In a World of Their Own: The American Bishops

by Thomas A. Droleskey

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I used to cover the annual meetings of the then named National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, now called the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. To say that the meetings were surreal is to understate the total lack of contact with reality demonstrated by the agenda and the tenor of those meetings. One bishop told me in 1988 that he sat as close as possible to the back of the hall where the meeting was held so as to escape from its oppressive proceedings as much as he could. Another bishop told me in 1991 that he deplored the overwhelming concern with the careerist ambitions of bishops desirous of promoting themselves for a more prestigious appointment. And several people who once worked in chancery offices, as I did in 1988-1989, that the leftist, Modernist apparatchiks who work at the headquarters of the bishops' conference in Washington, D.C., were so intent on muting the voices of the Successors of the Apostles in this country that they deliberately inundate diocesan bishops and their staffs with oceans of paperwork just prior to the bishops' annual meeting so as to blunt any effective and informed opposition to their nefarious schemes to arrogate unto themselves what belongs to the bishops.

After viewing the way in which the bishops closed ranks around Bishop Daniel Ryan, the now thoroughly disgraced former Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, in 1997 once the founder and President of Roman Catholic Faithful, Inc, Stephen G. Brady, had accused him of gross, perverse misconduct against two of his own priests, I helped to organize a conference on the state of the Church in this country that was held on the Sunday before the bishops began their annual meeting. The conference featured Mr. Brady, attorney James Bendell, the late Dr. William A. Marra, Sr., Judith Ammenhauser of Mothers' Watch, and yours truly. It was a comprehensive review of some of the chief problems facing the Church in her human elements, including the hostility of most of the bishops for the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.

Many of us stayed for the next three days to pray Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in front of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the location of the bishops' meetings. Led by Father John T. Murphy, the courageous head of the Save the Babies Foundation, we prayed over 100 Rosaries during those three days. Stephen Brady held a sign detailing Bishop Ryan's disgraceful behavior. And Frank Kelly, the head of Virginia Right to Life (a completely pro-life organization that has no links whatsoever to the partly pro-life/partly pro-abortion National Right to Life Committee, which had its origins as an arm of the United States Catholic Conference back in 1969), went up to the then Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, to tell him that his betrayal of the trust of the priests who had written to him to document their charges against Ryan (Cacciavillan sent the letters to Ryan, thereby violating his promise to the priests that their confidentiality would be maintained) was criminal. The former Commandant of the Quantico, Virginia, Marine base, Mr. Kelly walked right up to Cacciavillan, telling him that he belonged in jail for how he had betrayed the priests. Archbishop Cacciavillan, who was Papal Nuncio to the United States from 1990 to 1998, received endless letters from Catholics complaining about how American bishops were protecting perverted priests who had abused their own children. He did nothing to correct the problem. Nothing. He was rewarded for his years of protecting cowardly and corrupt members of the American hierarchy by receiving a cardinal's red hat from Pope John Paul II in 2001.

Indeed, most of the American bishops, in particular, belong in jail for how they have betrayed the Catholic Faith. We must pray for them every day without fail. We owe them zero obedience when they deny the plain meaning of the words of Pope Saint Pius V in Quo Primum, distort the history of the Traditional Latin Mass, punish priests who assert their rights under Quo Primum and who refuse to offer the Novus Ordo Missae (Edward Cardinal Egan is doing this at present in the case of one courageous priest; he has much company amongst his brother bishops), countenance liturgical irreverence and doctrinal impurity, show extraordinary tolerance for pro-abortion Catholic public officials while they browbeat Catholics critical of the unprecedented novelties that have racked the Catholic Church in this country and around the world in the past forty years, and systematically break down the innocence and the purity of the young by subjecting to the rot of all forms of instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments in direct violation of the absolute ban of such classroom instruction imposed by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri. That is correct. They are owed our prayers. They are owed zero obedience when their actions are in defiance of articles contained in the Deposit of Faith and when they contradict the absolute right of priests to offer and the faithful to hear the Immemorial Mass of Tradition without any unjust and illicit preconditions whatsoever.

As alluded to in Always the Half Measure, the support of most of the American bishops for the "rainbow" agenda of those steeped in the sin of Sodom has resulted in the weakening of the Faith of many Catholics and the paying out of hundreds of millions of dollars to settle cases that arose after years of efforts on their part and the part of their lawyers and insurance companies to intimidate good people who thought that they could trust their shepherds to protect their children, not realizing that more than a handful of bishops were themselves, shall we say, most sympathetic to the lavender agenda. The bishops have yet to recognize that it is indeed the promotion of the homosexualist agenda that helped to produce and exacerbate the scandal caused by perverted priests, a scandal that could have been prevented if perverts had not been recruited into the priesthood and thence promoted and protected by bishops and their chancery factotums. They continue to resent this truth when it is pointed out to them, hiring people to "advise" them on these matters that share their own Modernist views concerning unnatural, perverted acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments rather than relying upon sound spiritual masters who realize that it is the promotion of sin itself and the failure to pursue holiness as befits consecrated slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart that are at the root of the scandals that continue to cost one diocese after another millions upon millions of the dollars that simple Catholics had donated in good faith over the decades.

