Church Militant The Vortex Feed

TRANSCRIPT When Giuseppe Sarto was named as a bishop in 1884, his grandmother was ecstatic. She immediately set about planning a party. But Fr. Sarto lovingly sat her down and said it was no cause for a party. Looking straight at her, he said, "Nana, do you not realize that if I don't do my job as bishop, I go to Hell?" Father Sarto was consecrated a bishop, in fact, and later became Pope St. Pius X. It's a deep reflection to meditate on his words that a bishop who fails to do his job will be damned. Notice his reflection was not that a bishop who actively does bad things will be damned (although he would have certainly agreed with that), but that a bishop who fails to do what he should is bound for eternity as a slave of Satan. Just as there are gradations in Heaven (some are holier than others), in Hell, there are some "more damned" than others in the degree of punishment. Without exception, all humans are the object of the vilest hatred of the demons. It was, after all, their envy against us that brought about their fall from the celestial realm. God revealed to the angelic mind that He would create the material world (which they had no previous cognition of since it didn't yet exist) and that He would create man and unite Himself to man. And since He would accomplish this without any loss of His Divinity, they would worship Him as the God-Man. That was too much for Lucifer and his cohort and so they rebelled. In other words, the demons have a hatred for humans that no person can imagine. Could there be a more hideous sight in all creation than a priest in Hell? Well, actually, yes. Using that information, let's now look to the reality of Hell — and yes, Bp. Barron, there are humans in Hell. God has said so. When a human being is damned, he is immediately seized upon by the demons. Since the damned being is made in the image and likeness of God, regardless of how obscured that now is and will forever remain, it is still and forever true. The poor soul in front of them is theirs forever. But that soul is only a reminder to them of their own envy, not of their defeat. A soul that is damned that had been baptized in life has the mark of defeat forever impressed upon his soul. The Cross, even in this damned soul, still presents to them a sign of defeat, serves as an everlasting reminder that they lost. Even 2,000 years on, most souls are not baptized, and to these souls are reserved certain tortures by virtue of the horror they present to infernal legions. Now consider the case of the soul of a damned priest. Not only does this wretched creature have the Cross emblazoned on itself, but it also has the mark of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. This soul was consecrated to the service of extending the salvific work of Christ, carrying the victory of the Cross over Hell throughout time. His entire purpose, his reason for existence, was used to forgive sins and to call Christ Himself down from Heaven and to feed His flock. Each time the demons behold this soul, they become enraged and recall that this soul delivered countless other souls out of their grasp with deathbed anointings, millions of sins being forgiven, countless Holy Communions being administered. Since the evil state of the soul of a damned priest has no effect on grace passing through him, his personal evil was never an obstacle to God in ministering to His people. But the performance of his duties — done even when he himself was darkened by great evil — that did not save him from eternal death and the particular wrath of the demonic hatred in whose grasp he is now forever committed. It is part of the divine mystery that God uses even evil to accomplish His will, underscoring that He is always in control and that nothing has the power to overcome the desires of the Divine Heart. Just as the fallen angels were called to everlasting service of the Divine and yet rejected it, the damned priest was called to that everlasting service yet now suffers a similar fate as those fallen angels — with one defining difference: In Hell, he is now their slave, tortured with an intensity that the other souls in Hell can only recoil from in terror even as they themselves experience their own agonies. Saint Teresa of Ávila was shown the pits of Hell and the human souls there being ripped to shreds by the demons. She recounted that she could easily distinguish the souls of those who were priests because, unlike the other souls, their hands were burning in unspeakable agony as the fires of Hell ignited their palms that had been anointed at their ordinations. Those hands, anointed to be raised in blessing and to hold the Body and Blood of their High Priest, were now transformed into ghastly tortures owing to their sins and damnation for having rejected the sacredness of their office. Could there be a more hideous sight in all creation than a priest in Hell? Well, actually, yes. The most tortured, reviled, agonized, revolting sight in all creation is the soul of a bishop in Hell, a successor of the Apostles. If the demons reserve special tortures for the souls of damned priests, we can only imagine that it is Satan himself who unleashes the most unspeakable horrors on these men whose sacred office not only blessed, forgave and called Christ down from Heaven but created the priests to carry on the work of redemption. Recall at the Last Supper that in his rage and fury, Satan himself approached Christ and demanded the Apostles so that he could sift them like wheat. The soul of a bishop is the most conformed to Christ and possesses the fullness of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. It is this office that ensures the work of the Church and Her mission to save souls that continues throughout time and history. In the spiritual battle, Satan correctly views these men as the generals on the other side. And the truly astounding truth here on earth is that Satan has more regard for the office of bishop than the bishops themselves possess. He reserves an intensity of hatred for these souls that he unleashes on them forever. They were the leaders, the successors of the very Apostles who were the foundation of the Church established by Satan's enemy. There are no words to describe what awaits the soul of a damned bishop, and we know from the writings of great saints and Fathers of the Church that there are many bishops in Hell. A limitation of us humans here in time and space is that having no experience of life in the next realm, our imaginations are restricted from conjuring up images of the reality that awaits both the saved and the damned. It is part of the divine mystery that God uses even evil to accomplish His will, underscoring that He is always in control. Great saints have been given the slightest of glimpses of both, but even they fall back into a state of being unable to express what they have been shown. All they can confirm for us is what Our Blessed Lord has revealed: "For Heaven, eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart or mind of man what God has prepared for those who love Him." Of course, the same is true in reverse of the damned: They go to a place reserved for Satan and his fallen cohort who have been given everlasting rule in his kingdom of the souls of damned humans. The only real reality is the supernatural. All this, while "real" in the sense of the temporary, is passing away. Even as we walk through it, it is evaporating for each one of us like a morning fog, obscuring the actual reality. The fog itself is not reality — but what it obscures is everlasting reality. So reflecting on all this, in particular the destiny of cowardly and wicked bishops, there is really only one question to ask: "Bishops, are you insane?" Reserved for you will be the most horrific tortures and there will be no end to them. Father Sarto knew well the seriousness of his upcoming consecration. Too bad that virtually every bishop today refuses to accept that seriousness. They are trading away the glories of Heaven and embracing the horrors of Hell for gay sex, lies, money, being the toast of the party, human respect and so forth. Just as they sat atop the human order on earth, they will likewise sit atop the hierarchy of the damned.

TRANSCRIPT For years, Church Militant has been telling you how intimately connected the Church is with the world of politics. The convergence of the two is sometimes uncanny, just like Biden and his cheerleaders, the bishops. And every now and then, a scene emerges, a photo that captures all of it in a moment frozen in time. One, of course, is the photo of phony Catholic Biden yucking it up with communist Cdl. McCarrick and his episcopal pals. Little did anyone realize when that photo was snapped just how intimate the bond between these men was. So close were the two, in fact, that McCarrick was even at the funeral of Biden's son in June 2015. What has united Biden and McCarrick over the years, however, has been China. Each man has vigorously promoted China, with Biden getting it a "most favored nation" status during his time in the U.S. Senate and McCarrick getting China's horrific crimes against humanity, especially Christian humans, completely ignored. But as we think on all this and reflect deeper, always remember that the current U.S. hierarchy is largely a result of McCarrick's scheming. While Joseph Bernardin was also a major factor, it was McCarrick who has really shaped the American episcopate, thanks to the much greater number of years he had to work his evil. What has united Biden and McCarrick over the years, however, has been China. Bernardin has been dead since the mid-'90s. McCarrick went on for 22 years more, continuing to populate the ranks of the bishops with wicked, traitorous men, including Tobin of Newark and Cupich in Chicago. Never forget the lineage that McCarrick has created. He may be out of the picture now, but his very long shadow still dominates the conference of U.S. bishops — the same bishops who collectively created Joe Biden. And yes, make no mistake, Joe Biden is the U.S. bishops' Frankenstein monster, cobbled together from scraps and symbols of the Faith, such as a Rosary on his wrist and constant babbling about his deeply held private faith — all while receiving sacrilegious Holy Communions and officiating at homosexual relationships passed off as "marriage." When Biden named Marxist homosexual and baptized Catholic Pete Buttigieg to his cabinet, there was not a peep from the bishops. While the media world celebrated, the bishops said not a thing about naming a sexual deviant to the cabinet. However, they would say something against Trump with every opportunity that came up to do so. But Biden comes in as an unelected president in favor of child killing as well as sodomy and gets a pass from them. But there is another moment frozen in time that underscores all this, a picture so iconic that its callousness could only be met by the bishops. When the bodies of the dead U.S. servicemen from Afghanistan were brought back to Dover Air Force Base, Biden kept checking his watch. At first, the Marxist media covered for him. "Lies!" they yelled across their social media platforms. "More alt-right conspiracy theories from racists and White supremacists." And on and on. But when the actual video of Biden checking his watch multiple times came out — coupled with the firsthand eyewitness testimony of the family members there to receive the remains of their children in uniforms, whose blood is on Biden's hands — the lying media members were forced to backtrack. But in true fashion, they only backtracked the least amount they could. Their Soviet-style "fact-checkers" went into overdrive and did not recant their original stories. They merely updated them to say, "We can't be certain that he didn't check his watch. It's unclear." No, it's not "unclear." It's on video. There are eyewitnesses, just like with regard to a rigged election that put this communist killer into office. Well, let's now pivot to the bishops and apply this same template to them, which fits so perfectly: For decades, they either raped altar boys by the thousands or covered it up They lied about it all nonstop until the secular media caught up to them They doled out billions of dollars of the faithful's money to quiet the enormous evil More than 80% of all this was due to homosexual men attacking post-pubescent teenage males Church Militant has produced multiple eyewitnesses of all this evil Church Militant has produced audio recordings of these men grooming their victims Church Militant and other media outlets have established a rampant presence of active homosexual men in the priesthood But in the face of all those facts — fact-checked facts — the bishops continue to deny reality as the bodies and souls of millions are carried right past them, bodies and souls whose blood and eternal destinies are on their heads and hands. It's uncanny how much crossover there is between the crooked politician and the corrupt hierarchy. As we said, it's uncanny how much crossover there is between the crooked politician and the corrupt hierarchy. Both need to be blown up by the light of constant exposure. There will come a tipping point when enough people come to realize this evil. It is then that things will begin to change. No, we are not there yet, but the boulder is being pushed up the mountain. It's sometimes slow, but it took these monsters decades to accomplish their evil. Don't think it won't take just as long — and likely longer — to reverse it. One of these days, while the bishops are checking their watches, they're going to come to realize that time's up. You need to ensure that you are on the correct side of history when the alarm goes off.

TRANSCRIPT First, a happy birthday to Our Lady, the Blessed Mother, the Mother of God. As you know, we have consecrated our corporate efforts here to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be used to help save souls. That is why every Marian day is a little something special here at St. Michael's/Church Militant. Given all the insanity in the world today, it's always a good thing to reflect on the Faith and never forget that God is in charge. But that doesn't absolve any of us from being as involved as we can, in whatever way our Lord and Our Lady provide for us. Getting involved and fighting for the truth doesn't reflect a lack of faith in God's omnipotence. Indeed, it reflects a willingness born from charity to want to cooperate with it. Faith without works is dead. The works are your faithfulness, expressed in acts of love and charity. Given all the insanity in the world today, it's always a good thing to reflect on the Faith and never forget that God is in charge. The world is at the precipice of something truly awful, but in the face of this reality, more and more people do seem to be waking up. There even seems to be a kind of momentum building. True, the bad guys are better organized and more skillful, but something does seem to be happening with the good guys. Even in the face of the bad guys' advantages, the good guys are starting to stand up. When GoDaddy was bullied into shutting down the pro-life whistleblower page to help enforce the new Texas "heartbeat law," the group, undaunted by the child-killing cancel culture, pushed back simply by packing its bags and planning for a new host. Likewise, all across America, ticked-off parents are showing up at school board meetings everywhere and challenging the dominant Left in shouting matches over transgender evil, critical race theory and a host of other communist agenda items. In Australia, it is so COVID crazy that police are now tracking private citizens on their cell phones, monitoring where they are, and if they don't respond to the call in 15 minutes, the police go after them. But citizens are in a near revolutionary froth over this and are practically rioting (and we mean real riots, not the media-hyped "riot" of Jan. 6, which wasn't a riot, much less an insurrection). In Toronto and other places in Canada, it's the same deal. Citizens are pouring into the streets. The Marxist "fact-checkers" got smoked over the weekend when the good guys revealed most of what was being reported as all lies. Biden's troubles, especially regarding his phony allegiance to the Faith, keeps blowing up in his face precisely because people keep challenging his lies. Biden is as much a Catholic as he was the winner in 2020, which is to say, he's not. His old pal Cdl.Theodore McCarrick was hunted down and dragged into court last Friday for charges related to homosexual predation. In a striking similarity, McCarrick, who pleaded not guilty, is as about as innocent as Biden is Catholic. They each obtained their posts through illegitimate means and are closely allied to one another, China, sexual deviancy and senility. We are able to speak about all of this because of the absolute doggedness and strong-headed determination of outfits unwilling to "let it go." We at Church Militant have chronicled every bit of this evil every step of the way, ever since Obama appeared on the scene and we detected the smoke of Satan wafting into the Church. All of it is related, and what we do here at Church Militant is help you see all of it and how it all fits so intricately together. A corrupt and homosexual hierarchy, a complicit sect in Rome, the push for global communism, critical race theory, child murder, rigged elections, phony science to instill fear in citizens, the bishops' agreement with it all: Every last bit of this is all interconnected. But to see the interconnectedness, you must know the information. And it changes every day, usually pretty fast. There's no way any sole person can keep track of it all. That's why we here at Church Militant have dozens of faithful Catholics working on this every day, researching, interviewing, gathering the information, exploring the details, checking with sources and bringing you everything you need to know so you can inform the people you know. No one in the Catholic world brings you the combination of experience, professionalism, context and history that Church Militant does. No one. With our all-new Catholic Info Hour each weeknight at 7 p.m. ET, we provide you one-stop shopping to help you know everything that affects the Faith in a given day. Satan spread the old falsehood to never talk about religion or politics because evil profits from silence and lack of knowledge. Here at Church Militant, that's all we do is talk about everything the bad guys and Satan don't want you knowing or talking about. Think of it as a much-needed counterattack against the lies of communists and their woke ideology. When Our Lady said this evil would spread throughout the world, few, if any, realized the depth of it. Well, a century later, here we are immersed in it and needing champions to step forward and confront it. But champions can only step forward if they know what's going on and if they understand the current situation. In the current world order, the faithful need truthful information from trustworthy, knowledgeable Catholics just as much as they need good formation in the Faith. Church Militant doesn't need to create clickbait headlines or generate useless online petitions to beef up email lists. The truth itself is strange enough all on its own. There is no need to embellish it. Our new Catholic Info Hour combines our popular Evening News program with our mainstay program The Download to tell you what happened today and then really dig into the information from a decidedly Catholic perspective. Satan spread the old falsehood to never talk about religion or politics because evil profits from silence and lack of knowledge. Last night was the debut of Catholic Info Hour here on Church Militant, part of our ever-increasing presence on the internet and where millions come to each month for their news, information, support and reaffirming of the Faith. Now you can have that for a full hour each night. No Catholic should be relying on "the news" from the secular guys, not even Fox News. What we bring you is information geared to increase your spiritual strength, your will to stand tall and battle in this epic age. Please make this regular viewing for yourself and those you know, and please spread the word. The authentically Catholic counterattack in the world of media has begun. Please join us every weeknight at 7 p.m. ET.

Michael Voris interviews Jan Franczak, Polish writer and translator.

Michael Voris interviews David L. Gray, author of The Catholic Catechism on Freemasonry.

TRANSCRIPT This Labor Day weekend marks the 13th anniversary of the introduction of The Vortex. Over those 13 years, we've produced about 3,500 episodes and, of course, the USCCB couldn't be happier about that. Back at the very beginning, when were known as "Real Catholic TV," not "Church Militant," a lot of what we did actually had very little to do with the bishops. We were still uninformed about how corrupt and crooked so many of them are. This Labor Day weekend marks the 13th anniversary of the introduction of The Vortex. Instead, we were concentrating on the evils in the culture, especially politics. That year, 2008, was, of course, the Obama year. And since the child killer was being heavily promoted by every Catholic social justice group in America, we decided to start producing The Vortex to speak about his evil. This was almost the very first Vortex episode we ever produced. So please, enjoy.

TRANSCRIPT The transformation to both the world and the Church in just the last year has been astonishing. We hear the stupid "woke" term non-stop in the secular world, which means that you're enlightened; you've awakened to all the rot in the world owing to conservatives and whites. This "enlightenment" then transforms into an excuse to burn down and destroy everything that supposedly contributed to the past society, the bastion of white-privileged racism. All of it, however, is nothing more than an excuse to get at fundamental Christian truths. Since it was Catholicism that built Western civilization — and since Western civilization is so bad (and you realize this once you get woke) — then Catholicism itself is bad, and it must be destroyed. This is the reality behind all "wokeness." Once that notion that the Church needs to change gets embedded in people's minds, then the soil has been sufficiently tilled. The police have to be defunded because that whole "law and order" thing is racist. In fact, the whole system is racist, racked with racism from top to bottom. It's built on racism imported by white European men whose religion was Christianity and whose moral code derived from Catholicism. Racism, in fact, has become the trump card not only in the political order but also in the Church. For a variety of reasons, Churchmen in the United States have picked up on the racism narrative and are exploiting it. Some of these bishops are just going along because they want to feel relevant and always be on the cutting edge of events. But for others, the whole woke movement feeds into their larger plan of transforming the Church into a worldwide NGO (non-governmental organization) with the aim of globalist theology supplanting the Church. They don't want to actually get rid of the structure of the Church, just the Faith and its teachings that inhabit the structures. And frankly, they've done a great job at that: Most Catholics no longer believe anything of the Faith. They don't go to Mass; they don't believe in the Real Presence; they haven't been to confession in years, if not decades. But they all do believe they're going to Heaven when they die, thanks to Bp. Barron's self-indulgent ramblings that we have a reasonable hope that all men are saved. Various bishops and priests who claim to be Catholic want to import the entire woke insanity into the Church because it helps deform the Church. It also doesn't matter what the particular flavor of "wokeness" is at a given moment — it could be racism, sexism, transgenderism, immigration, climate change — it doesn't matter. All of them provide an opportunity for dissident bishops to declare the Church needs to change. And once that notion that the Church needs to change gets embedded in people's minds, then the soil has been sufficiently tilled. It's only one last step for people to think, "Well, the Church changed on all that stuff, so why can't it change on everything?" And presto — no more Church. And we're almost there. That's why Catholic laity have to experience their own version of being woke, of waking up to this rot and evil. And this pertains to men, in particular — Catholic men. The good news is that more men are waking up to all this. The bad news is that it isn't happening at anywhere near the rate it needs to in order to offset the likes of Cupich and others. But you'd be mistaken if you concentrated on just the marquee stars of the corrupt Catholic elite. True, they have the power and wield the scepter, but there are thousands of others in league with them who are every bit as corrupt or malformed. They're just not as ambitious and sneaky and cunning. But they all agree on the agenda. This happens not in some dicastery in Rome, but in your parish, school, Bible study or men's group. Errant ideas from the culture are smuggled in using theological vocabulary (just see James Martin if you need a reference point). These secular, woke ideas are spiritualized, baptized and packaged as somehow being Catholic. That's what Dallas bishop Edward Burns did a few days ago in his cathedral with a ridiculous Mass of Remembrance on the anniversary of the George Floyd killing. Of course, the entire event was brought to you courtesy of the woke racism narrative. Burns failed to mention that, at the very instant they were lighting candles, ringing bells and weeping in lamentation, the real racism was occurring just a few streets away as Black babies were being slaughtered in abortion chambers — just as they are being slaughtered every day. Planned Parenthood is targeting those children because they are Black. Planned Parenthood is profiting from a system of actual racism imposed on the Black community by Democratic Party policies that have destroyed Black families, eradicated their schools, created a network of gangs and lead to a continuing rise in Black-on-Black crime and homicide. Curious how none of that got into the bishop's homily. It never does and it never will because the truth about racism is that it is brought to you by the very people constantly whining about it and who also profit from it — think Al Sharpton, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, Wilton Gregory, the USCCB. Until Catholic men become truly woke, the Church will continue to descend even deeper into the darkness. That's why this year's Church Militant Strength and Honor Conference is zeroing in on this specific topic: "Catholic Wokeness." Two of our speakers will be Fr. James Altman and Jesse Romero, both great friends of this apostolate and the work we do here in serving Catholics. Jesse, Father and I will be deconstructing the lies, presenting the truth and then telling you what you need to do about all of this once you're back home. Strength and Honor will be here at Church Militant the first full weekend in August. There are some tickets remaining, but not many. Reserve yours today. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Church. If you are a Catholic man, a father, son, grandson, nephew, uncle, brother — this is for you. You need to understand that you are the target of the woke movement — your beliefs and how you live out your life. You need to get woke yourself. But beyond woke, you need to mobilize, take action to combat the woke culture coming to dominate in parishes and chanceries all over the country. It's your duty as believing men to put down the golf clubs and pick up the sword. But you need knowledge, companionship, spirit and drive. And you need a plan. That's what our Strength and Honor conference/retreat is all about. Click here to get yourselves to Church Militant the first weekend in August and hear from people who are in the trenches every day so you can make the commitment to get into these same trenches. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Church. Get woke — authentic woke.

Michael Voris interviews Bobby Hesley and David L. Gray. Bobby is a Catholic speaker and political commentator from Detroit, Michigan. David is a Catholic commentator and also the author of The Divine Symphony: An Exordium to the Theology of the Catholic Mass.

Michael Voris sits down with Fr. Mark White, a Virginia priest who was ordained by the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2003.

