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A very powerful cabal within the Australian Left aims to strictly control and eventually eliminate religious faith, and it appears the time is coming when Christians and others will be called upon to resist the onslaught. As Chris Uhlmann points out: “A religious civil war is raging … at stake is whether the ascendant state morality will drive deeper into the ancient institutions of faith and force believers to submit to its temporal commandments.” Working under the direction of federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the Australian Law Reform Commission is proposing a system of laws that will dictate what people may believe and how they may express those beliefs in interaction with others through faith-based institutions, especially schools and places of worship.
This objective is made perfectly clear in the ALRC’s Final Report, misleadingly titled (in true Orwellian fashion): ‘Maximising the Realisation of Human Rights: Religious Educational Institutions and Anti-Discrimination Laws”. It would be far more accurately titled ‘How to Use the Trojan Horse of Anti-Discrimination Law to Invade Religious Traditions and their Institutions in Order to Colonise them with the Socialist Principles of Militant Secularism and Achieve their Destruction’. The reference here to ‘socialism’ is quite deliberate, as the same type of ideologically-driven suppression of religion was implemented under National Socialism in Nazi Germany and under Communism in the Soviet Union.
In case there’s any doubt about what this anti-religious cabal is intending, the ALRC Report itself emphasizes that its key recommendations will quite deliberately limit “the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of one’s children in conformity with one’s own convictions.” That is, the Report stresses that its key objective is to a curtail a person’s liberty to give expression to their religious beliefs or to educate their children in these beliefs, under the threat of criminal penalty.
The clear intention of these militant secularists is eventually to eradicate humanity’s great religious traditions, and it is doing so under the aegis of a radical Socialist Left ALP government that came to power on the basis of 33 per cent of the primary vote (coincidentally the same proportion that got Hitler into power in Germany). In particular, their target is Christianity, the basis of Western Civilization and of all the institutions upon which our society is based, including the legal system that so privileges the self-selecting gang of elite lawyers and judges behind this Report (by an inquiry free of any significant scholarly expertise on the nature and role of religion). Conveniently, their names and qualifications and places of education are all detailed in the Report, so their elite status and background can easily be ascertained (see pages 7 and 8 here).
To the naïve observer, the draconian implications of this Report might appear to be directed against all religions; however, it is quite obviously directed primarily at Christianity, the religious tradition upon whose values and system of beliefs this society has depended during its historical evolution over the past 236 years, capitalizing in turn upon the achievements of Christendom in its various streams reaching back 2000 years. It is patently not intended that the system of repression detailed in the Report will be directed at other great religious traditions, e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., that have made their home here, at least not in the first stage of repression. Above all, Islam will be left alone. As we have seen, it is extremely unlikely that any ALP government at federal or state level or any agency under their control (e.g., the AHRC, AFP, etc.) would try to enforce this new system of law on people of the Islamic faith. Specifically, they would not send inspectors into Muslim mosques or schools; they would not charge Muslim clergy or officials with offences under the new laws, and they would certainly not take them to court. Indeed, in the unlikely event that the government did try to do anything of the sort, then the inspectors, investigators, police officers, and the courts themselves would simply be too afraid to act. Most would probably report in sick!
With Christians, of course, it is another matter altogether; they are fair game, as they don’t fight back; they seem to have minimal political clout; they have allowed themselves to be theologically confused; they have absorbed the ‘guilt trip’ imposed by critics and the media; and – with few exceptions – they seem to have poor and ineffective leadership, generally pre-occupied with aligning the church with fashionable causes.
Perhaps such a dire outcome seems unlikely. Perhaps Christians and those who understand the vital role played by humanity’s religious traditions can all hope for the best. Such optimism and hopefulness would be misplaced however, as Dreyfus and the forces behind him are clearly quite determined to have their way. This is a single-minded cabal of militant secularists working on a long-term agenda. Probably, they intend to implement the new laws selectively, in order to test public reaction. For example, the cabal could continue to move against the currently weakened Catholic Church, as they did so successfully with the persecution of Cardinal George Pell, and as the Greens-ALP government in the ACT did when it confiscated Calvary Hospital and proceeded to add it to the ACT’s already disastrous health system, an act designed to ensure the comprehensive implementation of unrestrained euthanasia. This seizure generated no particular backlash, and so our militant secularists have been further emboldened.
