Killing, repressing and imprisoning heretics is always wrong

Believe it or not, there is a controversy in Christendom even in our time, and particularly in the circles of traditional Catholicism about killing, silencing and imprisoning heretics. After the Second Vatican Council issued the document Dignitatis humanae in 1965, which made this repression no longer officially politick, some traditional Catholics termed it a betrayal of the ways of the old Church or even of the Gospel.

Multitudes of people have left the Roman Catholic Church in past ages due to its facilitation of the imprisonment and execution of "heretics" by Catholic civil authorities. Less notorious is the fact that many Protestant churches, such as the Anglican, Lutheran and Presbyterian, are also guilty of similar crimes, including against Catholic dissenters. Other than Roman Catholic theologians, the strongest justification for the imprisonment and execution of "heretics," was offered by the Calvinist theologian Samuel Rutherford (also spelled "Rutherfurd"), Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, in his book of 410 pages, A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London, 1649).

Here below is a statement from a representative of a very old church, the Greek Orthodox Church. Be certain to ponder the last paragraph which quotes a truly Christ-like, truly ancient and truly inspiring truth, articulated by St. John Chrysostom.

"WE ALL WORSHIP THE SAME GOD" 

By Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston          

 This article was written some years ago for the benefit of people who belonged to various jurisdictions of "World Orthodoxy," whose bishops and clergy were active participants in Ecumenism and who were teaching their adherents that "we all worship the same God." With some slight editorial modifications, here is the text:    

 In discussing this issue with friends and acquaintances, the following "parable" might be useful in clarifying our thoughts.

There is, indeed, only one true God, as the Holy Scriptures and our Holy Orthodox Faith affirm, but not all men worship Him; nor is it simply a matter of different peoples calling Him by various names, as some suppose. In various passages of the Old and New Testaments, He has described Himself to us, as far as it is possible for us to comprehend; these descriptions exclude many of the attributes which, for example, Hindus and others ascribe to Him. In the holy Prophets of Israel, God has many witnesses who foretold His incarnation and His sojourn among us. He has become man for us in time and space, and given us teachings about His Person and His relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit (hence, we know that He is one God in Trinity). So, as we said, we know that there is only one true God and that He has certain identifiable attributes. 

Likewise, there is only one Father Neketas Palassis in the whole universe. He is unique, since, presumably, only he has his unique DNA and other unique characteristics. Now — paraphrasing Father Michael Azkoul's example* — suppose you wanted to meet Father Neketas and you asked me to describe him to you. If I were to tell you that he is seven feet tall, weighs 300 pounds, has a red beard, green eyes, and speaks only Swahili with a French accent, and lives in Lompoc, California, would you ever be able to locate him and make his acquaintance — if you accepted my description of him as true?** 

In like manner, if you accepted a wrong description of God as being true, would you be able to find and acknowledge Him? For example, if someone were to tell you that God highly esteems men who are suicide bombers who kill innocent men, women and children; or that He approves of the "honor killing" of women; or that He reincarnates people as cats, dogs, or fish (1); or that He is a Tibetan monk and He teaches that nothing has any meaning; or that He is the Great Pumpkin Who rises into the sky from the Sacred Pumpkin Patch on Halloween night — would you ever be able to find the real God? — if you believed any of these false descriptions of Him?      

In Church terminology, these false descriptions are called "heresies."        

Further, it is important to know that, in the teachings of its Saints, the Orthodox Church — unlike some denominations or sects -- does not condone the extermination, persecution, or condemnation to death of individuals who disagree with the Church's teachings. For example, St. John Chrysostom, one of the Church's foremost preachers, teaches us the following:

 I do not persecute the heretic bodily, but I wage war against him with words — and not even against the heretic, but only against his heresy: I do not disdain the man; it is the error I hate, and I seek to pull him out of it….I am accustomed to being persecuted, not to persecute others….Thus did Christ triumph; He did not crucify, but rather it was He that was crucified. He did not smite others, but was Himself smitten. [PG 50, 701]* (Emphasis supplied).

(End quote from Metropolitan Ephraim of Boston)

 (1) Footnote added by Hoffman: Orthodox Judaism believes in gilgul (reincarnation). Cf. Judaism Discovered.

***

Pope John Paul "the Great" and his crime syndicate: Part I, Fr. Maciel

Contents

1. Investigative reporting by Jason Berry

2. "The Mission of Father Maciel"

by Alma Guillermoprieto

3. Michael Hoffman's Afterword 

_______________________________________

"Money paved way for Maciel's influence in the Vatican"

Jason Berry, April 6, 2010 (excerpt)

"How Fr. Maciel built his empire"

Jason Berry, Apr. 12, 2010 (excerpt)

Nov. 30, 2004: Pope John Paul II gives his apostolic blessing to Rev. Fr. Marcial Maciel

...Maciel was a morphine addict who sexually abused at least 20 Legion seminarians from the 1940s to the '60s. Bishop John McGann of Rockville Centre, N.Y., sent a letter by a former Legion priest with detailed allegations to the Vatican in 1976, 1978 and 1989 through official channels. Nothing happened.

Maciel began fathering children in the early 1980s -- three of them by two Mexican women, with reports of a third family with three children in Switzerland, according to El Mundo in Madrid, Spain.

Concealing his web of relations, Maciel raised a fortune from wealthy backers, and ingratiated himself with church officials in Rome...Maciel's chief supporter (was) Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006...

Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend. The Italian newsweekly L'espresso estimates the Legion's assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal....

In 1994 Pope John Paul II heralded him (Maciel) as "an efficacious guide to youth." John Paul continued praising Maciel after a 1997 Hartford Courant investigation by Gerald Renner and this writer exposed Maciel's drug habits and abuse of seminarians.

In 1998, eight ex-Legionaries filed a canon law case to prosecute him in then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's tribunal. For the next six years, Maciel had the staunch support of three pivotal figures: Sodano; Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; and Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish secretary of John Paul.

During those years, Sodano pressured Ratzinger not to prosecute Maciel...In 2004, John Paul -- ignoring the canon law charges against Maciel -- honored him in a Vatican ceremony in which he entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem's Notre Dame Center, an education and conference facility...

John Paul's support gave Maciel credibility as he moved with seamless ease among the ultra-wealthy. At a 2004 fundraiser in New York, a video cameraman filmed him running his fingers down the tuxedo lapel of the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a major Legion supporter. Besides donations, Legion schools in Mexico with high tuitions and low salaries subsidized the operations in Rome...Legion supporters ranged from Steve McEveety, producer of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (Legion priests advised on the film), to Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza and Ave Maria University in Florida. Others who supported the Legion include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who spoke at Legion conferences...and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who wrote that he believed with "moral certainty" that the charges against Maciel were "false and malicious."

Harvard Law Professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon taught at Regina Apostolorum Athenaeum, the Legion's university in Rome, and advised in the planning that led to the order's first university in America, University of Sacramento, Calif. In a 2002 letter for the Legion Web site she scoffed at the allegations against him and praised Maciel's "radiant holiness" and "the success of Regnum Christi [the order's lay wing] and the Legionaries of Christ in advancing the New Evangelization."...

William Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, defended Maciel in a letter to the Hartford Courant, after a 1997 article that exposed Maciel's history of pedophilia.

