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Thank you for joining us for this Dispatch; I am your host Michael Voris.
In scripture, Our Lord admonishes some of His listeners for not being able to read the signs of the times.
Sadly, many in the Church today cannot, or will not; they refuse to, read the handwriting on the wall.
This has greatly contributed to the faith being derailed.
This derailing of the faith, beginning with Martin Luther’s revolution and culminating in the implementation of misrepresentations of the Vatican II have brought us to this, a train wreck of global proportions.
Lending to the disaster in America, is the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress held at the Anaheim convention center in California every year.
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The reason this event in particular is so dangerous is that, unlike the two organizations we will be covering later in this Dispatch, Call to Ac- tion and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, who do noth- ing to hide their hatred of the Church and its teachings, the REC pro- motes soft peddled Catholicism and mixes it in with outright heresy.
The REC often employs token speakers at its events to give the appear- ance of, at the very least, balance.
As window dressing, REC organizers often invite one or two solidly acceptable speakers each year: Father Benedict Groeschel, founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal; philosopher Janet Smith, defend- er of Humanae Vitae; author Peter Kreeft of Boston College; and Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, the president of Gonzaga University, have all ad- dressed congress audiences. In 2006, both Father Spitzer and chastity speaker Pam Stenzel spoke.
But these are the exceptions, major speakers are consistently drawn from the pool where Call to Action finds its headliners.
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Speakers such as, Sister Fran Ferder and Father Timothy Radcliffe.
Sr. Fran Ferder teaches that the homosexual lifestyle is not a deviance, but a healthy alternative lifestyle.
Sr, Ferder regularly presents at the REC.
Sister Ferder is co-director of TARA: Therapy and Renewal Associates and co-author of the book "Tender Fires: The Spiritual Promise of Sex- uality" in which she says things such as, quote
"Whether we are married or single, young or old, divorced or remar- ried, male or female, gay or straight, celibate by choice or by circum- stance, each of us is called to make the long and arduous journey of claiming our sexuality with reverence and integrating it with responsi- bility"
And, quote,
"Spirituality without sexuality is a phantom."
One of the workshops Sister Ferder has run at the REC is titled, “How Can We Become Sexually Liberated? Reclaiming the Bond Between Christian Love and Justice.”
There has never been a break in the bond between true Christian Love and Justice. These types of phrases are code words for promotion of the homosexual lifestyle.
The other speaker we have mentioned, Father Timothy Radcliffe, has some very concerning beliefs and has made several statements that raise massive red flags.
At the REC in 2006, Father Radcliffe, urged the audience to "let our imaginations be stretched" by watching Brokeback Mountain. Brokeback Mountain is a movie about two men who engage in sodomy during their time together herding sheep on a mountain.
The movie focuses on this event and the subsequent fallout.
Fr. Radcliffe was the Master of the order of Preachers, the Dominicans, from 1992 to 2001
Here is the full quote:
“We begin by standing beside gay people.... And this means letting our imaginations be stretched open to watching Brokeback Mountain, reading gay novels, having gay friends...and listening with them as they listen to the Lord."
Randy Engel reports in her book The Rite of Sodomy -- a must read -- that Radcliffe issued a letter on February 25, 1998, to his Dominican brothers worldwide on the subject of "gay" religious. Radcliffe said on the acceptance of homosexual candidates to the Order that, quote,
"Our communities must be places in which there is no accusation...."
Engel interprets this to mean: "a warning against in-house whistleblowers who reveal clerical sexual misconduct and criminal acts by their fellow Dominicans to superiors or public authorities and law enforcement officers."
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In England, Radcliffe has celebrated Mass on more than one occasion for the openly dissenting homosexual group "Roman Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement”, now operating under the name "Soho Masses Pastoral Council", who hold Masses in the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Mayfair, London.
In the past, Radcliffe has been lauded and feted by English bishops despite complaints from Catholics concerned about his defense of practicing homosexuals.