Their probable first move will involve a carefully contrived ‘test case’ where some superficially appealing and media-friendly person will come forward with claims that they have been discriminated against in employment in a Catholic school on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity, which will be sufficiently exotic to make it impossible for the targeted school not to act. The cabal would then swing into action with a media blitz and, as such alleged discrimination would be a criminal offence, the Australian Federal Police would be mobilized to conduct the investigation and bring charges. (This would be readily overseen by Dreyfus as Attorney-General, because one of his first acts upon appointment to the federal ministry was to seize control of the AFP.) A very high-profile court case would then ensue, probably in either Victoria or the ACT, where the judiciary have been comprehensively compromised and can be expected to do what is required of them, as we saw with the Pell case.
But these are early days in this latest iteration of secular socialism’s relentless and long-term campaign against religious faith, and so perhaps it’s worthwhile reflecting on the history of similar attacks. These go back to the massive dechristianization campaign implemented during the French Revolution. Inspired by the materialist philosophies of the Enlightenment, this involved the destruction of all forms of Christian symbolism and iconography, including all crosses, images, statuary, bells, etc., and the death sentence for active priests and those harboring them. It also involved the introduction of militant secularist cults, including the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being, and symbolizing it all was the Festival of Reason, held in the desacralized Notre Dame Cathedral in November 1793. Driving this onslaught were the methods of the Great Terror, which used the mass execution of tens of thousands of people to achieve the primary aim of the new regime, i.e., to make people think, feel, and believe what it wanted them to think, feel and believe. Sadly, it is difficult to believe that the Socialist Left in Australia doesn’t have the same aim Or that it would restrain itself if it had the power to impose its will? After all, this is the party faction that produced the Andrews regime in Victoria and effectively controls both the police and the courts, as the Pell case so vividly revealed.
This type of proto-totalitarian anti-Christian campaign reached its murderous climax under the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. Once in power, and in a manner to which the Left aspires in Australia, they didn’t hesitate to use the State as a lethal instrument to suppress all opposition and achieve their goals. Indeed, in December 1917, Lenin established the Cheka, the state security apparatus that by 1921 had over 200,000 operatives and innumerable informers, and that quickly came to completely terrorize the population. In just the first two months, 10,000-15,000 people were summarily executed, while the long-term death toll was well over a million people.
This doesn’t include the innumerable religious victims; these were a special category targeted because their faith competed with the Bolshevik version of secular socialism . First to be targeted were the Jews, an easy mark in a country with a deplorable history of anti-Semitism and pogroms. Some 115,000 were murdered in the Ukraine in 1919 alone.
The real target, however, was Russian Orthodox Christianity, a faith that had provided the cultural foundations of Russian civilization for a millennium. For the Russian people, as Richard Pipes noted in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924
…culture meant religion – religious belief, but especially religious rituals and festivals … Their lives revolved around the ceremonies of the religious calendar, because these not only glorified their hard and humdrum existences but gave even the humblest of them a sense of dignity in the eyes of God.
For the Bolsheviks, this would not do. As committed Marxists, they knew that Communist ideology and the Christian religion could not co-exist, as they both made the same psychological demands for belief and commitment. Consequently, the Russian Christian was to be replaced by ‘the New Soviet Man’: “a rational, disciplined and collective being who lived only for the interests of the greater good, like a cell in a living organism,” or like a worker bee in a hive. (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1998) As Lenin explained, “if the Revolution was fully to liquidate the Old Regime it had to settle accounts with the Church [and] undermine the foundations on which the Russian world had hitherto reposed”, i.e., Christianity.
In a series of decrees, the Bolsheviks instituted a campaign of religious persecution on a scale not seen since the early centuries of the Roman Empire. They severed all links between the Church and the State, eliminated the Church’s status as a legal entity, ended all financial support, denied it any right to acquire or own any property, denounced all miracles, shut down all religious festivals, and prohibited the teaching of religion in all schools or any youth group. Party members and the public were encouraged to openly ridicule, harass and beat up priests, and many were actually murdered. Churches, monasteries, and synagogues were despoiled and converted to secular use, while senior clergy and priests were deprived of all civil rights, arrested, put through show trials and imprisoned or executed. In schools and elsewhere, all religion was to be replaced with a specially designed ‘Scientific Atheism’, and the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment was established, along with the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists. These were tasked with eliminating every last shred of religious material from the school curricula and replacing it with the new secular creed. This evolved into ‘Dialectical Materialism’, which purported to provide a complete materialist cosmology that served as a secular substitute religion. (In Australia, it appears the plan for our ‘post-Christian’ future is to make us subject to an ersatz form of primitive nature religion characterized by fire ceremonies and ancestor worship.)