Two Legion priests are TV news celebrities: Jonathan Morris on FOX, and Tom Williams, a theology professor at the Legion university in Rome, for NBC during Katie Couric's coverage of the 2005 conclave and again with Couric at CBS....(we) made repeated efforts to seek comment from the three cardinals who allegedly received substantial payments under Maciel's auspices, by speaking with Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi on the telephone and via follow-up e-mails. Besides calls to the residences of the two cardinals in Rome, the paper made an extensive effort to contact now-Cardinal Dziwisz, in Krakow, Poland. Iowana Hoffman, a Polish journalist in New York, translated a letter with questions for the cardinal, faxed it to Dziwisz's press secretary, but was told that the cardinal "does not have time for an interview."

Sodano, the former secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, and Martínez Somalo, former papal chamberlain, did not respond to messages left with Lombardi. A receptionist who answered Sodano's residential number said to call the Vatican. The woman answering Martínez Somalo's phone, when asked in Spanish if he would speak with a journalist, said emphatically, " No entrevista! " -- "No interview."


Had Sodano, Martínez Somalo and Dziwisz responded, the cardinals might have answered one question that hovers over this baroque financial drama: How do Vatican officials decide what to report, and to whom, if they are given large sums of money? The Vatican has no constitution or statutes that would make such transactions illegal. But those familiar with the strategy say it was Maciel's goal to insulate himself from the Vatican's archaic system of secret tribunals by making friends with men in power. For most of his life, it worked.

...The Legion constitution included the highly controversial Private Vows, by which each Legionary swore never to speak ill of Maciel, or the superiors, and to report to them anyone who uttered criticism. The vows basically rewarded spying as an expression of faith, and cemented the Legionaries' lockstep obedience to the founder....

Dziwisz was John Paul's closest confidante, a Pole who had a bedroom in the private quarters of the Apostolic Palace. Maciel spent years cultivating Dziwisz's support. Under Maciel, the Legion steered streams of money to Dziwisz in his function as gatekeeper for the pope's private Masses in the Apostolic Palace....such exchanges are not considered bribes in the view of Nicholas Cafardi, a prominent canon lawyer and the dean emeritus of Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh. Cafardi, who has done work as a legal consultant for many bishops, responded to a general question about large donations to priests or church officials in the Vatican. Under church law (canon 1302), a large financial gift to an official in Rome "would qualify as a pious cause," explains Cafardi. He spoke in broad terms, saying that such funds should be reported to the cardinal-vicar for Rome. An expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported.


...Maciel wanted to buy power," said the priest who facilitated the Mexican family's opera carita to Dziwisz. He did not use the word bribery, but in explaining why he left the Legion, morality was at issue. "It got to a breaking point for me [over] a culture of lying [within the order]. The superiors know they're lying and they know that you know," he said. "They lie about money, where it comes from, where it goes, how it's given."

When Martínez Somalo, a Spaniard, became head of the congregation overseeing religious in 1994, Maciel dispatched this priest to Martínez Somalo's home. The young priest carried an envelope thick with cash. "I didn't bat an eye," he recalled. "I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said goodbye. ... It was a way of making friends, insuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs."...Martínez Somalo's office took a new name: Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. But the job description stayed the same. From 1994 to 2004, the Spanish cardinal's duties included investigating any complaints about religious orders or their leaders. In the files of that congregation, according to several former Legionaries, sat letters that dated back many years, accusing Maciel of abusing seminarians. When the wrenching accounts of nine seminary-victims of Maciel made news in the 1997 Hartford Courant, Martínez Somalo did nothing. That was the reaction throughout the Roman curia.
John Paul named Martínez Somalo to the post of carmelango, or chamberlain, the official in charge of the conclave when a pope is elected.

For years Maciel had Legion priests dole out envelopes with cash and donate gifts to officials in the curia. In the days leading up to Christmas, Legion seminarians spent hours packaging the baskets with expensive bottles of wine, rare brandy, and cured Spanish hams that alone cost upward of $1,000 each. Priests involved in the gifts and larger cash exchanges say that in hindsight they view Maciel's strategy as akin to an insurance policy, to protect himself should he be exposed and to position the Legion as an elite presence in the workings of the Vatican.

Fichter, the former Legion member, is today pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Haworth, N.J. He has been a diocesan priest for a decade, and serves in the Newark archdiocese. He coordinated the Legion's administrative office in Rome from February 1998 until October 2000. "When Fr. Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with $10,000 in cash -- $5,000 in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling," explained Fichter. "I would be informed by one of his assistants that he was leaving and I would have to prepare the funds for him. I never questioned that he was not using it for good and noble purposes. It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would have not dared to ask him for a receipt."

...After the ex-Legion victims filed a canonical case in 1998 against Maciel in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Sodano as secretary of state -- essentially, the Vatican prime minister -- pressured Ratzinger, as the congregation's prefect, to halt the proceeding. ...José Barba, a college professor in Mexico City and ex-Legionary who filed the 1998 case in Ratzinger's office, learned from the canonist handling the case, Martha Wegan in Rome, of Sodano's role.

"Sodano came over with his entire family, 200 of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal," recalled Favreau. "And we fed them all. When he became secretary of state there was another celebration. He'd come over for special events, like the groundbreaking with a golden shovel for the House of Higher Studies. And a dinner after that." The intervention of a high Vatican official in a tribunal case illustrates the fragile nature of the system, and in the Maciel case, how a guilty man escaped punishment for years. "Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion," said one of the ex-Legionaries. "He'd come give a talk at Christmas and they'd give him $10,000."

...In 2009, a year after Maciel's death, the Legion disclosed its surprise on discovering that he had a daughter. The news jolted the order and its lay arm, Regnum Christi. Yet in an organization built on a cult of personality, the long praise from John Paul suggested a legacy of virtue in Maciel. Legion officials scrambled to suppress skepticism. Two Legion priests (said) in July (2009) that seminarians in Rome were still being taught about Maciel's virtuous life. "They are being brainwashed, as if nothing happened," said a Legionary, sitting on a bench near Rome's Tiber River....

In a book on Maciel published in Spain, journalist Alfonso Torres Robles calls an event on Jan. 3, 1991, "one of the most powerful demonstrations of strength by the Legion ... at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, when John Paul II ordained 60 Legionaries into the priesthood, in the presence of 7,000 Regnum Christi members from different countries, 15 cardinals, 52 bishops and many millionaire benefactors." Maciel had the event filmed and a sequence used in a video the Legion sold until 2006. John Paul was a strategic image in Legion mass mailings and the video shown to potential donors when seminarians accompanied priests to their homes. 

...Maciel forced all Legionaries to take private vows, never to speak ill of Maciel or any superiors, and to report to their superiors anyone who did. The vows ensured his cult of personality. 

Juan Vaca and seven other early victims of Maciel who first spoke publicly, in the 1997 Hartford Courant report by Gerald Renner and this writer, gave graphic accounts of how, in Spain and Rome in the 1950s, they watched Maciel inject himself with a morphine painkiller called dolantin, as the drug was called at the time. In 1956, a strung-out Maciel entered Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome. Cardinal Valerio Valeri, a reed-like former diplomat and prefect for Congregation of Religious, was furious over letters from an older seminarian in Mexico City who had seen Maciel self-inject and worried about his overly affectionate behavior with boys. The priest who ran the Legion high school was also concerned about Maciel's drug use and advances on youths. Cardinal Valeri suspended Maciel and arranged for Carmelite priests to assume control of the Legion house. 

...Maciel traveled between Spain and Latin America, raising money for a big project underway in Rome: Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica. Maciel got his break in 1959 when Pius XII died. Micara, by then the vicar of Rome, signed an order reinstating Maciel — something for which, in the interregnum between popes, he had no authority to do. Canon law puts official duties in abeyance in the interim. What were Valeri and other officials who were offended by Maciel to do? Expend what capital they had with the new pontiff, challenging Micara over a druggy priest with a vice for boys but cash lines to build a basilica? Maciel was redeemed by an illegitimate order from a cardinal to whom he had given $10,000 13 years before, according to a priest with access to Legion files. 

