Statement from Michael Hoffman on the Mosque Controversy in New York

Synagogues Permissible, but not Mosques?


"I am reasonably literate on the subject of what the religion of Orthodox Judaism actually believes and teaches in the synagogue, including execution of those who preach that Jesus Christ is God. As an American and a Christian I affirm  that a Talmudic synagogue is no more or less appropriate anywhere near "Ground Zero" in Manhattan than a mosque. Where did the Founding Fathers, the Constitution or the First Amendment stipulate that synagogues were permissible and mosques were not? Right wing Republicans are willfully ignorant of the evils of Talmudic law and stirred to rage over Sharia law. But this ignorance does not make synagogues any more acceptable than mosques. If a mosque is banned then a synagogue is liable to the same interdict. Our Constitution does not, however, provide for any house of worship of any religion, to be singled out for obstruction or suppression.”

- Michael Hoffman, author of Judaism Discovered 

Under the Synagogue’s Talmudic Noachide*  law those who worship Jesus Christ are subject to execution. Here is the documentation:

The rabbinic legal authorities of Orthodox Judaism decree that the worship of Jesus Christ constitutes idol worship (avodah zarah).
—Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 9:4. Teshuvos Pri ha-Sadeh 2:4. Igros Moshe, Y.D. 3:129-6

Idol worshippers are liable to the death penalty under the Talmudic "Noachide Laws."

—BT Sanhedrin 57a

Rabbinic authorities decree that a building set aside for actual (rather than feigned) worship of Jesus Christ is a house of avodah zarah.

—Yayin Malchus, 234-237. Minchas Elazar 1:53-3. Yechaveh Da'as 4:45. Darchei Teshuvah 150:2. Tzitz Eliezer 14:91

Therefore, when passing a church, Judaics utter a curse upon it as follows: "Beis gee'im visach Hashem.”

—Birkath ha-Minim, 12th Amidah. BT Berakhot 58b

Research by Michael Hoffman 

Copyright ©2010 All Rights Reserved

* The Talmudic Noah is not be confused with the Noah of the Bible. See Judaism Discovered pp. 496-499.

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The preceding documentation is excerpted from Michael Hoffman’s book Judaism Discovered 
http://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com/2010/03/michael-hoffmans-online-revisionist.html

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Hoffman contra Wilders: Sharia Law protested, Talmudic Law not an issue

Michael Hoffman’s dissent immediately follows the article below, which was circulated by Mr. Paul Fromm of the Canadian Association for Free Expression

______________

WARNING ABOUT ISLAM BY GEERT WILDERS

In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: Who lost Europe?

Here is the speech of Geert Wilders, Chairman, Party for Freedom, the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons, New York, introducing an Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem 

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me. I come to America with a mission.  All is not well in the old world.  There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe.  This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West.  The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.

First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe.  Then, I will say a few things about Islam.  To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.

The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks.  But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world.  It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.

All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen.  And if they are, they might regret it.  This goes for the police as well.  It's the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children.  Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead.  With mosques on many street corners.  The shops have signs you and I cannot read.  You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity.  These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics.  These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.

There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe.  With larger congregations than there are in churches.  And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region.  Clearly, the signal is: we rule.

Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille and Malmo in Sweden .  In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim.  Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods.  Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.
In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims.

Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils.  In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims.  Non-Muslim women routinely hear 'whore, whore'.  Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.

In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin.  The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.

In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves.  Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels , because he was drinking during the Ramadan.

Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II.  French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel.  I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe.  San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers.  And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate.  But there are few signs of that.  The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France.  One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks.  The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate.  Muslims demand what they call 'respect'.  And this is how we give them respect.  We have Muslim official state holidays. The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority.  We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots.  Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus.  I call the perpetrators 'settlers'.  Because that is what they are.  They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam.  Therefore, they are settlers. Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries.  Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet.  His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized.  Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem.  But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages - at the same time.  Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed.  Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza.  If it is good for Islam, it is good.  If it is bad for Islam, it is bad.

Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion.  Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins.  But in its essence Islam is a political ideology.  It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person.  Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life.  Islam means 'submission'.  Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia.  If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam 'the most retrograde force in the world', and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.  The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor.  I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times.  I support Israel.  First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.
This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam's territorial advance.  Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia.  Israel is simply in the way.  The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel.  It is a war against the West.  It is jihad.  Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us.  If there would have been no Israel , Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest.  Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities.  But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West.  It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values.

On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam.  They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed.  The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning.  It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination.  If they can get Israel, they can get everything.

So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'.  In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II.  And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat.  Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing.  The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine.  An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America -- as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts.  My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives.  All throughout Europe, American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish.  My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians.  We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe 's children in the same state in which it was offered to us.  We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams.  Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties.  We simply do not have the right to do so. We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know.