The death toll of this anti-religion terror campaign is difficult to estimate, but, e.g., in one campaign between June 1918 and January 1919, official church figures for the Moscow region record that one metropolitan (archbishop), 18 bishops, 102 priests, 154 deacons, and 94 monks and nuns were killed. More broadly, 579 monasteries and convents were liquidated, accompanied by the mass execution of many more monks and nuns, who were, of course, also subjected to systematic rape. In the longer term, at least 106,000 Russian clergymen were executed during the Great Purge in the 1930s, and the total number of Christians killed under the Soviet regime is estimated at some 12-20 million.
These figures are not cited to imply that we face such a murderous campaign in Australia (yet!). Rather, they are provided to indicate the brutal fanaticism driving militant secularists and socialists once they have their hands on the levers of State power. The difference between the Soviet Union and our future is one of scale not intention.
The dechristianization of Nazi Germany proceeded differently. This was because a significant element of the Church succumbed easily to political and economic enticements and fervent nationalism and shamefully retreated from its proper allegiance to the Gospel, allowing Jesus to be ‘de-Judaicized’ and to be re-born as ‘the Aryan Christ’. Meanwhile, much of the general public gravitated to the ‘New Heathenism’ based on Wotanism and sun worship, Wagnerian mythologies, Völkisch notions of a noble racial past, Teutonic tribal glories, and primeval customs and rituals, including nature worship and nudism(!) As historians have shown, much of this proved to be an ideological harbinger of the Greens.
Within the Church there emerged the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, which proclaimed the unity of National Socialism and Christianity, and adopted the swastika alongside the Cross. It championed such demands as the dismissal of all pastors unsympathetic to National Socialism; the implementation of the ‘Aryan Paragraph’, which restricted Church membership to those of ‘pure Aryan birth’ and expelled all those of full or partial Jewish descent; the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible and all ‘non-German’ elements from religious services; and the ‘re-imagining’ of Jesus as a blond Nordic warrior battling against the depraved Jewish influences that were allegedly corrupting the Church and society.
Ultimately, even this religious decadence didn’t approach what Hitler had in mind for the new Nazi religion he intended to impose on the citizens of ‘the Thousand Year Reich’, once Christianity had been eradicated. As he declared: “to the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul … I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of their continued existence [only] in the immortality of the German nation.” “The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the ages.” (Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, 2000)
Predictably, Christians who didn’t betray their faith fell victim to the Gestapo and the SS. These included the White Rose, a group of young idealists in the universities who dared to denounce the criminality of the Nazi regime and called for non-violent resistance to it. They also openly denounced the persecution and mass murder of the Jews. After about eight months of clandestine campaigning they were uncovered, arrested, tried, and summarily executed in early 1943. A more famous opponent of the Nazis was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant Lutheran pastor and theologian who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church opposing the German Christians. His resistance to the Nazi regime and to such policies as its compulsory euthanasia program and persecution of the Jews led to his arrest in April 1943 and imprisonment, ultimately in a concentration camp. In 1944 he was implicated in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and was tried along with other alleged plotters and hanged on April 9, 1945, just as the Nazi regime was finally disintegrating. Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and his theological and prison writings have become Christian classics.
All of this happened during the century past and while the present historical and political circumstances are obviously quite different, it would be foolish to assume that some such concerted and fanatical attack on Christianity will not occur; after all, who could possibly have anticipated the anti-Semitism that has erupted all around us? It would appear to be much more realistic to assume, not only that the antireligious onslaught could occur, but that it has in fact begun, as the ALRC Report and the legislation proposed by the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, makes clear.
They would leave Islam out of their “war” on religion. That is because Islam is not a religion. It is an ideology masquerading as a religion – an ideology of dominance.
The Nasty Nanny State is on the march and has been for some time.
Which is worse, the Nanny State or a Religious one?
Christians and Jews tolerate Atheists, who in turn don’t mind their beliefs and practices,
Muslims, however are something else. As you say, an ideology of dominance. We now see them flex their political muscles in Britain and Australia.
