***Is Your Parish a Member of VOICE? VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement) lists these diocesan parishes as members: (Arlington) St. Charles Borromeo and Our Lady Queen of Peace, (Alexandria) St. Joseph, (Fairfax) Good Shepherd, Nativity of Our Lord, and St. John Neumann, (Prince William) Holy Family, Sacred Heart Manassas, and St. Francis of Assisi. All these parishes are pouring money into the Industrial Areas Foundation, the daddy of community organizing. Congregations are generally taxed 1% of their annual budget. The money goes to IAF – not to the poor. In fact, a lot of IAF organizing is about shaking down local government and businesses using immoral tactics like sending groups into hospital emergency rooms or banks or businesses where they refuse to leave until they get their demands met. Now it’s one thing to sit in at an abortion mill to save babies’ lives; it’s quite another to sit in an emergency room preventing those who are really sick from receiving care. That’s the kind of umbrella VOICE sits under.
***An IAF Tactic: Relational Training Wickipedia calls relational training a “primary organizing tool” used by IAF. How does it work? “It consists of a one-on-one, face-to-face meeting of two persons lasting at least 30 minutes, where personal topics and stories dealing with values, motivations, self-interest and life are discussed in an often confessional, cathartic sort of manner." The purpose is to make the individual “feel important” and manipulate him/her into joining the team and promoting the organizer’s agenda. The target is isolated to prevent another viewpoint that might give the person pause. The ethics of relational training are fluid, i.e., there are no moral absolutes. Saul Alinsky was committed to pragmatism: what’s right is what works. And the organizers’s training kit includes his works filled with Machiavellian methods of manipulation. During the 70s, when Catholic churches in Chicago were infiltrated by IAF with the help of Msgr. Jack Egan, an IAF psychologist, Robert Newsome, developed strategies for “reforming” the churches by training parish change agensts. He described his goal in a 1977 grant request, “The project faces a challenge of dramatically changing the way Catholic parishes serve themselves and the secular community of which they are a part. Heretofore parishes have principally focused on the salvation and grace of their members. The purpose of this project is to unleash the capacity of parishes to be apostolic organizations with a new vision, mission, and capability for developing the greatness and well-being of mankind.” [Creating an earthly Utopia using the world’s playbook.] Stephanie Block’s extensive research on Alinsky methods shows how individuals are trained to use any means to reach the goal no matter how immoral. And IAF training is coming to D.C. this month sponsored by Metro IAF. VOICE is advertising it on their website. “Topics include community leadership, person-to-person organizing, and building the local power necessary to transform the community.” Consider that IAF began in Chicago in the 70s with that same goal of “transforming the community.” Has anyone noticed less poverty, less violence, better schools, better race relations, etc. in the windy city? Just askin’. But doesn’t it make you wonder whether there’s another agenda of the change agents that has nothing to do with helping the poor? ***Meet Kasper the Unfriendly Cardinal!The Extraordinary Synod on the Family exposed the true colors of German Cardinal Walter Kasper big time. Especially telling were his direct lies about the interview outside the Synod hall when he dissed the African bishops saying, “[T]here are different problems of different continents and different cultures. Africa is totally different from the West. Also Asian and Muslim countries, they’re very different, especially about gays. You can’t speak about this with Africans and people of Muslim countries. It’s not possible. It’s a taboo. For us, we say we ought not to discriminate, we don’t want to discriminate in certain respects….[T]he questions of Africa we cannot solve…. [W]ith Africa it’s impossible [for us to solve]. But they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” Surely not! The West has nothing to learn from those Third World black cardinals even though Africa is where the Church is growing, unlike Germany where the faith has all but disappeared! Several reporters heard Kasper’s elitist comments, but later, when Catholic Register reporter, Edward Pentin, quoted him, Kasper lied and accused Pentin of making it all up. Fortunately Pentin taped the exchange and released it on his blog along with a written transcript. So Kasper began spinning a new story about how he thought his comments were off the record… blah…blah. Kasper’s behavior was despicable especially when you consider the damage his calumny could do to the reporter’s livelihood. But, hey, the end justifies the means to men like Kasper who appears to follow Saul Alinsky and his unethical rules. ***But there’s more about Cdl. Kasper who holds many views against Church teaching. His opinion on giving Communion to those in invalid marriages is well known thanks to the Synod, but he also wants a review of contraception. In a radio interview with Brian Lehrer last May, he responded to a question about whether poor couples should be allowed to practice contraception saying, “Well, the Church is not against birth control at all.