By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“A rising group of right-wing U.S. Catholic Bishops is colliding with a very Catholic president who supports abortion rights,” The Washington Post tweeted April 29.
These days the Post assumes that its remaining readers can’t think for themselves. They must be trained, in this case through the lens of the lazy “right-left” trope so dear to Social Justice Warriors.
The Post’s lesson plan continues: “Having a U.S. president who attends Mass week after week and talks about his faith is powerful to millions of American Catholics.”
This mandatory postulation appears in the “news” section, of course. And it is directed not only to Washington’s Blue Bubble, but also to any “rising” bishops who don’t want any bad press. With scant subtlety, the Post warns them that “we represent those ‘powerful millions,’ and you’d better be prepared for a frontal assault if you betray them at your annual meeting in June.”
This is not an idle threat. Jeff Bezos’ Billionaire Blog hates the true faith, and will savage those who defend it. Remember how they welcomed Biden’s inauguration with this treacle?
“Joe Biden’s Catholicism is all about healing. Now, he will lead a suffering America.”
The Post knows that our bishops have been derelict for years – ever since Wilton Gregory, now D.C.’s cardinal archbishop, worked hand in glove with Ted McCarrick to cover up the exploding homosexual abuse-and-coverup scandals in 2002.
Will our shepherds follow orders, shut up, and stick to “Social Justice”?
The “Pre-Eminent Issue” Comes Out Of Hiding
Well, one American prelate has finally had enough. On the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone published his first pastoral letter, Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You (full text at inthewomb.org). It addresses the “Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life,” and gets right to the point: Abortion is a grave evil; cooperating with it is evil too; reject that teaching, or ignore it, and you shouldn’t receive the Eucharist; if you’re in public life, you run the risk of scandal, another objective evil. (The Wanderer will be publishing the full text of Archbishop Cordileone’s pastoral letter in two parts, in our next two issues.)
Upon reading it, one is inclined to suspect that Joe Biden might not be “very Catholic” after all.
“Abortion is the axe laid to the roots of the tree of human rights,” the archbishop writes. “When our culture encourages the violation of life at its youngest and most vulnerable condition, other ethical norms cannot stand for long.”
Carefully and charitably, Cordileone acknowledges that many choose to avoid the issue. But we can’t ignore it, and neither can you, he writes. Abortion is “a genocide against the unborn,” so we’re going to talk about it.
“The topic is swathed in sophistries by [pro-abortion] advocates and discussion about it is forbidden in many venues. It is my conviction that this conspiracy of disinformation and silence is fueled by fear of what it would mean to recognize the reality with which we are dealing. How can we face the enormity of this outrage?”
Here Are The Facts. Now What?
Then comes the action item, which America’s bishops have desperately avoided for years. It is “powerful,” indeed:
“When other avenues are exhausted, the only recourse a pastor has left is the public medicine of temporary exclusion from the Lord’s Table. This is a bitter medicine, but the gravity of the evil of abortion can sometimes warrant it.”
Oh, you don’t have ears to hear? The pastoral helpfully includes a sidebar on “The Medicine of Excommunication.”
And the duties of bishops are not optional either: “I tremble that if I do not forthrightly challenge Catholics under my pastoral care who advocate for abortion, both they and I will have to answer to God for innocent blood.”
We pray that Cordileone’s brother bishops will respond with fortitude and solidarity. But what about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most outspoken public advocate of abortion under the archbishop’s “pastoral care”?
Time will tell.
Will Our Thought Police Soon Be Speaking Chinese?
Facebook’s “independent” Oversight Board has confirmed that Donald Trump’s account, which had over 80 million followers, will be permanently terminated. Twitter, where Trump had 88 million followers, has done the same. Snapchat, Twitch, and YouTube, have also banned the former president.
Of course this censorship is not aimed at Trump; it’s a hate crime aimed at his millions of supporters. In a classic bait-and-switch, Big Tech had convinced Deplorables years ago that we could rely on their promise of a dependable way to stay in touch with one another. Once our habits were ingrained (“It’s so easy! And it’s free!”), Big Tech pulled the plug.
The Stasi, the KGB, and the Red Guards would undoubtedly admire such brazen fraud.
We the People are the real targets of this Classic Cancel Campaign. Pro-life organizations have noticed for some time that their social media communications channels have been constricted, then strangled, by corporate Thought Police. Now it’s almost old news when one after another pro-life, pro-family organization is banned altogether. (Our friends at LifeSiteNews.com reported Tuesday, May 4 that Facebook had “permanently banned [them] from the site.”)
Except that it isn’t news at all, since there are no longer any means to report it. Relying on those popular platforms, we didn’t think we’d have to build bombproof back channels that we could turn to.
New social media services like Gab, Telegram, and Parler struggle to supply new avenues for Deplorable communications, but they’d better hurry. Countless other conservative and pro-life groups are being canceled as well. Major server and storage providers like Amazon are also joining the Blitzkrieg. “Woke” leftist groups are now demanding that MasterCard and Visa join in and refuse to allow Deplorable sites to use them as payment options.
Everybody’s asking: “Where can we find a dependable server? Kartra cut off our conference right in the middle, with 50,000 listeners. Will Zoom be any better?”
As we scramble for new servers, channels, and providers, the constant question is, “How do we get back online?”
But wait — “online” to what?
The Internet, of course.
And what if we lose the Internet?
What if everything we wrote, said, or videoed were subject to Thought Police review before we could even get an Internet signal?
That’s our future, if Communist Chinese Premier Xi Jinping gets his way.
China Joe’s Real Crisis
“Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally directed the communist regime to focus its efforts to control the global internet, displacing the influential role of the United States,” the Epoch Times reported on Monday, May 3. Xi said that the “power to control the internet” had become the “new focal point” of China’s strategic planning, and identified the United States as the “rival force” in the “strategic contest.” Xi’s goal of “using technology to rule the internet” would give China “discourse power” over communications and discussions on the world stage, he said.
But didn’t the United States develop the original Internet? Don’t we control the core operations that guarantee transparency and legitimacy of domain names and IP addresses?
Well, we did — once. However, in 2014, Obama’s Commerce Department began preparations to transfer that control to a “nonprofit organization governed by an international board.” In spite of objections from conservatives led by Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the transfer was finalized in 2016.
CCP Leader Xi has just donned the mantle of “The Great Helmsman,” a sobriquet not proclaimed since Mao himself. Xi’s “Social Credit System” rules every aspect of Chinese life with an iron hand. Evidently, he wants to impose that system worldwide through control of the Internet.
One wonders whether Joe Biden is capable of confronting Xi’s offensive at all. Daily life in America would collapse without a reliable Internet. If Xi’s “strategic contest” turns into all-out cyber warfare, that reliability will undoubtedly be Xi’s primary target in his quest for “discourse power” over worldwide communications.
Is China Joe paying attention?
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