Sir Rick Santorum, Knighted in 2004 has zero allegiance to the United States

[Dig]

This is really unbelievable, this communist/fascist is a fricking knight.

Wolf Bitzer and all the other Bilderberg Media puppets have been addressing him without the title of Sir as he has 'earned' for circumventing the constitution in US politics for the past several decades.

Did you know that he is a devout communist and believes that the government has a mandate to control all individuals; lifestyles including that in the bedroom? He voted to increase government control of healthcare and even blamed libertarianism for the Roman Catholic church's expansion in the practice of pedaphilia. He is a Roman Catholic so he has to find something other than the Catholic Church to blame for the covering up of the tens of thousands of institutionalized rape, trama, and torture of children at the hands of his religious authority. He is also a member of the Opes Dei secret society which is like Skull and Bones for evangelical psychos who have no clue what the separation of Church and State is.

Here are just some of the thousands of pieces of evidence:

Santorum’s Communist Clan, and his Fascist Opus Dei Cult Connections
http://deadlinelive.info/2012/01/12/santorums-communist-clan-and-his-fascist-opus-dei-cult-connections/
January 12, 2012 by Jack Blood   


Who does this guy really Work for?

In the tiny town of Riva del Garda in northern Italy, 83-year-old-Maria Malacarne Santorum keeps her family’s secrets—including those of her late husband’s cousin, Rick. In an exclusive interview with the Italian weekly magazine Oggi, Mrs. Santorum recalls fondly when Rick visited her in 1985 during his law internship in Florence, and when he came back again in 1986 and 1989. “He loved our culture and cuisine so much, he brought his wife-to-be, Karen, a massive cookbook of Italian recipes,” she said.

But the elder Santorum matriarch doesn’t understand why he has diverged so far from the family’s longtime political stance. “In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli, likening the family to “Peppone” after a famous fictional Italian communist mayor who fought against an ultraconservative priest known as Don Cammillo and about which a popular television series is based. “But on the other side of the ocean, it’s like his family here doesn’t exist. Instead he draws crowds as the head of the ultraconservative faction of the Republican party, against divorce, gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.”

Those politics don’t play well in Riva del Garda, a community of ultraliberals. On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy “to escape fascism,” but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party. “Rick’s grandfather Pietro was a liberal man and he understood right away what was happening in Italy,” Mrs. Santorum told Oggi. “He was anti-fascist to the extreme, and the political climate in 1925 was stifling so he left for America. After a few years he returned to Italy with his wife and children, including Aldo, Rick’s father, who passed away late last year. It’s a shame he won’t have the joy to see his son’s success in his bid for the White House.” She goes on to explain how the family then became pillars of the Communist Party in Italy.

The matriarch lauds her distant relative as a “masterpiece” of the family, whom she calls a man of high intelligence and integrity. “He would be a great president,” she told Oggi. “But if he wants to make it, he will have to soften some of his positions. To take a stand against homosexuality or to oppose divorce is harmful. Principles count, but in politics one must have the capacity to be open-minded.”

The Oggi piece also quotes an angry cousin who preferred to voice his dissent anonymously, remembering the time when high-ranking Communist Party members frequented the Santorum household in Riva del Garda. “There are Santorums who would roll over in their graves to hear [Rick’s] rhetoric,” he said.

But the rest of the family seems content to turn a blind eye to their American cousin’s political persuasion. One cousin, Michela Santorum, told Oggi that she fondly remembers Rick’s interest in his Italian heritage, and especially Italian cuisine. “We were always astonished at how many ice cubes he put in his drinks,” Michela told Oggi. “But he loved everything else, including polenta.”

According to Oggi, the general sentiment is that the Italian Santorums will forgive their American cousin if his bid is successful. “When he wins, he will send the American presidential airplane and take all the Santorums to the White House,” Bruno Santorum told the magazine.

But after Santorum’s loss in New Hampshire and his recent slump in the polls, the question of whether he would bring his communist cousins to his ultraconservative White House may never be tested.

 
How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum sent two of his sons to a Washington, D.C. all-boys school affiliated with Opus Dei, the Catholic group whose members were portrayed as sinisterly weird in the sensationalistic Da Vinci Code but in reality only engage in some mild self-mutilation, “nothing traumatic,” as the group’s website says. Santorum says he’s not a member of Opus Dei, though he did go to Rome in 2002 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding, and he belongs to the St. Catherine of Siena Parish, “a favorite of Opus Dei,” the Washington Post says. Opus Dei has about 90,000 members, a third of which are “numeraries” who are celibate for life and wear a cilice — a garter belt with spikes turned toward the skin — every day. (The group is often criticized as elitist, but you can find a “three link, 1mm gauge, full-leg metal cilice with metal fastener” on sale for an affordable $69.) It might seem unfair to criticize Santorum for his religious affiliations, but Santorum wouldn’t think so. He convincingly argued it was okay in December 2007, after Mitt Romney delivered a speech on his Mormon faith. “[Romney's] supporters say it is akin to rejecting a Barack Obama because he is black,” Santorum wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But Obama was born black; Romney is a Mormon because he accepts the beliefs of the Mormon faith. This permits us, therefore, to make inferences about his judgment and character, good or bad.”

The New York Times‘ Mark Oppenheimer reports that many prominent conservative Catholics involved in politics send their kids to The Heights School, which is not run by Opus Dei, Oppenheimer reports. Instead, the group appoints “appoints the school chaplain and provides to the faculty a traditional reading of Catholicism to teach students.” Sex ed is abstinence-only. That’s a relief to many parents, Oppenheimer reports:

Linda Maher, the school’s director of communications, sent her three sons to The Heights. Where the mothers at her sons’ swim team practice “would put condoms in their sons’ Christmas stockings,” The Heights mothers were different.

Urban legends about the depravity of the secular world spread like viruses through a lot of religious communities. The spreaders are apparently so insulated from outsiders that they don’t know that most secular people would find the idea of a mom giving her son condoms for Christmas to be extremely creepy. Some of that isolation is on display when Santorum says things that show a way of thinking pretty unfamiliar to most Americans. Example: On birth control: “lt’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Another example, from Santorum’s 2007 essay on Romney’s religion:

Would the potential attraction to Mormonism by simply having a Mormon in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?

If that sounds a bit inflammatory, don’t worry, Santorum explained that he’s quite tolerant of Romney’s faith. He writes, “I’m more concerned about losing our children to jihadis or a materialistic culture than losing them to Mormonism.” It’s not clear whether he meant to equate conspicuous consumption with terrorism, but he did once compare the Massachusetts’ state supreme court’s approval of gay marriage to 9/11.

 

RELATED INFO:

*According to Web reporter Wayne Madsen, who claims to be a former NSA analyst, Opus Dei is a “shadowy and sinister Roman Catholic group [that is] running an espionage and political assassination team in the United States.”

*In the book Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, British journalist Robert Hutchison calls Opus Dei “a Mafia shrouded in white.” He asserts that the group assigns its members to infiltrate intelligence agencies, newspapers, banks and political parties, and cultivate connections with organized crime. This power, once amassed, will be used to stifle reform within the Church and provoke a confrontation with Islam that would culminate in a revival of the Crusades.

Nor are Moslems the only target. The Opus Dei menace is homing in on gay wedding planners, according to blogger Bob Geiger, of Democrats.com. In the article “Is Brownback Bringing Opus Dei Into The Senate?”, Geiger slams the Catholic convert senator for opposing same-sex marriage with arguments drawn from the Princeton University-based Witherspoon Institute. That group, according to Geiger, is

“linked to Opus Dei, a strict, religious group that some former members have described as a cult…. [C]ritics in academia—which include former members who sometimes go through ‘deprogramming’ upon exiting Opus Dei—charge that organizations like the Witherspoon Institute are just veiled attempts by Opus Dei to spread its influence in top-tier academic circles.”

*Another resolute critic of Opus Dei is Miguel de Portugal, a self-proclaimed visionary who makes it his life work to spread apocalyptic warnings over the Internet. Among his claims is that Opus Dei is at once backing pro-life neo-Nazis in Argentina and selling abortifacients in Spain, infiltrating the FBI to cover up its involvement in the Anthrax attacks, and smuggling of illegal drugs.

*Two O.D. members include former FBI director Louis Freeh, and current jailbird Robert Hansen—who used the money he got from his Soviet spymasters to pay tuition for his daughters at the Opus Dei school Oakcrest in Virginia.

Opus Dei In US Government

Out of a total of nine US Supreme Court Justices, five are conservative Catholics – that is 55.6 % of the membership.
Out of those five, two have “too close for comfort” ties with the Opus Dei – that is 22.2 % of the membership. (NOT SURE THIS INFO WAS UPDATED TO ADD NEWEST SJ Sonia Sotomayer – note last name translates to “Punisher form the Grove” and she is an admitted member of the “Belizian Grove” an offshoot of the Bohemian Grove, but for women…)

Opus Dei – Allegations of far-right links

There is evidence of several links between Opus Dei and right-wing organizations, particulary a famous letter from Escriva to Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain who was assisted by Nazi Germany into power. In this letter Escriva addresses Franco as “his Excellency”, as he was Spain’s head of state. Several Opus Dei members were appointed ministers in Franco’s government. On the other side there were members who went into prison or left Spain under Franco because they didn’t agree with the political opinion of Franco and his regime.

Opus Dei is a secret society

Like most religious movements, Opus Dei does not in general comment on who is or is not a member. This has tended to create suspicion that Opus Dei functions as a secret society. There are persistent rumours that some senior members of the U.S. judiciary and FBI are Opus Dei members. The trial of FBI spy Robert Hanssen caused some controversy when it was revealed that he was an Opus Dei member.

Here at last we find the smudgy fingerprints of conspiracy: The Rothschilds are involved. This family, which first acquired its wealth serving as the bankers to royalty, is perhaps the single most important bloodline in Europe.
Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the various branches of the Rothschilds, who worked in London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, were often employed as unpaid diplomats by their governments—who might not trust their own ambassadors, but could rely upon the Rothschilds.

As Rothschild critic Myron Fagan (a playwright and journalist, who “launched a one man crusade to unmask the Red Conspiracy in Hollywood which had set about to produce films that would aid that One World Governement [sic] plot,”) asserts:

“Adam Weishaupt was a Jesuit-trained professor of canon law, teaching in Engelstock University, when he defected from Christianity to embrace the Luciferian conspiracy. It was in 1770 that the professional money lenders, the then recently organized House of Rothschild, retained him to revise and modernize the age-old Protocols of Zionism, which from the outset, was designed to give the Synagogue of Satan, so named by Jesus Christ, ultimate world domination so they could impose the Luciferian ideology upon what would remain of the human race after the final social cataclysm by use of satanic despotism.”