Our Catholic colleges and universities and seminaries and elementary schools and high schools and religious education programs are run, with very few exceptions, by people who dissent from one or more articles contained in the Deposit of Faith, including the Virgin birth of Our Divine Redeemer and His actual Bodily Resurrection from the dead. Catholic educational programs from Kindergarten through the postgraduate level are filled with people who mock the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, who are moral relativists and liturgical revolutionaries, who promote baby-killing under cover of law, both by surgical and chemical means, and who are menaces to the salvation of the immortal souls of the young people entrusted to their care. Flushed down the Orwellian memory hole is any concept of the wisdom contained in Pope Pius XI's Divini Illius Magistri on this point:

In fact it must never be forgotten that the subject of Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural, such as right reason and revelation show him to be; man, therefore, fallen from his original estate, but redeemed by Christ and restored to the supernatural condition of adopted son of God, though without the preternatural privileges of bodily immortality or perfect control of appetite. There remain therefore, in human nature the effects of original sin, the chief of which are weakness of will and disorderly inclinations.

"Folly is bound up in the heart of a child and the rod of correction shall drive it away." Disorderly inclinations then must be corrected, good tendencies encouraged and regulated from tender childhood, and above all the mind must be enlightened and the will strengthened by supernatural truth and by the means of grace, without which it is impossible to control evil impulses, impossible to attain to the full and complete perfection of education intended by the Church, which Christ has endowed so richly with divine doctrine and with the Sacraments, the efficacious means of grace.

Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher's authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education.

If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education; if the intention is to banish from education despotism and violence, which, by the way, just punishment is not, this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church in traditional Christian education, in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each; for His Wisdom "reacheth from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly."

But alas! it is clear from the obvious meaning of the words and from experience, that what is intended by not a few, is the withdrawal of education from every sort of dependence on the divine law. So today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education, as if there existed no decalogue, no gospel law, no law even of nature stamped by God on the heart of man, promulgated by right reason, and codified in positive revelation by God Himself in the ten commandments. These innovators are wont to refer contemptuously to Christian education as "heteronomous," "passive","obsolete," because founded upon the authority of God and His holy law.

Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections, which, as a logical consequence of this false system, come to be justified as legitimate demands of a so-called autonomous nature.

Pope Pius XI could just as well have been describing the state of Catholic education in the United States of America in 2005 rather than the state of public schooling in 1929. Catholic education has been infected with the very errors described above by Pope Pius XI as the American bishops have either permitted the infection or looked the other way as their "professionals" implemented plans and programs that are deleterious to the sanctification and salvation of human souls, which has a corresponding, inexorable negative influence on the state of civil society, which depends for its order upon the right ordering of the souls of its citizens in cooperation with sanctifying grace. The bishops are blind to this fact, content to wallow in the rot of their embrace of pluralism, carrying on the tragedy of the Americanist heresy that they have inherited from so many of their episcopal ancestors in this country. Indeed, as I noted in a recent commentary, how many of the American bishops know anything about the immutable doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, no less are able to cite cogently the summary of said doctrine contained in the writings of Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI?

Yes, some bishops pray in front of abortuaries on a regular basis. All well and good. It is precisely because Catholic souls are being aborted in Catholic schools and religious education programs that so many Catholic women are seeking to kill their children in American child-killing centers, abortuaries. The abortion of souls leads to the holocaust that has been imposed on nearly fifty million preborn babies in the past thirty-eight years since three states, California, Colorado, and Hawaii, first "liberalized" existing pro-abortion laws, followed by New Jersey in 1969 and New York in 1970 prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Most importantly, though, the bishops of this country, who have long been in the forefront of the false ecumenism condemned by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos in 1928, reaffirm others, including Talmudic Jews, in their false religions, doing nothing to invite those outside of the Catholic Church to convert, and I mean nothing. (See, for example, The Lost Sheep, an article published in the printed pages of Christ or Chaos in early 2003.) This fundamental abdication of episcopal responsibility is on display throughout this country, as I noted in the articles discussing our trip from Texas to the northeast to escape Hurricane Rita back in December. Souls are wandering in the desert, parched from a thirst induced by being born in a country steeped in the errors of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry. The Catholic Church, the Mystical Bride of Christ, has done nothing in this country to relieve their thirst, has spent no energy to evangelize the lost souls of Protestantism and Mormonism and Seventh Day Adventism and Pentecostalism and Talmudic Judaism and Mohammedanism. Alas, as I note in "The Lost Sheep," the very ethos of the Novus Ordo Missae takes its life breath from ecumenism, stripping the Mass of its Catholicity in order to appeal to those outside of the Church. The results have been, as the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber noted in The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, the alienation of Catholics from the Church, most of whom have joined some manner of fundamentalist or evangelical Protestant sects. Will the bishops acknowledge this at their upcoming meeting? Oh, no. They will congratulate the Second Vatican Council for all of the wonderful documents "reforms" that have devastated the vineyard of Christ and have set so many souls adrift in the midst of the false currents of the errors of Russia that continue to spread, both civilly and ecclesiastically, without any check at all from the Successors of the Apostles.

