February 1997

Cardinal Hume and the Judas Complex

- Kulturkampf II meets the Second Reformation -

MICHAEL McGRADE

THE first article in this edition of Christian Order is a fascinating summary of a Catholic layman's faith, courage and persistence during the first Kulturkampf - that fearsome war against Catholicism which preoccupied, the German State for the greater part of the period 1870-1900. While inspired by the indefatigable Ludwig Windhorst, however, I suspect that the many unheralded, orthodox heroes and heroines of the postconciliar Church currently expending themselves in the thick of Kulturkanipf II will be quick to spot the most dramatic difference between then and now i.e. the united, convinced Church Militant that did battle with Windhorst against Bismarck as compared with today's utter lack of Catholic conviction, epitomised by the hierarchy, which not only fragments and hinders the Catholic fight but so often positively encourages the enemy. Unlike Windhorst, in seeking to fulfill their mission to sanctify this materialistic and, therefore, essentially anti-Catholic world, the contemporary lay faithful find themselves fighting not only against all the secular odds but against the overt hostility and kneeling before the world of the very men divinely appointed to lead them in battle!

The cavernous divide which has opened up between the grassroots and the elite was never more visible than last November when 14-year-old Emilia, a student at John Henry Newman senior school in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, took well-publicised exception to Catholic institutions hobnobbing with urbane agents of evil. Under threat of expulsion, this courageous teenager boycotted a prize-giving ceremony because the school had arranged for her to receive her award from notorious pro-abort feminist Barbara Follett. "My conscience", she stated, "would not allow me to accept the prize from someone who is anti-life in the things she has done and proposes to do." ,A collective, emphatic "Yeeesss!" went up from common Catholic folk everywhere, less histrionic but no less ecstatic than a Cup Final goal-scorer in extra time. Such is the exhilarating effect of small, surprising victories in a moribund Church. A Church where smug complicity, not public heroics, are the daily fare. The sort of Church where it is not those guilty of polluting the very ethos of her school - by honouring a proponent of the culture of death - but she, Emilia, who stands condemned. In the eyes of the hierarchy, you see - as articulated in their social justice statement The Common Good - such a boorish, "single issue" outlook clearly condemns the young Catholic heroine to the margins of social acceptability. For Emilia - glorious exile; for the bishops - humiliation. Such is the stark contrast between Catholic conviction and worldly ambivalence; between a schoolgirl's faithful resolve and the kind of capitulation instilled in this episcopate by its late mentor Archbishop Worlock, whose spirit of surrender permeates the disgraceful, worldly-wise sell out of pre-born life in the above document. In fact, so bereft of Catholic faith was this feted liberal icon that he once sent a "minder" to warn off an equally committed Merseyside teenager from pursuing an ecumenically embarrassing pro-life campaign against the Abortion Bill when it first came before Parliament. By the grace of God, the young schoolboy concerned on that occasion not only survived this unnerving, treacherous ordeal but went on to become a priest! Judging by Emilia's providential response in the wake of The Common Good, it would seem that Worlock's latest, albeit posthumous, betrayal of the pro-life cause enshrined by his disciples in that "single issue" proviso - will backfire just as splendidly this time around.

Corrosive Common Ground
In any event, the point here is that despite their fidelity, the battle weary faithful have long been reduced to little more than onlookers; pained observers of this wicked rapprochement between the overwhelming, ever more defiant spirit of secularism and the increasingly brazen doctrinal and moral ambiguity of the Catholic bishops. After all, as recounted in the preceding interview with Cardinal Simonis, this is the inexorable end-point of the "non-Catholic thinking within Catholicism" recognised by Paul VI 20-30 years ago and which he imagined becoming "stronger in the future." That future is now and the "non-Catholic thinking" has, as the Cardinal points out, penetrated "deep into the Church." So deep, in fact, that the Western hierarchies have no option but to rationalise their complicity in such thinking; blinding themselves to the fact that the second Kulturkampf, which they generally acknowledge, has also coincided with what Cardinal Simonis unequivocally calls a "Second Reformation ... even more dangerous than the first." Forget the enemies outside the Church, he says, the real threat from Reformation II is within the Catholic fort and, like its socio-political twin Kulturkampf II, far more subtle and perilous this time around.

