The Smell of Blackmail

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        The structure of the Church continues to burn while Rome fiddles on about the supposed "schism" of "extreme traditionalists," whose basic offense is to criticize the disastrous "reforms" of Vatican II and the consequent collapse of faith and discipline in the Church.

        Now we read that the New Zealand Bishop’s Conference has "added its approval of a government plan to grant same-sex couples the same legal rights enjoyed by married couples, in apparent contradiction to current teaching from the Vatican." (Catholic World News, April 26, 2002) Yes, it seems that the bishops of New Zealand have suddenly decided that they will support the registration of "same-sex couples" in order to grant these "couples" various legal rights, including "tax allowances, legal aid, and property entitlements, that married couples have." In other words, the bishops of New Zealand support the legal equivalent of homosexual "marriage," although they nominally oppose "adoption by same-sex couples or access to ‘reproductive technology’ to allow them to become parents."

        Yet again, Protestant groups have revealed themselves to be more conservative than the bishops. The plan was vigorously opposed by New Zealand’s Christian Heritage Party, which, according to CWN, was "stunned by the bishops' acquiescence to the plan. The Rev. Graham Capill, leader of the party, said same-sex unions should not be recognized in any form. ‘We are playing with semantics. To treat homosexual couples to a form of registration but not call them married is to give them the same status but not the same title,’" said Capill.

       This disgusting development reminds me of the sudden reversal of the Connecticut Catholic Conference’s opposition to Connecticut’s "gay rights" legislation. Homosexual activists publicly boasted that they had blackmailed the Connecticut bishops into reversing their opposition by threatening to "out" gay bishops. (Catholic World Report, May 2002, p. 45) Likewise, traditional Catholics were outraged when Bishop Joseph Gerry of Maine suddenly declared that he would offer no opposition to "gay rights" legislation in that state, even though it would compel Catholic institutions that receive government grants not to "discriminate" against homosexuals.

       I agree with the assessment of Father Paul Shaughnessy (Catholic World Report, May 2002) that such reversals "are difficult to understand without resort to the blackmail explanation." The smell of blackmail is in the air throughout North America, whose bishops have spent decades coddling homosexual predators in the priesthood and covering up their crimes. Indeed, the smell of blackmail can be detected throughout the world, as the Vatican does nothing to root out the corruption. For example, Bishop Cawcutt of South Africa openly declared that if Cardinal Ratzinger or anyone else at the Vatican attempted to issue an instruction banning homosexuals from the priesthood "I will cause lotsa [expletive deleted] for him and the Vatican. My intention would be simply to ask the question what he [Ratzinger] intends doing with those priests, bishops (possibly ‘like me’) and cardinals…who are gay." [See, Roman Catholic Faithful website for Cawcutt’s widely disseminated email on this subject.] Not surprisingly, the Vatican has failed to issue any instruction directing the seminaries to exclude homosexual candidates - thus guaranteeing a new harvest of scandal for the Church.

       In short, the homosexual mafia in the Catholic Church is extorting acquiescence in its activities, at the same time the Vatican apparatus busily hounds traditional Roman Catholic priests, such as Father Nicholas Gruner, who rightly refuse to participate in the insane program of innovation (including everything from communion in the hand, to altar girls, to the "new" Message of Fatima) which has produced this incomparably scandalous state of affairs. We are in the midst of the worst crisis in Church history - a crisis on all fronts. Only the Mother of God will deliver the Church from this time of trial. It is God’s plan that in the end Her Immaculate Heart will triumph - not 2,000 years ago, as Cardinal Ratzinger would have it, but in the end. That triumph is what Fatima is all about.