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| Parallel Economies - Agriculture |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-17-2022, 08:25 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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PARALLEL ECONOMIES - AGRICULTURE
The Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin | November 16, 2022
Hi everyone—
I had the distinct privilege and honor yesterday to speak here at Hillsdale College in Michigan. This college is a bastion of liberty and freedom, refusing even to take the GI bill because of the government strings attached. Since they wanted my remarks written to be printed in the conference proceedings, I wrote this speech and therefore have the unusual opportunity to get you a copy. It was a 40 minute speech to give; you can probably read it in 20-25 minutes. Glad to hear your thoughts.
Blessings,
joel
HILLSDALE COLLEGE
PARALLEL ECONOMIES—AGRICULTURE
Joel Salatin
This spring when Russia invaded Ukraine, fertilizer prices increased in some cases 400 percent and global grain shipments sputtered, our farm didn’t feel anything because we don’t buy fertilizer and we don’t buy foreign grain. Suddenly our years of being marginalized by the agri-industrial complex inverted and interest in our methods and madness exploded. Both farmers and non-farmers began asking “how do we disentangle from the system?”
“Just in time,” the darling inventory phrase of recent decades, changed to “just in case” as supply lines fractured. Culturally, a society detached from menial life tasks like farm chores and kitchen duties, suddenly found itself vulnerable to unforeseen fragilities. The food and farming sector goal switched from efficiency to resiliency. In the spring of 2020, as covid’s black swan permeated the world, store shelves went bare. Farmers euthanized (that means killed and threw away) millions of chickens, turkeys, and hogs because mega-processing plants couldn’t maintain operations.
At our house, we neither worried nor feared because we had freezers full of meat and a basement full of canned garden produce. I don’t say all this proudly; I say it gratefully, and as a challenge to everyone: freedom comes from participation. We’ve spent a couple of generations exiting historically normal tasks and behavior, from integrating livestock and crops, growing gardens, buying locally and cultivating domestic culinary arts. We even abandoned breast feeding our babies for a couple of decades.
We thought squeezable cheese and subcontracting kitchen duties to mega-corporate entities, replacing decomposition with chemical fertilizer, honey with refined sugar, and butter with hydrogenated vegetable oil would launch us into a new freedom nirvana. But instead it shackled us, enslaved us to nefarious scientists bringing us fertilizer and menus from laboratories instead of from God’s ecological womb. Those of us who continued to participate in historically-normal farm chores, garden production, local or biologically grown sustenance, and domestic culinary arts are today enjoying more independence and freedom. You cannot have freedom without participation.
Here are two questions to ponder. First, would America’s food system have convulsed as violently if instead of 300 mega-processing facilities employing 5,000 people apiece we funneled our food through 300,000 community-scaled 20-50-employee facilities? The second question is when rocky disruptions affect our ship of state, would you rather navigate dangerous shoals in a maneuverable speedboat or an aircraft carrier that takes 10 miles to turn around?
Let’s examine what a food and farming parallel universe would look like by juxtaposing current objectives with the lunatic fringe alternative.
1. CHEAP FOOD VERSUS PRECIOUS FOOD. If one thing defines American agriculture, it is dedication to cheap food. American per capita expenditure on food is the lowest in the world; our per capita expenditure on health care is the highest. Cheap food promised to give us spendable cash to attend football games and casinos, cruises and movies.
It created a love affair with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOS) that became incubators for disease. Floating on a sea of cheap energy, these facilities promised mechanized farming and pharmaceutical health. Subtherapeutic antibiotic use created a world of superbugs like mRSA and cDiff. A brand new lexicon burst on the American vocabulary: campylobacter, lysteria, E. coli, salmonella, food allergies, Type 2 diabetes: these are nature, beaten and abused, on its knees, pleading and begging “Enough!”
Instead of God’s designed decomposition driving fertility, petroleum-based chemical fertilizers substituted, like an intravenous feeding tube replacing edible food. In short order, our agriculture system created a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico, infertile frogs, and three-legged salamanders. And now our life expectancy is dropping; we’re addicted to pharmaceuticals; physical and emotional maladies plague our nation.
Perhaps cheap food policy’s most damaging effect is on farmers themselves. The primary custodians of our natural resources, not to mention food, feel marginalized and unappreciated. When’s the last time you heard about a school guidance counselor advising: “Mary, you’re really sharp, with great grades and honors credentials. You should be a farmer.” Burdened with the unnecessary and ridiculous responsibility of feeding the world, American farmers now number fewer than our prison population. It gives me pause to realize that my book You Can Farm would have much bigger buyer interest if it had been You Can Be a Successful Inmate. Stewarding our air, soil, and water with our best and brightest will only come when we have a precious food policy. That’s up to consumers, not farmers.
Can you imagine a cheap religion policy? A cheap road-building policy? A cheap information technology policy? Dear folks, you cannot abdicate precious food respect without serious consequences. As a culture, we must leave this cheap food universe and get in the escape pod of precious food.
2. QUANTITY VERSUS QUALITY. Bushels and tonnage are all we measure. By every metric, over the last century nutritional quality plummeted. Today you have to eat three times as much broccoli to get the same nutrition as you did in 1940.
Our farm participated in a pastured egg nutrient study several years ago. The official USDA nutrition label for conventional supermarket eggs lists folic acid as 48 micrograms per egg. Our Polyface eggs averaged 1,038. Grass finished beef has 300 percent more riboflavin than grain-finished. Pastured livestock offer much higher percentages of conjugated linoleic acid; indeed, only two weeks of grain feeding chases it out of the body on beef cattle.
The Bionutrient Food Association is documenting the wildly disparate nutrient contents of various foods. In carrots, for example, they found that you would need to eat more than 10 carrots of the worst to get the same nutrition as one carrot of the best. To my knowledge, nobody in the conventional food and farming sector is seeking better quality; they’re just trying to fill bins and trucks. Doesn’t matter if it’s junk.
We can all thank Austrian biochemist Justus von Liebig for beginning this downward trend when in 1837 he told the world that all life is simply a rearrangement of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous (NPK). Replacing the magnificent complex relational biological community with simple chemicals denies the human microbiome its optimal sustenance.
Sir Albert Howard, who developed the scientific aerobic composting method and brought it to the world in his iconic 1943 book, An Agricultural Testament, wrote “Artificial manures [that’s what he called chemical fertilizer] lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.” I would add “who can only be kept alive with artificials.” A functional authentic agriculture requires a focus on quality.
3. SEGREGATED VERSUS INTEGRATED. Throughout history, agriculture required a highly integrated approach because until cheap energy and mechanization, distribution was laborious. You couldn’t pack more animals in a house than you could bring in feedstocks and haul out manure by draft power.
Indeed, from 1900-1910, with the industrial revolution well underway, along with rapid urbanization, newspaper editors and city planners feared metropolitan implosion. Dependent on draft power to haul in fodder and livery supplies and haul out manure, cities were sinking under transportational inefficiency. Poop covered the streets. It was on your shoes when you went into the bakery. Travelers drug manure into hotels. Patrons carried poop into restaurants.
On farms, the same constraints required integrated systems. Crops required proximate animals in order to receive the blessing of their manure. In 1946, the average morsel of food in America traveled only 40 miles from field to fork. Today, the average is 1,500 miles. And we’ve gone from a calorie of energy per calorie of food to 15 calories of energy to a calorie of food. We’ve become that inefficient, or looked at another way, that segregated.
No longer dependent on nature’s fertility, we mine our fertilizer from far away places to be placed on land that grows crops to be fed hundreds of miles away to animals that are trucked to mega-processing facilities for packaged food shipped to the Costco near you. Meanwhile, the historic blessing of manure becomes a liability, clogging our streams and poisoning our groundwater because it’s too much in one place for our ecological womb to metabolize.
Sir Albert Howard also envisioned diamond cities and predicted water-based sewage systems would fade into obsolescence by the 1960s. He imagined 25-house developments placed in a diamond shape so each one would have access to passive solar heat. The one acre inside the diamond would employ a master gardener and composter who would collect the human excrement each day, compost it, and grow highly nutritious fruits and vegetables to feed the 25 households surrounding the garden. Isn’t that beautiful?
Our college campuses should all have a chicken house attached to the back door of the dining hall so kitchen scraps can be converted to eggs onsite. All roofs can be guttered to cisterns equipped with pumps operated by exercise bikes in the fitness room. Students could exercise by pumping the water back up the roof, which would grow vegetables that would cascade down the walls for fresh picking from dorms and classrooms. The vegetated roofs would cool the buildings enough to eliminate the need for air conditioning. The cisterns would eliminate stormwater infrastructure. The campus would be divided into quadrants and each day students would waken to an app notice telling them where fresh blackberries, apples, or strawberries were ready for picking; the students would graze their way across campus. All buildings would have attached solariums, generating passive solar heat and growing cool-hardy leafy greens all winter, eliminating trucking from California. The campus that institutes these simple low-tech improvements will be a beacon of hope and help to a world wallowing in hopelessness and helplessness. Could it be Hilsdale?
4. CENTRALIZED VERSUS DECENTRALIZED. People assume that to feed the world, we need big things. Big chicken factories. Big combines. Big fields. No we don’t. A lot of littles can outcompete one big.
I appreciate big and small are subjective terms and by USDA standards, our Polyface Farm is now a large farm. But compared to Tyson, we’re a drop in the ocean. On our farm, scaling up is not by centralization; it’s by duplication. The difference is profound.
The average American farmer is now 60 years old. In the next 15 years, 50 percent—half—of all agricultural equity is going to change hands. That’s farmland, equipment, and buildings. No civilization has ever seen that big a change in ownership in peace; only in conquest, like the Huns rampaging Rome. I’m not suggesting the U.S. is getting ready to be overrun by Huns—maybe we are or maybe we aren’t. But what we’re seeing in the geo-political agricultural landscape is unprecedented. Any business book will tell you that when the average practitioner in any vocation or economic sector is more than 35 years old, that’s a sector in decline. This successional problem isn’t because farming is obsolete. It’s largely due to cost of entry for the next generation. When young people can’t get in, old people can’t get out.
For example, if a young person wanted to grow chickens for Tyson, the first item on the agenda is a half a million dollar building. Would you call that an impediment to entry? Compare that to our pastured poultry model which requires 10 ft. X 12 ft. X 2 ft. high floorless boxes containing 75 broilers (meat chickens) moved daily across the field. All you have to do is cancel your Netflix subscription for a couple of months and you have enough cash to build one and enter the chicken business. If you like it, you can build another with retained earnings. If you love it as much as we do, over time you can build more than 200 of them, debt free. Dave Ramsey would be proud.