Would that our own Cardinal possessed such a clear and honest vision of the present Catholic condition as his Dutch counterpart. Would that he, like Simonis (and, indeed, Paul VI himself) saw his "primary concern" as "the orthodoxy of the faith." Alas, they are poles apart. Not only does Cardinal Hume dismiss out of hand the idea that there is a crisis in the Church - "I personally think that the Catholic Church is in a very satisfactory state" (May 1996) - he seems oblivious to the fact that just as Protestantism made common cause with Bismarck in his first Kulturkampf against the Church, so the neo-Protestantised Catholicism which alarms Cardinal Simonis but which be, Hume, is doing so much to foster, is today making common cause with the movers and shakers of Kulturkampf II. We have here the real, frightening and unprecedented point of convergence referred to above: churchmen so captured by "non-Catholic thinking" that they are working en masse, hand in glove with insidious worldlings perhaps less pugnacious but no less pathologically anti-Catholic than Bismarck.

Now, it may seem like one thing to claim that bishops have, by and large, rejected the reality of this Second Reformation but quite another to say that they have subsequently extended a very public helping hand to anti-Catholic forces currently arrayed against the Church. Yet if a prelate, like the Primate of England and Wales, is himself so immersed in that erroneous thinking at the heart of Reformation II that he fails to comprehend either the Pope or the Primate of The Netherlands when they identify it and warn that it is questioning "the very foundations of the Faith" then, surely, red hat or no, his next logical step is straight into the facile embrace of Satan's hordes. And this because what constitutes the nub of that "non-Catholic thinking" within the Second Reformation is the same as that at the core of Kulturkampf II: blurring of distinctions - which, of course, is the quintessence of Liberalism and that ambiguous common ground where secular Liberal and ecclesiastical Modernist meet to share, as the brilliant Joseph Sobran puts it, a distinctively indistinct vocabulary of their own, full of oozy words like change, openness, process, dialogue, growth and progress. "It would be easier to know what they meant," he adds, "if they knew themselves but, as they say, they 'reject labels;' that is, they resist definition and identification." No matter what their rhetorical style: marxism, liberalism, evolutionism, ecumenism or pantheism, "their favoured buzz words lack both the harmony of orthodoxy and the ring of individuality, they all sound alike without sounding like anything in particular. Their style has the character of their doctrine: a corrosive vagueness."

This, incidentally, is why Anglicanism, despite its cheeky claim to represent a branch of Christianity, is really nothing more than a word in a dictionary; a synonym for Liberalism - since its raison d'etre has always been a corrosively vague "middle way" inimical to those clear distinctions essential for salvation. Little wonder, then, that as Cardinal Hume's fascination with an ecumenical, via-media-style anglo-Catholic Church of the Future escalates, he becomes, contrary to the expressed wishes of John Paul II, more reluctant to draw and enforce lines of demarcation between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy within his own fold, and more inclined - a la George Carey - to an ever greater accommodation with the "distinctly indistinct" spirit and desires of the worldlings outside.

Along with routine episodes like the Barbara Follett fiasco, one could devote another several editions of this publication to enunciating recent examples of such perfidious 'cuddling up' with the present Kulturkampf. The ensuing articles in this edition, however, concentrate on two pivotal, interrelated issues; the hierarchy's response to the homosexual push - which perhaps best demonstrates the unholy conjuncture outlined above and the surreal state of Catholicism in Britain today; and sex- education - the mechanism by which homosexual and other deviant propaganda is disseminated to Catholic schoolchildren and the example par excellence of bishops fighting their own and making common cause with evil.

As regards sex-education, suffice to say that examples abound of the kind of degeneracy now afflicting a British Catholic school system which, with episcopal blessing, has turned its back on Catholicity of the orthodox stripe contained in the Vatican's Truth and Meaning of human Sexuality and sold its soul to Kulturkampf proponents of AIDS education and the like.

