1980’s: Was Every Pro-Communist Central American Religious Killed a Martyr?

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Four Liberals in a Profound Moment

Four Liberals in a Profound Moment

The Winona Daily News reports Minnesota St. Mary’s University Trustees have presented Pope Francis with an award.

An Argentinian pope has joined a Guatemalan bishop as the second recipient of the Signum Fidei Award from Saint Mary’s University — created in memory of an SMU alumni martyred in Central America.

Was this alumnus martyred for the Faith or because he ‘loved the poor?’  Oh, right! Same thing.

SMU President William Mann, along with SMU trustees Mary Burrichter and Sandra Simon, presented Pope Francis — personally — with the award following the pope’s weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square April 15.

The Signum Fidei — Sign of the Faith — Award is bestowed in recognition of extraordinary service to the vulnerable and marginalized members of society and work that promotes human solidarity. The award presented to the pope is in the form of a bronze bust of Brother James Miller, a SMU alumni and member of the Christian Brothers who in 1982, while serving as a missionary in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, was gunned down by three unidentified gunmen while repairing a wall at the mission school.

They never know who did it, but they always know why.

Miller met his death serving the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, Mann said. “This pope seems to be — in a major way — reaching out to those populations.”

What is a marginalized population anyway?  Doesn’t it just mean liberal?  And if some people are forgotten, why do they get remembered so much?

When is the pope going to reach out to a Catholic?

Mann said that as he explained to the pope who James Miller was and what he had done, Francis reached out to touch the bronze and blessed it — the Latin American pope very aware of the situation at the time.

“It was an incredible experience,” Burrichter said of her meeting with Pope Francis. “He came up to us,” she said, “ Brother William spoke to him in Spanish … He held my right hand. He gave us his blessing, then said to us in English, ‘Pray for me.’”

“He seemed to be a very gentle, a very kind man.”

Really?  What about this?

Who Created FrancisChurch?

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FrancisPriest and his friend, Raul

FrancisChurch priest and his friend, Raul: advocates for ‘the poor’

At National Review, Ion Mihai Pacepa brings back a too-quickly forgotten reality of the Latin American Church.

History often repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing the reenactment with your own eyes.

Liberation theology, of which not much has been heard for two decades, is back in the news. But what is not being mentioned is its origins. It was not invented by Latin American Catholics. It was developed by the KGB. The man who is now the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name “Mikhailov” and spent four decades promoting liberation theology, which we at the top of the Eastern European intelligence community nicknamed Christianized Marxism.

Imagine how brilliant this idea!  In the rubble of the Vatican II earthquake, move Communist activists into the Catholic  orders and mix their ‘ideologies’ into one worldly focus.  Who would denounce the ‘holy’ goals of the Church itself?  Who could silence Marxist priests without also provoking the faithful?

Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians. I described the birth of liberation theology in my book Disinformation, co-authored with Professor Ronald Rychlak. Its genesis was part of a highly classified Party/State Disinformation Program, formally approved in 1960 by KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and Politburo member Aleksei Kirichenko, then the second in the party hierarchy after Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1971, the KGB sent Kirill — who had just been elevated to the rank of archimandrite — to Geneva as emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church to the World Council of Churches. The WCC was, and still is, the largest international religious organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations in 120 countries. Kirill/Mikhailov’s main task was to involve the WCC in spreading the new liberation theology throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB was able to infiltrate Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC — a position he held until he was “elected” patriarch of Russia, in 2009. Not long after he joined the Central Committee, Kirill reported to the KGB: “Now the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.”

There is perhaps a reason why pliant, morbid mainline protestant groups almost always echo the policy positions of the world’s bishops?

During Kirill’s years at the helm of the WCC, liberation theology put down deep roots in Latin America — where the map now has significant patches of red. Russian military ships and bombers are back in Cuba for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and Russia has also newly sent ships and bombers to Venezuela.

It can be argued whether today’s Russia is aggressive or defensive, but they are clearly engaged.  And despite evidence that both Kirill and Putin may have unfairly enriched themselves, today they project Christian leadership and defend Christian values while the West just capitulates.

Pope John Paul II, who knew the Communist playbook well, was not taken in by the Soviets’ liberation theology. In 1983, his friend and trusted colleague Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who at that time was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, discarded as Marxist the liberation-theology idea that class struggle is fundamental to history. The cardinal called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and blasted it as a “fundamental threat” to the Church.

This has in no way changed, only become more true.

Of course, it was and remains a threat — one deliberately designed to undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating religion to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.

Listen for this coming from Rome today!

Now names — like Oscar Romero and Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann – not heard since the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still en vogue, are again making international news. And here we are. The promoters of a KGB-inspired religious ideology, which once embraced violent Marxist revolution, are now denying its link to Marxism and to the KGB.

Whom is it that has rehabilitated Romero; naming him ‘martyr’ and eager to make him saint?  Who resurrected the notorious d’Escota?