America has roughly 35 million acres of lawn and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. We can spread production over thousands and thousands of places; not a single confinement animal facility is necessary. We have millions of acres locked up. On our farm, pastured pork and forest-housed pigs using high tech electric fencing and moved every few days exercises the ecology and eliminates concrete, fans, and despicable manure lagoons.
People who embrace pod schools, home schooling, and educational coops know that centralization, which is akin to institutionalization, does not a better education make. The same applies to agriculture. Spread it out; democratize it; entrepreneurialize it.
5. MECHANICAL VERSUS BIOLOGICAL. The Greco-Roman disconnected compartmentalized linear reductionist individualized parts-oriented mindset views life as fundamentally mechanical. It views living things like inanimate piles of protoplasm to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine, like 3-D printing or metal widgets.
Until recently, this was simply an incorrect idea. But with today’s disdain for death and cultish worship of animals, it has new allure. My dog is my aunt is my cat is my child now permeates society with the fundamental notion that life does not require death. Thinking they’ve entered a new evolutionary elevated spiritual awareness, these folks actually exhibit a profound devolutionary spiral into anti-ecological thinking. Everything is eating and being eaten.
If you don’t believe that, go lie naked in your flower bed for a week and see what gets eaten. Or in the pig pen. Nothing more dramatically illustrates this principle than a compost pile, teeming with bugs and worms, all eating and in turn being eaten. The life, death, decomposition, regeneration cycle is as foundational to our ecological womb as the need for sunlight and water. Respect during life creates either desecration or sacredness in sacrifice. At our farm, we dare to ask how to honor the pigness of the pig and the tomatoness of the tomato, understanding that such questions define ethical and moral boundaries around affirmation and being-hood. A society that refuses to ask how to have happy pigs will soon refuse to ask how to have happy people. If we’re going to honor the Tomness of Tom and the Maryness of Mary, it starts with honoring the pigness of the pig.
If you’re eating something that won’t decompose, it probably won’t digest. Shelf stable cheese isn’t food at all. Good cheese should mold at room temperature and even sprout legs and walk off the table in a week. In order to create life, something has to die. If we want to live, we die to self. I think Jesus had something to say about that.
Interestingly, our pastured beef, pork, and chicken cook 15-20 percent faster than conventional supermarket counterparts. One explanation is that ours is more moist due to exercise. Another is that our animals live a happy life, stress free, and do not live every day secreting hardening adrenalin that makes them tougher to cook. If we eat stress, do we become more stressed? Hmmmmmm.
Life is far more than interchangeable parts. Machines can’t forgive. They can’t heal. They can’t love. You can hug your Tesla all day but when you finally tear yourself away, it doesn’t pine for another hug. A parallel agriculture understands that growing sacred food, authentic sustenance, feeds our microbiome life, not inert substance.
6. OPAQUE VERSUS TRANSPARENT. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker used to live above their shops, attend community functions with others, and be approachable. The industrial revolution expanded the butcher, baker and candlestick maker to a size that was unapproachable. Hiding behind razor wire and security posts, mega-processors and farms became opaque to the populace, which fostered ignorance about what was going on behind those cloistered complexes. Ignorance breeds fear.
Fear demanded government oversight. Today, Americans fear food. Our credentialed experts told us to quit eating butter and go to margarine. They said to quit using manure and go to chemical fertilizer. They encouraged us to powder our garden beds with DDT. They brought us the food pyramid in 1979, placing Cheerios and Twinkies on the foundational bottom tier. Today they tell us genetically modified organisms are safe, encourage us to stab our kids with 72 injections before they’re 18, raw milk is bad but Coke is fine. Folks, the government/industrial credentialed expert track record is abysmal.
The food police are fine with chlorinated chicken and red dye 29, but criminalize home-processed chicken and homemade pepperoni. You can eat it; you just can’t sell it. If it’s too hazardous to sell, why isn’t it too hazardous to eat? Thousands and thousands of wanna-be entrepreneurial farmers are held hostage by scale-prejudicial food regulations. Food choice is not guaranteed to Americans. My Virginia commissioner of food inspection told me that if we allowed people to make their own food choices, like buying pie from a friend at church, we couldn’t build enough hospitals for all the people sickened by unsafe food.
Years ago the Government Accounting Office conducted a study on food-borne illness and found four culprits: centralized production, centralized processing, long distance transportation, and subtherapeutic use of antibiotics. This is one of the only times I’ve ever seen a government study get it right. Wouldn’t you think such a finding would make someone in the seat of power ask “well, if that’s the cause, what’s the opposite?” Let’s see, the opposite of centralized production would be lots of viable small farms. The opposite of centralized processing would be thousands of small outfits. The opposite of long distance transportation would be . . . let’s see . . . what would that be? Oh, local. And how about drugging our animals? Oh, that would be happy pigs. But nobody dared broach the solution because it would invert the power, position, prestige and profits of the entire food and farm industry. Food bullies don’t like transparency.
Why do we listen to them? On our farm, we have a 24/7/365 open door policy for anyone to come from anywhere to see anything anytime unannounced. We’re customer inspected, not bully compliant.
7. CHEMICAL VERSUS CARBON. What feeds soil biology is decomposing biomass. Through photosynthesis, a plant takes in something as mystical and esoteric as sunbeams and converts it to fungible, physical, measurable, tradable material. The plant pumps energy into the soil, where up to 5 billion microorganisms per handful engage in an underground cafe. “I’ve got a gram of molybdenum I’ll trade you for some polysaccharide.” It’s more drama and theater than Broadway ever imagined.
All ecosystems thrived without chemical fertilizers. From the Fertile Crescent to the American plains, chemical 10-10-10 fertilizer did not build the rich soils that grew powerful civilizations that collapsed under fertility depletion. This historical cycle is as axiomatic as high taxes and governmental corruption. North America produced more food 500 years ago than it does today. It wasn’t all eaten by humans, for sure. We had 200 million beavers eating more vegetation than all the humans today. Some 2 million wolves at 20 pounds of meat a day. Passenger pigeons numerous enough to be in flocks big enough to block out the sun for three days flew over the landscape. And 100-200 million bison, along with elk, deer, prairie chickens and turkeys filled the landscape.
The notion that abundance comes out of a bag or tube fails to appreciate the real source of soil development: the sun. In our faith community, we honor the S-o-n. In a functionally fertile agriculture, we honor the s-u-n. We do that through a carbon economy rather than a chemical economy. That means we till less, grow more perennials rather than annuals, and put carbonaceous diapers under our livestock when they’re housed in the winter.
With an industrial-scale chipper, on our farm we convert low-quality trees into chips to absorb manure and urine. As the diaper builds through the winter, we add corn, which ferments in the anaerobic bedding pack. When the cows come out in the spring, we put in pigs—we call them pigaerators—who seek the fermented corn and churn the diaper into aerobic compost. If American agriculture took all the money we currently spend on chemical fertilizer and battling fires due to overgrown vegetation and spent it on fertility from carbon, we would grow far more nutritious food, build soil, and provide sacred employment for thousands who yearn for society’s respect working in blue collar vocations.
Carbon and organic matter are kissing cousins. Carbon feeds the soil biology and increases sponginess. I like to view the soil like a majestic cathedral, full of rooms and compartments. Some have hydrogen; some have water and some have minerals. Throughout the cathedral, billions of parishioners called nematodes, actinomycetes, bacteria and the gigantic worms and grubs interact in both harmony and competitiveness, eating and being eaten, trading and growing.
On our farm, we’ve moved from 1 percent organic matter to more than 8 percent in half a century. Every one percent of organic matter can hold 20,000 gallons of water per acre; we’ve moved 7 percent, which is 140,000 gallons of water per acre we can hold in our farm soils now that we couldn’t when we arrived in 1961. Our gullied rockpile armpit of the community now produces 3-4 times the county average. Scarcity moved to abundance.
People who think we could not have fed the world without chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and hybridization don’t understand that if we had had a Manhattan Project for compost, not only would we have fed the world, we would have built soil, reduced sickness, and created landscape resiliency. Indeed, we would have done it without three-legged salamanders and infertile frogs. Nature is not a reluctant partner to violently wrestle into submission; creation is a benevolent lover to be caressed in the right places.
We don’t need to shortcut the sun. We need to harness it through carbon.
8. SICKNESS VERSUS HEALTH. Conventional agriculture’s overriding mentality is that nature is fundamentally flawed and we have to fix it. The average farm conference focuses nearly all of its attention on disease and sickness.
If you attend an organic or sustainable—whatever buzzword you want to use—conference, you will hear little about sickness. Although our farm has thousands of animals, we use a veterinarian only once every other year, and that’s for a calving problem beyond our ability. While the average farmer buys tons of drugs and chemicals, I don’t buy any of it. What I buy is seaweed as a mineral supplement.
I run laying hens behind the cow herd in Eggmobiles to duplicate the bird-herbivore symbiosis seen throughout wild ecosystems. The chickens scatter the dung, peck out the fly larvae to sanitize the field, and eat the newly exposed grasshoppers and crickets, turning it all into incredibly nutritious eggs. Instead of paying vet bills we sell eggs.
Our animals move daily to new areas, away from yesterday’s toilet. We’re constantly trying to mimic nature’s template. When government agriculture experts told us to feed dead cows to cows in the early 1970s, farmers who believe like I do didn’t do it. We were castigated for being anti-science, anti-progress. I didn’t buy the expert advice because I couldn’t find a pattern in nature where herbivores eat carrion. A couple of decades later, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) stormed across the western world and a collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t oughtta done that” replaced the scientific hubris.
Somehow God’s design and modeling keeps things healthy. Every sickness or malady we’ve had on our farm has been a result of our mismanagement. It could be lack of sanitation, or selecting the wrong genetics, or nutritional deficiencies. When we have a sickness issue, we don’t assume we failed to use the right vaccine or drug. We look in the mirror and ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of these animals?” I suggest we learn far more by assuming it’s our fault than if we assume we’re victims of an incorrect concoction.
If we formed a diabolical committee to create a pathogen-friendly farm, what would we do? We’d have only one animal or plant—a mono-species in order to make sure pathogens always had a host and weren’t confused with other species. We’d grow them as close together as possible so pathogens always had proximate access to a host. We’d eliminate sunshine as nature’s best detoxifier. We’d make them breathe fecal particulate to abrade lesions into fragile mucous membranes. You get the picture. What have I just described? Modern American agriculture. It’s time for a parallel system.
9. EXPLOITIVE VERSUS NURTURING. Ever since the Conquistadors exterminated indigenous populations in the New World in the name of God and the Queen, our European DNA loves short-term gain. Sir Albert Howard said it is the temptation of every civilization to turn what nature spent millenia creating into cash for today.