Within the Church there has already emerged a pro Socialist Australian Christian movement who claim that Christ was a Socialist. Though Cardinal Pell was innocent he remains guilty in the eyes of the woke enlightenment, many of them Christians.. Love itself has grown weak and pale and even Dan Andrews claimed he was a Catholic – the liars do not know they lie (nor do they care that they do not know). Must we die like Christians in the Colosseum? … or can we fight this emerging darkness, somehow?
I don’t think this is in our hands Patrick. There are anti-God forces at work which are, as usual, making the best of humanity’s apathy and ignorance. Our duty remains the same regardless: a relentless pursuit of truth, which provides the basis for hope and love. Politics certainly isn’t going to help anyone as long as it’s embedded in humanist nihilism (inevitably expressed as socialism).
Destruction of religion (ergo Christianity, which is anti-socialism) is one of the four building blocks of the socialist living death, along with the destruction of family, private property, and culture. This is necessary to create ‘equality’, which is their word for melting a society down into meaninglessness and spiritual death. Socialism is a disease for which a hate for life is the key symptom. In their spiritual insanity the socialist believes that utopia will arise from the nature-chaos of destruction, in which all people will live in a blissful, collective meaninglessness with everything provided by a ruling class of man-gods. What you actually get is Joseph, Mao or Adolf and a bunch of slaves.
To Mark Dreyfus and his mob may I say, “Go ye forth and multiply.”
Mervyn Bendle, congratulations on a superbly apposite exposé of the relentless, far-reaching left-secularist persecution of Christianity which is being waged in this country, and is ever-intensifying. I am pleased to note your citing of Chris Uhlmann’s similarly splendid article exposing the same in the Weekend Australian of 11-12 May.
I think the most important point you make pertains to the servile complicity-of-silence in the persecution by church leaders and bureaucracies. You say,
“With Christians, of course, it is another matter altogether; they are fair game, as they don’t fight back; they seem to have minimal political clout; they have allowed themselves to be theologically confused; they have absorbed the ‘guilt trip’ imposed by critics and the media; and – with few exceptions – they seem to have poor and ineffective leadership, generally pre-occupied with aligning the church with fashionable causes….This is a single-minded cabal of militant secularists working on a long-term agenda. Probably, they intend to implement the new laws selectively, in order to test public reaction. For example, the cabal could continue to move against the currently weakened Catholic Church, as they did so successfully with the persecution of Cardinal George Pell, and as the Greens-ALP government in the ACT did when it confiscated Calvary Hospital and proceeded to add it to the ACT’s already disastrous health system, an act designed to ensure the comprehensive implementation of unrestrained euthanasia. This seizure generated no particular backlash, and so our militant secularists have been further emboldened.”
As an ACT Catholic I should have been surprised by the docile acquiescence of the local Catholic leadership (insofar as there is any), the Australian Catholic bishops as a whole, the Catholic “social justice” bodies (invariably Left-agenda parrot-ensembles), and bureaucracies in the seizure of Calvary by the cabal of feminists, other perverts, and Left-fanatics which runs the ACT – including, by ideological chum-arrangements, the “progressive” ACT Liberal Party – but I was not. Without doubt there had been behind-the-scenes “dialogue” for months or even years whereby the Catholic bishops, through intermediaries, and the Catholic health bureaucracies, in return for being made to feel important and conspiratorially influential were sweet-talked into letting the take-over occur with merely nominal murmurs of protest. And well worthy of remembering is Andrew Bolt’s expression of puzzlement on Sky’s The Bolt Report, when the persecution of Cardinal Pell was at its height, that the other Australian bishops seemed to have “gone AWOL”, as he put it, leaving the Cardinal to swing in the breeze, being pelted with hate and filth, all on his lonesome.
I hasten to add that Archbishop Fisher of Sydney and Archbishop Porteous of Hobart are honourable and admirable dissidents against the habitual grovelling cowardice which characterises the Australian bishops generally and their bureaucracies.
Bolt is an Agnostic (much like myself).
Re Australia’s catholic bishops, excluding Fisher and Porteous – I attended the consecration of a bishop when I was an altar boy, and sat next to my parish priest. At one stage in the ceremony the candidate was surrounded by the other bishops and was lost sight of from where I was sitting I whispered to the priest, “What are they doing?” “Taking his spine out!”
Brilliant!
Bloody brilliant.
ALRC report………………….