TRANSCRIPT With college football season about to start and with all the brain-dead, woke individuals walking around in their zombie mode, it was only a matter of time until one among them noticed the "ethnic" reference to the Irish in the mascot and sports team of the "Fighting Irish" at Notre Dame. For the record, Notre Dame itself did a little "polishing" of its own name a number of years back. We graduates from back in the day recall it used to be the "Fightin' Irish," not the more sedate "Fighting Irish." The quasi-slang word "fightin'" was meant to convey a kind of street-brawling, somewhat-uneducated commoner. "Fighting" is a little more refined. "Domers," as Notre Dame students and alumni are called, can now associate with the more refined, having dialed back on the lower-class moniker of "Fightin'" by adding the "g" to the end of it. But that's just a little history to show that even Notre Dame, when convenient, will add to its own history in order to subtract from its own lore. However, when the zombies came after the name and the leprechaun (the Notre Dame mascot) a couple of weeks ago, Notre Dame fired back, telling the zombies to, as the Irish say, kiss off. The reasoning was sound because, unlike major league sports teams like the Atlanta Braves, which, as a team, doesn't have anything to do with native Americans, Notre Dame became a haven for Irish immigrants to escape the extremes of a very anti-Catholic climate. He is celebrated at Notre Dame as some giant figure of accomplishment, but he was a traitor to the Faith, plain and simple. Actually, Notre Dame was founded in 1842 by the French order of C.S.C. — Holy Cross — and originally established as a school for mostly native American children and orphans of the Potawatomi tribe who had been orphaned by attacks from other Native American tribes (so much for the "peaceful Indians overrun by the mean White colonials" narrative). But as the waves of Catholic immigrants picked up steam over the next 50 years, Notre Dame became an outpost for young Catholic men banding together for a Catholic education who wanted to make something of themselves in their new country. Since many of the Irish already spoke some level of English, it was easier for them to advance, and large numbers of Irish immigrants and their sons began flocking to Notre Dame, transforming the French-run former school for Indian orphans into a pre-college, a college and, eventually, a university. Along the way, the Irish student body discovered a little pastime called football and would go on to become the unsurpassed champions of the gridiron. But that "ethnic thing" really stuck. The severe anti-Catholicism of the early 20th century was dominant, and it was constantly thrown in the face of the Notre Dame football team. In fact, Notre Dame became the country's national team precisely because of anti-Catholicism. When legendary coach Knute Rockne applied for entry into the Western Athletic Conference (which is now the Big Ten and which actually has 12 teams), the application was rejected specifically because of odium fidei, hatred of the Faith. The big kid on the block in the WAC was the University of Michigan, whose head coach, Fielding Yost, hated Catholics. He told the rest of the conference that if Notre Dame gained admission, he would take his Michigan football team and go home. And in a classic case of "lemons to lemonade," when Rockne and Notre Dame were shunned because of the Faith, Rockne simply took the team on the road, playing in the largest cities in the country and developing an intense national following as Catholics in all these major cities took pride in playing and whipping the rear ends of the anti-Catholic Protestant schools of the day. It was in that climate that the nickname "Fightin' Irish" was born. It was originally an insult levied by sportswriters and Protestant fans who, after having been handed one defeat after another, derided the Irish Catholics with catcalls from the stands, such as "all you Irish can do is drink and fight." So the name "Fightin' Irish" was originally a slur, however, in true Irish form, Notre Dame's 1924 yearbook embraced it saying, "'Fightin' Irish': a moniker originally given in derision; but so truly has it come to represent us that we are now unwilling to part with it, and we are, therefore, the Fightin' Irish of Notre Dame." It was that history that Notre Dame recently threw back in the face of the woke zombies, who quickly retreated and just dropped the subject altogether, even taking down the website where the school name had been listed in the top five of the most offensive sports teams in the country. The absolute dominance of Notre Dame in football brought the university a prestige, a certain cache, that, in the hands of the right man, could have produced the most Catholic university in the country. But another man, a truly malevolent and deceptive man, took over Notre Dame in the late 1950s and transformed the school into a vehicle for the widest possible destruction of the Faith imaginable. The man was Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, a Holy Cross priest who was president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987. During his tenure, he used Notre Dame to totally remake Catholic education and even tried to change Church teaching. He is celebrated at Notre Dame as some giant figure of accomplishment, but he was a traitor to the Faith, plain and simple. In the 1960s, for example, he worked behind the scenes with Planned Parenthood in a series of conferences paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce a document for dissident theologians to sign and present to Rome to try to change the teaching on birth control. For his efforts to undermine the Church, he was given the chairmanship of the Rockefeller Foundation. Additionally, Hesburgh worked with another Theodore, not well-known at all at the time, also to undermine the Church. On the signature page of the statement that came to be known as the Land O' Lakes statement, you can see his name proudly displayed: Theodore McCarrick, president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. The communist-trained homopredator had already insinuated himself into the foundations of the destruction of the Church way back then. Various accounts, in fact, suggest that McCarrick was one of the driving forces, if not the driving force, behind the actual words of the statement, having been the major ghostwriter author of it. Theodore McCarrick and Theodore Hesburgh wiped out Catholic higher-level education in America, which eventually worked its way down to grade-school level all across the Church in the United States. By the time McCarrick was planting the dynamite at Notre Dame to destroy the Faith in Catholic classrooms, he was already a prolific homosexual rapist, attacking numerous boys and young men on his way to becoming the most notorious homosexual rapist the Church has known. But this was just one of Hesburgh's "accomplishments," bringing aboard a rapist to help chart the course of Catholic higher education. Everywhere the man went, he sought to undo the spiritual success of Notre Dame and substitute it with worldly success, exchanging spiritual goods for earthly evils disguised as goods. He brought aboard Fr. Richard McBrien, a lying cheat of a priest who did all in his power for 30 years on campus to corrupt the minds of the young students sitting before him semester after semester, even becoming chairman of the theology department for a dozen years. He came to campus supporting birth control and women's ordination, so he was the perfect star in the dark constellation that Hesburgh was creating at Notre Dame. What did not get printed in the glowing press releases from Notre Dame's propaganda department was that McBrien was secretly living with a woman who would regularly accompany him to all the clerical events at Notre Dame, the worst kept secret among Notre Dame's priests. He and the woman lived together for so long that the state of Indiana treated their cohabitation as a civil marriage, it having surpassed the necessary number of years at the same address to be considered legal. Hesburgh hired and defended and promoted a vow-breaking, fornicating priest and set him loose on 30 years of students to instruct them in theology. His "theology" was so bad that even the wildly liberal U.S. bishops' conference had to condemn it. Over the many years of Hesburgh's rule over Notre Dame, he stopped at nothing to convert the students sent there into radical anti-Catholics. Even the race-baiting author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a 1998 graduate of Hesburgh's influence. He brought the traitorous Catholic New York governor Mario Cuomo to campus in 1984 during the Reagan-Mondale campaign to attack Catholic teaching on abortion. It was at Notre Dame in 1984 where the line "personally opposed but ... " first fell from the lips of U.S. Catholic politicians, all under the watchful and supportive eyes of Hesburgh. That would have come as no surprise, however, if you had been a student at Notre Dame prior to the campaign of 1980. During the Reagan-Carter race of that year, I was a sophomore, and on one fall day, Hesburgh went around to every single large class and promoted the line "abortion isn't the only issue." I was a sophomore in chemistry class when Hesburgh came in and politely asked the professor for a few moments to address the students, which, of course, the professor agreed to. Hesburgh went on to tell the few hundred of us sitting there that we needed to weigh all the life issues and that abortion was no different from poverty, subtly placing in students' minds the scandal of Cdl. Joseph Bernardin's so-called consistent ethic of life, which came to be known as the "seamless garment theory." Hesburgh actually had Bernardin be the commencement speaker at my class graduation in 1983. Looking over the totality of Hesburgh's anti-Catholicism disguised as elitist Catholicism, quite the picture comes into focus. Looking over the totality of Hesburgh's anti-Catholicism disguised as elitist Catholicism, quite the picture comes into focus. He cooperated with Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller Foundation, used his influence as president of Notre Dame to get Pope Paul VI to change Church teaching on birth control, conspired with the likes of Theodore McCarrick, Richard McBrien and Joseph Bernardin to corrupt the minds of students for almost 40 years and laid the course for how Catholic education could be completely corrupted. But at least the university got the "Fighting Irish" part right. And I'm pretty sure it didn't have anything to do with the marketing department that recently signed the most lucrative sports marketing deal in all of college sports. No, Notre Dame would never stoop to that level. Corrupt young minds? Cooperate with fornicating and homosexual rapist clergy? Advance political agendas resulting in the deaths of 65 million children? Well, okay, but come on, man, don't mess with the leprechaun. That's a bridge too far and too woke, even for us.

TRANSCRIPT When news broke on Pentecost Sunday that Fr. James Altman was being gunned for by his bishop — the weak, ineffectual and divisive William Callahan of La Crosse — it could not have been a surprise. First off, being ineffectual and divisive is precisely what Callahan accused Fr. Altman of, but Fr. Altman has grown his parish, so that's hardly ineffectual. As far as being divisive, who cares? Being divisive is a benchmark of a faithful Catholic because the world embraces sin and darkness. If you aren't being divisive in the face of that, then you'll be damned. Pretty simple. Being divisive is a benchmark of a faithful Catholic because the world embraces sin and darkness. We could get into all the theology of that, but the bishops don't believe in theology, so why bother? But they do believe in the world. They love the world. They love its politics, power plays, drama, endless disguises and deceptions. In fact, they relish in all that, and they especially love that they get to somehow appear above it all as the guardians of peace they fancy themselves to be. All are welcome, as they say. Except their facade is a load of, well, you know. No, all are not welcome in their world of conniving, immorality and cover-up of child rape and theft of hundreds of millions of dollars. When you've been doing this work as long as Church Militant has, you hear quite a bit. And when you do it every day and good priests email you and tell you what's really going on, you hear a lot. The same goes for when you speak to good law enforcement and when diocesan insiders feed you information, and seminarians let you know about the rampant corruption. The stream of information about these liars is like water coming out of a fire hose. It's powerful and endless. Law enforcement folks have even said to us that the bishops are more corrupt than the Mafia. So when good priests are attacked by lousy, weak bishops — or better said, weak men who happen to be bishops — no one in the Catholic world can or should be surprised. The similarities between the world and the hierarchy are so screamingly obvious, you'd need to be dead not to notice. You need look no further than the "Catholic COVID cult" and their adoration of all things Wuhan. The Marxist bishops are now forcing Catholics to get into two lines at Mass — the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The next directive from the chancery will be a yellow star on the outer garment of all the unvaccinated and a special roped-off section of the pews, in the back, of course, marked, "leprosy/unclean, sit here." The "Catholic COVID cult" is all about making sure they please their overlords in the government who are handing them tens of millions of dollars for "helping the poor" in the illegal immigration mess. What the rest of the country says is a crisis, the bishops call "good business" or a "cash cow." In fact, the bishops are indistinguishable from the Democrats. The bishops are the Democratic Party in robes. We would say the bishops are the Democratic Party at prayer, but given the state of the Church, it seems like the bishops only pray when cameras are on and rolling. We need to call a halt to this pretense that they are spiritual fathers. They are spiritual terrorists who use the Church for a comfortable life, to have homosexual relations or to lie and steal and cover up one scheme after another. In other words, they do whatever is necessary to crush the truth of their miserable, spiritually dead lives. We need to pray for them, of course, but it is their victims who also need the prayers. News broke earlier this week that a predator priest in Massachusetts was about to be charged by the district attorney — not just with molesting a teen male decades ago, but with actually murdering him and dumping his body in the river. We say "about to be charged" because the priest died this past Friday. The bishop at the time (Christopher Weldon) covered it all up. Of course, he had a great motive because Bp. Weldon himself was raping altar boys left and right. His evil is laid out in a giant lawsuit where the John Doe plaintiff alleges, among other things, that a former bishop (Mitchell T. Rozanski) engaged in a cover-up to protect Weldon's legacy. Rozanski, of course, got promoted last year to be archbishop of St. Louis for his skulduggery, filth and cover-up expertise. This whole rotten network wrote the playbook the Mafia uses. Even the mob doesn't rape and kill children, cover it up, pretend they're holy and then go around silencing priests who want to help people get to Heaven. Yes, the U.S. hierarchy is rotten to the core. We have Cdl. Dolan lying about virtually everything he says, including his role in the cover-up of the homosexual chancery in New York. There is also the notorious case of Fr. Peter Miqueli that made national headlines with his "gay-for-pay" activities; his leading role in getting active homosexuals celebrated in the St. Patrick's Day parade; his silence on eucharistic sacrilege; his shifting tens of millions of dollars around during his time in Milwaukee to shield it from sex-abuse victims; and, of course, his private letters to Catholic millionaires to attend a chic fundraising dinner where Catholic titans could hobnob with George Bush and Jay Leno. This is what these men have turned the Church into. There isn't a drop of supernatural faith in them. Quite the opposite, in fact. They are entangled in child murder — not just of altar boys, but the preborn. They are involved in the theft and misuse of billions of dollars to protect their child-sex rings and homosexual lives and brother bishops. They pervert the will of God, the Word of God and the Body and Blood of God. And yet, they have the gall to go after good priests all over the country for being "divisive" and for inspiring hate against the hierarchy. As far as being divisive, take a look in the mirror, bishops. For the record, it would be really difficult for any priest to inspire more hatred against the bishops than what they have managed to inspire themselves. As far as being divisive, take a look in the mirror, bishops. It would be harder to imagine a scene with a more revolting countenance looking back. This is why they loathe actual men, actual good priests: They look at them and know down deep who they themselves really are — repugnant, filthy, little men who cannot handle the truth, either hearing it about themselves or when preached about God. One day a rain will come and, like their spiritual father Judas, it will have been better for them had they never been born.

TRANSCRIPT What we are looking at in today's religious and cultural breakdown is the combination of two factors, each of which has played out in two stages and all of which has now combined. In the Church, the heresy of modernism is now in near-total control. It was first identified by Pope St. Pius X back in 1907 when he called modernism the synthesis of all heresies, which indeed it is. Every heresy takes some aspect of truth and perverts it, which is why it may not be immediately recognizable. In the culture, we have communism rising, just as we do modernism in the Church, and, following the same type of game plan, that political system presents some truthful cultural dynamic, such as the uneven distribution of wealth, and then perverts it. It's interesting to note that the first phase of modernism and communism appeared on the world stage at roughly the same time and same locale, which would be modern-day Germany. They are, in fact, siblings, as it were, since religion and culture are always bound together so intricately. Both agents, modernism and communism, however, do not content themselves merely to make commentary on the current state of affairs, but rather create a revolution within their own spheres and overthrow the existing order. That is where the second phase comes in for each of them. Modernism's goal is the overthrow of the Church, and communism's goal is the overthrow of political freedom. And this is where both systems openly converge. Prior to the mid-20th century, we could have spoken of these as parallel streams, but now, in the past 50 years or so, they have joined together and created one giant river, wiping away everything in its path. In the first phase, each system worked to undermine its respective institution — the Church and the culture — to soften up its defenses and to lay the groundwork for the coming assault to be met with the least amount of resistance as possible. It was a two-pronged attack, always destined to link up and surround the enemy (the enemy in this case, of course, being faithful Catholics, and to a much lesser degree, baptized Christians of goodwill). While belief in and adherence to the authority of the Church and Her teachings were being softened up on the right flank, the trust in the cultural institutions was also being eroded on the left flank. As people's faith grew weaker, they became more susceptible to believing cultural lies and half-truths. As people's faith grew weaker, they became more susceptible to believing cultural lies and half-truths. Moral theology in the Church, with its emphasis on sexuality, simply fell out of fashion as a direct result of it having been undermined in previous decades. Ryan Grant is founder of Mediatrix Press and translates such giants in the realm of moral theology as St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Alphonsus Liguori. He correctly asserts that the Church has fallen into the error of laxism, and this needs to be brought to an end immediately. It was commonplace in the Church's history to produce what were known in shorthand as "moral manuals," references for guidance and explanation in the moral life; what you can do or not do and why. Grant shares that in classroom settings, for example, students are looking for clarity in various matters, including, most commonly, areas of sexuality. What communism and modernism combined have accomplished is the enthronement of the sexual revolution — which is actually no longer a revolution because it is now the status quo. In fact, it is so much the status quo that what is revolutionary is to oppose it. The Church's severely weakened defenses against the evil of sexual immorality were the floodgate that allowed communism to sweep into the West without a single shot being fired. Guns and bullets were not necessary once minds were captured, especially young minds on Catholic campuses across the nation. If the Catholic Church could be manipulated into giving up on fighting sexual immorality, then the culture could be won. In short, that is precisely what has happened. However, the final stage of all this is playing out now before our eyes. Having created a culture that now no longer merely tolerates but embraces evil, even enumerates various evils as actual civil rights protected in law and forced upon the citizenry, the goal of these two "isms" (communism and modernism, now united), is clearly within the grasp of their proponents. And so united are these two that it's almost antiquated to speak of them as two separate ideologies, for there is far less separating them than there is uniting them. A culture steeped in immorality — fornication, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, pornography — and blinded by lust and perversion to the reality around it, has no future. A person chooses either morality or death. Human history never remains static. There are always, in every age, human agents cooperating with spiritual agents, knowingly or not, to either advance or destroy humanity. But not just humanity in the broad, general, collective sense, but individual souls. All humanity is, after all, is a giant collection of individuals. Truth, which by its nature is objective, has been discarded and substituted with relativism, and this disorder in the Church and the culture has become the new order. The individual, divorced in the common mind from his connection to God, no longer has a claim to his individual freedom. All we need to understand this is to look around at what is touted as science, which is merely the political imposition of the new world order. Objective truth doesn't matter because it "does not exist." Truth, as Pontius Pilate suggested, is imaginary, fleeting, whatever can be used by the State at a given moment for securing whatever the State wants. That reality has always been the case, but what is most alarming is the cooperation that so many bishops have engaged in with all of this. But after just a small amount of reflection, the reasonable person concludes that it must be this way with the bishops because they have been colluding with the State for decades, just not as openly. At this point, they, as a body, have become so corrupt themselves that it is impossible for them to extricate themselves from the spiritual and cultural quagmire they have created. They have produced generations of political leaders with no moral training, and those political leaders are now in control. The individual, divorced in the common mind from his connection to God, no longer has a claim to his individual freedom. Absent truth (which they are), absent any firm founding in moral training, they have become Pontius Pilates and King Herods and are bringing about the final destruction of a nation, a people and large swaths of the Church. We know in the end that justice and peace will meet and embrace, but in the immediate present, modernism and communism have met and embraced. On this week's Mic'd Up, we go into much deeper probing of all of this and explore the need to reassert the Church's moral theology to whatever degree we can do so in our own spheres. We produce Mic'd Up almost every week and release it on Sundays. It is one of our Premium programs that we strongly suggest you view. We have great, very knowledgeable interview subjects in Mic'd Up who provide you the opportunity to learn, on a much deeper level, the things you may not have thought of before. Likewise, we kick off each episode with a very well-produced video report that essentially summarizes the week's topic before we go in-depth with our guest. If this is not the end of the world we are getting into, and we have no idea one way or the other, but if it is not, then when humanity reemerges from this current darkness, it will need the faithful to reassert the truth. It might be a few years, it might be a few centuries, but the light can never be completely extinguished. Please view this week's Mic'd Up, and if you are not already a Premium member, please use this as an opportunity to sign up now.

TRANSCRIPT At Pentecost Mass in Rome this past Sunday, Pope Francis was reported to have said the following: "Today, if we listen to the Spirit, we will not focus on conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and liberals, right-wingers and leftists. If this is the criteria, then the Spirit is forgotten in the Church. The Paraclete urges unity, consensus." This is one of those counsels to the faithful that sounds wonderful on the surface, but with just a smidgen of second thought, reveals itself to be completely empty and bereft of any substance. The main reason is that there is absolutely zero context. Of course the Holy Spirit urges unity. Consensus, on the other hand, well, we don't quite know what is meant by that. Again, it's lacking context. Does consensus mean something akin to compromise where we all decide this or that based on some kind of spiritual horse-trading? You know, the stuff that comprises the art of diplomacy, such as compromise. The basic issue with using terms like "progressive," "liberal" and "leftist" as adjectives for Catholics is simple: There is no such thing. There's only one word for what is trying to be described: "heretic." As St. Thomas More would say, "It's not a likable word; it's not a likable thing." The basic issue with using terms like 'progressive,' 'liberal' and 'leftist' as adjectives for Catholics is simple: There is no such thing. But it is the best word. When a person claiming to be Catholic continually espouses ideas, notions and ideologies that morph into an agenda that is anti-Catholic, that person is not a "progressive Catholic." He is a traitor to the Faith. This is not isolated to just the arena of intrinsic evils, but it certainly is most prominently seen there. When James Martin, Blase Cupich, Joseph Tobin or Robert McElroy try to doublespeak and make homosexual acts seem OK, that's not progressive Catholicism. It's heresy. Nor is it liberal or leftist. All those terms are political labels. They have no business or traction inside the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. That's precisely what the "One" stands for and signifies at the head of that list. And when a priest, bishop or cardinal tries to teach or present "between the lines" that sodomy, for example, is not an intrinsically evil act, they are, in no way, being Catholic. "Liberal Catholics" don't get to support sodomy or gloss over the LGBTQ+ agenda and then present themselves as somehow Catholic. When priests and bishops of Germany "bless" homosexual couples, they aren't doing something "progressively Catholic." They're doing something anti-Catholic. They are, in fact, abusing their offices and authority to make something unholy out of that which is holy. That's the walking definition of sacrilege. Perhaps a better way for the Holy Father to have phrased this might have been an appeal to the Holy Spirit to bring unity to the Catholic clergy and laity who are supporting sacrilege and dissent and heresy. And that means conversion, not consensus. There is no consensus with sacrilege or evil or sin. The Church is not a government agency (although sacrilegious dissidents behave as though it is) where we come up with policies we can "unify" around and create a "big tent" so that we can all give up something in exchange for something else and cut backroom deals on assorted teachings. Yet, if you look around the leadership of the Church these days, that is exactly what we have — a corrupt hierarchy that, while perhaps not outwardly denying the teachings (although some have), has kept quiet in the face of scandal, sacrilege, abuse, theft and everything else. Such men are not merely "leftist Catholics" or some other variety. They act in a manner diametrically opposed to the One True Faith. Where there is a legitimate difference in the Church is over spiritualities, devotions and so forth. There can be various discussions on finer points of questions like, "If Adam and Eve had not sinned, would the Second Person have incarnated anyway?" Exploring a question like that can broaden thought to bring up other questions and reflections and arrive at new understandings of the same truth. There is nothing anti-Catholic or opposed to truth in asking, for example, if we will have our pets in Heaven. Of course, these are theological questions that we'll likely only know once we die. In the meantime, they'll make for splendid Catholic discussion around the barbecue this coming weekend. All those terms are political labels. They have no business or traction inside the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. We can divide and subdivide into the pro-pet Catholic or the anti-Incarnation Catholic, assuming Adam and Eve had not sinned. But there can be no division — hence, no need for adjectives and descriptors — with Catholics who accept the unity of the Church as She is constituted in Christ. But those who create conditions leading to confusion in men's souls, conditions that raise doubts about the Church Herself — which is what lies at the bottom of all this because that is the desired outcome — well, my dog Rebel is more Catholic than they are. After all, which of these two creatures has never masqueraded error as truth? Rebel is straight-up Catholic — at least as much as leftist, liberal, progressive Catholics, which is simply shorthand for "heretic."

TRANSCRIPT There is a quote all over the Catholic internet attributed to Pope Benedict XVI that he never actually said, just like many quotes attributed to people, especially saints, that they never said. Sometimes these quotes are a "mashing together" of various things they said over a period of time, and then authors and internet types take huge liberties and arrange separate thoughts, putting them together as though it was one continual utterance. The specific quote attributed to Pope Benedict we are referencing is "The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness." While the gist of that is true, it's not what he said. It likely arose from a combination of things he said at various talks and what he wrote in his 2007 encyclical, Spe Salvi, which translates to "saved in hope." What he wrote is "Man was created for greatness — for God Himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched." Anything outside of life with God and in God, sooner or later, is found wanting, insufficient. What he spoke at various times were things like "Man is not created for comfort." So, yes, the upshot is that we are not made for ease, but for God. Good enough. But there is something much deeper here, and it's something that has been glossed over for decades and downplayed by Church leaders: Man has zero capability of achieving greatness. God alone bestows greatness because greatness, properly understood, is life with God. Anything outside of life with God and in God, sooner or later, is found wanting, insufficient. Yet, a veritable cornucopia of insufficient, temporary satisfactions is placed before us by the millions, comfort offered over greatness. The first step to life with God is a rejection of these false gods — and there are many of them. This is, for example, the chief error of James Martin when he preaches to confused audiences of homosexuals, who are mostly baptized Catholics. It is also the chief error of the hierarchy, which stays silent about his evil. At its heart, accepting comfort over greatness is a violation of the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods besides Me." Yet to choose comfort over greatness is precisely that — opting for a fake god over God Himself. So how does one aspire to greatness — not achieve it, just aspire to it? We never achieve greatness. God grants it. Note, for example, the Tower of Babel account. It states specifically that they desire to be great; it's the motivation for their action. God wiped out those plans. But then He shuffled over to Ur and spoke to Abram saying, "I will make of you a great nation." It is God alone Who bestows greatness; we just need to be worthy of receiving it and worthiness comes through our actions. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." Love entails rejecting comfort when it becomes a block to becoming worthy. Ultimately, it demands sacrifice — and not just some sacrifice that is normal and usual in the day-to-day of human life. Even atheists make sacrifices, sometimes repeatedly. But the sacrifice must entail the view — the intention — to be made for greatness with God. Sacrifice on its own is meaningless. In fact, sacrifice is woven into the fabric of daily life even for the most selfish person. A selfish person works and "sacrifices" some of his wealth for a house, food, car and so forth. Ultimately, all sacrifice is just an exchange of one thing for another, a thing you hold valuable for something you consider more valuable. But unless the object of the exchange is God, it will ultimately disappoint. Food perishes; houses need constant repair and upkeep; cars break down. No earthly comfort ever suffices. Sex, money, power and drugs are all oriented toward self and have no substance to bring about greatness. The Christian life is the Cross, the sacrifice here for the reward later. It's so basic, you say. But if it's so basic, why do we never hear about it? The Christian life is the Cross, the sacrifice here for the reward later. The James Martins of the world, the U.S. bishops and the worldwide hierarchy are constructing a "Tower of Babel," looking to establish some kind of "great" civilization of controlling the climate, reimagining nations and so forth. Like in the Old Testament, it will be brought to ruin. It's just too bad that so many leaders in the Church have cast their lot with those building the tower, as opposed to those being chosen by God for greatness.

