by
Thomas A. Droleskey
To defend the honor of the Mother of God is not an option for a Catholic. It is a duty. Every Catholic has the obligation to defend the honor of Our Lady, in whose Virginal and Immaculate Womb the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity assumed His Sacred Humanity by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at the Annunciation.
As one who obtained his Master of Arts in political science (major field: American Government; minor fields: comparative government and international relations) from the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Notre Dame, Indiana, on January 10, 1974, I feel a most special obligation to defend the honor of Our Lady as it is being impugned at the university named for her, the university from which I received my master's degree.
I have done this in the past as the University of Notre Dame's Department of Theology, then chaired by Hartford's Mark of Apostasy, Father Richard P. McBrien, played host to then New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo on Thursday, September 12, 1984, and as the administration of the university permitted the "queer film festival" to make its debut there on February 11, 2004. I did so yet again three years ago when the President of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, "Father John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., awarded an honorary doctorate on the completely pro-abortion President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, who have the university's commencement address on Sunday, May 17, 2009 (see No "Common Ground" Between Truth and Error). "Father" Jenkins compounded this travesty by having a number of Catholics arrested that day on criminal trespassing charges as they merely prayed Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in reparation for the reigning caesar's appearance at the university bearing her most holy name. The case of the "Notre Dame 88" became a cause celebre as a result (see Persecuting Those Who Defended Our Lady's Honor, Refusing Any Semblance of Mercy). The charges were not dropped until May 5, 2011, nearly two years after the arrests took place. This was scandalous in and of itself, of course.
Well, it's nearly commencement time again at my master's alma mater. Another commencement speaker whose work is at odds with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, has been invited by "Father" John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
Dr. Thomas Quinn, who received his bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame du Lac in 1969 and his master's degree in 1970, will be speaking at the university's Graduate School's commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 19, 2012, even though his work at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Health in Baltimore, Maryland, includes "facilitating" different kinds of "prophylactics" to stop the spread in sub-Saharan Africa of a disease that is contracted principally, although not exclusively, by unchaste behavior in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. As can be seen from the following report from the Cardinal Newman Society, the University of Notre Dame du Lac has also entered into a "partnership" agreement with a "consortium," based at Indiana University, whose work includes the provision of a wide variety of "family planning" services in Africa:
The University of Notre Dame made two major announcements Monday that
put the University at odds with Pope Benedict XVI on the promotion of
condoms to prevent AIDS—even as the U.S. bishops fight to defend
Catholic colleges’ First Amendment right to uphold Catholic teaching on
contraception.
The University also has reignited concerns about its standards for commencement speakers and honorees with its selection of Dr. Thomas Quinn, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for
Global Health, as Distinguished Alumnus and graduate commencement
speaker on May 19.
This week, Notre Dame announced that its Eck Institute for Global Health is now a full member of the AMPATH Consortium, a collaborative effort led by Indiana University to address the pandemic of HIV/AIDS in western Kenya.
Although the consortium has done much good for Kenyans struggling
with the spread of HIV infections, AMPATH also promotes condoms and has
partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to
integrate family planning programs, including contraception.
Notre Dame indicates that AMPATH is expanding its services to include
“delivery of essential primary care services and control of
communicable diseases and non-communicable, chronic illnesses.” The
University’s will bring its expertise in tropical and communicable
diseases to support research at Moi University School of Medicine and to
address “constraints to health care in western Kenya.”
But Notre Dame also says, “Joint research activities, participation
in seminars and academic meetings, student and faculty exchanges, and
special short-term courses will be used to advance the mission of the
Consortium.”
A USAID study from 2005 to 2009 followed an AMPATH pilot program to offer both
HIV/AIDS prevention services and family planning services from a single
clinic. The final report explains that prior to the pilot program,
AMPATH provided only “condom counseling” and “strategically” placed
condoms “in the waiting bay, check in/out rooms, and consultation rooms
for patients to access.” But in the trial, AMPATH provided clinic
patients the “oral contraceptive pill, intrauterine contraceptive
device, implants, injectable depo provera, or condoms” upon request.
Today, the AMPATH Reproductive Health program promotes contraception to AMPATH clients, according to AMPATH’s website. Among the consortium’s other programs is the B-Fine Women’s Project, a clinic that offers a variety of services including distribution of condoms in
local bars and motels and providing condom “education” to truck drivers.
An Indiana University article last year described AMPATH’s at-home counseling and testing (HCT)
program, which includes youth outreach: “It influences youth, teaching
proper condom use and distributing free condoms to the community,
encouraging safe sex practices.” An AMPATH program manager’s presentation on the HCT program reveals that 150,000 condoms were distributed between July and October 2009.
Notre Dame’s selection of Thomas Quinn to be honored as Distinguished
Alumnus and to speak at the Graduate School commencement ceremony
similarly raises concerns about the University’s commitment to Catholic
teaching on contraception, and it appears to violate the U.S. bishops’
2004 policy banning Catholic honors and platforms for opponents of Catholic moral teaching.
That policy was the basis for protests in 2009 against Notre Dame’s
selection of President Barack Obama as commencement speaker and
honoree. Opponents included 83 bishops who publicly criticized the
University and more than 367,000 individuals who signed a Cardinal
Newman Society petition.
At the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, Quinn is responsible
for facilitating numerous faculty projects, including many that promote
the use of contraceptives including male and female condoms, “emergency”
contraception (which can cause early abortion), and IUDs (which also
can cause abortion). Current examples include:
- reproductive health project in Malawi
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation project to promote contraception in Kenya (see also here)
- condom marketing project in Mozambique
- project to study a new female condom
- family planning project in Liberia
- HIV/AIDS prevention project in Kazakhstan
- HIV/AIDS counseling project in Lesotho
- HIV/AIDS prevention project in Kazakhstan
When asked whether such projects should have any bearing on his
selection as Notre Dame’s commencement speaker and Distinguished
Alumnus, Quinn said that his job is simply to “coordinate” faculty
activities.
“You may have concerns about what those individuals are doing,” Quinn said. “I myself am not. I keep the data in line.”
Quinn has done his own important work studying HIV/AIDS and its
prevention. But his work has involved condom distribution to prevent
HIV infection, as he explained in a December 2000 article about his project in Uganda:
“The number of sub-Saharan Africans living with HIV is
frighteningly high,” opined Dr. Quinn. “The number is almost
meaningless, it’s so high. We wanted to take some of the lessons we
learned early in the United States, such as condom use and safer sex
education, and see if we could make them work over there.”