....Maciel reaped lasting dividends in Monterrey with the Garza-Sada families. The dynasty dates to 1890, when Isaac Garza and his brother-in-law, Francisco Sada, opened a brewery. Isaac's sons, Eugenio and Roberto Garza Sada, both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a bottling factory in 1943. As they branched into other industries, the Garza brothers founded a university, TEC — the Technical Institute of Superior Studies in Monterrey. Maciel launched private schools in Monterrey, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for prep schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi, which organized study groups to discuss Maciel's letters. Lay celibates, the highest level of Regnum Christi members, live in communities and work relentlessly on fundraising...."They were grooming us for Regnum Christi — the Movement. If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you. They kept telling me, 'God gave you everything, you must give back by fighting the forces of evil.' … Their whole discourse was this paradise of moral rectitude...." Two of (Garza-Sada) siblings joined the Movement. Paulina, now in her 50s, is a Regnum Christi consecrated woman in Rome. A brother, Fr. Luis Garza Medina, graduated from Stanford University in California in 1978 with a degree in industrial engineering and entered the Legion. At 32 he became vicar general, the second highest position. Through the two siblings, Maciel secured a continuing flow of money from the family. Fr. Garza donated $3 million of his inheritance to the Legion, according to a colleague at the time. In an e-mail exchange, Fr. Garza would neither confirm nor deny the amount or the donation....

Maciel died in a surreal drama where his life pieces converged with shuddering fall. In late January 2008, he was in a hospital in Miami, according to a Jan. 31, 2010 report by reporters Sota and Vidal of El Mundo....In the hospital gathered Alvaro Corcuera, Maciel's successor as director general; the Legion's general secretary, Evarista Sada; and numerous other associates. Maciel reportedly refused to make a confession, stirring such concerns that someone summoned an exorcist, though the article does not describe a ritual. The men around Maciel were jarred when two women appeared: Norma the mother, and Normita, 23. At that point, Maciel reportedly said of the Normas: "I want to stay with them."

The El Mundo article continues: "The Legionary priests, alarmed by Maciel's attitude, called Rome. [Fr.] Luis Garza knew right away that this was a grave problem. He consulted with the highest authority, Alvaro Corcuera, and then hopped on the first plane to Miami and went directly to the hospital.
[Garza's] indignation could be read on his face. He faced the once-powerful founder and threatened him: "I will give you two hours to come with us or I will call all the press and the whole world will find out who you really are." And Maciel let his arm be twisted. After the priests got Maciel to a Legion house in Jacksonville, Florida, he reportedly grew belligerent when Corcuero tried to anoint him, yelling, "I said no!" The article says Maciel refused to make a final confession, and states flatly that he "did not believe in God's pardon." That is an opinion that Maciel's sordid life might well support, but for which, in fact, we have no proof. 

In announcing his ascent to heaven, immediately following Maciel's 2008 death, the Legion high command took propaganda to a level beyond category.

The Mission of Father Maciel

New York Review of Books (excerpt) | June 24, 2010

by Alma Guillermoprieto

Maciel on the cover of Quien magazine (Mexico), March 19, 2010

Of all the terrible sexual scandals the hierarchs in the Vatican find themselves tangled in, none is likely to do more institutional damage than the astounding and still unfolding story of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel.

The crimes committed against children by other priests and bishops may provoke rage, but they also make one want to look away. With Father Maciel, on the other hand, one can hardly tear oneself from the ghastly drama as it unfolds, page by page, revelation by revelation, in the Mexican press.

Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico and died in 2008 at the age of eighty-seven, was known around the Catholic world. Against ordinarily insurmountable obstacles, he founded what was to become one of the most dynamic, profitable, and conservative religious orders of the twentieth century, which today has almost eight hundred priests and approximately 70,000 men and women around the world who participate in the lay movement Regnum Christi. The Legion of Christ, nearly seventy years old as an order, is comparatively small, but it is influential: it operates fifteen universities, and some 140,000 students are enrolled in its schools (in New York, its members teach in eleven parish schools). And its leadership has long enjoyed remarkable access to the Vatican hierarchy.

A great achiever and close associate of Pope John Paul II, Maciel was also a bigamist, pederast, dope fiend, and plagiarist. He came from the fervently religious state of Michoacán in the southwest of Mexico and grew up during the years of the Cristero War (1926–1929), a savage conflict that pitched traditional Catholics (Cristeros) in provincial Mexico against the anticlerical government in the capital. One of his uncles was the commanding general of the Cristeros. Another four uncles were bishops. One of them, Rafael Guízar Valencia, brought him into a clandestine seminary in Mexico City. As a twenty-year-old who had not even taken his vows, Maciel created a new religious order with the help of another uncle.

... Maciel was evidently a man of some magnetism. Dozens of wealthy women contributed generous amounts for the Legionaries’ good works, and the Mexican magazine Quién, normally known for its society pages and not for its investigative reporting, recently had a story about one of Mexico's wealthiest widows, Flora Barragán de Garza, who donated upward of $50 million during the years of Maciel's glory. “She gave him practically all our father’s fortune,” Barragán’s daughter told the Quién interviewer, adding that the family finally had to intervene so that the by then elderly woman would not be left destitute. Her generosity allowed Maciel to travel first-class throughout his peripatetic life, but it also provided the seed money for the network of private schools to which wealthy Mexican conservatives dispatched their children.

In 1997, Blanca Estela Lara Gutiérrez, a Mexican woman who was living in Cuernavaca, looked at the cover of the magazine Contenido—a Reader’s Digest sort of publication—and saw on it the face of her common-law husband. She had been his partner for twenty-one years and borne him two children, and she knew him as a private detective or “CIA agent” who, for understandable work-related reasons, put in only occasional appearances at home. Now she learned that he was a priest and that his real name was Marcial Maciel. 


He was, the magazine said, the head of an order whose strictness and extreme conservatism appeared to hide some vile secrets: the article, picking up information first brought to light by Gerald Renner and Jason Berry in the Hartford Courant, revealed that nine men—two of whom helped to establish the Legionaries in the US and another still an active member, and the rest all former members of the order—had informed their superiors in Rome that Maciel had abused them sexually when they were pubescent seminarians under his care.

The accusations were not new, nor would they be the last. In 1938 Maciel was expelled from his uncle Guízar’s seminary, and shortly afterward from a seminary in the United States. According to witnesses, Maciel and his uncle had a gigantic row behind closed doors, and one witness, a Legionary who had known Maciel since childhood, told the psychoanalyst Fernando González that the bishop’s rage had to do with the fact that Maciel was locking himself up in the boardinghouse where he was staying with some of the younger boys at his uncle’s seminary.

...Later, it would become known that Maciel had his students and seminarians procure Dolantin (morphine) for him. This led to Maciel’s suspension as head of the order in 1956. Inexplicably, he was reinstated after two years. Much later still, someone realized that his book, The Psalter of My Days, which was more or less required reading in Legionary institutions, and was a sort of Book of Hours, or prayer guide, was lifted virtually in its entirety from The Psalter of My Hours, an account written by a Spaniard who was sentenced to life in prison after the Spanish civil war.

Uneducated and mendacious, Maciel nevertheless had a genius for politics, and for personal relations. But there was more... Maciel’s envoys would regularly deliver envelopes with thousands of dollars in cash to key Church hierarchs. Private audiences with the Pope commanded as much as $50,000 dollars per visit, money that was channeled through Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish priest who was the Pope’s private secretary from 1966 until John Paul’s death.

