Catholic author Philip Lawler wasn't the only guest speaker at the 2008 Saint Benedict Center Conference. Another guest speaker was Catholic author Gary Potter, who has referred to the Holocaust as the "so-called Holocaust" See here: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2007/11/so-called-holocaust.html Still another guest speaker was Dr. Robert Hickson. Dr. Hickson, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, served as Chairman of the Literature and Latin Department at Christendom College for seven years.
According to the Adelaide Institute, Dr. Hickson has expressed his belief that:
"It would be illuminating to understand the influences and motivation behind what has been called not just our (USA) 'messianic foreign policy', but our"apocalyptic foreign policy". The 'Protestant Christian Zionists' are certainly a significant influence in this direction, basing their political-military views on their 'dispensationalist theology' and rather stark views about 'the end of times', although 'the chosen of God' will purportedly be 'raptured out' before 'the Armageddon comes' and then their 'Messiah will return'. Moreover, there are certain segments of Jews who are striving to (re)build 'the Third Temple of Jerusalem', which would require the prior desecration and destruction of the mosque, and likely produce an enormous war, if not even more serious devastations. Does [there] exist any possibility to escape from this laborious insanity, which indeed, may end up in the transformation of the planet Earth into a subsequent belt of asteroids turning around the Sun? I propose to look once again at information I quoted at the beginning of this lecture...
[The] Chinese discovered America already in 1241, and despite their technical supremacy, they did not engage in its conquest. All these mentioned above, ultra potent 'groupies', pushing for the creation of 'New Global Israel', consider themselves to be heirs of these Hebrew 'pious' (Chassidic) gangsters-idiots, always in search for new occasions to suck and to wreck subsequent nations and territories. But for me all these Bushes, Wolfowitzes, Libermans and their "cabal", conspicuously resemble to these Chinese high War Commanders and financial tycoons, who 500 hundred years ago formed the super potent Eunuch's Party at the Court of the Empire of the Middle. And Chinese have managed somehow to scale down the sterile, anti-zoological - which means, hostile to our senso-motorial development - ambitions of this early version of the present World Eunuch's Party of Conquest." (Source: http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Dissenters/shamir1.htm).
And what is the Adelaide Institute? Wikipedia provides us with an answer: "Established in 1994, the Adelaide Institute was formed from the former Truth Mission that was established in 1993 by Dr. Gerald Fredrick Toben. The Adelaide Institute is a Holocaust denial group in Australia and is considered to be anti-Semitic by Australian and international human rights groups...The Institute has also been implicated in distributing Holocaust denials through mainstream and alternative publications...The Institutes stated goal is exposing "the Holocaust myth."
Also, according to Wikipedia:
"The Institute's website drew the attention of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in 2000. HREOC found that the Adelaide Institute had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by publishing material on the website, the consequences of which were "vilificatory, bullying, insulting and offensive" to the Jewish population; HREOC ordered Töben to close the site and apologise to the people he had offended. Because rulings of the HREOC are not enforceable at law, the case was also brought before the Federal Court of Australia, which ordered in 2002 that certain material be removed from the Adelaide Institute web site.
The Order of the Federal Court of Australia was that the Adelaide Institute should remove from its website any material which conveys one or any of the following imputations:
there is serious doubt that the Holocaust occurred
it is unlikely that there were homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz
Jewish people who are offended by and challenge Holocaust denial are of limited intelligence
some Jewish people, for improper purposes, including financial gain, have exaggerated the number of Jews killed during World War II and the circumstances in which they were killed
It has been noted by human rights organisations that the Institute has failed to fully comply with the order of the Federal Court of Australia and still publishes materials that it was ordered to remove in the 2002 judgement." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Institute)
I'll ask the question again: Why did Mr. Philip Lawler attend the 2008 Saint Benedict Center Conference as a guest speaker?
Related reading: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2007/10/im-not-historian.html
Hebrew gangster-idiots? That ranks right up there with Father Feeney's hateful rhetoric and Douglas Bersaws as well. Positively frightening. What is even more frightening for me is the fact that Dr. Hickson taught for 7 years at Christendom College. The same man who has affiliated himself with the anti-semitic SBC.
