A former papal diplomat to the United States made a shocking assertion in a recent letter to President Donald Trump.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s nuncio, or ambassador, from 2011-2016, described the controversies roiling the nation this year as a Biblical battle between good and evil. The shocking part is Vigano’s assertion that the Catholic Establishment fights alongside evil.
“Just as there is a deep state,” Vigano wrote, “there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God.” (italics in original).
As it abandons those commitments, the “deep church” dedicates itself to opposing Trump.
Many Americans recognize the term “deep state,” a collection of entrenched politicians and bureaucrats dedicated to imposing an agenda that contradicts the nation’s founding principles. But what is the “deep church”?
William Lobdell, the former religion editor for the Los Angeles Times, unwittingly supplied an example.
Lobdell, a convert to evangelical Protestantism, nearly became a Catholic. But covering such scandals as the clerical sex-abuse crisis and the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s financial malfeasance ravaged him. While taking classes to join the church, Lobdell resumed drinking and went to therapy twice a week.
Eventually, Lobdell became an atheist, resigned as the religion editor and wrote a column explaining his resignation. While addressing the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Lobdell mentioned an anonymous response to his column from a surprising source.
“I got an e-mail from someone deep inside the Vatican, who says there are many people in the Vatican who don’t believe any of this stuff, not surprisingly,” Lobdell said, referring to Catholic theology. “It was amazing.”
More amazing is the idea of the Catholic Church tolerating satanic worship. So said Malachi Martin, a Catholic scholar, author and former Jesuit exorcist who had extensive contacts in the Vatican.
“We have prelates and priests and nuns – but above all, prelates – who have become members of covens and worship Satan,” Martin told Catholic interviewer Bernard Janzen in 1997. “I can’t tell you how shocking it is when you find out that a prelate is a member of a coven and that actually worships Lucifer. It’s such a desecration.
“Some of them are destined to be influential. Some are destined to become Cardinals, and they get special attention. Believe you me, they get special attention.”
For Martin, the implications are obvious:
“The organization — the Roman Catholic organization, that is composed of cardinals, bishops, priests, religious, nuns, with schools and academies and institutions, parishes and dioceses and everything that goes along with this — that this, as an organization, is in apostasy. At the present moment, a sizable majority of people are in apostasy, have been led into apostasy, and a sizable minority of cardinals, bishops, priests and religious are in apostasy. They no longer profess the basic truths of Christianity, forget Catholicism. (emphasis added)
“They find they can deny the divinity of Jesus and nobody does anything to them. The majority are being led by the nose out of the true faith and they don’t know it because they are obedient. Most of them find that it’s too difficult to go against the grain. How can they go up to their pastor and say, ‘You’re teaching heresy’ or ‘You’re not teaching the truth’?”
In 2009, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the president of the German bishops’ conference, illustrated Martin’s point.
Zollitsch said on German television that Jesus Christ “did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat” but in “solidarity” with the poor and suffering. Thus did Zollitsch repudiate one of Christianity’s foundational doctrines.
Pope Benedict, that noted conservative theological stickler and a fellow German, never publicly corrected or rebuked Zollitsch – whom Pope John Paul II appointed in 2003 as the archbishop of Freiburg.
“Catholic schools as a whole seem to be ashamed to be Catholic,” tweeted Melanie Diodati, a Master’s candidate in theology at Villanova. “And they spend their entire history proving to people why they aren’t *too* Catholic. It’s downright embarrassing.”
So if Catholic bishops, priests and nuns no longer believe in basic Christian theology, what do they believe in? A globalist, humanist utopia, as Front Page Magazine examined in “The Roman Globalist Church.”
“The agenda is this because this is the Luciferian wish,” Martin said. “They want to completely de-supernaturalize Roman Catholic teaching so that we become good, un-supernaturally motivated human beings and therefore accede to their plans for humanity, which are very dark plans.”
Those plans include subordinating Catholicism to the “woke” narrative, as Diodati tweeted:
“Prof ‘as we all know, our very religion is used as and in fact supports oppression of people, race and gender wise’
“Classmates *nod in profound agreement*
So what does this have to do with Trump? Simple. By asserting the United States’ own prerogatives independently from other nations, Trump resists the Vatican’s globalist agenda.