…All subjects in both groups received intensive instruction from
trained personnel on the prevention of HIV and condom use. Subjects
were also offered free condoms….
In an interview with The Cardinal Newman Society, Quinn claimed that
the Catholic Church in Uganda endorsed the Ugandan government’s policy
of “abstinence, be faithful, condoms” to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS.
“There are 30 million people infected with HIV and you need to do something to actively try to change that,” Quinn said.
But a 2004 study by Cambridge University researchers found that Uganda’s incidence of
HIV declined by 70 percent in the 1990s under a program emphasizing
abstinence, behavioral change and communication—before widespread condom
distribution and counseling became available through programs like
Quinn’s. (More on this here.)
The Cambridge researchers questioned the strategic emphasis on
condoms and recommended a “shift in strategic thinking on health policy
and HIV/AIDS, with greater attention to epidemiological intelligence and
communications to mobilise risk avoidance.”
“My commencement address won’t be about these issues,” Quinn
promised. “What I want to do is talk about their futures and their
lives.”
“I know there was a lot of controversy about President Obama,” said
Quinn. “I want to reassure the Society that they can rest assured that I
won’t be promoting anything like that. My job is saving lives.” (Notre Dame Commencement Speaker At Odds With Catholic Teaching.)
Unfortunately for Dr. Quinn and the conciliar "bishops" of Uganda, one cannot "save lives" by placing their immortal souls in jeopardy. The presence of an infectious disease in no way exculpates married couples from the moral law, which forbids anything that interferes with the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage.
Similarly, it is unfortunately the case for the Cardinal Newman Society that the confusion concerning Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's comments on the use of a certain type of prophylactic in these circumstances, made in a book length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald that was published under the title of Light of the World, was not caused by the "media." It was caused by Ratzinger/Benedict himself, prompting "papal" spokesflack "Father" Federico Lombardi, S.J., to issue a "clarification" that only confused matters more. The additional confusion necessitated an "official" clarification of the false "pope's comments made in one of his "unofficial" books that was issued by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. See If Them, Why Not Others?, Let the Olympic Games of Absurdity Begin!, Razing The Last Bastions, Nothing New Under Benedict's Sun, Words and Actions Without Consequences, Talk About Clothing the Emperor! and Making a Mockery of Catholicism. The effort on the part the Cardinal Newman Society to whitewash Ratzinger/Benedict's comments in Light of the World is simple spin-doctoring that is so common in "conservative" circles in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. I know. I did my fair share of it in my own "conservative" days. I know.
The bottom line is this: Dr. Thomas Quinn has no qualifications to speak to graduates of a supposedly Catholic university about their "future" as his own time at present is spent "facilitating" the work of the devil. Sure, he does not see it that way. That, however, is the reality of what he does. His "work" makes possible violations of the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage.
The fraud that is "Catholic" education has been the subject of
numerous articles of mine in the past thirty-five years. As one who has
experienced the horrors of Catholic higher education first-hand as a
student and as a professor, I can attest to the simple, undeniable fact
that souls have been and continue to be aborted as a result of the
institutionalization of programs and policies that are designed to
undermine the truths of the Catholic Faith.
Alas, we are faced today with the spectacle in one
formerly Catholic
college and university after another of the promotion of the very
thing, sin, that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to
suffer cruelly in His Sacred
Humanity during His Passion and Death. Such has been case many times
in the past decade
at my own Master's alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, when one
of
the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance has been celebrated
unrepentantly. Such is the case, however, every day on the campus of
all
but a handful of once proudly Catholic educational institutions. The
"film festivals" celebrating perversity that occurred for several
straight years in the second week of February at the
University of Notre Dame in the past decade was the fruit of a long
process of the
systematic de-Catholicization of Catholic higher education.
Catholic universities and colleges once
taught the Faith reasonably well when they were in the control of the Catholic Church, not her counterfeit ape. Catholic scholars were trained in a
framework of orthodoxy during most of the Nineteenth Century. They were
trained in Thomistic philosophy and theology, schooled in Patristics,
well-groomed in dogmatic and moral theology, and trained to love the
Mass of the ages and the Mother of God.
Oh, yes, elements of Americanism were
present at Georgetown College from its inception. Modernist elements
began to seep into some universities and colleges by the end of the
Nineteenth Century, which is one of the reasons Pope Saint Pius X
required an oath to be taken against the errors of Modernism. He saw the
dangers posed to the life of the Faith in Europe and in the United
States by the rampant spread of Modernism, especially in the realm of
Biblical scholarship (with the advent of the German Protestant school of
exegesis) and in the realm of philosophy (where the "process thought"
of Hegelianism, which emphasized the belief that truths evolve over time
and can change, was being taught quite openly in some places). Pope
Saint Pius X believed it was essential to safeguard doctrinal integrity
in seminaries and colleges and universities, especially since it was the
case that only those who were genuinely equipped for serious
intellectual work were the ones who attended Catholic colleges and
universities (unlike the case in our own era of egalitarianism, which
asserts that everyone is equally as able as everyone else to perform
well in college).
Over the course of time, therefore, the
foxes began to invade the henhouse at at Catholic colleges and
universities. In the United States, for instance, the Americanist ethos
of academic freedom became such a clarion call among some Catholic
intellectuals in the 1940's and 1950's that there began to be murmurings
against any and all Church interference in the life of professional
scholars. Others, such as University of Notre Dame President Father
Theodore Hesburgh, believed that Catholic colleges and universities had
been ghettoized because of their strict adherence to Catholic theology
and philosophy, that our institutions of higher learning would never be
taken seriously by "the world" if they were not open to the hiring of
non-Catholic faculty, people who would bring a "diversity of opinion"
into the academic marketplace of ideas. Also uppermost in the mind of
Hesburgh was his belief that graduates of Catholic colleges and
universities would not be able to achieve prominence in the economic,
scientific, legal, and political realms if they were viewed as graduates
of second-rate institutions which were closed-minded about the great
issues of the day.
A major turning point in the
de-Catholicization of Catholic universities and colleges occurred from
1965-1967 when seventy-five of some 500 professors at my own bachelor's alma mater,
Saint John's University (New York), went on strike. Although the
University's president at the time, Father Joseph Cahill, C.M., tried
valiantly to maintain the right of the central administration to
maintain control over the hiring and promotion and tenure of professors
to assure their adherence to the Faith, the result was that the faculty
won one of their central points: the devolution of personnel decisions
to the level of personnel and budget committees in the individual
academic departments. Dissenting Catholics and non-Catholics were hired
in droves from that point on, resulting in the eventual re-casting of a
once proud Catholic institution of higher education into a
self-professed "multicultural" center of "urban" education. The battle
at Saint John's University set the stage for the infamous meeting of
Catholic college administrators at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, in 1967.