Is it perhaps the one who rails constantly against the evil economic system, framing Christianity as the enemy of power and wealth? Is it the one who sees those who cling to the doctrines of Faith and the rubrics of the Mass as control-obsessed Pharisees and Lawgivers jealous of Christ, the one who thinks Communism stole the flag of Christendom?

 

Pope Francis Revises the Concept of Martyr

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Unitarian Universalist?

Unitarian Universalist?

Nigerian Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme has just announced the most devastating strategy to thwart the Islamist world takeover that’s been heard in years.

Other than that, nobody seems to be doing anything besides crying and ‘pontificating.’

Vatican Radio writes:

Drawing inspiration from the First Reading of the Act of the Apostles which tells of the stoning and martyrdom of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, the Pope remembered “our brothers whose throats have been slit on the beaches of Libya”, he spoke of “the young boy who was burnt alive by his companions because he was Christian”, he recalled “the migrants who were thrown from their boat into open sea” because, they too, were Christians.

The Pope is very vocal about the now widespread slaughter of Christians, praising their courage and their faith, and comparing them to past martyrs and saints like Stephen.

“God’s Word is always rejected by some. God’s Word is inconvenient when you have a stone heart, when you have a pagan heart, because God’s Word asks you to go ahead trying to satisfy your hunger with the bread which Jesus spoke of.  In the history of the Revelation many martyrs have been killed for their faith and loyalty towards God’s Word, God’s Truth”.

Pope Francis continued comparing the martyrdom of Stephen to that of Jesus: he too “died with that Christian magnanimity of forgiveness, praying for his enemies’.

And those who persecuted the prophets – the Pope pointed out – believed they were giving glory to God; they thought they were being true to God’s doctrine.

“Today – the  Pope said – I would like to remember that the true history of the Church is that of the Saints and the martyrs,” of so many who were persecuted and killed by those who thought they possessed the ‘truth’- whose heart was corrupted by ‘truth’:

Now, what does Pope Francis mean by that?  Did the truth have some corrupting effect on the hearts of those persecutors?  I thought they became corrupted by lies, or worldliness or other temptations.

“In these days how many Stephens there are in the world! Let us think of our brothers whose throats were slit on the beach in Libya; let’s think of the young boy who was burnt alive by his companions because he was a Christian; let us think of those migrants thrown from their boat into the open sea by other migrants because they were Christians; let us think – just the day before yesterday – of those Ethiopians assassinated because they were Christians… and of many others. Many others of whom we do not even know and who are suffering in jails because they are Christians… The Church today is a Church of martyrs: they suffer, they give their lives and we receive the blessing of God for their witness”.

Around the world in places like Nigeria, Christians slaughtered by Muslims are Catholics, but in most of the Middle East they are schismatic separated Christians.  They are more faithful and virtuous than many Roman Catholics, but they are still not united to the Church to which St. Stephen belonged.  Where we may be removed through sin and false catechesis, they are separated in a different way.

Their churches vary in teaching from the Truth in matters like marriage and authority.  This is heresy, and heresy like any other sin committed in ignorance or not, is never right.  The Pope makes it seem like it’s all one Truth and one Church; as if it didn’t matter.

Will all non-Catholic men and woman who choose to confess Christ in the face of death go to Heaven?  They may be ahead of the rest of us, but what if they’ve lived distorted misguided lives?  What if, like most Protestants, they’ve rejected the Sacraments?  At what point are they dying for something that is not really the Truth, but they nevertheless consider Christian?  Pope Francis seems to believe they still die for the Truth anyway.

Islam itself was born of the Arian Heresy.  They can’t technically be called Christians but that misused word can be a pretty low bar.  The Qur’an is full of references to Jesus and Mary.  Are Muslims martyrs when they kill each other?

Can Mormons be martyrs?

Were the Yazidi’s martyrs?  They died for being Yazidis, another form of NOT Muslim.  Not enough, right?  But Protestantism is.

Unitarianism?  Quakers?

Either way, isn’t Pope Francis muddying already black waters here by constantly holding up Protestants killed by Muslims as examples of Catholic martyrs?  These brave Christians are dead now.  The rest of us have to live on with true examples of men and women who were actually Catholic and died for the Christ’s Church.  Must we underestimate the necessity of true unity with the Church Militant at every turn, dropping important truths and picking up heresies here and there as we go along in one big ‘ecumenism of blood’ (whatever that means)?

The Pope plays so loose with hard Catholic concepts in an effort to distort!  Oscar Romero is made martyr because undefined right-wingers shot him at Mass ending his nationwide alignment with Communist guerillas, i mean, ‘the poor.’

And now we have special ‘hidden martyrs.’

The Pope also pointed out that there are also many “hidden martyrs: those men and women who are faithful to the voice of the Spirit and who are searching for new ways and paths to help their brothers better love God”.

He said they are often viewed with suspicion, vilified and persecuted by so many modern ‘Sanhedrins’ who think they are the possessors of truth.

This sounds familiar.  I think we’ve found something that’s definitely NOT a martyr in FrancisChurch.  It’s an actual Catholic!