…It’s about the methods of birth control. I do not want to enter into this characteristic...how they have to do it. It’s their personal conscience and personal responsibility.” This same line was used after Humanae Vitae by the dissenters. Many poorly catechized Catholics heard it in the confessional without any direction about a properly formed conscience or moral methods of birth regulation. In a talk at Fordham Univ. pushing his new book, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, LifeSite News reported that Kasper, “attacked the current head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, and claimed that Pope Francis has no concerns about ‘heresy’ or the overturning of the Church’s doctrines. Religion News Service reported that in the Q&A session following his lecture, Kasper related that Pope Francis himself had told him the story of ‘an old cardinal’ who had said of Kasper’s book, ‘Holy Father, you cannot do this! There are heresies in this book!’ The German cardinal related that the pope had reassured him with a smile that, ‘This enters in one ear and goes out the other.’ Pope Francis is on record saying that Kasper’s book ‘has done me such good.’” Whether the lying Kasper is telling the truth about this who knows? Let’s hope not. If the pope really “has no concerns about heresy” we are in deep trouble indeed. But Kasper’s word sure can’t be trusted! “The truth is not in him.” 1 John 2:4 ***From Vatican Insider’s Andrea Tornielli: “Among the most shocking declarations made by prelates who were not present at the Synod assembly, were those published on the Diocese of Providence website by Bishop Thomas Tobin: ‘The concept of having a representative body of the Church voting on doctrinal applications and pastoral solutions strikes me as being rather Protestant... the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, counter-cultural, prophetic voice’. Commenting on the distortions of the media, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, said the ‘public image’ of the Synod has created ‘confusion’ and ‘confusion is of the devil’.”
***After the Funeral: Where’s Brittany Now?
Brittany Maynard fulfilled her macabre plan to kill herself the day after Halloween. In her last months she became the poster girl for the culture of death crusading for every state to legalize physician-assisted-suicide. She worked with Compassion and Choices (CC), a group with roots in The Hemlock Society founded by Derek Humphry. Rita Marker, an expert on the history of the euthanasia move-ment, often points out that legalizing "mercy killing" isn't about the right to die, but the right to kill. Humphry, smothered his first wife, Jean, who had breast cancer when drugs failed to kill her. He then drove his second wife, Ann, (who participated in Jean’s death and witnessed her murder) to kill herself when she developed breast cancer as well. Marker tells Ann’s story in Deadly Compassion: The Death of Ann Humphrey and the Truth about Euthanasia. Brittany probably had no clue about the history of the group using her as poster girl for their deadly agenda. What a coup! Did they push her to go through with her scheme when she back-pedaled in the last days of her life? Derek wanted Ann to kill herself after he left her. In her death note she wrote him a personal message saying, “What you did - desertion and abandonment and subsequent harassment of a dying woman - is so unspeakable there are no words to describe it.” No, there is nothing lovely, or courageous, or noble about suicide, because it means turning one’s back on God. “Death with dignity” isn’t suicide, but, embracing life in all its messiness. One mom on Facebook reacted to Brittany’s death by remembering her first husband who died of the same disease. She wrote, All I can think of is my late husband, and how filled with hope he was every single day. He never gave up; he used to say 'tomorrow could be the day they find a cure'. Even when he was completely incapable of moving on his own or even speaking, he never believed he was fighting for nothing. In the end, because he wanted no stone left unturned, he was the first patient...to receive an experimental cancer drug that is now typically the first course of treatment for newly diagnosed patients. He left a legacy of hope and even if he decided on no treatments at all (which I would have fully supported!!) he never would have taken his own life. And that is courage! Pray that Brittany repented in her last moments.