Pandering to the Homosexual Agenda
On the homosexual question quite a bit more needs saying. Therefore, as with the November 1996 number, where Bishop Smith's deficient statement about dissident Clare Richards was published in full together with commentaries, Cardinal Hume's flawed note on homosexuality is reprinted herein together with a Roman statement on the subject and a refreshingly candid critique by Father Michael McCarthy. In this, way, despite a recent fine sounding declaration from the Cardinal advising dissidents that "the teaching of the Church on moral questions must be known and accepted", readers might better appreciate the deceptive manner in which clear Vatican directives are undermined by "non-Catholic (hierarchical) thinking" almost as a matter of course in this country.

A clear understanding of the Church's true position on this topic is also essential since disinformation about homosexuality has reached epic proportions, mainly through the agency of a homo-friendly media which lies to the public, on a near daily basis; as much in the countless uncritical ways they recycle homosexual propaganda (1) and portray homosexuality as more or less benign as in its massive censorship of negatives e.g. what it omits to tell us about the very short, brutish life a young man can expect once recruited into the sodomitical milieu (2). In fact, whether the high success rate of change therapy and burgeoning number of groups formed by ex-homosexuals to assist others who wish to cure their addiction to the sodomitical lifestyle (before it kills them), or the calculated recruitment of unhappy, vulnerable people into the gay cult ("chicken-hawking" in homosexual lingo), or the high incidence of homosexual harassment and rape when "recruitment" fails (as documented by the U.S. military), or the range of debilitating exotic diseases apart from AIDS that afflict homosexuals as a matter of course (due to their filthy practices), or the overwhelming evidence showing a disproportionately high correlation between homosexuality and crime at every level (from petty misdemeanours to serial murder)(3) - any information whatsoever that taints the homosexual assertion of "normalcy" is routinely and wilfully omitted from discussion.

This complicity sickens but does not surprise. After all, a media that daily betrays the child in the womb - veiling the gruesome reality of abortion and mocking its opponents - will naturally conceal the sordid acts of the most belligerent pro-abortion lobby in the world; a lobby which despises the fruitfulness of heterosexual love as deeply as it loathes its own sterility. This much we can understand. But it is not so easy to figure out how and why our ecclesiastical leadership came to buy and promote so much of the same homosexual propaganda within the Church. In particular, the great lie about homosexual "orientation" - that "homosexuals are born that way" and just cannot help themselves(4) - is preached regularly to Catholic youth as gospel with full episcopal approval. As revealed in the March 1996 Christian Order, this fiction that homosexuality is perfectly normal or, at worst, morally neutral, is the view pushed by the Bishops' National Catholic Youth Assembly which involves the homosexual group QUEST in its activities (a group which, as the Cardinal knows full well, has advertised its public support for the pro-sodomy Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement). And by way of further example, how many Catholic parents are aware that a sex-education video produced for the Bishops Conference of England and Wales, carrying the Nihil Obstat of Bishop Vincent Nichols on its accompanying manual and distributed to Catholic senior schools across the land, pushes the same line; at one point clearly implying that the homosexual "love" between an older man and a teenage boy is morally equivalent to heterosexual romance, while ensuring that references to Catholic teaching in the manual are not repeated on film in anything more than caricature.. For anyone who might be interested, it is called A Time to Embrace, and has been on the shelves in Catholic schools since 1988.(5)