As the late Monsignor George Kelly pointed out in his massive work, Battle for the American Church,
the Land O'Lakes Conference was the forum in which the administrators
of ten Catholic colleges and universities believed it was necessary for
them to secularize their institutions by divorcing themselves
voluntarily from the official control of the Roman Catholic Church in
this country. This opened the way for these institutions to take down
the Crucifixes from classroom walls, hire a glut of non-Catholics (as
well as dissenting, heretical Catholics), and to go about their business
as though the salvation of souls of the students entrusted to them did
not matter at all. Indeed, if there is no such thing as objective truth
which exists in the nature of things and exists definitely in the person
of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, Who deposited His teaching in Holy Mother
Church, then there is no need to be concerned about educating students
in the framework of Christian truth. Catholic education thus became
thoroughly Protestantized, concerned about the business of training good
apparatchiks who would make a lot of money in the professional world --
and who would therefore donate money back to the institutions which
gave them the ability to become successful financially.
The result of this has been to make formerly Catholic
colleges and universities dangerous
places for the temporal and eternal welfare of souls. This includes
the "conservative" colleges where students are taught to view the
Fathers of the Church through the eyes of the "Second" Vatican Council
and the "magisterium" of the conciliar "popes"!
Personnel
decisions have been made at the more "mainstream" institutions that
once belonged to Holy Mother Church to favor most deliberately the
hiring and
promotion of faculty members who are either non-Catholics or those
deemed to be "progressive" Catholics. Those
adjudged to be reactionary "conservatives" found themselves unable to
obtain positions in our colleges and universities or they were denied
tenure and/or promotions. Many are the horror stories of faithful
Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their
orthodoxy while teaching in formerly Catholic universities. Naturally,
the
harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are
open-minded and receptive to all people. College administrators at
these institutions of apostasy
have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this
harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in
the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of
higher learning.
All of this has had a devastating impact on
the intellectual and spiritual formation of young Catholics, many of
whom now enter a formerly Catholic college or university after having received
the relativistic theological training provided them in a Catholic high
school that is in conciliar captivity. Ironically, these badly catechized young Catholics entering
what they think, albeit falsely, to be Catholic colleges were taught in high schools by the graduates of the
very institutions intent on brainwashing them with the same sort of
advanced disinformation possessed by their high school teachers. The
cycle thus perpetuates itself ad infinitum.
Most of the
graduates of formerly Catholic colleges and universities have learned nothing
that is true about the Faith, coming to believe they can do anything
they want as long as their "fundamental option" is for God, including
the practice of contraception and the procuring of an abortion.
Remember, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton received his undergraduate
degree from Jesuit Georgetown University in the direct aftermath of
Georgetown's having secularized itself. (Georgetown's sister Jesuit
university, Fordham, was the first historically Catholic institution in the nation to
divest itself of official Catholic control and to voluntarily remove
Crucifixes from the walls of its classrooms in the Fall of 1966.) And it
is no wonder that a large number of the Catholic pro-aborts in public
life are graduates of once Catholic institutions of higher learning.
Catholic collegiate and university
education used to integrate the truths of the Faith into every aspect of
their academic programs. While non-Catholics who had a specialty in
mathematics or science might have been hired from time to time to teach
in their fields of competency, they were expected to familiarize
themselves with how the Catholic Faith imbues all fields of knowledge,
as Pope Pius XI noted in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. Such
scholars were also expected to remember that they were never to place in
doubt the truths of the Catholic Faith, never to use their classrooms
as a forum to profess that which was contrary to what the Catholic
Church held was received teaching of the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity made Man, Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Catholics who
taught in Catholic universities and colleges understood that they had
the obligation to be scholars who were faithful to the totality of the
Deposit of Faith and to see in their students redeemed creatures who
were looking to them, the faculty, for a model as to how to live the
faith in the midst of one's own professional responsibilities. There was
an integrity to the teaching of the Faith which flowed over into all
aspects of a college or university.
Pope Pius XI noted the following in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:
This norm
of a just freedom in things scientific, serves also as an inviolable
norm of a just freedom in things didactic, or for rightly understood
liberty in teaching; it should be observed therefore in whatever
instruction is imparted to others. Its obligation is all the more
binding in justice when there is question of instructing youth. For in
this work the teacher, whether public or private, has no absolute right
of his own, but only such as has been communicated to him by others.
Besides every Christian child or youth has a strict right to instruction
in harmony with the teaching of the Church, the pillar and ground of
truth. And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave
wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their
teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their
natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false.
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. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Pope Pius XI's words are very clear: "And
whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong,
inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers,
and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural
craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false." No one is
free to lead himself or others into temptation.
We pray every day in
the Pater Noster that we will not be led into temptation (Et ne nos inducas in tentantionem).
There is no "freedom" to deny or to put into question the truths
contained in the Deposit of Faith. None. There is no "balancing" of the
Faith and "academic freedom," as a spokesman for "Father" John Jenkins,
C.S.C., the President of the University of Notre Dame, noted recently in
an article in The New York Times. "All sides" must must not be
taught as equal to the Faith, as the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, an
ardent Americanist and a fierce apologist for the Kennedys, argued
during the first controversy involving Father Charles Curran in
1967. Every Catholic must be faithful to the Deposit of Faith at all
times. No one must be hired to teach in any Catholic education
institution who dissents from even one iota of the truths of the Holy
Faith. It is that simple.
What, then, is the Catholic understanding
of academic freedom? Again, the answer is simple. A Catholic
understanding of academic freedom affords individual professors great
latitude in presenting the truths of the Faith in accord with their own
personalities and temperaments. We have different communities of
religious men and women in the Church. Those communities, at least
traditionally until they were infected with Modernism and the blight of
perverse moral problems condemned in no uncertain terms by Saint Peter
Damian, expressed the truths of the Faith in different ways. Each had
different charisms and missions. The Benedictines and the Cistercians
and the Carmelites and the Dominicans and the Franciscans and the
Jesuits and the Pallotines and the Vincentians and the Redemptorists and
the Passionists--and countless others--served the cause of the
sanctification and salvation of human souls in many and varied ways. In
like manner, you see, two Catholic professors of the same subject matter
might teach the same course in very different ways without ever once
putting any truths of the Faith into question. That's a legitimate understanding of academic freedom.
