXIII and looking at this crisis through his construct again — "The weapons of truth, then, must be used in defense against these weapons of evil" — allows us to ask the direct question, "Why would any Catholic turn to these establishment-media types for any information?"

Think of the enormous, massive harm and damage done to just the victims of all this, spiritually and bodily. Does all that not constitute evil? And yet, when organizations like Church Militant come on the scene and begin reporting on it all, we (and others) are completely vilified by the bishops and their lackeys in the so-called Catholic media.

It is just like the secular media shilling for Biden. The Hunter laptop story is just one example. The border crisis, Biden's dementia, inflation, changing the definition of recession — the list is endless.

So, people turn to other sources for their information because the establishment media cannot be trusted when what they are saying simply rings hollow — at the gas pump, the grocery store, public schools, you name it. It takes a long time to establish credibility in this business and just a few minutes to destroy it.

The Catholic media long ago lost all credibility owing to their participation in the cover-up of all the corruption. They are able to survive only because they never tick off the bishops and are therefore allowed to keep being parasites on the institution, as opposed to watchdogs of it.

The role of the media is to hold those in authority accountable. It is not to aid and abet them in crimes for financial gain.

You look over the current landscape and you ask yourself, "What on earth would Pope John write today in an encyclical about truth?"

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