The damage done to individuals, not only but especially the young, at every level of society by such pandering to the deviant "cause" of this allegedly "victimised" 1-2% of the populace (ask AIDS-infected heterosexuals just who is victimising whom?), cannot be overestimated. The universal hijacking of AIDS awareness campaigns and consequent engineering of a sodomitically sympathetic and promiscuous condom culture by the very perpetrators and disseminators of the disease itself, is surely the greatest con job since The Fall; another breathtaking coup by the Evil Genius which has even duped the elect of his bete noire - the Church. We have reached the point where this universal mocking of the Creator and His Law - implying, portraying, teaching or legislating the moral equivalence of homosexual and heterosexual "orientations" and/ or "acts" - has so perverted right reason that our own Catholic Primate is now rightfully hailed by homosexual activists, the most bitter of all anti-Catholic Kulturkampf antagonists, as an ally. Those who have not yet grasped what is really going on in the Church in Britain, the depths to which things have sunk and the massive loss of nerve and faith behind the episcopate's grinning facade, would put this extraordinary turn of events down to the Cardinal's inherent wetness and simply call it false-charity. While always bearing in mind that a certain respect must be preserved for bad bishops whatever their crimes, I, for one, am more inclined to Father Malachi Martin's explanation which, though it involves a sinister comparison with Judas and what St. Paul called "the mystery of iniquity"(6), is altogether more plausible.

The Judas Complex
Now, there is no good reason to suppose that Judas started out any less well-intentioned or devoted to Jesus than the other apostles. Nor can we suppose that Christ withheld from Judas any of the special divine graces and charisms he conferred on the others. In fact, he was afforded a position of some prominence. Yet Judas alone shattered the group's unity. He did not, however, intend to destroy Jesus and the Twelve. Judas, in the opinion of Father Martin, was something classical: "the antihero who insisted on implementing his own plan for Jesus and the others… He could, he thought, reconcile Jesus and his enemies. He could, by decent compromise, ensure Jesus' success in the world by compacting with the world's leaders."

Judas could have left Jesus and "walked with him no more" as so many others did. But he wanted to stay. "He believed, after his own fashion, in Jesus and his group and their ideals. He just wanted Jesus and the others to conform to political and social realities, to follow his plan, not whatever plans Jesus may have had." He had formed his own ideas about the sensible way Jesus should go about seizing power from the hated Romans. And, after all, by not following orders he had already "betrayed" Jesus many times and everything had turned out fine. So, even after the Lord had frankly acknowledged during the Last Supper that he knew Judas would betray Him, that compromise plan still seemed the best to Judas. All the evil, agony and sacrilege that subsequently fell upon Jesus was a direct result of that Judas complex. "While the ultimate result of Judas' choice was gross betrayal and treachery, his specific sin was compromise - what really seemed to him a wise and prudent compromise given the otherwise impossible situation into which Jesus had boxed himself and his loyal group by his violent attacks on the status quo and by his refusal to meet Jewish authorities halfway..."

This, then, is the essence of the Judas complex: "the compromise of one's basic principles in order to fit in with the modes of thought and behaviour that the world regards as necessary for its vital interests. The principle of that special group was Jesus - his physical existence, his authority, his teaching. Judas had been persuaded by his tempters and corrupters that all that Jesus stood for had to be modified by a decent and sensible compromise."

Similarly, those countless bishops and priests who have betrayed the Roman Catholic Church during the past thirty years probably started off with the same intentions and devotion to the Church as those who have not betrayed their calling. Yet they and their assistant officials, like Judas, "have set themselves up as anti-Church within the Church." They do not want to leave the Church and do not intend to obliterate the Church, "but just to make it over to their new plan; it is, by now, trivial in their minds that their plan is irreconcilable with God's plan as revealed through the present-day successor of Peter and his teaching authority..." They are convinced that they really understand what is going on, and that they can ensure the success of Christ's Church by compacting with the world's leaders; that they can reconcile that Church and its enemies by "decent and sensible compromise."

But if compromise equals betrayal, it is effected through the middle part of the equation previously mentioned i.e. compromise = blurring of distinctions = betrayal. The Hume/homosexual rapprochement is a classic example of this Judas complex formula in action. The Cardinal has decided, as Fr. McCarthy points out elsewhere in this edition, that in matters of morality as they pertain to questions of sexual deviance, he knows better than the Pope and his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)(7). As in so many other areas, Hume wants to implement his own plan concerning moral questions, not the one Christ sent him via Rome. On the one hand, as recently as last December, he publicly tells dissenters that where the Church's teaching has been set out unambiguously it must be followed. On the other, he ignores the Vatican's unambiguous statement on homosexual orientation and issues his own erroneous corrective! You can almost hear his mind ticking over. "If only John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger understood," he seems to be thinking, "that all that is needed is a little 'decent and sensible compromise' on this question of 'orientation' towards sodomy; a softening of the distinction; a middle-way. After all, England is a 'special case' and an approach placing greater stress upon the fundamental law of Charity which applies to all human beings will be more comprehensible to our society at large. It will surely put the Church in a more user-friendly light and aid our broader ecumenical evangelisation." Somewhere in eternity, you can almost hear Judas cackling with delight.