For example, one professor might prefer the
Socratic method of instruction, peppering his students with questions
during class time to get them to discern and to defend the truth.
Others, including me, prefer the lecture method of instruction. Neither
is received from the hand of God. Both are legitimate forms of
instruction.
Similarly, some professors may prefer
students to respond at length to essay questions in order to demonstrate
a profound grasp of the subject matter, more or less forcing the
students to "teach" the reader of their essay about a question as though
the reader knew nothing about the subject. Other professors may prefer
short-answer essays to cover to variety of topics. Still others might
desire students to answer "objective" questions (multiple choice,
true-false, fill-in-the-blank, which is one of my own favorite devices
to test the breadth of student comprehension). Once again, none of these
things are de fide. Professors and teachers should be given
the widest latitude in the method of instruction and examination they
believe will best inform and then challenge their students.
To be sure, there can be lively
intellectual discussions and arguments among students and faculty
members even when the Faith is transmitted in all of its purity and
integrity. Catholic scholarship does not argue about what is true (no
less about whether there is such a thing as truth). Rather, authentic
Catholic scholars can and do argue, sometimes quite forcefully, about
the application of received teaching in concrete
circumstances.
What sort of governmental system is most conducive to the
establishment
of the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?
Is the contemporary state by
its very definition and composition a threat to the life of the Faith?
What particular policies are the best way to protect the primacy of
the
Divine positive law and the natural law? What is the correct
interpretation of a particular philosopher or a passage from a piece of
literature or the correct translation to be used in a piece of
scholarship. These, and many other areas, constitute legitimate forms of
academic freedom as understood by the Catholic Church.
What is inarguable, however, is the fact
that the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by our Lord upon the
Rock of Peter, the Pope, and that He has revealed truths which are
clear, certain and immutable. Anyone who argues about that is an abject
heretic. Anyone who contends that an "opposition" to the Catholic Faith
must be presented on equal terms with the Faith, as opposed to examining
errors so as to be able to recognize and refute them (which is a
necessary part of the educational process), is in league with the devil.
No one has to be "fair" to the "opposition," as the instigator of the
secularized "Catholic" university, former University of Notre Dame
president Father Theodore Hesburgh noted five years ago in The New York Times. We must not be "fair" to the devil, the progenitor of all falsehoods. We learn about errors to refute them. For Catholics, you see, must be faithful to each and every one of the truths of the Faith without giving a moment's credibility
to anything that is in opposition to those truths and thus harmful to
the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious
Blood. Professors need to aspire to the holiness of Saint John Cantius,
not the worldliness of our present day.
The late Father John A. Hardon, S.J,. said
in a conference given at Saint Ignatius Loyola Church in New York, New
York, in August of 1978 that the implantation of doubt in the souls of
the young was a crime almost as great as that of killing an unborn child
by abortion (whether by chemical or surgical means.) "To cause a young
person to doubt the Faith is to help to abort that soul." Father noted,
moving his head from side to side, looking straight as his audience for
emphasis. Sadly, though, much of what passes for Catholic education (including
elementary and secondary schools) in the conciliar structures does precisely this, doing so in the
fallacious belief that there can be no true faith without doubt. While
it is true that some people may have crises of faith in their own lives
from time to time, we are not to encourage doubt. One of the spiritual
works of mercy is precisely to counsel the doubting.
Contemporary Catholic higher education in conciliar captivity, at least in
most instances, does more that encourage doubt. No, it actually does much
to destroy faith by the promotion of atheist, leftist, collectivist,
relativist, statist, redistributionist, feminist, positivist,
environmentalist, pantheistic, evolutionist, indifferentist and other
naturalist ideologies, including those of the New Age ilk. Its participation in the
rot of explicit instruction in matters pertaining to personal purity
feeds the myth that human beings are beast who are incapable of
controlling themselves by means of Sanctifying Grace. And more that a
handful of practicing homosexuals and lesbians have been recruited into a
lifestyle of perversity and self-destruction as a result of propaganda
in favor of sodomy disseminated on the campuses of formerly Catholic colleges and
universities (where openly pro-abortion and sodomite-friendly groups
are permitted to meet and to participate in the life of those campuses).
As though the hiring of non-Catholic and
heretical Catholic faculty members has not caused enough damage to souls
over the last forty-five years, the messages transmitted by those faculty
members in their classrooms is forcefully reinforced by speakers brought
in to address students during special events (or at their graduation
ceremonies). Workshops are held and retreats are sponsored to brainwash
students in the ways of "progressive" Catholicism. Zen meditation rooms
are to be found on supposedly Catholic college campuses. Some of these colleges
have even actively recruited a large body of non-Catholic students so as to
force anyone who might be inclined to speak authentically as a Catholic
(whether students or faculty members) to be dissuaded from doing so in
order not to offend the sensibilities of multiculturalism and pluralism
and diversity. "Liturgies" held at most Catholic colleges and
universities are generally the worst offered in the world of the Novus Ordo, and that is putting the matter very, very mildly. This has all been very insidious, very demonic.
The bottom line of this is all really quite
simple: a Catholic does not possess the right to deny the received
teachings of Christ the King. No one is free morally to lead people into error.
Indeed, the whole secular notion of academic freedom is itself both an
exercise in relativism and hypocrisy. It is an exercise in relativism in
that it asserts that scholars must be free to distort history and to
relativize known truths into meaninglessness, much in the manner
promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is an exercise in rank hypocrisy
in that those who dissent from the prevailing cultural orthodoxy, no
less hold fast to the Church's authentic Tradition, have no freedom at
all to teach as they desire in the classroom. In an utter perversion of
a right principle, the very people who profess to be the guardians of
academic freedom jealously fight off perceived heresies, denying to
others the very freedom they extol. The very people who want liberation
from the Church, who is our mater and our magister,
make themselves into a magisterium which will impose harsh penalties
upon those who dissent from its defense of cultural orthodoxy,
theological relativism, and liturgical irreverence.
Although the problems that exist in the fraud and sham that is "Catholic"
education at all levels in the conciliar structures today antedate the "Second" Vatican Council, to be
sure, the errors of the past fifty years have made it possible for the
nascent Modernism of the 1940s and 1950s to become institutionalized so
as to deform countless numbers of souls.