A stooge from the left with pedigreed credentials. Sore – the name Mordecai Bromberg – told me all I ought to know.
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“He presided in Eatock v Bolt in the Federal Court, in which columnist Andrew Bolt was found to be in breach of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.[6]
In a 2021 case, Sharma v Minister for the Environment, Bromberg ruled that the federal Minister for the Environment had a duty of care, arising from the law of negligence, to protect children from climate change when considering whether to approve projects under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Bromberg did not grant the injunction sought by the plaintiffs, a group of teenagers, who sought to bar the minister from approving an extension to the Vickery coal mine owned by Whitehaven Coal.[7] Bromberg's ruling was unanimously overturned on appeal to the full bench of the Federal Court of Australia in 2022, with Chief Justice James Allsop stating government policy should be determined by the government and not by the courts.[8]
In April 2023, a Federal Court ruling determined in favour of the native title application lodged by Anangu seven years earlier for around 10,000 km2 (3,900 sq mi) of pastoral lease land in the Northern Territory, that includes Erldunda, Lyndavale, and Curtin Springs cattle stations. This was the first recognition of commercial rights in Central Australia, and was handed down by Bromberg at a gathering in the remote community of imanpa.”
Obviously Bromberg believes in principle that government social policy should be if not determined by the courts at the very least enforced by judicial office.
……
His family left Israel and a emigrated to what is now the socialist capital of Australia. Melbourne, shortly before the invading Arab armies during the six day war or 1967.
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Surely someone who does not stay to preserve the integrity of their country of birth-anyone- and leaves other countrymen to pick up the can; could be in legal and moral terms be thought of as firstly disloyal and secondly a traitor and therefore has the capacity to practice treasonous traits!
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Therefore it should be of absolutely no surprise that this guy is pushing the agenda of the connoisseurs of treasonous intent- in this case the socialist agendas of the loony left..
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To turn your back on the country it’s values and beliefs, and more specifically, ‘the turning of the culture’, that gave you safe harbour is to my sense of right and wrong and absolutely despicable act that at the very least is worthy of political court martial .
As always Merv, no rock is left unturned.
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PS…. The picture atop…….Islamic immigration……in the future will these be the people capable of enforcing the thuggish brutalities in support of a socialist ( like minded) authoritarian state of living?
Well said.
Very kind William, thank you.
I second the observations on the compliance of the more woke Catholic bishops (with the exclusion of Archbishops Fisher and Porteus). Of course, these bishops find no support from those in the Vatican hierarchy and any opportunity to emasculate them would be seized upon. Yes, they have to watch their backs.
At the risk of identifying as a trouble-maker, my diagnosis of the weakening of spiritual certainty lies in the change of liturgy, accompanied by ambiguity, whereby the fundamental truths of the Faith were swept up into a general philosophy of ‘nice.’
In this respect in addition to Mr Bendle’s observations above, it is mindful to consider the attitude of the German bishops under the Nazis, the vast majority of whom stood implacably opposed and who made vocal resistance to the Nazi ideology as against the family of man under Adam, by which there is neither circumcision or non-circumcision (to quote Pope Pius XI). These bishops excommunicated any who joined the Nazi party up until the election by which they lawfully gained power, as a consequence of which, canon law required that the excommunication be withdrawn. Bishops such as Von Galen spoke up fearlessly, and the Catholic press vocally resisted – the editor of the Catholic newspaper tortured and executed, his ashes sent to his wife in an envelope. Thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and religious were imprisoned and died in the concentration camps: Dachau was called ‘the priests’ barracks’ due to the fact that 2,579 Catholic priests were imprisoned there, along with numerous seminarians and lay brothers. 868 Polish priests died in that camp and, significantly, 478 German priests also died in the camp. Thousands of priests died in other concentration camps.
These people died under the bad, old Catholic faith and liturgy. They died for their fellow man, no matter what their faith or race. These were the Catholic priests who celebrated the Good Friday liturgy.
Think about that in consideration of the whole theology of the Catholic faith, in case you wonder what has changed.
William, as a penance for my sins I taught religion in a Catholic Secondary School. I got on well with the Tuck Shop manageress who had attended the school in the 60’s.
“We’ve just had an old girls’ reunion.” “Oh, that’s good. And what did you do?” “We went to the pub and had lunch.” “And after? A tour of the school, Catching up with any of the nuns? Benediction in the chapel?” “What planet are you on? We went to an Adult Shop and bought sex aids and porn videos.” God bless the Sisters of ………
Not even the belles of St Trinians could match that.