Also See:

INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI

Operation Gladio (False Flag Terror playbook) / Vatican (Nazi) Ratlines (Project Paperclip) / Masonic activity / Eugenics

According to critics, Opus Dei is aggressively right wing in its teachings, and operates a form of thought control. Disciples undergo bouts of agonizing self inflicted torture, allegedly designed to “clarify thought and cleanse the spirit”. (See MK ULTRA) They are also taught to avoid natural human feelings, being admonished instead to have a “reticent and guarded heart.” Likewise, disciples are not permitted to read certain books, including those authored by communist ideologist Karl Marx.

Detractors believe it a religious faction that shares numerous values similar to the neo-nazi’s that people the Masonic P2 lodge. Until recently – and for hundreds of years previously – any member of the Catholic church who was found to be a Freemason was automatically ex-communicated. Despite this many members of the Curia were discovered to be covert members of P2. Subsequently, in 1983, a new Canon Law announced that this would cease. Thereafter, any member of the Roman Church was free to become a Freemason.

[Dig]

A Pennsylvanian's Guide to the Rick Santorum You Don't Know
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/rick-santorum-surge_b_1185833.html
Posted: 1/5/12


You've probably heard all the good ones about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by now. The one about his "Google problem." The one about the "man-on-dog sex" (prompting the greatest journalistic response ever, when the reporter told Santorum that he was "sort of freaking me out.") The one about how the Catholic Church's priest sex abuse scandal was caused by Boston liberalism, or the one about how President Obama should be anti-abortion because he's black and abortion is like slavery. And so on and so forth.

That's the Rick Santorum that America has come to know over the last 15 years or so -- an unapologetic and almost goofy culture warrior whose obsessions -- like thinking that gay sex is a gateway drug to bestiality -- make him a hero to social conservatives and often a laughing stock to most everyone else. Santorum's rise in the 2012 presidential race has people talking about whether his views on social issues -- talk of annulling gay marriages, seemingly questioning the right to even birth control -- make him too extreme to be president -- and that's an important topic to discuss.

But I also think Santorum's weird sexual bluster can obscure who he really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign. As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state's junior senator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people obsessing on the "man-on-dog" stuff are missing the bigger picture. For one thing, the self-styled "family values" expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum's legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him too much credit.

Here's a Pennsylvanian's brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don't know:

1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum's political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity's money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum's finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum's charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity -- which didn't register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called "leadership PAC" created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America's Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less -- and typically far less -- than any other "leadership PACs." What America's Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum's then-hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Walmart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC's expenses -- paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists -- were "unconventional," at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg "McMansion" with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.

3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines -- not all positive -- for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy. What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum's passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum's efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart's corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform "out of respect for the Schiavo family" even as the closed fundraisers went on.

4. Santorum didn't seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum's kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash-strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.

5. Washington's lobbyist culture -- Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called "K Street Project," an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate's "point man" on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist -- at least occasionally and perhaps frequently -- to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.

6. Santorum had no problem with big government if it was supporting his campaign contributors in Big Pharma. It's little wonder that Santorum ultimately supported Medicare Part D, a prescription drug plan for the elderly that has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit and was drafted in such a way to best help pharmaceutical companies maximize profits from all the unbridled spending. When Santorum was defeated for a third term in 2006, an internal memo at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline said his departure from Washington "creates a big hole that we need to fill."

7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate, including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes in overtime rules that would benefit the company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.

8. Santorum has frequently insisted that his political values are guided by his religious values, and that John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech describing a separation between the two had done "much harm" in America. But despite inviting such scrutiny, there's been little discussion of Santorum's ties to ultra-conservative movements within the Roman Catholic Church. Santorum's comments about JFK were made in Rome in 2002 when he spoke at a 100th birthday event for Jose Maria Escrivade Balaguer, founder of the secretive group within the church known as Opus Dei. Although Santorum says he is not a member of Opus Dei -- which has been criticized by some for alleged cult-like qualities and ties to ultra-conservative regimes around the world -- he did receive written permission to attend the ultra-conservative St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., where Mass is still conducted in Latin and a long-time priest and many parishioners are members of Opus Dei, mingling with political conservatives like Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and former FBI director Louis Freeh.

9. Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they're linked to his allies and campaign contributors. Consider the type of project that the Tea Party loves to hate, a $750 million energy plant in Schuylkill County, Pa., that was to convert coal to liquids but needed massive subsidies. Santorum boasted of his rule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hired Pennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as a lobbyist and paid him at least $900,000. Despite Santorum's efforts, the plant has not been built.

10. Santorum apparently believes in "an entitlement culture" when it comes for former politicians. After Tuesday night's virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, the Pennsylvanian spoke eloquently about his immigrant grandfather working for decades in the Pennsylvania coal fields and his massive hands; the grandson probably won't have that problem. Losing an election in 2006 allowed Santorum to become a poster child for how ex-pols quickly and easily cash in in America, as a lawyer-rainmaker and joining a "think tank" (that for a time was called America's Enemies) and as an analyst for the Fox News Channel and as a board member for Universal Health Services, an ethically challenged company where executives had supported his Senate campaigns. The New York Times' Gail Collins noted that Santorum had earned $970,000 in 2010 despite seeming sort of unemployed.

The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.

[Dig]

Rick Santorum & Opus Dei
http://secularright.org/SR/wordpress/2012/01/08/rick-santorum-opus-dei/

I touched the other day on the fact that Rick Santorum had included Opus Dei in the list of organizations he chose to praise for the “new evangelization” (he also included Regnum Christi, a group of which I had never previously heard, of which I’ll write something in a later post), and I drew some criticism from one reader from saying that Opus Dei rang a “somewhat sinister” bell. His suspicion, quite clearly, was that I had been influenced by Dan Brown’s distinctly dodgy narratives. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Opus Dei certainly has some fine people in its ranks, but, as this recent post from the Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson (a former editor of the Catholic Herald) demonstrates, there is something about this organization that does not feel, well, quite right:

With all this phone hacking around, I think it’s time electronic eavesdroppers had their own patron saint, don’t you? As it happens, I have the perfect candidate: St Josemaria Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, who died as recently as 1975 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

A few years ago, I interviewed a distinguished priest who, as a young man, had been a member of Opus Dei and close associate of Escrivá. My jaw dropped when, half way through our conversation, he mentioned casually that “The Father” had installed bugs in Opus’s Rome headquarters in order to tape-record the conversations of visitors waiting to see him. I asked him how he knew.
“Because I helped him do it,” came the reply.

The Vatican refused to hear this priest’s testimony when Escrivá was being assessed for sainthood; conveniently, the role of Devil’s Advocate had been abolished. Of course, all saints had flaws. It’s just that you don’t expect them to share the same ones as Richard Nixon (a far more sympathetic character than Escrivá, in my book).

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing up Opus Dei is that this controversial organisation – comically misrepresented in The Da Vinci Code but still secretive and slippery – is planning to open two independent secondary schools in south-east England.
Or, to adopt the official party line, a group of parents, some of whom happen to belong to Opus Dei, are opening schools “inspired by the teachings” of St Josemaria. Hmm. Don’t get me wrong, Escrivá was undoubtedly holy, but he was also vain, a snob and a spiritual control freak. While some of his followers are exemplary Christians, the saturnine ethos of Opus bothers many Catholics, including some outstanding clergy.

A priest I know used to hear the confessions of primary school children at an Opus Dei school. “It was disturbing,” he told me. “I’d hear seven-year-olds riddled with adult scruples, worried that their disposition towards the sacrament wasn’t sufficiently pure and their sin wouldn’t be forgiven.”

He added that a teacher at an Opus school had boasted to him that she’d persuaded a little boy to give up his teddy bear for Lent. “How on earth is that going to help the child – to take away something so comforting and normal as part of his so-called spiritual development?”

Indeed. And one might also ask: how are Opus Dei “numeraries” (full members) supposed to develop healthy relationships with the opposite sex when men and women are forbidden to travel in the same car? Even if the man is a priest? One Opus centre has installed two sets of sliding doors between the kitchen and the dining room. This allows serving women to leave food in the small space between the rooms so male diners aren’t “distracted” by female flesh.

Opus Dei in England has taken advantage of the bumbling of the Catholic bishops. (Think L/Cpl Jones in a mitre.) Its fingerprints are all over a new PR outfit called “Catholic Voices”, it has a growing presence in a certain seminary, and before the papal visit it even managed to appoint a thickly accented Spaniard as spokesman for the beatification of John Henry Newman.

Opus always hits back when it’s criticised, so no doubt there will be the usual carefully worded and disingenuous denial of everything I’ve just told you. Meanwhile, its recruiters will keep gatecrashing smart Catholic parties, scanning the crowd for attractive young professionals who can be invited to “informal” drinks and then plugged into E-meters. No, sorry, that’s the Scientologists. But it’s an easy mistake to make.

And Rick Santorum’s support for Opus Dei is more than a matter than one line in a problematic article. If, for example, we turn to a 2002 report from the National Catholic Reporter we find this:

The extent of the power and prestige of Opus Dei in today’s Catholic church was on full display during a high profile Jan. 7-11 congress here marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer.

The event drew 1,200 people from 57 countries, with an impressive number of church and state VIPs on hand, and was streamed live on the Internet. It occurred less than a month after Pope John Paul II recognized a miracle that clears the way for Escriva to become a saint.

One point that became clear during the Congress was how Opus Dei-inspired politicians tend to apply Escriva’s emphasis on finding holiness in work. A key theme of the gathering was the need for “coherence” between faith and politics, which in practical terms means taking one’s cues from the Catholic church on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and cloning.

American VIPs included Archbishop John Myers of Newark, N.J., a member of Opus Dei’s Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, and U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania. Santorum told NCR he is not a member of Opus Dei, but an admirer of Escriva…

Santorum is, of course, fully entitled to those views, but the electorate is fully entitled to ask how they would affect his behavior as president. Writing in the 2007 article I cited in a previous post, Santorum argued as follows:

[Romney] also said that “a person should not be rejected . . . because of his faith.” His supporters say it is akin to rejecting Barack Obama because he is black. But Obama was born black; Romney is a Mormon because he accepts the beliefs of the Mormon faith. This permits us, therefore, to make inferences about his judgment and character, good or bad.

Fair enough, and the same can be said about Santorum’s admiration for Opus Dei.

[Dig]

HOSPITALLERS (PDF).
Volume 1.

Sovereign Military Hospitaller
Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and Malta.
Winter 2004/2005.

Rick Santorum Knighted

http://www.maltausa.org/files/newsletter_hospitallers_04.pdf

[Geolibertarian]

Lesser evil voter: "But Santorum's got electrolytes."

[gEEk squad]

Don't forget Legatus:

George W. Bush to address Summit, receive award

January 7, 2010



Legatus will present President George W. Bush with its prestigious Cardinal John J. O’Connor Pro-Life Award at its annual Summit, Feb. 4-6, in Dana Point, Calif. Previous recipients of the award include Fr. Frank Pavone (Priests for Life), Fr. Thomas Euteneuer (Human Life International), Judie Brown (American Life League), Sen. Rick Santorum, Sen. Sam Brownback, and Rep. Henry Hyde.