TRANSCRIPT As you certainly know by now, after months of planning and organizing our "Bishops: Enough Is Enough" prayer rally and protest scheduled for Baltimore this coming November (to coincide with the bishops' annual meeting), the city of Baltimore, namely, the city solicitor James Shea, abruptly canceled the event. His out-of-the-blue decision, however, may not have been as out of the blue as it first appeared. Subsequent to my initial phone call with him asking why he canceled the perfectly legal contract, Church Militant has learned that the highly active Democrat has some long, deep relationships with the U.S. bishops. Without knowing those details when I was speaking with him, I had nevertheless asked him, "Did you get a call or communication from anyone at the USCCB asking you to cancel it?" His response was, "I can neither confirm nor deny that." Our First Amendment rights have been clearly violated, and, as a result, we have been huddling with some very good First Amendment attorneys. Shea maintained to me throughout that phone call that the reason he decided to cancel the contract was that he had received reports that Church Militant was tied to the Jan. 6 events at the Capitol and posed a threat of violence. That, as they say, is a load of bull, and Shea knows it, which is why he couldn't provide me with a single report, claim or document showing that claim to be true. He just kept saying that the reports are widely available on the internet. First, no they are not. We looked through, scoured actually, the internet, looking for anything claiming we had anything to do with Jan. 6. Nothing turned up. Shea either blatantly lied about that or was lied to by some other actor or actors and just accepted their word. In either case, our First Amendment rights have been clearly violated, and, as a result, we have been huddling with some very good First Amendment attorneys and are now taking action. What Shea, acting as an agent of the city as well as personally, has done here is engage in what's called "viewpoint discrimination," meaning he or the bishops or both just don't like our viewpoint so he made up a bunch of garbage to cancel our event. But it's really about the content, just like it always is when someone says something about Church Militant. They pretend it's the tone, and in this case, some idiocy that we are going to firebomb the Baltimore harbor and attack the bishops' conference, but it's really about the content of what would be said from the stage. And everybody knows it. What Shea, acting as an agent of the city as well as personally, has done here is engage in what's called 'viewpoint discrimination.' So, first step, we have sent the following demand letter to Shea and given him until noon this Friday to comply and reverse his original order to cancel, which, again, is based on a pack of lies. If he does not reverse and restore the rally that was based on a perfectly legal contract and which we broke no provisions of, then, as they say, we'll see you in court — as well as be diligently pursuing the whole "bishop angle" to all of this. We said we'd keep you updated, so here is the letter: Mr. James Shea: We are formally demanding that the prayer rally originally scheduled to take place at the MECU Pavilion on Nov. 16, 2021 by St. Michael's Media/Church Militant be reinstated. We require a response within five business days. After the MECU Pavilion agreed to allow us to host our event, relying on that legal and binding contractual agreement, St. Michael's Media promoted the event publicly and secured 16 nationally known speakers to appear at the rally. Relying on that agreement, we received more than 2,000 reservations, with the expectation the event would reach full capacity. Many attendees purchased plane tickets and made hotel arrangements. Our staff also spent many hours organizing and planning. The MECU Pavilion was specifically chosen because of its proximity to the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott Hotel, where the U.S. bishops hold their annual meeting. Our prayer rally was meant to be a visible protest of the bishops' corruption, sex abuse cover-up and financial malfeasance. In addition to talks, we had planned on praying the Rosary. Thus the event was both in the public interest and also had an overriding religious dimension. Holding the event elsewhere would be moot and would eliminate the very purpose of the rally, which is meant to be a visible protest directly in view of the bishops. We held the exact same rally in the same location during the U.S. bishops' meeting in 2018. The rally was peaceful, and there were no complaints from MECU management or from the city. We therefore have a demonstrated track record of peaceful and orderly presence in Baltimore. On Aug. 5, 2021, you abruptly canceled our rally. We were never advised of any contract provision we had violated. Neither did you substantiate the outrageous, slanderous allegation that St. Michael's Media was linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol protest — a claim we vehemently deny. We are also highly suspicious of your personal close associations with the U.S. hierarchy, coupled with the reality that the U.S. bishops, who were the ones being prayed for and protested against by 3,000 Catholic U.S. citizens, are the only substantive beneficiaries of your actions. We pose no threat to anyone's health or safety — and you know that. Your friendly ties to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have the appearance of collusion with the only entity that stands to benefit from our cancellation — even under false pretenses. Furthermore, the reasons offered to cancel our event were a pretext and utterly without basis, resulting in violation of our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and free exercise of religion. We also believe you are in breach of contract for canceling the agreement based on this pretext, after we had relied on the agreement to our detriment. The right to peaceably assemble and protest is a cornerstone of our constitutional government. Government may not violate those rights without a compelling government interest, using the least speech-restrictive option available. You have provided no such compelling government interest here because the reason you offer — an alleged link to Jan. 6 — is utterly without basis and demonstrably false. Likewise, the quickly evaporating case, as admitted this past week by the government against those who actually were present in D.C. on Jan. 6, further weakens your claims. Even so, the government is not allowed to weaponize security concerns to trample on citizens' First Amendment rights. You are engaging in a heckler's veto, which is unconstitutional. If you stand by your original, baseless decision, or fail to reply, we will initiate legal proceedings against you personally, as well as the city of Baltimore, in whose name you spuriously acted to deny us our First Amendment rights. We will not sit idly by while the city tramples on our rights because you do not agree with our viewpoint and have fabricated salacious stories about us to justify your abuse of authority. While this is still a free country, no thanks to the political party (Democrat) you personally are so wedded to, as well as a corrupt hierarchy wildly supportive of your political party, we will fight this with every means available. We are submitting this demand letter that the city reverse its decision and reinstate our Nov. 16 rally. Your deadline to respond is 12 p.m. ET, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. Sincerely, Michael Voris. We will let you know what, if any, his response is and then what happens after that. Stay tuned, and please keep all this in your prayers.

TRANSCRIPT It might be a little too early to call it another "Great Awakening," but something is certainly afoot. Something is stirring in the souls of patriots in America, many of whom are solid Catholics. Whether this thing has the potential to turn the ship around, we'll have to see. But if that doesn't happen, it won't be from lack of trying. Given the unique arena in which Church Militant operates — a hybrid of theology and politics — we keep encountering solid men and women of faith who, even if they aren't Catholic, are very friendly toward the One True Faith. Something is stirring in the souls of patriots in America, many of whom are solid Catholics. Among these folks, there is a decided push to change things politically; to grab the Marxists currently in control of Washington, D.C. and give them a good throttling. They are beginning to arrive in droves to the political world. They're first-timers who have never really had any kind of professional experience in politics. Call them the "Trumpsters" or the "America Firsters" — or whatever you call them — they are beginning to gather steam, and they are done with "The Swamp." Many of these folks (mostly, but not exclusively, men) are everything the Marxist Swamp detests with a passion. They're heterosexual family men. They're pro-military, pro-law and order and pro-baby in the womb. In short, they check all the boxes. As I said, Church Militant keeps crossing paths with these folks — people who are also elated to do an interview with us. The feeling on that score is mutual. The most recent interview we did was with Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc, USA (Ret.), the man who served in the Army and put his life on the line for America multiple times — unlike the Marxists currently running the show. He's running for the U.S. Senate next year in New Hampshire and is hoping to unseat first-term Democrat Maggie Hassan.

TRANSCRIPT Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. Despite the constant harping by the Left that people need to move on from the 2020 election, an enormous percentage of Americans still believe that the election was either stolen or that we don't know who actually won. Surveys produce varying results, but about one-third of all voters and two-thirds of Republican voters believe Biden is in the Oval Office because the election was somehow rigged or, at least, badly mismanaged. And to show how persistent and current that belief is, in the ongoing primaries around the country, it is largely the Republican candidates who espouse this belief who keep winning, as highlighted in this article from last month. The feeling among rank-and-file Republicans that Democrats stole 2020 is intense, and they are the ones turning out to vote — and doing so in record numbers. And this feeling is finding a concrete reality in multiple ways, which largely explains the success of the movie 2000 Mules, available largely away from the big screens and being intensely viewed at home by millions. The movie by Dinesh D'Souza outlines a team of investigators exposing the fraudulent election, and polls of people who have watched it, including Democrats, say the flick has increased their conviction and anger. The 2022 midterms are shaping up to be what experts call a "revenge vote." The 2022 midterms are shaping up to be what experts call a 'revenge vote.' The Democrats and the national media had hoped — and even encouraged the belief — that as time went by, fewer and fewer voters would remember or care. Things are turning out, however, to be the exact opposite, and now that the primaries are in full swing, these voters finally have a way to begin to vent their anger. But it's not just the Democrats that middle-class Americans are ticked off at. It's also the Republican leadership, as well as even Donald Trump himself. Trump has endorsed a flurry of candidates for both federal and state offices all over the country, but an increasing number of those endorsements are raising eyebrows with the base. Many were scratching their heads over his endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, but the recent smiles and hugs extended to Congressman Kevin McCarthy ticked off quite a few. McCarthy is seen as pure GOP establishment, one who did nothing to listen to the pleas of the little man in the wake of 2020. On this subject, conservative commentator Pedro Gonzalez said, "Trump endorsing Frank Luntz bunk buddy Kevin McCarthy, instead of using his political capital to undermine bad GOP leadership, is a sign that Trump has not learned much after all this time about who is and is not America First." Another guy took to Twitter, essentially saying the same thing: "Trump's endorsement of swamp rat Kevin McCarthy makes me think that he has learned absolutely nothing from his past mistakes. If he were to be re-elected, he will most likely surround himself with the same losers and backstabbers as he did in his first term." These tweets pretty much sum up what many conservatives are thinking right now. Kristina Karamo is a prime example of how strongly the revenge vote may factor in this election. She's running in Michigan for secretary of state against incumbent Jocelyn Benson, an autocrat who helped make sure nothing was done in Michigan to investigate the steal. Benson simply locked down and shut down all access to voters' calls for a statewide inquiry into the claims. But Benson's tyrannical approach was greatly assisted by a complicit GOP state leadership, headed up by big-money Republicans, spearheaded by the DeVos family, owners of Amway in the western part of the state. That leadership wants nothing to do with a grassroots Republican candidate like Karamo. While Karamo is not Catholic, she is closer to a Catholic worldview than many big-name Catholic politicos whom the bishops support or, at the very least, rarely say a word about. In fact, there is a parallel thing going on between rank-and-file faithful Catholics and rank-and-file Republicans. There is a strong feeling among both — and there is a lot of overlap between these two camps — that they have been massively betrayed by leaders, and large numbers of each point to the same reality that there has been a rejection of core Christian teachings among the elites. Church Militant has interviewed Karamo on three occasions now, this last one being here in the studio. In many ways, she is like many we have interviewed — the anti-candidate, someone who is not concerned with the political game but with making politics work for the people. There is a strong feeling among both camps that they have been massively betrayed by leaders. It's much like Catholics who are walking away from the Church of Nice and its abandonment of core beliefs in favor of the latest "cause of the month," depicted by an increasingly confusing flag with so many agendas represented that even some leftists aren't sure what it all means. Thanks to a rebellion in the ranks of delegates to the Republican convention earlier this year, Karamo is already the party nominee for Michigan Secretary of State and there isn't a lot the GOP elites can do, although they are trying dirty tricks behind the scenes. Therefore, Karamo, with her Trump endorsement in hand, will go on to face off against a woman who successfully shut down every challenge in the state to the 2020 election results. She just won't have any real backing from the party establishment, who would be content to allow Benson another four years in order to prevent a candidate of the people from winning. If you'd like to see the full interview of Kristina, please click on the provided link.

TRANSCRIPT A couple of hundred years ago, an American Protestant clergyman said, "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do." That's an apt thought as faithful Catholics lament the state of the Church. Things are so bad and so overwhelming that a kind of paralysis sets in, which can easily lead to a quiet despair that "nothing can be done." But that's not true, not even close. There is much that can be done, but all of this mess and our actions in response to the mess must be viewed realistically. First, the crisis in the culture, which is little else than communism rising, is a direct result of the unfaithfulness of the Catholic Church, particularly Her leadership — but with plenty of blame to pass around to us laity as well. So when you look around the world and see it collapsing, know that the Church collapsed first. The corruption within the hierarchy became the launching pad for the greater societal evils because the Church was established by Our Blessed Lord to be the sole path to Heaven and, being so constituted, is the only force on earth that can actually push back against and defeat evil. So when you look around the world and see it collapsing, know that the Church collapsed first. Her guardians exchanged the good of Heaven for the pleasures of earth. Second, the crisis in the Church far precedes the fallout from Vatican II. The Second Vatican Council has become a kind of scapegoat in the minds of many Catholics who unthinkingly look at all the confusion following Vatican II and attribute it to Vatican II. That is a very simplistic and wrong notion. The fallout from the council was able to be generated in the first place because, behind the scenes, the seeds had already been planted for decades by modernists who cleverly hid within the cracks and crevices of the Church like termites gnawing away. All that happened after Vatican II is that they came out into the light. Third, if you go into this battle to help restore the Faith without realizing what you are up against, you will become despondent. Simply accept the fact that the corruption and cowardice across the board within the hierarchy has transformed it into an international gay-crime syndicate. As Church Militant has been told repeatedly by officials and victims who come into close contact with this syndicate, it's worse than a mafia. That is your starting point. You cannot go into battle unaware of your enemy. And within the hierarchy itself, do not talk about "good" bishops. A cowardly bishop who still privately believes the Faith but remains largely silent about the evil within the episcopate does not qualify as a "good" bishop. He qualifies as a "not active promoter" of the evil. Good bishops die for the flock and announce the truth because anything short of the fullness of the truth damns souls, including their own. So in approaching bishops in your mind, you must first think in terms of wicked, evil men, such as McCarrick, raised to the episcopate through his influence and trained to lie, cheat, deceive, in some cases, rape and, in all cases, cover it up. Then, when finally caught, they deflect and cut secret financial deals with your money. The other bishops are the cowards, those who, through their own lack of courage, will be the first damned, as St. Paul and St. John tell us. They are the ones who have permitted the wicked bishops to ascend to these great heights by going along with whatever asinine "brother bishop code" or secret handshake they have. Many of these men, nearly all of them products of deficient seminary training back in the 1960s and 1970s, are malformed in theology. It doesn't matter if they are polite or soft-spoken or great to have over to your cocktail party, men like this will abandon the faithful at the first sign of trouble — just look at their ongoing, terrified response to the COVID craziness. To whatever degree they may personally believe the Faith, they don't believe enough, and that's the point. To follow Our Blessed Lord, even as a lowly, insignificant layman, means total abandonment of self. Of course, that plays out over time, but the point is that we must be at least heading that way. Point to any bishop in the United States who is doing just that (and by "just that," we don't mean giving an occasional sound bite or making a social media posting, but one who is standing up out loud and denouncing the evil within the ranks of his own brother bishops). Wicked men enabled by cowards run the Church; accept that reality and come to terms with it. And, please, no comments about Pope Francis down below. The pope did not fall out of the sky. It was this same ecclesiastical swamp that he emerged from as well. For years, Church Militant has been saying that the constant pounding on Pope Francis is just low-hanging fruit by a bevy of social media-type Catholics to generate clicks. But when it comes to the real nitty-gritty of attacking the beast itself, the episcopate from which Jorge Bergoglio emerged, these "YouTube Catholics" are nowhere to be found. They don't organize on-the-ground efforts to help facilitate awareness. They don't put in the time and excruciating effort to investigate individual cases of episcopal corruption. That work is too hard and doesn't gin up anywhere near the number of likes and clicks and payments and emails as other content does. It's much easier to just strike for the high-visibility, low-hanging fruit of Pope Francis. All of that is part of why Church Militant began its grassroots movement that we call Resistance. It was very clear to us that all this constant bellyaching about Pope Francis was accomplishing absolutely nothing, at least for the Faith. All it does is accomplish free publicity for the clickbaiters. But we aren't interested in clicks. We are interested in souls being preserved from this evil swamp in the diocesan and parish levels where the real work of the evil is happening with gay priests, malformed RCIA directors, chanceries full of woke idiots pretending to be Catholic and so forth. Even as we speak, bishops all over the United States are denying people their freedom of conscience regarding the so-called COVID vaccination, sometimes forcing Church workers to submit or get fired. So much for compassion, tolerance and dialogue, right? And that's just one obvious example. The vax hysteria was preceded by a near-total abandonment of the Faith — in liturgy, morals, finances, doctrine — you name it, so that is where whatever effort that can be expended needs to be expended. Here's a short list of successes that Church Militant Resistance has recently had: A predator priest for the Lafayette diocese was denied parole, thanks to the letter-writing campaign held by the Lafayette Resistance A vaccine drive in the diocese of Orange, California was canceled thanks to pressure applied by the Orange County Resistance Austin, Texas Resistance got James Martin canceled from a local Catholic event Thousands of people in San Antonio pledged not to give their money to their archdiocese, thanks to efforts by San Antonio Resistance Hundreds of affidavits were signed calling for a forensic audit of the Michigan election, thanks to support from Detroit Resistance, with sponsorship from the successful "Stand Up Michigan" It's true that no one person can do everything. But you must do whatever you can. Spiritual battles very frequently play out in the material world. It's true that no one person can do everything. But you must do whatever you can. This is why the Church Herself encourages both the spiritual works of mercy as well as the temporal works of mercy. If you are able to do more than pray, then you are obligated to do so. Late next month, Church Militant Resistance is sponsoring a "Boot Camp" in Southern California and is inviting you to attend it. Please click here for details, and please consider attending. The main point is to go into all of this much more in-depth with knowledge and training on what and how to do what needs to be done in your parish or diocese. This kind of grassroots organizing is something the forces of darkness in the culture have been absolute masters at over the decades in ginning up discontent. They have taken serious advantage of the natural disposition of good Catholics and conservatives to do nothing. Like the cowardly bishops, the laissez-faire Catholic has quietly sat by and enabled the wicked in the culture to overrun it. It's time to resist. Resist it all and push back hard. Please join us in SoCal for the Church Militant Resistance Boot Camp.

TRANSCRIPT Manhood and masculinity have so disappeared from the landscape of the Church that it's difficult to know where to even begin when giving examples. But one thing is very definite: Whether it's from the country-club "professional Catholics" (as Pope Benedict labeled them) who would never rock the boat with their local bishop or the wimps on parish councils who refuse to insist on the transmission of the authentic Faith or pastors who just let the LGBTQIA+ agenda rule the roost in their schools, all of this — every last bit — originates from the ranks of the ordained. And the higher up the ranks a male progresses, the more of a woman he becomes. That is fantastic and splendid and beautiful if you are a woman, but in a man, it's repulsive. The sword carries within itself the idea of struggle and conquest, as was used by our Blessed Lord Himself. Two giant examples come to mind here, one somewhat symbolic, the other very real. First, the symbolic: The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem just announced that in its investiture of knights moving forward, it will no longer dub a man a knight by using the sword and tapping it on his shoulder. That's just too violent. Plus, somehow it discriminates against the women who are also invested in the order. This is pure idiocy, total "wokeness." And, of course, it's all brought to you by none other than a cardinal — Fernando Filoni — whose name just happens to conveniently rhyme with "phony," which this whole thing is. The FOF (Friend of Francis) says of his decision to dump the mean, violent sword: The sword represents a symbolism I would consider inadequate for today's reality of our order and for post-conciliar ecclesiology ... and, in popular imagination, carries within itself the idea of armed struggle and conquest; often, in Sacred Scripture, the sword represents punishment for the idea of war and the terrible consequences it produces. What a load of bull. Filoni is a phony who embraces the emasculation of men that has swept over the Western world as the standard by which all males should be measured. In short, it's castrated masculinity. The sword carries within itself the idea of struggle and conquest, as was used by our Blessed Lord Himself as a symbol when He said that He Himself had come to bring the sword. Likewise, St. Paul instructed the Ephesians to take up the "sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Of course, having tossed out spiritual warfare and any substantive belief in Our Lord as divine, it just follows that high-ranking clergy would also rush to toss out all the symbolism attached to spiritual warfare and replace it with stupidity. Cardinal Filoni, in perhaps more symbolism than he realizes, said the bishop crozier would be substituted as the instrument by which knights are to be dubbed, tapping them on the shoulder with that instead of the sword. Given that virtually all bishops, especially in the United States, have forgotten that a chief function of a shepherd's crozier is to violently beat attacking wolves to protect the sheep, it seems more than apropos that a wimpy understanding of a crozier would substitute for a sword. Swords are mean and violent, but a shepherd's crozier is a sweet, cute little thing. These men have gone spiritually insane. But that's what happens when you suck the testosterone out of the clergy: You get "women" religious. And speaking of women, the U.S. bishops are meeting in a few weeks — virtually, of course, so they don't all kill each other with COVID and also so they can sidestep any protests. A topic scheduled to be on the agenda is sacrilegious Holy Communion for the Joe Bidens and Nancy Pelosis of the Church. The topic seemed to have created enough buzz within the conference that, as has been reported, Abp. José Gómez of Los Angeles sent a letter to Rome asking about what they should do because they're so confused. Essentially, what he asked is: Dear Rome, the president of the country and hundreds of other Catholic politicians go to Holy Communion despite keeping in place a well-oiled system which kills millions and millions of children. Everyone in America knows they do this. Many vote for them specifically because they are child murderers. But still, they come up to Holy Communion. Should we bishops continue violating Canon Law 915 and keep committing sacrilege and scandal? We're so confused. Please help. Signed, the gender-confused bishops of America. Well, when their letter got to Rome — to men who have no point of confusion over their preferred genders — the pro-homosexual Cupich and Tobin met with the Roman authorities and plotted with them to make sure Jesus would still be handed over to His enemies. Come to think of it, Judas may have been the first gender-confused among the episcopate because he did the exact same thing. But, as we know, he certainly was not the last. Anyway, the "ladies in scarlet" managed to convince another FOF — the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith — to join them in keeping the sacrilege rolling along, and Gómez was instructed to drag the process out with consensus-building, dialogue, conferences and Zoom calls all over the world with every other bishop and with no end in sight. So that's what he has reported back to the American bishops for their meeting next month. This is where we will see the rubber hit the road. But will bishops who present themselves as faithful stand up at that Zoom meeting and call for an end to this outrage, even if it means losing their miters? A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice. Granted, it is, in one view, being caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, it's God condemning you at your final judgment for silence in the face of massive sacrilege. On the other hand, it's Cupich and Tobin condemning you, engineering your career destruction in Rome behind the scenes. But for men who some of the faithful think are faithful bishops, it all boils down to whom they fear more: God or Cupich. But another way to come at this is that fear of God should not really be the jumping-off point. It should be love of God. If you really believe, you would be horrified at what's going on with these sacrilegious Holy Communions. You would rush to the defense of the Blessed Sacrament, not sit around and debate the wisest political approach. But the heart of the matter is that even the "good" bishops were allowed to advance because they were seen as weak men who would never rock the boat. They, of course, didn't believe in the outrageous corruption and, for the most part, have even steered clear of much of it, at least overtly. But those who let them into seminary, let them advance, ordained them, and, in some cases, even consecrated them, knew they were severely lacking in testosterone and would never challenge or confront the evil in the Church, no matter how much they personally disagreed with it. They would, in the end, cave. In some ways, they are even more emasculated than the Cupiches of the Church, if you can picture that. In a certain sense, Cupich is a toxic brute who imposes his will on anyone he wants and avenges anyone who crosses him. His "femininity" resides in his adoration of the homosexual cult in the Church and his promotion of it. Will one of them man up and take out his sword to beat back the toxic femininity so rampant in the Church? We have a horrible climate in the Church today. It's run by cowards — some of whom are brutal in exercising their authority to drive authentic masculinity further out of the Church. Venerable Abp. Fulton Sheen's canonization process was brought to a halt because U.S. bishops could not have the laity looking at a bishop like that. After all, after listening to Sheen, the laity are able to easily see the current bishops' slips under their cassocks. Archbishop Sheen used to say, "Once a ball is rolling on a certain path, it will continue along that trajectory, rolling straight, unless something is put in its way that changes its trajectory." We have reached such a moment with the conference of U.S. bishops in a few weeks. Will one of them man up and take out his sword to beat back the toxic femininity so rampant in the Church? If the unelected president of the United States, with blood dripping from his hands after receiving Holy Communion, does not present such a moment for bishops to stop breaking canon law and get things going in the right trajectory, then no moment ever will.

Today's Vortex is the second half of our Church Militant Spotlight investigation into Bp. Richard Stika of the diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee. Watch Part I here.