Objectively Disordered Inclination
Father McCarthy has elsewhere pointed out that the core of this desire to meet homosexuals half-way is the moral teaching that temptation is not sin - only actions are sins. Since it is vital that Catholics - especially prelates - grasp this aspect of the controversy, I here relate Father's extremely helpful reasoning on the point which begins by recognising that while it is true in principle that only acts are sins, in the moral view thoughts are also actions, and wishing to do something sinful is the equivalent of doing it. Envy, hatred, jealousy and coveting our neighbours goods are sins that we can commit in our innermost thoughts. Lust is another of these sins of thought. Our Lord taught that when a man looks at a woman lustfully he has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matt. 5:28). In the case of a man and a woman the thought he is harbouring is about actions which are natural and hence not, in the words of the Vatican, "deprived of their essential and indispensable finality." Despite the fact that these actions could be morally acceptable (within the marriage covenant) the mere harbouring of thoughts and desires is still a sin according to Our Lord. How, Father asks, can prelates be so insistent that the homosexuals' harbouring of thoughts and desires for actions which are always sinful is such an important distinction from the actions themselves?

He continues: "The moral theology of the Church recognises that there is a stage of thought which is called temptation which if it is not accepted by the person does not become a sin of thought. This is a grey area for anyone. It is difficult to be confident that the temptation was not accepted momentarily to become a sin of thought or desire. It is clear in the Church's teaching that temptations are to be fought and eliminated zealously with prayer and recourse to the means of grace. Each time we pray the Lord's Prayer we ask: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. If we give the hypothetical virtuous homosexual the benefit of the doubt and agree that his thoughts are not sins but only temptations it is still not a basis for approval of the homosexual tendency, inclination or orientation. These temptations should be fought and rooted out before they become sins. If [Catholic Bishops] see temptations as a legitimate outlet for homosexual desires they have already accepted the temptation and made of it a sinful thought. This is a dead end useless distinction."

Thus Father McCarthy notes that his own Canadian bishops, like so many others, put homosexuality on the same basis as the normal sexuality between a man and a woman and ignore the fact that "while there are many sinful thoughts and actions in the relations between men and women there are some of these thoughts and actions which are not sinful. This is because the fundamental "orientation" is God given and it can fulfill the plan of God when it is lived out according to His law. In the case of homosexuality ALL the related thoughts and actions are sinful. There is no legitimate outlet for these homosexual desires. All homosexual acts, desires, and thoughts are to be rejected. There is no morally acceptable element to be found in homosexuality as in heterosexuality. Why are homosexuals to be commended for (supposedly) restraining themselves to thoughts and desires? The celibate homosexual [usually put forward in episcopal documents] has already committed sodomy or oral intercourse in his heart. The CDF statement that 'the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder' is being studiously ignored... Who needs [erroneous episcopal] explanations when the CDF teaching is so much more forthright and clear?"