...It is hard not to think that these are the reasons the Vatican ignored the detailed and heart-wrenching letter sent in 1998 by eight of Maciel’s accusers (the ninth member of the group having died). Even as the public first became aware of the accusations through the Hartford Courant and the Mexican press, which picked up the story immediately, the Vatican refused to act. Instead, Pope John Paul II put forward the beatification of Maciel’s mother and of his uncle, Bishop Guízar. (The bishop is now Saint Guízar; Maciel’s mother is still going through the beatification process.) It was only in 2006, after John Paul’s death, that a Vatican communiqué announced that Maciel had been “invited to lead a reserved life of prayer and penitence.” He lived out his final years quietly and died in the United States. The Legionaries, however, have continued to grow in numbers and in wealth.

...Paraguayans have not abandoned their cheerful president, former priest Fernando Lugo, despite the fact that he is known to have fathered at least three children (he seems to think there may be more) while he was still a bishop. Homosexuality has also been tolerated and to some degree almost expected of skirt-wearing priests in this macho part of the (Latin American) world. It is possible, perhaps, that for many Catholics baptism, confession, and weekly mass are almost bureaucratic procedures, like voting or getting a driver’s license, and that true faith is something that happens at homemade altars and through the magical pathways of much older rituals, leaving priests to live their own lives as long as they do a creditable job with the sermons and the burials. The sexual abuse of children and its cover-up are a different matter entirely, one suspects.

As it turns out, Maciel’s common-law marriage to Lara Gutiérrez was not exclusive. Some ten years after he met her, he began a long-lasting relationship with a nineteen-year-old waitress from Acapulco, to whom he introduced himself as an “oil broker.” He had a daughter with her, and, according to a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, several more children with other partners.

After she found out that her husband was not a CIA agent but a child- molesting priest, Lara Gutiérrez did not come forth with the news that she was married to him. Perhaps she was terrified unawares of the man she believed “was her God,” as she would say a decade later. Perhaps she was simply ashamed. At any rate, she kept silent ...And then, last March, two years after Maciel’s death, Lara Gutiérrez appeared with her three sons on one of Mexico’s most well-regarded talk shows and listened quietly while two of her children testified that their father, Marcial Maciel, had made them masturbate him, and had first attempted to rape them, the older one said, when he was seven years old. (This testimony has been tarnished somewhat by the revelation that the sons had earlier demanded millions of dollars from the Legionaries of Christ in exchange for their silence. The order has not attempted to deny the accusation, however).

We have a double vision of Maciel: we see the saintly figure known to his followers—one long, elegant hand placed on his chest, the other raised in benediction—and, as if through a keyhole, the other, nightmarish, Maciel, demanding that young boys masturbate him and then assuring the shocked, traumatized children that he was authorized by the Vatican to obtain “relief” by this means from dreadful physical pain.

...The Legionaries—that is, Maciel—financed the construction of the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Philip Martyr in Rome, which Maciel intended for his mausoleum. But strikingly, Maciel the priest nearly always staged his pederastic dramas in the infirmary, or sick room (enfermeria) of whatever Legionary seminary he happened to be at, as if this were a place where he could be cured. The masturbatory acts were explained to his victims as a remedy for his pain, but perhaps he truly hoped for healing of some sort in the infirmary. He knew, in any event, how sick he was: he left instructions with his delegates not to start the process of his canonization until thirty years after his death—in the hope, one can guess, that the memory of his sins would be erased by then.

Quite apart from the damage to Maciel’s victims, there is the pressing question of why the Catholic Church, as an institution, did not condemn him when he was ordained as a priest, or when he founded the Legionaries, or when the story of his pederasty made the covers of magazines, or when enough evidence was found for Pope Benedict XVI to conclude that Maciel should live out the rest of his life in seclusion, or even when the rumors grew strong enough to warrant a Vatican investigation of the order as a whole. The answer surprises no one: at a time in which churches are emptying, the Legionaries have been a rich source of conscripts, money, and influence. In Mexico everyone from (billionaire) Carlos Slim to Marta Sahagún, the wife of former president Vicente Fox, gave money to or asked favors from Maciel. It was not until last year that Karol Wojtyla’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, at last authorized a visitation—churchspeak for investigation—of the entire order of the Legion of Christ.

As usual, the press and some disaffected religious have been way ahead of the Vatican. Now we learn from the press that the order kept some nine hundred women under nonbinding vows as consagradas, or quasi nuns, in conditions of severe emotional privation. According to a recent report in Milenio, the women, members of the Regnum Christi, live communally although they are not ordained. They are allowed to see their parents once a year, and spend two weeks with the rest of their family every seven years. They are expected to donate half their material worth after fifteen years of consecration, and donate the full amount after twenty-five. Twice a month they are obligated to have a confession-like conversation with their female superiors, who in turn report on the content of these talks to their own superiors within the Legionaries. The Vatican visitators who conducted the recent investigation of Maciel were allegedly surprised to discover the existence of the consagradas, and to find these and other violations of canonical law in their statutes.

In the end, the scandal of Marcial Maciel, gruesome and grotesque as it is, may turn out to be a scandal of the Catholic Church. There is the distressing question of the Church’s last pope, the popular John Paul II, and his relations with the demonic priest. There is the not unimportant fact that the Legionaries—along with Benedict XVI and indeed John Paul II—represent the most morally conservative part of the Church, and that they now appear enmeshed in squalid moral scandals. There is, above all, the fact that an entire large, wealthy, international institution is now under suspicion (what did Maciel’s fellow Legionaries know, when did they know it, and who was complicit?) and that the greatest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, appears to have engaged in a cover-up for decades on its behalf....

...Many priests and nuns, it would seem, opt to “obey” rules but not comply with them, as the Spanish formulation has it (obedezco, pero no cumplo). I offer this simply as anecdotal evidence, but in my casual, friendly, and often admiring acquaintance with members of the Catholic orders—all from the social activist branch of the Church, for whatever it’s worth—a remarkable number have been involved in some sort of couple relationship...(end quote).

Michael Hoffman's Afterword 

These crimes were facilitated in many ways: through bureaucracy, greed and venality, but above all the devil worked through those priests and hierarchs who instilled in the faithful an allegiance to a false understanding of obedience. Beware religious authorities who insinuate that you must obey them rather than God, reversing the Gospel command to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

This is the lesson to be gleaned from this disgusting and criminal Vatican farrago, as it transpired in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II — and many of the most guilty hierarchs remain in power under Pope Benedict XVI.

Marcial Maciel named his organization the "Legion of Christ" and by his subsequent actions he blasphemed that name, the name above all others, to which every knee shall bow (Philippians 2:10). How any Christian can give allegiance to the Vatican mafia that is still in place and which enabled Maciel's crime spree is beyond rational comprehension, except in terms of the functioning of a cult mentality (Matthew 20: 25-28).

***

Helen Thomas and a Truth too hot to handle

by Michael Hoffman

Copyright © 2010 by RevisionistHistory.org

On May 27, 2010, during the "American Jewish Heritage Month" celebration at the White House, Orthodox Rabbi David Nesenoff (rabbi@rabbilive.com) asked Helen Thomas, dean of the Washington Press corps, if she had any comments on the Israeli state. Thomas replied, "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine...Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land; its not German, its not Poland's." She was then asked where the Judaics should go, to which she replied: "they should go home" to "Poland, Germany." Then, after another question she added, "America and everywhere else." The rabbi videotaped her remarks, and his video quickly achieved Internet notoriety with "viral" status.