Desertification, plummeting aquifers, erosion, and McDonald’s all represent a short-term valuation. One of our problems is that as a society, for all our cleverness, we have not figured out an accounting system that measures liabilities against assets. If I pollute the stream that runs through our farm, it’s positive for Gross Domestic Product because it creates economic activity. Labor, trucks, fuel, infrastructure all come to fix the pollution, but it all goes on the national balance sheet as positive income. What’s the dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico worth?
We build a juvenile detention facility to house delinquents and call it an asset. It should be treated as an expense. A society that does not or will not measure ills across the land is destined for collapse. If we can’t separate good and bad, evil and righteous, asset and liability, we’re headed for a bankrupt future, spiritually, economically, and ecologically. Wendell Berry articulates this beautifully when he writes about the cost of divorce. In a happy homestead with one income, one car, a milk cow, garden and woodlot, the family requires little money.
But with divorce, now you have two homes, two cars, everybody works in town, spending more on gasoline. No time is left for gardening or milking the cow, canning or cooking supper. More meals out, more tranquilizers to suppress anxiety. He concludes that what is good for us creates less GDP than what is bad for us. Such a lopsided accounting system makes thinking people want a parallel universe.
My goal as a farmer is to leave more soil, more pure water, more breathable air, more happy people in my community, more health, more immune strength as a result of my pilgrimage. In short, more of the commons. True wealth isn’t cash as much as it is decoupling from cash. Being able to step free of systemic enslavement. Defunding the Conquistadors.
10. TYRANNY VERSUS LIBERTY. Government intervention in the marketplace puts everyone at risk. Subsidies, now called crop insurance, identify only six commodities worthy of protection. Why? This skews the market, making the protected items cheaper than they otherwise would be and the unprotected ones more expensive than they otherwise would be.
No government agency has been more successful at annihilating its constituency than the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That President Abraham Lincoln, when instituting the USDA, thought government agents were necessary to make farmers successful is perhaps one of the most profound examples of elitist naivete. We have fewer farmers, worse food, more sickness than we did in the the 1860s.
The domestic larder no longer exists. Replaced by the supermarket warehouse, Americans generally are completely dependent on a three-day supply of food in their urban supermarkets. Neighborhood abattoirs and canneries are gone. Most households don’t even have freezers anymore. Half of all American households can’t put their hands on $400 right now, so buying half a beef for the freezer is as undoable as walking on water.
When someone like Amish farmer Amos Miller in Pennsylvania or a food buying club like Rawsome Foods in California tries to offer true choice to the system, government agents and swat teams show up to confiscate and eradicate integrity food. It’s not all food police. Some of it is zoning. On our farm, we can’t legally make and sell a chair from our own trees milled into lumber on our own sawmill because such work is classified manufacturing, which is illegal in an agricultural zone. The national Rogue Food Conference movement is an antidote to the madness. These conferences promote circumvention rather than compliance.
I’m in favor of a Food Emancipation Proclamation guaranteeing to every American the right to purchase the food of their choice from the source of their choice. If you want to come to my farm as a voluntary consenting adult, look around, smell around, ask around and then buy a pound of sausage from a backyard-processed pig or a pot pie from my kitchen, we should be able to transact that trade without a bureaucrat between us. When the government gets between my spoon and my throat, I call that an invasion of privacy. What good is the freedom to speak and assemble if we can’t choose our bodies’ fuel to give us the energy to go preach and pray?
In a day when freedom of choice rules the day, when we want the government out of our bedrooms and our womb, surely it’s time to get the government out of our stomachs so we can feed our microbiome the fuel it needs. We’ve lived under an enslaved food and farming system ever since Lincoln gave us the USDA and it’s time to put the opt out choice on the table. If I prefer backyard butchery, I should have the right to get it. If I prefer raw milk, I should have the right to get it. If I prefer Aunt Matilda’s chicken pot pie, I should have the right to buy it and she should be able to sell it to me if she wants to.
When Governor Tim Kaine, now one of our Virginia Senators, visited our farm toward the end of his tenure, I toured him around and he was totally smitten by what we were doing. He asked me what he could do for me. I told him his responsibility was the same as every other elected official: to act as a hedge of protection for the minority view. I don’t want chlorine on my chickens. I don’t want to vaccinate my calves. I don’t want to cram my pigs in a house. I don’t want to use GMOs or anti-microbials. People ask me routinely if I fear Monsanto, Bayer, Cargill, Tyson. No because they have no power over me.
The power is from the government regulatory and judicial enforcement agents who are not independent non-partisan objective people. Subject to emotions, politics, and corporate protection agendas, these powers can terrorize marketplace competition, food choice, and alternative agriculture models. These powers don’t like compost because it isn’t sterile. They don’t like cheese that can mold. They certainly don’t like raw milk. They don’t want pigs to roam outside. I told Governor Kaine that his job was to protect the minority view, to keep diversity and creativity alive in our social and agricultural landscape, and to offer Americans choice in their most intimate decision: what to eat.
The parallel agriculture I advocate embraces a whosoever will mentality. What can possibly be wrong with enjoying a vibrant minority along with a larger majority? If we really are fringe, fine; what have the big boys to fear? Oh, but what if we represent gunpowder in front of these castles? What if what we have is really better than what they have? In either case, protecting a parallel option preserves innovation. The minority view, known as the lunatic fringe, has always provided the answers to society’s problems. When we look through our plate at dinner, what do we see? Imagine the farms on the other side, the foodscape on the other side, the nutritional commitment on the other side. Dear folks, we need to make our menus agree with what we know and believe in our minds.
What I propose here is a long term solution, an abundant solution, a people-affirming solution. God help us to love it, do it, embrace it.
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| 'Orthodox' Archbishop Broglio elected USCCB President |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-16-2022, 07:13 AM - Forum: General Commentary
- No Replies
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Archbishop Broglio elected USCCB president
Broglio has a generally orthodox record and has supported religious freedom and conscience exemptions to COVID jab mandates.
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Archbishop Timothy Broglio
Tue Nov 15, 2022
BALTIMORE (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, was elected Tuesday to serve as the next president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
The U.S. bishops elected Archbishop Broglio, the current secretary of the USCCB, to a three-year term as president by a vote of 138-99.
Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the bishops’ committee on pro-life activities, was elected vice president in a 143-96 vote, winning in a run-off against Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, a noted conservative.
Archbishop Broglio was considered a frontrunner in the presidential race, as he was the runner-up in the USCCB’s 2019 vice-presidential election. The bishops typically pick the conference’s vice president to succeed as president, but outgoing USCCB vice president Archbishop Allen Vigernon of Detroit was ineligible due to age.
Archbishop Broglio, 70, has led the Archdiocese for the Military Services since 2008 and previously served as apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic and apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico, according to Catholic News Agency. From 1990 to 2001, he worked as personal secretary to late Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who faced allegations of covering up sex abuse committed by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Legionaries of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel.
Broglio has a generally orthodox record. He implemented guidelines in 2013 that prohibit military chaplains from taking part in ceremonies for homosexual partners and reiterated that anyone known to be in homosexual sin may not serve in lay ministries. He also backed former President Donald Trump’s ban on gender-confused troops, condemned allowing open homosexuals to serve in the military, and has recognized homosexuality as a root cause of the clerical sex abuse crisis.
In 2020, he released a “clarification“ stressing that Pope Francis’ remarks affirming same-sex civil unions did not constitute Church teaching.
The military archbishop was one a small number of prelates who opposed COVID-era restrictions on public Masses and strongly denounced COVID jab mandates last year after initially urging Catholic servicemen to get jabbed. In 2017, he did, however, support the Paris Climate Agreement, which subtly incorporates the United Nations’ pro-abortion agenda.
Dissident, left-wing Catholics immediately condemned the election of Archbishop Broglio as USSCB president. The National Catholic Reporter decried the move as a “clear message of rejection to Pope Francis,” noting that Broglio served as apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico when Pope Benedict XVI appointed conservative Puerto Rican Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres.
Pope Francis removed Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres from his diocese earlier this year due to his support of conscience exemptions to vaccine mandates.
Tuesday’s USCCB elections are a defeat for the U.S. bishops’ progressive faction, as the rest of the episcopate voted down decidedly liberal candidates, including Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle and Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Síller of San Antonio.
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| Klaus Schwab calls for global ‘restructuring’ at annual international summit |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-16-2022, 07:04 AM - Forum: Great Reset
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Klaus Schwab calls for global ‘restructuring’ at annual international summit
'If you restructure an economy, the result is a reduction of income — of disposable income — which can lead to extensive social tensions, which we see in our world.'
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World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab giving an address at the 2022 B20 Summit in Indonesia
BeritaSatu / YouTube
Nov 15, 2022
BALI, Indonesia (LifeSiteNews) — Klaus Schwab kicked off this year’s B-20 meeting in Indonesia Monday by calling for a wholesale “restructuring” of the world’s economic, political, social, and ecological systems.
During his call for a global overhaul, Schwab – a German economist who serves as chairman of the World Economic Forum – said the restructuring will not only take “several years” to accomplish, but will likely include suffering for ordinary people.
“If you look at all the challenges, we can speak about a multi-crisis, an economic, political, social, ecological and institutional crisis. But actually, what we have to confront is a deep systemic — and structural — restructuring of our world. And this will take some time. And the world will look differently after we have gone through this transition process,” he said.
The B-20 is a gathering of business movers and shakers that acts as the official sister organization of the G-20. The G-20 is an international consortium of the world’s largest economies. This year’s B-20 conference features remarks from Schwab but also Twitter owner Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and other global players, some of whom attended virtually.
Echoing themes from other speeches he’s given about the so-called fourth industrial revolution, Schwab told business leaders that they have arrived at “the inflection point” and that there needs to be a particular focus on technology, energy, the re-reshaping of supply chains, and holding accountable those who pollute the environment.
“If you restructure a company, you write off the costs and, of course, the shareholders are suffering,” Schwab said during his keynote address, Harnessing the Power of Innovation for Future Economic Growth. “If you restructure an economy, the result is a reduction of income — of disposable income — which can lead to extensive social tensions, which we see in our world.”
Schwab also asserted that there exists a great need for private enterprise and public governments to work more closely together, and that the world needs to move toward a “multi-polar” political landscape that ensures businesses adhere to “stakeholder capitalism.”
“Governments and businesses have to cooperate in order to become a fast fish because in our world today it’s not anymore so much the big fish who eats the small fish, but it is the fast fish who eats the slow fish. And in order to be a fast fish … you have to have two co-pilots: business and governments.”
Schwab touched on transhumanist themes as well, heralding the internet and “the metaverse” as positive advances that have altered mankind.
“Technology will change completely what we are doing at this present time, and not only what we are doing, it will have an impact even on who we are. Just look at how even the internet has changed to a certain extent our identities over the last 20 years,” he said.
