Monthly Archives: April 2022

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Feminism, Radicalism, Religion

The subversive faux-sister is tireless

Pope Francis’s special handpicked envoy is still at it. There is no getting away from it: when Nathalie Becquart takes her mouth on her jaunts around the world, she is also taking the pope’s mouth.

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‘Simply Wrong’: Vatican Official Criticized for Address to Pro-Homosexuality Catholic Organization

Xavière Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary at the Synod of Bishops’ general secretariat, delivered an online PowerPoint presentation to New Ways Ministry, which promotes homosexual and transgender rights in the Church, on April 3.

Edward Pentin Vatican NCR April 12, 2022

VATICAN CITY — A recent lecture given by a high-level member of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops to a dissenting American organization has been criticized as “simply wrong” and part of a concerted effort to influence the current worldwide Synod on Synodality to legitimize the homosexual agenda in the Church.  

Xavière Missionary Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary at the Synod of Bishops’ general secretariat responsible for coordinating all the Vatican’s synods, delivered an online PowerPoint presentation to New Ways Ministry, which promotes homosexual and transgender rights in the Church, on April 3. The subject was “Synodality — a Path of Reconciliation” — a discussion on the current Synod on Synodality that runs until October 2023. 

The presentation, billed as a memorial lecture, was in honor of the late Salvatorian Father Robert Nugent, who, together with Sister of Loretto Jeannine Gramick, founded New Ways Ministry in 1977 to minister to  homosexual people in the Church. Sister Jeannine led the opening prayer before the lecture. Both Father Nugent and Sister Jeannine were disciplined by the Vatican in the 1990s because of the flaws in their approach to ministry to homosexuals persons. 

Introducing Sister Nathalie’s lecture, New Ways Ministry’s executive director, Francis DeBernardo, said he was “particularly delighted” to welcome her and “ecstatic” about the presentation. Sister Nathalie said it was a “great joy” to address the organization but made no mention of its past problematic history with the Church.  

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Catholic Church, Catholicism, Law, Radicalism, Religion

Self-mutilation – a sign of self-determination?

Cardinal Muller’s speaking out against the immorality of forcing bodily mutilation on children is welcome. It is one thing to have transgenderism forced on society in general, it is another to target children, who are not capable of making an informed decision about such bodily desecration. We must thank God we have a prelate so clearly in defence of Church teaching in contrast with that political subversive sister, Nathalie Becquart, who is just as clear in her denial of Church doctrine.

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Cardinal Müller: Transgender ideology is ‘self-mutilation,’ promoting it is a ‘serious sin’

‘When the self-mutilation of mind, soul, and body is peddled ideologically and politically as an alleged “self-determination,” then that is nothing less than a serious sin against the well-being and salvation of children and young people,’ the German cardinal said.

(LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Gerhard Müller excoriated the LGBT movement in recent remarks, describing transgender ideology as “self-mutilation of mind, soul, and body” that supporters have given a “totalitarian position” in society at the expense of young people and religious and scientific freedom.

The German cardinal and former prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (previously the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) made the comments in a March 30 statement to German magazine Tichys Einblick.

Cardinal Müller was responding to controversy over an episode of a German kids’ TV program that sparked parental outrage for glorifying “gender transitioning.” The episode, released ahead of so-called “Transgender Day of Visibility” last week, featured a character named Erik reemerging on the show as a cross-dressing “trans woman” named “Katja.“

“A trans person is a person who was born a girl, but is actually a boy, or the other way around,” a presenter, who opened with episode with LGBT “pride” flags, told the child audience.

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Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, Political correctness, Radicalism, Religion

Subverting State and Church

For years, many of us have recognize the effort by radicals to replace our traditional Western Society and the universal Church with Marxist schemes of their manufacture. The work is almost complete. Marxist ideas, or derivative ideas, have capture all organs of society. Here, Archbishop Vigano talks about the infiltration of the Catholic Church by those who scarcely hide their program of subversion any longer.

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Abp. Viganò: Both society and Church ‘infiltrated’ by people who want to ‘destroy’ these institutions

Archbishop Viganò noted how Archbishop Lefebvre ‘was one of the few, very few prelates who wanted to denounce the conciliar revolution, understanding its subversive nature,’ an intervention which is now understood.

LifeSiteNews, Mon Apr 11, 2022

(LifeSiteNews) – Editor’s note: The following is a translation of an interview Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò gave to Dr. Armando Manocchia for the Italian TV channel “Canale Italia,” April 2, 2022.

Dr. Armando Manocchia: Beginning with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Masonic infiltrations within the Catholic Church have become increasingly substantial. Progressivism and relativism have been employed as weapons to undermine fidelity to Tradition. Did Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988, therefore sense that Catholicism was on the brink of the abyss?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: Certainly. Archbishop Lefebvre was one of the few, very few prelates who wanted to denounce the conciliar revolution, understanding its subversive nature. And I say “who wanted” because many other prelates understood that a real revolution was underway. Some saw it as a danger, others saw it as a “springtime of the Church.” But among those who saw the danger, almost no one knew how to denounce it openly. Today we understand the historical merit of Archbishop Lefebvre in having rebelled against the line dictated by the conciliar politburo and having created the premises for a return of the Church to the doctrine and Holy Mass of all time.