TRANSCRIPT If you aren't a big-picture-type person, this Vortex is especially for you. Some folks are very detail-oriented; others are big-picture types. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Big-picture types are the ones who "get it." But they also have a tendency to blow over or not even notice little markers along the way that are creating the big picture they see. Likewise, detail-oriented people understand a level of minutiae that confounds the "average Joe." But they also often simply get lost in the weeds. At Church Militant, we have a decent grasp of what the big picture is and how it develops. The big picture, of course, is salvation/redemption and the eternal destiny of each soul, Heaven or Hell. But that overarching theme of human history isn't all there is; it's just the most important as it's the capstone of existence under which everything else is fitted. The failure to understand that is yet another indication that the bishops, collectively, are simply horrible shepherds. With their insanity in never mentioning Hell, sin, the Devil or spiritual warfare (with the Barron-promoted evil that we have a reasonable hope that all men are saved), not only do they not get the big picture, but all the smaller "big pictures" make no sense either. The good news is that you don't have to end up in Hell. If you ignore that escape hatch, however, you will. Human history has a plot, just like a good story. Stray from the plot and nothing in the story makes any sense: the characters, their motivations, their actions, the flow — nothing. Such a story just becomes a rambling chaos of disconnected events. It still might be cleverly written here and there, but, in the end, there isn't an end. There's a simple reason every good book, movie or stage play has a plot, a good guy, a villain, critical moments and a conclusion. It's because art imitates life, the spiritual life, the ultimate reality. Everything on earth — the natural order and how it is set up — is merely a reflection of the supernatural order. Justice, love, mercy, truth, sacrifice, joy, evil, malevolence, lies, pride, lust and violence all exist on earth because they first existed in the supernatural realm and then flowed into the natural order. They are the building blocks, so to speak, of a fallen world, and the war on earth is a battle over which of these sets of qualities will win out in each individual person. All of this is human history, but among those building blocks are ones that actually prevent the building from being properly built. With those in the mix, man can never successfully build anything. It is impossible. So we need an outside agent to help us overcome and eliminate the negative and the evils as much as possible so that we can build successfully. Mankind needs a savior or it is condemned to radical failure, here and in the next life. And let's be very clear that fallen man's destiny is misery and eternal death. From that truth, there is no escape. In short, on our own, we are doomed. However, there is hope in the Creator, the Eternal Logos Who comes to this fallen, doomed world and shows the "escape hatch." There is a way out. It's a very narrow opening in the wall. It takes a mighty struggle to first reach it and then go through it. But it exists and, even better, every single human being is capable of finding it and escaping. That is what is meant by what Christians call "the good news." The good news is that you don't have to end up in Hell. If you ignore that escape hatch, however, you will. Despite our inability to save ourselves, there is still hope that we can be saved. We'd say that ranks pretty darn high on the list of "news that is good." All of that, of course, is the ultimate big picture. But as we dive down deeper into all this playing out, this is where you need to stay alert, both for other big pictures and the details which create them, all the while never losing sight of the ultimate big picture. Turning to the world media, for example (something Church Militant is very focused on), it is interesting that while we have the good news, we always have fake news. Fake news on earth is set up to directly counteract and oppose the good news given us from Heaven, and the reason is simple: Fake news is comprised of lies aimed at making you lose sight of the big picture. The term "fake news" was, of course, popularized by Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and employed regularly during his presidency. Donald Trump obviously was not and is not the savior, but he did help create a political and cultural environment where the good news could be more easily preached and pursued. He was, and still is, at least on some level, cooperating with natural virtue, a necessary first step on the road to discovering the escape hatch. For that reason, he had to be opposed by the anti-God forces. So the fake news began. Whatever we think about the so-called vaccines, it was Trump who got them to market in record time, something the fake news lies about. Trump also pushed for hydroxychloroquine, but the fake news lied about its efficacy. Trump's southern border policy was extremely successful compared with the current crisis that has no end in sight. Last month alone, nearly a quarter-million illegal immigrants were apprehended, the highest total ever, and no one knows how many successfully made it in. Fake news not only lied about but actually created the entire Russia narrative to drive an impeachment effort. Fake news lied about and covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story. They lied about the Lafayette Square being cleared for a photo-op incident, a lie that Cdl. Wilton Gregory was quick to embrace and, like so many others, has never backed away from. What else did fake news lie about? They lied about the effectiveness of the life-ruining, economy-demolishing lockdowns in blue states They covered for fake Catholic governor Andrew Cuomo's killing of thousands in nursing homes They lied about the Jan. 6 so-called insurrection being inspired by Trump They lied about the winner of the 2020 election They lied about the death tolls actually from COVID-19 They lied about the source of the virus by saying a kid ate the head of a bat in the Wuhan wet market They lied about the World Health Organization's involvement in all this and how it covered for the communists in Beijing They lied by calling it the Trump virus when, if anything, it's the Fauci virus Each one of these examples is a detail, but each detail feeds into a larger narrative, a bigger big picture, which then feeds into an even bigger big picture, with the ultimate goal of preventing you from finding the escape hatch because your mind is so confused. Clarity, vision, understanding, honesty, knowledge — all pointing to the Truth: That is the only way to find the escape hatch. Clarity, vision, understanding, honesty, knowledge — all pointing to the Truth: That is the only way to find the escape hatch. That escape hatch, of course, is Our Blessed Lord and His Church, the only Church, because He established only one Church. And just as the lies and falsehoods in the secular order must be exposed and fought against, so too must the lies and deceptions within the Church, because all lies — from the world or Church leaders — have the single goal of preventing you from discovering the escape hatch. Ultimately, fake news is in direct contradiction to the good news. This is the driving force behind Church Militant's upcoming Catholic Info Hour, debuting on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021, the day after the U.S. Labor Day holiday, at 7 p.m. ET. We have deliberately chosen this time slot to stand in direct opposition to the empire of fake news, all of which itself airs at that hour. Tune them out; tune us in. Please tell your friends and family, and make this "appointment TV" for yourself. The media, the great purveyor of lies, must be recaptured. This is our effort here at Church Militant to do just that.

TRANSCRIPT Father John Hardon, Servant of God, once described the media in this country as "Luciferian." He was spot-on because the media outlets do the work of their father, the Father of Lies. They spread error — not just mistakes — but actual willful errors to confound and confuse good people into accepting an agenda fundamentally opposed to the truth. None of them is immune from this, and that includes Fox News, as we saw on election night and following. As a very quick aside, regarding Fox, what you see at night during their prime time is not Fox News. Fox News is largely driven by reporters like Chris Wallace — disingenuous liberals masquerading as journalists. The fact that Fox News isn't quite as bad as the others doesn't make them good or reliable. It just makes them not as bad. And as a further aside, that has nothing to do with loving the truth, but everything to do with money. Fox knows and understands that a large, politically conservative voting bloc exists, and they pander to them — at least more than CNN does, for example. If the Catholic Church is the fullness of the truth, which it is, then that needs to be given a voice and brought to people. But moving on, in the Catholic world, there needs to be a counter to all that, and that is what we have and continue to build here at Church Militant. If the Catholic Church is the fullness of the truth, which it is, then that needs to be given a voice and brought to people. Specifically, in the realm of news and current events, the Luciferian media has made gigantic strides in corrupting people's intellects through its expert "storytelling," its high production standards and everything that goes into making television. This is precisely why Fr. Hardon called it "Luciferian." It all looks good, it's professionally presented and even deals with truthful information most of the time — just in a duplicitous way. Presentation, the look, the style, the personalities, the quality — all that goes into the packaging, so to speak. What that accomplishes, like a good presentation of a meal at a restaurant, is to soften you up to want to eat the entree. The entire experience in a restaurant is geared to make you have a favorable feeling about the food in front of you. Presentation goes a long way. It serves the purpose of inviting the potential customer or consumer to want to sample the meal and to have an overall fulfilling experience. And if the meal itself is only just passable, all that packaging will still actually have the patrons coming back. That's how television news works. Package it up all nice and then serve up a portion of information (however distorted) that the viewer grades out as passable. And then, importantly, you get them coming back for more until they are a regular. Until Church Militant rolled onto the scene, it seems no one in what passes as the Catholic "media" world understood this. Unlike the Luciferian media, we here at Church Militant understand that we have a duty to Almighty God to relay His truth — not a pack of lies — to the masses. But additionally, we understand that, like the Luciferian media, packaging counts for a lot. You can announce the truth all you want, but in the arena of the media, especially competing against the Devil, if your writing is lousy, if the camera work is shoddy, if the editing is poor, if it looks bad overall, then an insufficient number of people will watch. As my mom used to say to me about my career in news, "Michael, it's the whole package people take in." That is true, and it is the truth of that which Satan and his media allies have been so wildly successful at exploiting. They find sympathetic victims, and through writing, on-camera interviews, editing and so forth, conjure up an emotional response in viewers who then, after becoming sympathetic to the person the story is about, completely disregard their own intellects and become sympathetic to the agenda being pushed — like abortion, for example. It has worked masterfully for decades. As the Marxist invasion of the educational establishment has served to soften people's critical-thinking skills, the takeover of the media has come at them like the second blow in a one-two punch strategy and gotten them to change their views. They use tactics like: Look at this poor poor woman "victim" who wants so desperately to be a priest and is prevented from doing so by that mean, old, patriarchal Church Roll cameras, show her welling up, find a poignant sound bite and amplify it Shoot or stage some visually compelling video that underscores her pain that you are emotionally required to share Now, find the meanest example you can of some old, unsympathetic priest or grouchy old man — preferably white — and have him say on camera something that paints his words as the villain Quick, cut back to the would-be woman priest who is emotional, but resolved, to change this corrupt Church, and then wrap the whole thing up in a feelings-based flurry of shots, music and very clever writing — with a closing thought suggesting there's something wrong with you if you aren't on her side And voilà, another one — meaning the intellect of the viewer — bites the dust, shot down, and in its place, another supporter of women's ordination. Of course, what's left out of all of this is the truth. But that is precisely what makes the Luciferian media, well, Luciferian — truth be damned. There has, to this point, not been anywhere in the Catholic-media world even a response to this evil in the media, much less an answer. Until now. In the wake of the stolen election, following up on our campaign and election coverage in the midst of the stealing and the refusal of establishment Republicans and courts to address the fraud, Church Militant made a decision to actually continue our election coverage in what we called our Post-Election Special. We committed to producing that coverage every day until someone took the oath of office or it was a foregone conclusion. So for two months, that's what we did, right from this very stage behind me. We poured virtually all our resources into that, night after night, suspending almost everything else we do because it was that important. The Luciferian media, sensing a near-total wipeout, promoted massive lies, and they did so with the help of various members of the Church. That needed to be combated, so we did. Those Post-Election Specials brought in thousands and thousands of viewers every night. We went professional, so to speak. Everyone in this room dedicated themselves to covering every single angle from every perspective possible because we understand this one point: The work of the demonic is carried out in every sphere of life, including politics — in this day and age, you could even say especially politics. We understood (and we broadcasted) that what was happening was a takeover of America, engineered by anti-Christian forces committed to demolishing faith in Jesus Christ and His Church. Well, that was then. We kept airing our Post-Election Special until Jan. 6 when Biden, through cheating by Marxists and cowardice by Republicans and judges, officially secured the Electoral College vote. However, that was not and is not the end of the story. It was the conclusion of a very horrible chapter, but it isn't over. To that end, we converted our Post-Election Special into our Church Militant Evening News, which comes to you live each weeknight at 6:30 p.m. ET and is then available on replay very shortly thereafter. Church Militant realizes most people don't have the time to pore through dozens of hours of news and information every day to get a firm handle on all this evil so that they're able to tell family and friends and help them understand what's going on. That's why we do Evening News every single weeknight — to provide you the most reliable, expansive, no-holds-barred and truthful news you can get from an authentic Catholic lens. What we have created is what you can call a "one-stop-shopping" media outlet for you. Give us 30 minutes a night, and we'll give you everything you need to know. If you can't watch us live, as we said, the replay is on the site and available for when you can watch. It's fine to tune into Tucker or whomever — you'll get some truth there with clever writing, presentation and all that. But you will not and cannot get what you get from Church Militant, which is how all this is connected to destroy your soul. Even so-called conservative media, at the end of the day, is all about politics and ratings. We deal in salvation and correctly understand politics not as an end in itself, but as one of the foxholes on the battlefield for your soul. Granted, it's a very important foxhole, but only in relation to salvation. This is what we mean by presenting the news from an authentic Catholic lens. Quality of production absolutely matters so people will give you a hearing, a chance. If we don't care about the quality of our own work, why should you? But we do care. In fact, we are meticulous about it. The Marxist media is incredibly good at what it does. It's why it has been so successful at corrupting a nation. And here's a closing thought on all this: If media is not a major player in the spiritual war, then why has Satan pursued it so vigorously and captured it, turning it into his work? If media is not a major player in the spiritual war, then why has Satan pursued it so vigorously and captured it, turning it into his work? Catholics are far behind in many, many areas. We've been too docile, too quick to roll over and (incorrectly) turn the other cheek, too complacent, too "let God handle it," too willing to retreat from battle and confrontation and into a piety that is more excuse than genuine. When will we stand up and own the truth given to us and fight for it? The Marxist media fights like mad to advance its lies, but Catholics refuse. Well, not here, no longer. There are lots of foxholes on this battlefield for salvation, and we have jammed our stake in the ground of this one, the media foxhole. Please join us either live at 6:30 or on replay each weeknight for Church Militant Evening News as we reclaim the world of media.

Today's Vortex is the first half of our Church Militant Spotlight investigation into Bp. Richard Stika of the diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee. Watch Part II here.

TRANSCRIPT Shortly after the news broke about Theodore McCarrick in June of 2018 that he was a serial homopredator, the modernist spin machine went into overdrive covering its tracks. In a stunningly audacious interview at the annual Knights of Columbus convention that summer, Cdl. Donald Wuerl, who turned out to be the frontman for the cover-up, totally attempted to deflect when questioned by another liar in a collar, Fr. Thomas Rosica. For the record, the truth of both these men has been fully revealed. Rosica being a serial plagiarist is now in "ecclesiastical Siberia," where he should have always been, and Wuerl was essentially embarrassed into stepping down after his role in the cover-up. But life being what it is, Rosica gets banished and Wuerl collects a couple of million dollars a year from the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. The interview, however, revealed a lot more because Wuerl signaled in that interview to his brother bishops to hold the party line and do or say nothing. When it came to homosexual bishops or cover-up bishops, all of this was to be kept "in-house." That summer was a total revealing of the corruption in the hierarchy — from McCarrick and the Pennsylvania grand jury report, to the original Vigano testimony where, for the first time, the presence of an active, wicked, homosexual cabal was outed as having a stranglehold on the Church. If knowledge were not king, the evil bishops and their cowardly counterparts would not go to such great lengths to deprive you of it. But to Wuerl, who had been a master of deceit his entire time in robes, this was just another opportunity to get control of the narrative by saying the issue went back "decades and decades" so there was no need for him to resign. Wuerl, with his serpentine demeanor, went on the secular media tour, continuing the cover-up not only of himself but of all the other bishops involved in this filth — just like so many other cardinals in the Church whose resumes are replete with degrees in lying, deceit, deflection and falsehoods. To dive a little deeper into the "decades and decades ago" fabrication, if that is the case, then why was a Brazilian bishop just relieved of his duties for pleasuring himself on a video feed? Why was a Michigan priest, trained at Sacred Heart Seminary here in Detroit just a few years ago and touted as a "model seminarian," just arrested and charged with child sex trafficking? Why was the highest-ranking priest in the United States, Msgr. Jeffrey "Grindr" Burrill, just caught making hundreds of hookups for homosexual activity? Why is the North American College in Rome currently being sued for homopredator behavior on the part of the vice rector who mysteriously just resigned out of the blue? Included in that suit are more than 30 U.S. bishops who, according to the suit, covered it all up and were completely nonresponsive to the pleas of a seminarian being railroaded by Cdl. Timothy Dolan of New York. And that Brazilain bishop, prior to his unfortunate video display, had been twice reported to the Vatican for theft and having a homosexual lover. Of course, nothing was ever pursued. It's becoming commonplace now in the Church that if you do not have electronic recordings of the actual crime or sin, the bishops investigate themselves and then clear themselves. For example, Bp. Richard Malone of Buffalo is no longer bishop not because he refused to answer questions we and others put to him about his cover-up of sex abuse by Buffalo clergy, but because he was secretly recorded on audio by one of his own priests admitting his scheming. Likewise, in Crookston, Minnesota, Bp. Michael Hoeppner is gone now because he was captured lying on video during a deposition. And while there wasn't specific video or audio evidence with Wuerl, there was a paperwork trail that came to light that proved he too, as Abp. Vigano said, was lying through his teeth. Civil suits, criminal charges or video/audio proof are the only things that the "transparent, always want to dialogue, apologetic" bishop crowd ever respond to because only then is their hand forced. Of course, all this begins with knowledge, meaning the Catholic faithful must first understand precisely who and what they are dealing with: The hierarchy is an international homosexual crime syndicate that destroys anyone and everyone it can to secure its money and cover its active homosexuality. The hierarchy has been aligning itself with the party of death, the communist Democrats, for decades because that party has been funneling them loads of cash every year to help destabilize America. The bishops steal the faithful's money from the collection basket each Sunday and steal it again from their taxes every year. It's quite the racket, in fact. You get zillions of dollars from people you have fooled into thinking you're trustworthy and then you owe an accounting to no one — until you die, of course. And even now, in light of all these revelations, a huge number of Catholics are still in the dark because so few people are actually telling you all this, least of all the Catholic establishment media who also profit from all this evil, however pious they may present themselves in matters strictly theological. Church Militant has been informing you of all this corruption way before it was fashionable. As we learned of the total depravity and depth of the evil the hierarchy engages in, we committed to exposing everything we can because, at the end of the day, it stands as a roadblock to innocent souls flailing about in an ocean of cultural wokeness engineered by the bishops in cooperation with the Marxist Democrats. The bottom line to this Vortex is that knowledge is king. If knowledge were not king, the evil bishops and their cowardly counterparts would not go to such great lengths to deprive you of it. They never reveal anything unless they are forced to by a judge or by other circumstances. What is needed right now is more knowledge on the part of the faithful so that they can spread the word and take action, demand change, look for opportunities to sue these monsters in miters, get the secular press to do stories on them, and just be relentless, pounding, and never stopping — just like the hierarchy has been with you for decades in covering up the truth. In other words, hound these men — but you need the knowledge to do that. That is why Church Militant is excited to announce that beginning on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021, we will be expanding our nightly news coverage to now incorporate The Download discussion immediately following it. Secondly, we will be airing this all-new Catholic Info Hour each weeknight from 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. ET. (This is a change from the current 6:30 p.m. ET time where we bring you just Evening News live. Now it will be Evening News and The Download as a full one-hour live presentation beginning at 7 p.m. ET.) The Catholic world needs a single, reliable point of knowledge and information that has no constraints. The staff has been in meetings and planning sessions and deeper discussions for weeks now, and we are getting our final game on by rearranging shifts and personnel responsibilities to bring you the most informative, no-holds-barred, honest, trustworthy news and discussion show in the entire Catholic world. Sorry EWTN, CNA, Register, Relevant Radio, Ave Maria Radio and the like, but the rest of you are just not trustworthy in discussing the current crisis in the Church. You are personally invested in keeping your mouths shut. And, as we have said for years, that's the price you have to pay for your lack of independence. You are too closely tied to the criminals in the hierarchy, and, no matter how you slice it and dice it, you are compromised. Period. There are simply some subjects you are forbidden from covering, but the problem is that it is precisely those subjects that are at the heart of the crisis. The Catholic world needs a single, reliable point of knowledge and information that has no constraints. That, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow faithful Catholics, is the Catholic Info Hour, debuting live on Church Militant on Tuesday, Sept 7, 2021, at 7 p.m. ET. Thank you to all our Premium Members and supporters who make the ever-expanding Church Militant footprint possible. And, for the record, that's six million viewers per month. Thank you, and be sure to mark your calendars for the debut of the Catholic Info Hour.

TRANSCRIPT Yesterday, Pope Francis announced that Jesus is not God, having faith does not matter at all, and everyone goes to Heaven, so it doesn't matter how you live your life — commit as many sins as you like; have sex with whomever you want and as often as you like; marriage is just a social construct, so you can have sex before marriage because, well, nothing is a sin, because sin is just a theological construct. Actually, he didn't say any of that. But that is the effect of what the Vatican and huge numbers of bishops have allowed through their unholy silence. Large numbers of people actually believe all that stuff we just mentioned, to one degree or another. Why? Because to actually believe requires the supernatural virtue of faith, and the more you indulge in sin and come to actually embrace it, the less you believe. Sin is never able to be excused as being right. God hates sin. And let's draw a bright line here. We aren't talking about struggling with sin, believing it to be wrong and evil and in need of being confessed. We are not talking about the habit of sin that a weak man frequently succumbs to. We're talking about the sin that occurs when a weak man actually steps over the line, crosses the threshold and has so embraced the sin that he begins to rationalize it, makes excuses for it and eventually comes to believe that it's fine. When a man reaches that point, good luck — because he's going to need it. At that point, he has crossed a boundary from which it is extremely hard to come back. Why? Because such a man comes to believe in his sin, which means he comes to disbelieve the Church and Her divinely instituted teachings. Let's take, for example, a man who gives into the capital sin of lust but actually tells himself it's OK. At the beginning of his process of losing his faith, and thereby his eternal life, he's got really good reasons: We live together because we're going to get married anyway Right now neither of us can afford to live on our own, so being under the same roof makes sense, financially Everyone I know is doing the same thing, so it just makes sense Yes, every one of those is a reason — but not an excuse. Sin is never able to be excused as being right. God hates sin. He completely and utterly despises it, and His followers cannot claim to believe in Him and believe sin is OK. God hates sin because of what it does to the individual. These are not arbitrary commands placed on fallen man to make his life difficult. Sin destroys. It is spiritual cancer that, if not checked early or battled against continually, will kill the person — first in this life, and then in the next. Sin is, without exception, always an act turned in on oneself, even if another person is involved in the sin. But it's not about the other person. It can't be, no matter how much the man or woman pretends it is, covers it over in romantic talk and so forth. If they really cared about the other person, they wouldn't be using the other person's body as an instrument for self-satisfaction and then rationalizing it. They would not be leading that person they claim to love straight into Hell. Illicit sex always leads down a road that ends badly. One way or the other, somehow, someway, it always ends in death. The philosophical reason is that sex is about life, giving life, creating life; and to pervert it brings about death. Just like fire properly understood and employed is about warmth and comfort — when perverted, it brings about ferocious destruction. No human being walks this earth who is not a complex bundle of psychological factors. No one. It is there, in the recesses of our pain, confusion, lack of understanding and passions that sin finds an incubator. And it doesn't matter what the sin is. For many, it is sexual or sex-related, but just because it is probably the most common area of sin, it doesn't mean it gets a pass. Will the damned really rely on the excuse, "Well, everyone I knew was just like this too," as they are plunging into the depths of the fiery pit? Sin destroys faith. A man cannot serve two masters. Sooner or later, the man who first succumbs to and then embraces sin will begin to embrace other sins as well or go deeper into that sin. Sin, like God, wants to take total possession of a person. There are no half measures when it comes to the soul. The soul does not half-commit to something. True, it takes steps, baby steps at first, as it moves toward its end, but it is never not moving toward an end, be it good or bad. Heaven is the total embrace of God. Hell is the total non-embrace of God. Few people achieve either state fully in this life, but they are "rewarded" with it in the next. There is a line in Scripture that is truly horrifying. It is, "God will grant you your heart's desire." It's true. He will give you whatever it is you will, wherever it is you direct your will. He gave you your free will, and He will give you whatever it is you will. What we will, however, is entirely our choice. But because we are victims of fallen nature, what we will is oftentimes completely twisted, perverted, corrupted. Even when it is something good in and of itself, we often have a way of spoiling it in the day-to-day. This is why grace is so absolutely necessary and, without it, a soul is damned. It's why the Church teaches that a person must die in a state of sanctifying grace with the life of the Blessed Trinity present in him in order to spend eternity with that same Trinity. Nothing has the power to save but grace. But a soul must have faith, supernatural faith, to correspond its actions to the free gift of grace and increase in holiness. Repeatedly rejecting grace, not by sinning per se, but by embracing sin, destroys the soul's ability to cooperate with that grace. Oftentimes, all this is playing out in people's lives slowly, emphasis on slowly, in the background. It's on the slow boil. And every moral act inclines a person to one side or the other. As long as a person remains within what we might term the "moral range," there is always the possibility of straightening up again, of flying right. Whatever degree of sin a person's soul is in, as long as he believes, he is always just one confession away from being brought back from the dead. God's mercy is that far-reaching. But a soul also has the ability to place itself beyond God's reach, not through any fault or failure of God, but because of the soul's embrace of sin — its desire for and love of sin; its embrace of sin, which is always, in the last analysis, an embrace of self and not of God. Such a soul, therefore, has turned off all means of salvation by the person's own free will. He is the one who has shut off the channels to supernatural faith and grace. He is in a state not of grace but of mortal sin. But more than just mortal sin, such a soul now sins against the Holy Spirit because the soul is so entwined in sin that it no longer perceives its actions as sinful and, therefore, never seeks forgiveness because it perceives there is nothing to be forgiven for. Such a soul is bound for Hell and will die in that state. When sinful actions erode supernatural faith to such a point that a person no longer believes, that is the worst possible case. But sinful actions cannot really be battled against, resisted or overcome without grace. The Catholic life — working out a person's salvation in fear and trembling — really is an all-or-nothing proposition. In the end, there is either Heaven or Hell. While there is, of course, Purgatory, that is merely a necessary purification for Heaven. The soul in Purgatory has attained salvation — it just isn't ready to fully stand in the glory of God's omnipotence and love. But it will. Repeatedly rejecting grace, not by sinning per se, but by embracing sin, destroys the soul's ability to cooperate with that grace. The utter failure of the bishops to teach these ultimate truths will earn them the lowest depths of Hell. It was to preach these truths that they were ordained and eventually consecrated. It was not to cooperate with governments in COVID restrictions and work behind the scenes to help legislate carbon emissions taxes and construct a global reset. It was not to construct a scenario where lousy clergy could call the cops on faithful Catholics and have them thrown out of a church. It was not to allow scandal to remain in the midst of the Church by permitting sacrilegious Holy Communion. And it certainly was not to spread the lie that we have a reasonable hope that all men are saved. Perhaps a larger number than we expect will be saved, but that number will not include bishops who helped steer souls into Hell like they were shoveling coal into a furnace. Such men need to be denounced. The souls they have corrupted will be damned. But the punishment for that will pour down on their heads. Their pains will be the worst of all — forever. God despises sin. He hates it. Anyone who embraces it and turns from Him merits what their heart desired here on earth.