On a more humorous note, (do I laugh or
cry?), you’re observation about the liturgy is correct. The deformation of the liturgy post Vatican II is the root cause of the crisis in the Catholic Church. Everything wrong and rotten flows from that. For every crisis in the history of the church has ultimately been a crisis of contemplation. Next time you are up against a ‘progressive’ Catholic bishop, priest, brother, sister or layperson or church beaurocrat, ask them, “And do pray the Divine Office, read your bible daily and spend time in silent prayer or say the rosary?”
Don’t hold your breath.
So very true, padmmdpat, if religious do not pray the Divine Office, they lose the spiritual community and the transcendent dimension of their role.
Speaking of reunions, I attended Mass at my old school and the priest told us that he doesn’t say the Creed, because he doesn’t understand it’! (One of your ‘progressive’ priests – if ‘progressive’ means the 1970’s)!
So many orders abandoned their charism to ‘meet the world,’ ironically, the traditional orders are inundated with vocations.
The kind of history described in this article is not taught in Western schools and so is practically meaningless.
What is ‘known’ by every good school student is that LGBT and other sexually alternative lifestyles are perfectly fine and it is wrong to discriminate against them.
Unfortunately this article did not include any discussion of how easily LGBT and sexuality issues have been taken over by anti-Christian secularists.
The report also got Australian history wrong by claiming Europeans came to Australia. The British founded Australia on the coast of New Holland.
Dreyfus’s true colours have come to the fore with the outrageous ongoing imprisonment of Darcy Duggan.
He’s a supercilious shit, end of story.
Not just warring against religion but against family,.centres of influence over people’s lives that progressives see as standing in their way to power. Islam and Muslims will be the exception of course as intimidation works.
Uncharacteristically, there is a fair amount of hyperventilation in this account. It would seem we have the ‘secular militantism’ of the atheists v the authoritarian collectivism of religion and subservience to the church (ironically a kind of socialism)
The very fact that this appeal to the authority of religion feels it necessary to describe atheism as ‘secular militanism’ tells you everything you need to know about its desire for authoritarian control. National Socialists and Bolsheviks (like the church both central control and command ideologies) did not challenge religion because it was an anathema to what they believed but rather because it is too similar a competitor for social control and there wasn’t room for both.
Ironically, this article seems to militate the argument that it is religion that should not and will not tolerate decent.
All religions should be free to practice in good faith unimpeded by Government. – that is secularism.
CK: Adolph Hitler was a Catholic, born and baptised as such. He could have had some bizarre mental repentance known only to God after he shot himself in the head in his Berlin Fuehrerbunker in 1944,. As a result he could have possibly got himself installed in Heaven, after a spot of time in Purgatory (now abolished by some pope or other). So to be on the safe side, and in case he managed to squeak in, Catholics could petition the Pope to say a solemn Expusion High Mass or whatever, to get him chucked out again, as per Matt. 16; 15-21.. Just in case he got in, mind.
But don’t hold your breath on that.
The key here is, was. Stalin and Mussolini were as ‘well’.
Bishop Sheen notionally put this idea at our disposal, of how different the world could and would have been if someone had taken the time and energy to take an interest in identifying these kids when they were troubled self centred brats.
One of the main strategies used by governments against Christianity is to disrupt the processes by which mothers and fathers pass on the faith to their children. Socialist states progressively build legal structures which transfer the traditional rights and duties of raising children from the parent to the government. The state then becomes the (supposedly benevolent) parent or guardian of every child by law. It is interesting to see how willingly many parents cooperate with this process, as the burden of shaping the education and character of their offspring is steadily taken away and placed on the broader shoulders of an all-knowing and all-wise state. The other side of this counterfeit coin is the view, common among Australian socialists that raising a child as a Christian is a form of child abuse.
20 May 2024
Indeed. We once received a complaint letter (anonymous, as I recall; they generally were) about our church letterboxing. The older woman (we strongly assumed!) used as her excuse for complaining about having received a pamphlet the fact that a little girl was out doing it–as though that were a terrible thing. She was “by herself” (she wasn’t; my mother was on the same street, keeping with her) and “probably couldn’t even read” what she was distributing. That comment made my sister–who, though small, was nine or ten-years-old at the time–absolutely livid!