Time magazine scribe Joe Klein termed her views "odious" and said she should no longer have the privilege, accorded by the White House Correspondents Association, of a front row center seat. Former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, a neocon architect of the invasion of Iraq, said,"She should lose her job over this. As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling." On May 30, Thomas was dropped by her speaker's bureau, Nine Speakers. Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland canceled Thomas's commencement address.

Thomas apologized for her remarks on June 4. The Anti-Defamation League said the apology did not go far enough. Hearst News corporation, which has employed Thomas as a columnist for the past 10 years, issued a statement announcing her "retirement," which Hearst said, was "effective immediately."

Thomas has been covering the White House for fifty years, since 1960. She will mark her 90th birthday on Aug. 4. She was often the only White House reporter asking presidents probing questions about American and Israeli wars.

This writer is not aware of whether Helen Thomas has read Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People or Paul Wexler's The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity. These books deliver a long overdue knockout punch to the laughable hoax that asserts that today's descendants of the Khazars are the direct "Jewish" descendants of the ancient patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sand and Wexler document that the home of the Khazar impostor "Jews" is indeed, as Thomas implied, in eastern Europe, not Palestine.

Perhaps Miss Thomas was offering only a woman's intuition, that the "Jews" of "Israel" are neither; that they have more in common with the Yiddish shetls of eastern Europe than the Biblical land of the Middle East. In either case, in America, candor -- when it touches on myths sacred to the ruling class -- is simply not permitted to the working guy or gal. The latter-days Diogenes will quickly be out of a job. Under American capitalism you have freedom of speech as long as you don't care about eating.

A crusader for peace and an investigative journalist who refused to rubberstamp Bush's ghastly war in Iraq, as did the entire White House Press corps on March 6, 2003, as documented by Bill Moyers, Thomas is now fodder for pompous discursive lectures on the venality of the goyim, camouflaged as human rights lessons, by the likes of columnist Richard Cohen (cohenr@washpost.com).

In "What Helen Thomas missed," (Washington Post, June 8, 2010, p. A17), Mr. Cohen views the controversy as an opportunity to libel, from his lofty moral perch, Polish gentiles as thieves, murderers and haters, and General George Patton as an evil "bigot":

"Ah, another teachable moment! This one comes to us from Helen Thomas, the longtime White House reporter and columnist who announced her retirement on Monday. Thomas, of Lebanese ancestry and almost 90, has never been shy about her anti-Israel views, for which, as far as I'm concerned, she is wrong and to which she is entitled. Then the other day, she performed a notable public service by revealing how very little she knew. Asked at a White House event if she had any comments about Israel, Thomas said, 'Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. . . . Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.'

"Well, I don't know about 'everywhere else,' but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to 'go home' to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them -- killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

"The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsize role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Harry Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself.

"Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered. In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were killed. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not 'go home.' When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives...

"For that reason, those who had struck out for home soon returned to DP camps and the safety of -- irony of ironies -- Germany. Some of the camps were under the command of Gen. George S. Patton, a great man on the screen, a contemptible bigot in real life....For the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe, there was no going home -- and no staying, either. Europe was hostile to them, not in the least appalled or sorry about what had just happened. Even the American military, in the person of the hideous Patton, seemed hostile... For most of the DPs, America was also out of the question. The United States, in the grip of feverish anti-communism and already unreceptive to immigrants, maintained a tight quota. When the Jewish DPs were polled, an overwhelming majority said they wanted to go to Palestine. They knew life would be tough there, but they would be among their own people -- and relatively safe" (end quote).

Richard Cohen, the mainstream media's fount of moral history, has penned hate speech/group libel disguised as "a teachable moment." Hundreds of other Talmudic supremacists in the media and academia are engaged in the same relentless offensive  -- spreading contempt and instilling guilt in the goyim -- entire nations such as "feverish anti-communist" America, or "thieving" Poland where Poles irrationally attack Judaics because of:"sheer ethnic hatred," "fear they would lose their (stolen) homes" (most of Poland must have been once owned by Judaics) or, that old reliable standby, "rumors of a Jewish ritual murder."

The reader is supposed to sit at the feet of Cohen in wide-eyed awe as this righteous Zionist savant spews his hatred for east European gentiles and heroes like George Patton. The only good goy in Cohen's column is 33rd degree Freemason Harry Truman, the president who heated Hiroshima and Nagasaki to several thousand degrees of hell.

Does Mr. Cohen himself exhibit any "sheer ethnic hatred" for Polish Catholics? Was it really a case of Poles rising against Judaic people only due to "rumors" and "hatred," or has Mr. Cohen suppressed the other half of the story? What is the real history behind the alleged "mini-holocaust" in Kielce in 1946?

According to Judaic author John Sack, "In 1945 many Poles felt (and not without reason) that Jews ran the Office of State Security...the chief of the Office was Jacob Berman, a Jew, and all or almost all the department heads were Jews."

Sack reported that 75% of the officers of the Communist Secret Police in Silesia were Judiacs ("Jews"). He noted that many Judaics in the Communist terror apparatus in Poland changed their names to Polish ones, such as General Romkowski, Colonel Rozanski, Capt. Studencki and Lt. Jurkowski. (cf. Sack, The New Republic, Feb. 14, 1994, p. 6).

According to Sheldon Kirshner, writing in the Canadian Jewish News, Nov. 5, 1992, p. 16: In Poland, "...a disproportionate number of Communists were Jews. In 1930, at its peak, 35% of the members of the party were Jewish. In Communist youth organizations, Jewish membership was even higher, while Communists of Jewish origin occupied most of the seats on the central committee. Communism appealed to some Jews because it opposed anti-Semitism more vigorously than any other Polish party...Jewish Communists reached their apogee in the years immediately after World War Two, when the party leadership was totally in the hands of the prewar Communist leadership that abhorred anti-Semitism" (end quote).

The mass murder of Polish Catholics at the hands of Judaic Communists is almost never raised. Instead, the attack on Judaics by Polish peasants enraged at the role of Judaics in Communist terror, which occurred at Kielce, will be the focus. The Catholic Primate of Poland at the time, Cardinal August Hlond (1881-1948), declared that the attack in Kielce occurred because of resentment "due to the Jews who today occupy leading positions in Poland's (Communist) government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have."

As Piotr S. Wandycz of Yale University observed, "The average Pole could not but notice in the Stalinist era that the two most powerful men in the country--Berman and Minc--were both Jewish as was the dreaded security official Rozanski." (New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1983, p. 51).

Solomon Morel was commandant of a post-war Communist concentration camp for Germans in Poland. Stalin deliberately put Judaics in charge of such camps. In Poland Morel tortured and murdered thousands of Germans, sometimes with his bare hands (cf. "The Wrath of Solomon," The Village Voice, March 30, 1993). Morel found safe haven in the Israeli state, which refused requests to extradite him to stand trial for war crimes in Poland. Sack recounts the facts in his important book, An Eye for an Eye.

You left out the rest of the story, Mr. Cohen. It's called context.

Helen Thomas uttered truths too hot to handle for our supposed "anything goes" culture. Her fate will be familiar to all Americans who have dared to contradict sanctified Zionist mythology.

Michael Hoffman is the editor of Revisionist History newsletter and the author of the massive reference work, Judaism Discovered. Hoffman's independent scholarship is supported by donations and the sale of his books, pamphlets, newsletters, recorded lectures and documentary films. http://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com

For further reference:
Defending the Honor of an unjustly attacked 90-year-old woman

*****

The Bible, Interrogation and the Supreme Court's Miranda Rights

by Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2010 

The report this week of the Supreme Court's June 1 decision in Berghuis v. Thompkins, on the interpretation of the 1966 Miranda ruling (Arizona v. Miranda) is an interesting one.