TRANSCRIPT The curious case of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill is still shrouded in mystery. Almost a year ago, you may recall, Burill, the general secretary of the U.S. bishop conference, abruptly resigned following media reports that he was an active participant on a gay-sex phone app called "Grindr." The reports quickly earned him the name "Msgr. Grindr" and created a public relations crisis with the homosexual-friendly U.S. bishop conference. Bear in mind, the nation's bishops, as a body, warmly embrace homosexuality; they just don't like getting caught doing so, especially when it's discovered one of their own is so active. But nonetheless, that's where we are. So, in the fallout from the scandal, the bishops spun up their legal teams and produced the usual statements of blather about mercy and love and understanding and guilt or innocence and fairness and all that — hoping to produce sufficient smoke and deflection to kick the can down the road, hoping everyone forgets, which most usually do. We got stonewalled. They squirrel these types of men away, quickly getting them out of the limelight, and, then, once the dust has settled, quietly place them back in ministry. We want to play a segment of our call to the diocese of La Crosse asking his whereabouts, progress on the nearly year-old investigation and just overall what's going on. We called and told the switchboard receptionist we had questions about the status of Msgr. Burrill and were transferred to a person we were told was handling that. When we were connected to a lady by the name of Debbie, we got stonewalled. Notice, the diocese denies it's a matter of public concern, but it was the diocese that made it a matter of public concern when it released this statement back in July last year, pointing to the problem with Msgr. Grindr, mentioned in the U.S. bishop conference's public statement about him and the media reports. Notice also that she kicked it upstairs, saying she didn't have the authority to talk about it — fair enough. But then she quickly added that those who do have the authority just aren't going to talk about it. Ever. So it's not really a question of who has the authority; it's actually a matter of they refuse to come clean about all this. The claim that this isn't a matter of public concern is absurd on its face. Recall that Burrill, who worked at the USCCB (which is funded by money from the faithful), lived in USCCB housing funded by the faithful and traveled around on trips all over the country on USCCB business (paid for by the faithful) and used a USCCB phone paid for by the faithful with the gay-sex app on it. How in tarnation does that qualify as not public? It's kind of the definition of public. The diocese denies it's a matter of public concern. But Bp. William Callahan of the diocese never seems to be available to answer these questions. So as to the investigation: What has been learned over the year since it's been launched? Who is conducting it? Who's being questioned? Who is paying for it? And most importantly, where is Burrill — Msgr. Grindr? He presumably is also in receipt of money originating from the faithful — again — a public matter. How much is he making? Who's paying for his food, his housing, his insurance? Does he have a phone? Who's paying for it? Is his phone activity being monitored? But most importantly, does he deny the charges — the entire substance? And, deny or admit, why won't the bishop and his cronies reveal his answer? That they pretend — or worse, believe — you don't have a right to know any of this because it's not public. That tells you everything you need to know. Nothing has changed in the Church hierarchy and these chancery staffers when it comes to cleaning things up. If anything, it's gotten worse.

TRANSCRIPT In the midst of the global craziness that has become the new norm, we must remember that "the Catholic lens" must always be at hand. Everything that happens in the world must be viewed through this lens — and not just in big-stage global affairs, but in our own individual lives. Most people don't make the necessary intellectual jump from "the world" to "their world" — as in your household, your children, your day-to-day life, your soul. But the globalists have made that connection. In fact, they created it, and they even trumpet it, as World Economic Forum leader Klaus Schwab bragged about at the recently concluded Davos meeting in Switzerland. A combination of many forces has brought the world to the brink of all this — technology, media, education, economics, politics. All these forces, each in the hands of spiritual degenerates, have created a new order for the world. The entire point is to wipe away any vestige of Christianity — specifically Catholicism. True, the plan has been around for centuries, and that plan has been the destruction of the Christian order of the world, but until certain pieces were put in place, it could not accelerate. Those pieces are now being put into place, and we have seen some of this play out already: A stolen election to lockdown power in D.C. A man-made pandemic to wreck the world's economy and condition people to fall in line One media distraction after another to deflect from the truth The amassing of trillions in new national debt to cripple any meaningful recovery Constant climate-change propaganda to set the stage for the destruction of energy independence The nonstop drumbeating of sexual perversion and degeneracy as "human rights" It never ends. The entire point is to wipe away any vestige of Christianity — specifically Catholicism — because until the Faith is crushed underfoot, they don't have total control, as founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci admitted back in the 1930s. The world, as well as your world, has zero hope of salvation without Catholicism. That's why, from day one here at Church Militant, we have been dedicated to proclaiming Catholic truth — especially in our programming, much of which is Premium programming. On that score, we are proud to announce the rollout of three new Premium shows. The first is Mental Health (and the need to understand it from a Catholic perspective), which debuted last month. The second all-new show that debuted earlier this week is Marian Moment. The inspiration for this was a live show we produced every day with very limited staff back during the early COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Its focus was specifically on Marian theology, but in this new program, we expand on that and talk about how the fullness of Marian theology finds its place in today's global crisis, brought about by Freemasonry and communism. The Church Militant Premium channel literally has thousands of hours and hundreds of episodes that explore virtually every last nook and cranny of the Faith. We've never changed the low cost of just $10 monthly, because we want anyone who wants to, to be able to join and view the content. Likewise, Church Militant provides hours and hours of programming each week, such as this Vortex, Evening News, Headlines and Investigations — all of that for free to you. But it isn't free for us to produce. Your $10-a-month subscription not only goes toward the Premium content, but it also allows us to keep producing the daily free programming. And not just video, but high-quality production and relevant information that is properly vetted and researched by accomplished professionals with degrees in theology and real-world experience in politics and journalism. If there was ever a time to support Church Militant and become a Premium member, now is that time. All of that is what your $10 monthly (as well as any other donations) provide: a guarantee of Catholic analysis and perspective delivered like no other in the Catholic world. It's truthful, hard hitting and to the point. If there was ever a time to support Church Militant and become a Premium member, now is that time. Finally, we mentioned a third Premium show, which is now in final production. That show is called "Restoring Tradition" and will trace the history of the attacks against Tradition and orthodoxy and lay out the need to restore them. Look for that in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please sign up today to become a Premium member by clicking here. Thank you in advance.

TRANSCRIPT Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. "Total disaster" and "bungled from the get-go" are apt descriptors of Joe Biden's Afghanistan insanity. However, worth noting is the U.S. bishops' total silence on his chaotic approach. It's worth noting because, without a single life being lost (indeed, many actually being saved), Donald Trump's southern border policy became the constant punching bag for our illustrious leaders in robes. Whether it was increasing ICE presence, building the wall or returning illegals, whatever slowed the flow of anyone into the United States, the bishops were right there, firing off statements, almost as fast as closing churches and now insisting on jabs in exchange for the sacraments. Their phony rationale was the sanctity of human life — that it's so important to respect the dignity of human beings. Too bad for them that not a single informed Catholic actually believes that malarkey of theirs. It's true, of course, that human life is sacred and needs protecting, but if the bishops were so down with that, it sure seems like they'd stop promoting (either directly or through their silence) the most murderous political party in human history, the Democrats. The bigger the crisis, the more money the U.S. bishops get. Talk about never letting a good crisis go to waste. At this very moment, Kabul is a case study in disregard for human life, both for American citizens trapped and being beaten by the Taliban (as the Pentagon acknowledged over this past weekend) and for thousands of Afghan allies whose lives are now threatened and very likely over, as the Taliban go hunting for them door to door. The scenes in and around the airport of human chaos, combined with bungling Biden's dementia-driven approach, should be eliciting something from the U.S. bishops based on their past record of assailing Donald Trump, even as his policies actually were working to slow down human suffering. Likewise, the southern border disaster (another result of Beijing Biden's disastrous policies that have resulted in increasing human misery and death) should be sending the bishops scrambling, firing off press releases at the same pace as they did against Trump. However, you will note one item in particular present in both the case with Afghanistan and our southern border that goes somewhat unnoticed: It's the money the bishops make providing "humanitarian" care for all these people. Along the border, the nation's bishops have reaped a windfall in government contracts as the leading provider of shelter, food, transportation and eventual resettlement for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants across the United States. This money funnel had shriveled considerably under Trump. The fewer people who get in and need attention, the smaller the contracts. And near the end of last week, as it became clear that Afghanistan had fallen and there was an immediate crisis of having to relocate tens of thousands of Afghanistan refugees, the U.S. bishops started saying, "Bring them here. We'll take care of them." Again, the bigger the crisis, the more money the U.S. bishops get. Talk about never letting a good crisis go to waste. The U.S. bishops themselves have had what could be termed their own "Afghanistan moment." It wasn't as sudden and certainly did not make for as dramatic footage as we saw from Kabul with babies being passed over barbed wire, but because of its eternal consequences, it is, in its own way, far worse. The Catholic empire has fallen just as surely as the American empire has. In fact, the American empire has fallen because the Catholic empire fell first. American priorities on the national and international stage have become completely woke. Tradition has been ejected and replaced with a bizarre understanding of the mission, purpose and even constitution of what makes the nation. American exceptionalism is an unknown commodity among the nation's elites — even as they themselves profit from it. All that matters to the elites of the culture and government is sex and money. However, the U.S. elites were not the first ones to cross that finish line. The U.S. hierarchy led the way, all the way back to the 1960s, publicly and in private. The U.S. bishops essentially gave permission for the society to become "woke" when they abandoned their role of moral leadership, and they embraced the whole "woke" insanity that set the stage for Afghanistan to be completely overrun in a matter of weeks. In about three weeks, the United States will remember the Sept. 11 attacks, as we take note that 20 years later, almost to the day, $2 trillion dollars later, with thousands of dead U.S. military, tens of thousands of wounded, tens of thousands of dead Afghanistan citizens, we look back and recognize the folly of policies that were doomed to defeat. But do not forget that even as the Taliban members were gobbling up vast tracts of land on their three-week march toward Kabul, back in June, the U.S. embassy there, along with U.S. embassies all over the world, was celebrating sodomy, so-called Pride Month, as part of Joe Biden's international policy. American exceptionalism was replaced with American perversion, and that has extremely close ties to what is happening in the Church. When the United States flew those pride flags from its embassies all over the world, there was not a peep from the bishops. Of course, that might have been a little difficult when so many bishops are homosexual themselves or support it or remain silent on it and let so many of their clergy drape pride flags over the altar of sacrifice and even around statues of the Blessed Mother. But hey, why push doctrine when there's a buck to be made, right? What we are witnessing, around the world and at home, is a direct result of the U.S. hierarchy's actions. It was they and their silence and, in some cases, promotion, that allowed so many of these phony-Catholic, child-killing, sodomy-promoting politicians to get into power and then maintain it. Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are just the prime examples, but there are hundreds of these vermin who owe their careers to the U.S. bishops: Kennedy, Kerry, Durbin, McCain and so forth. The exchange of the Faith was done for money and influence. As long as the bishops can keep stoking the fires of wokeness — such as with racism and what have you — then they can keep the very people in power who grease the skids for those lucrative government contracts. American exceptionalism is an unknown commodity among the nation's elites — even as they themselves profit from it. Even now, dioceses all over the country continue to pound the drum about racism, calling it systemic and so forth, parroting the talking points of their "money men" in the Democratic Party. What happened and is happening in Kabul could not have turned out any other way with the fake Catholic with no conscience that we have in the White House. But do not forget who helped put him there: Biden is the product of a Catholic hierarchy that faced and failed its own Kabul moment, its own Saigon moment, long ago. And now, just as there is an emergency airlift plan to save as many as possible in Kabul, the same thing is occurring within the Catholic Church: an emergency airlift plan, if you will, to rescue as many as possible from the errors of this corrupt and degenerate hierarchy and instill in them actual Catholic teaching, before they are also overrun. Time is short, very short, for both operations, while the bishops sit around counting and trying to increase their dollars, ignoring the body count.

TRANSCRIPT Despite all the evil rot we see unfolding in every sphere we can imagine, we should, every now and then, take a small step back and realize the gains and the small victories. It's encouraging and gives us a reason for hope. The danger, of course, is that while counting wins, people slip back into a kind of complacency. But you'd have to be completely insane to think a few wins here and there are enough to make you lay down your weapons. So, at the risk of that, let's move ahead. Despite the constant drumming by the Marxists in the media, about a third of the country remains unchanged in knowing Biden did not win the election. Marxist policies are being shown to be the losers they are as crises continue to expand under the phony Catholic and unelected president. Michigan governor Whitmer continues to be exposed as the lying witch she is by local media, particularly in reference to her own hypocritical conduct during the virus crisis. In loads of races around the country, which you'll never hear about from the Marxists, staunch conservative GOP candidates — not the RINOs — are winning off-cycle elections and blowing their Democratic Party opponents out of the water. An overwhelming majority of Americans continue to say that they just don't like AOC. The U.S. bishops are finally feeling the heat regarding heretic apostate politicians being able to receive Holy Communion, forcing them to venture out from their "unity" tent. What's being dubbed as "America's audit" in Arizona is shaking the lying, cheating Democratic machine to its core as the truth becomes more and more evident that Biden cheated — a lot. The various religious communities dedicated to orthodoxy are growing, even as the behemoth of the Church of Nice continues to fade away. The filth in various dioceses, seminaries and chanceries continues to be exposed in places like Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo. The laity are beginning to hit the streets and protest the corruption of the hierarchy in various places like Dallas, where Bp. Edward Burns is being exposed for the hypocritical fraud that he is. Meanwhile, the Vatican's complicity with the communist Chinese continues to come more into focus, and its participation in the globalist push continues to discredit the corrupt network of homosexuals and freemasons so well-ensconced in Rome. Last week, Texas became the 14th state to pass a heartbeat bill to help save the lives of the unborn. Trust in the mainstream media is in the toilet, and that's true of the social-media giants as well. In fact, major media is doing some soul searching, as are nearly all the major polling firms that have quietly admitted that they really messed up in 2020. In short, almost every major cultural institution taken over by the Marxists in the past 50 years is now viewed suspiciously and disliked by a majority of citizens — Hollywood, government, businesses, the courts, the media and, yes, religion. The leadership of these institutions remains powerful, largely because of their wealth, but their ideas are proving to be bankrupt — morally, financially and spiritually. To be certain, the needle was already moving in this direction even before Trump, but he stepped on the gas and now it has simply become an awareness for an enormous number of Americans that these folks are all out for themselves, are agenda-driven and lie through their teeth. It's difficult to imagine how that perception can ever be overcome because it's rooted in the truth and experience of people's day-to-day lives. And, close to home, large numbers of Catholics simply don't trust their bishops, and that's a good thing. No one should trust an untrustworthy man. The bishops have spent decades lying, stealing, cheating and so forth. And with every day that passes, another batch of Catholics somewhere in the country wakes up to that difficult realization and then orders his or her life around it. They pull their kids from official Church-run schools. They stop donating. They migrate to a faithful parish, deserting the Church of Nice. They ignore their bishop's annual whining about needing money while financial campaigns repeatedly blow up in their faces. Every fiscal year, more diocese staff are laid off or bought off. Vocations decline in various places because that is exactly what should be happening in the face of the hierarchy's loss of supernatural faith and embrace of the world. The Church Herself is not shrinking; it's just that the curtain is being pulled back on the truth that there hasn't been a robust embrace of the Faith in America for decades. It's all been a paper tiger. But the reality is that most baptized American Catholics couldn't give a rip about the Church. They don't believe the teachings. They gave up on the bishops and view them as little else than a bunch of tired, old liars who cover up abuse and don't care about anything but money. They have it wrong, of course, about the teachings, but that part about the hierarchy is true. Almost none of this generation of Catholic youth cares a lick about the Church because, again, they have eyes and ears that work, and they can smell phoniness a mile away. The truth of the matter is, the Church is not salvageable in its current state in America. But a tremendous and necessary pruning is going on. There's no way around it. Those who have caused this necessity will be damned for their cowardice, wickedness or negligence. But the Church will be stronger, much more mature and be able to step back into the world with a greater resolve to help save it. There also are a number of committed Catholics who are throwing their hats into the political ring to make a difference in that arena. The various religious communities dedicated to orthodoxy are growing, even as the behemoth of the Church of Nice continues to fade away. In five years or less, men like Dolan, Vigneron, Gregory and so forth will be nobodies. A few short years after them, the Cupichs, Tobins, McElroys and so forth will also be gone. And while it's true that Cupich has engineered yet another injection of homosexual men into the U.S. hierarchy, the institutional Church that the latest crop of clerics will be presiding over will be little more than a warmed-over corpse, thanks, of course, to all the previous decades of homosexual clergy. Turning an aircraft carrier around to change course takes time, and many people currently living will likely not be alive to see the new course being followed. But they are alive now and are part of that new course, the correct heading that's being plotted. These are people out in front of chanceries demanding an end to the corruption; the ones firing off letters — not just signing a pointless online petition — to the papal nuncio. These are the people signing up by the thousands for Church Militant's Resistance. All the sound and fury may be still thundering over there on the wrong side of history in the media, the courts, the Church and other cultural institutions, but a giant storm is slowly gathering force just off the radar. We here at Church Militant have not only been tracking this for 15 years, but we're also happy to say we have been a part of it. The Church of God must be reclaimed by the faithful. That is happening. Fifteen years ago, it looked really bleak. Today, and looking 15 years into the future, the shoe is on the other foot. The current bad guys will all be gone, many much sooner, and a smaller, more faithful, spiritually energized Church will be much wiser to a crooked hierarchy — a hierarchy that, despite its lineage, will simply have no choice but to listen to the believing faithful. They won't like it. They'll probably still have their boyfriends and their personal slush funds, but the Church as they knew it and expected it to be simply won't be there anymore. The old lesbian nuns will have all passed on. All that property, being sold off now at breakneck speed, will be off the books and no longer available. The same will be true for the homosexual religious orders. Keep fighting for the restoration like your eternal life depends on it — because it does. All their two-faced mouthing about wanting a "poor Church" will have actually come true. In short, the scales will have tipped. True, the pie will be smaller, but they will no longer control most of it. You can sense this shift happening everywhere in the Church, but, as we said, you don't turn an aircraft carrier around in a minute. Stay faithful. Keep pounding and praying. Don't stop. If you don't see the victory in the Church Militant, then you'll have a ringside seat with the Church Triumphant, even if you do have to hang out with the Church Suffering for a while. Keep fighting for the restoration like your eternal life depends on it — because it does. And remember to smell the roses every now and then, even if they are in bombed-out cities for the time being.

In today's Vortex, Michael Voris is interviewed by Dr. Michael Robillard. Dr. Robillard is an American philosopher, Army veteran, Roman Catholic and host of The Patriot Philosopher podcast. Interview was recorded on May 17, 2022.

TRANSCRIPT The very first requirement in battle is to know your enemy. You must know who you are fighting and what his strengths are — that allows you to draw up a plan of attack. Don't overestimate him, certainly, but do not underestimate him. Doing either of those hinders your planning and could easily spell defeat. In the battle for the culture, any thought that politics alone will win things back is decidedly wrongheaded. Politics has become a necessary battlefield, absolutely; but that's only because battles farther back down the line have already been lost. In a manner of speaking, the political world is our last stand. However, for faithful Catholics, there is a much larger battle that must be fought, and, we're sorry to report, most Catholics are completely delusional when it comes to understanding this battle. First, being delusional is the understandable human response. Human nature, fallen human nature, never wants to really embrace the magnitude of any evil right in front of it. It does so in stages; it goes through a process and digests it slowly. And oftentimes, as the enormity of what stares us in the face comes into sharp focus, we recoil and look for easy answers. Again, it's a totally understandable response because what we are seeing in the Church is frightening. When people sense their world actually collapsing around them, many retreat into whatever comfort they can find. When people sense their world actually collapsing around them, many retreat. It's akin to the "comfort food syndrome" of eating foods we like when we are emotionally overwhelmed or stressed or whatnot. Some people can't deal with things, so they look for an emotional diversion. When battling evil in the Church, given the eternal stakes at play, the fear is compounded, and so the desire to find an easy answer, a quick fix, naturally arises. This desire takes various forms, depending on the person and his personality. Some just stick their heads in the sand and say things like, "Oh, the Church has been through bad times before — no big deal," or, "We know who wins in the end." Both of these and similar thought patterns are born from cowardice, an unwillingness to face the full truth of what is happening. It's like Hitler in his bunker deploying imaginary army groups to wipe out the approaching Russians. The truth is, a failure to sufficiently comprehend a crisis actually increases the crisis. On the other hand, there are people who do grasp the reality, but respond poorly, deluding themselves into thinking there is one overarching solution — the "silver bullet." Unlike the other group that refuses to grasp the severity of what's playing out, this group "gets it," but is massively fanciful in their minds about what to do. You find this approach among people, for example, who think that all they have to do is go to the Latin Mass and all will be fine. There was even a woefully naive slogan a few years back that said, "Save the Liturgy, save the world." But to place all your eggs in one basket is fool's gold. First of all, the Church began to visibly fall apart when the Latin Mass was the dominant Liturgy, so how did that happen? Every bishop at Vatican II was schooled, formed and consecrated in the Old Rite. Again, how did that happen? Even the tendency to just point at Vatican II and blame everything on that is misguided — but it is easy, which makes that approach attractive. Likewise, there is another group that is so distressed at affairs in the Church that they chase prophecies and visions and apparitions and secret unapproved messages "from Heaven." Every bit of this smacks of Gnosticism — secret, privileged knowledge — and, ultimately, is rooted in pride. But what the new Gnosticism and the "silver bullet" crowd have in common is that they never get down to business. They do not want to look this filth in the Church squarely in the face and properly diagnose it. They won't spend time learning the history, for example, of how we got where we are. It's too easy to just sit on social media and read some report of an unapproved apparition somewhere that speaks to their own personality traits. Too many people want signs and wonders such as Our Lord splitting open the sky, hurling down lightning bolts and a host of other instant cures. Of course, Our Lord can do that whenever He wants, if He wants, but "hope" is not a strategy. On the point of learning, Church Militant has produced a series of reports and investigations on how we got to where we are. These span centuries, from the philosophical collapse originating with Martin Luther, to the societal trends and the failure of various Church leaders to confront these evils. We go deeply into the role the Rockefeller family played in all this at the end of the 19th century and then the cooperation with all that by notable clerics like Notre Dame's president Theodore Hesburgh. We take a deep look into the modern homosexual rights movement, which began in Germany in the 19th century, and we explore at great length the rise and advance of Freemasonry and the dominant role it has played in all of this. We were the first Catholic outfit to produce any meaningful programming on the connection between Saul Alinsky and the U.S. bishops, which is the very thing that started them paying attention to us and eventually understanding the danger we posed to their wickedness. In short, they'd been discovered. Likewise, we investigate the phony "man-made climate change" movement, which goes back much farther than almost anyone realizes. Church Militant has spent literally thousands of hours researching and producing these investigations. They are all right here on the website under "All Shows" and then "FBI—Faith-Based Investigations." We started producing them back in 2009 once we caught on to what was going on in the Church, and we set on a course to unearth the reason why things were so bad. What we discovered in all these investigations is that the problem is not some simple thing, nor is the solution a simple one. It is, in fact, much more serious and deeper than almost anyone realizes, and that means there will not be an easy, short solution to this. It will require a multi-generational attack; a relentless, constant war. In truth, we should have been in this mindset all along, but as the servants in the gospels came to understand, they fell asleep, and the enemy planted the seed while they were sleeping. It's pretty clear that for the foreseeable future, the hierarchy as a whole is a lost cause, especially with the recent appointment and promotions by Pope Francis. It is, in a term, a total disaster. It's time now for those who want to fight to step up and be completely dedicated to the cause. To date, the response from the laity at large has been woefully inadequate. In fact, it's been naive and cowardly. That will have to change — a mobilization of those who believe and love the truth must develop. Church Militant has already begun this process with our Church Militant Resistance. Resistance is a Catholic grassroots operation founded and organized by Church Militant to help Catholics learn the riches of their Faith, increase in holiness, strive for strong virtue and combat the heresies and abuses that have infiltrated the Church. We don't trick your email out of you by pretending that if you sign this or that petition it will make some difference. It won't. What petition drives will do is ask you for a ton of requests for donations, but they won't accomplish anything substantive in the war. It will just make you think you've actually done something, but you haven't. This will be a long and arduous war with no silver bullet, no simple anything. This is the greatest crisis to ever face the Church, and it's been over a century in the making. It's time now for those who want to fight to step up and be completely dedicated to the cause. Catholic saints must now arise and answer the call.