“Technological innovation doesn’t deal with one or two innovations,” he also remarked. “It’s a whole panoply of technologies which interact, and which will compete and change how we produce, how we consumer, how we communicate.”
Schwab has long been the target of criticism for meddling in international affairs and pushing for a new world order. During COVID-19, Schwab, 84, was a leading voice for vaccine mandates and lockdowns. He has groomed a large number of influential politicians, including Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, through his Young Global Leaders Program. And as chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum — the group behind the “Great Reset” agenda — he is able to exert an enormous amount of pressure on international bodies and nation states.
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| Conciliar SSPX New Altar Tables |
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Posted by: Ruthy - 11-15-2022, 04:06 PM - Forum: The New-Conciliar SSPX
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The pictures below are from a newly built, conciliar SSPX church in Richfield, OH - St. Peregrine. - link
They are using a table for an altar. And the crucifix above the table is not a crucifix.
This must be the new norm for the conciliar SSPX, when building a new church, because they are using a table for an altar in the new church being built in St. Marys. Their excuse for the use of the table is the same one that they used to usher in the new mass... It was the norm until about the 8th century.
You can watch an explanation in this video https://youtu.be/GvdG8Nebj70 - Starts about 3:00 minute mark.
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From the book:
The Catholic Sanctuary
and the Second Vatican Council
by Michael Davies -
How tragic it is that the objectives of what Pope Pius XII condemned as a "wicked movement" are now being imposed upon us as the norm for Catholic worship. See that your flocks are not deceived, he warned, "by a mania for restoring primitive usages in the liturgy."
It was under the guise of a return to the primitive that the Protestant Reformers were able to destroy the Mass. Today, in the service of false ecumenism, the Catholic ethos of our churches is being replaced by a Protestant ethos, precisely under the guise of a return to earlier practices. No good fruits have come from this ecumenical surrender. In no country in the western world have the changes been followed by an increase in fervor and piety among the faithful[size=undefined]-----[/size]only by a massive falling away from the Faith. [Cf. Michael Davies, Liturgical Shipwreck: 20 Years of the New Mass (TAN, 1995), Part 8.]
St. Richard Gwyn, a Welsh teacher and father of six children who was executed in 1584 for recusancy [refusal to attend Protestant services], looked upon the desecrated sanctuaries of Wales and remarked with sadness: "Yn lle allol; trestyl trist"[size=undefined]-----"In place of an altar, there is a miserable table." God grant that the "miserable tables" that have replaced the traditional altars of sacrifice throughout the Catholic world will one day themselves be removed and replaced by traditional altars of sacrifice.[/size]
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| Here Come "Programmable Dollars": New York Fed And 12 Banking Giants Launch Digital Dollar Test |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 02:17 PM - Forum: Great Reset
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Here Come "Programmable Dollars": New York Fed And 12 Banking Giants Launch Digital Dollar Test
ZH |NOV 15, 2022
Never let a crisis go to waste. Or a market crash for that matter.
With equity and bond markets stuck in brutal bear markets and providing a sufficient distraction to what is happening behind the scenes, the Fed and a group of banks have been quietly preparing for the next stage in the "organized crash" pipeline: the rollout of CBSC.
According to a statement by the New York Fed, global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the participants announced on Tuesday.
Citigroup, HSBC Holdings, Mastercard and Wells Fargo are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed, which will provide a "public contribution to the body of knowledge on the application of new technology to the regulated financial system."
Bank of New York Mellon, the money-laundering bank of the world, HSBC Holdings, PNC Financial Services, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Truist Financial and U.S. Bancorp are also participating in the test, along with payments network Mastercard.
The project, which is called the "regulated liability network", will allow banks to simulate issuing digital money representing their customers’ own funds before settling through central bank reserves on a distributed ledger, the New York Fed said.
The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.
“Programmable US dollars may be necessary to support new business models and provide a foundation to much-needed innovations in financial settlements and infrastructure,” Tony McLaughlin, managing director for emerging payments and business development at Citigroup’s treasury and trade solutions division, said in a statement Tuesday. “Projects like this, that focus on the digitization of central bank money and individual bank deposits, could be expanded to take a broader view of the opportunity.”
Earlier this month, Michelle Neal, head of the New York Fed's market's group, said it sees promise in using a central bank digital dollar (CBDC) to speed up settlement time in currency markets.
For years, Wall Street’s biggest banks have explored the use of blockchain in their businesses for everything from interbank payments to mortgages and cross-border trades. Still, this week’s move comes amid a rout in cryptocurrency markets following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s digital-asset empire last week.
In addition to weighing central bank digital currencies and compliant stablecoins, “there should be the option of leveraging the scale and economic value of bank deposits,” Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s head of crypto and blockchain, said in the statement. The regulated liability network “is an innovative proof of concept led by the industry that could help shape how consumers and businesses view the credibility of token-based payments.”
The new network is meant to follow existing laws and regulations for deposit-based payments processing, including anti-money-laundering requirements. After the 12-week test, the banks will publicize the results, they said in a statement, though lenders “are not committed to any future phases of work” once the test is complete.
While the initial work will focus on simulating digital money issued by regulated institutions in US dollars, the concept could be extended to multicurrency operations and stablecoins, which are typically backed one-to-one by another asset such as the dollar or euro.
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| Perhaps another N.O. bishop waking up?: “Deconsecrated Temples and the Religion of Man” |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 07:36 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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“Deconsecrated Temples and the Religion of Man” — Archbishop Hector Aguer
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RorateCaeliblog [slightly adapted - emphasis in the original] | November 12, 2022
In recent times, we have witnessed, here and there, the use of cathedrals and other sacred buildings for conferences and other events for politicians, social leaders and members of other groups of different orientations. In this way, for example, recognition is sought for the ten years since the pontifical election. And the Pope himself endorses them with words such as: "It comforts my soul that my person has made possible this moment of communion, of encounter beyond differences." In these meetings, the Holy Father's teachings in the encyclicals Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti are invited to be taken up.
Beyond this allusion, it is known that there are many in Argentina, as in the rest of the world, who do not agree with the ideological position of the Pope, specifically with his ecological globalism that has become the official position of the Roman Church. The message of the two documents cited has little to do with the essential mission of the Church and the substance of the faith; in this sense it is clearly different from the homogeneous tradition of the Social Doctrine opened in 1891 by Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum.
It has been remarked, for example, that "even if we have different political or religious visions, we cannot ignore that Francis's social message challenges us all, invites us to ask ourselves questions, summons us not to forget the enormous dignity of every human person." This description of papal thought makes evident the distance that separates it from the Lord's command to the apostles -- valid for the Church of all times -- to make Christians of all peoples (pánta tà éthnē).
This is the main problem, revealed in the painful crack opened in the Church by the official departure from the great and unanimous Tradition. On the other side of the crack, on the shore of homogeneous continuity with the right doctrine -- always the same and always renewed -- are those who are despised as "indietrists" or "backwardists."
In a previous intervention I explained the meaning of this position [of fidelity to tradition, which stands] contrary to the official progressivism that proposes the nebulous gnosis of a "way out," of a march "forward," heterogeneous with respect to the roots that have sustained the Church in difficult times, of express or immanent schisms, and of the heresies that could have wounded her. To move forward, in authentic progress, it is necessary to look back (indietro, as they say in Italian), that is, to sink the roots of thought and the loving adherence of the will in the ecclesial Tradition, which is not a museum piece, but the ever-fertile soil in which the life of Catholicism flourishes.
The encyclicals Laudato si and Fratelli tutti are novel texts that are assimilated to the globalist movement, to the gnosis present in the "new paradigms," foreign to a timely and homogeneous continuation of Tradition. In the 5th century, St. Vincent de Lerins pointed it out in his Commonitory as a matter of identity: in the same dogma, the same sense, the same affirmation.
Let us return to the acts that take place in different sacred buildings. They are political meetings, convocations to bring about a unity of diverse opposing forces; that is what the mission of the Church has ended up in, according to what the Argentine Episcopal Conference, for example, has assumed as its main aspect. Christ remains, in reality, on the margin; he does not count because, obviously, he divides: one is either with Him or against Him. Freemasonry is surprised by this new competition that has come its way, but remains, after all, grateful.
Why are churches specifically chosen for such days? There are spaces as wide or wider than churches, in the civic and social realm. It would be authentically pastoral, for example, to occupy a historical place, the usual scene of all kinds of significant events for cities and towns and their institutions.
Why, then, are churches chosen to become conference halls? Let's say it brutally: to desacralize them. I cannot affirm that this was an express will; for such an express will is not necessary in order to desacralize. These facts are inscribed rather in a habitual purpose, in different dioceses, that in liturgical matters we should do the opposite of what was practiced in other times (and with optimal results). The validity of sacrality was coherent with the grandeur, beauty, and sublimity of the building of worship.
Why, then, are cathedrals and other temples the settings for these convocations? The Kirchnerist political narrative and the Bergoglian ecclesiastical narrative have coincided in a new secular religion. The lecturers are the officiants of the new cult; the parishioners are the irreconcilable politicians, miraculously reconciled for a short while. I apologize for the ironic comment I have just made; however, I am convinced that it expresses the profound meaning of what happened in these churches.
It is enough to reread the Pauline Letters to see that according to the great Apostle and the Church that was contemporary to him, unity and peace in the world depend on conversion to Christ. In some way, with the art of pastoral discourse, it is necessary to present to political leaders, as to society as a whole, the need to be converted to the Gospel. It does not respond to the Church's mission, according to the Lord's command, to avoid the very core of preaching -- much less, to accommodate the Gospel to the taste and tolerance of politicians or society.
Let us take as an example Paul's attitude in the Areopagus of Athens before Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. The altar dedicated to the unknown God (Agnóstō Theō) inspired in him a lesson in theodicy: he uncovered to the listeners the meaning of that title and introduced them to that God whom they worshipped without knowing him, in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). But the purpose of his discourse was to announce the Risen Christ, Redeemer and Judge of men. Some of the listeners scoffed, but others gave a positive response: "We will hear you speak about it again" (Akousómetha sou perì toutou kaì pálin, Acts 17:32). Those people were restless and eager to hear news, Luke, author of the Book that is the second volume of his Gospel, points out.
The meaning that one wants to give to acts of this type leads whoever wishes to interpret it, for example, to the basic problem of Argentinean Catholicism. Is ours a Catholic country? Father Leonardo Castellani answered in the affirmative, but he added that it was with a "mistongo" [miserable, low-quality] Catholicism. This reality, present to some extent since its origins, has historically upset the heads of the Church. At present, and I believe that without much effort of interpretation, the dislocation of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, whose discourse is usually quite alien to the cultural and social reality of the country, is noticeable. There is, yes, an awareness of the division, of the aggressiveness of the political factions, and the somewhat illusory concern to overcome them.