<< Cam 1 >> Another Speaker, Father Richard Sparks, said in one of his addresses, "If you can't fantasize Mary and Joseph having sex - even if you want- ed to say - okay, the Church says, 'ever-virgin' - okay, I leave that in place. I'm not out to change that. Church says, obviously for Jesus, Mary was still a virgin - because it's like a miraculous conception - okay, where did all those brothers and sisters come from? They're cousins? Where did all those brothers and sisters come from? Joseph had children from a previous marriage? Okaaaay. But if somebody says, 'Do you think Joseph ever wanted to jump her bones? Do you think Joseph ever thought, 'God, why can't we consummate this thing?' Now, all I'm saying is - even if they didn't have sex, did they ever neck? or did they maybe cuddle and snuggle? Did he ever sorta fondle his wife? Did she ever kinda fondle him?" Talk about EVIL!
While we are sure there are some speakers at the REC that are in full accordance with Church teachings, if you do not have extensive knowledge of apologetics and the true Catholic faith, going to the Congress is a very bad idea.
If you know that even ONE speaker will be presenting on ideas contrary to Church teaching, for instance, the practice of liturgical dancing, which is not the norm in the West and its liturgy, you need to analyze EVERY SINGLE THING anyone presenting at the Congress is saying.
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Again, for the record, liturgical dancing is not allowed in the U.S. and this year, 2014, will see three speakers teaching on this subject, therefore, you have a minimum of three bad sessions
IF you decide to go, take notes, and when you get home, look up everything to be sure that you were told the truth before you believe anything anyone said.
Both Sr. Ferder and Father Radcliffe will be speaking at the 2014 REC held in March.
Masses at the REC are notorious for their “innovation” and modernist bent.
Face it, when you need an electric bass and dancing cheerleaders to keep your audience from fidgeting or drifting away, you're admitting the Main Act is a flop from the get-go.
Any cursory search on youtube will reveal what we are talking about.
REC isn’t alone amidst the rubble of the Church.
Let’s look into the Call to Action organization. << Cam 1 >>
Call to Action, from which many REC speakers are drawn, is the chief umbrella organization for Catholic dissenters in the US and, according to their own claims, has some 20,000 members.
Most of them well into senior citizenship.
Many of the Religious Orders that frequent CtA events , who were part of the radical modernization push in the Church back in the 60’s, have withered up and are close to death.
The Call to Action organization is so heretical you hardlyknow where to begin, and around the CtA movement has grown up a legion of supportive organizations, each with inter-related ambitions.
This creates tremendous confusion and has, in the past, generally protected the parent movement against serious crackdown.
<< Cam 2 >> Here are just some of the errors and heresies promulgated by Call to Action, repudiating the Catholic Church: 1. Christ has not protected The Church from error throughout the centuries, therefore, it has been wrong for centuries on a whole host of doctrinal and moral teachings. 2. The Holy Scriptures are full of serious moral and theological distortions and errors. 3. The human conscience is a higher authority than the official position of the Church on doctrine and moral teaching. 4. At Mass, there is no miraculous transubstantiation at the consecration thus one does not need Holy Orders to consecrate the bread and wine. "Real Presence" is only in a spiritual sense as protestants hold. 5. Women, and indeed any baptized member of the Church, should be able to preside over the Mass. 6. Those who speak for Call to Action make up the authentic Magisterium of the Church. 8. The Church should approve and bless homosexual or lesbian couples 9. The crucifix and the male image of Jesus as Messiah/Redeemer represents a perversion of the truth. 10. There is no Holy Trinity, no triune God. Instead we have the goddess Sophia to worship which the Judeo-Christian religious traditions have suppressed. 11. There is no clear distinction between God, nature and humanity.
Worship of self is the final object of this Frankenstein Christian/New Age religion now filtering into our parishes.
Call to Action is dangerous and thankfully, in pockets here and there, this has been fully acknowledged.