...

The President joins an already impressive host of speakers at the upcoming Summit, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista, Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond), entrepreneur Frank J. Hanna III, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, and Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A medical panel, moderated by Ascension Health president Tony Tersigni of Legatus’ St. Louis Chapter, will discuss the future of health care in America.

[gEEk squad]

Newt and Santorum, Legatus brothers:

Newt to address Legatus Summit

December 1, 2009
Former Speaker of the House to discuss his conversion and his John Paul II film . . .

by Patrick Novecosky



Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will discuss his conversion to Catholicism and share his new film about Pope John Paul II at the Legatus Summit, Feb. 4-6 in Dana Point, Calif. Since leaving politics in 1999, Gingrich, who entered the Church last March, has worked as a political analyst, author, consultant and filmmaker.

[Dig]

Holy Crap!

Someone just let a whole lot of Santorum out on the Internet...

Rick Santorum, Opus Dei, Roman Catholicism and USA democracy and freedom
http://arthuride.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/rick-santorum-opus-dei-roman-catholicism-and-usa-democracy-and-freedom/
January 10, 2012 · 10:58 PM

Rupert Murdoch endorsed Rick Santorum for president before the Iowa caucuses met and awarded him a second place finish (Mitt Romney beating him by eight votes). Murdoch owns Santorum, as he owns Fox News, New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, and twists and distorts the news for personal gain never hesitating to invade privacy or the lives of others. Santorum was a paid analyst (before leaving to run for the presidency) for Fox News and exhibited a total lack of objectivity, neutrality or other virtues associated with respectable journalism.


Karen Santorum: 2012 Is a 'Battlefield' for 'Defending God's Truth'

Santorum has been called, and accepts the judgment of many, that he is a Roman Catholic missionary first and foremost in his life.  This is not the case with his family members in Italy where the Santorums were dedicated communists.  “In Riva del Garda [a community of ultraliberals that support gay rights, abortion, birth control, and liberal causes; the family frequently had "high ranking" communists into their home] his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” reads one weekly magazine: Oggi: No. 36. “Chi è Santorum, il candidato americano che sfida Obama” di [by] Giuseppe Fumagalli. For videos, view here and here.

Throughout his political career his religion came before the Constitution or the rights of citizens. He is a member of Opus Dei that would force all people into Roman Catholicism by any means including lying, betrayal, and subterfuge, repressing basic human sexuality and normal instincts because of the extraordinary religious zeal of his wife Karen.   Karen Santorum is a fervid radical-right spokeswoman who argues that there will be a real battle in 2012 to defend god and god’s truth, since her god does not have enough power or resources to defend itself. In speaking with Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, Karen explained:

Defending the secredness [sic: sacredness] of marriage. Defending the sanctity of life. So I see it a little differently because I know it’s going to be literally on a battlefield, and it’s going to be really hard. So there is a lot of reservation. But it really boils down to God’s will. What is it that God wants?

The Santorums support the politics of assassination, jubilant over the murder of Osama bin Laden, but argued that Obama did not go far enough.  God wants more carnage.  God wants Rick as president (psychotic delusions are discussed in Jaspers, Karl (1913). Allgemeine Psychopathologie. Ein Leitfaden  für  Studierende, Ärzte und Psychologen. Berlin, Germany: J. Springer; cp. Myin-Germeys I, Nicolson NA, Delespaul PA (April 2001). “The context of delusional experiences in the daily life of patients with schizophrenia”. Psychological Medicine 31 (3): 489–98, and Freeman, D. (2006).  ”Delusions in the nonclinical population”. Current Psychiatry Reports. June 8(3):191-204) and he and his wife’s mental patterns have been shaped by Opus Dei (Jørgensen P, and Jensen J (1994). “What predicts the persistence of delusional beliefs?” Pscyhopathology 27(1-2):73-8; and, Jørgensen P (1994). “Course and outcome in delusional beliefs”. Psychopatholgy 27(1-2):89-99) which is the focus of this study.  The Santorums belief system was reinforced in Iowa by Bob Vander Plaats of The FAMiLY, who shows similar traits of delusional psychopathology, the desire to force society into a conformist mold, to elevate a single theology above all others, and the restratification of the family with the male being superior (see my article on Bob Vander Plaats and the death of the family structure in Iowa).

Richard John Santorum is a strict conformist who believes whatever he is told by a priest or bishop, and enforces the Opus Dei codex with a passion, regardless of its scientific or medical legitimacy.  This devotion to Opus Dei and unswerving submission to Roman Catholicism can be seen in his every move, public and private.  This can best be seen in his relationship with a 20-week old fetus that died two hours after a forced birth.


Fetal development week 18 (20 weeks after first day of last normal menstrual period)

As the fetus became increasingly more likely to die, the doctors said that the only chance it had at twenty-weeks was an induced delivery, but that would require the use of a special drug.  After resisting at first, Karen Anne Garver Santorum who has a nursing degree from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, (and worked several years as a neonatal intensive care nurse) allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocinto speed the birth. Karen Santorum was a law student at the University of Pittsburgh where she met her future husband who was recruiting her to work at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. Karen was not the Christian-zealot Santorum initially wanted, but that would come as her reasoning would be transmogrified into obedience. As a nursing student at Duquesne University, Karen Santorum lived with Tom Allen, an obstetrician-gynecologist (op-gyn) who was 40 years her senior in age (she was twenty and the doctor sixty years of age) and had in fact delivered her, and had cofounded Pittsburgh’s first abortion clinic.  At the time that she had the sexual affair with Allen, Karen Garver (Santorum) was pro-choice.  When she met Rick Santorum, she was eager and delighted to tell Dr. Allen that Rick Santorum was pro-choice.  As Dr. Allen told a Pennsylvania newspaper in 2005 (see Philadelphia Citypaper):

“When she moved out to go be with Rick, she told me I’d like him, that he was pro-choice and a humanist,” said Allen, an elderly but vibrant man, during a brief conversation on the porch of his Pittsburgh row home. “But I don’t think there’s a humanist bone in that man’s body.”

As he began to make money, his values changed and he began to attack the poor and Middle Class, as he records in his book It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good (449 pages). For example: on page 138 Santorum wrote: “The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong.” Or page 386: “It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.” At one point, he accuses feminists of hating women, yet in speeches he claims that feminists are lesbians.

Rick Santorum and his wife Karen condemn men and women who are living together “out of wedlock [marriage]“, which is absolute hypocrisy, as Carole Joeffe, a University of California, San Francisco professor noted in her article, that the future Mrs. Santorum was an “unmarried but cohabitating [female], and presumably using birth control—that has become only more common in American society since the late 1980s, when she lived with Dr. Allen. (Indeed, the only difference between Karen Santorum and millions of other Americans in similar circumstances, then and now, was the unusually large gap in age between her and her partner).”  … “…Rick Santorum’s stated policy positions, which include not only his well known obsession with abolishing legal abortion, but also his opposition to birth control and all nonprocreative sexual acts, are greatly out of step with the lives of the vast majority of Americans.  Clearly, the Santorums have changed their views over time on the issues of premarital sex and contraception as well as abortion, moving in a far more conservative direction. The couple has attributed these changes to a deepening religious faith, and such new beliefs are of course their right. But the Senator’s fervent desire to deny the rest of us the sexual and reproductive choices that his own wife once enjoyed is breathtakingly hypocritical and cruel.”

Rick’s book is a definitive diary of a paranoid schizophrenic who condemns working mothers, including those who must work as they are the only parent, to equating poverty as a judgment of his god. In his book, Santorum scolds working mothers. Helping support the family, he writes, “provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home” yet he says nothing about underemployed and unemployed fathers, or those making minimum wage.  Santorum  screams that liberals screwed up by trying to protect children born out of wedlock from cuts in welfare. Stigma and shame should attach to illegitimate births, he argues, but later he laments the high rate of abortion among poor, African American women ignoring the fact that abortion is the ultimate solution for many African (and other races) American women who cannot afford to feed another mouth, buy the necessary clothes, or pay for even a modest education for their young.

According to Karen Santorum’s book, Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum, she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. Intrauterine infection usually leads to brain damage in the fetus (Huleihel, Mahmoud; Golan, Hava; and, Hallak, Mordechai (2004). “Intrauterine infection/inflammation during pregnancy and offspring brain damage: Possible mechanisms involved”. Reproductive Biological Endocrinology 2:17) and is associated with morbidity and mortality to infants, increased risk of intraventricular hemorrhage, neonatal white matter damage, and subsequent cerebral palsy  (as the Genetics of Pregnancy Encyclopedia notes: “there are only five bacteria/viruses or pathogens that can pass through the placenta and affect a fetus that can cause fetal damage. These organisms are known by the acronym TORCHS - Toxoplasma, Rubella (German measles), Cytomegalovirus (CMV), Herpes virus, and Syphilis”).  Karen Santorum went into induced labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant.


20-week-old fetus

When the fetus was delivered, the Santorums quickly called it “Gabriel” in honor of the archangel.  Gabriel lived just two hours. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home (an exhibition of pedopseudonecrophile psychosis bordering on Schadenfreude). They spent several hours kissing and cuddling Gabriel with his three siblings, ages 6, 4 and 1 1/2. They took photos, sang lullabies in his ear and held a private Mass.  ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen, in a mode of self-denial (abnegation in psychology, a form of self-torture which can lead to natural or voluntary death of the person in self-denial: it is a prelude to suicide or crime) and is detrimental to physical and psychological health, writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel‘.”   Santorum, out of touch with reality and strangely attached to mental psychosis of denial, never accepted the fact that what he slept with was a dead fetus.  

Santorum is a devout son of the Roman Catholic Church and its official teachings–even though the majority of Roman Catholics reject most of them.  For example, Rick and Karen Santorum oppose all forms of birth control.  As Rick invoked on October 18, 2011: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country…. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”  He pledged to repeal all federal funding for contraceptives, which will cause the greatest hardship for


Implant contraception

the poor. Nearly every woman in the USA, age 15 to 44, uses at least one contraceptive measure to prevent unwanted pregnancies and contact with sexually transmitted diseases. Without funding from Medicaid and Title X, “abortions occurring in the United States would be nearly two-thirds higher among women overall and among teens; the number of unintended pregnancies among poor women would nearly double.”

