THE VORTEX Moving the Needle September 2, 2014 Hello everyone and welcome to The Vortex, where lies and falsehoods are trapped and exposed. I’m Michael Voris. It is the duty of every Catholic these days who considers himself faithful to try and move the needle—to become a counter-revolutionary INSIDE the Church. If you are the sort of Catholic who has been asleep in the pews at any point during the past fifty years—as everyone who works here at ChurchMilitant.TV once was themselves —don’t feel bad or weirded out. You are like the vast majority of Catholics who have been lulled into a sense of complacency and indifference by leaders in the Church. Among many of these leaders, the older ones were the revolutionaries, or the disciples of the revolutionaries, and they have taken control of many aspects of Church life. That was a generation or so ago—stretching back to the 1970s to 1990s. Their names are well known: men like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco, Cardinal John Dearden of Detroit, Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee (an openly active homosexual), Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, New York, Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester, New York, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, DC. These were the marquee name destroyers of Catholic tradition, but they had MANY other allies in the US episcopate and lower clergy in those halcyon years. In diocese after diocese, they tore the Church apart, introducing innovation after innovation meant to dislodge the Church from its traditional moorings. For various reasons particular to each of them, they had completely different views of the Church than Jesus Christ does and they put plans in place to change it. From the 1970s–2000s, during which time they had control of the seminaries, they produced a crop of priests, some of whom have since gone on to be today’s bishops—and many of these men are unaware of the indoctrination they received while young seminarians. Many of the men ordained during those years were selected specifically for all the wrong reasons—they were homosexual, or weak, or ambitious—and many others were rejected for just the opposite reasons—they were heterosexual, strong, and humble. By and large the first group was comprised of heterodox men, or at least ones who may have been orthodox but severely lacking in the testosterone category when it came to defending orthodoxy. And it was these, the heirs of the revolution, who largely control the pulpits and wear the miters today in the United States. Of course there are exceptions to all of this—solid holy leaders like Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone in San Francisco, Archbishop Alexander Sample in Portland, Oregon, Bishop Thomas Olmsted in Phoenix, Bishop Thomas Paprocki in Springfield, Illinois, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne / South Bend, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, Bishop Robert Vasa of Santa Rosa, California, Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and quite a few others—but many of these men and those who are like-minded are in relatively lesser dioceses, and none of them are cardinals. They do not occupy THE premier bully pulpits like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who turns a blind eye to massive abuses in his archdiocese of New York; Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who seems to think the only sin is related to immigration; Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, who continues to publicly distort canon law on the issue of distribution of Holy Communion to notorious public sinners; Houston’s Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who allows his cathedral to be used for ordinations of women clergy for Protestant sects and openly defends it under the guise of false ecumenism, while giving the cold shoulder to local pro-life Catholics; Detroit’s Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who continues to permit the world’s longest running gay Mass each week right under his nose, while ignoring for years the pleas of Catholics to clamp down on local Catholic hospitals that perform sterilizations, staff abortionists, and hand out contraception like candy; Atlanta’s archbishop Gregory Wilton, a direct disciple of Chicago’s Joseph Bernardin, who has introduced much liberalism into his diocese while drawing up plans for a multi-million dollar residence for himself. THESE are the men who run the Church on a national level in the United States. They and their allies are on all the important committees and boards—and they continue to promote or permit a view of the Church inconsistent with Her Tradition. They were taught in their younger years that the Church is some kind of social agency whose mission is to bring about heaven on earth. With that mission in mind, two things happen: they downplay traditional Church teachings and give great latitude to innovation —or at the very least continue to allow abusive innovations, some of them in direct violation of the documents of Vatican II. For example, when is the last time any of these men launched a concerted effort—a diocese-wide, all-hands-on-deck, everyone-get-on-board program—to decry the evils of contraception, which has ruined the Catholic Church in the West? But they will fall all over themselves to create committees and form programs that deal with ecumenism or immigration—and certainly fund-raising. On that score, if the amount of time spent on raising tens of millions of dollars were the determining factor for gaining salvation, then this current crop would supplant the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in the order of holiness. That would all be fine—except they take much of that money and pump it back into a system that does little else but keep the establishment chugging along, the status quo in place, and the machine well oiled. But little by little, various Catholics are waking up to this disaster, this mockery of the Church—and it is a mockery. Holy Communion in the hand, altar girls, rock band Masses, ugly, uninspiring church buildings, a collapse of Catholic education, a failure to preach on anything significant or meaningful or even truthful in many cases, a near- complete sell-out to the democratic party in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in government money for “fighting poverty.” In short, the men who ordained them to the priesthood and consecrated them to the episcopate brought revolution to the Church, and these men are maintaining it. Mother Angelica, who started EWTN in 1981, is one who may have not realized early on the extent of the destruction the Church was undergoing back then. Many well- intentioned people didn’t—just as is the case today. For those Catholics who attend Mass weekly, which by the way is only one in four, their usual formal experience with the Church is just Mass at their parish on Sundays. They have almost no connection with or understanding of what goes on the other six days a week, on a more macro- or global level. Life gets busy and they simply trust the shepherds will do their job. But just as Mother Angelica discovered, that trust is often misplaced. In 1993, during the Denver World Youth Day, the committee in charge organized a Stations of the Cross performance where the role of Jesus was played by a woman. Mother Angelica went bananas on the air, justifiably and understandably. That one incident concretized for her all the little symptoms she had been seeing here and there all over the Church in America. For the rest of this week, we are going to be analyzing Mother’s comments and seeing what has changed in the twenty-one years since she experienced her watershed moment and declared war on liberal and weak bishops and their staffs. And we are going to take a close look at the question of just how true EWTN is being to Mother’s style of confrontation and calling out. Has the network, in many ways, become the very sort of thing Mother battled against so strongly during her active days? Has EWTN been taken over by the Church of Nice? GOD Love you. I’m Michael Voris..