Slippery Slope to Sodomy
The Cardinal's flawed view of the homosexual condition in this regard is entirely consistent with his studied ambivalence towards the unequivocal Catholic teaching on contraception. Despite periodic platitudes to the contrary, this indifference is clearly seen in his workaday severing of the inseparable link between episcopal teaching and episcopal enforcement - between doctrine and discipline - as trumpeted through the regular red carpet treatment long dispensed within his diocese to archHumanae Vitae dissenters like Jack Dominian, or in his complicity with anti-Humanae Vitae literature on sale both within his cathedral (The Tablet) and the bookshop next door, to mention just a few examples. An ambivalence surely at the heart of his desire to mute rather than court profitable controversy on this grave matter wherever possible. How many readers are aware, for instance, that prior to the papal tour of England in 1982,. Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Worlock wrote John Paul a joint communique insisting that he refrain from all particular mention of contraception in his addresses. Consequently, limiting himself to a few passing references to the "contraceptive mentality," England remains the only country in the world in which the Holy Father has failed to mention and accentuate the intrinsic evils of contraception per se - which extraordinary turn of events moved one percipient, if snide, Anglican prelate to ask whether contraception was a sin in Ireland but not in England? Now I say that the Cardinal's train of thought is entirely, if subconsciously, consistent in this regard because contraception and homosexuality come from the same stable and ambivalence towards one naturally compromises your view of the other. As Rev. Richard Kirker, General Secretary of the Gay Christian Movement in England has stated: "...the roles of ordained minister and practising homosexual are quite consistent since this logically flowed from the Anglican Church's radical alteration of its teaching as to the purpose of the sexual act through its changed teaching on contraception at the 1930 Lambeth Conference."

Father McCarthy's critique in this issue, taken from the Canadian Orator, was actually a response to the fact that rather than reiterating Cardinal Ratzinger's definitive statements, the, Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops preferred to quote from Cardinal Hume's erroneous note about Church teaching on homosexuality in a letter of 16 April 1996 to the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien - which communication assisted his government to pass an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act to include "sexual orientation" as a prohibited ground for discrimination. The frightening flow-on effects of this amendment for both Canadian society and its runaway local Church. already in thrall to homosexuals and feminists, cannot be overstated. The Canadian Bishops were among the first to sell out Humanae Vitae upon its release in 1968 and it is telling that all these years later they have undermined Rome once more on the related issue of homosexuality while making common cause with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. Certainly, as with the Canadian bishops, Cardinal Hume has so far stopped short of condoning homosexual acts, yet in somersaulting over Vatican declarations to accommodate their "orientation" - due, it seems, to half-hearted submission to the essence of Humanae Vitae - he is, in effect, rehabilitating homosexuality at a time when compassion demands that every possible opportunity be taken to counter the media's disinformation with moral and factual truths about this lifestyle choice and its deadly social impact.

One wonders how long it took Bishop Reginald Cawcutt, Auxiliary Bishop of Cape Town, to descend from similar perfunctory acceptance of Humanae Vitae to the blurring of distinctions between hetero- and homosexual "tendencies" to this tragi-comic hotchpotch of heresy he articulated in The Southem Cross, South Africa's national Catholic weekly, on 21 April 1996:

"…no scripture scholar these days sees the condemnation of Sodom as based on anything sexual, but rather on inhospitality ... The Church does not condemn the homosexual act as being unnatural. That would be a bad choice of words. For homosexuals it would be a natural act - just as a heterosexual act would be an unnatural one for them. But I would accept homosexuality as being abnormal, since the norm is obviously heterosexuality... Modern scientific studies I have come across indicate that homosexuality is a genetic thing."

Such mind-numbing arrogance, ignorance and treason merely underlies the inexorable and catastrophic descent depicted in this article, to wit: blurring clear doctrinal and moral outlines of the Faith produces "non-Catholic thinking within Catholicism" and precipitates the Judas complex whereby, for example, treacherous episcopal succour is afforded to governments enacting legislation which has as its intent the protection of behaviour "to which", Rome states, "no one has any conceivable right." Nor should we overlook the fact that if Cardinal Hume is well advanced on his own journey down the same slippery slope as Bishop Cawcutt, the range of his promotion and propagation of confusion about key beliefs extends well beyond the vital issues surrounding the reproductive faculties of men and women. A clue to his non-understanding of the key concept of collegiality, for instance, was given at the 1996 Faith of Our Fathers conference where he posited that by virtue of his episcopal consecration the local ordinary is ipso facto "in communion" with the Pope. I doubt that the Cardinal would very much like to be reminded of the clear distinction between this wishful thinking and Catholic dogma - which says that each bishop is the legitimate chief pastor of his diocese, provided he be in communion with the Pope i.e. that he hold the same beliefs and moral laws as the Pope and that he be subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope. And I suspect he would positively choke with lordly, indignation if informed that the Pope, as universal Pastor of the Church, is also pastor of each diocese in his own right - which includes Westminster! But that, like so much more that could be said about the arrogant dismissal or reinterpretation of Vatican directives and papal pleas by an English epsicopate acting like a collegial law unto itself, is another story for another time.