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In the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, for instance, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz warned Catholics that membership in the organization Call to Action would result in excommunication saying in a statement is- sued in May of 1996, quote,
"All Catholics in and of the Diocese of Lincoln, are forbidden to be members of the organizations and groups listed below. Membership in these organizations is always perilous to the Catholic Faith and most often is totally incompatible with the Catholic Faith: Planned Parent- hood, Hemlock Society, Call to Action, Call to Action Nebraska, St. Michael the Archangel Chapel, Freemasons, Job's Daughters, DeMolay, Eastern Star, Rainbow Girls, and Catholics for a Free Choice. Any Catholics in and of the Diocese of Lincoln who attain or retain mem- bership in any of the above listed organizations . . . are by that very fact . . . under interdict and absolutely forbidden to receive Holy Commu- nion."
In a letter to the Lincoln bishop, made public Dec. 8, 2006, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, representing the Vatican, upheld Bishop Bruske- witz rulings.
We called the Diocese of Lincoln and spoke to the Chancellor, Father Daniel Rayer and he said that the interdict and excommunications still stand to this day.
Sadly, on the other side of the spectrum, seven months after the excom- munication of Nebraska Call to Action participants, Bishops Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, whom we will cover in an upcoming Dispatch, and Raymond Lucker (Lukk-er) of New Ulm, Minnesota were speakers at the National Call to Action Conference.
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The average person who observes these obviously different position propably wonder where the other bishops stand in these matters.
Archbishop Michael Sheehan of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe provides a fairly typical example.
Archbishop Sheehan formally condemned the position of Call to Action on all the main issues.
Priestly celibacy, women’s ordination, homosexuality, etc.
However, despite the appearance of the Archbishop’s firm articulation, the Call to Action hub of New Mexico continued to operate on the grounds of Holy Family Parish in Albuquerque New Mexico until about 2005, almost 10 years after Bishop Bruskewitz formally excom- municated members of CtA from his Diocese.
The CtA center was moved right down the street and continues to protest Church teaching.
Speakers at the Center have not only taught that Scripture carries no condemnation of sodomy, but that on the contrary, Jesus has blessed and approved the sexually-engaged homosexual relationship.
New Mexican Call to Action supporters continue to do as they please, and unlike Bishop Bruskewitz, Archbishop Sheehan has issued no for- mal excommunications of the group.
This is very confusing situation for faithful Catholics.
We will end our presentation of CtA by presenting this quote from one of their websites: “We call upon the Church to discard the discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy and to open the Priesthood to women and married men...so that the Eucharist may continue to be the center of the spiritual life of all Catholics.”
We will now turn our attention toward the Leadership Conference of Women Religious or the LCWR.
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LCWR was founded in 1956 and approved by the Vatican as an umbrella organization representing sisters and nuns in the U.S.
Its over 1500 members belong to congregations representing over 80 percent of the 59,000 Catholic women religious in the United States.
Since the 1960s, the LCWR has become the de facto representative of the far left in the U.S. Catholic Church, with its membership dedicated to, in the words of the CDF, “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith,” and “policies of corporate dissent,” from Catholic teaching.
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For example, the LCWR publicly expressed in 1977 its refusal to assent to the teaching of the reservation of priestly ordination to men.
This public refusal has never been formally rescinded.
Their dissent has gone on for decades.
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On October 7, 1979, Sister Theresa Kane R.S.M., former president of the LCWR, issued a formal plea during Pope John Paul II's Apostolic visit to the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Take a listen:
Did you see that?
Sister Kane defied the Pope to his face and asked that He change the dogmatic teachings of the Church.
If it weren’t so sad you might be tempted to laugh. LCWR speakers explore themes such as global spirituality, the new cosmology, earth-justice and eco-feminism in ways that are frequently ambiguous, dubious or even erroneous with respect to the Christian faith.
While the LCWR upholds Catholic social teaching in some areas, it is notably silent when it comes to two of the major moral challenges of our time: the right to life of the unborn, and the God-given meaning of marriage between one man and one woman.
During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan proposed by the Oba- ma administration, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration and other Democrats, particularly Catholic Demoncrats, in the battle over health care.