In 2000, an accused murderer, Van Chester Thompkins, was silent for nearly three hours while being interrogated by the police concerning the killing of young Samuel Morris in Southfield, Michigan. He only finally answered when one of the detectives asked him, "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?" At this the murderer, who still had a conscience, broke down and answered that he did pray thus, thereby confessing his guilt. Thompkins was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Some sectors of our society view this police interrogation and its result (the gaining of evidence against the murderer and his eventual conviction) as entrapment. "Defense" attorneys sought to have the conviction overturned on the basis that the interrogation violated the accused man's Miranda right to silence. They appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

We note that the accused consented to be present at the interrogation and, as a result of the interrogation, his conscience was pricked and he was moved to confess his crime.

On the materialist/humanist plane, his supposed legal defenders view these two developments as a severe liability. How wrong they are: without confession there can be no forgiveness.

We are all for the right to silence, which Jesus established for us by being silent in the presence of his accusers. But Jesus was innocent and the man in question was guilty, and had Mr. Thompkins gone on to repentance he would be bound for heaven now, whatever his sentence on earth.

The world does not see it that way, however. In their rank materialism, all that matters to the worldly is the condition of the body and not the eternal destiny of the soul. Consequently, "defense" lawyers argue against a just verdict based on an honest confession and seek to have it overturned on a legal technicality, viz. a misconstruction of the Miranda precedent, which the Supreme Court, in this instance, correctly rejected.

Interrogation of the innocent for purposes of entrapping them is of course a grave sin and corrupt police are known to commit this sin; against this corruption the innocent must be protected. The invocation of the right of silence in the face of interrogation is ethical, compelling and testimony to the wisdom of the American Bill of Rights in its Fifth Amendment.

Interrogation of the guilty benefits not only the victim but the accused, and this point is one which few defense lawyers grasp.

For proof let us turn to Genesis 3, wherein the serpent seduced the woman, and the woman the man, into not fearing God and thereby succumbing to the temptation to transgress God's law.

In Genesis 3:9 God begins His arraignment of Adam and Eve by interrogating them. Of course God is omniscient and His interrogation is needful only for the spiritual benefit of Adam and Eve, as well as for all future generations of believers, as a model of judicial investigation.

Important legal lessons are imparted in Genesis concerning how to approach suspects. God's interrogation in Genesis 3: 9-13 forms an exemplary precedent for all judges, prosecutors and police officers.

In reply to God's questions, Adam accuses his wife and Eve likewise blames not herself but the serpent. Nonetheless, and this is key, in spite of attempting to minimize their guilt, they do not deny the crime for which they stand accused. Silence on the part of Adam and Eve in response to God's interrogation would have greatly compounded their transgression.

The humanist-oriented lawyer will only be interested in exculpating the defendants by having them resist God's interrogation through silence. Yet unknown to such a humanist mindset, any such silence would have brought a far more grievous sentence down upon our first parents than what they received after confessing their guilt, even though they did so in a roundabout manner. In this case, interrogation offered the guilty an opportunity to confess. Only through their mea culpa could repentance and reconciliation with God begin.

So-called defense lawyers would prefer that the guilty defendants refuse to answer the questions. This is the fatal and shortsighted folly of lawyers. They overlook the significance of the fact that there were three perpetrators, and yet only two were interrogated. The serpent was not interrogated by God -- because God did not intend to show the serpent any mercy!

Godly interrogation of the guilty is an act of mercy, a first step on the path to forgiveness for crimes committed.

The "conservatives" on the Supreme Court did not make this argument. "Conservative" justices like Antonin Scalia are more likely to argue from the Talmud than the Bible. When they do cite the Bible it is often the Bible filtered through the Talmud (cf. Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co. June 8, 2009, wherein Scalia argued using the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Aboth).

To establish God's justice and His legal procedures for mankind, Christians are to resort to the authority of Scripture and not the arbitrary and deluded humanist or other traditions of men who imagine themselves wiser than Yahweh.

Hoffman is the editor of Revisionist History newsletter and the author of They Were White and They Were Slaves and Judaism Discovered, offered here.

***

David P. Goldman's brazen buncombe about the roots of West's law

Practically every word Mr. Goldman has written below, in his article for Asia Times, is either a lie or a deception. Can you spot them? We invite readers of Michael Hoffman's Judaism Discovered to submit responses to Goldman's devious misrepresentation of Judaism, which is so patently fraudulent it constitutes an insult to the intelligence of the reader. We will publish in this blog one or two of the best refutations of Goldman's drivel. Our latest Revisionist History Newsletter issue no. 52 analyzes the concept of the "Hebrew Republic" in the West, and challenges the myth which Goldman (and Michael Novak and Eric Nelson) retail, that Judaism is synonymous with the Old Testament and that the heritage of freedom bequeathed to the West by Biblical jurisprudence is a legacy of Talmudic Judaism. Only an audience bereft of the most basic knowledge of the subject matter could be suckered by such brazen buncombe. Talmudic Judaism, with its Pharisee-derived Mishnah, and its Babylonian Talmud, is the very antipode of the law of Yahweh's Old Testament.

Mr. Goldman advances, with typical Pharisee conceit, the moral superiority of Talmudic Judaism over Islam, attempting what no con man before the modern era could achieve, a linkage between the murderous violence and rabbinic dictatorship of Talmudic Judaism, and the Christian West's heritage of freedom and liberty.

Wife-beating, sharia, and Western law

By David P. Goldman | Asia Times | May 25, 2010

...(Muslim) Sharia (law) resembles Halakha (Judaic law), but by construction, for the same reason the Koran resembles the Torah: it is derived from it, with self-serving adjustments (Ishmael becomes the heir of Abraham rather than Isaac). But the principles of the two legal systems are radically different. That is why Jewish observance of Halakha never has clashed with the legal systems of modern democracy while sharia inevitably must conflict, and in the most intractable and intimate way, that is, in matters of family law.

The term "law" applied to Judaism and Islam means entirely different things to radically different peoples. Civil law rests ultimately on the state's monopoly of violence. In Muslim states, civil and religious law are identical, such that sharia courts hold the sword of the state. No Jewish religious court has had the capacity to inflict violence since the 1st century CE; the first detailed codification of Jewish law appears in the 3rd century in the Mishnah. The rabbis of antiquity explicitly put in abeyance ancient applications of violence, such as the injunction to kill a rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21:18-21); the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) states that no Jewish court ever handed down such a sentence. Killing of rebellious children, as noted, happens in Muslim countries, and is sadly frequent among Muslim immigrant communities in the West.

Jewish law, though, requires no adaptation to modern Western law, for modern Western law ultimately derives from Jewish principles, as Harvard's Eric Nelson most recently showed in his 2010 book The Hebrew Republic, and Michael Novak explained in his 2002 volume On Two Wings. Jewish law proceeds from God's Covenant with each member of the Jewish people. The notion of an intermediate sovereign, such as Islam's "governor" of the family, is inconceivable in Jewish law, for there is only one Sovereign, the King of Kings. The powers of the earthly sovereign derive from God and are limited by God's laws. The American founding notion of "inalienable rights" stems from the Hebrew concept of covenant: a grant of rights implies a Grantor, and an irreversible grant implies a God who limits his own sovereignty in covenant with mankind. (End quote)

Mr. Goldman is senior editor at First Things

***

University of Arizona names new telescope attachment "Lucifer"

LUCIFER Allows Astronomers to Watch Stars Being Born

April 21, 2010 - University of Arizona (UA) News: A new instrument for the world's largest optical telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham, allows astronomers to observe the faintest and most distant objects in the universe.