The entire story of Gabriel is a horror turned tragedy.  The Santorums knew that the fetus had little chance for survival.  Strongly Roman Catholic, neither Rick nor Karen accepted the reality of abortion, even to save a mother’s life or to remove a dead fetus.  While brain development does begin early in pregnancy, it remains at embryonic stages until late in the gestation period, with fetal brain tissue only beginning to appear in the fourth week and does not reach a significant potential until the thirtieth week taking on those characteristic grooves and indentations that include brain cells (red blood cells) while much of the lanugo — commonly referred to as a soft, downy hair that covers the body of the fetus that gave it an almost animal-like appearance — is beginning to disappear.  Lanugo disappears because both fat and the emerging brain are regulating the body temperature of the fetus. This does not happen in the twentieth week; Karen ignored basic embryological facts. Synapses of the cortex (cf. Palay, S. L. (1956). “Synapses in the central nervous system.” Journal of Biophysical and Biochemical Cytology. Jul 25;2(4 Suppl):193–202.) do not develop until the last months (not midway through a pregnancy). Synapses of the cortex bestow cognitive reasoning abilities on the fetus (such as crying, screaming, and so forth).  A fetus does not have a fully developed brain until the close of the gestation period—before the final stages prior to birth. Well-formed nerve endings/fibers are not yet fully developed although what exists can transmit some pain in the twentieth week.


Egg penetrated by sperm

The Roman Catholic Church, that Karen and Rick Santorum adhere to and attend regularly, argues that life (a “baby”) begins at conception. This is false, as conception brings about a union of cells with potential. Even Thomas Aquinas (Summa contra Gentiles 2.87 and 2.79 ), plagiarizing Augustine of Hippo (L’Anima e la sua Origine and Le Due Anime 2.2) with both taking from Plato (Augustine, Confessions 9.13-15, 20.26 and City of God chapter 8, especially VIII.7 with Augustine struggling to make Plato a proto-Christian; Aquinas, on the other hand, followed Aristotelian thinking that the soul appears when the body is completed in formation: Summa Theologica Book I, 75.4, 75.7, 76.1, Book II, Part 1, 4.5, and Summa contra Gentiles 2.57 with Aquinas struggling to make Aristotle a proto-Christian with Aquinas arguing that the being in the womb after conception first possesses only a vegetative soul matching ancient Hebrew thinking),  disagreed that a fetus has a “soul” that is the primary ingredient for “life” in Roman Catholic teaching.

“Personhood” (originally argued by Bernard Nathanson and later championed by evangelicals and Roman Catholics in the State of Mississippi in an effort to have their religious ideology declared fact and law) does not begin nor exist before the twenty-eighth week at the earliest, as Dr. Dominick Purpura,  former dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, and later dean at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York argued (read: Dr. Edwin C. Meyer, chair of Pediatric Neurology of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, in The New York Times (25 January 1985), and Ide, Arthur Frederick (1986). Abortion Handbook: the History, Legal Progress, Practice & Psychology of Abortion (3rd ed.). Las Colinas, TX: The Liberal Press, pp. 17-31).

The Santorum story is not unusual.  Some people have taken home a seventeen week-old fetus. Ghoulish, yes, but grief (post-traumatic stress that has five stages and can lead to severe psychological trauma) defies logic and is common.


17-week-old fetus carried home

What the Santorums did is not much different from other parents; for example: Barbara Bush showed her son George W. Bush her dead fetus that she kept in a jar.  After seeing the fetus in the jar, George W. Bush claimed that it made him “pro-life”.


Preserved 20-week-old fetus in jar

Justin Frank, a Washington, DC based psychoanalyst found the preservation of the fetus to be the behavior of an extremely depressed person. Probably also extremely angry… because I think she’s saying—essentially—that she has had to suffer.” Dr. Robert Gangi, a New York City psychologist specializing in bereavement, was also struck by Barbara Bush’s decision to show a dead fetus to her son. “In general, parents would look to shield the siblings from that sort of a thing,” he said, adding that “the plain trauma of seeing a fetus in a jar” would be “a pretty significant experience.”  I know of no reputable psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst who would consider it normal behavior to expose children to the sight of a dead fetus—it only causes shock, dismay, and self-condemnation, and find it applauded only in popular journals such as Psychology Today.  I disagree with the commentary that a fetus is a baby.  A baby, by definition is a newborn or very young infant or child, while a fetus is an evolving embryo in a womb or egg that is recognizable in form of its kind, and in humans is recognizable after the end of the second month of gestation. A fertilized egg or embryo officially becomes a fetus about one month before the first trimester ends, and he remains a fetus until birth.  

To arbitrarily, and wrongly interchange these words adds to the grieving process that can be cataclysmic if there is no source of external comfort. Comfort comes best with conversations with medical and trained psychologists (Murray J, Callan VJ (1988). “Predicting adjustment to perinatal death.” British Journal of Medical Psychology.  September; 61 (Pt 3):237-44; and Weiss, L, Fischer L, and Richman, J. (1989). “Parental adjustment to intrapartum and delivery room loss. The role of a hospital-based support program.” Clinics in Perinatology. December, 16(4):1009-1019; Thomas, J. (1995). “The effects on the family of miscarriage, termination of abnormality, stillbirth and neonatal death.” Child Care Health and Development November 21 (6):413-424).


Rick Santorum's Leesburg, VA home (he claims he is a resident of Pennsylvania)

Today, Karen Santorum is a lawyer (Rick also took a degree in law at the University of Pittsburgh) and an outspoken opponent of birth control (she was one of twelve children) and abortion (they have seven children: four boys and three girls all of whom are home-schooled to shield them from the real world and received $70,000 from the State of Pennsylvania and the Penn Hills School District as required by local and state law while Rick bragged he was living “from paycheck to paycheck” and “if necessary” take out a loan to further his children’s education); the Santorums were renting a house in Penn Hills. Later the School District asked the Santorums to repay $67,000, which they refused, and took their children out of the Cyber School.  In September 2006, Santorum asked county officials to exempt his Penn Hills property from the homestead tax exemption, which applied to homeowners’ primary residences. The county council president responded by saying that Santorum had “said during a televised debate that he spends about 30 days in his Penn Hills house each year.”  The lies of the Santorum became viral, and were a part of the reasons why he lost the Pennsylvania US Senate Seat that was won by Democrat Casey (The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ultimately endorsed Casey, noting that “Santorum exemplifies the worse of Washington“.


Santorums theme: Kinder, Küche, Kirche

Home life is important to the Santorums, and matching the message of the last Kaiser of Germany and later the Nazis and even Hitler (Doramus, Max, ed. (1990). The Complete Hitler. A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches & Proclamations, 1932-1945.   Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. p. 532 on-line) who uniformly invoked “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (Children, Kitchen, Church), Rick argues that women must stay at home: “In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don’t both need to. … What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.”

The subtle nuances of truth meant nothing to the Roman Catholic Church that awarded him and his wife the John Paul II Award (normally it is given to youth ages 16 to 18 who participate in the diocese affairs in Ireland; there is only one single reference to the Santorums winning the award, it is an unsubstantiated item (No. 17) and is a mere mention).  Later, Rick and Karen Santorum were recognized by the Institute for Psychological Sciences for “championing women and unborn children.”  The Institute is a front for Roman Catholicism and has little in common with actual psychology and its instruction.


Institute for the Psychological Sciences home webpage

Institute for Psychological Sciences is not a recognized psychological institute, but in fact a Roman Catholic graduate school offering a Master of Arts degree and affiliated covertly with Opus Dei and openly with the Legion of Christ that demands the protection of fertilized human eggs (zygotes or embryos). All zygotes (fertilized eggs) and fetuses are considered “babies” even those spontaneously aborted.  The Institute openly admits that it teaches faith and not psychology, training its students to be missionaries for the faith under the pretense of psychology. It is strictly Roman Catholic in perspective and has no tolerance for other faiths.


Gladys M. Sweeney

The Institute for Psychological Sciences is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association or any reputable psychological group worldwide.  It is a fraud started by Founder and Academic Dean Gladys M. Sweeney, Ph. D. Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University M.Ed., Pennsylvania State University and is a member of Opus Dei.  Sweeney is the junior editor of two books both from “a Roman Catholic perspective”:  Robinson, Daniel M. (a philosophy professor at Oxford University with no training in psychology), and Sweeny, Gladys M. (2006) Human Nature in Its Wholeness: A Roman Catholic Perspective (Washington, DC: Catholic University; Database: ISIS Bibliography of the History of Science; History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Database), chapter fourteen is entitled “The Doctrines of Human Nature, Sin, and Grace”.  It liberally borrows from Augustine of Hippo while giving special attention to the theology and anthropology of John Paul II.


Karol Józef Wojtyła age 12

John Paul II, birth registry notes his name as Karol Józef Wojtyła was a young man who showed little interest in religion.  He attended Krakow’s Jagiellonian University in 1938 where he showed an interest in theater and poetry.  Only with the Nazi occupation of Poland did the  youth study theology under the archbishop of Krakow and was ordained in 1946.  He later studied theology in Rome, at the Pontifical International Athenaeum Angelicum where he earned a licentiate and later a doctorate in sacred theology but has no education in the sciences or arts.  His dissertation was entitled The Doctrine of Faith According to Saint John of the Cross.


Constantine burning Arian books (from a compendium of canon law)

John Paul charted Roman Catholic church’s teaching were central to Western Civilization without detailing how immense and universal has its hatred for the individual and destruction of individuality and choice.  He never made mention of the numerous times the Roman Catholic Church burned books it disagreed with, executed authors who did not accept Roman Catholic teaching, or banned those who cast aspersions on the numerous pagan gods who were raised to sainthood to “strengthen the faith” among those ”without Jesus.”

The barbarities of the founding of the Roman Catholic Church in the late fourth century CE, the new theologian, were seen as the cornerstone of faith as seen in the Spanish Inquisition and the attack on women accused of being witches as covered in the Mallus Maleficarum of Heinrich Krammer and James Sprenger and the Bull against witchcraft by Pope Innocent VIII (1484); and Golub, Lester S. and Sweeny, Gladys M. (1981). Improving Academic Performance in a Bilingual Education Classroom.  (ERIC: the ERIC database is an initiative of the US Department of Education).  Neither is applicable to the public school system or to freedom of thought and disagreement.

A strong supporter of fascist groups, including Opus Dei, Legion of Christ, the Neocatechumenal Way, Schoenstatt, the charismatic movement, John Paul II shielded clerics who rallied against human and civil rights. He opposed birth control, LGBT rights, and supported gender roles in keeping with the writings of the Pauline epistles, and while he allowed and encouraged women to take roles in secular governments–provided they followed Roman Catholic


Women as priests and deaconesses in early church c. 47 - 400 CE

teaching and Church authority–he denied women a preaching role in the Church–even though women were priests and bishops in the ancient Christian communities (Ide, Arthur Frederick (1984). Woman as priest, bishop, and laity in the early Catholic Church to 440 A.D. : with a translation and critical commentary on Romans 16 and other relevant scripture and patrological writings on women in the early Christian church. Mesquite, TX: IHP: online).  