The same illusion is reflected by the Pontiff in his various messages. In the panorama of the not very serious Catholicism (that means the qualification of "mistongo", according to Castellani), a good number of serious Catholics stand out -- they would be recognized as "backwardists" in Rome -- people convinced that the political malaise and other penalties that afflict us cannot be overcome without the conversion of the majority of the society. The solution would be for the majority of "mistongos" Catholics to become true Catholics.
These "backwardists" are not few in number. On October 8, no less than 1,000 men, on their knees in Plaza de Mayo, prayed to the Blessed Virgin with the recitation of the Rosary, asking for the conversion of the nation. Just a small example. This was the second time that this meeting of men was held in this place, in front of the seat of the national government. The fact that men are the ones summoned is significant in light of the gender perspective, but it is also an invitation to remember that in October 1934, within the framework of the International Eucharistic Congress, presided over by the then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli as Pius XI's legate, a massive and unusual Communion of men took place. It was a historic milestone in a country where the baptized do not go to Mass; they did not go in 1934, and even fewer go now, especially men.
The reference made above to the Pauline discourse in the Areopagus of Athens can serve as an incitement, an inspiration, to elaborate the discourse that has to be addressed to the crowd of Stoics and Epicureans in today's Argentina. The Apostle based himself on the Unknown God. We can start from the God who is the source of all Reason and Justice, invoked by the authors of the National Constitution. The specifically Christian moment of the speech appears in the mention of the famous article 2, which invariably survived all the reforms: it is a historical fact that has not been reversed. The State "sustains" the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Worship.
Lost as it is, Argentina preserves, albeit faintly, that historical memory: a dimension that cannot be erased. It should not be forgotten or shamefully hidden. Juan Bautista Alberti, the author of the Bases that have served as support to the Constitution, maintained that the State cannot "sustain" a cult that is not its own; that is to say, ours is, in spite of all regrets, a Catholic country. With these data that I have recalled, one may elaborate a theodicy to be proposed in the confused Areopagus of today's Argentina.
+ Héctor Aguer
Archbishop Emeritus of La Plata
November 12, 2022
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| Vatican II and the American Deep State |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 07:14 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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Vatican II and the American Deep State
![[Image: jfk.webp]](https://onepeterfive.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/jfk.webp)
Above: US government officials with Catholic president John F. Kennedy.
OnePeterFive | November 14, 2022
Before he died, Robert Blair Kaiser, Time magazine reporter at the Vatican II Council, told me that the reporters were “participant-observers to influence the schemas.” This was part of a worldwide assault on Catholic doctrine, noticed years before, and Vatican II provided an opportunity for the American “deep state” and “globalists” to place the Catholic Church in their service. The Council was occurring within about 17 years after the end of the bloodiest war in history and that war was vivid in the minds of many participants. At the same time, the world was locked in the Cold War, a titanic struggle between two different world views – one represented by Soviet Communism and the other by America. The former was depicted as dark and foreboding, the latter as light and prosperous. The American media helped to paint that picture.
Time magazine was the creation of Henry Robinson Luce. Luce was the son of a Presbyterian minister and could trace his lineage back to the American Revolution. He invented the newsmagazine with the founding of Time. With the mentoring of Walter Lippmann, Luce put into practice the emerging science and systemization of psychological manipulation which used images, words, and emotions to shape, form, and influence views, ideas, and perceptions both in the United States and overseas. Luce’s magazines made him one of the most powerful and influential men in America, and eventually the world. It is said that there was not a day that he did not speak of the United States Constitution which came to represent the political manifestation of the organizing principles of American society, or in other words, the American ideology. At the heart of this ideology were the tenets of the First Amendment.
Luce long had his eye on the Catholic Church with its doctrine of church and state. The Church was both an obstacle to the designs of the plutocratic interests to rule America and the world, and at the same time an opportunity to facilitate that objective of greater power and control. Luce shared the sentiments of Paul Blanshard, whose book American Freedom and Catholic Power became the bible of anti-Catholic liberals. Blanshard observed that the priest was the “agent for Roman spiritual and political goods” and “is subordinate to the hierarchy.”[1] The priest lent credibility to any idea, and a priest who was a theologian was even more of an authority. Blanshard understood the role of theology in helping the Church maintain its power. According to Blanshard,
Quote:The Church’s philosophy of church and state is far more important than the continued existence of a bit of acreage which has its own postage stamps and flag. In fact, the philosophy of church and state espoused by the Vatican is the most important thing in the whole Catholic system because it determines the political and social policies which the bishops and priests will pursue throughout the world.[2]
So, Luce and the socio-economic elites whose interests he advanced, needed a theologian to espouse approval of the American system of social organization. The American elites wanted the Church to approve the First Amendment with its Establishment Clause that disestablished any religion as the basis of the laws of a society, and that gave real power to the private interests with the free speech and free press clauses. That theologian would be John Courtney Murray, SJ, a professor at Woodstock College and editor of Theological Studies.
A secret meeting was held on April 26, 1948 at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, and hosted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.[3] Representatives were present from Protestantism, Judaism and Catholicism. The main issue was the relation of church and state. Murray agreed there was a problem. When it came to church-state relations, Catholicism was the problem, not America, or as he later put it: “the Church-State problem is, in the very specific and unique sense, a Catholic problem – a Roman Catholic problem.”[4] By agreeing to provide “a more liberal interpretation” of Catholic doctrine on church and state relations, Murray embarked upon an enterprise that would eventually weaken in the minds of many Catholic leaders one of the most important doctrines of the Catholic Faith.
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Murray appearing on the cover of Time shortly before the Council
Not long after, the United States Government, under the leadership of Dr. Edward Lilly, a wealthy Catholic professor at the Catholic University of America, devised a program of doctrinal warfare. Doctrinal warfare was considered “the central core of psychological warfare. Ideological or doctrinal warfare” involved a “planned attack against the basic hostile system conducted concurrently with a positive advocacy of basic ideas of our own system.”[5] Doctrinal warfare, in other words, was a way to reorder societies. Doctrinal warfare was not directed at “influencing mass behavior; in fact it is not immediately aimed at the masses, but at the decision makers and their staffs.”[6] It targeted the “developed mind. This mind, engaged in developing concepts and rationalizations and capable of projecting the same to others, possess the ability to clarify, analyze and synthesize” and one that would become “unsatisfied with their accepted ideology.”[7]
By 1953, the plan was developed and contained in the classified document known as PSB D-33. The doctrinal warfare program would seek to provide “permanent literature” and foster “long-term intellectual movements, which will appeal to intellectuals, including scholars and opinion-forming groups, to: (1) break down world-wide doctrinaire thought patterns which have provided an intellectual basis for Communism and other doctrines hostile to American and Free World objectives.”[8] To do this, it would “Exploit local divergencies, heresies or policy disagreements within opposition systems.”[9] The Government intelligence agencies were to coordinate their efforts with the media and corporations.
This was in time to help implement the plans for what we know today to be globalization. In 1952 and 1954 representatives of industry, banking, labor unions, intelligence agencies, federal government agencies such as the State Department, and others officially met unofficially at Princeton, New Jersey to discuss plans for making that happen.[10] American culture and ideas had to be inserted into societies so as to open the way for their economic development, or as some may say, economic colonization.
With the death of Pope Pius XII in October, 1958, and calling of the Council by his successor, John XXIII, the American elites sensed opportunity to expand their power by turning the Catholic Church into a purveyor of American ideas and policies, most notably the ideas behind the First Amendment. Luce and his entourage already knew that changes were afoot in the Vatican before that time, as they had great intelligence of the happenings in the headquarters of the Catholic Church. For example, he and the American establishment, as well as US intelligence agencies, funded and supported Pro Deo University and its founder, Fr. Felix Morlion, OP. This institution of higher education was in Rome and taught young businessmen and other professionals from around the Catholic world of the benefits of the American system of social organization. Indeed, it was there in November, 1953 that Luce delivered his speech, “The American Proposition.” Written by Murray, the speech as delivered by Luce advocated for the First Amendment as the ideal of social organization. Essential to that ideal was the Establishment Clause which disestablished the Catholic Church and the Catholic religion (as well as any church or any religion) from society. This clause, with free speech and free press, gave real power in society, the culture, and even over the religions, to the powerful private interests, or the plutocratic class.
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Henry Luce with Pius XII
In the Summer of 1962, just weeks before the start of the Council, Luce sent his chief lieutenant, Charles Douglas Jackson (“CD Jackson”), to Rome to investigate. Jackson had a history of working with media, intelligence agencies, and industry. He was a central figure in the confluence of the activities and interests of these three groups and also served as President Dwight Eisenhower’s speech writer. Jackson, privy to the internal workings of the hierarchy, remarked how the Church, “that tremendous mechanism all over the world,”[11] had to change to adapt to modern times.
Note: My book, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition, explains the psychological and doctrinal warfare waged in the early stages of the Cold War against the Catholic leadership in an attempt to change Catholic doctrine, especially as to the proper relations between church and state. Catholic doctrine did not change, but there was fashioned a rhetorical and ideological weapon known as “the spirit of Vatican II” that has been used to distort Vatican II, mutilate Catholic doctrine, and bring confusion and suffering to many. More than seven years in the making with hundreds of footnotes from a multitude of sources, this two volume new edition with a forward by Dr. John C. Rao may be found on amazon.com in either paperback or e-version.
[1] Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 34.
[2] Ibid., 44.
[3] David Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and the American Proposition (South Bend, IN: Wagon Wheel Press, 2022), Vol. I, 93-97.
[4] Untitled text of talk by John Courtney Murray that begins with “Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,” John Courtney Murray Papers, Box 6 File 445, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, DC.
[5]“Terms of Reference, Ideological Warfare Panel,” OCB Secretariat Series Box 2 Folder “Doctrinal Warfare (Official) (File # 1) (4),” Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
[6]“Statement on Doctrinal Warfare Targets,” dated February 6, 1953, OCB Secretariat Series Box 2 Folder “Doctrinal Warfare (Official) (File # 2) (2),” Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
[7] Ibid.
[8] PSB D-33 June 29, 1953, “U.S. Doctrinal Program”, Psychological Strategy Board, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Wemhoff, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition, Vol. I, 469-480.
[11] C.D. Jackson, “Overseas Report (Confidential) # 4 from CD Jackson,” dated August 7, 1962, CD Jackson Papers, Box 109, “World Trip, Transcripts, Italy, 1962,” Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.
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| Amazon founder Jeff Bezos warns a recession is looming - and Americans should 'prepare for the worst |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-15-2022, 07:07 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos warns a recession is looming - and Americans should 'prepare for the worst'
Market Insider [adapted] | November 14, 2022
- Jeff Bezos warned the US economy is likely to slump in a painful recession.