ReplyDeleteReally Ellen. The whole conference is frightening in my opinion. There are other disturbing facts about the SBC documented at: http://sbcwatch.
ReplyDeleteblogspot.com
One post at SBC Watch asks Louis Villarrubia ("Brother Andre Marie") what the FBI had to say when they paid the SBC a visit. Evidently NH State Troopers have also visited the SBC.
I don't know what those visits were about. But they provide additional cause for concern.
As reported in The Wanderer, Phil Lawler said something very interesting at the Satin Benedict Center Conference:
ReplyDeleteCatholic Author Sees Jail Time for Bishops
by Jack Kenny
The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is not over and may end with bishops behind bars, a prominent Catholic journalist told a gathering of traditionalist Catholics at the Crowne Plaza Hotel here.
"The floodgates might open when the first bishop goes to jail and when he goes to jail not for his own misbehavior, but for abetting the misbehavior of others," Phil Lawler, former editor of Catholic World Report, said to an audience of about 150 people during a July 18-20 conference on "The Light of Our Faith in the Darkest of Times." The event was sponsored by the St. Benedict Center, a Catholic monastery in Richmond, N.H.
Lawler predicted criminal sanctions under the controversial Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act will eventually be sought against bishops who knowingly covered up child sex abuse by priests and allowed sexual predators to remain in parish ministries. He said, however, that he is not aware of any such efforts taking place.
"To the best of my knowledge there's nothing underway," he said. "And I'm surprised. I think it's just a matter of time."
The federal RICO statue was used in the 1990's to bring civil suits against members of Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion activists who planned and carried out human blockades at abortion facilities. Critics of the litigation argued the law was meant as a legal weapon against organized crime, not anti-abortion protesters. Lawler, then a leader of Operation Rescue in Boston, was among the targets of litigants claiming their civil rights were violated by clinic blockades.
"it kind of gets your attention when someone files a lien against your house," said Lawler, a father of seven. Due largely to the exposure to lawsuits, the blockades have decreased in recent years.
Lawler said the number of priests found to be involved in sex with minors is but a tiny percentage of Catholic priests in America. The same cannot be said for bishops who covered up those crimes, he said. "It was most of them. It was at least two-thirds of them," he said. The coverup is still going on, he said, under the guise of protecting children.
"The psychiatrists on whom the bishops were relying when they pronounced someone healed and ready to go to go back into ministry, those psychiatrists are still consulting with the bishops. They're consulting with them, among other things, on the programs that are being put in place allegedly to safeguard children. Let me tell you something. Those programs are not safeguarding children. They're safeguarding insurance companies. Those programs are making the children better witnesses if they're molested."
Those responsible for the sexual abuse, he said, include "the people who were acting as gatekeepers in the seminaries. And then acting as gatekeepers in the other way, swinging open the gates in these treatment places for troubled priests. These people have to be brought to account. They cannot be allowed to continue doing their damage." The scandal that came to light in Boston in 2002 was not new, he said.
The founder of the Servants of the Paraclete was saying in the 50's that when there are priests abusing children, you've got to get them out forever. Now that was the order that became one of the epicenters of the problems, but the founder understood the problem," Lawler said.
"It's ancient knowledge that we lost and we lost deliberately because we went after human respect. We went after the psychologists with the secular credentials, with degrees from Harvard, rather than Notre Dame," he said, adding that "Notre Dame was different at that time."
The failure of so many bishops to deal with the problem is hard to explain, he said, since it is in their self-interest to get abusing priests out of parish ministries altogether. "I personally think there's something in the order of blackmail happening," said Lawler. But efforts within the Church to promote "the homosexual agenda" are no longer a secret, he said.
"You might have said 20 years ago that there was a conspiracy at St. Vincent's Church in Manhattan to promote the homosexual agenda. Well, now the parish marches in the Gay Pride parade. That's not a conspiracy, that's open rebellion."
Faithful Catholics need to confront the heirarchy over the scandal of priests and members of religious orders promoting values and conduct at war with the moral teachings of the Church, he said.
"We need to be telling people in power, as respectfully and charitably as we can, that we cannot tolerate people who are working for the other side under the guise of the Catholic Church."