Living in an unreal world of their own fertile imaginations, the bishops will ignore real offenses to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, such as corporate America's assault upon Christmas by naming false holidays such as Chanukah and Kwanza but using the word "Holiday" for any reference to the feast commemorating the birth of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in the manger in the stable in the cave in Bethlehem, in order to address the leftist political agenda of the Marxists and allied Modernists who advise the bishops' conference on "public policy" concerns. Boycott, say, all things Disney for that company's continued assault against the Catholic Church? Boycott Wal-Mart and Loew's for their obliteration of the word "Christmas" from their websites and their physical store displays? Boycott CVS and Eckerd and Walgreen pharmacies for their taking disciplinary actions against employees who would not fill prescriptions for abortifacient contraceptives? Stand up for the rights of Catholic employees in the corporate world to refuse to participate in mandatory ideological propagandizing in behalf of perversion? Perish those silly, narrow-minded, preconciliar thoughts. Why, you understand, the bishops have more important things to do, like condemning budget cuts in Federal entitlement programs whose very existence is made necessary as a result of the systematic warfare waged upon the integrity of the family by the entire agenda of the Judeo-Masonic establishment that crafted the New Deal and the Great Society so as to make human beings the mere creatures of the state. Stand up for Catholicism? Punish pro-abortion politicians? Condemn the funding of contraception, both through Title X and international "family planning" programs, contained in the Federal budget? Insist on the Social Reign of Christ the King? Call upon Pope Benedict XVI to fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Message? These things are not on the agenda of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Thus, we must pray fervently for the conversion of the Catholic bishops to the totality of Catholic Tradition without compromise. Some are ignorant of the truths of the Faith. Others are pro-active, revolutionary Modernists. Yet others are simply fat-cat money-changers who are looking for their next big assignment, doing and saying only those things that will advance their cause with the Roman curia, men who are oblivious to the good of the Catholic souls entrusted to their care and probably totally clueless about the fact that their immortal souls will be judged at the moment of the Particular Judgments on how well they sought to shepherd everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, in their diocesan boundaries safely to Heaven through the true Church. And there are some bishops who are indeed believers, men who spend much time in prayers and who take seriously their Apostolic Mandate, but who are caught in the vortex of fidelity to a merely pastoral council that must one day be denounced as having devastated the Church in her human elements.

All the more reason at this time of year to redouble our own efforts to make reparation for our own sins, offering our prayers and our sacrifices to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart for the honor and glory of the Blessed Trinity, for our own conversion on a daily basis and the conversion of everyone in the world to the true Faith, for the good of the Poor Souls in Purgatory, in thanksgiving for all of the spiritual and temporal benefits we have received and in petition for those spiritual and temporal benefits we yet need to save our souls and to fulfill the duties of our states-in-life. All the more reason to prepare for a penitential Advent by discharging the duties of filial piety by making supplication for the Successors of the Apostles, most of whom are contemptuous of the Catholic past and living in a state of denial about the true state of the Church in her human elements at present.

As always, we never lose heart. The Church is indeed divinely founded and maintained. She will last until the end of time. The jaws of Hell will never prevail against her. Each one of our own sins has wounded Our Lord once in time and wounds His Mystical Body, the Church, today, which is why we must make a good Confession once a week. Tending to the weeds in our own spiritual lives, though, we must nevertheless call our shepherd to account for their dereliction of duty, hoping that at least some will awaken from their slumber to restore sanity and sanctity to the actual life of the Church in her human elements and who will petition Pope Benedict XVI to put an end to the madness in the Church and the world by the proper consecration of Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Pope Saint Martin I, pray for us.

Saint John Neumann, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

The North American Martyrs, pray for us.

Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Saint Pius X, pray for us.

Blessed Junipero Serra, pray for us.

Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.