- Amazon's billionaire founder advised consumers and businesses to delay purchases and stockpile cash.
- Bezos recently suggested it was time to "batten down the hatches."
Jeff Bezos has warned a US recession is looming, and advised consumers and businesses to stockpile cash in case there's a devastating downturn.
"The economy does not look great right now," Amazon's billionaire founder and executive chairman told CNN on Saturday.
"Things are slowing down, you're seeing layoffs in many, many sectors of the economy," he continued. "The probabilities say if we're not in a recession right now, we're likely to be in one very soon."
Bezos recommended American households delay big-ticket purchases such as new TVs, refrigerators, and cars, given the risk that economic conditions worsen. Similarly, he suggested small-business owners consider holding off on investments in new equipment, and build their cash reserves instead.
The e-commerce pioneer declined to estimate how long the recession could last, but he urged people to be ready for an economic disaster.
"Take as much risk off the table as you can," he said. "Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."
Bezos' latest comments echo his response to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon in October, when the bank chief said there's a good chance of a US recession.
"Yep, the probabilities in this economy tell you to batten down the hatches," Bezos tweeted at the time.
Andy Jassy, who succeeded Bezos as Amazon's CEO last summer, appears to share his predecessor's recession fears. Amazon has been cutting costs, slowing spending, and freezing hiring for certain roles in recent months, likely in preparation for a tougher economic backdrop.
Leading investors, executives, academics, and analysts have sounded the recession alarm this year. They have pointed to the Federal Reserve's efforts to combat inflation, which surged to a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, and remained at 7.7% in October.
The US central bank is rushing to cool the economy and alleviate upward pressure on prices by raising interest rates. It has hiked them from nearly zero in March to a range of 3.75% to 4% today, and indicated they could peak above 5% for the first time since 2007.
The upshot is that American consumers and businesses may have to weather soaring prices, surging borrowing costs, and a shrinking economy. Bezos is likely recommending they stockpile cash to help them survive that painful squeeze.
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| 'Prophetic Call for Climate Justice and Ceremony of Repentance' |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-14-2022, 07:36 PM - Forum: Global News
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The new religion?
In Sinai, a Prophetic Call for Climate Justice and Ceremony of Repentance
Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development [undated]
Between November 6th and 18th, 2022, the UN climate conference COP 27 will take place on the Sinai Peninsula, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Religious communities and religious leaders have a key role to play in addressing climate change and climate justice, which requires deep transformation within society. The knowledge of what changes are critically needed to diminish long-term harm to the planet is readily available. However, bringing about change in action demands deeper changes in attitude, a change of heart. This has been the domain of religions for millennia. Religions are sources of inspiration for the transformation of heart and the ensuing changes of attitude.
To support, challenge and inspire discussions during COP 27 at Sharm El Sheikh, interfaith climate events will take place in Sharm El Sheik, London, Jerusalem, and elsewhere that will be heart-stirring, transformative and a moment of inspiration for religious communities and for humanity. Religious leaders will call for a reexamination of deep-seated attitudes and for identifying ways to transform these attitudes for the wellbeing of Earth, our common home.
Mount Sinai is a mountain whose memory and meaning loom large as a place of revelation in the collective consciousness of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others. As an ancient sacred space, it was the site of prophetic experience, and receiving God’s message, for the prophets Moses and Elijah in all three Abrahamic traditions, and the prophet Muhammed in the Muslim tradition. COP 27 taking place in Sinai can remind humanity of our sacred responsibility to care for God’s creation.
We come to Sinai in a movement of repentance and quest. We seek a new vision for humanity and its endangered existence, and we seek to receive and amplify a message of life-sustaining living and habits that humanity needs to hear today. In this spirit, the project partners will bring together premier religious leaders from the world’s major religions to put forth a prophetic interreligious call to action: “Ten Universal Principles for Climate Justice.”
Interfaith Climate Events at COP 27
The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development (ICSD), together with partners, is organizing four multifaith climate events at COP 27, from Monday, Nov. 14 through Wednesday, Nov. 16 . The events will incorporate concrete examples of how religious communities are actively meeting the climate challenge, and feature concrete initiatives that translate the broader spiritual practices into action.
On Monday, Nov. 14 at 9 am, ICSD is organizing an interfaith climate event with religious leaders speaking, in the Israeli exhibition within the Blue Zone. Speakers include H.E. Metropolitan Serafim Kykotis, Sr. Maureen Goodman, James Sternlicht, and Rabbi Yonatan Neril.
In addition, ICSD is organizing three press conference events in the press conference space for NGOs in the blue zone at COP 27, in the Luxor Taba Area B. If you have a badge to enter the blue zone, we invite you to attend any or all of them.
The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development (ICSD) is organizing four multifaith climate events at COP 27, from Monday, Nov. 14 through Wednesday, Nov. 16.
On Monday, Nov. 14 at 9 am, ICSD is organizing an interfaith climate event with religious leaders speaking. It will take place in the Israeli exhibition within the Blue Zone.
In addition, ICSD is organizing three press conference events in the press conference space for NGOs in the blue zone at COP 27, in the Luxor Taba Area. If you have a badge to enter the blue zone, we invite you to attend any or all of them.
Due to restrictions placed upon us by the Egyptian government, we have had to move the ceremony of repentance and the central release of the 10 spiritual climate principles to another location. The event is currently planned to take place on Nov. 13th in London. Please come back to this page in order to view a link for live broadcast.
Mon, Nov. 14th 10:30 – 11:00 am Faith Leaders Share Ten Universal Principles for Climate Justice
Tue, Nov. 15th 10:00 – 10:30 am Religious Figures Share Concrete Steps for Climate Action Within Faith Communities. Speakers include Bishop Andreas Holmberg of Stockholm, Rev. Susan Hendershot, president of Interfaith Power and Light, Dr. Fachruddin Mangunjaya, and Rabbi Yonatan Neril.
Wed, Nov. 16th 11:00 – 11:30 am Bringing Religion to Bear on the Climate Emergency. Speakers include H.E. Metropolitan Serafim Kykotis, Paul Beckwith, Regina Valdez.
Learn more about the Sinai Climate Partnership for Houses of Worship
As world leaders and climate activists meet in November for the U.N.’s COP27, preachers and congregations can add their voices to the calls for climate justice.
In an effort to encourage clergy to teach and preach on climate change during COP 27, we have made available the following free resources:
Abraham and Torah teachings on Climate Change
COP27 – Solidarity And Endurance For Climate Justice: Malachi 4 And Luke 21
For materials on Islam and climate change, click here.
For materials on Hinduism and climate change, click here.
Who: The London climate repentance ceremony will involve world religious leaders, primarily from the Elijah Board of World Religious Leaders.
Follow Up and Outreach:
Following the Sinai event, we intend to launch a series of educational initiatives that will flow from it. The materials produced by religious leaders participating in the event will be converted into study materials, that will serve the religious communities and the community of climate activists, in special seminars and ongoing teaching situations.
Learn more about the Sinai Climate Partnership for Houses of Worship
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10 Spiritual Principles for Climate Repentance
The Elijah Board of World Religious Leaders
climate repentence.com
Introduction
The leaders of the world are presently gathered in Egypt, during this time of great international tension and conflict, for the Cop-27 meeting. We support them with our deepest prayers and meditations. Theirs is the urgent work of addressing the practical challenges of climate change and for negotiating between nations, in an attempt to help humanity resolve the climate crisis. As religious leaders we offer our voice as a contribution to the gathered leaders and to humanity. Ours is a voice of hope and unity, grounded in a spiritual vision. From this vision, offered as common ground between diverse religions, an positive attitude to life is derived that can inform practical decisions and negotiations. It can also give hope and meaning to individuals struggling under the burden of climate anxiety, who seek to find their place and identify their responsibility at this time of crisis. We must also confront honestly the destructive habits which continue to limit the possibilities and the hopes of human beings, in a call for wake up and self-examination. With the following ten principles we seek to initiate a process of climate repentance, broader understanding, and effective action. Many practical consequences can be derived from the vision set forth here, as well as from the individual principles we offer. Our call is a call to action; and a call to return to a correct vision of the creation, the creator, and the harmonious relationship of humanity with creation.
God and the world – the Nature of Being
1. Creation is not our possession. The human person must recognize this and find his/her rightful place in relation to this fundamental fact. For some of us, this leads to a sense of gratitude for God’s gifts and for the gift of life itself, wherein humanity takes its rightful place as partner and co-creator, in advancing the life of all creation. For others,, creation itself is sacred.
Therefore: We recognize human responsibility to love and protect nature.
2. Creation is not simply external to God. It is, in significant ways, permeated by God’s presence and being, manifesting the divine agency and reality. Such understandings are found in all traditions, whether as the universal view or as one voice among others. Alternatively, nature is permeated by the spiritual, manifesting ultimate reality in every particle.
Therefore: We must treat all of life with reverence.
3.Within creation, and between humans and other parts of creation, as well as among religious communities, there is interdependence. All are part of a greater whole wherein each element both receives and gives influence, impact, love, and growth.
Therefore: We must care for each other and the planet.
Humanity and Its Responsibilities
4. The distinctive task of humanity is to nurture and serve this interdependent life-giving, and so to resist the temptation to exploitation, waste, and harm. Acting in the interest of human well-being cannot be something pursued in separation from working for the well-being of the whole created order. This finds two prominent expressions:
a. Commitment to not harm creation, and the responsibility to protect it.
b. Commitment to serve, advance, and aid in the growth and evolution of all parts of creation.
Therefore: We recognize that we are responsible for the wellbeing of all life today, as well as for future generations.
5. The human person has capacities that are conducive to the realization of this vision, as well as forces that are destructive. Ego, self-centeredness, greed, arrogance, and more are negative traits stemming from a limited sense of the human person. These have the potential to destroy humanity and creation. The soul, or the higher aspects of the human person, have the capacity to realize the fuller vision of humanity’s role in the broader scheme of the meaning of life and creation.
Therefore: A disciplined spiritual life is helpful in overcoming the challenges of climate change.
6. There is an inherent relationship between the human person (within) and nature and objective reality (without). Thoughts, speech and action have the capacity to bring harm or to heal.
Therefore: Use thought, speech and action only for the good.
7. Based on this understanding of the human person and his/her role in creation, the processes of growth, transformation, return and repentance are fundamental to human existence.
Therefore: The human person is benefitted by the ongoing effort to purify, raise, and transform himself, in view of a higher vision.
Living in Spirituality and Responsibility
8. There are reactions when we harm the earth and others. Actions have consequences and no action can be ignored. The weight of our actions and their short and long term consequences lead us to find ways of mitigating harmful actions and to work for the good.