 LBT partners in the U.S, Germany and Italy announced April 21 that the first of two new innovative near-infrared cameras/spectrographs for the LBT is now available to astronomers for scientific observations at the telescope on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona. After more than a decade of design, manufacturing and testing, the new instrument – dubbed LUCIFER 1 – provides a powerful tool to gain spectacular insights into the universe – from the Milky Way to extremely distant galaxies.

LUCIFER, built by a consortium of German institutes, will be followed by an identical twin instrument that will be delivered to the telescope in early 2011. "With the large light-gathering power of the LBT, astronomers are now able to collect the spectral fingerprints of the faintest and most distant objects in the universe," said LBT director Richard Green, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. LUCIFER 1 and its twin are mounted at the focus points of the LBT's two giant 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) diameter telescope mirrors. Each instrument is cooled to -213 degrees Celsius in order to observe in the near-infrared wavelength range. Near-infrared observations are essential for understanding the formation of stars and planets in our galaxy as well as revealing the secrets of the most distant and very young galaxies.

 LUCIFER's innovative design allows astronomers to observe in unprecedented detail, for example star forming regions, which are commonly hidden by dust clouds. The instrument is remarkably flexible, combining a large field of view with a high resolution. It provides three exchangeable cameras for imaging and spectroscopy in different resolutions according to observational requirements. Astronomers use spectroscopy to analyze incoming light and answer questions such as how stars and galaxies formed and what they are made of. The instruments were built by a consortium of five German institutes led by the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University, together with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, the Astronomical Institute of the Ruhr-University in Bochum, and the University of Applied Sciences in Mannheim.

The LBT is a collaboration among the Italian astronomical community (National Institute of Astrophysics), the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, the LBT Beteiligungsgesellschaft in Germany (Max-Planck-Institut Astronomie in Heidelberg, Zentrum fur Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Astrophysikalisches Institut in Potsdam, Max-Planck-Institut  Extraterrestrische Physik in Munich, and Max-Planck-Institut Radioastronomie in Bonn), and the Ohio State University and Research Corporation (Ohio State University, University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota and University of Virginia).

End quote (emphasis supplied).

Correspondence with New York Times Reporter Patricia Cohen

Dear Patricia Cohen

In your article about Irène Némirovsky in the New York Times of April 25, "Assessing Jewish Identity of Author Killed by Nazis," you say that Némirovsky was "killed" in Auschwitz rather than having died there of natural causes, such as the typhus plague that was raging at the time.

Was she shot or gassed, according to your information?

Sincerely, Michael Hoffman

From Patricia Cohen:

She died of typhus a month after arriving. Patti Cohen

Dear Patti

If she died of typhus, why did you write that she was "killed"?

Sincerely, Michael Hoffman

From Patricia Cohen:

I don't consider dying in a concentration camp from typhus, untreated, as dying of "natural causes" as you put it in your email.

patti cohen

(End quote)

***

The Attacks on Pope Benedict - a Conspiracy of Man - or God?

by Michael Hoffman

Over the centuries many sorts of masquers have bored deep into the bowels of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of these have even occupied the papal throne; others were content to be the power behind that throne.

King Henry VIII first received the theological justification for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon from the Neoplatonic brotherhood inside the Vatican; out of said fraternity would emerge Dr. John Dee, the Protestant magician who, using the Hermetic and Kabbalistic cunning of the Roman Catholic magician Marsilio Ficino, furnished William Cecil with the mind control keys and mass persuasion techniques that gained him the rule of England through a reanimated goddess Isis who is known to history as Queen Elizabeth I.

Very few believing Catholics ever glimpse this hidden reality, and when they are so privileged as to gain a fleeting vision of it, they run from it, so threatening is it to the papal Caesarism to which they kowtow like the pagan subjects of Kubla Khan. Jesus Christ did not come to institute slavish and cowering obedience to mere men, however elaborately costumed or adored. He came to save souls, which is the highest law, a law recognized by only a few churchmen, such as the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who defied Popes Paul VI and John Paul II for that very reason.

Behind the scenes of the competing Catholic and Protestant churches exists a golden thread, a rainbow bridge if you will, that unites initiates in both camps who, believing they possess godlike powers derived from the secret gnosis of the Corpus Hermeticum, are above the morality they publicly preach, beyond good and evil, and united in processing humankind toward a "higher" destiny without the knowledge or consent of those being processed. This is the age-old mandate of the pagan-occult imperium.

Shortly before the latest uproar over pederasty within the Roman Catholic Church, a Vatican exorcist announced that the devil was active in the Vatican, even at the highest levels. Prior to this not exactly unexpected revelation, Pope Benedict XVI completed the third of his pilgrimages to the Synagogue, the latest, on Jan. 17, at Rome itself, where this papal Judas gave every encouragement to the assembled Pharisees.

Most recently he has appointed a member of the secret society of Opus Dei to head the powerful diocese of Los Angeles, California, after child-molestation enabler and obstructor of justice Cardinal Roger Mahony retires next year with his pension intact and full church honors accorded to this patron of pederasty.

Certain Catholic automatons have marched forth, decrying a purported "media conspiracy" of "gossip" against the pope. But are the troubles that have befallen this pope a conspiracy of man, or a curse of God?

How long do the vassals of Rome imagine that God will be mocked by popes who make common cause with the ideological and spiritual descendants of those who stoned, laid hands upon and conspired in the murder of His Divine Son?

Pope John Paul II, the modern champion of the Synagogue and the first pope in history to enter its precincts as a supplicant, spent the final years of his pontificate as a hunchback, drooling spittle onto his breast. Unless he repents and makes reparation, Pope Benedict XVI can no more escape the wrath of God than did his predecessor.

If Benedict is besieged now, it may be payback for his treason to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, notwithstanding his provisional revival of the old Latin Mass, which he has integrated into a neo-Catholic hybrid Church of Holocaustianity, whereby Auschwitz is rendered far more sacred than Calvary, a revolutionary betrayal made tolerable now that it is accompanied by Tridentine incense and Gregorian chant.

Those badly deceived persons who make common cause with this pontiff might wish to consider what fate may be in store if they do not switch their allegiance from Benedict to Jesus.

Copyright ©2010 by RevisionistHistory.org

Hoffman is the author of seven books of history and literature, including Judaism Discovered. He edits Revisionist History, a newsletter published six times a year. The latest issue, on "The Money Power," is available for purchase online.

***

Vatican compares molestation scandal to "persecution of the Jews"

Rev. Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa: since 1980 the prestigious "preacher to the papal household"

by Michael Hoffman, Good Friday, 2010 

"By a rare coincidence, this year our Easter falls on the same week of the Jewish Passover which is the ancestor and matrix within which it was formed. This pushes us to direct a thought to our Jewish brothers. They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms. I received in this week the letter of a Jewish friend and, with his permission, I share here a part of it. He said:

"I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the Pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism. Therefore I desire to express to you personally, to the Pope and to the whole Church my solidarity as Jew of dialogue and of all those that in the Jewish world (and there are many) share these sentiments of brotherhood. Our Passover and yours undoubtedly have different elements, but we both live with Messianic hope that surely will reunite us in the love of our common Father. I wish you and all Catholics a Good Easter."