One of those errors that has
made it possible for Catholic institutions to maintain something of a
Catholic "identity" while divesting themselves of their official, de jure connection to the Church is the error of episcopal collegiality. The
unwillingness of one conciliar "pope" after another, starting with Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, who
did not intervene in the matter of Father Charles Curran's open dissent
from Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968), no matter the legitimate
problems with that document, while serving on the theology faculty of
The Catholic University of America in 1968, to require that
Catholicism be taught in supposedly Catholic colleges and universities
is the result of their own Modernism and, at least in part, to
be seen to be in the least critical of any of their "bishops" or
institutions. Even Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesia motu proprio,
issued on August 15, 1990, which was meant to require theology professors to seek an episcopal
mandate in order to teach in a Catholic university or college or
seminary, was opposed vigorously by many "bishops," including Bernard
"Cardinal" Law. Souls have thus been lost and/or grossly
deformed by heretics and infidels, causing incalculable damage to the
the right ordering of the world
itself, which depends upon rightly ordered Catholics to provide it with
the leaven of Our Lord's truth and the assertion of His Social Reign
over men and nations.
Pope Pius XI wrote directly in Divini Illius Magistri about the dangers of leading students into temptation. His words have
direct application to a play with a gross, indecent title that has
become popular in recent years (and has been banned, thankfully, at
Providence College in Rhode Island):
It is no
less necessary to direct and watch the education of the adolescent,
"soft as wax to be moulded into vice,"[58] in whatever other environment
he may happen to be, removing occasions of evil and providing occasions
for good in his recreations and social intercourse; for "evil
communications corrupt good manners."
More than ever nowadays an extended and careful vigilance is
necessary, inasmuch as the dangers of moral and religious shipwreck are
greater for inexperienced youth. Especially is this true of impious and
immoral books, often diabolically circulated at low prices; of the
cinema, which multiplies every kind of exhibition; and now also of the
radio, which facilitates every kind of communications. These most
powerful means of publicity, which can be of great utility for
instruction and education when directed by sound principles, are only
too often used as an incentive to evil passions and greed for gain. St.
Augustine deplored the passion for the shows of the circus which
possessed even some Christians of his time, and he dramatically narrates
the infatuation for them, fortunately only temporary, of his disciple
and friend Alipius. How often today must parents and educators bewail
the corruption of youth brought about by the modern theater and the vile
book!
Worthy of all praise and encouragement therefore are those
educational associations which have for their object to point out to
parents and educators, by means of suitable books and periodicals, the
dangers to morals and religion that are often cunningly disguised in
books and theatrical representations. In their spirit of zeal for the
souls of the young, they endeavor at the same time to circulate good
literature and to promote plays that are really instructive, going so
far as to put up at the cost of great sacrifices, theaters and cinemas,
in which virtue will have nothing to suffer and much to gain. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
It is clear that most formerly Catholic educational
institutions today, the products of Modernity in the world and Modernism
in the conciliar church, reject such sage advice as they promote the very things
denounced by Pope Pius XI. It is also clear that most formerly Catholic
educational institutions today reject the only purpose of Catholic
education: to form souls faithfully according to the mind of the Divine
Redeemer as He has discharged it solely in the Catholic Church. Once
again, the words of Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri are apposite:
The
proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with
divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form
Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism, according to the
emphatic expression of the Apostle: "My little children, of whom I am in
labor again, until Christ be formed in you."[63] For the true Christian
must live a supernatural life in Christ: "Christ who is your life,"and
display it in all his actions: "That the life also of Jesus may be made
manifest in our mortal flesh."
For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the
whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and
moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it
in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in
accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.
Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the
supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently
in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of
the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current
term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind
of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles
that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal
principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he
praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose."
And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to
God what is due to God, as the true Christian does.
The scope and aim of Christian education as here described,
appears to the worldly as an abstraction, or rather as something that
cannot be attained without the suppression or dwarfing of the natural
faculties, and without a renunciation of the activities of the present
life, and hence inimical to social life and temporal prosperity, and
contrary to all progress in letters, arts and sciences, and all the
other elements of civilization. To a like objection raised by the
ignorance and the prejudice of even cultured pagans of a former day, and
repeated with greater frequency and insistence in modern times,
Tertullian has replied as follows:
'We are not strangers to life. We are fully aware of the
gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Creator. We reject none of the
fruits of His handiwork; we only abstain from their immoderate or
unlawful use. We are living in the world with you; we do not shun your
forum, your markets, your baths, your shops, your factories, your
stables, your places of business and traffic. We take shop with you and
we serve in your armies; we are farmers and merchants with you; we
interchange skilled labor and display our works in public for your
service. How we can seem unprofitable to you with whom we live and of
whom we are, I know not.'
The true Christian does not renounce the activities of this
life, he does not stunt his natural faculties; but he develops and
perfects them, by coordinating them with the supernatural. He thus
ennobles what is merely natural in life and secures for it new strength
in the material and temporal order, no less then in the spiritual and
eternal.
This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and
its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true
civilization and progress up to the present day. It stands out
conspicuously in the lives of the numerous Saints, whom the Church, and
she alone, produces, in whom is perfectly realized the purpose of
Christian education, and who have in every way ennobled and benefited
human society. Indeed, the Saints have ever been, are, and ever will be
the greatest benefactors of society, and perfect models for every class
and profession, for every state and condition of life, from the simple
and uncultured peasant to the master of sciences and letters, from the
humble artisan to the commander of armies, from the father of a family
to the ruler of peoples and nations, from simple maidens and matrons of
the domestic hearth to queens and empresses. What shall we say of the
immense work which has been accomplished even for the temporal
well-being of men by missionaries of the Gospel, who have brought and
still bring to barbarous tribes the benefits of civilization together
with the light of the Faith? What of the founders of so many social and
charitable institutions, of the vast numbers of saintly educators, men
and women, who have perpetuated and multiplied their life work, by
leaving after them prolific institutions of Christian education, in aid
of families and for the inestimable advantage of nations? (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Obviously, formerly Catholic institutions of higher
education are in the control of the conciliar revolutionaries. They will
be restored one day when a true pope actually consecrates Russia to Our
Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate
Heart, thereby restoring the Mass of all ages as normative in the
Roman
Rite of the Catholic Church and restoring right doctrine in all of the
Church's educational institutions and parishes. Until that time,
however, we must continue to denounce the errors of the present day
and
seek to protect ourselves and our children from those errors as we
have nothing to do with the conciliar officials. We must continue our
to present the
truths of the Faith with clarity and in charity and to call errors by
their proper names until that
time, at which point our work will be as commonplace in the Age of
Mary
Immaculate as it was in the time before Modernism began to eclipse the
Faith and started to lead souls into temptation and despair.