Therefore: Act knowing that every action counts.
9. Empowered by mind, reason and spiritual understanding, we adopt a mindful and attentive view of the natural world.
Therefore: take seriously the lessons and observations that humanity has reached by application of its mind in scientific study and through common reason.
10.The life of attentive, intelligent love is embodied in compassion: in openness to the pain and vulnerability of the world. Care for the other is expressed in love and compassion as fundamental spiritual principles. These are to be applied to other humans, human communities, and other parts of creation. Compassion means suffering with others—to feel the pain of the earth, of the poor, and of those who suffer the consequences of climate change. Opening our hearts to their pain will lead us to change.
Therefore: Be sensitive to the intolerable insecurities and injustices in which so many of our fellow-humans live.
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| Methodists, Catholics celebrate 55 years of 'ecumenical dialogue' |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-14-2022, 12:11 PM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Methodists, Catholics celebrate 55 years of ecumenical dialogue
![[Image: 11.14.22%20ecumenical%20meeting.JPG]](https://www.ncronline.org/files/2022-11/11.14.22%20ecumenical%20meeting.JPG)
Pope Francis accepts a report from Fr. Edgardo A. Colón-Emeric, the new Methodist co-chair of the Joint International Commission for Dialogue
between the World Methodist Council and the Catholic Church, during an audience with members of the commission at the Vatican Oct. 5.
Colón-Emeric is dean of Duke University Divinity School in Durham, N.C., and (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
NCR | November 14, 2022
When Pope Francis celebrated the 60th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II on Oct. 11, he paid tribute to the ways the council led to an opening of the Catholic Church's relationships with other Christian churches.
But only one of those groups has been in official continuous dialogue with the Holy See since the council: the Methodists.
At the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI invited a number of churches to formal theological dialogue. In 1966, the worldwide communion of Methodist and Wesleyan churches were invited and they held their first formal meeting a year later.
"We received the invitation with great enthusiasm," the Rev. Matthew Laferty, director of the Methodist Ecumenical Office in Rome, told NCR, recalling the response of the Methodists at the time. "And we've never taken a break in our work."
Just before the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, from Oct. 2-8, members of the Methodist-Roman Catholic International Commission, which is the official theological dialogue body between the World Methodist Council and the Holy See, met in Rome to begin a new cycle of dialogue under the theme "unity and mission."
According to Laferty, co-secretary of the commission, the dialogues take place in five-year cycles under different themes and provide an occasion for a theological exploration of certain issues, and social and moral concerns "within the broader context of how our two churches might respond to those issues."
During this year's Rome gathering, the commission spent time hearing papers and discussing a range of topics, including synodality and each other's understanding of the hierarchy of truths.
Bishop Shane Mackinlay of Sandhurst, Australia, co-chair of the commission, told NCR that while much ecumenical work, such as the recent meeting between Methodists and Catholics, may go unnoticed, it is essential for the shared goal of unity.
"Jesus established one church. And anything that we do that diminishes that unity takes us further away from that mission," said Mackinlay.
![[Image: 11.14.22%20ecumenical%20audience.JPG]](https://www.ncronline.org/files/2022-11/11.14.22%20ecumenical%20audience.JPG)
Pope Francis leads an audience with members of the Joint International Commission for Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Catholic Church at the Vatican Oct. 5. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
On Oct. 5, Pope Francis received the members of the commission — who hail from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States — in a private audience, where they presented him with a copy of the report from their recently completed 11th round of dialogue.
The report, "God in Christ Reconciling: On the Way to Full Communion in Faith, Sacraments and Mission," discusses the ways the two churches understand the work of reconciliation.
Mackinlay said that when Francis was presented a copy of the report, which uses the parable of the prodigal son, the pope noted that the father in the story has two sons and both Catholics and Methodists alike need to repent for their divisions in order to return to the father.
"Ecumenism is not about one party returning because they've wandered off, while the other stayed home," Macklinay said. "It's about all the parties recognizing the ways in which each of us have moved away from the father's house and need to recover."
Fr. Anthony Currer, the commission's outgoing Catholic co-secretary, told NCR that the report is the first ecumenical dialogue in the Catholic Church's relationships with other Western churches that examines the question of sacramental reconciliation.
"We might think we were a long way apart but under closer examination some of that distance collapses and we find real convergence," he said.
"Catholics can recognize that Methodists do celebrate liturgically the forgiveness Jesus made present among us, some in forms close to Catholic sacramental reconciliation, but all in forms that are based on what we know as the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass," Currer said.
Mackinlay noted that the new report is not just inward looking, but also has a missional element focusing on the needed role of reconciliation in the world today.
It also includes a liturgical text for Methodists and Catholics to join together in a service for "renewing our commitment to reconciliation as churches."
During the commission's week in Rome, members also met with officials from the Vatican's synod office, the department responsible for overseeing Pope Francis' ongoing consultation process with the world's Catholics.
Both Laferty and Mackinlay noted that synodality has a role to play in the work of ecumenism through listening to and integrating the perspectives of other Christian communions, as well as hopefully healing divides between churches.
"It is clear that Catholics need to continue to walk with and explore these questions learning from our ecumenical partners," said Currer, referring to what he called a "receptive ecumenism."
"We recognize that these Christian communities are used by God and have therefore been blessed and gifted by the Spirit," he added. "What the Spirit has given to them needs to be received by us for our own ecclesial healing."
Macklinay said that after 55 years of nonstop dialogue, the two communions are committed to the ongoing work of shared prayer, thoughtful listening and engagement to continually ask "What can we learn from one another to bring us closer to being the church that Jesus wants us to be?"
* * *
Again, this is not Francis per se, it's the regurgitation of Vatican II.
Excerpts from Fr. Hesse's Ten Errors of Vatican II:
Ten Errors of Vatican II
[Taken from The Recusant: based on notes from a talk given by the late Fr. Gregory Hesse, STD, JCD]
Lumen Gentium 8
“This Church [the Church of Christ] constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure.”
Fr. Hesse: The word subsists doesn’t tell us much in English, but in Latin “subsistere” means to exist, to be present, to lie underneath. You could say for example that the grass is subsistent to my way of walking. But it could also be subsistent to someone else’s way of walking and not just to mine. So when you say that the Catholic Church “subsists” in the Catholic Church, it is phrased that way deliberately so as not to exclude Protestants, Orthodox, etc. The architects of Vatican II were too clever to say that the Church of Christ “contains” the Protestants, the Orthodox and all those other non-Catholics. So they said that it can be found in the Catholic Church in a way that does not exclude the others. But it is defined dogma that the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church, the two are identical. Nothing outside the Catholic Church is part of the Church of Christ and nothing of the Church of Christ is outside the Catholic Church. The two are identical.
Lumen Gentium 15
“Likewise we can say that in some real way they [non-Catholic/Protestant sects] are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too He gives His gifts and graces whereby He is operative among them with His sanctifying power.”
Fr. Hesse: What way is this “real way”? They never say. In the Gospel of St. John one can read that the Holy Ghost was given only to the Catholic Church, not to Protestants, not to the Lutheran Church, not to the Anglicans. When a Lutheran pastor baptises a baby, if it is valid, it is a sacrament stolen from the Catholic Church. If that innocent child, after being baptised, dies and goes to heaven, it goes to heaven as a member of the Catholic Church because the Lutheran pastor illicitly administered the Catholic sacrament of baptism.
Lumen Gentium 16
“But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, together with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.”
Fr. Hesse: What about the Incarnation? What about the Holy Trinity? The Koran, the Muslims’ holy book calls the idea of the Trinity an “excremental idea.” And now Vatican II tells us that they, together with us, adore the one merciful God?!? What about the First Commandment? They have another God, they have the lonely one-person Allah. We have Father, Son and Holy Ghost. “Et Verbum caro factum est,” says the last Gospel at Mass, “And the Word became flesh” I’ve never heard that Allah became flesh. This is blasphemy. It is heresy and it is blasphemy.
The idea that Muslims, Jews and Catholics are basically all the same anyway is a Freemasonic idea. It was being promoted by the Freemasons long before Vatican II, and now we have a so-called Ecumenical Council telling us the same thing too. Give me a Catholic interpretation of that quote about the Muslims together with us adoring the same God. It’s not possible. It’s just a heresy.
Unitatis Redintigratio 3
“The brethren divided from us also use many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. These most certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community. These liturgical actions must be regarded as capable of giving access to the community of salvation."
Fr. Hesse: It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.”
The Protestant “churches,” and the Orthodox “churches,” cannot save anyone, they are not, never have been and never will be a means of salvation to anyone. They can only lead you to hell. Subjectively speaking, you might ask whether a Protestant who has lived a just life all his life, who has tried his best to find the truth, who has tried his best to avoid sin, whether perhaps for whatever reason he was not able to find out about the Catholic Church... or a Russian Orthodox living under communism all his life, who maybe never heard about the Catholic Church... whether because of that God would not send him to hell. Well, subjectively speaking perhaps, but even so objectively speaking they are living in mortal sin and outside Christ’s Church. Who knows if through an extraordinary act of grace from God, through an act of contrition, that man might die as a member of the Catholic Church. In reality, it must be highly improbable if ever possible, especially in this day and age for the likes of you and I. And, objectively speaking, for anyone to say that the Protestant sects or any religion other than the Catholic Church can be a means to salvation, that is a heresy. Here is a small sample of what the Popes and Councils have taught concerning this: “On the one hand, therefore, it is necessary that the mission of teaching whatever Christ had taught should remain perpetual and immutable, and on the other that the duty of accepting and professing all their doctrine should likewise be perpetual and immutable.
‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, when in His Gospel He testifies that those who not are with Him are His enemies, does not designate any special form of heresy, but declares that all heretics who are not with Him and do not gather with Him, scatter His flock and are His adversaries: He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth’ (St. Cyprian, Ep. lxix., ad Magnum, n. I).
- . . . The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium.
. . . Wherefore, as appears from what has been said, Christ instituted in the Church a living, authoritative and permanent Magisterium, which by His own power He strengthened, by the Spirit of truth He taught, and by miracles confirmed. He willed and ordered, under the gravest penalties, that its teachings should be received as if they were His own. As often, therefore, as it is declared on the authority of this teaching that this or that is contained in the deposit of divine revelation, it must be believed by everyone as true. ... But he who dissents even in one point from divinely revealed truth absolutely rejects all faith, since he thereby refuses to honour God as the supreme truth and the formal motive of faith.”(Leo XIII, Satis Cogitum, 8 ff.)