Michael Voris interviews Shane Trejo about restoring moral values to the Republican Party.

TRANSCRIPT There isn't a faithful Catholic in the Church who can't help but wonder just how many of the bishops are going to be damned. More than a few would be where the smart money is. And before all the "Church of Nice" and "cocktail Catholic" crowds get all upset and start clutching their pearls in horror, consider that this was a common theme in the first centuries of the Church and even in the centuries following. The bishops in the United States have once again backed down in the face of continued sacrilege or skirted around the issue. They might as well agree with it because that is the effect. The topic of giving Holy Communion to child-killing politicians has taken on heightened interest since "Catholic" Joe Biden became president without actually winning the election. So with that fraud in the White House, all his bishop buddies circled the wagon around him — and their own sacrilege — rushing to the barricades to announce he is worthy to receive Holy Communion. Everything is about theology and politics. Everything. And loads of you thought politics and theology had nothing to do with each other. Hint: Everything is about theology and politics. Everything. A quick series of events, all circling around the Real Presence of Our Blessed Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, has now rushed upon us. The truth of the Real Presence is laid aside by bishops, hence the truthful claim that a huge number of these men are on their way to Hell. First, Biden cheats his way into the Oval Office — the highest-profile "Catholic" receiving Holy Communion. That sets off a flurry of cries from the faithful that the bishops should denounce his reception of Our Lord's Body and Blood. So Abp. Gómez of Los Angeles, the president of the U.S. bishops, fires off a letter to the Vatican asking for some direction on whether an open child-killer who scoffs at the Faith and acts against it at every turn should be allowed to receive Holy Communion. Then, one of the most crooked cardinals in the history of the Church, Chicago's Blase Cupich, together with his other pro-homosexual cardinal buddy (both elevated to their high posts by homosexual pederast Theodore McCarrick) meet with Vatican officials and slyly inform them how to respond to the letter from Gómez. In the meantime, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone publishes a letter hailed around the Catholic world by easily deceived faithful that did nothing more than simply restate 2,000 years of Catholic teaching about worthy reception of Holy Communion and how child-killers should not be given the Sacred Species. However, as the bishop of Nancy Pelosi, a female version of Biden, he never mentions a word about this notorious sinner and her reception of Holy Communion. When asked directly during a number of interviews, he basically deflected, saying that Nancy understands he wouldn't approve of that, implying, of course, that there is some kind of quiet agreement between them. Archbishop, regardless of your own personal beliefs about the dogma of the Real Presence, you have let this child-killing woman off the hook repeatedly. You have a duty here, and you can write all the nicely worded and correct documents you like, but those won't get you off the hook when you stand before Our Lord. You should have put an end to this the first day you were in office. But going back to Nancy, she said she was pleased with the document the Vatican put out, which says not to be divisive. The letter she's referencing is what the Vatican sent back to Gómez, crafted by the homosexuality-loving cardinals Cupich and Tobin, two more churchmen the demons are stoking the furnaces for. The letter they wrote basically says that the U.S. bishops need a consensus on this subject among themselves. Then they all need to pursue "dialogue" and go explain to the wicked child-killers that ripping children to pieces in the womb and then selling their pieces for medical research to work into vaccines and cosmetics is a bad thing, and they really shouldn't support it. Next, they need to all reconvene, compare notes, formulate a policy and then get in touch with bishops' conferences all around the world and get further "consensus." Then they need to run that by the Vatican so all those homosexuals running the show can tinker with it and revise it and send it back for further dialogue and discussion and on and on. If you are a Church-of-Nice Catholic or one of the establishment class who has bishops over to your house for cocktails and polite discussions about your golf handicap, do you really think these men are not bound for Hell? How can you not? They are protecting the murder of children by the tens of millions, regardless of talking a little pro-life here and there. That's just a cover to keep you in place. Then, even worse, they hand the Body and Blood of Our Savior over to the men and women who make the laws to advance the holocaust. Are you, comfortable Catholics, so thick, so spiritually dense and deceived, such theological wastelands, that you think these men are not heading to Hell and taking untold millions of souls with them? They don't defend humanity. They don't defend Our Lord's divinity. Many of them actively work against one or the other — or both. The supposedly good bishops won't do what needs to be done. Those "good" bishops need to stand up and decry this defiling of the Temple and then, whatever happens, happens. So big deal — you lose your diocese. Who cares? What good are you doing anyway when you rationalize your silence and lack of action? Our Lord doesn't need you in your diocese to correct these errors. But you may very well need to be pulled from your diocese for defending the truth, in order to be saved. Imagine an archbishop who tries to defend, yet tiptoes, around the truth being damned and spending eternity with the very bishops he was terrified of speaking out against on earth. Because that's where this is heading. It's throw-down time. In fact, it's long past throw-down time. Wicked men have assumed control in the Church, and weak men will not fight for the sanctity of life or divine truth by denouncing them or the wicked Catholics who defile the Church and commit sacrilege. The Communion wars are now in full swing and have been for decades, and believing-yet-weak bishops have been conditioned to think that the only thing that matters is politeness, consensus, dialogue and unity. Weak bishops have been conditioned to think that the only thing that matters is politeness, consensus, dialogue and unity. That is precisely why those spiritually dead cardinals Cupich and Tobin crafted that wicked, duplicitous response the way they did. It was meant to summon forth the inner cowardice of their easily manipulated bishops back home, and, so far, it's working. If a bishop, whoever he is or however well-intended he may be, doesn't see the need to lose his miter to protect human life and divine truth, then the Devil and his legions may as well just toss some more coal in the furnace to handle the anticipated increased capacity. "Good" bishops and their comfortable country-club Catholics are being played for fools by these wicked men — in the Church and in Congress. At your judgments, you will have nowhere to go, no place to run and hide when you stand before the Lord of Heaven and earth, Whom you refused to defend in this life. You will never again have a moment so crystal clear to stand in defense of the truth. Enough with your letters and debates and consensus-building and useless dialogue. You are on the way to Hell for your refusal to do the right thing. Your sins of omission are no less severe than the other bishops' sins of commission.

TRANSCRIPT Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. It's kind of funny that so many bishops hate Church Militant — even notables in the Vatican can't stand us. But, in a sense, the joke's on them. Church Militant is an unintended creation of them, specifically, their refusal to do their job. Do they really think that Catholics who love the Church are going to sit by while they lie, steal, abuse, cover up and so forth — all while refusing to say the truth of the glory of Catholic teaching? They refuse to say the truth, which deprives souls of the truth who want the truth. Sorry, bishops, but you don't get to do that, miter or no miter. Every faithful Catholic has an obligation to speak the truth of the Faith, of Jesus Christ; and whatever happens, happens. However, in a climate of widespread ecclesiastical corruption, that obligation is increased significantly. They refuse to say the truth. Bishops have forsworn their sacred obligation, and done so in a most cowardly, self-absorbed fashion. So now, the baton of truth-telling is handed to the laity, which is a lesson the bishops should learn from. It's really not that difficult to say the truth, and when you proclaim the truth, people react. Most do not like the truth, which is what makes the bishops such cowards in being afraid of negative responses. But some do respond favorably when they hear truth, and, like a flower turning toward the light, open up to it. A couple of weeks ago, Church Militant interviewed a local Michigan woman running to be a state representative. Her name is Jacky Eubanks, and she believes and embraces everything the Church teaches. Because we spoke about truth and Church teaching in the arena of politics, some on the Left lost their minds. A video from a dude who calls himself "Texas Paul" on the Meidas Touch website got close to 100,000 views in about 24 hours. It also got more than 4,000 comments. But them's "small potatoes" compared to the Lincoln Project's brief video, which has going on half a million views in the same time frame. It also has thousands of comments. On top of that, a tweet posted last week from the account Left of Center MI has been retweeted over 2,000 times and has 1.1 million views. The Left is in an uproar, or, more precisely, the haters of truth are in an uproar. But, then again, they are always in an uproar. It's safe to say this one clip has brought the truth to more people about contraception than the U.S. bishops have in the past 50 years. So by the time this Vortex airs, almost 2 million people will have viewed the truth and thousands will have attacked it. And on top of that, this interview also made international news. "Banning Abortions Is Just the Start — Next, the U.S. Right Want to Outlaw Contraception": That's a headline from The Guardian yesterday. Here's the subtitle: "Jacky Eubanks Wants to Be a Michigan Senator — and to Ban Contraception. And She's Not the Only One." And a quick message to other Catholics running for office: You should have the same unapologetic zeal that Jacky does. Now for the bishops: Not that we care or certainly excuse their cowardice, but this is what happens when you say the truth or challenge the established narrative, which excuses evil. For example, wildly popular conservative pundit Mark Dice, with almost 2 million subscribers, earlier this week highlighted a recent interview Church Militant conducted with Matt Schlapp on the question of homosexuality. In less than a day, over a hundred thousand views and 4,000 comments. When you say the truth, some people will respond to it and change their lives. And this is the very thing the bishops seem to never grasp, the cowardly wimps. When you say the truth, some people will respond to it and change their lives. For their sake, the truth must be told. For its own sake as well — but for its saving, life-transforming power, it must be not just told, but announced everywhere, loudly and clearly. As St. Paul said, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel." Here's a reminder to those bishops who keep the gospel from people: When the Holy Spirit inspires the authors to use the word "woe," it never ends well. Tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. The alternative is, don't tell the truth, and fall into Hell.

TRANSCRIPT Wow, what a difference a holiday weekend makes — especially for bad men. Let's start, shall we, in Rome, with the "shocking" not-shocking news that Pope Francis elevated one of the most homosexual-friendly bishops in the United States, Robert McElroy of San Diego, to the College of Cardinals. Seriously, a known sodomy-supporting bishop has been put in the position of voting for the next pope. But of course, on that score, he's not the only one (Cupich in Chicago and Tobin in Newark, just to name a few). Still, there is a certain stench around this particular appointment — and that's saying something when you consider those other two. McElroy, for example, had been informed about Theodore McCarrick before all the news about the ex-cardinal homopredator and, of course, deep-sixed it. In a 2016 interview with the heterodox Jesuit magazine America, he said, "The destructive attitude of many Catholics to the gay and lesbian community is motivated by a failure to comprehend the totality of the Church's teaching on homosexuality." He says active, unrepentant homosexuals can have Catholic funerals. McElroy tossed out some Catholics who were asking questions he didn't like about homosexuality. At a series of 2018 "listening sessions" about the clerical sex abuse crisis, McElroy tossed out some young, devout Catholics who were asking questions he didn't like about homosexuality. He was the featured speaker at the 2018 Association of United States Catholic Priests' meeting — a pro-gay organization. He's on record as saying the Catechism needs to change its language and not call homosexual acts intrinsically disordered. He asserts the insane claim that climate change kills more people each year around the world than abortion. That's 40 million victims, for the record. He never stops going on about illegal immigration — as in the need for everyone to be let in. Yep, this guy's a real winner. And now, he's on track to have a say in who the next pope will be. I bet he votes for himself. And speaking of winners, also as the Memorial Day weekend approached, Dubuque archbishop Michael Jackels issued one of the most demeaning letters you could imagine to Catholics in his archdiocese in reaction to the recent Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings. He says, for example, "You've got to wonder about reasons for refusing reasonable limits on gun ownership," and adds, "we readily identify things like abortion and capital punishment as life issues, but protecting the earth, our common home, or making food, water, shelter, education and health care accessible, or defense against gun violence ... these are life issues too." Ah, the voice of homopredator Cdl. Joseph Bernardin and his "seamless garment" garbage screams from his grave yet again. In the minds of these prelates, everything is a life issue, but what they always fail to state is that there is a hierarchy of life issues. They are not all equal. The only reason abortion exists is to deliberately kill an innocent human. That's it. But the crazy archbishop then goes on to attack Catholics fighting abortion, saying: Some people want to repair the scandal of pro-choice Catholic politicians by refusing them the Eucharist. But that's a misguided response for at least two reasons: As Jesus said, it's the sick people who need a doctor, not the healthy, and He gave us the Eucharist as a healing remedy; don't deny the people who need the medicine. That is so theologically twisted that it proves the reality of just how malformed these old men are. Notice how he conflates two unrelated aspects here. True, Our Blessed Lord did say the sick need a doctor, but it was not in any manner in context with reception of Holy Communion. It was when the hypocritical Pharisees challenged Him for eating with tax collectors — nothing to do with the Eucharist. So is Jackels just stupid about that, or is he deliberately misleading? As for the point about the Eucharist being medicine — again, more twisting of truth. A soul in a state of mortal sin (Catholic pro-abort politicians, for example) is dead. Hence, the term "mortal sin" — a concept that seems lost on most of the U.S. hierarchy, perhaps because many of them are likely in that state themselves, given the condition of the Church and their preaching. You can't administer medicine to a corpse, Archbishop. But then he brings it home: "Also, to be consistent, to repair the scandal of Catholics being indifferent or opposed to all those other life issues, they would have to be denied Holy Communion as well." Umm, no they wouldn't. Not even close. No Catholic is deliberately voting in support of gun rights so that mass shootings will happen, Archbishop. No Catholic is voting to deny food, water, shelter, education and health care to people. This is the distinction that these liberal (or malformed) bishops never seem to make. And the Catholic mind makes distinctions because distinctions need to be made. A person's intent matters. Abortion is done intending to kill an innocent life. Period. And not just an innocent life, but the most vulnerable life you can imagine, with zero capacity to defend itself. These other smokescreen issues are just that — smokescreen. They are a balancing of rights with other rights, and, in political terms, they result in policies that often are imperfect. But to suggest that those on either side are heartless killers and should be denied Holy Communion is absurd and insulting. You can't administer medicine to a corpse, Archbishop. Nancy Pelosi and many other so-called Catholics are heartless killers, Archbishop. In no way can they be compared to Catholics who support the Second Amendment. You're theologically nuts, Archbishop. Completely crazy. Where did you go to seminary, Our Lady of Climbing the Episcopal Ladder? You owe Catholics an apology for your muddled, confusing letter. This is the sorry state of the episcopate these days — nutty statements fired off by old men in miters who feel (feel, not think) they speak with some authority that allows them to override Catholic teaching and just plain old common sense. Jackels, in his letter, does not speak for the Church because he does not speak with a Catholic mind or heart or even a Catholic sense. But if he keeps stupidly yammering on like that, who knows, maybe he'll be the next U.S. cardinal. He's only 68, which means if he became a cardinal, he could keep screwing up the Church for another dozen years, just like McElroy, who is also just 68.

TRANSCRIPT With Pope Francis' recent limits — and even seeming attack — on the Traditional Latin Mass, one natural response for those weak in the Faith would be to think Rome no longer represents the Catholic faith so they have to take their family to a place that does. That opens up the door for a number of places, but perhaps none more notable than the schismatic movement begun by Abp. Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, when he illicitly consecrated four bishops directly against the express order from Pope St. John Paul not to do so. Over the following years ... the Society of St. Pius X has grown and cast itself as the 'eternal Rome,' setting itself up as the 'real' Church. The pope told Lefebvre that if he followed through with the consecrations, he would incur automatic excommunication. Lefebvre ignored the pope and was excommunicated. Over the following years, his movement, known as the Society of St. Pius X, has grown and cast itself as the "eternal Rome," setting itself up as the "real" Church. Pope Benedict XVI did everything humanly possible to reconcile them to the Church, but the SSPX walked away in the end. Now, one of the chief talking points of the SSPX is that they represent authentic Catholicism, untainted by the modernism and moral corruption that so plagues the "other" Church. However, that's not even close to true. In fact, when it comes to moral corruption, sex abuse and its cover-up, the SSPX operates at a whole new level. Yet, in the midst of all this, they continue to fleece the flock, and their media allies continue to lie about it all.

Michael Voris interviews Fr. James Altman about the COVID-19 "vaccine," pro-abortion politicians receiving Holy Communion and much more.

TRANSCRIPT When I was a little kid, I wanted to be in the movies. Well, not really, but for the purposes of this Vortex, let's roll with that. So when I dreamed of a career on the silver screen when I was 10, I never could have imagined that, one day, I'd have the honor of being in a Martin Scorsese film. But here I am, a half-century later, playing the part of the villain. The movie is Building a Bridge, and, yep, Martin Scorsese is the producer. The flick is all about the "journey" of the long-suffering Fr. James Martin crusading for love and acceptance of sodomites in the Church. And, of course, any good movie needs a villain as well as a hero, and that's where we come in — black hat and all. The movie debuted in 2021 at the "prestigious" Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan and went on sale for home viewing earlier this month. Here's the trailer. Sure, you want to be close to Jesus, Father. Sure, that's why you're doing all this. And, by the way, back when Martin exploded so flamboyantly onto the ecclesiastical stage, the question was put to him, "Fr. Martin, are you homosexual?" Eventually, he responded by saying his Jesuit superiors have ordered him not to talk about his orientation. That's a little weird, but OK. Martin exploded flamboyantly onto the ecclesiastical stage. The nearly hour-long movie is really little else than a propaganda piece trumpeting sodomy in the Church, with the "unique" angle that a priest is leading the charge. Of course, given the current state of affairs, there's nothing unique about a pro-gay priest. Scorsese, you will recall, also directed the blasphemous 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which we won't get into because of its filth. Let's just say, Mother Angelica's review was direct, calling the movie "the most blasphemous ridicule of the Eucharist that's ever been perpetrated in this world." But back to Jimmy Martin and his bridge to Hell construction: Church Militant should consider itself blessed to be cast as the villain in a pro-sodomy film. In fact, we do. My father, God rest his soul, used to say to me, "Michael, when you die and go before Our Lord, make sure you have the right list of enemies with you." If Fr. James Martin and Martin Scorsese are on that list, which they are, then I have some hope of salvation. Let's be very clear here — very clear. Anyone, especially a priest, who promotes intrinsic evil is on his way to damnation, and, in the case of a priest, he takes many souls with him. Church teaching is very clear: Homosexual acts are contrary to nature, the natural moral law and, as such, are always evil. Martin cannot sidestep this, no matter how hard he tries. So, what Martin does is simply ignore the teaching and twist it around by quoting Scripture out of context, deliberately so. Jesus didn't eat with prostitutes and tax collectors because He wanted to be inclusive and tolerant and accepting. He ate with them because He loved them enough to call them out of their sin to change their lives and live for Him. Martin knows this, all of it, and yet continues deceiving his audiences — souls that have a right to the truth, even if they don't like it. Martin is obligated by Almighty God to tell these souls the truth and help them live it. But since Martin is gay himself — and if you aren't, Father, deny it — he seeks damnation for them because, you know, misery loves company. The movie is based on Martin's book Building a Bridge and, in the video promoting his book, he spews out so many errors and deceptions, it's almost impossible to catalog them all, or count them. The first 23 seconds are five questions that deliberately obscure the truth, so they are actually lies disguised as questions. From there, it just spirals downward, conflating terms and phrases to obscure the truth. For example, the Church has an obligation to welcome LGBT people. Again, more obfuscation — commingling friendly sounding words like "welcome" with objective states of mortal sin. The Church is under absolutely zero obligation to welcome sin and evil. In fact, it's under an obligation to speak against sin and expel it from the Temple. He spews out so many errors and deceptions, it's almost impossible to catalog them all. Sinners are welcome, of course, but with the obligation on their part of being remorseful for their sins and repenting of them. And that's not just true of active homosexuals; it's also true of every sinner or every kind of sin. But again, Martin skips over that part, as well as many others, because to reveal the whole truth would explode his agenda of getting the unsuspecting and horribly formed to accept sodomy as cool and fun and a "gift." Martin is a devil. Period. He has no love of truth, and, like his father, Satan, his mouth is a wide-open grave and all honey his speech. A couple years back, Church Militant ran into Martin in Rome the day before the Pachamama summit began. We've never divulged the details of the conversation with him there in the Borga, steps away from the Vatican's St. Anne's gate. We promised him we would not as a condition of his remaining and talking with me. That said, allow us to characterize it as Fr. Martin not being able to get away with his crap to my face like he does in the film. Scorsese even goes so far, and Martin allows it, to have his elderly mother appear in the film and disparage me for not liking her son. And yeah, we're serious. Being cast as the villain opposite Martin is actually a badge of honor, and Church Militant is happy to don the black hat. In the homo-dominated hierarchy today, even the color of the hat you wear doesn't mean what it used to.

TRANSCRIPT The curious case of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill is still shrouded in mystery. Almost a year ago, you may recall, Burill, the general secretary of the U.S. bishop conference, abruptly resigned following media reports that he was an active participant on a gay-sex phone app called "Grindr." The reports quickly earned him the name "Msgr. Grindr" and created a public relations crisis with the homosexual-friendly U.S. bishop conference. Bear in mind, the nation's bishops, as a body, warmly embrace homosexuality; they just don't like getting caught doing so, especially when it's discovered one of their own is so active. But nonetheless, that's where we are. So, in the fallout from the scandal, the bishops spun up their legal teams and produced the usual statements of blather about mercy and love and understanding and guilt or innocence and fairness and all that — hoping to produce sufficient smoke and deflection to kick the can down the road, hoping everyone forgets, which most usually do. We got stonewalled. They squirrel these types of men away, quickly getting them out of the limelight, and, then, once the dust has settled, quietly place them back in ministry. We want to play a segment of our call to the diocese of La Crosse asking his whereabouts, progress on the nearly year-old investigation and just overall what's going on. We called and told the switchboard receptionist we had questions about the status of Msgr. Burrill and were transferred to a person we were told was handling that. When we were connected to a lady by the name of Debbie, we got stonewalled. Notice, the diocese denies it's a matter of public concern, but it was the diocese that made it a matter of public concern when it released this statement back in July last year, pointing to the problem with Msgr. Grindr, mentioned in the U.S. bishop conference's public statement about him and the media reports. Notice also that she kicked it upstairs, saying she didn't have the authority to talk about it — fair enough. But then she quickly added that those who do have the authority just aren't going to talk about it. Ever. So it's not really a question of who has the authority; it's actually a matter of they refuse to come clean about all this. The claim that this isn't a matter of public concern is absurd on its face. Recall that Burrill, who worked at the USCCB (which is funded by money from the faithful), lived in USCCB housing funded by the faithful and traveled around on trips all over the country on USCCB business (paid for by the faithful) and used a USCCB phone paid for by the faithful with the gay-sex app on it. How in tarnation does that qualify as not public? It's kind of the definition of public. The diocese denies it's a matter of public concern. But Bp. William Callahan of the diocese never seems to be available to answer these questions. So as to the investigation: What has been learned over the year since it's been launched? Who is conducting it? Who's being questioned? Who is paying for it? And most importantly, where is Burrill — Msgr. Grindr? He presumably is also in receipt of money originating from the faithful — again — a public matter. How much is he making? Who's paying for his food, his housing, his insurance? Does he have a phone? Who's paying for it? Is his phone activity being monitored? But most importantly, does he deny the charges — the entire substance? And, deny or admit, why won't the bishop and his cronies reveal his answer? That they pretend — or worse, believe — you don't have a right to know any of this because it's not public. That tells you everything you need to know. Nothing has changed in the Church hierarchy and these chancery staffers when it comes to cleaning things up. If anything, it's gotten worse.

TRANSCRIPT Tomorrow, Aug. 20, is my deceased brother's birthday. His name is Marshall. Please remember him in your prayers. It also happens to be my birthday as well. Marshall and I were born the same day, seven years and one minute apart. It was beside my brother's coffin in 2003 where my reversion to the Catholic faith began. And it was beside my mother's coffin in 2004 where it was completed. As life moves on, lots of things change — including this apostolate. From those two deaths and all that pain, this apostolate was born. That was 15 years ago. As life moves on, lots of things change — including this apostolate. So on this anniversary of our birthdays, it seems a fitting moment to take a trip down memory lane. And just before we do, we want to say thank you to all of you who keep us afloat with your subscriptions, donations and, of course, prayers.