That agenda includes open borders, which Pope Francis promotes. In his guidelines for Catholic voters, San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy relied on anti-Trump stereotypes in criticizing the president’s immigration policy.
McElroy claimed a “culture of exclusion” has “grown so dramatically in our nation during the last three years” and “unleashed a poison of animosity against immigrants” that “paralyzes our politics so deeply that we cannot even find a pathway to protect young men and women who came to this nation as children and now thirst to be citizens of the only land they have ever known.”
But in his guidelines, McElroy failed to mention how profitable open borders can be for his brother bishops.
In 2018, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops received $26 million from the Federal government to re-settle and support migrants. In its combined financial statements for 2015 and 2016, the conference received 66.2 percent of its revenue from Federal contracts and grants. So fewer migrants means less money.
Other critics are apoplectic. Among them is economist Jeffery Sachs, one of Francis’ closest advisors on sustainability – and an advocate of using abortion to limit international population.
During a Vatican conference in February, Sachs called Trump’s unilateral approach “complete lawlessness” and “thuggery, a complete violation of every international rule.” That approach resulted in withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on carbon-dioxide emissions – which Francis, as a dedicated environmentalist, enthusiastically supports.
Sachs also accused Trump of “dismantling the international system,” encouraged his audience to oppose being “cowed by bullying” and proclaimed Trump’s re-election to be “absolutely dangerous.”
The Vatican conference Sachs attended was entitled, “New Forms of Solidarity: Toward Fraternal Inclusion, Integration and Innovation.”
Also apoplectic is Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C. When Trump and his wife Melania, who is Catholic, visited the Saint John Paul II National Shrine on June 2, Gregory reacted in a statement:
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree.”
Inherent in Gregory’s criticism is the left-wing stereotype of Trump as a self-serving, tyrannical racist. Missing is the fact that the Knights of Columbus, who operate the shrine, invited Gregory to join Trump in the ceremony, which announced an executive order promoting religious freedom worldwide.
The Catholic website Crux reported that Gregory did not know about the visit until June 1. But correspondence between the White House and the shrine showed that Gregory declined the invitation May 30.
Yet Gregory persisted with propaganda:
“Saint Pope John Paul II was an ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings. … He certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace.”
The archbishop alluded to a protest near St. John’s Episcopal Church that law enforcement dispersed. Afterward, Trump visited the church – which had been damaged by arson – and posed for a picture as he held a Bible.
The protest had become so violent that protestors threw “bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids,” acting Chief Gregory Monahan of the United States Park Police said in a statement.
The park police “following established policy, issued three warnings over a loudspeaker to alert demonstrators … to evacuate the area,” Monahan said. “As many of the protestors became more combative … and attempted to grab officers’ weapons, officers then employed the use of smoke canisters and pepper balls. USPP officers and other assisting law enforcement partners did not use tear gas…”
Monahan’s and Gregory’s statements appeared the same day. Once Monahan’s appeared, the archdiocese issued neither an apology nor a retraction.
The day after Gregory’s statement, Vigano released an open letter to Catholics in Washington:
“Over the past twenty years, your (archdiocese) of Washington, in particular and now for the third time, has been and continues to be deeply afflicted and wounded by false shepherds whose way of life is full of lies, deceits, lust and corruption. Wherever they have been, they were a cause of serious scandal for various local Churches, for your entire country and for the whole Church.”
Vigano referred to Gregory’s two immediate predecessors, Cardinal Donald Wuerl and the now-defrocked Theodore McCarrick. Wuerl is implicated in concealing clerical sex abuse, and McCarrick is accused of serial sex abuse.
In his letter to Trump, Vigano subtly included Gregory among Catholic leaders who not only seek to sabotage his presidency, but their own church:
“(I)t is disconcerting that there are Bishops – such as those whom I recently denounced – who, by their words, prove that they are aligned on the opposing side. They are subservient to the deep state, to globalism, to aligned thought, to the New World Order which they invoke ever more frequently in the name of a universal brotherhood which has nothing Christian about it…” (italics in original)
Martin expressed that allegiance more succinctly. Before his death in 1999, Martin was working on a book that promised to be his magnum opus.
The title? “Primacy: How the Institutional Roman Catholic Church Became a Creature of the New World Order.”
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