Do the Bishops Have the Time (or Energy)?

Over the last several months, the US Bishops have had to deal with an embarrassing problem called the United States Catholic Conference, which is the Bishops' very own .....umnnnhhhh.....bureaucracy.

The USCC, formerly called the NCCB (Nat'l Conference of Catholic Bishops) was re-organized under the direction of Cdl. Jos. Bernardin to become the propaganda vehicle for a lot of Lefties, notably one Fr. Brian Hehir. "Notable" may not be the best word for Hehir. "Notorious" fits just as well.

Anyhooo.....the USCC and its charity arm, Catholic Charities, managed to separate Catholic teaching from the Bishops--who ARE responsible for teaching--and managed to separate Catholics from their money, which has gone into Alinskyite groups all around the US, including Milwaukee's very own Voces de la Frontera. Some of those groups are intimately involved with abortion and birth-control support, too.

In other words, the Bishops are not in control of their own organization(s).

And it gets worse. This fellow Gramsci was an Italian Communist; he's notorious for his "Third Way Solution" which captured the imagination of the First Hag during the Clinton years.

The below arrived by email, but should be credited to this blogspot.

Last year an essay, which appears to be an introduction to Robert Chandler’s book Shadow World, outlined how Gramsci’s passive revolution is infiltrating the Catholic Church. Cliff Kincaid, who is President of America’s Survival, Inc., and Chandler outlined the process in ‘How Marxism Has Infiltrated the Catholic Church’.

It began, more or less, with Nicaragua, but hardly ended there.

Robert Chandler, the author of the aforementioned Shadow World, is a retired US Air Force Colonel and Vietnam War veteran. He has worked as a US Government strategist for many years. He explains how Gramscian thought is at work in the Catholic Church in the United States:

… to overturn the existing order and “Marxize the inner man,” one must create a subversive program of “counter-hegemony” against its supporting culture. The war against the existing culture would leave nothing outside of the struggle, especially Christianity, to negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.

Christianity is considered a prime target in preparing the way for a “Marxized America,” since religion, as an independent center of societal values, stands in the way of creating a new culture based on what is deceptively called “social justice” and “change.” Religion, in the Gramsci view, is the foundation for the Western values of individual liberty, private property, and the traditional family, and must be abolished in order for the new communist society to emerge.

Chandler notes that one of Gramsci’s leading proponents is actually a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His name is Joseph Butteglieg. Butteglieg has not only translated Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks but is also the co-founder and current president of the International Gramsci Society! He has also addressed Marxist and Communist fora in the United States.

Another Notre Dame faculty member with avowedly left-wing credentials as an activist and advisor to the UN is David Cortright. Cortright is a research fellow at ND’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

And, speaking of the UN, did you know that the president of their General Assembly in 2008-2009 was one Miguel D’Escoto — like Blase Bonpane, a Maryknoll priest — who was also a former foreign minister of Sandinista Nicaragua? As one might expect, Fr D’Escoto strongly advocates liberation theology.

What does all of this mean for the average American Catholic? Chandler cites an explanation from the late conservative Catholic author, Malachi Martin:

Malachi Martin explained that Gramsci’s quiet, anonymous revolution would do everything in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of the claims and constraints of Christianity: “Accomplish that, said Gramsci, and you will have established a true and freely adopted hegemony over the civil and political thinking of every formerly Christian country. Do that, he promised, and in essence you will have Marxized the West. The final step — the Marxization of the politics of life itself — will then follow. All classes will be one class. All minds will be proletarian minds. The earthly Paradise will be achieved.”

Does ‘earthly Paradise’ by way of ‘social justice’ sound familiar? If so, avoid being Gramscied! Who else is promoting this? Rick Warren as well as the Emergent Church guys.

Chandler adds:

for nearly five decades a revolutionary Marxist fifth column has been working openly to transform American culture from one founded upon a free market and personal liberties to one that could be made amenable to a socialist governance and secularization. These subversive activities were expected to pay-off after fifteen to twenty-five years of effort — the estimated time needed for successfully instilling a new set of socialist-Marxist values in America’s youth—to “Marxize” the inner man.

He closes his essay with a warning:

When one enters a Catholic church in Europe for Sunday Mass, often the only sound to be heard is the echo of one’s own footsteps. If Americans give up Christianity to the contemporaneous Obama rush toward socialism and secularism, they will find their inner selves “Marxized” while their footsteps echo loudly in churches across the country — a hollow protest against the end of religious faith.