We must also recognize that our sins have contributed mightily to the worsening of the state of the Church Militant and to the state of the world. We have much for which to make reparation, especially those of us who were slow to embrace the truth that those who defect from the Faith expel themselves from the Church and cannot hold office within her legitimately. Our Rosaries of reparation today may help to plant the seeds for the restoration of the Church Militant at some point in the future. There is still time to intensify our prayers, our sacrifices and our mortifications as we fast from food and other legitimate pleasures to prepare more fully for a deep immersion into the mysteries of our Redemption during the Paschal Triduum.
Our Lady will not abandon us at the hour of death if we have attempted to defend her honor during our lives. May the occasion of the scandal caused by the invitation extended to a fully pro-abortion public official to speak at her university give us cause to pray more fervently and to make many more sacrifices to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary with joy and with love.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us, especially on your feast day today!
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Catharine of Siena, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
Appendix
The University of Notre Dame du Lac's Anti-Life Track Record
The administration of the University of Notre Dame du Lac has indeed taken an aloof view of the life issues for a very long time. The university's administrators takes money every year from the rabidly pro-contraception, pro-abortion Ford Foundation, which has been funding various programs and projects at the university for over fifty-five years. This is blood money. And it is this blood money that talks on the campus of Our Lady, whose Immaculate Heart is indeed so sorrowful that a university named for her dishonors her as it honors pro-aborts and as it takes money from a foundation that seeks to overturn laws in the Catholic countries of Latin America that provide some legal protection to the innocent preborn.
The directors of the Ford Foundation are very proud of its support for baby-killing, as can be seen in this page from its website:
Increasing their understanding of their sexuality, and reducing their vulnerability to unsafe practices and treatments. The Cairo office has supported the dissemination of health information and the publication of an Arabic health guide for women, similar to the U.S. volume Our Bodies, Ourselves. The Brazil office has helped the SOS-Corpo Women's Health Group hold workshops on women's health and sexuality and to organize self-help groups among adolescents and women in poor neighborhoods of Recife. The group's educational methods—which include producing skits and modeling with clay—have been successful in engaging women, their partners, and children in discussions of health and human reproduction. Members of the group have increasingly been called upon to advise other community groups and government health programs on health services for poor women.
The Foundation has also devoted attention to the controversial problems of freedom of reproductive choice and access to safe and sanitary abortion services. Safe, accessible abortion services are essential to the health and economic security of women, especially low-income, disadvantaged women, many of whom are single mothers with dependent children. Although Foundation support for abortion-related activities dates back to 1973, when the Preterm Institute received a grant for disseminating standards for safe abortion services, special appropriation funds enabled the Foundation to expand the range of grantees and to try a variety of approaches. Grants have been made to encourage dialogue among those who occupy the large middle ground between polarized extremes, to strengthen the voice of groups such as Catholics for a Free Choice, and to produce a major study of the assumptions of opposing groups, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood by Kristin Luker. Fewer abortion-related grants emerged in the field offices, with the important exception of Bangladesh, which provided support to the Bangladesh Women's Health Coalition for educating and training providers of menstrual-regulation services. (Created Equal: A Report on Ford Foundation Women's Programs)
It was in 1973, the year that the pro-contraception and pro-"population control" Ford Foundation began its support for baby-killing in the United States of America and around the world, that its directors voted to fund a "civil rights" center at the University of Notre Dame, whose infamous president at the time was Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., a former Chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission and a leader in the movement to "secularize" Catholic colleges so as to make them more 'respectable" in the eyes of the leaders of private, nondenominational institutions such as those in the "Ivy League." It did not matter to Father Hesburgh that the Ford Foundation had come out in support of baby-killing. He accepted the money and established the "civil rights" center (on which I was asked by a constitutional law professor at the University of Notre Dame to serve; I attended one meeting, which centered around "reparations" for slavery, whereupon I resigned):
The Ford Foundation has awarded a $750,000 three-year grant to the Center for Civil and Human Rights (CCHR) at the University of Notre Dame to conduct academic, research and advocacy projects on the subject of accountability for gross human rights abuses worldwide.
Long recognized as a leader in this area of human rights, the CCHR will dedicate the Ford Foundation funding to analysis of issues such as truth and justice in transitions to democracy, universal jurisdiction, and international criminal justice, including support for an International Criminal Court.
More specifically, the grant will enhance Notre Dame's place as a primary research center on human rights accountability by increasing the University's collection of library materials on the topic, drawing invited practitioners with experience in the field to campus as visiting fellows, and placing attorneys and other professionals in internships with tribunals, truth commissions and appropriate nongovernmental organizations.
The center also will organize conferences, publish the results of scientific research, and attract to its master's and doctoral programs lawyers from around the world who demonstrate a strong commitment to a serious study of all aspects of accountability.
The grant to Notre Dame is one of the first awarded by the Ford Foundation in its "Enforcing Human Rights" initiative, which features a new International Center for Transitional Justice that will collaborate with the CCHR and other similar centers to provide advisory services to governments and civil society. One early example is a recent trip by Juan Mendez, director of the CCHR, and three other international experts to Peru, where there are plans for a truth commission.
It was a grant from the Ford Foundation that led to the creation of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame in 1973. The center initially focused on civil rights issues in the Untied States, but in recent years has expanded its work to the international human rights arena.
Over several decades, the Ford Foundation has been a major force supporting the field of human rights worldwide. An independent, nonprofit grant-making organization, it has headquarters in New York and offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Russia. More information is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.fordfound.org.(Ford Foundation grant supports study of human rights)
What about the human rights of the innocent preborn? Such rights are not recognized by the directors of the Ford Foundation who fund various projects and programs at the University of Notre Dame:
The Ford Foundation is another key supporter of anti-life extremism in Latin America.
To Mexico, the foundation sent:
- $350,000 from 1999 to 2000 to Mujer Z Modem, a feminist pro-abortion group.
- $100,000 in 2000 to Communication and Information for Women, a feminist news agency.
- $300,000 in 2000 to CFFC "to build a pro-choice alliance in Mexico by expanding the Catholic constituency for reproductive rights."