TRANSCRIPT Church Militant recently received an email from a parishioner who had confronted a priest about the church closings in the diocese. The email we received was the response from the priest to the parishioner, which the parishioner passed on to us. So as not to cause an unnecessary headache for the parishioner, we'll keep things nonspecific. And, likewise, it doesn't really matter where this took place because this situation applies across the entire country. The priest (who was ticked off at Church Militant, like many of them are) was complaining that we talk about the collapse of the Church and the resultant parish closures. His response to the parishioner was, "Well, what would you have the bishop do? In a few years, this archdiocese will have only one non-retired priest to serve over 100 parishes unless we close a huge number of them now. Priests will have to be kept on past retirement to serve these parishes." While all of that may be true, there's a measure of justice in this situation. For decades, bishops lied to the faithful and still continue to in spades. They have allowed sacrilege to rule the day. And it's important to note that they didn't just become a bishop and start doing this. They were doing it all along in their priesthood. In fact, you could make the case that they became a bishop because they were so good at not teaching the Faith. In fact, you could make the case that they became a bishop because they were so good at not teaching the Faith. Over the decades, of course, this has had the effect of blowing up the Church, destroying faith and reducing the Church to rubble. But at least many of them are still sitting on hundreds of millions in endowments and investments. But just like they never teach the Faith, they also keep that little fact from you as well. Another issue they have lied through their teeth about (and still do) is their embrace of sodomy within their own ranks. Many of these men are homosexual and have turned a blind eye to it their entire careers — and that's on a good day. They put homosexuals in charge of their seminaries to keep straight guys out and bring in "fresh meat" for their diocesan gay bars, also known as the chancery. Those men in seminary, once they proved themselves to their superiors, were ordained and promoted and eventually flooded into the bishop pipeline to keep the cycle going. Certainly not all, but enough of these homosexual clerics went on to rape thousands and thousands of altar boys. Their acts were then covered up and lied about for decades by their fellow homosexuals in miters. But as the ranks of the bishops and priests became more homosexual, society was mirroring this. No longer was it necessary for young, Catholic homosexuals to go hide in a seminary and live off the Church. Now they could just go work for the news media or Democrats or teach college classes and receive special rights as a protected class, all based strictly on whom they had sexual relations with. One effect of this was that seminary enrollments began to decline. Of course, since the Church was shrinking overall anyway, it wasn't that big of a deal. Until now. Now, conditions have reached a breaking point because the decades-long decline of seminarians has resulted in a massive shortage of priests. And yet, there are still a huge number of parish buildings with only a few Catholics in each of them. These homosexual men in collars — and eventually miters — have been the precipitating cause of the destruction of the Church in America. These homosexual men in collars — and eventually miters — have been the precipitating cause of the destruction of the Church in America. Perhaps nowhere in the country is this whole phenomenon more easily seen than the diocese of Buffalo, New York. And it's only more easily seen because people "in the know" there spilled the beans. There is nothing special about Buffalo. The root of the evil in the Church is just better known here — but it is everywhere. And the seminary in Buffalo is "exhibit No. 1." Church Militant has produced our latest Spotlight episode to show you how this evil has virtually wiped out the Church in the United States.

TRANSCRIPT Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress 35 years and, for a good portion of that time, she has been the "queen" of Capitol Hill, either as House minority leader for the Party of Death or the actual speaker of the U.S. House, as she is now. During her reign, abortion-related votes have come up multiple times, and never once has she not been a safe vote for child murder. Her latest archbishop in San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, has been there for 10 years — which is to say, when he arrived, Nancy had already been on a quarter-century killing spree. So late last week, he finally issued a decree that the sacrilege of her being given and receiving Holy Communion was going to stop, as canon law 915 makes clear as crystal should happen. So, on this narrow score, good for Abp. Cordileone. And on this narrow score is where the praise stops. He will, of course, have very nasty things said about him. California's politicians and the Marxist media editorial boards are demanding he now be removed by Pope Francis, yada, yada. Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., has made clear that Biden is free to commit sacrilege whenever he wants. But he has received public support for his action from some of his brother bishops, although, as of Monday this week, it was less than two dozen sitting ordinaries, leaving more than 150 still silent. So, on what looks like the eve of Roe being overturned by the Supreme Court, at last a single archbishop does what should have been done by him 10 years ago and by three archbishops a quarter-century before that and done across the country by hundreds of bishops continually, and now we are celebrating. This scene, good in and of itself, certainly, only goes to show the atrocious state of affairs in the Church these days. In the Catholic social media world, many are singing the praises of the archbishop — again good in and of itself for his decree. But what is being overlooked is the length of time it took this to happen, the massive lack of support among other bishops (evidenced by their silence), the constant, ongoing practice of sacrilegious Holy Communion being given to child killers all over the country and the failure on the part of the national conference of bishops to do anything for the past 50 years about this horrendous crime. Archbishop Cordileone's action only looks good in isolation, and, even then, in isolation from his own foot-dragging for the past decade. It serves to highlight, by comparison, the sorry condition of the males in miters across the country. When they gathered in Baltimore last November, they refused to take up the issue with regard to Biden, an even more glaring example. Despite all kinds of reports from the press that Biden was going to be declared unfit for reception of Holy Communion, that was never on the bishops' agenda, ever. That was made blindingly clear by Fort Wayne–South Bend bishop Kevin Rhoades in the run-up to the meeting. He said flat out it was not on the agenda. That, of course, didn't stop or even slow down the Marxist media, in their bloodlust support for abortion, from reporting about the imaginary news. But again, it was never going to happen, as was made clear after the meeting by comments from Texas bishop Daniel Flores, quoted by The Washington Post: "We saw initially a moment of different ideas of what the document should be about. Is it mostly about political responsibility? A Eucharistic revival? A teaching document? The document tried to nuance that," said Bp. Daniel Flores, of Brownsville, Texas. "It's not a one-size-fits-all. It's not adjudicated by popular opinion. We have to be patient, and patient with one another. I think the bishops wanted to speak with patience with one another." "Patience" over sacrilege is more than misplaced patience; its scandal. Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., has made clear that Biden is free to commit sacrilege whenever he wants, and Gregory will support him — actually, defend him. The same is true of Biden's newly appointed bishop, William Koenig, in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, who deftly sidestepped questions about the scandal. New York's Cdl. Timothy Dolan, a number of years back, made clear in an interview that his view is the question should be left to individual bishops, which, of course, makes no sense at all. Sacrilege is not determined by a declaration of a local bishop, one way or the other, but by the very action itself. That, of course, explains why Dolan said he would not have denied Holy Communion to Biden back during the campaign when Fr. Robert Morey of Florence, South Carolina, did just that. Dolan infamously noted, regarding the story, "If only saints could receive Holy Communion, we wouldn't have anybody at Mass, including myself." There is still no consensus on the part of bishops to actually follow canon law in hundreds of other cases around the nation. Much larger questions loom over all this, occasioned by Cordileone's correct action, but perhaps the most pressing question is, Do the bishops themselves believe the teaching on the Eucharist, and if they do (because it's not clear at all that at least some of them do), why don't their actions comport with Church teaching on the subject? So while the impetus to praise Cordileone may be strong — not so fast. Thirty-five years is a long time to have dithered around with this whole matter, 10 of those years on his watch. And, even now, there is still no consensus on the part of bishops to actually follow canon law in hundreds of other cases around the nation. True, Biden and Pelosi are certainly the poster children for this whole thing, but they are hardly the only examples. On both state and federal levels, there are scores, if not hundreds, of other examples of this same evil, where bishops simply look the other way. And a final question: With the dwindling number of believing Catholics being more and more evident, is it finally reckoning time for the U.S. hierarchy? After decades of ignoring this evil, can it be that a smaller-yet-more-vocal-and-critical denouncement of their inactions is finally reaching their ears? It is a question. Why now after so long of doing nothing? That question matters because the answer has predictive value in the coming months and years in the Church in the United States.

In today's Vortex, Michael Voris is interviewed by Dr. Michael Robillard. Dr. Robillard is an American philosopher, Army veteran, Roman Catholic and host of The Patriot Philosopher podcast. Interview was recorded on May 17, 2022.

TRANSCRIPT A number of years back, we were speaking with a highly influential member of the hierarchy who confessed to me that Pope Francis said directly to him, "I want the confusion." The papal reply came in direct response to the hierarchy man's pain over all the confusion in the Church today. Who the member of the hierarchy was who told me this doesn't matter. It was a private conversation, but I have absolutely no reason to assume what was told me was not true. Looking around the Church and the culture today, it seems confusion is the order of the day. For example, in Washington, D.C., with the poster boy for confusion (the unelected president), confusion reigns supreme. Biden doesn't seem to know what's going on, whether it's with Afghanistan, the border, China, the economy, the China virus or foreign policy. All of it seems completely lost on him. No wonder Jen Psaki and Nancy Pelosi never allow him to answer reporters' questions — unless they're about his favorite ice cream. But the mass confusion in the White House points to something else, just as it does in the Church. Biden isn't really the one making the decisions. Once you accept the fact that the government is being run by a bunch of grown-up hippies from the 1960s, things become very clear. They have no love of America, just as Obama didn't, and they don't have any real-world experience, just like Obama didn't. Looking around the Church and the culture today, it seems confusion is the order of the day. On Obama, he walks into the White House not especially well off. He walks out of the White House extremely wealthy. Imagine how much better things could have been for him if Americans weren't so racist. He could have two houses on Martha's Vineyard. There are so many parallels between the antics and mindset of the current government leaders and Church leaders that it really is staggering. But when you think about it, why should it be staggering? They all grew up in the same hippie, anti-U.S., anti-establishment, pro-deviance culture. But even the leaders aren't actual leaders. What does lead them is a mix of modernism and Marxism, which itself is even somewhat vague to them (and which is why within their own ranks you see this division and confusion over strategy, e.g., the Bernie/AOC camp vs. the Pelosi/Schumer camp.) In the Church, we see the same thing in the hierarchy. Take the recent kerfuffle over the so-called Eucharist-coherence document. What a waste of time. Yet here we see within the ranks of the modernist prelates massive disagreement. One-third of them didn't want to even talk about it, while many of the rest pushed forward the idea of talking about it but not really saying anything substantive. As I was relaying to one bishop recently, what precisely is the USCCB going to produce that's more profound than what St. Thomas has already written about the Eucharist? Maybe the bishops haven't learned about cut and paste yet. There are many examples of how modernism has infected the hierarchy and created this reign of confusion, but this Eucharist-coherence debate is a timely example. First, what does the term "Eucharistic coherence" even reference? Well, coherence is a quality of being logical and consistent, forming a unified whole based on those qualities. Remember, this whole thing began because Joe Biden and others like him are allowed to receive Holy Communion. That a child killer and sodomite supporter would be allowed to receive is at odds with what the Church teaches about the Eucharist. So what do the bishops do in their stunning brilliance? They decide to produce a document on Eucharist coherence and exclude any discussion from it on the very issue at hand: notorious Catholic characters receiving Holy Communion. And somehow they think the worthless document they are all laboring over is going to be read by anyone besides their interns and a few staffers. All that the U.S. bishops and various big-name politicos seem to understand is that the Church and America of yesteryear must be demolished. What takes its place, how it comes into being, what policies and processes emerge, who the leaders are — none of that really matters. All that matters is that everything that used to be the case must be wiped away. On the political scene, look no further than the China virus: mask, no mask, flatten the curve, crush the economy, get jabbed, get boosters, Delta variant, religious exemptions, no religious exemptions, get fired, sue, courts agree, courts disagree. COVID is about politics, not science, which is why there is such massive disagreement and confusion over it. It all makes your head spin, and that is exactly the point. It's not the worldly leaders actually pulling the strings here. It's the otherworldly leader pulling their strings. It's the same in the Church hierarchy. The heresy of modernism and Marxism are really the same thing, just presented slightly differently. The underlying thesis of each is that the way things were in the past is bad and must be supplanted. That's it, nothing more. Blow up everything that preceded us, and we'll make it up as we go along after that. So yes, when a common enemy comes along harkening back to the past, they can easily surround him and attack. Trump comes to mind with his "America First" theme. Likewise, the Traditional Latin Mass with its God-first theme. And any Catholic media apostolates who preach Catholic truth with a ferocity also become the object of attacks. But leaving aside obvious enemies, the Marxist/modernist crowd then begins to break down and divide over everything — not in principle, mind you, but in tactics and plans. Even when it comes to who's actually in charge. They are all beholden to a grand vision of humanity without religion and political freedom, but everything after that becomes vague in terms of who calls the shots, which plan gets followed, how to execute a series of plans not everyone agrees on — you get the idea. If you drift back to the days of Nazi Germany, even the leadership of the Third Reich couldn't see straight on the "Jewish question." The Nuremberg laws themselves were a complete cluster of definitions, legal recourse, administrative madness, mass confusion of how certain things were to be applied and what exemptions there were, if any. Even that couldn't be agreed upon. From that mass confusion, of course, we got the so-called Final Solution, but even the term implies enormous disagreement over what the solution should be. The problem was about how to create a Jew-free Germany. The solution to the problem — the Final Solution — was just to kill them all. All that the U.S. bishops and various big-name politicos seem to understand is that the Church and America of yesteryear must be demolished. But the point is, before the Final Solution, there were many other "solutions." There were mass-sterilization programs, mass-deportation programs, mass-incarceration programs, mass-disenfranchisement programs, mass-ghetto programs and so forth. Mass extermination was not in any of the original programs. Likewise, in our day, the "problem" for the modernists and Marxists is this: How do we eradicate tradition from the Church and the culture? We see right now tons of ideas and programs to do just that: Pack the Supreme Court, blow up the filibuster, put the TLM on life support, replace catechesis with pabulum. Within their ranks, there are all sorts of disagreements, and, in both politics and the Church, it's not entirely clear, from an earthly perspective, just who exactly is in charge. Is there an individual or cabals behind the respective thrones? It's not entirely clear. The only thing that is clear is the dominance of confusion everywhere. And that, we know, comes from the ancient enemy. Hold fast to that tradition, no matter the cost to yourself.

TRANSCRIPT If you've followed Church Militant or the Vortex for any length of time, you'll know that we have said often that it is obvious many members of the hierarchy, as well as their pet clergy, have no supernatural faith. Faith is the supernatural virtue that instills and upholds supernatural hope, which leads to the supernatural virtue of charity. All are infused at the moment of baptism, but each — or all — may be lost. When a person loses supernatural faith, it's lights out. If you don't believe, you won't have hope, and without hope, you will not act out of an abundance of supernatural charity. This is why St. Paul points to these three supernatural virtues as being key: "In the end, three things abideth — faith, hope and charity. And the greatest of these is charity." It is possible, at least to a degree, to perceive people's degree of faith by looking at their degree of charity. In short, how much do they love? How much are their actions inspired by love of God and neighbor? If you aren't seeing that because it doesn't appear to be present, then there is a problem at the root of their faith — their supernatural faith. It is possible, at least to a degree, to perceive people's degree of faith by looking at their degree of charity. These three virtues are called the theological virtues because they have God Himself as their end. An atheist has natural faith as well as natural hope and even, at times, natural charity. When he goes to bed at night, he has faith he will wake up in the morning. When he starts his car, he has hope the engine will turn over and he can drive to work. When he arrives at work, he might even have a kind word for a fellow worker, acting charitably toward him. But none of that is supernatural because none of those actions has God as their end. So as the old philosophical adage goes, you can tell someone by his actions, and a lack of supernatural charitable acts can betoken a lack of supernatural faith. An abundance of uncharitable actions is practical proof of no supernatural faith or a very weak supernatural faith. So using this template, let's turn to the U.S. hierarchy. It is abundantly clear that various members of the hierarchy possess either no or insufficient supernatural faith simply by noting their lack of charity. Many members of the hierarchy have lied openly to the faithful and continue to do so. They deceive about an enormous variety of matters, many about the actual Faith and others about material management of the Church. They lie to or deceive victims of abuse. They deceive or refuse to be transparent about things the laity has a right to know. They abuse their own clergy by falsely accusing them of heinous deeds or shipping them off to the clerical nuthouse so they can start a "paper trail" on them that follows them to the grave. These are not men of God. They have His authority by virtue of their ordination and consecrations, but they abuse that authority entrusted to them. And when we move to the all-important issue of sacrilegious Holy Communion — notorious sinners being scandalously given Holy Communion — there is simply no way that a deacon, priest or bishop who approves of this can possibly possess the necessary supernatural faith that Jesus Christ is really, wholly and substantially present — Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity — under the appearance of bread and wine. As for the weakling bishops who do believe, the sad fact is that they don't love Our Lord enough. Faith is directly related to charity (love). The more you believe, the more you should love God. Likewise, the less you love God, the less you believe. It's simply nonsensical to think that a bishop who is flippant and unconcerned about giving sacrilegious Holy Communion to notoriously pro-abortion Catholic politicians still believes that Holy Communion is Jesus Christ. It's just not possible. They would be in fear for the soul of the politician, in fear of their own damnation and they would pay very close attention to the warning of St. Paul. Instead, they pervert and twist canon law and deflect from the truth, and, when it comes to Our Lord's actual presence, deflecting from the truth means you don't believe. There is no other reasonable conclusion. And for those who do believe, at least to some degree (yet go along with this and do not condemn this outrage), their belief, such as it is, produces an insufficient charity toward God. They stay silent or murmur a little bit as Our Lord is desecrated by being placed into the hands of public, obstinate sinners, endangering their souls and presenting huge scandal to the faithful, weakening their faith. The more you believe, the more you should love God. Likewise, the less you love God, the less you believe. Does the unbelieving crowd think they will escape damnation? Does the insufficiently loving crowd think they will be immune from divine judgment? The bishops who have created and continue this atmosphere of sacrilege, in whatever way each does, will have to answer to Our Lord when they meet Him at their judgments. It is monstrous that this has been allowed to proceed to this point. And now, with what looks like the Vatican stepping in and letting the bishops off the hook, the circle of guilt has widened. Theological perverts, doctrinal heretics and dissidents support this (or are too cowardly to condemn it and simply face whatever the consequences are from speaking out). Writing nice documents that ask for or promote dialogue has accomplished nothing. This evil — and that is precisely what it is — has gone on for decades. We will repeat what we have said for years here: It is clear that many members of the hierarchy have no supernatural faith or don't love God enough to care for your souls, or, in the end, even their own. No wonder saints and Fathers of the Church have said a large number of bishops will be damned.

TRANSCRIPT It's hardly a secret that the Party of Death hates life — hence their much-deserved nickname. And a primary target of their rage against life is aimed at the youngest among us. They are well-documented haters of the pre-born, proven time and time again. But the recent vote in the U.S. Senate to supposedly codify Roe was the icing on the cake. After 50 years of reigning down death on children in the womb, it appears they are ready to suffer a major blow from the Supreme Court in the upcoming Dobbs decision, likely to be handed down the last week of June. While roughly half the states will place severe restrictions on the child-murdering industry, roughly half will proceed full steam ahead. And now, woke Democrat child killers in charge of large corporations have promised to actually pay for employees who want to travel to the pro-death states to kill their children. Amazon, Apple, CitiGroup, Bumble dating app, Tesla, Microsoft, Yelp, Levi Strauss, Salesforce, Starbucks, Mastercard and Lyft, to name just some. In fact, Lyft went so far as to promise to actually pay the legal fees for any of its drivers who get sued in Oklahoma or Texas for driving a woman to an abortuary to kill her child. In those two states, new laws allow anyone involved in the killing of a child to be gone after by private citizens. Not wanting to miss out on the action, Uber rushed to the microphones to match that promise. As June gets closer, we can expect the list of companies supportive of child murdering to only increase. In their bloodlust, the Democrats have simply lost the ability to recognize, or even respond to, truth. Large corporations have promised to pay for employees to travel to the pro-death states. Like we said, truth and reason have left the building when it comes to the Party of Death. It's the same reason why so many American parents are now staring into the face of the evil that's been going on in their children's classrooms for a couple decades now as "teachers" indoctrinate their kids about the glories of transgenderism and masturbation and flipping sexual identities and any other perversion that spews forth from their own demented minds. Again, notice the target — children. If they can't kill their bodies in the womb, well then, they'll kill their souls in the classrooms. That is, if they make it to the classrooms. Because in the midst of this, of course, we have the baby formula crisis, manufactured by the Biden administration's bungling of everything they touch. But given the long track record of anti-child policies of the Democrats, it looks to be something much more than just bungling, especially when the children of illegal immigrants are given baby formula galore, yet citizens scramble for their own infants. The Party of Death orbits around the central notion that humanity, in and of itself, needs to be done in. That is the single philosophy which animates the entire party — kill and destroy. Everything they do, every bill they introduce, every law they succeed in getting passed, has that as its goal. That's why humanity must be sacrificed "for the sake of the planet." That's why the economy can be wrecked. That's why families can have war waged against them on multiple fronts. That's why pedophilia and child trafficking are so embraced. That's why contraception can be pushed wholesale. That's why homosexuality always gets the red carpet treatment. That's why child slaughter is sacrosanct — because it is the most direct way to end the race. Fallen angels rebelled over this question — that God would assume human form. The Democratic Party is diabolical, in the grip and control of the diabolical at the service of the diabolical, and does the bidding of the diabolical. It is the Antichrist. Period. The demonic hates humanity. The fallen angels rebelled over this very question — that God would assume human form and they would worship Him in that form. They are in everlasting torment because of this single issue, and, until the world ends, they will vent their rage against human life. Now, considering all that, when you come to learn that approximately one third of U.S. bishops are registered members of this legion from Hell, you now realize just how bad things are in the Church. And those are just the bishops who are officially Democrats. Huge numbers of others among them support bits and pieces of that agenda. And most disturbing is that the ones most faithful Catholics consider "good" say and do next to nothing about these devils in their own ranks. The world cannot advance in truth and goodness as long as the Church is floundering. And the floundering will continue until the ranks of the shepherds are thinned or, better, completely purged of these homosexual monsters who advance Democrats, cover up sex abuse of children and seminarians, steal billions from the laity to conceal their crimes, sell off the patrimony of the Church and so forth. Their crimes have no end. They don't believe the Faith; it's not even clear all of them believe in God. In fact, it's a safe bet there are either atheists or "practical" atheists among them. So while they prattle on about justice for the planet and justice for illegal immigrants, they profit handsomely from their fellow Democrats. Some of the bishops are evil, of that there is no doubt. Most of the rest are enablers of that evil. Most have embraced the agenda of Satan one way or another, either through commission or omission, which means they should be perfectly comfortable spending eternity with him. Fools.

TRANSCRIPT Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. It's kind of funny that so many bishops hate Church Militant — even notables in the Vatican can't stand us. But, in a sense, the joke's on them. Church Militant is an unintended creation of them, specifically, their refusal to do their job. Do they really think that Catholics who love the Church are going to sit by while they lie, steal, abuse, cover up and so forth — all while refusing to say the truth of the glory of Catholic teaching? They refuse to say the truth, which deprives souls of the truth who want the truth. Sorry, bishops, but you don't get to do that, miter or no miter. Every faithful Catholic has an obligation to speak the truth of the Faith, of Jesus Christ; and whatever happens, happens. However, in a climate of widespread ecclesiastical corruption, that obligation is increased significantly. They refuse to say the truth. Bishops have forsworn their sacred obligation, and done so in a most cowardly, self-absorbed fashion. So now, the baton of truth-telling is handed to the laity, which is a lesson the bishops should learn from. It's really not that difficult to say the truth, and when you proclaim the truth, people react. Most do not like the truth, which is what makes the bishops such cowards in being afraid of negative responses. But some do respond favorably when they hear truth, and, like a flower turning toward the light, open up to it. A couple of weeks ago, Church Militant interviewed a local Michigan woman running to be a state representative. Her name is Jacky Eubanks, and she believes and embraces everything the Church teaches. Because we spoke about truth and Church teaching in the arena of politics, some on the Left lost their minds. A video from a dude who calls himself "Texas Paul" on the Meidas Touch website got close to 100,000 views in about 24 hours. It also got more than 4,000 comments. But them's "small potatoes" compared to the Lincoln Project's brief video, which has going on half a million views in the same time frame. It also has thousands of comments. On top of that, a tweet posted last week from the account Left of Center MI has been retweeted over 2,000 times and has 1.1 million views. The Left is in an uproar, or, more precisely, the haters of truth are in an uproar. But, then again, they are always in an uproar. It's safe to say this one clip has brought the truth to more people about contraception than the U.S. bishops have in the past 50 years. So by the time this Vortex airs, almost 2 million people will have viewed the truth and thousands will have attacked it. And on top of that, this interview also made international news. "Banning Abortions Is Just the Start — Next, the U.S. Right Want to Outlaw Contraception": That's a headline from The Guardian yesterday. Here's the subtitle: "Jacky Eubanks Wants to Be a Michigan Senator — and to Ban Contraception. And She's Not the Only One." And a quick message to other Catholics running for office: You should have the same unapologetic zeal that Jacky does. Now for the bishops: Not that we care or certainly excuse their cowardice, but this is what happens when you say the truth or challenge the established narrative, which excuses evil. For example, wildly popular conservative pundit Mark Dice, with almost 2 million subscribers, earlier this week highlighted a recent interview Church Militant conducted with Matt Schlapp on the question of homosexuality. In less than a day, over a hundred thousand views and 4,000 comments. When you say the truth, some people will respond to it and change their lives. And this is the very thing the bishops seem to never grasp, the cowardly wimps. When you say the truth, some people will respond to it and change their lives. For their sake, the truth must be told. For its own sake as well — but for its saving, life-transforming power, it must be not just told, but announced everywhere, loudly and clearly. As St. Paul said, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel." Here's a reminder to those bishops who keep the gospel from people: When the Holy Spirit inspires the authors to use the word "woe," it never ends well. Tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. The alternative is, don't tell the truth, and fall into Hell.