One of Santorum’s acts for a self-flagellant in the Opus Dei movement was to shepherd then US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) into the Roman Catholic faith and ultimately indoctrinated the Senator who would become the Governor of Kansas from evangelical Protestant Christianity into Opus Dei.  Santorum took Brownback in 2002, to an Opus Dei priest, the Rev. C. John McCloskey III, former director of the Catholic Information Center, who performed the final conversion of U.S. Senator Sam Brownback and a member of the secretive apocalyptic order for world domination by the Roman Catholic religion (read: Jeff Sharlett (2008). The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York, NY, USA: HarperCollins (Harper Perennial edition 2009), pp. 261-263).


Ratzinger / Benedict XVI

In 1982, one of the most intolerant and hate-filled pontiffs of the Roman Catholic church, John Paul II, granted Opus Dei special status known as a “personal prelature”.  It allowed the group to be overseen by its own bishop (a member of the “holy mafia”), and who reports directly to the pope. Both John Paul II and his successor, the former Hitler Youth Josef Ratzinger (Benedict XVI who has been charged with crimes against humanity and child abuse and hiding pedophile priests), have frequently called for a holy war against non-believers and to convert the world to their god. Opus Dei was officially recognized as a “hand” of the church by Pope Pius XII in 1957.

Opus Dei is a secret organization, and has been most accurately portrayed by Dan Brown in his book The Da Vinci Code (Brown, Dan (2004). The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday). Opus Dei does not publish a directory of members but is known for its interest in targeting the rich and powerful. Over the years, rumors have surfaced that certain high-profile Catholics might be members. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito have been fingered as possibilities, with current rumors circulating that Clarence Thomas is now also a member. There is no proof in any of these cases, but Newsweek magazine reported in 2001 that Scalia’s wife has attended functions at the Catholic Information Center, and his son Paul, a Catholic priest, has spoken there.


JFK Greater Houston speech: Vatican would not control him.

Santorum is also pegged as a possible member. In 2002, Santorum attended an Opus Dei event in Rome, during which he attacked President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 endorsement of church-state separation. Santorum said the Kennedy vow not to enforce Catholic doctrine through civil law has caused “much harm in America” and went on to describe President George W. Bush, a Methodist, as the nation’s first true Catholic president.


Josemaria Escrivá

Opus Dei was founded by a madman and psychopath (see The Way, maxims 166, 181, 188, etc., and Escrivá’s boast: “I would hang the last bishop with his own guts”, and his love affair with war, jubilating:  ”War! War has a supernatural object… But at last, we must love it, the way a religious must love his disciplines” (The Way, maxim 311). ), Josemaria Escrivá, an incorrigible Spaniard and religious radical who in 1958, wrote a fawning letter to Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain, congratulating him for extending official recognition to the Catholic Church.  The May 28, 1953, missive reads,

Although alien to any political activity, I cannot help but rejoice as a priest and Spaniard that the Chief of State’s authoritative voice should proclaim that, ‘The Spanish nation considers it a badge of honor to accept the law of God according to the one and true doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, inseparable faith of the national conscience which will inspire its legislation.


Hitler was a Roman Catholic

Escrivá also is documented as having praised Adolf Hitler, as found in the letters of his assistant Monsignor Vladimir Felzmann who wrote: Escrivá include: “Vlad, Hitler couldn’t have been such a bad person. He couldn’t have killed six million. It couldn’t have been more than four million”, and “Hitler against the Jews, Hitler against the Slavs, this means Hitler against communism” (Luis Carandell, “La otra cara del beato Escrivá”, Cambio 16, March 1992. Available in Spanish:  showing his greed for gold).


Bob Vander Plaats (Sioux City IA Journal)

Escrivá thought of leaving the Roman Catholic Church and entering the Greek Orthodox (Eastern) Church, where he would take his followers (numerary and supernumerary) in an effort to conquer the world and invoke total mind control more gruesome than anything Hitler or Stalin had tried but that right-wing USA politicians like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum praise and prize while self-styled preachers similar to Bob Vander Plaats and Keith Ratliff of Iowa and Rick Warren of California find a special calling in hatred and loathing those they detest.  Like Cardinal Cipriani of Lima, Escrivá openly supported dictators and mercenaries; Cipriani applauded the assassinations of Vladimiro Montesinos under Alberto Fujimori and his daughter Keiko (among Perú’s greatest thieves: read here and here), while Escrivá of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.


Escrivá and Opus Dei

For political expediency, Escrivá was elevated to sainthood as numerous bishops demanded the enthronement of one of the world’s greatest tyrants in the same manner as the sainthood of Constantine I and other mass murderers. This was argued as necessary to give “spiritual strength” to Escriva’s Machiavellian work: The Way.  The Way was used clandestinely by many, especially those who became members of the subversive organization who became accustomed to using secrecy to obtain end results (The Way, No. 839).  Escrivá argued that compromise is a form of laziness and weakness (The Way, No. 54), and that the true Roman Catholics must follow blindly “in obedience” all Church teachings (The Way, No. 617 and No. 941): “Blind obedience to your superior, the way of sanctity. Obedience in your apostolate, the only way; for, in a work of God, the spirit must be to obey or to leave.” Submission to religious authority is understood to be a good in itself, while calling non-Catholic schools, “pagan schools” (The Way, No.866).  Modern enlightened thinkers, such as Voltaire (The Way, No. 849) were/are instruments of darkness.  This mordacity matches Santorum’s criticism of John F. Kennedy not being Catholic enough to be considered a Roman Catholic President of the USA (read here and here and here).    

While Kennedy vowed that the Vatican would not control politics or the White House in his Houston address, Santorum promised that he would obey the Roman Catholic Church in everything (read here and here),  thereby inviting a foreign power to rule over all Americans in the USA in a speech entitled “A Charge to Revive the Role of Faith in the Public Square” and billed as a “challenge” to Mr. Kennedy’s remarks a half-century ago (as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted here and here and here).   The last time faith had a place in the public square was during the Holy Inquisition (Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición) created through papal bull, Ad Abolendam, issued at the end of


Lucius III

the twelfth century by Pope Lucius III as a way to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France.  It murdered over 50 million people (popular records and Wikipedia claim the number was only in the thousands) in Europe who were tortured to death and throughout Latin America (where some civilizations were more advanced than their Christian counterparts in Europe) in the Middle Ages) with the Spanish conquerors and their Roman Catholic monks and priests burned, raped, pillaged, and slaughtered in the name of Jesus.

The Council of Harbonne, in 1244, ordered that in sentencing heretics “no husband should be spared because of his wife, nor wife because of her husband and no parent spared from a helpless child”, through the Reformation era w hen Cardinal Giovanni Caraffa, ruled (for Pope Paul III):

“Firstly, when the faith is in question, there must be no delay; bat at the slightest suspicion, rigorous measures must be resorted to with all speed.  Secondly, no consideration is to be shown to any prince or prelate, however high his station. Thirdly, extreme severity is rather to be exercised against those who attempt to shied themselves under the protection of any potentate, and fourthly, no man must lower himself by showing toleration toward heretics of any kind”, with Jews especially targeted for slaughter.

It rose again 1940-1945 when it slaughtered over 40 million more “souls” in the name of ethnic cleansing: holocaust.


Auto-da-fé, Plaza Mayor in Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru, 17th century (in author's private collection)

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation saw the rise of censorship, book burning (a favorite form of discouraging dissent and controlling education in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant cults) and banning, beheading, water-boarding, numerous auto-de-fé executions (especially in Lima, Perú where the Jesuits, Augustinians and other nefarious sacerdotal groups masquerading as priests and postulants raped, sodomized, stole, and slaughtered with immunity; 1175 cases were called for investigation in 1570, and 31 were burned at the stake 1540-1700; Medina, José Toribio (1887-1899). Historia de la Inquisición de Lima; de Chile; le la Plata; de Cartagena de las Indias; en las islas Filipinas (6 vol.), (1887–1899) a shorter version (2 vols.) was issued in 1887 under the title Historia del tribunal del Santo oficio de la inquisicion de Lima (1569-1820) Santiago [de Chile] Imprint:. Gutenberg, 1887. I have in my private library Medina, José Toribio (1899), El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las Islas Filipinas. Santiago de Chile: Elzeviriana, and Medina José Toribio (1899). Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Cartagena de las Indias. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, and others. I compare these with my rarest volumen on the Inquisition that was issued by Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Córdoba, Relacion del auto de fe, que se celebró por el Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion de Cordova, en el Real Convento de San Pablo, del Orden de Santo Domingo, el domingo doze de abril del mil setecientos y veinte y dos años. [Madrid, Spain] Se hallará … en casa de Isidro Joseph Serrete, librero) and more.


Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, a.k.a. Opus Dei University (Rome)

Santorum’s rising role in the rancorous rite of Opus Dei is detailed in an Opus Dei funded trip to attend their private university in Rome in January 2002, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Foundation, and promulgate the past proselytizing of the patron of the group.  He praised Escrivá, of whom it is recorded that the Spaniard would, like the


Gateway to Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Opus Dei

monk Silas (Opus Dei does not have monks, however) in Brown’s exposé, whip himself until the walls of a bathroom were splattered with blood, and later


A stone etching on the outside of the church above, a place to put donations for candles for the dead (Holy Cross U Opus Dei Rome)

would write: “Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain…Glorified be pain!” The same message glorifying pain became the hallmark message of the mad woman of Calcutta Mother Theresa who saw suffering as the price of sin that she took a sadistic delight in seeing it manifest among the incurables whom she watched suffer and die, claiming that it is a spiritual privilege to suffer.  (Mother Theresa (1994), Suffering into Joy; what Mother Teresa teaches about true joy prepared and edited by Eileen Egan and Kathleen Egan. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: Servant Publications; such morose delight was actually condemned by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae Partis Q. 74, with Mother Theresa openly exhibiting epikhairekakos (ἐπιχαιρέκακος) mentality: cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.7.1108b1-10; cp. Takahashi, H.; Kato, M.; Matsuura, M.; Mobbs, D.; Suhara, T.; Okubo, Y. (2009-02-13). February 13, 2009: “When Your Gain Is My Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude” by Hidehiko Takahashi et al. Science (Sciencemag.org) 323 (5916): 937–9).  This became a part of the modus operandi to skim money off for Mother Theresa from organized crime (cf. David Wise’s 2002 book, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hans­sen Betrayed America, Robert Philip Hanssen paid Mother Theresa $30,000 he had earned while spying for the former Soviet Union while serving as a high-placed FBI agent and a member of Opus Dei.  Hanssen exposed three soviet agents in the CIA; two were later executed. Hanssen was introduced to Gospel Catholic readers in Volume 17, No. 4, (Spring 2001) as a holy man of Opus Dei.


