Enemies of Christ in Shepherds' Clothing

by Thomas A. Droleskey

As has been noted in other commentaries on the tragedy of the threats to the life of Mrs. Terri Schindler-Schiavo, there are countless other persons in situations like hers that are being starved and dehydrated to death every day in this country. One of the reasons that men like the Most Reverend Robert N. Lynch, Bishop of Saint Petersburg, Florida, and others in the hierarchy in this country have endorsed the removal of food and water tubes in certain cases is that this practice is common in Catholic hospitals. Bishop Lynch cannot admit that a pastoral letter issued in 1989 by the Florida bishops was wrong. He cannot admit that those Catholic hospitals that have followed the "guidelines" contained in that pastoral letter have wrongly murdered their patients. He must stand steadfast in support of the thoroughly heterodox view, contrary to both the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law, that it is permissible in some cases to withdraw food and water. Anyone who simply restates the principle founded in objective truth that one may never take any action that has as its only and immediate end the death of an innocent human being must thus be ignored as an "irritant," even if this means ignoring the Successor of Saint Peter as he himself merely re-states the immutable truths of the Divine positive law and the natural law.

The murder of innocent human beings in Catholic hospitals by starvation and dehydration is a scandal of major proportions. News stories about this scandal have appeared in various Catholic publications. As was the case with the sodomite priest scandals, which were broken at first by the investigations of men like the late Father Charles Fiore and reported in The Wanderer, among other places, the scandal of starving and dehydrating patients in Catholic hospitals has yet to get any "traction" in secular news outlets. This is partly attributable to the fact that many of the relatives of those who have been murdered have acquiesced in the removal of food and water tubes, believing in the medical advice that had been given them by physicians and the ethical advice that had been given them by Catholic priests and nuns.

That is, the sensus Catholicus leads a practicing Catholic to trust in his bishop or parish priest or nun. A Catholic is by the supernatural gifts he has received in the Baptismal font and that are fortified by the worthy reception of Holy Communion and the frequenting of the Sacred Tribunal of Penance predisposed to believing those in ecclesiastical authority. The devil knows this, which is why the Modernists within the hierarchy and the priesthood and the ranks of the consecrated religious and within the nooks and crannies of all of the ecclesiastical bureaucracies of chancery offices and universities and colleges and schools want to stay within the Church they hate so much so that they can be recognized as authorities by the lowly sheep, thus making it possible for these enemies of Our Lord to attack the truths contained in the Deposit of the Faith with the persistence of a worm eating through an apple.

To wit, Father Lawrence C. Smith told me this morning, February 28, 2005, after offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Garden Grove, California, that a parishioner of his in Iowa was shocked when he told her, upon learning of the circumstances of her mother's death, that she had murdered her mother by starvation and dehydration. She was outraged, not at Father Smith for telling the truth but at the fact that an "ethicist" at a Catholic hospital told her that it was the right thing to do. This is not an isolated instance at all. Indeed, it is the norm in many Catholic hospitals around the nation. And it is a scandal, involving the promotion of a sin that cries out to Heaven (the murder of the innocent) that exceeds in its magnitude the protection and promotion of those within the priesthood who have been unrepentant practitioners and apologists for one of the other of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, the sin of Sodom.

The Most Reverend Walter Sullivan, the former Bishop of Richmond, Virginia, publicly supported Mrs. Michele Finn's desire to use a law in the Commonwealth of Virginia to have her brain-damaged husband, Hugh Finn, starved and dehydrated to death in 1998. Mrs. Finn also had the support of Louisville Archbishop Thomas Kelly, O.P. A woman who lives in Virginia reported in an e-mail she sent out to her list on Saturday, February 26, 2005:

I struggled against this moral issue constantly when directing Hospice - trying to teach the value of human life and suffering to Catholic and non-Catholic volunteers and nurses, alike!  God alone knows if I made any headway.  I went head to head with Bishop Sullivan - via letters exchanged - when he approved of this evil mentality of euthanasia - and fought St. Mary's hospital, unable to find even one priest who would support my friend's battle to save her mother's life after brain surgery BECAUSE HER MOM WAS IN A COMA AND COULD NOT LIFT THE SPOON HERSELF!  Yes, the hospital called itself "Catholic!"  So did Bishop Sullivan - call himself Catholic! 