Michael Hoffman contra Geert Wilders: 
Sharia Law protested, Talmudic Law not an issue

I will address the two main fallacies which Mr. Wilders advances: 1. Alliance with Judaism and Zionism 2. Obsession with the symptoms rather than the root of the European demographic crisis.

1. Alliance with Judaism and Zionism

Wilders claims the Israelis are part of the West. What nonsense. Talmudism was allied with Islam for centuries. Jonathan Pollard's spying benefited Pakistan through Mossad. Today Egypt is an Israeli satrapy.

Who backed Islamic immigration into Europe in the first place? Major Zionist organizations, that's who. Do some research on Marek Halter; also the Conseil Representif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF).

Talmudists work for the destruction of the West, as annually commemorated in their Ninth of Av  — Tish b’Av rites (see Judaism Discovered). Triumphs of western civilization are regarded by the religion of Orthodox Judaism as disasters and ritually lamented on Tish b’Av.

Mr. Wilders is worried about life under Sharia law, but Europe has been under Halachic (Talmudic) law for decades, without much of a murmur of protest. Does Wilders know the status of a stranger (ger) under the Halacha of the rabbis? He protests rule by Islamic supremacists but works with Zionist supremacists with the supposed joint intention of the restoration of European civilization — a civilization which Orthodox Judaism execrates!

Orthodox Judaism calls western civilization the "kochi ve’otzem yadi of Edom," i.e. the brute strength of their irreconcilable and perpetual racial enemy. Judaism, being more shrewd and duplicitous than Islam, has kept its religious secrets from the prying eyes of outsiders to a far greater extent than Islam.

Even when elite westerners have access to documentation that testifies to the authentic nature of rabbinic Judaism, they refuse to publicize it, in part because they are allied with it through Freemasonry and cognate secret societies which seek the rebuilding of the Third Temple at Jerusalem. Mr. Wilders is oblivious to the religious fanaticism and violence inherent in this rebuilding project, as he is to all the other evil and retrograde aspects of Orthodox Judaism.

As an American and a student of Judaism I am appalled by the extent to which my fellow Americans are serving as puppets of a hidden agenda, when, like Wilders, they shriek and wail about “Sharia law” as if it were in power in state houses across the U.S.

Yet they have zero interest in making the slightest mouse-like peep about the Talmudic law that is increasingly encroaching upon our Constitution and taking over our judiciary and legislature — not a word about Halachic law from the Sharia law protestors. Hence, the latter are very obviously being directed not by American patriots, but by powerful forces who have led them to practice selective indignation concerning the subversive religions (plural) undermining our nation.

 2. Obsession with the symptoms rather than the root of the European demographic crisis

The root of the crisis: selfish, pleasure-addicted European Whites are self-exterminating through contraception and abortion.

Foreign peoples who do not engage in the twin plagues of contraception and abortion will quite naturally replace those indigenous people who do engage in those despicable vices. This is a Law of Nature.

To use Islamic immigrants as an excuse to ally with Zionism and Talmudism is a failure of vision remarkable to behold. By this “logic" European Whites are obliged to support war on Muslim Iran and its “Holocaust” revisionist president. Will we never escape from offering our blood and treasure to the idol of Zionism and Judaism? Will we always be suckered into serving as rabbinic golem in Judaic wars, on the basis of one fantastic alibi or another?

Mr. Wilders and his self-extinguishing European brethren should first look to their own child-hating, death loving and aging societies for the cause of their demise.

Alien ethnics of all nationalities and religions will always rush in to fill a demographic vacuum brought on by the selfishness and degeneracy of baby-despising Europeans. Joining with Israelis in their brutal territorial wars will do absolutely nothing to save Europe from its own debased hedonism.

When European couples are again having five, ten and fifteen children as their great grand-parents did, they will begin their long peregrination on the road to regaining their ancestral lands.

European nations awash in atheism, euthanasia, abortion and birth control will never revive the civilization of their Christian ancestors, no matter how much they lick the Talmudic boots and share in the bloody crimes of rabbis and Zionists.

Hoffman is the editor of the hard-copy Revisionist History newsletter, and the author of Judaism Discovered.

Copyright© 2010 www.RevisionistHistory.org

Oliver Stone, Adolf Hitler and Hypocritical Outrage

Oliver Stone: Jewish control of the media is preventing free Holocaust debate

Outspoken Hollywood director says new film aims to put Adolf Hitler, who he has called an 'easy scapegoat' in the past, in his due historical context

Haaretz (Israeli newspaper) | July 26, 2010

(Michael Hoffman’s observations immediately follow this report)

Oliver Stone

Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington's foreign policy for years.

In the Sunday (July 25) interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the "Jewish domination of the media," adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin "in context."

"There's a major lobby in the United States," Stone said, adding that "they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.”