TRANSCRIPT For years, Church Militant has been sounding the alarm over the horror of homosexuality in the ranks of the clergy. Nobody in the Catholic establishment media has uttered a syllable about it unless and until some single aspect of it breaks through as a stand-alone story, usually from either criminal charges being filed or a civil lawsuit that gets reported by the secular media. So it was more than a little weird to see a headline late last week from the National Catholic Register that read, "Clerical Misconduct on 'Hook-Up' Apps Poses Fresh Challenges for Bishops." While accurate on its face, there is not a single thing fresh about the underlying issue. Frankly, why does it matter if homosexual clergy are using an app or a rent-a-boy 1-800 number or carrying on with each other? The issue isn't the means by which they connect, but that they connect in the first place. The people making the decisions know the current condition of the Church but refuse to disclose it to you in any meaningful, actionable way. The issue of bishops, some of whom are gay themselves, is the gay sex, not how they meet. How is it that this is such an issue? That is the question, not the phone app they use. And that is the question that bishops are not only massively adept at dodging, but they also have enablers in Catholic establishment media. If you've been following Church Militant for some time, you will recognize this theme as one of our recurring themes: the distinct lack of integrity among Catholic establishment media. They have been grossly derelict in the category of sins of omission. Much of what they write about is fine and good and all that. But to be pointing at the beautiful floral arrangements and statuary in the sanctuary while the Church Herself is on fire is a complete abdication of their professional responsibility. The Catholic establishment media is essentially controlled by the bishops. Period. Catholic News Service (CNS), for example, actually has its offices in the USCCB building in Washington, D.C. and serves as little else than a public relations outfit posing as news. But other outfits such as EWTN, CNA and the National Catholic Register are all owned and operated by the same people and are simply not reliable when it comes to informing you on what's really going on in the Church. True, they don't publish out-and-out lies like National Catholic Reporter or America Magazine, but in many ways that makes them even more dangerous. Non-heretical Catholics read these publications and watch their milquetoast coverage of events and walk away totally uninformed of the actual reality, while also thinking they have learned something. They haven't. The editorial decisions of this monolith of feel-good Catholic news are a detriment to the current situation Catholics face. And here's one horrible part of this: The people making the decisions know the current condition of the Church but refuse to disclose it to you in any meaningful, actionable way. They simply stay away from a certain set of stories that will tick off the bishops — namely, corruption within the episcopal ranks. Only when a story gets out of the bag do they then spring into action, like this latest story, but even here, where is the larger discussion of the underlying issue? Who cares that clergy use Grindr? What we care about and have every right to be informed of is that they are having sex with each other and/or strangers with great frequency. The Catholic establishment media fell completely in lockstep, for example, back in February of 2019 at the much-ballyhooed but completely worthless Rome sex summit, a three-day affair where absolutely nothing serious was allowed on the agenda. Cardinal Blase Cupich was dispatched by Pope Francis to ensure that the question of homosexuality within the clerical ranks never came up, and there was barely a peep from the Catholic media. How this group goes to sleep each night with a clear conscience is beyond me. They are facilitating the evil in the Church by their constant sidestepping of the issue. And then when the occasional moment does in fact arrive where they are more or less forced to pen a column, it's always a monumental example of deflection. They find some secondary, tertiary or even academic issue to hone in on, deliberately avoiding the pink elephant in the sanctuary. Whether they are actually ordered by bishops to avoid that topic or they simply understand they should not bite the hand that feeds them, they refuse to write stories that discuss this in any meaningful way. For example, with the whole question of the gay seminarian pipelines set up by Bernardin, McCarrick and Henry Mansell back in the 1980s and 1990s in Chicago, New Jeresy and Buffalo, respectively, it was Church Militant who broke that news, not them. During the Roman sex summit, it was Church Militant who was asking why Cupich was refusing to allow discussion on homosexuality or McCarrick, which was the entire impetus for the Summit. In the case of Bp. Michael Hoeppner of Crookston, Minnesota (the first bishop in the world to be dumped from office under the pope's new rules), it was Church Militant who broke that story and followed through with it — not the Catholic establishment media. The Church hierarchy is crawling with gay men. The Catholic establishment media know this and keep very quiet about it. Where are the groundbreaking reports on McCarrick? McCarrick as well as Bernardin populated the hierarchy, priesthood and seminaries with thousands of gay men over the decades, and, over those decades, many of them rose to great heights within the Church. Where are all the stories on this? They can't possibly claim to not know. Our studio here is so inundated with these tips and information, it's impossible to keep up with. And since many of the leaders of the Catholic establishment media are in so tight with the bishops and their aides and personnel, they know much, so where are the stories? The real stories. Because they appeal to a somewhat conservative audience, they are content to write stories on the big level, such as what this cardinal or that has to say about the culture or the latest oddity coming out of the Francis papacy. But here on the ground where all those stories originate, not a word. Pope Francis didn't just drop out of the sky. He was incubated in a malformed episcopate where so-called social justice supplanted doctrine. The $4 billion (and counting) sex abuse scandal didn't suddenly arrive out of the blue, and the fact that bishops are doing a somewhat better job with minors being raped by clergy does not mean there should be no stories on priests and bishops sodomizing each other and the massive damage being done to the Church because of it. Here's the bottom line: If you wish to get sanitized information so as not to disrupt your peaceable and delusional view of the Church and the evils that beset Her from within, then continue going to the Catholic establishment media. They are the extreme professionals at putting lipstick on pink pigs. But if you want to actually know what's going on through in-depth exploration, further probing and concomitant questioning and investigation, then come here to Church Militant. No bishop, cardinal or pope orders us as to what we can and cannot report on. Unlike the Catholic establishment media, our focus is strictly on souls. Period. Unlike the Catholic establishment media, our focus is strictly on souls. Period. And even though they deflect from the whole truth, it's interesting that more and more they are being forced to have to report (kind of) on the very events Church Militant has been doing for years. Even though a number of them individually are journalists, even good ones, the environment of being beholden to the bishops prevents them from pursuing the type of stories and raising the sorts of issues we do here at Church Militant. So the very reasonable question arises: Why would you watch, read or listen to them, and why would you give them any money? They don't tell you the real story. They don't exactly lie, but they aren't completely honest either.

TRANSCRIPT Following on from yesterday's Vortex about this apostolate's 15-year anniversary and how things have evolved here, I have some thoughts to share. The Faith is not preached in a vacuum. The souls that truth is brought to are not neutral, and they do not live in a neutral world. The world, as Our Blessed Lord described it Himself, is the enemy of truth and it will hate us who try to live by and preach the truth because it hated Him first — He who is Truth. So that is the basic foundation on which we have to begin any effort at evangelization — not any kind of pie-in-the-sky, romanticized-monks-preaching-to-the-barbarians-and-them-all-being-baptized kind of image. First, that effort took centuries and many of the monks and preachers were martyred or, at the bare minimum, suffered tremendously at the hands of the world. It comes with the territory. Each age has brought new challenges to each epoch of the Church — things that, while in principle are the same, are realized in the day-to-day quite differently. A thousand or so years later, here we are: the 21st-century Church living an experience not only never lived out before in the life of the Church (or the world, for that matter), but with absolutely zero precedent. This has been centuries in the making, originating with the evils in the hierarchy which brought about the Protestant revolt. The theological revolution, ultimately undermining the very notion of authority itself, brought about philosophical and political revolution. It's not surprising at all that the collapse of the Church happened exactly at the same time that the media became dominant. No faithful Catholic can ever fail to understand that from the moment you attain the age of reason until you die, there is a spiritual war, a ferocious battle, being waged for your soul. This battle has a million different sub-battles and is played out not just personally in your own mind, but also in the world, which engages with you in such a way as to try and drive truth from your intellect. To that end — the denial of truth — we have arrived at a point where every cultural institution has been so compromised and overrun (most especially the Church hierarchy and much of the clergy) that every soul is now at a severe disadvantage because the very concepts of truth, right, morality and authority are denied. While we can trace this evolution in a number of different ways, we would like to propose to you that it has taken off — achieved a victory in the human consciousness, thanks to the corruption of the media (specifically news media). There is Luciferian media (Fr. John Hardon's excellent term) now present that has never before been present in human history. It is the media, more than any other single institution, that has been used to corrupt the human intellect. Even within the Church, evil men's cooperation with these media narratives (COVID, immigration, climate change, social justice, "love") have all been used and continue to be used to corrupt the Faith in people's minds. It is the case of corruption through distortion. It may have seemed 70 or 80 years ago that a broad-based corruption of various institutions was not really connected. The nation's law schools, for example, were turning from truth to an outcome-based agenda. Many of the nation's universities were dabbling in strange philosophies, which, at first, may have seemed classroom-confined and somewhat innocuous, but proved, in the end, to be the beginning stages of a social cancer. Likewise, the media, specifically news, was a somewhat noble profession trying to pursue justice. But even there it was the advent of mass media, specifically electronic and, more specifically, television — the visual image — that transformed media into a vehicle for hate disguised as justice. Consider that the entire Vietnam War effort completely flipped based on CBS News' false story that the United States had lost certain battles, when we had, in fact, won them. It was the images flashed into people's homes night after night with the melodious tones of uber-liberal Walter Cronkite that turned the war effort, ultimately having a deep psychological effect on the nation's citizens. In the ensuing decades, the three major networks became like gods as they dictated the ebb and flow of what Americans were supposed to believe. As they deliberately eroded the authority of Church and State, they seized that authority unto themselves, and people believed them. The truth of Watergate was nowhere near as heinous as it was portrayed to be and certainly much less than what Obama did during his presidency, but one president was vilified and had to resign while the other was celebrated by the exact same establishment. In fact, Obama and his reign were a direct product of the media establishment. So why is it important to know and understand all this? To be able to be conversant in all this? What does it have to do with saving souls and Catholic truth? Because this is where the battle for minds is taking place every day — the battle for truth and influence over the intellect. In centuries past, such battles may have occurred in the king's court or on a battlefield and so forth. For the moment, it has been assigned to this realm. And this is why it must be fought voraciously. For example, the media wanted Obama canonized and Trump demonized because of what each man represented. Obama was the perfect contemporary man: godless, without any moral compass, power-hungry and a man who fit their suit. He was black, which meant if you spoke against anything he said or did, you were immediately labeled a racist. He shoved aside all notions of America even remotely resembling a Christian nation or people. And with his anti-god policies and personnel in power, he set about the creation of what would later be revealed to be the deep state. Hillary was supposed to win and just carry on the policies of sodomy-as-marriage, child slaughter and so forth, but Trump interrupted that and reminded us, if even in a flawed way, that America was better than this. But what was moving under the radar on all of this political maelstrom was the participation in the overthrow of the old world by many men in the U.S. hierarchy. Various numbers of them are every bit as much a part of the deep state as any senior Democrat or turncoat Republican. They even can be said to have constituted a deep church — and, make no mistake, they are in control. Just as Obama — through his agents and with the never-ending drum pounding of the media — controls the government, so too do his allies in the Church who worked so hard to get him elected in 2008 and reelected in 2012. And why should you care about all this as a faithful Catholic? Because the policies of Obama and the subversive actions of multiple prelates are intended to prevent you from ever achieving your eternal destiny desired by God. And that is because, ultimately, it is Satan in control of the media and government — not Obama or Kamala or Blase Cupich or Wilton Gregory or Joseph Tobin. They are his puppets. They have completely surrendered to him, yet, through pride, they believe themselves to be calling the shots. They are not. He is. Their hatred of truth does not really derive from themselves but from him, the Father of Lies. He proposes to them in their warped, arrogant, power-hungry intellects, and they rush to embrace his falsehoods. But bear in mind, in our current political governance, none of this would be possible if the citizenry had not first been corrupted to accept their policies disguised as goods. And that happened because of the media, predominantly the news media, in all its opposition to truth. This is the entire reason Satan seized hold of the media: to corrupt intellects. And it's not surprising at all that the collapse of the Church happened exactly at the same time that the media became dominant: the 1960s and following. The media even spun its own narrative about Vatican II — so much so that Pope Benedict once famously noted that there was the actual council and then the council of the media. Whatever your thoughts about Vatican II and the behind-the-scenes strangeness going on, it is a fact that the media put into the intellects of the Catholic world that "everything has changed." And they meant everything: sin, liturgy, Hell — all of it was out the window, and a new church of homosexual clergy and lesbian nuns sprang into being. In truth, the gays and lesbians were already there at the time, moving into key positions, but it was the media that allowed them to begin their march to tear down Holy Mother Church and replace Her with a globalist, social justice, Marxist Church consumed with a radically evil understanding of "love" — which has not a thing to do with love as it is in God. How man is governed is massively important to how he understands himself in relation to God. How he is instructed by religious leaders in this regard is more important. These forces that have seized political control and control in the Church are not neutral. They are literally hell-bent on actually destroying religion and using the powers of government to crush the Faith and believers. And the media is their main weapon in that. The media tries to convince people that their narrative is true and all about love and equality and fairness, and if you oppose it, you need to be eliminated. You suffer from some type of phobia. You are a hater and need to be treated as such. And they are winning, which is why they have to be opposed — because to actively oppose their lies is to stand for Catholic truth and the Faith. Truthful news, therefore, becomes a tool to evangelize. We preach where people live. What the faithful must come to understand clearly is the connection between the corrupt media and the necessity of challenging it. It's why the Vatican, Bp. Barron, James Martin and many others are looking for ways to silence us and other faithful Catholics — because this work in the media is undoing their decades of lies and misinformation. The media narrative must be attacked head-on and undone, or at least sufficiently destabilized in people's minds to be able to clear a way for the truth to get in. Many people have come across us here at Church Militant and either converted or reverted, specifically because of listening to us talk like this. That's what they tell us, over and over again. The faithful today have a challenge we never had before. It's a very different world. Getting people to come to the truth means you have to undo and demolish an entire network of lies that has been spun for them through and by the media. For example, just look at how the bishops not only caved but went even further than state governors on the whole COVID crisis created by the media. What the faithful must come to understand clearly is the connection between the corrupt media and the necessity of challenging it — that this does comprise a significant part of what we call "evangelizing." They are not two different things. They have everything to do with each other. The forces of evil in the media enjoy a significant head start, so much so that it may not be able to be overcome. But we aren't called to win; we are called to fight. Any victory would be brought about by God anyway. In the meantime, fight we must. The battle for salvation in this epoch of the Church is being fought as an information war. We didn't ask for this but it is, nonetheless, where we are. As a reminder and in response to our current situation, Church Militant has put together the most comprehensive newscast in the entire Catholic world, airing on the site each weeknight at 6:30 p.m. ET and then on replay about 60 minutes or so later. Please make it part of your routine. It's news and information from an authentic Catholic viewpoint on the things of this world, which directly bear upon our lives in the next.

TRANSCRIPT As the political season really heats up and the merger between faith and politics gains greater scrutiny, there are some benchmarks that need to be kept front and center. The main one is this — in any attempt to preserve or restore a Christian culture, politics is at the service of the Faith, not the other way around. Especially among self-identifying Catholics, no one gets to claim the mantle of Catholicism or claim that things are being done in the name of truth when lies or untruths or decidedly un-Catholic things are being promoted. The Faith cannot be distorted, maligned, associated with evil, whacky ideas or any other ideology with the excuse that "we need to win." No ideology needs to win so badly that the truths of the Faith can be abused in the process. And it doesn't matter who you are, how old you are, what your motivation is — nothing excuses using the Faith, established by the Incarnate Eternal Logos, for your own ends, even if you are well intentioned. Nothing and no one uses the truth, regardless of intentions. Sadly, though, the using of Catholicism seems to be somewhat common, especially in the world of politics. We are all familiar with the assault on the Faith from the so-called religious Left, the James Martin camp, for example, distorting and perverting theological truths so that men can be granted religious permission to have anal sex with other men — ridiculous. But equally ridiculous is the indifference to sexual sins exhibited by Catholics on the so-called "conservative" side, where the embrace of homosexuality by fiscal conservatives has been deemed somehow acceptable — again, even by self-identifying Catholics. Likewise, the marrying of prejudice and/or ethnic hate or mockery has absolutely zero place among anyone purporting to be Catholic and trying to restore Western civilization. Any understanding of Western civilization (built by the Catholic Church) that incorporates or excuses or laughs off hatred of ethnic groups, demeans a person's sex or envisions the Faith as a "white" religion is, frankly, disturbed, and deeply so. Hatred based on skin color or DNA couldn't be further removed from Catholicism. The early Church was almost exclusively comprised of Jews. St. Augustine was black. The Rwandan martyrs were African. Saint Paul Miki and his community of martyrs were Japanese. As St. Paul utters under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to the stupid Galatians: For, through faith, you are all children of God in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to the promise. Hatred, mockery or despising of someone based on the color of their skin or the DNA in their body couldn't be further removed from Catholicism. Likewise, appealing to weird race theories, attacking inter-racial marriage and a host of other activities and veiling it all in uncertain, undefined, vague terms and vocabulary is not Catholic by any stretch of anyone's imagination. The Faith has been hijacked by competing political interests and placed in the service of sin. This is an abomination, a profaning of the holy, placed at the service of Satan. There is never any reason, no reason exists, that excuses this kind of activity. None of this is to deny the reality of evil ideologies and various individuals and movements that have mobilized against the truth of Christ. These must be fought against with every fiber of our beings. But that fight must be waged with nothing but truth, not facsimiles of the truth, not provocation for its own sake, not cult followings, not half truths. No one who is not properly formed in the Faith should ever be speaking in the name of this Faith, and it doesn't matter if you are a bishop, priest, religious layman, political leader — no one. The ability to be misled or, God forbid, mislead others, is simply too great. The things of the holy should not be handled by those who are not striving for holiness themselves and in a usual state of sanctifying grace. If you are not a usual Mass attendee nor a frequenter of confession, you should never open your mouth in the name of the Catholic Faith and advance your cause, no matter how noble you believe your cause to be. You need the humility to retire and learn the Faith in its fullness. And even then, danger lurks, and you need trusted people around you to consult with and advise and discuss. When you enter into the Temple and preach in the name of the Most High, you had better be pure of heart. A political end is insufficient to this great calling, no matter the end. There is a far greater war at play than just a culture war. There is a great spiritual war at play. It is, in fact, the war, and this battlefield may never be stepped onto without great preparation, training, education, forming. It is the height of pride to assume the mantle of holiness and truth and then place that truth under politics. It is the Faith that controls, nothing else. If you are aware of your own formational and catechetical deficiencies, then you need to fall silent and retreat from that battle — lest you be consumed in it. If you are unaware of your own deficiencies, then you need to listen to those who tell you you have no place in the battle you are claiming a leadership role in. If you persist in pushing sinfulness as an acceptable strategy to achieve a political end, then you need to have the integrity to stop wrapping it up in Catholicism, as though the Son of God blesses your agenda. He most assuredly does not. You are wholly unprepared to fight the diabolical, no matter how much Satan has fooled you into thinking you are brave and noble. You are being duped by the demonic. You need the humility to retire and learn the Faith in its fullness — nothing less. The world does not need lies, even lies disguised as half truths. What it needs is the Faith in its fullness.

TRANSCRIPT When I was a little kid, I wanted to be in the movies. Well, not really, but for the purposes of this Vortex, let's roll with that. So when I dreamed of a career on the silver screen when I was 10, I never could have imagined that, one day, I'd have the honor of being in a Martin Scorsese film. But here I am, a half-century later, playing the part of the villain. The movie is Building a Bridge, and, yep, Martin Scorsese is the producer. The flick is all about the "journey" of the long-suffering Fr. James Martin crusading for love and acceptance of sodomites in the Church. And, of course, any good movie needs a villain as well as a hero, and that's where we come in — black hat and all. The movie debuted in 2021 at the "prestigious" Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan and went on sale for home viewing earlier this month. Here's the trailer. Sure, you want to be close to Jesus, Father. Sure, that's why you're doing all this. And, by the way, back when Martin exploded so flamboyantly onto the ecclesiastical stage, the question was put to him, "Fr. Martin, are you homosexual?" Eventually, he responded by saying his Jesuit superiors have ordered him not to talk about his orientation. That's a little weird, but OK. Martin exploded flamboyantly onto the ecclesiastical stage. The nearly hour-long movie is really little else than a propaganda piece trumpeting sodomy in the Church, with the "unique" angle that a priest is leading the charge. Of course, given the current state of affairs, there's nothing unique about a pro-gay priest. Scorsese, you will recall, also directed the blasphemous 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which we won't get into because of its filth. Let's just say, Mother Angelica's review was direct, calling the movie "the most blasphemous ridicule of the Eucharist that's ever been perpetrated in this world." But back to Jimmy Martin and his bridge to Hell construction: Church Militant should consider itself blessed to be cast as the villain in a pro-sodomy film. In fact, we do. My father, God rest his soul, used to say to me, "Michael, when you die and go before Our Lord, make sure you have the right list of enemies with you." If Fr. James Martin and Martin Scorsese are on that list, which they are, then I have some hope of salvation. Let's be very clear here — very clear. Anyone, especially a priest, who promotes intrinsic evil is on his way to damnation, and, in the case of a priest, he takes many souls with him. Church teaching is very clear: Homosexual acts are contrary to nature, the natural moral law and, as such, are always evil. Martin cannot sidestep this, no matter how hard he tries. So, what Martin does is simply ignore the teaching and twist it around by quoting Scripture out of context, deliberately so. Jesus didn't eat with prostitutes and tax collectors because He wanted to be inclusive and tolerant and accepting. He ate with them because He loved them enough to call them out of their sin to change their lives and live for Him. Martin knows this, all of it, and yet continues deceiving his audiences — souls that have a right to the truth, even if they don't like it. Martin is obligated by Almighty God to tell these souls the truth and help them live it. But since Martin is gay himself — and if you aren't, Father, deny it — he seeks damnation for them because, you know, misery loves company. The movie is based on Martin's book Building a Bridge and, in the video promoting his book, he spews out so many errors and deceptions, it's almost impossible to catalog them all, or count them. The first 23 seconds are five questions that deliberately obscure the truth, so they are actually lies disguised as questions. From there, it just spirals downward, conflating terms and phrases to obscure the truth. For example, the Church has an obligation to welcome LGBT people. Again, more obfuscation — commingling friendly sounding words like "welcome" with objective states of mortal sin. The Church is under absolutely zero obligation to welcome sin and evil. In fact, it's under an obligation to speak against sin and expel it from the Temple. He spews out so many errors and deceptions, it's almost impossible to catalog them all. Sinners are welcome, of course, but with the obligation on their part of being remorseful for their sins and repenting of them. And that's not just true of active homosexuals; it's also true of every sinner or every kind of sin. But again, Martin skips over that part, as well as many others, because to reveal the whole truth would explode his agenda of getting the unsuspecting and horribly formed to accept sodomy as cool and fun and a "gift." Martin is a devil. Period. He has no love of truth, and, like his father, Satan, his mouth is a wide-open grave and all honey his speech. A couple years back, Church Militant ran into Martin in Rome the day before the Pachamama summit began. We've never divulged the details of the conversation with him there in the Borga, steps away from the Vatican's St. Anne's gate. We promised him we would not as a condition of his remaining and talking with me. That said, allow us to characterize it as Fr. Martin not being able to get away with his crap to my face like he does in the film. Scorsese even goes so far, and Martin allows it, to have his elderly mother appear in the film and disparage me for not liking her son. And yeah, we're serious. Being cast as the villain opposite Martin is actually a badge of honor, and Church Militant is happy to don the black hat. In the homo-dominated hierarchy today, even the color of the hat you wear doesn't mean what it used to.