By order of the Vatican an assessment was undertaken to clarify doctrinal issues and the result was a call to the LCWR to get into conformity with the Church.
As you can imagine all hell broke loose among the dissidents, claiming that the Papacy was unjustly discriminating against them.
Phrases such as Patriarchal Tyranny, investigation, and Inquisition abounded.
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The assessment was headed by Bishop Leonard Blair from Toledo Ohio who had this to say,
“The biggest distortion of all is the claim that the CDF and the bishops are attacking or criticizing the life and work of our Catholic sisters in the United States. The word investigation suggests an attempt to uncover things that might not be known. In reality, what the CDF commissioned was a doctrinal “assessment,” an appraisal of materials which are readily available to anyone who cares to read them on the LCWR website and in other LCWR published resources.”
Some of the issues he pointed out involved speakers given a free reign to speak as they wished at LCWR events. Here is a quote from one of their past keynote speakers, Sister Sandra Schneiders: “It can no longer be taken for granted that the members of a given congregation share the same faith.” Another keynote speaker, Sister Laurie Brink, noted without any indication of disapproval that some women religious were, “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus.” Yet another keynote speaker, Father Michael Crosby, observed that the Vatican claims that God taught women cannot be ordained, saying, quote, “That god is literally ‘unbelievable, it is a false god; it cannot be worshiped.” Bishop Blair submitted reports to the CDF and engaged in correspondence with the LCWR during 2009 and 2010. The documentation collected during the Assessment was submitted to the CDF in January, 2011, and then given, together with the CDF's recommendation that steps be taken to reform the LCWR, to the Pope. The Pope approved the CDF's decision and the CDF began its implementation after the submission of the Assessment's Final Report in December 2011. The findings of the Vatican’s assessment, unsurprisingly, identified the doctrinal deficiencies present within the LCWR and set in motion a process by which the LCWR will be brought out of the “crisis” they are currently in, saying, quote,
“On the doctrinal level, this crisis…leads… to a loss of a constant and lively sense of the Church among some Religious…. While there has been a great deal of work on the part of LCWR promoting issues of social justice in harmony with the Church’s social doctrine, it is silent on the right to life from conception to natural death…. Moreover, occasional public statements by the LCWR that disagree with or challenge positions taken by the Bishops, who are the Church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals, are not compatible with its purpose” The Catholic sisterhoods in the U.S. have been in CRISIS since the closing of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 which ushered in a maelstrom of change. << Steady Cam>> This change, while frequently lauded as “prophetic” by the LCWR sis- ters themselves, has seen the near-total collapse of the Catholic reli- gious life, and after almost 50 years, the closure or effective seculariza- tion of hundreds, if not thousands, of schools, nursing homes, hospitals, colleges and other Catholic charitable institutions, including convents. In the intervening decades, while new vocations have become more rare, the religious orders have turned their attention largely to political interests, with the sisters themselves focusing on an array of liberal and secular causes. The median age of women in LCWR institutes is now 74, and many of the LCWR-represented congregations are no longer accepting appli- cants, choosing instead to merge with other orders or shut down their operations entirely, proving Our Lord right when He said that all who do not gather to Him will scatter, and elsewhere when he spoke of vines that wither when cut off from Him. << Cam 1 >> In April 2012, the Vatican released the findings from the assessment.
The Vatican chose Archbishop James Sartain of the Archdiocese of Seattle to oversee changes in the LCWR to reform its statutes, programs, and affiliations to conform more closely to "the teachings and discipline of the Church."
They were been given up to five years to revise the group’s statutes, ap- prove of every speaker at the group’s public programs and replace a handbook the group used to facilitate dialogue on matters that the Vati- can says is settled.
While not exhaustive, this taken into account some of the damage that has caused this Catholic Trainwreck.
The REC, CtA, and LCWR are all representative of the Crisis in the Church, and we here at ChurchMilitant.TV thank you for tuning in and staying informed.
As they say, “Knowing is half the battle”
That’s all for now, with this Dispatch from the Front Lines, I’m Michael Voris