The famed Hollywood director of such films as “Platoon" and “JFK," also said that while "Hitler was a Frankenstein," there was also a “Dr. Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support," Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed].”

Referring to the alleged influence of the powerful Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Stone said that Israel had distorted "United States foreign policy for years," adding he felt U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible. Iran isn't necessarily the good guy," Stone said, insisting that Americans did not "know the full story.”

Stone's comments to the Sunday Times echo pervious remarks by the Hollywood director, regarding what he conceives as the distorted view of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in U.S. media. Earlier this year, Stone, speaking at the at the Television Critics Association's semi-annual press tour in Pasadena said that "Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it's been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect ... People in America don't know the connection between World War I and World War II," Stone said, adding that through his documentary work he has been able to "walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view.”

"We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated," Stone said.

End quote from Haaretz

HOFFMAN’S OBSERVATIONS

The Gevurah/Right wing Republican neocons are running wild with Stone’s remarks, pointing to them as a manifestation of the Chesed/Left-wing’s incomparably perverted true nature. As part of this Left/Right charade, Mr. Stone is being cast as the unconscionable bad guy possessed of depraved indifference to a genocidal maniac (Hitler). This fire is directed by Zionist lapdogs who regard the Palestinian people as lower than dirt and cheer the Orthodox Judaic rabbinate who encourage Israeli  atrocities in Palestine.

Amid the canned outrage approved by New York and Hollywood, let’s ask, where is the outrage over Rabbi Shapira, who declared, "It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation. If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Where is the outrage over Goldwin Smith, Judaic Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, who opined, "We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them.”

Where is the outrage over Noel Ignatiev, Harvard professor: “…The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacist…Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the white race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed.”

Gee, I’m sorry that I can’t be more “patriotic" and join with "Avodah Zarah" Sarah (Palin) and "Flush Limberger" and the rest of the six-pointed mobsters disguised as Jeffersonian Constitutionalists, in hurling heated epithets at Oliver Stone, when their Zionist heroes are running about advocating killing gentiles while wearing the striped pajamas of Auschwitz inmates.

This theatre of the absurd unfolds against the backdrop of  relentless focus on Islam as the "most evil religion on earth" and a threat to all the other “benign" world religions, such as the warm, fuzzy Judaism whose “holy” book says Jesus Christ is in hell being boiled in feces. With apologies to Sarah and Flush and everyone at The Weekly Standard and Fox Noose, as a Christian I dare not fail to publicly condemn and abominate the disgusting and blasphemous rabbinic religion and still hope for mercy from my Savior on Judgment Day.

Forgetting that Judaism and Islam were allies for centuries, from enforced ignorance about Judaism the faith of Islam emerges as the primary religious menace in the minds of Americans. The reaction against Oliver Stone, who merely pricked the gas bag of the monotonous Holohoax propaganda industry (and then issued the de rigueur apology for telling the truth about it), is out of all proportion because Americans do not study what Orthodox Judaism actually teaches, and care little or nothing for the Nazi-like crimes of the little Hitlers who serve the Israeli war machine while financed by US taxpayers.

Stone says Hitler was a stooge of the corporations. I say he was a stooge of deep cover Kabbalistic Judaism, as manifested in the New Age occult beliefs that were his astrological religion. Dig deeply beneath the Orthodox Judaic surface and you will excavate rabbinic admiration for Hitler as "G-d’s avenging angel" against  the majority of 20th century European Judaics who were in the process of liberating themselves from the prison house of Talmudism. Of this Oliver Stone is as ignorant as any Tea Party tippler.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered. He writes from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

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Governor of New York follows pagan occult Kabbalah

We are ruled by Judaism

*****

Gov. Paterson turns to higher power by wearing red string kabbalah bracelet to ward off evil

by Celeste Katz 

(ckatz@nydailynews.com)  

New York Daily News, July 15, 2010

New York Governor David Paterson photographed wearing the red string talisman of Kabbalah adherents  

Gov. Paterson is counting on a Madonna-blessed higher power to lead him out of the mess in Albany. The lame-duck governor has begun wearing a red string kabbalah bracelet - just like the Material Girl - in an eyebrow-raising bid to deflect ill will. "It was explained to the governor that the red string is a symbol of protection [that] wards off problems and tribulations," Paterson spokesman Morgan Hook said. "His attitude was that he'll take all the help he can get."

 Paterson could be forgiven for turning to a little divine protection. In the past six months he's found himself under investigation, dumped his reelection bid as a result, and wrestled with the Legislature over the state budget. So he's apparently trying his luck with the trendy talisman favored by followers of the mystical Jewish discipline.

But unlike Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears, Paterson is not yet one of the devoted, a spokesman said. "Kabbalah didn't change his life, just to be clear here," Hook said. Either way, Paterson may not be getting all the spiritual backup he hopes for - the bracelet is customarily worn on the left wrist, while the governor is seen in photos wearing it on his right.