- $434,000 from 2000 to 2001 to CFFC for additional pro-abortion activities.
To Brazil:
- $553,000 in 1999 and 2001 to the Executive Secretariat of the National Feminist Network for Health and Reproductive Rights.
- $286,000 from 1999 to 2000 to CFFC's Brazil branch.
To Chile:
- $225,000 in 2001 to the Latin American and Caribbean Women's Health Network.
- $145,000 in 2001 to Isis International, Chile's leading feminist pro-abortion group.
To Peru:
- $383,000 for 1999 and 2001 to the Centro de la Mujer Peruana Flora Tristán (Flora Tristan Center for Peruvian Women), Peru's main feminist pro-abortion organization.
In addition, the Ford Foundation channeled $772,000 from 1999 to 2001 to the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights (CLADEM), a feminist pro-abortion organization with branches in every Latin American country.
To enable someone to have an abortion is a serious enough crime. But to use force and fraud to compel an entire hemisphere to kill its unborn children is nothing short of genocide. When such money could be used to do good for so many people, it is simply a tragedy that American foundations are bent on using our country's great wealth to subsidize the slaughter of Latin America's youth. (American Foundations: Funding Pro-Abortion Extremists in Latin America)
What does this matter to "Father" John Jenkins and his associates at the University of Notre Dame du Lac who take blood money from the Ford Foundation every year?
What does it matter to "Father" John Jenkins and his associates at the University of Notre Dame du Lac that the Ford Foundation funds the oxymoronic "Catholics for a Free Choice" organization that supports the destruction of the innocent preborn under cover of law?
In promoting its political agenda, one of the world’s largest philanthropic agencies has made itself the biggest single financial contributor to a self-described Roman Catholic group dedicated to vigorously fighting the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and birth control.
For more than 20 years, the Ford Foundation and Catholics For A Free Choice (CFFC) have forged a strong political and financial alliance that sacrifices the lives of the unborn to a discredited view of international economic development.[1]
Founded in 1973, CFFC has been led since 1982 by Frances Kissling, a feminist who has actively promoted abortion for more than three decades. Before joining CFFC’s board in 1979, Kissling opened an abortion clinic in New York in 1970, and in 1976, founded the National Abortion Federation, an association of abortion clinics.
Kissling, who grew up in a working-class Roman Catholic family and left her convent at the age of 20, revealed her feelings about the church to Mother Jones Magazine in 1989: “I spent 20 years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic Church.”[2]
CFFC’s uncompromising support for abortion directly opposes the ancient position of the Catholic Church -- and all of Christendom. The Roman Catholic Church’s catechism states that the embryo “must be treated from conception as a person…must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.”[3]
Catholic opposition to abortion is uncompromising. “The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life,” the catechism states.[4]
Nevertheless, Kissling advances her agenda with Ford’s support. One campaign involves promoting abortion and contraception in Latin America. (CFFC has offices in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Mexico.) Another campaign seeks to downgrade the Vatican’s status at the United Nations from that of a permanent observer to that of a non-governmental organization, which cannot vote or block United Nations decisions.[5]
CFFC even hopes to force Roman Catholic hospitals to offer abortion and contraception; Ford helped fund a briefing paper detailing how mergers with Roman Catholic hospitals could threaten the availability of such services.[6]
Ford supports CFFC more than any other group does. The foundation provided more than $2 million of the $8 million in grants CFFC received between 1980 and 1994, including a two-year grant for $775,000 in 1994. Since that time, the proportion of Ford’s support for CFFC dramatically increased. Between 1996 and 2000, CFFC raised $10 million, with $4.4 million coming from Ford grants.[7]
Funding from such agencies as Ford keeps CFFC alive, as the group’s income records for 1993 demonstrate. That year, CFFC declared $1,530,636 in total income. Of that total, $1,501,412 came from various foundation grants. Only $29,224 came from other sources, and $17,876 was interest from cash accounts and savings.
Grant funding becomes pivotal for CFFC in light of decreasing revenue from subscriptions to the group’s magazine, Conscience. Subscription income fell from $3,427 in 1989 to $1,542 in 1993.
Ford supports a wide variety of CFFC projects. In 1982, the foundation gave CFFC $19,560 to study what the Foundation Grant Index (FGI) called, “effects of religious upbringing and religious attitudes on (the) decision to have (an) abortion.”
Two years later, a Ford grant of $25,000 created a “fellowship program in journalism and moral theology dealing with…contraception and abortion.”
In 1991, Ford issued a $300,000 grant good for two-and-a-half years. As part of that grant, $150,000 went for “family planning and reproductive health programs in developing countries,” and $50,000 went for “education on reproductive health and rights in Latin America,” as reported by the FGI.
Ford’s concern with “reproductive health” extends far beyond CFFC. In 1993, Ford approved $22 million in grants to various organizations promoting population control, especially in poor countries.
But here are the critical questions: Among the endeavors it could support, why does Ford direct such resources toward “family planning” (that is, abortion) and what role does CFFC play in Ford’s efforts?
A bit of history will help. The roots of Ford’s interest extend to the first decade following World War II. Secular organizations began worrying about the possibility that unchecked population growth in poor countries would stifle economic development and increase competition for natural resources, thereby accelerating international tensions. (Others -- including Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger -- were outspoken racist eugenicists.)
That concern revived interest in the theories of the 18th century English economist, Thomas Malthus. Malthus believed that since population tends to increase faster than the food supply, nations must control their birth rates to avoid worldwide disaster.[8]
Malthus viewed famine and war not only as inevitable consequences of overpopulation, but even as necessary means to limit growth if nations refused to do so. In Malthus’ economy, such tragedies reduce the number of poor people, who tend to have more children than they can afford, thus making overall conditions worse.[9]
Agricultural improvements in the 19th century refuted Malthus’ assertions. Nevertheless, various postwar books and articles began addressing such issues as environmental protection and international peace in Malthusian terms. A bestseller from 1948, Road to Survival, even cast Japanese imperialism as the result of a costly pursuit of resources stemming from Japan’s refusal to control its birth rate.
The author, William Vogt, argued that growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would be reduced, and war avoided, if both nations pursued aggressive birth control policies: “If the United States had spent $2 billion developing…a contraceptive instead of the atomic bomb, it would have contributed far more to our national security.”
In 1952, Ford helped found the Population Council, designed to create an international network to promote population control. Ford made its first grant of $600,000 to the council in 1954 and followed with grants of $1 million in 1957 and $1.4 million in 1959.