Into the Consoling Arms of the Establishment
Ignoring not only Roman documents themselves but the wealth of medical and scientific literature that back them up on issues like sex-education and homosexuality, Cardinal Hume, like Judas, is doubtless convinced that his way is good for the Church as he conceives the Church to be. As Malachi Martin observes: "It seems obvious that all those prelates and priests who have gone along with the de-Catholicising of people's beliefs and moral behaviour do believe that they are making the Church more relevant, more practical, more in tune with the modern mind, more understandable and, therefore, acceptable. The parallel with the Judas Complex seems complete." Indeed. Back amidst the Twelve, the Prince of this world has merely broadened his apostolic appeal. Kulturkampf II and the Second Reformation have met and married.

Yet although the Judas complex explains a lot, it is not, of course, the full story. As ever, the acrid stench of lassitude hangs heavily over this rapprochement. Like Germany's Centre Party at the turn of the century after Windhorst's demise, British episcopates have, in addition to their sincere treachery, simply wearied of swimming against the tide. Their craven capitulation to the sex-ed crowd and slavish mimicking of spurious pop-slogans of the "single issue," "sexual orientation," "homophobia" variety, are outward signs of inner exhaustion. The Kulturkampf has worn them down. The Shepherds, as Richard Schaefer remarked of the Centre Party, are "eager after so many years on the outside to finally have the door opened and be welcome." If Germans seek another Windhorst, how the English crave a Manning.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES

(1) Especially scandalous in this regard is the ad nauseam rpetition of Kinsey's fraudulent, long discredited claims that 10% of the population are homosexual when an array of surveys and studies, including those from aggressively pro-homosexual institutes, place the "best and fair number" at between only 1-2% - Homosexualitv: A Disease and For Gays A Cult, Samuel A. Nigro, M.D., Social Justice Review, 1994.

(2) A Family Research Institute study of over 6,700 obituaries in sixteen homosexual newspapers in the U.S. found that the median age of homosexual men dying of AIDS was 39 years old. The median age of death for other homosexual men, from all other causes, was only 41 years old, and often linked to suicide and violent death. It had been written that 30% of homosexuals between the ages of 14 and 21 had attempted suicide. It has been estimated that less than 3% of all practising homosexuals live beyond 55 years of age. Little wonder when male homosexuals in the U.S. are said to average over 500 partners in their lifetime - ibid.

(3) Claims that homosexuals molest children at no higher rate than heterosexuals, for example, are patently false. Exhaustive studies - whether indexed by population reports of molestation, pedophile convictions or teacher-pupil assaults - indicate that although homosexuals constitute perhaps 2% of the, adult population, they account for between 20-40% of all molestations of children. Not every homosexual is a child molester. But enough gays do molest children to the extent that the risk of a homosexual molesting a child is 10 to 20 times greater than that of a heterosexual. - Child Molestation and Homosexuality, Family Research Institute, 1993.

(4) See "On the Origins and Treatment of Homosexuality" in this issue.

(5) I add in passing that this video includes the disedifying spectacle of a young girl tearfully informing a boy how she lost her virginity in the back of a car, in flagrant disregard for Pius XI's stern and commonsense warning, reiterated by the Vatican in The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality, that such "foolhardy initiation and precautionary instruction" corrupts youth rather than forearming it - like trying to douse the inferno with methanol.

(6) Writing to the Thessalonians about the universal apostasy at the end of time.

(7)Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1 October 1986; Some Considerations Concerning the Catholic Response to the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to all American bishops, June 1992.

 

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