- “And here, beloved Sons and Venerable Brothers, We should mention again and censure a very grave error in which some Catholics are unhappily engaged, who believe that men living in error, and separated from the true faith and from Catholic unity, can attain eternal life. Indeed, this is certainly quite contrary to Catholic teaching.” (Pius IX, Quanto Conficiamur Moerore, 7)
- “This Council firmly believes, professes and preaches that all those who are outside the catholic church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are joined to the Catholic Church before the end of their lives; that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is of such importance that only for those who abide in it do the church's sacraments contribute to salvation and do fasts, almsgiving and other works of piety and practices of the Christian militia produce eternal rewards; and that nobody can be saved, no matter how much he has given away in alms and even if he has shed his blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” (Council of Ferrara-Florence, Session XI)
We could, if we wished, quote many, many more Popes and they all say the same thing, indeed until Vatican II one could not find any Pope or Council saying differently. So, it is clear that this one part of this one document is heretical. Therefore the whole document is heretical. Therefore the whole Council is heretical. As noted before, just one heresy would be enough to condemn the whole thing, but it doesn’t end there...
Unitatis Redintigratio 6
This document is supposedly about ‘Ecumenism’, and in this paragraph it suggests the following as a means to achieving ‘Christian unity’: “Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth. The Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated - to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself - these can and should be set right at the opportune moment.”
Fr. Hesse: The morals of the clergy have often needed reforming throughout the history of the Church. But the idea of “reforming” Church teaching (or its ‘formulation’) is something entirely different. And the distinction introduced here between “Church teaching” and “the deposit of the Faith itself” is completely false. Here is what a recent Pope taught regarding this bogus distinction:
Quote:“12. How so great a variety of opinions can clear the way for the unity of the Church, We know not. That unity can arise only from one teaching authority, one law of belief, and one faith of Christians. But We do know that from such a state of affairs it is but an easy step to the neglect of religion or “Indifferentism,” and to the error of the modernists, who hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute but relative, that is, that it changes according to the varying necessities of time and place and the varying tendencies of the mind; that it is not contained in an immutable tradition, but can be altered to suit the needs of human life.
13. Furthermore, it is never lawful to employ in connection with articles of faith the distinction invented by some between “fundamental” and “non-fundamental” articles, the former to be accepted by all, the latter being left to the free acceptance of the faithful. The supernatural virtue of faith has as its formal motive the authority of God revealing, and this allows of no such distinction.” (Pius XI, Mortalium Animos, 1928)
Dignitatis Humanae 2
This is perhaps the best known error of Vatican II, perhaps because its consequences are so visible, or because is an error which so many Popes fought against right up to the Council. Here’s what the document actually says: “This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.
Fr. Hesse: The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.(2) This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.” The supposed reason or grounds for this error, human dignity, is also itself wrong. As Pope St. Pius X said “The only dignity of man is in his being a Catholic.”
If I really thought that I had religious liberty, I would find an easier religion to belong to. Why not be an Anglican? They have nicer churches, they are more musical, their laws are not as strict... But I am not an Anglican, I am a Catholic because I do not have ‘religious liberty’, I have no choice: I am bound in conscience to be a Catholic if I want to save my soul. G.K. Chesterton said “If I were not a Catholic, I would have a harem.”
“Religious freedom” or “religious liberty” has been condemned by Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, St. Pius X, Pius XI and Pius X. You are not free to choose your religion. You are bound in conscience to become a Catholic and to join the Catholic Church in order to save your soul. If you choose not to, you go to hell. Nobody can coerce someone into thinking something they do not want to think or believing something they do not want to believe. But the laws of a Catholic state can prevent the followers of a false religion from practising in public, from trying to make converts, from trying to spread their false doctrine and false morals, etc. Look at the catastrophic numbers of millions of souls today leaving the Church to join ‘evangelical’ protestant sects in countries where before the council everyone was Catholic: South America, the Philippines, etc. These formerly Catholic countries were forced to change their constitutions so as to no longer give the Catholic religion pride of place. All this disaster as a result of just two paragraphs in one of the sixteen documents of this robber council. As noted above, just one error is enough. One heresy makes the whole document heretical, and one heretical document makes the whole council heretical.
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| Proposition 1: California abortion rights now enshrined in state constitution |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-14-2022, 11:40 AM - Forum: Abortion
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The person forwarding this to me pointed out that 'This allows the murder of a fetus or a baby up until 28 days after birth, no questions asked. It made it illegal for law enforcement to open an investigation, and the death is exempted for any other kind of "manslaughter" or "murder" laws. Wicked. Truly wicked!'
Proposition 1: California abortion rights now enshrined in state constitution
![[Image: SJM-L-CLINTON-1014-13.jpg?w=799]](https://www.ocregister.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SJM-L-CLINTON-1014-13.jpg?w=799)
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 13: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022. Clinton paid a visit to support abortion rights and California Proposition 1. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
OCR | November 8, 2022
Californians have approved Proposition 1, which will amend the state constitution to enshrine access to abortion and contraception throughout the state.
Democrats rallied around Prop. 1 to gin up turnout in a midterm election which otherwise may have been defined by troubling economic headwinds. Hillary Clinton even visited the Bay Area last month to rally support.
Prop. 1 backers, including pro-choice groups and the California Democratic party, say that enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution is essential after the the Supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, ending national abortion protections.
Groups opposed to Prop. 1, including pro-life groups and the California Republican party, say that the measure is unnecessary given the state’s already-existing protections for abortion access. They also claim the proposition is vaguely written and could expand access to late-term abortion treatments, though experts say that is untrue.
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| St. Martin Escapes from a Falling Pine-tree |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-13-2022, 09:48 AM - Forum: The Saints
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St. Martin Escapes from a Falling Pine-tree
After St. Martin was acclaimed Bishop of Tours in the year 371, he took very aggressive actions against the pagan temples and symbols, destroying one after another.
Once, in a certain village he had demolished a very ancient temple, and had set about cutting down a pine tree worshipped by the pagans as a god, which stood close to the temple.
![[Image: H238_Mar.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H238_Mar.jpg)
St. Martin destroyed the pagan idols & temples throughout Tours
The chief priest of that place and a crowd of other heathens began to oppose him. These people, who, under the influence of the Lord, had been quiet while the temple was being overthrown, would not patiently allow the tree to be cut down. Martin carefully instructed them that there was nothing sacred in the trunk of a tree, and urged them rather to honor God whom he himself served. He added that there was a moral reason for why that tree should be cut down, because it had been dedicated to a demon.
Then one of the protesting pagans who was bolder than the others said: “If you have any trust in your God, whom you say you worship, we ourselves will cut down this tree, so long as you lay yourself down in the very path where it will fall. For if, as you declare, your Lord is with you, you will escape all injury.”
Then Martin, courageously trusting in the Lord, promised that he would do what had been asked. Upon his assent, all that crowd of heathens agreed to the condition named, for they held the loss of their tree a small matter if only they could be rid of the enemy of their religion buried beneath its fall.
Accordingly, since that pine tree was hanging over in one direction so that there was no doubt about how it would fall on being cut, the pagans bound the body of Martin with ropes and placed him on the ground on that spot where, as no one doubted, the tree was about to fall.
![[Image: H238_Tre.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H238_Tre.jpg)
The cut tree turned in midair & fell the opposite direction
They began, therefore, to cut down their own tree with great glee and joyfulness, while at some distance a great multitude of wondering spectators stood to view the spectacle.
And now the pine tree began to totter and to threaten its own ruin by falling. The monks at a distance grew pale and were terrified by the danger ever coming nearer their holy Bishop. Losing all hope and confidence, they expected only the death of Martin.
But he calmly trusted in the Lord and waited courageously. Then, as the falling pine uttered its expiring crash and began to fall, it started to rush down upon him. But Martin simply held up his hand against it and made the Sign of Cross, the sign of salvation.
Then, indeed, like a spinning-top (one might have thought it were being driven back and away from the Bishop’s prostrate body), it swept around in midair to the opposite side, with such speed and force that it almost crushed the rustic audiences, who had taken their places there in what was deemed a safe spot.
Then truly, a shout was raised to Heaven. The heathen were amazed by the miracle while the monks wept for joy, and the name of Christ was in common extolled by all.
![[Image: H328_Ham.jpg]](https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/images_F-J/H328_Ham.jpg)
His hammer with these words on its grip: ‘The pagan statues fall, hit by St. Martin’s axe’
The well-known result was that on that day salvation came to that region. For there was hardly one of that immense multitude of heathens who did not express a desire for Baptism, and abandoning his impious errors, made a profession of faith in the Lord Jesus.
Certainly, before the times of Martin, very few, nay, almost none, in those regions had received the name of Christ. But through his virtues and example Christians have become so numerous that now there is no place thereabouts which is not filled with very crowded churches or monasteries. For wherever he destroyed heathen temples, there he would immediately build either churches or monasteries.
Adapted from Sulpitius Severus, The Life of St Martin de Tours, trans. by Alexander Roberts
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| Anger As Spanish Government Celebrates Communist Party With Commemorative Postage Stamp |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-13-2022, 09:42 AM - Forum: Socialism & Communism
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Anger As Spanish Government Celebrates Communist Party With Commemorative Postage Stamp
![[Image: Spainstamp.jpg?itok=dxbNbsJQ]](https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_mobile/public/inline-images/Spainstamp.jpg?itok=dxbNbsJQ)
ZH [slightly adapted]| NOV 12, 2022
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
The extreme leftist Spanish government has drawn the rage of many in the country after it announced a commemorative postage stamp marking the centenary of the Communist Party.
The stamp, featuring the notorious hammer and sickle imagery, is to be launched by the state controlled Correos on November 14, with 135,000 limited edition copies with a postal value of 0.75 euros.
The move has enraged many citizens, who have directed anger at Socialist Spanish leader Pedro Sánchez, with some pointing out that the Correos is currently headed up by Sánchez’s former Chief of staff.
It is estimated that Communism has resulted in more than 100 million deaths throughout its relatively short history.
Other victims of Communism are appalled by the move:
Others noted how Spain’s communist party has a history of cosy ties with the Soviet regime, involvement in war crimes during the Spanish Civil War, and has even expressed support for modern Communist dictatorships in Cuba, China, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Spain’s current government is a coalition between Sánchez’s Socialist Worker’s Party and the extreme far left Podemos party.
The government was heavily criticised during the pandemic for instituting draconian mask, lockdown and vaccine passport policies.
A huge scandal also emerged when the elite of the Spanish business world as well as sports figures and celebrities were caught buying fake vaccine certificates in an attempt to maintain access to social freedom without taking the vaccines.
The country also finds itself in the midst of its own migrant crisis, with the leftist government routinely charged with leaving the borders wide open.
Following disturbing revelations concerning a spike in crime including rape at the hands of immigrants, the Spanish conservative populist party VOX is calling for a new referendum on immigration.
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