"DIVISIVE"
The way the bishops responded to the crisis of clerical sex abuse, Lawler said, fits a pattern that has developed over the past several decades.
"And the pattern was one of ignoring the problems as they festered, of denying the evil of the problem when the evidence was transparently before them," Lawler said. They included "times there were liturgical abuses and they were presented to the bishops and the bishops said to the complaintants, 'You're the problem, because you see a problem with the liturgy'." Reports of heresies being taught in Catholic schools and the colleges get the same reaction, he said.
"You complain about sex education in Catholic schools and you're told you are being divisive. And you realize what the word 'divisive' means is making waves."
The Catholic bishops of Massachusetts, he said, did not lobby against a recent bill in the Sate Senate to allow same-sex couples from other states to marry in the Bay State. "They put out a statement a couple of hours before the vote, obviously for the public record and not for the purpose of influencing votes." The bill passed, unopposed, he said, noting that most members of the Massachusetts Senate are Catholic.
"Every member of the Knights of Columbus in the State Senate voted for that. Every member of the Hibernians voted for it. We can no longer count on any sort of institutional Catholic support," he said.
Lawler was editor of the archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot, in Boston from 1986-1988, but was fired over what he said were editorial differences with the chancery. In 2000 he ran as the Conservative Party candidate against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He is editor of Catholic World News.com and author of a new book, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture (www.encounterbooks.com; 1-800-786-3839). Catholics in "the Hub" no longer have the solidarity they had when, "without power, without influence, without money," they built Catholic churches and schools that many of their more affluent descendants have abandoned, Lawler said.
"Why did we acommodate ourselves into the society?" he asked. "So that we'd be more comfortable? So that we'd have more power, so that we'd be able to make more deals? So that we'd be viewed with the respect that would give us status? And now, look what we've wrought," he said, noting that parishes and schools have been closing, the chancery has moved to the suburbs, and "the legislators scorn any talk of influence."
But Catholics loyal to the faith have a lot of advantages their ancestors lacked, he said, in money, education, and communications technologies unimagined in the days when Irish, Italian, and other Catholic immigrants were at the bottom of the predominantly Protestant social order in Boston.
"Catholics in the course of a century took every institution in Massachusetts from a hostile majority," Lawler said. "Okay? So we did it once. We can do it again."
Mr. Lawler, according to Jack Kenny (who was a fellow parishioner of mine at Ste. Marie's Parish in Manchester, New Hampshire), told participants at the 2008 Saint Benedict Center Conference that the Catholic Bishops of Massachusetts failed to lobby against the recent Bill in the State Senate to allow same-sex couples from other states to marry in the Bay State and that all they did was "..put out a statement a couple of hours before the vote, obviously for the public record and not forthe purpose of influencing votes."
ReplyDeleteFor the record, here's what the Massachusetts Catholic Bishops actually said in their statement:
"The Massachusetts legislature is considering Senate 800, An Act Concerning Marriage. This bill would expand access to marriage licenses in the Commonwealth to same-sex couples living in other states that do not recognize same-sex marriage.
We, the Roman Catholic Bishops in Massachusetts, throughout the public debate on the definition of marriage in the Commonwealth, have repeatedly spoken in support of the traditional institution of marriage. Today, we reiterate our belief that marriage is a faithful, exclusive, lifelong union of a man and a woman joined in an intimate community of love and life. Across times, cultures and many different religious beliefs, marriage between a man and a woman is the foundation of the family and society. Marriage is a personal relationship with public significance.
The Supreme Judicial Court has redefined marriage in Massachusetts by allowing marriage licenses to be issued
to same-sex couples. However, under a law enacted in 1913 and upheld recently as valid by the Supreme Judicial Court, same-sex couples from other states must prove that their home state also recognizes same-sex marriage before they can obtain a marriage license in Massachusetts.
Senate 800 would remove this requirement, and thus extend the threat of redefining marriage beyond our borders. If Senate 800 is enacted, residents from states that recognize only the union of a man and a woman as marriage could obtain a license in the Commonwealth, marry in Massachusetts, return home, and then file court challenges against the laws of their own states.