--Rev. Fr. Cantalamessa 

Homily in the presence of the Holy Father at the Liturgy of Good Friday, April 2, 2010

This would be hilarious if it were not so depraved and disgusting. The crypto-rabbi wing of Judeo-Churchianity (Rev. Fr. Cantalamessa, Pope Benedict) trying to curry favor, on Good Friday, with the rabbis of the Judeo wing, compare the uproar over the culture of child-molestation facilitation in the Catholic hierarchy (Mahony, Driscoll, Skylstad still in power; Bernard Law, fugitive from justice, made Arch Priest of a Roman basilica) with the persecution of the "Jews" ("antisemitism"),"collective guilt" and "collective violence."

Here we have prima facie evidence that Cantalamessa and his enabler, Pope Benedict, are not Catholic. "Persecution of the Jews" is the historic cry of the Freemasons and rabbis against the saints and theologians of the early and medieval Church.

To claim that worldwide anger over child molestation facilitation by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is comparable to unjust "persecution of the Jews" is self-indicting. To make this claim on Good Friday is blasphemy. It signifies that the current usurpers who occupy the Church are as phony as the paranoid and megalomaniac ADL that sees "persecution of the Jews" in every stubbed Zionist toe.

Moreover, what is the definition of "persecution of the Jews"? Is it "persecution" when freedom of speech is in place to permit educating the public concerning the murderous racism in the Talmud that inspires Israeli mass murder in Palestine? Is it "persecution" when the stories of execution gas chambers in Auschwitz are questioned by scientists and publishers? Is it "persecution" when Israeli generals are compared to Nazis when they butcher the people of Gaza?

As for "collective" punishment, what of the collective punishment of German civilians during and after World War II? What of the ongoing collective punishment of the populations of Lebanon and Palestine by the "state of Israel," egged on by homicidal maniacs known as Orthodox "settler" rabbis?

If the Vatican was truly Catholic and Christ-like it would announce to the world that every child-molestation facilitator, beginning with Cardinal Roger Mahony in Los Angeles, has been removed from office and shipped to a Trappist monastery while they await state prosecution -- with the Vatican fully cooperating with the prosecutors. Bernard Law would be extradited from Vatican City back to Boston to face justice. Instead, the Vatican continues to keep these and other evil bishops (Skylstad, Driscoll, ad nauseum) in power while the Vatican sobs about "exaggerated" charges of a culture of child molestation facilitation existing within the Church.

The Vatican is the enemy of the Catholicism of the early and medieval Church, and thus today it appears without shame, on Good Friday, like Martin Gray, author of For Those I Loved, a book filled with his sorrowful ordeal as a persecuted Judaic "Holocaust Survivor" who was supposedly forced to help clear bodies out of the Treblinka "gas chamber." In truth, Gray and his book were both fakes. In fact, he was a decorated officer in the Soviet NKVD responsible for the murder of Christians and gentiles, posing as a poor persecuted Chosen One. This is the pattern of despicable fraud and shetl chicanery which the pope and his papal household preacher, sunk in the ethos of Holocaustianity, mount as an alibi and imitate as a form of self-defense.

Alas, the rabbinic racketeers will never surrender their monopoly on persecution to the hated papacy, even when the "Holy See" is occupied by a co-conspirator who is so inept he imagines he can grab a share of the persecution paranoia and co-opt Judaism's most cherished, trademarked brand. Consequently this disgraceful Vatican pandering to the ideological heirs of those who demanded the death of Jesus, is now backfiring.

In a palimpsest of falsification, the Zionist media keeps the pressure on Benedict by portraying this agent of the Synagogue as quasi antisemitic. This ruse serves a two-fold function: 1. it keeps Benedict pandering ever more to the rabbis, offering ever more craven concessions and servile compromise; and 2. it gives the 39-watt filaments of the Remnant newspaper types in traditional Catholicism the opportunity to claim that poor, pitiful Pope Benedict is a Catholic bastion against the synagogue! (Somewhere the masters of the Zohar are grinning).

For those who own a copy of my book Judaism Discovered, you will find a dossier on the lies and deceitful word games played by the crypto-rabbi "preacher of the papal household," Raniero Cantalamessa. Cf. pp. 389-390 and 414-418.

At Vatican Service, Persecution of Jews Is Invoked

NY Times April 2, 2010

ROME — A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack.

The remarks, on the day Christians mark the crucifixion, underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and criticism over how it has handled charges of child molestation against priests in the past, and sought to focus attention on the church as the central victim.

In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Friesing in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s.

Benedict sat looking downward when the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household, delivered his remarks in the traditional prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica. Wearing the brown cassock of a Franciscan, Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said.

Father Cantalamessa quoted from what he said was a letter from an unnamed Jewish friend. “I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole word,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

Even as the priest spoke out against attacks on the church, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, head of the German Bishops Conference, said that sex abuse victims were not helped enough “out of a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church.”

The church, he said, was shaken by “the suffering inflicted on the victims, who often for decades could not put their injuries into words.” Bishops around Europe have been offering similar remarks in recent days, following up on a major statement on molestation in the Irish church by the pope.

Father Cantalamessa’s comments about the Jews came toward the end of a long talk about scripture, the nature of violence and the sacrifice of Jesus. He also spoke about violence against women, but gave only a slight mention of the children and adolescents who have been molested by priests. “I am not speaking here of violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained; of that there is sufficient talk outside of here,” he said.

Disclosures about hundreds of such cases have emerged in recent months in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and France, after a previous round of scandal in the United States earlier this decade.

A leading advocate for sex abuse victims in the United States, David Clohessy, called comparing criticism of the church to persecution of the Jews “breathtakingly callous and misguided. Men who deliberately and consistently hide child sex crime are in no way victims,” he said. “And to conflate public scrutiny with horrific violence is about as wrong as wrong can be.”

The comments could cause a new twist in Vatican-Jewish relations, which have had ups and downs during Benedict’s papacy. Rabbi Riccardo di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, who hosted Benedict at the Rome synagogue in January on a visit that helped calm waters after a year of tensions, laughed in seeming disbelief when asked about Father Cantalamessa’s remarks.

“With a minimum of irony, I will say that today is Good Friday, when they pray that the Lord illuminate our hearts so we recognize Jesus,” Rabbi Di Segni said, referring to a prayer in a traditional Catholic liturgy calling for the conversion of the Jews. “We also pray that the Lord illuminate theirs.”

In 2008, Benedict ruffled feathers with Jewish groups when he issued a ruling making it easier to use the Latin Mass including that Good Friday prayer, which had fallen out of widespread use after the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. In January 2009, he stirred outrage when he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom turned out to have denied the scope of the Holocaust.

The legacy of the wartime pope, Pius XII, has been another sticking point. Some say he didn’t do enough to save Jews during the Holocaust; on a visit to the Rome synagogue in January, Benedict said that the Holy See had “provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way,” to help Jews.

Father Cantalamessa’s remarks come after weeks of intense scrutiny of Benedict, which some Italian media have seen in conspiratorial terms. Last week, the center-left daily La Repubblica wrote, without attribution, that “certain Catholic circles” believed the criticism of the church stemmed from “a New York ‘Jewish lobby.’”

Father Cantalamessa is a longtime fixture in the papal household, having been its official preacher since 1980. It is an ancient role, established by Pope Paul IV in the middle of the 16th century. The job is reserved for a member of the Franciscan Order of Capuchin Friars Minor. The apostolic preacher, as he also is called, gives meditations — especially during Advent and Lent — for the pope, cardinals, bishops and leaders of religious orders...

Nicholas Kulish contributed reporting from Berlin.

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