Robert Hanssen arrested

Rev Robert Bucciarelli, an Opus Dei priest told Hanssen that if he gave the money to Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, a Roman Catholic nun born and raised in Albania and went to India at the age of 19, who was more concerned about abortion than hunger and overpopulation and with no interest in easing the burden of poverty rampant throughout India while Mother Teresa took in hundreds of thousands of dollars to build retirement homes for aged priests and nuns; the biggest complaint against this pseudo-saint was that she expected her 3000 nuns to needlessly suffer “to make God happy”), he would not have to tell the truth about his spying nor the assassinations he ordered, in keeping with the Opus Dei code that Senator Santorum fully supports), and damned the only US Roman Catholic president John F. Kennedy as not being Roman Catholic “enough”.


Frank Shakespeare (ambassador to Vatican 1986-1989)

Hanssen played a significant role in Opus Dei and working for the Soviets that the FBI did not catch. In one missed warning around 1987, the report says, Mr. Hanssen committed ”a serious security breach” by disclosing information to a Soviet defector he was debriefing.  Instead of being reprimanded, Hanssen was promoted under pressure from the Ronald Reagan White House that appointed Frank Shakespeare, a Roman Catholic, graduated from Holy Cross college and member of Opus Dei, as ambassador to the Pope in attempting to gain stronger support from the Vatican.

In 1993, Mr. Hanssen sought out a Russian agent in a parking garage and tried to give him a package with classified data, the report says. The overture was ‘”remarkable for its recklessness and self-destructive quality,” it says, and the Russians were so concerned that they were being set up that they filed a formal protest with the United States government. The investigation never led to Mr. Hanssen. Santorum only had praise for the “religious fervor” of Hanssen.

The FBI only learned of how far Hanssen went after it paid a KGB agent $7 million to learn details, that were already revealed in Wise’s book, in 2002 when George W. Bush was approached about Opus Dei and would accept conversion to Roman Catholicism and become a member of Opus Dei (read: Wise, David (2002). SPY: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen betrayed America(New York, NY, USA: Random House).   The Republican Party in the USA, since 1975, has been targeted by Opus Dei and other radical religious movements such as the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), whose most illustrious and best known confessors are US


Michele and Marcus Bachmann after denouncing LGBT civil and human rights

Congressional Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Marcus Bachmann a self-styled psychologist who is not registered to practice in Minnesota, having bought his degree online, in an effort to turn the USA into a theocracy on the order of Iran.  In 2011, as his wife pursued the USA presidency, Marcus Bachmann continued to style himself as a reparative therapist to “pray away the gay”, even though reparative therapy is denounced by all major psychological and psychiatric professionals and organizations.


Archbishop Broglio (US Military Chaplain)

The junk science of reparative therapy, however, has been endorsed by most Roman Catholic bishops (especially the malcontent archbishop Timothy Paul Andrew Broglio (born 1951, now archbishop for the Military Services in the United States of America services) whose own sexuality has been speculated on for a long time; he has long been associated with Opus Dei) and pseudo-scientists, believes in “holy war” and supports having Bible citations on armaments used by USA military personnel as a way to “educate” them in Christianity and help them on their “mission to bring people to the Lord Jesus Christ”.


Santorums rural Virginia home-made possible with sweetheart loan

Rick Santorum is no saint, and while in Congress (1991-1995) and the US Senate (1995-2007)  was faced with numerous questions of personal and professional ethics.  Santorum received a preferred mortgage from a bank run by campaign donors (unorthodox $500,000 mortgage that Santorum and his wife secured on the home in rural Virginia they had purchased for $643,361.

According to a series of reports in the Philadelphia Daily News, the mortgage came from Philadelphia Trust Company, a fledgling private bank catering to “affluent investors and institutions” whose officers had contributed $24,000 to Santorum’s political action committees and re-election campaign. Santorum’s public disclosure forms showed he did not have the required minimum $250,000 in liquid assets and was not an investor with Philadelphia Trust.), and $8 million in Santorum-sponsored federal earmark funds that went to a real estate developer who backed his charity. “There were several instances in which Santorum appeared to have taken campaign contributions in direct exchange for legislative assistance,” said Sloan, whose organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), spent months investigating Santorum’s activities while he was in office. “He violated Senate gift rules by accepting a mortgage from a bank in which he had no interest and which otherwise made loans only to its own investors.”

The other issue that captivated Santorum critics involved a non-profit charity called Operation Good Neighbor (Barbara Bonfiglio is treasurer of Operation Good Neighbor. She was also treasurer of Santorum’s reelection campaign and a lobbyist) that paid $216,000 in “travel” expenses for Santorum in 2004. Santorum founded the organization to “illustrate compassionate conservatism” but did not take a formal role in its day-to-day operations. The charity was run by his campaign staffers who paid themselves generous salaries “in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ”. It operated out of the same building as his campaign headquarters. And its board included several top Washington, D.C. lobbyists who had clients with millions of dollars in business before the U.S. Senate, according to a 2006 report by WTAE, the ABC News affiliate in Pittsburgh.

The chairman of Operation Good Neighbor was Michael O’Neill, CEO of Preferred Real Estate. The company was involved in a waterfront development in Chester, Pennsylvania, with Santorum’s help, benefitted from more than $8 million in federal grants, according to local reports; neither the Middle Class, nor the poor, found any benefit or largesse from Operation Good Neighbor or Rick Santorum.

[continued in next post]

[Dig]

[continued from post above "Holy Crap! Someone just let a whole lot of Santorum out on the Internet..."]



Hunger in the USA (1999 - 2009)

Santorum is against anything that helps the poor or Middle Class.  He is against food stamps, as Santorum claims there are so many people are obese, so no one needs more food!  Hunger was highest during Santorum’s time in public office.  Santorum is out-of-touch with reality with his attacks on Food Stamps (that name has been changed; the Food Stamp Program has been replaced by SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the Food Stamp Program), the nation’s most important anti-hunger program.   In 2011, SNAP helped almost 45 million low-income Americans to afford a nutritionally adequate diet in a typical month.  Contrary to Santorum’s claim that Food Stamps are used to feed the fat, the “lazy Blacks” and other social parasites, nearly 75 percent of SNAP participants are in families with children; more than one-quarter are in households with seniors or people with disabilities.  While SNAP’s fundamental purpose is to help low-income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities afford an adequate diet and avoid hardship, it promotes other goals as well, such as reducing poverty, supporting and encouraging work, protecting the overall economy from risk, and promoting healthy eating.  Santorum, along with Governor Jon Huntsman (R-UT) wants the poor and hungry to “feel real pain” by defunding the program in favor of giving grants to the states to use as each state choses. Santorum argues should be applied to other assistance programs, cutting families off without regard to their current situation but instead based on timelines set by Congress, chortling: “We’ve gotta block-grant [food stamps] and send it back to the states, just like I did with welfare reform — do the same thing with Medicaid, including housing programs, block-grant them, send them back to the states, require work, and you put a time limit on it.”  If the time limit runs out, the poor can take jobs offering less than minimum wage and live on scraps, following the raw rhetoric of Chuck Bentley of the radical right Reverend Moon’s sordid Washington Times pseudo-journalism, claiming that the Food Stamp Program (SNAP) is saturated with corruption. SNAP payment accuracy has continued to improve, reaching all-time highs (see graph released by the US Food and Nutrition Service).  


SNAP error rates 1990 - 2010

Even-more-so, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that SNAP spending will fall as a share of the economy in coming years as the economy recovers and temporary benefit expansions that Congress enacted in 2009 expire.  Far from being a drain on the US economy, SNAP helps the US economy: putting dollars back into the market sector, keeping food tenders (grocers, farmers, and so forth) working, and lowering medical costs by improving diet and health. The problem with this is that the gluttonous insurance industry is not making the obscene profits it is accustomed to generating, hospitals are seeing fewer patients with chronic illnesses due to inadequate diet, and people are more productive and attentive.  The presidency most successful in cutting back fraud and abuse has been that of Barrack Obama.


Health Insurance profits rising

The former Pennsylvania US Senator operates in blinding ignorance of public health research claiming that those who can afford health insurance will be healthy–as health insurance profits rise–even though an increasing number of Americans have no health insurance while asserting that health care reform would mean compromised treatment for people like his disabled daughter are directly contrary to fact.


Food stamps recipients soar

Santorum is not worried about food choices in poor neighborhoods, and has taken direct aim and doing away with any safety net for Black Americans, exposing his racism even further.  Speaking in Le Mars, Iowa on Monday December 5, 2011, Santorum told a group that he would cut the food stamp programthat 48 million people depend on (out of a national population of 300-million people, and in Iowa, where Santorum made his comments, only


Food stamp recipients 2009 (New York Times graphic)

9% of all Blacks receive food stamps while 84% are white) with 1 in 4 children depending on food stamps to avoid hunger and starvation, asking: “If hunger is a problem in America, then why do we have an obesity problem among the people who we say have a hunger problem?”


Where jobs disappear, food stamp use increases

Food stamp use is on a fast track in Santorum’s declared home state of Pennsylvania, yet he had never worked to help the poor who live there.
Santorum ignores that hunger has jumped because of the rising number of people who are out of work and those whose wages have been severely cutback.  Recent data from the US Department of Agriculture found that nearly “70 percent [of all] households that relied on food stamps last year had no earned income.”  An additional 20% of households in the USA had no cash income at all in 2010.  Food prices have gone up, so hunger increased.


Poverty in the USA

Santorum is a quasi-covert racist.  He opposes the idea that it “takes a village” to raise a child. Santorum noted that the phrase comes from an “African proverb” and is but an excuse to rob from the rich to aid the poor and struggling.  A further example of Santorum’s racism can be read in a statement Santorum made in Iowa on Monday, January 2, 2012. Speaking to Republicans in Iowa on Monday, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) said his administration would reform welfare to the point that it would offer no welfare at all. After


Rise in Health Care Insurance costs leading to greater poverty in the USA

suggesting that an expansion of Medicare is really just a plot to make voters more “dependent” on Washington, Santorum added: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money”.  Social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, are equated as being part of fascism and autocratic government.  27.4% of all Blacks in the USA are living in poverty, compared to 9.9% of all whites.

Santorum’s knowledge of history (he knows next to nothing about Europe) and contemporary affairs are as weak-to-non-existent as those of Newt Gingrich.  While Gingrich claimed that Palestinians are an “invented people,” Santorum claimed on November 11, 2011 that “All the people that [sic: who] live in the West Bank are Israelis.  They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian. This is Israeli land.” (watch here and read here The Jewish Week)   Many Israeli Jews and Jews of other nationality support the two State solution based on UN resolution. Santorum’s statement mirrors the views of the Christian Zionists who as Hank Hanegraaff said “defend ethnic cleansing as a divine command” and are “bent on ensuring that the horrors of Armageddon become a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Hanegraaff, Hank (2007). The Apocalypse Code: Find out what the Bible really says about the end-times and why it matters today. Nashville, TN, USA: Thomas Nelson, p. 167; a Spanish edition was published by Thomas Nelson in 2008). As for 1967 war, Menachem Begin said, “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack Him [Naser]“.  (Finkelstein, Norman G. (2003), Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London, UK; New York, NY, USA: Verso, p. 135). Santorum’s statement is an outright lie (read also here and here).


Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi personally caused the murder of more than 1 million Iraqis

In 2006, Santorum told reporters he had “evidence” of WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in Iraq—a foible that has since been exposed as a lie by “Curveball” (an Iraqi defector: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi) to involve the Western Powers in an illegal war to “bring down” Saddam Hussein.  On September 7, 2006, in an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Post Santorum issued a tirade against Islamic fascism and began to go after Iran, and said nothing about Roman Catholic fascism, proclaiming that Iran is at the center of the world’s conflicts.

After leaving the US Senate, Santorum’s income jumped—along with star power working for Fox News and distorting the truth.  A large portion came from his lobbying efforts in opposition to clean air, water, and the environment. $332,000 — came from his work as a consultant for groups advocating and lobbying for industry interests. That included $142,500 to help advise a Pennsylvania natural gas firm, Consol Energy, and $65,000 to consult with lobby firm American Continental Group, and its insurance services client.  His opposition to universal health care that he refers to as Obamacare is directly related to the largesse heaped on him by the insurance industry in the USA (read here and here).


Rick Santorum at Republican Leadership Conference (New Orleans)

Opposed to science, Santorum wants creationism (“Intelligent Design”) required as the only fact for everyone to believe in.  He claims that creationism is a “legitimate scientific theory” (it is not) and must be taught in classrooms even if it means dismissing teachers who are not strong “people of faith and support the Bible.”  His antiquated ideas are endorsed by the Discovery Institute’s leaders who argue that the “people” want creationism. Santorum denies the reality of global warming (watch the video); he is the most fevered opponent of any science that does not match the Bible, and believes the world was created in six days and that the sun travels around the earth, as detailed in Joshua (for Santorum, the Bible is without error). He not only has attempted to gut every science program in the USA, but sponsored a bill that would have gutted the core functions of The National Weather Service, and handed it to private companies, including AccuWeather (which is in his home state)–in exchange for a hefty fee.  He has never spoken with Zack Kopplin.

The greatest threat to the USA and American democracy is a Roman Catholic presidency of Rick Santorum who is owned by the Vatican and Opus Dei. Liberties and freedom fought for in 1776 will be dashed and a theocracy more brutal than that by the Spanish sacerdotal scions will be unleashed as women lose control over their bodies, the young denied an objective education, and the elderly pillaged of their savings and retirement all in the name of a religion that has existed for 1678 years.  It is already evident in the nefarious muzzling of Roman Catholic clergy in Minnesota by would-be censor and mind-controlling Archbishop / theocrat John Clayton Neinstedt of Minneapolis-St.


John Clayton Nienstedt

St. Paul (read here and here), a recognized bully responsible for numerous suicides throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul (read here and here), and pedophile prelates and priests in cathedrals from California to Texas and Pennsylvania while the Roman Catholic bishop Gabino Zavala of San Diego resigns after admitting fathering two teenagers and others repackage discrimination under the disguise of “religious freedom” with Bishop William E. Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, a diocese rocked with numerous lawsuits against the clergy (a list of Fathers and Monsignori accused of pedophilia) who sexually attacked underage youth during the stormy tenure of now-retired New York cardinal Edward Egan, in a reportmore than 12,000 pages long, cackling before the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution in October 2011, that to allow


Bishop Gabino Zavala of San Diego

all people freedom of choice would curtail the right to discriminate by Roman Catholics and other cults.   Rick Santorum’s public stand against gay civil rights has been loudly booed on the campaign trail as most young, and many older people do not tolerate the discrimination shown by Santorum and the Roman Catholic Church.
Santorum claimed that priests were pedophiles primarily in “liberal” dioceses, such as Boston, while it also exists in all other dioceses including in Dubuque, Iowa and Joliet, Illinois,  etc. with the arch-conservative diocese of San Diego, CA covering up pedophile priests misconduct as its bishop fathered two children.  Pedophilia, Santorum equates as being homosexual attacks—which it is not.  There have always been a large number of religious leaders who sexually attacked, raped, sodomized, and violated who were young girls (read here and here) as well as young adults and older women (read here and here for a stellar article by Katherine van Wormer and Lois Berns of the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls).
 


Santorum "tweet" on homosexuality

Santorum’s preoccupation with homosexuality strongly suggests a conscious effort to suppress his own secreted sexual interests.  This is clearly seen in his Associated Press interview, when Santorum declared on April 7, 2003: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. … That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”  One thing is clear, as it is with Bradlee Dean and even more so with Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa, is that Rick Santorum is obsessed with homosexuality, all of whom exhibit Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)–a psychiatric disorder that can cause severe distress, disability, and social impairment (cf. Gillan, Claire M.; Papmeyer, Martina; Morein-Zamir, Sharon; Sahakian, Barbara J. Sahakian; Fineberg, Naomi A.; Robbins, Trevor W. Robbins; and de Wit, Sanne de Wit (2011). “Disruption in the Balance Between Goal-Directed Behavior and Habit Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder”. American Journal of Psychiatry, July; 168 (7); 718-726; cp. Kämpfer, Nicole; Fluri, Peter (2001). Unbeachtet  mittendrin: Diskriminierung von schwulen und lesbischen  KlientInnen in der ambulanten Beratung. Zürich, Switzerland: Edition Soziothek).


Rev. Ted Haggard

Santorum’s preoccupation with male homosexuality and his condemnation of it is similar to Ted Haggard and other Protestant sexual predators (Bazemore, Patricia M, “Homosexuality” ed. David Bienenfeld, with a special section devoted to judgmentalism leading to suicides among homosexuals,  and the role of religion).  While denouncing homosexuality, all were actively engaged in homosexual activity.

One of the most outspoken homophobes, later exposed as a gay man in a mega-church pulpit, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a strong supporter of Santorum, even when his second gay affair became public knowledge as his wife, Gayle, argued that it was conditioned into her husband and was neither genetic nor a result of incubation in the womb  before Ted admitted to a second affair, and subsequent affairs.  This led the preacher into wife-swapping with actor Gary Busey.  Haggard and Biblical-literalists are correct in noting that such actions as wife-swapping (and even homosexuality) have Biblical antecedents.  Not only did Lot offer his daughters to the citizens of Sodom (the first Biblical gang bang in Genesis 19) before committing incest and impregnating both daughters in the mountains outside of the City of Zoar (Genesis 19:8 ff), but Abram sold his wife Sara several times to different sovereigns (including to the King of Sodom and the Egyptian pharaoh in Genesis 12:11 and 18, cp. Genesis 20:1-18, etc.) as neither the Torah nor the Bible saw marriage as being between one man and one woman (Solomon did have 700 wives and 300 concubines, for example; and, Jacob did marry his first cousins who were sisters, etc).

Santorum has conveniently forgotten Luke 6:37, but like Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, Santorum’s knowledge of scripture is not even minimal (none read Greek, Coptic, and other early Biblical languages) showing distinct borderline personality disorder (consider Cutler, Brian L. (2011). Conviction of the Innocent: Lessons from Psychological Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association) a problem affecting 30.8 million Americans, with Santorum’s close to avoidant personality disorder (read The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th edition text revision. (DSM-IV TR) published by the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.  The inflexibility of this mental disorder can have dire effects).


Charles Gilbert Chaddock

Homosexuality is neither a medical disease or a mental disorder (American Medical Association, American Psychological Association,  American Psychiatric Association, etc.)  Homosexuality is natural, normal, healthy, and if a person is self-actualized is a contributing creative force.  There is no condemnation of homosexuality in the Torah, Jewish Old Testament, or Christian New Testament—as the word “homosexual” did not exist before 1892, first used by C. G. Chaddock in his translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (Chaddock, Charles Gilbert (1892, trans.) Krafft-Ebing, Richard [baron] von, Psychopathia sexualis: with especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: a medico-legal study … translation of the seventh German edition. Philadelphia, PA, USA, and London,UK: F.A. Davis Co; the original was published in 1886 with the title Psychopathia sexualis: eine klinisch-forensische Studie. Stuttgart: Enke). The Biblical objection is to Temple Prostitution in non-Yahwistic religions, known as Qadesh (קדשה)‎, which is a feminine noun,  that the King James Version of the Bible deliberately mistranslated as “sodomite”. It has been repeatedly misused by Santorum who is neither a linguist, biblical scholar, or knowledgeable about the ancient world, but found time to speak


Bradlee Dean (Smith) with tattoos

with Minnesota’s pontiff of perdition and herald of hate Bradlee Dean, who claims “Obama is no Christian”, and calls for the execution of homosexuals worldwide in the name of Jesus (read here and here) yet Dean (Smith) ignores Leviticus 19:28, dropping his support for homophobic Congresswoman Michele Bachmann  in favor of Rick Santorum who is more in keeping with his desire to kill as many homosexuals as possible, on the order of mega church leader Rick Warren of California and other Protestants and Roman Catholics. Uganda has passed a law requiring a three-year prison sentence for anyone who knows a homosexual and does not report the person to the government for execution.  


Roger Vangheluwe, bishop of Bruges, pictured in November 2006

Priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, and other religious leaders who are pedophiles are worldwide and include the lower echelon of clergy all the way forward to ayatollahs and archbishops (e.g. Danneels stepped down as Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and Roger Vangheluwe, the bishop of Bruges for the last 25 years, was forced to resign after admitting to sexually abusing a boy earlier in his career; little has been published about pedophile bishops, priests and nuns in Perú (that led to the murder of two priests in Lima in 2011; child prostitution is a way of life in Peru) and even less on preying Pentecostal pastors (read here and here).  What is ignored is the plethora of Protestant preachers that actually exceeds that of the Roman Catholic clergy with 260 Protestant cases compared with 228 Roman Catholic in the USA alone.  

With the advent of the Opus Dei cardinal Cipriani slithering into Perú, continuing to halo fantasies, fictions, and pseudohistories, the number of pedophile priests rose. In 2007, Daniel Bernardo Beltrán Murguía Ward, a 42 year-old SCV consecrated layman was found by the National Police in a hostel in Cercado de Lima with a 12 year-old boy, of whom he was taking sexually explicit pictures and performing oral sex (read here and here; both documents are in Spanish).   Throughout Latin Americaand Spain where Opus Dei has a stranglehold on the media other priests, monks, nuns, sisters, and bishops (such as the President Bishop Fernando Lugo Mendez of Paraguay who


Bishop Fernando Lugo Mendez (President of Paraguay)

admitted having a child while the Vatican still considered him to be a bishop) are throwing off their vows of chastity with their robes, and molesting people of all ages. Opus Dei has taken no action against its members who confess to child abuse and pedophilia–save for them to pray more, give more time and money to “the work of God” and “convert the world”.  The Opus Dei archbishop of Lima takes a more kindly approach of offering only reproach for “misguided actions”.