But standing in the way of this Malthusian approach to world progress and harmony is the Catholic Church. John M. Swomley, professor emeritus of social ethics at the St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, expresses the prevailing attitude toward Malthus and Catholicism in a 1997 article for Christian Ethics Today. That article criticized the Reagan administration’s decision to remove financial support for international “family planning” programs, including the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, after consultations with the Vatican. Swomley wrote:
The consequences are enormous. The editor of the National Catholic Reporter, in an editorial in the June 19, 1992, issue, said, “I feel the church is causing great harm to the planet, making millions suffer unnecessarily...Among today’s 5.2 billion, as many as one-fifth, mostly children, are undernourished. About 1 million die from hunger or hunger-related causes yearly.”
Moreover, those hunger-related problems have led to massive economic migrations which, in turn, have led to population wars such as those in Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, and in India where “nine or ten million refugees from East Pakistan were driven out.”
CFFC, therefore, provides a useful counterweight to the Vatican’s position in public debate. Joseph O’Rourke, a former Jesuit and president of CFFC, told the conservative National Catholic Register in 1984, “CFFC really was just kept alive for years because the mainline pro-choice movement wanted a Catholic vote.”
But does CFFC embrace a neo-Malthusian perspective? Barbara Crossette, writing for Conscience, provides the answer in an article that otherwise criticizes the arbitrary brutality of Chinese population control:
(I)n human terms…enough diverging numbers…can be linked to the social benefits of China's sharply reduced population growth and India's slower progress. Infant mortality in China, according to United Nations figures, is 36.5 deaths in every 1,000 births. In India, there are 64.7 deaths per 1,000 births. Life expectancy in China now stands at 71 years; in India it is 64.
Large numbers in a poor country put great strain on a family's resources as well as a nation's. In India, nearly a quarter of the population is undernourished, with nearly half the children under five already underweight and undersized. In China, United Nations figures show a national malnutrition rate of nine percent, with about 10 percent of children underweight and 17 percent undersized.[10]
Support for neo-Malthusian ideology gives the lie to CFFC’s advocacy of “free choice.” After all, if choice were the ultimate criterion, the way a woman exercises that choice, through abortion, adoption or child-rearing, would be secondary. Not so, wrote Marjorie Reilly Maguire, one of CFFC’s founders, to the liberal National Catholic Reporter in 1995:
Various personal experiences with CFFC have led me to believe that its agenda is no longer simply to defend the legality of a woman’s abortion choice…I now see CFFC’s agenda as the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior. I don’t think this is a Catholic or pro-woman agenda….
It seems that the only acceptable “choice” for CFFC and its backers is one that reinforces a particular theory of population control – a discredited theory that some of the world’s wealthiest foundations still hold to be in vogue in an era of zero population growth – at the expense of the unborn. That they do so in the name of the Roman Catholic Church is sacrilegious. Yet the Ford Foundation continues to pour the funds into CFFC, because CFFC renders Ford an invaluable service: a war by proxy with the Pope and his church. (FrontPage Magazine)
The authors of this important piece of research obviously accepted the "legitimacy" of the conciliar "pontiffs." However, it is these conciliar "pontiffs" who have done nothing but flap their jawbones occasionally to talk about the Catholic "character" of universities and colleges which receive funding from organizations such as the Ford Foundation whose directors promote baby-killing with an evangelical zeal. No conciliar "interdict" has been placed on these universities and colleges, which make warfare against the Faith as their administrators and professors frequently go beyond the approved apostasies and novelties of conciliarism to plant the seeds of doubt and unbelief in the souls of the students who believe, despite all of the empirical evidence that has been amassed in the past forty years, that these institutions represent the Catholic Church, which, of course, they do not.
Readers will note that the Ford Foundation was instrumental in establishing the Population Council in 1952. This did not deter administrators of the University of Notre Dame at the time from accepting grant monies from the Ford Foundation:
Notre Dame University received a grant of $57,500 for faculty research in East European affairs and the advanced research training of a number of graduate students.
The grant, extending over five years, will help in the acquisition of special research materials, provide a small number of research assistantships, and permit additions to the present teaching program. (Ford Foundation Annual Report 1954 | Archives | Ford Foundation; see also Ford Foundation Annual Report 1956 and Ford Foundation Annual Report 1963 for proof of the University of Notre Dame's blithe association with a foundation that was funding the evil of "population control" that paved the way for the acceptance of the slaughter of the innocent preborn. This association continues to this day despite the facts one can find by clicking this link: Foundation Giving to Contraception and Abortion.)
A protege of the Ford Foundation was appointed by United Masonic Nations Organization Ban Ki-moon to become that body's "high commissioner for human rights:"
NEW YORK - United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to name abortion advocate Navanethem "Navi" Pillay of South Africa as the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) this week, despite reservations from the United States.
According to the New York Times, the United States has privately raised concerns about Pillay's nomination to the top human rights post because of her strong support for abortion. Pillay is a founding member of the international non-governmental organization Equality Now, a group that has spearheaded campaigns for abortion access in Poland and Nepal. Pillay remains on the board of the organization which receives major funding from pro-abortion foundations, including George Soros' Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.(UN Secretary General Nominates Abortion Advocate)
Yes, the administrators of the University of Notre Dame, a place where God is offended daily in the "offerings" of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and where the Faith is assaulted in one classroom after another, recognizing that there are exceptions here and there to this assault, have a long and bloody track-record of associating with pro-aborts. It makes perfect sense for them to invite the fully and unapologetically pro-abortion Barack Hussein Obama to address the graduating classes of 2009. After all, the University of Notre Dame gave then President James Earl Carter, Jr., a forum to give his "we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism" commencement address on May 22, 1977. Why not give a forum to a Communist pro-abort on May 17, 2009?
Catholicism has been eradicated from the hearts and souls and minds of many of those who are administrators of the universities and colleges that trade on their once Catholic identities but which are now on the "cutting edge," if you will, of the doctrinal and liturgical and moral revolutions of conciliarism. The bankruptcy of the sensus Catholicus is such that "Father" John Jenkins believes that he has found a "balance" between "academic freedom" and "Catholicism" by permitting the "queer film festival" to proceed under other names (Gay and Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, Spectatorships. Qlassics: Reimagining Sexuality and the Self in Recent American Cinema) without recognizing for a single moment that no human being is to base their self-identity on sinful behavior or inclinations. Such a thought is totally foreign to "Father" Jenkins.