As I noted in "Flying in the Face of Catholicism," totally absent from the considerations of these Modernist bishops is the reality of redemptive suffering and the sufficiency of the graces won for us by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross to endure any and all crosses we are asked to bear, both in our own lives and as we help others carry their own crosses in imitation of Simon of Cyrene and his sons Rufus and Alexander. This is a fundamental loss of the Catholic Faith, demonstrated in the 1989 Florida bishops' pastoral letter, a similar pastoral letter issued in 1996 by the then ordinary of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, the now deceased Bishop John Raymond McGann, the public statements of Archbishop Kelly and Bishop Walter Sullivan in the Hugh Finn case in 1998, the public statements of Bishop Robert Lynch in the Terri Schiavo case, and the February 15, 2005, statement of the Florida Catholic Conference. What is even worse is that some bishops who know that the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings is wrong do not have the apostolic courage to clean up the Catholic hospitals administered by various religious communities where these murders are taking place, just as they lack the apostolic courage to clean up Catholic schools and universities and colleges. Bodies and souls are thus both placed into jeopardy as a result.

The practice of starving and dehydrating patients in Catholic hospitals and hospices has been going on for quite some time. As mentioned before, few people are complaining because they either agree with the practice or they accept the word of the "experts." Such was the case ten years ago when a Catholic man, who cannot be otherwise identified, was starved and dehydrated to death in a Catholic hospital. His parents, who were from a foreign country, spoke little English and were afraid to confront the hospital officials as they saw their son die a cruel death from starvation and dehydration. Indeed, I prepared a report on this matter for publication in The Wanderer. The eyewitnesses to this tragedy, though, were intimidated by the hospital officials into backing down lest they, the eyewitnesses, be slapped with a lawsuit, an eerie echo of what has happened in not a small number of cases in the 1990s and before to those who brought forth complaints against sodomite priests. And it was just two years later that a nurse from the Midwest spoke publicly at a conference in New Jersey on her own knowledge of this practice in a Catholic hospital.

The starvation and dehydration of those deemed to be a "burden" to themselves and/or others is but the logical result of indifference to or acceptance of the killing of children in the womb. Many of those who staff the institutions of the Church today are thorough-going secularists who believe in leftism, statism, relativism, utilitarianism, positivism, and every other sort of secular religion, eschewing Catholicism with a demonic hatred. The extent of this hatred of the Mercy of the Divine Redeemer for those who are sick and in need of both the Spiritual and the Corporal Works of Mercy can be seen by reviewing once more the report written by Jill Stanek on September 15, 2004, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, published at www.worldnet daily.com:

The news was a real bummer. A reporter named Tom Szyszkiewicz, who writes for the Catholic publications, Our Sunday Visitor and the National Catholic Register, was calling to tell me he had discovered two Catholic hospital systems were committing the induced-labor abortion procedure – live-birth abortion – on handicapped babies.

The bad news warped to bizarre when Szyszkiewicz said these hospitals were waiting until babies were 23 to 26 weeks gestation before aborting them – i.e., until they were of viable age – so they could say these weren't abortions at all, but simply labor inductions and, thus, sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

"That's crazy," I thought. Most hospitals I'm aware of that commit LBA do just the opposite: They make sure to abort babies before 23 weeks – the most recent viability cutoff date according to the American Heart Association and American Academy of Pediatrics – to avoid the ethical and legal dilemmas of deciding whether to resuscitate a baby they just tried to kill.

The Catholic hospitals' abortion strategy seemed even more risky when taking the Born Alive Infants Protection Act into account. It states that live-born babies, no matter what their gestational age or circumstances of birth, are "persons." According to the 14th Amendment, "persons" born in the United States are automatic citizens who cannot be "deprive[d] ... of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor den[ied] ... equal protection of the laws."

This means live-aborted babies can't be cast aside to die in hospital soiled utility rooms, or drowned in buckets of water, or sealed to suffocate in biohazard bags. They must be medically assessed and cared for just like wanted babies.

Last week, I contacted both hospital systems to make sure I wasn't missing something. I wasn't.

Loyola Health System in Chicago, and Providence Health System on the West Coast and Alaska, both commit live-birth abortion. But they don't like the word, abortion." They call what they do, "early induction of labor."

Webster's Dictionary defines abortion as, "the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus."

So now "termination of pregnancy" is called "early induction of labor." Euphemisms ... what would abortion proponents do without them?

Other Catholic hospitals may also be involved. Szyszkiewicz reported in the March 7, 2004, Our Sunday Visitor that Providence is the 10th largest U.S. Catholic health system, and "spokespersons for the other nine ... were either vague about their hospitals' practices or did not return calls."

Loyola and Providence say they are acting in accordance with the 2001 U.S. Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services that states, "For proportionate reason, labor may be induced after the fetus is viable."

Theologian James LaGrye from the bishops' doctrinal office said the term "proportionate" is used "for situations in which some grave risk would be incurred if an action were not taken to avoid it," wrote Szyszkiewicz, who added, "LaGrye said the mental health of the mother 'is a reason' to perform early induction."

In addition to having "mental health" concerns, Fr. Jack O'Callahan, staff ethicist at Loyola, said they are trying "to ward off the physical complications of bringing to term a child who is not going to live anyway."