We, the Roman Catholic Bishops in Massachusetts, oppose Senate 800. Our legislature is attempting to impose the Supreme Judicial Court’s definition of marriage upon other states. Such action endangers the principle of
state sovereignty that gives each state the right to govern itself and enact its own laws.
Massachusetts enjoys
this same protection and rightly would not tolerate its violation by another state. Thus, we urge the legislature to respect the laws of other states by voting no on Senate 800.
Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley
Archdiocese of Boston
Most Rev. George W. Coleman
Diocese of Fall River
Most Rev. Timothy A. McDonnell
Diocese of Springfield
Most Rev. Robert J. McManus
Diocese of Worcester
Notice the wording? "We, the Roman Catholic Bishops in Massachusetts, throughout the public debate on the definition of marriage in the Commonwealth, have repeatedly spoken in support of the traditional institution of marriage. Today, we reiterate our belief that marriage is a faithful, exclusive, lifelong union of a man and a woman..."
What more can honestly be expected from the Massachusetts Bishops? It's not as if the State Legislature is hanging on their every word. They have spoken the truth repeatedly to a governmental body which isn't interested in the truth regarding marriage.
Lawler was Editor of The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, until he was fired for what he says were "editorial differences with the chancery." Wouldn't it be interesting to learn what those "editorial differences" were?
ReplyDeleteEqually noteworthy is the fact that while Lawler is quick to judge the Massachusetts Bishops and to accuse them of not really opposing State Senate Bill 800, he balks at others even questioning his motives or character.
Double-standard. He can freely hurl accusations but will not tolerate just being questioned.
The Massachusetts Catholic Conference is the political voice/public policy arm of the Massachusetts Bishops. And one can sign up for Legislative alerts there by clicking on this link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.macathconf.org/
alerts.htm
I think it's reprehensible for Mr. Lawler to imply that the Massachusetts Bishops "did not lobby" against Senate Bill 800. Where is his proof? Besides their joint statement, the Bishops used the various diocesan newspapers to educate the faithful - including legislators -on what constitutes marriage and why the 1913 law should not be repealed. They also used their political voice - the Massachusetts Catholic Conference.
The following comment was left at the Holy Cross Cardinal Newman Society website:
ReplyDelete"Philip Lawler's Blog describes itself as "A conversational blog about Phil's book -- join us!," but when I left comments (2) asking a few questions - both in a respectful tone - my comments were not published. Apparently not all "conversation" is welcome. Only comments praising his book. I asked if Mr. Lawler is an anti-semite because of his association with anti-semites and Holocaust deniers. I also asked if he is a Feeneyite since the SBC (where he spoke recently) is Feeneyite and because of what he wrote in The Faithful Departed.
Mr. Lawler's approach to those who merely question him is much like that of Louis Villarrubia, the "Prior" of the SBC who has portrayed himself as an ordained Deacon. He ignores questions he doesn't like and tries to silence those who would ask him difficult questions.
Mr. Lawler's silence speaks loud and clear to me."
I think I understand why Mr. Lawler was fired by Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper. He apparently cannot bear anyone who thinks differently than he does or who asks difficult questions.
Paul, your link to the Adelaide Institute piece which quotes from Dr. Hickson has the following name at the top of the page: Israel Shamir. Israel Shamir is the pseudonymn of a rabid anti-Semite who has been using the internet for years to propagandize against the Jewish people. "Shamir" argues that the Jewish people are out to take control of the entire world. Read about him here at Fringe Watch:
ReplyDeletehttp://fringewatcher.blogspot
.com/2006/07/culture-wars-troubling-praise-of-israel.
html
I've warned others at my Scripture study to avoid Phil Lawler's book. I'm just too concerned about his connections.
ReplyDeleteBrian, I tried posting comments numerous times myself at Philip Lawler's Blog. Each time my comment was deleted with one exception - my last where I compared his Blog to Pravda, censoring comments whic he simply doesn't like because they question his beliefs or character.
ReplyDeleteHe published THAT comment and asked if my previous comments were really deleted and then insulted me by asking if I had anything to say.
I think Philip Lawler is arrogant and has too high an opinion of himself. Maybe that's why the Archdiocese of Boston fired him from The Pilot?