Paterson's spiritual shift was set in motion this spring when the Catholic-raised pol visited the Queens burial site of a venerated rabbi. It was at the Union Field Cemetery in Ridgewood, housing the body of Rabbi Jacob Joseph, who died in 1902 and whose tomb has become a sacred site visited by thousands of Jews, that Paterson learned about the little red string.

Kabbalah followers believe that the $26.00 bracelet wards off the "evil eye" and brings about good fortune.

It appears to be the accessory of choice for high-profile New Yorkers facing controversy. Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez sported a red kabbalah string on his left wrist last year when he confessed in a TV interview to using steroids. At the time, A-Rod was linked to Madonna.

Kabbalah teachings date back 4,000 years. According to the Kabbalah Centre's Web site, its "sages have taught that every human being is born with the potential for greatness. Kabbalah is the means for activating that potential."

The exact date Governor Paterson began wearing the red string isn't clear, but may have been around February when he came under scrutiny for having intervened in a domestic-violence case involving his former top aide, David Johnson.  (End quote)

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Learn the whole truth about the Kabbalah, read Judaism Discovered

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Babylonian Talmudic Traditional Catholicism

The corpulent fellow in the red suit having his hand kissed is "His Eminence" Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard of Bordeaux, France.

Effusive praise and gratitude is being heaped on him by "traditional Catholics" because on June 13 he deigned to administer the sacrament of Confirmation to French children according to the old, pre-Vatican II rite. (See it here). 

Cardinal Ricard is a follower of the Babylonian Talmud under the instruction of Rabbi Avi Weiss of New York.

In July 1989, Rabbi Weiss and six associates attacked the Carmelite Catholic nuns' convent in Auschwitz. Pope John Paul II subsequently expelled the nuns and closed the convent. 

In March 2006 Cardinal Ricard underwent his submission to the Babylonian Talmud at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, under the direction of Rabbi Weiss. 

Cardinal Ricard removed his pectoral cross during his time at Yeshivat Chovevei.

Cardinal Ricard has never repudiated his submission to the Talmud or his allegiance to his nun-hunting rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Weiss.

This is the face of the papally-approved "return to tradition" -- the emerging, hybrid Babylonian Talmudic "Traditional" Catholicism. 

For documentation on Cardinal Ricard and Rabbi Weiss cf. Judaism Discovered by Michael Hoffman, pp. 547-554. 

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"Holocaust denier" found dead in parking lot

Dariusz Ratajczak

By 24opole.pl and Michael Hoffman

Opole, Poland, June 16, 2010 -- The body of a former Polish history professor, Dariusz Ratajczak, convicted by a Polish court in 2002 of claiming that mass gassings of human beings in Auschwitz-Birkenau was impossible, has been found dead in a shopping center parking lot in the western Polish city of Opole.

Prof. Ratajczak was suspended in April 1999 from his teaching post at Opole University's Historical Institute after state prosecutors opened an investigation into the publication of his book Tematy niebezpieczne ("Dangerous Themes").

"The body, which was severely decomposed, has been identified by Ratajczak's family, so additional DNA tests will not have to be carried out," says Lidia Sieradzka from the Prosecutor's Office in Opole.   

Judging by the state of the body and recent high temperatures, the man has been dead for up to two weeks, say police. Security guards at the Karolinka shopping centre claim, however, that the historian's Renault Kangoo was left at the car park on the same day, June 11, that it was discovered.   In the car police found documents which belonged to 48-year-old revisionist historian Ratajczak. Recordings from CCTV are being examined.

The cause of Ratajczak's death remains uncertain. Police think it is unlikely that he was murdered because  it is alleged that no injuries were found on the body during the autopsy.    

Police established that the historian, who had problems finding employment in Poland, planned to go to Holland or Belgium to work in a company to do menial labor. For that purpose he acquired a Renault Kangoo automobile, in which his body was found stuffed between the front and rear seats. It is reported that he may have been living in his car. He worked at odd jobs for food.

 In 2000, Dariusz Ratajczak was fired from the University of Opole, where he worked for eleven years, and banned from teaching at other universities for three years after the publication of Tematy niebezpieczne, in which he claimed that it was not scientifically possible to kill millions of people in alleged Auschwitz death camp gas chambers.  

Earlier in 1999, a Polish court found Ratajczak guilty of "public denial" of German war crimes – which is against the law in Poland – but because the book was self-published with a print run of only 260 copies it was not thought to be able to create a "social annoyance" and he was not punished. In his defense, Prof. Ratajczak told the court that his book was merely a survey of many dissenting views on the "Holocaust," including revisionist works by British historian David Irving and others. "Holocaust denial" is a crime in Poland, Germany, Hungary, France, Switzerland and Austria.

Mr. Ratajczak is survived by a son and a daughter.  

***

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).

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