The "mental health" of a mother "is a reason" to perform "early induction?" The sufficiency of God's grace and the protection offered by Our Lady's maternal intercession? Bearing one's cross by offering all to the Immaculate Heart of Mary? Just as the Florida Catholic Conference and Bishop Robert N. Lynch justify the removal of Terri Schindler-Schiavo's feeding and hydration tubes on the grounds of their being a "burden" to her, so is life in the womb said to be a burden both to the little child and to his mother in instances noted in Miss Stanek's report. The barbarians masquerading as bishops and ecclesiastical functionaries have thus embraced the very eugenic ethos denounced by the Bishop of Munster, Clemens von Galens, when he was delivering sermons against Adolf Hitler's euthanasia decrees in 1939.

Physical deformities detected before birth and physical maladies that afflict the body as a result of disease or accident after birth are not to be dealt with by killing those who suffer from them. Our Lord comes to us mystically in the persons of those who are suffering, pleading for us to see His Divine impress in the creatures for whom He shed His Most Precious Blood and founded for us His Holy Church to be our mater and our magister. The Fifth Commandment does not admit of exceptions in the cases of physical deformities or financial burdens. Each of us suffers from the deformities to our souls caused by our sins, and one of the chief ways we can repair those deformities is precisely by bearing our crosses in love and by patiently helping to bear the crosses of others, keeping in mind how Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart was pierced on Good Friday by the sword of sorrow that had been prophesied by Simeon at the moment of her Purification. Those who reject the theology of redemptive suffering and who thus embrace a utilitarian, proportionalist mentality with respect to physical sufferings, cannot call themselves Catholics in good standing.

The foul miasma that has been created by the rejection of the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law as entrusted to and explicated by Holy Mother Church will not be corrected until some pope actually consecrates Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Although our current Holy Father has indeed spoken out against crimes against innocent life, he has placed into positions of ecclesiastical authority men who are themselves enemies of the Cross of Christ and who put in place in their own bureaucracies their co-conspirators against the Catholic Faith. While we pray for our Holy Father as he recovers from yet another life-threatening episode, we must pray that he or one of his successors does what Our Lady wants done without delay. France suffered the punishment of the French Revolution because King Louis XIV and the bishops of France refused to heed Our Lord's request, given through Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, to consecrate the entirety of France, not just Paris, to His Most Sacred Heart. The Church and the world are suffering today because a very simple thing, the public mention of the word "Russia," is deemed to be politically insensitive and theologically absurd.

Our Lord said the following to Sister Lucia in Rianjo, Spain, in August of 1931:

Make it known to My ministers, given that they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My command, they will follow him into misfortune. It is never too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.

The essence of God, however, is simplicity. He wants from each of us, from the Chief Shepherd on earth down to us lowly sheep, a simple Faith, a simple readiness to do exactly what He tells us to do, being ever willing to listen attentively to His own Most Blessed Mother, who has told us that there can be no peace in the world absence the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart following the consecration of Russia by the pope and all of the world's bishops. What is so difficult about this? All of the rot of the past forty years (doctrinal and liturgical) will be wiped away. There will be a conversion of souls as miraculous as what happened in Latin America following Our Lady's apparitions to Saint Juan Diego in 1531. We must pray and fast and do penance, especially deep in the midst of our desert journey in Lent, to help to bring this about and to make reparation for our own many sins, which have added in no small measure to the problems we face in the Church and the world.

We never lose heart. We keep in mind the words of Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas, which was issued in 1925:

We may well admire in this the admirable wisdom of the Providence of God, who, ever bringing good out of evil, has from time to time suffered the faith and piety of men to grow weak, and allowed Catholic truth to be attacked by false doctrines, but always with the result that truth has afterwards shone out with greater splendor, and that men's faith, aroused from its lethargy, has shown itself more vigorous than before.

Pope Pius XI went on to note in that same encyclical letter, which instituted the Feast of Christ the King:

We firmly hope, however, that the feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of  society to our loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society nor the authority which should belong to those who bear the torch of truth. This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance; thus the enemies of the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those hearts that are bitter and estranged from him, and would valiantly defend his rights.

Pope Pius XI spoke of the enemies of the Church and how they become bolder when the faithful do not resist them. We must face facts: the enemies of the Church today frequently wear the clothing of shepherds. They bear impressive titles and have copious degrees from institutions promoting the advances of the inter-related revolutions in the doctrinal and liturgical realms. They will not win. The final victory belongs to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and will be made manifest by the restoration of Christendom itself. We are born, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Sapientiae Christianae in 1890, for combat, and armed with the supernatural virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, keeping close to Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament and to His Most Blessed Mother in her Holy Rosary, we must try to do what we can to make today's enemies of Christ convert and to become His friends now and for all eternity.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint John Fisher, pray for our bishops.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for the consecrated religious of the United States and the world.