Dr. Manocchia: Could the St. Gallen Mafia be considered as a sort of ecclesiastical World Economic Forum?

Archbishop Viganò: If we identify the World Economic Forum as a private lobby that has placed its followers in the most important posts of national and international public institutions in order to impose the globalist agenda against the will of the citizens, it is certainly fitting to see a parallel with the St. GallenMafia. In a similar way, this cabal of conspirators also placed its agents in the Roman Curia and in the peripheral organs of the Church, just as it imposed the conciliar agenda against the will of the faithful. But just as there is not only theWorld Economic Forum in the public sphere, so there is not only the St. Gallen Mafia in the ecclesiastical sphere.

We are facing a global coup that involves both civil society and the Church. Both are infiltrated and controlled by characters who use their power and the authority that derives from it, not for the purposes of the institutions they govern, but in order to destroy them. This crisis of authority must be denounced, because the action of those who have reached the highest levels of leadership both of nations and of the Church is a subversive and criminal act.

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Catholic Church, Feminism, Political correctness, Religion

Plenary Council – battle for the Australian Church

Two years ago, I established a tab on this website which would provide links to articles about the proposed Fifth Plenary Council of the Catholic Church in Australia. Hearing about the plan had at once aroused my suspicions. The dissenters and destroyers have been hard at work ever since the Church Fathers paraded into St Peters to begin the Second Vatican in October 1962.

As it turned out, my gut reaction to the news was spot on. The effusions of many of the organisers made it clear that a powerful group aimed to take charge and make radical changes to the Church’s governance and doctrine. The document ‘Continuing the Journey’ and the views of Sister Nathalie Becquart, a popular invitee to radical groups around the Catholic world, were explicit enough. See my previous comments about this pretend religious sister. So, I was gratified to come across an article by Professor Greg Craven in the Catholic Weekly, outlining similar misgivings.

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Greg Craven: Plenary ‘reformers’ are really demolitionists

By Professor Greg Craven, The Catholic Weekly, December 2, 2021

Even Beelzebub must feel sorry for the Catholic Church in Australia. Beset externally by enemies in the media, politics and what passes for the intelligentsia, it now has its own self-righteous fifth column.

These worthies like to describe themselves as “reformers”, but they want to reform the Church the way woodworm reforms a house. They really are demolitionists, hoping to clear away the existing Church, and replace it with one in their own image.

On 18 November, the demolitionists had their electronic clan-gathering, grandly titled a “Convocation” around “The Future of Catholicism in Australia”.

The website is very proud that 1500 people participated. To put this in context, the last census revealed 5,210,000 Catholics, so that is a whopping 0.03 per cent. Or for further comparison, outside COVID, 3,000 people visit St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney each day. A quarter of a million attended Pope Benedict’s World Youth Day Mass at Randwick in 2008.

So why would one worry about this micro-swarm of gnats? Mainly because, in the wake of the appalling scandal over Church child abuse, some Bishops are briskly walking scared.

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Catholic Church, Feminism, Political correctness, Religion

Promoting the Synod of subversion

You have to admire the honesty of Nathalie Becquart, the political pretend-sister of the pretend female religious order La Xaviere. Her articulation of the far-left’s program of subversion is not wanting in clarity. She is doing what all her deceitful, cowardly, clerical colleagues don’t dare to do.

Faux-sister’s plans for the Church is not a gentle sleight-of-hand rupture, one passing from the pre-Vatican to the post-Vatican Church. No, her aim is the total destruction the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church, so that she and her subversive, pallid, green-eyed colleagues are left in total control.

She says she is articulating the thoughts of Pope Francis and seeing that Pope Francis appointed her to a critical role in manufacturing a ‘synodal church’, we must conclude that she is right – that the Pope holds the opinions she is so brazenly articulating. What is the nitty-gritty of those plans? It’s simple really.

She wants to replace the sacramental hierarchical structure of the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church with a purely ‘democratic’ structure where elected ministries and functionaries, not clergy, govern the Church. It’s the obliteration of the Church of the ages, a Church that got it all wrong politically. Female ordination is rejected as merely perpetuating the male clerical structure. Along with the new structure would be new doctrine compatible with the new wokist Church.

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Pope Francis is using Synod to separate Church ‘leadership’ from ‘ordination’: liberal Vatican nun

Sr. Nathalie Becquart told The New York Times that the role of women in the Church was changing under Pope Francis.

Sr Nathalie Becquart

Michael Haynes, Mon Mar 7, 2022 – 4:22 pm EST

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) – A prominent female member of the Vatican Curia, Sister Nathalie Becquart, has declared that Pope Francis intends to “disconnect participation in the leadership of the church from ordination” in the Synod on Synodality.

Sr. Becquart – appointed in February 2021 as the Vatican’s first female member of the Roman Curia with synodal voting rights, and under-secretary of the Synod of Bishops, the body which is organizing the current Synod on Synodality – made the revelation in an interview conducted by The New York Times as part of the publication’s “Women and Leadership special report.”

Asked about the “obstacles” to female ordination in the Catholic Church, Becquart replied:

‘The vision of Pope Francis, through this synod, is to get rid of a clerical church and move to a synodal church — to disconnect participation in the leadership of the church from ordination. We can say that the way now opening up is to listen to all different views; for instance, not everyone thinks ordination of women is a good path. You have some groups calling for that, but you also have some groups calling for new ministries.’

“The question of women is a sign of the times,” she said. “It is a powerful call within our societies and in the church. The church has already said we should fight against any discrimination against women. But it is a long way, not only in the church.”

Similar allusions to fundamental change in the Catholic Church following the Synod on Synodality were made by Cardinal Mario Grech, the general-secretary of the Synod of Bishops, who recently said the Synodal process would be a “discernment process,” by which the Church would “find truth.” Grech even hinted at Pope Francis effecting a “change” in doctrine following the Synod.

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Catholic Church, Catholicism, Conservatism, Radicalism, Religion

The Cardinal we know and admire

Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, lynch-mob leaders like delusional Louise Milligan, and that whole band of feral wokists have not bowed Cardial George Pell in the least. Not even 404 days in solitary confinement made one jot of difference to his immovable stand on moral and religious principles. He wrote three inspiring books about his experiences. When a German cardinal and a German bishop proposed changing key dogma of the faith, the aging cardinal was immediately at the barricades.

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Cardinal Pell Calls on Vatican to Correct 2 Senior European Bishops for Rejecting Church’s Sexual Ethics

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews.

Edward Pentin Blogs NCR March 15, 2022

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal George Pell has called on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to publicly reprimand two of Europe’s most senior bishops for what he said was their “wholesale and explicit rejection” of the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics.

In a statement released March 15, Cardinal Pell asked the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation to “intervene and pronounce judgment” on comments made by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the Vatican Synod on Synodality, and Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference. 

Cardinal Pell had made the appeal a few days earlier, in an interview given to the German Catholic television agency K-TV on March 11.

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews. 

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Books, Culture, English language

The Opening Paragraph!

There is a lot of advice on writing on the internet these days – by professionals and amateurs alike. My favourite is Alyssa Matesic, freelance editor, who has a youtube channel providing all manner of professional advice to writers. She has a video on How to Nail Your Novel Opening and Hook Your Reader. Crime Reads website gives examples from Graham Greene’s novels of outstanding opening paragraphs. They are worth studying.

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Graham Greene and the Art of the Opening Paragraph

Dwyer Murphy, Crime Reads

It’s no wonder that Graham Greene, a man who sampled so abundantly from life’s many offerings and made it a matter of constitutional pride never to turn down the chance of an adventure, excelled at what we now call world-building. Although sci-fi and fantasy writers tend to get the nod as masters of the craft, world-building has long been a cornerstone of the thriller, especially the international thriller, that rarefied form in which a reader is dropped into a new terrain, a new culture, and has to learn to decipher its signs and signifiers well enough to know when the whole enterprise is being compromised. The literary work must be done swiftly, and to great effect, and there was no one for it like Graham Greene, a writer who could conjure up a life, a setting, a dilemma, and a worldview, all in a few neat lines.

Greene, born 115 years ago today in Hertfordshire, lived a complex, globetrotting, ambivalent life. He was a journalist, a teacher, a converted Catholic, an Englishman in frequent exile, a screenwriter, an ambitious novelist, an author of “entertainments,” a spy, a sympathizer of guerrillas and dictators alike, and a man of deeply held moral beliefs. With all that experience, all he’d seen of the world, and with a honed craft, he brought the international thriller (and other styles) to new heights and left an indelible mark on the history of 20th century literature. His stories moved from far-flung locales to the damp streets of English seaside towns. Havana, Saigon, Port-au-Prince, Brighton, Dover, the Mexican countryside, an Argentine border town—he brought each of them to life with rich stories of intrigue and struggle. Often expats and westerners were his subjects (and often his fiction reflected views we now recognize as racist), but he never shied away from exploring the lives of locals and how they’d been disrupted by the intrusions and exploitations of global powers.

Today we’re celebrating one piece of Greene’s craft: the opening paragraph. Assembled here for your reading pleasure are ten of his greatest opening gambits (ranked, roughly). Note how much depth Greene packs into these lines, how he launches the story forward without any ostentatious bells or whistles, just an authenticity of voice and a confidence in craft. Who else could have written these lines but Greene?

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