The Vatican and other religious groups are attempting to stop the dissemination of this knowledge by censoring the internet, with Benedict XVIbeing the most culpable of the religious leaders today protecting pedophile priests with


Juan Luis Cipriani

solicitation frequently occurring within the confessional (read here in Spanish and here in Latin; the majority of the crimes have been hidden by Lima’s archbishop Juan Luis cardinal Cipriani Thorne, a fervent apologist for and member of Opus Dei who is bitterly opposed to basic human and civil rights especially for women.  Cipriani is endorsed and supported by the odiously opportunistic Perú Council of (Roman Catholic) Bishops who are equally opposed to any human rights for any Peruano who does not follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church: women who demand freedom of


"Human rights are not for 'fools' ('fools' literally is 'assholes' or 'bastards')"

choice and the right to determine what happens to their bodies, the LGBT community that is out in Lima but hides in the provinces, non-Roman Catholics struggling for equality and a decent education, educators who reject the Roman Catholic Church’s stand on the sciences and other subjects, and so forth.


Julián Herranz Casado (Opus Dei leader in Spain)

While Cipriani is a cardinal, and the only Opus Dei cardinal in South America, he is not unique.  There is one other Opus Dei cardinal: Julián Herranz Casado of Spain who is even more corrupt than Cipriani (the document is in Italian). Herranz Casado was President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts until his resignation from that body on February 15, 2007).  Most of his statements followed the intolerant line of the ayatollahs of Iran, and none reflective the inclusion sought by Pope John XXIII.

Unfortunately, little is said about the crimes of Roman Catholic and Protestant nuns/sisters of the church who drug unwed mothers (sometimes wed) to steal and sell their babies.  In Ireland, Roman Catholic nuns paid $193 million in settlements for exploiting and selling children (for Ireland, watch this video; for Australia watch this video (with more than 500,000 children abused, watch here); for Spain, watch this video; it happens in all nations, but most grievously in Roman Catholic countries, with the Roman Catholic Church abusing women of all ages, especially in Latin America where Opus Dei is strong, watch here; Perú is the least safe place to raise a child especially with the advent of Cipriani). This is the organization that the Santorums declare is “holy” and “created by God.”  All were waiting for a new Christ, a new Jesus as the one Opus Dei defined–or at least a politician who would act as they believed Jesus would act: intolerant (John 7:24 rejecting Matthew 7:1), confrontational (Matthew 28:19), exclusionary (John 14:6), hate-filled (John 9:41), quick to go to war (Matthew 10:34).

Santorum ultimately proclaimed that the USA needed a “Jesus candidate”: himself. Illusions of grandeur and divinity are constant within the psychologyof Santorum (cf. West, Louis Jolyon (1988). “The Anatomy of Illusion: Religious Cults and Destructive Persuasion”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 145:123-a-124; Forrest, David V. (2000). “Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.”  American Journal of Psychiatry. 157:841-842).

Santorum fully supports, and yearns for a “holy war” against Islam and against any “enemy” of the Roman Catholic Church or his interpretation of what constitutes Christianity (cf. Hoge, Charles W.; Terhakopian, Artin; Castro, Carl A.; Messer, Stephen C.; and Engel, Charles C. (2007). “Association of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder With Somatic Symptoms, Health Care Visits, and Absenteeism Among Iraq War Veterans”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 164:150-153; to argue for a “holy war” is now considered a sign of insanity: Savin, Daniel (2011). “Wars, Insurgencies, and Terrorist Attacks: A Psychosocial Perspective From the Muslim World”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 168:653-654. A debate is available at “Reasoned discourse or a holy war: postscript to a report on ECT”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1975;132:77-79; cp. Tuerk, Peter W. ; Grubaugh, Anouk L.; Hamner, Mark B.; and Foa, Edna B. (2009). “Diagnosis and Treatment of PTSD-Related Compulsive Checking Behaviors in Veterans of the Iraq War: The Influence of Military Context on the Expression of PTSD Symptoms”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 166:762-767).  Santorum sang the praises of carnage when he carolled February 22, 2011: “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom. … “  Santorum’s ignorance of history is most apparent, as is his lack of knowledge of Latin.  To help the former Senator, I offer this translation of Pope Urban II’s speech (as recorded by Robert the Monk):

“Oh, race of Franks, race from across the mountains, race chosen and beloved by God as shines forth in very many of your works set apart from all nations by the situation of your country, as well as by your catholic faith and the honor of the holy church! To you our discourse is addressed and for you our exhortation is intended. We wish you to know what a grievous cause has led us to Your country, what peril threatening you and all the faithful has brought us.

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempt to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and deprived of territory so vast in extent that it can not be traversed in a march of two months. On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you.

Let the deeds of your ancestors move you and incite your minds to manly achievements; the glory and greatness of king Charles the Great, and of his son Louis, and of your other kings, who have destroyed the kingdoms of the pagans, and have extended in these lands the territory of the holy church. Let the holy sepulchre of the Lord our Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially incite you, and the holy places which are now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with their filthiness. Oh, most valiant soldiers and descendants of invincible ancestors, be not degenerate, but recall the valor of your progenitors.

But if you are hindered by love of children, parents and wives, remember what the Lord says in the Gospel, “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.” “Every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake shall receive a hundredfold and shall inherit everlasting life.” Let none of your possessions detain you, no solicitude for your family affairs, since this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says “floweth with milk and honey,” was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights. This the Redeemer of the human race has made illustrious by His advent, has beautified by residence, has consecrated by suffering, has redeemed by death, has glorified by burial. This royal city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated, and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially she asks succor, because, as we have already said, God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms. Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven.

When Pope Urban had said these and very many similar things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present, that they cried out, “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!” When the venerable Roman pontiff heard that, with eyes uplifted to heaven he gave thanks to God and, with his hand commanding silence, said:

Most beloved brethren, today is manifest in you what the Lord says in the Gospel, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry. For, although the cry issued from numerous mouths, yet the origin of the cry was one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted this in your breasts, has drawn it forth from you. Let this then be your war-cry in combats, because this word is given to you by God. When an armed attack is made upon the enemy, let this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God: It is the will of God! It is the will of God!

And we do not command or advise that the old or feeble, or those unfit for bearing arms, undertake this journey; nor ought women to set out at all, without their husbands or brothers or legal guardians. For such are more of a hindrance than aid, more of a burden than advantage. Let the rich aid the needy; and according to their wealth, let them take with them experienced soldiers. The priests and clerks of any order are not to go without the consent of their bishop; for this journey would profit them nothing if they went without permission of these. Also, it is not fitting that laymen should enter upon the pilgrimage without the blessing of their priests.

Whoever, therefore, shall determine upon this holy pilgrimage and shall make his vow to God to that effect and shall offer himself to Him as a, living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, shall wear the sign of the cross of the Lord on his forehead or on his breast. When,’ truly’,’ having fulfilled his vow be wishes to return, let him place the cross on his back between his shoulders. Such, indeed, by the twofold action will fulfill the precept of the Lord, as He commands in the Gospel, ‘He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me, is not worthy of me‘ “.


Speech of Pope Urban II (in Latin)

In the same manner as every pope since Urban II in 1095, Santorum continues to spread the lie that Christians did nothing against Muslims even though any basic textbook will state the opposite.  Santorums lies are justified by Mr. Josemaria Escrivá who ruled that lying for Christianity is acceptable, that Christianity never showed any “aggression” against Islam and argued that American intervention in the Middle East helps promote “core American values”:

“What I’m talking about is onward American [Christian] soldiers,” he said. “What we’re talking about are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’ — that’s a Christian value, but it’s an American value.”

“It’s become part of our national religion, if you will,” he continued. “The point I was trying to make was that the national faith, the national ideal, is rooted in the Christian ideal — in the Judeo-Christian concept of the person.”

When Santorum uses the word “Christian” he means Roman Catholic.  He does accept any of the various off-shoots from the church created by Constantine I in 325 CE.  He is especially anxious and angry about the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), as he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer on December 20, 2007:

“Would the potential attraction to Mormonism by simply having a Mormon in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?”


Bishop Robert Finn (Kansas City)

Santorum’s attack on the US Constitution is orchestrated by the four outspoken Opus Dei priests in the USA.  Santorum champions the US Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops attacks on fundamental freedoms in the USA as defined by the USA Supreme Court and common sense.  He is championed by Bishop Robert Finn of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese who “forgot” to tell police about child pornography and attempted to hide pedophile priests and has been indicted for these “omissions”.  Bishop Finn, is among the most unpopular US bishops and is regularly demonstrated against by people demanding that he leave the church and his post as bishop.  Unfortunately,


Roman Catholics protest against Bishop Finn

Bishop Finn is supported by Archbishop Jose Gomez of San Antonio who shielded at least one priest accused of raping a  16-years-old boy in church who was abused approximately twice a month in exchange for a car and other gifts.


Father John Fiala

Father John M. Fiala was a parish priest in Rocksprings, a community in the San Antonio area raped the youth at gun point, and later repeatedly raped the child and later attempted to have the boy killed; the attacks were hushed up by Archbishop Gomez, successor of Cardinal Mahony (the latter who covered up 25 years of pedophilia in the Los Angeles archdiocese), were not much different from the priests who attacked, raped and sodomized  young girls.  Added to this mix are two other Opus Dei prelates who take Escrivá and his book seriously: that there is no sin in covering up the peccadilloes of priests or parishioners who are members of Opus Dei if the sin further’s the advancement of “the Kingdom of God.”  The other USA Bishops  include  Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, equally guilty of cover ups, lies and deceits, as well as the iniquitous and reprehensible


Newark Archbishop John J. Myers (Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger)

Archbishop John Myers of Newark, NJ.  In 2002, Myers crafted a policy to shield pedophile priests. Although Myers publicly proclaimed that there would be transparency and truth in exposing all pedophile priests, he personally intervened to rescue four who sexually molested children and one adult.  Myers also wrote a letter of recommendation for one priest who broke into a woman’s house in Florida and assaulted her. The most controversial example is the Rev. Michael Fugee.  Fugee confessed to police eight years ago that he molested a 13-year-old boy. Myers refused to oust Fugee from the priesthood, and instead had the archdiocese assigned him last year as chaplain to St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark without telling hospital officials of his past, in keeping with the instructions of Josemaria Escrivá and Opus Dei. All four are Opus Dei prelates with the same desire detailed dramatically by Dan Brown in his book DaVinci Code that the Roman Catholic Church.


US Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops

The Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops of the USA swear that their first and only allegiance is to Rome, not to the USA nor to the “rule of law of men” but to the “Vicar of Christ [the Pope]“.  While the US Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops claim that they meet to assist the faithful, especially the poor and hungry, that is seldom the case.  On the contrary, meetings are conducted to determine the destiny of the LGBT (homosexual) community and what the Roman Catholic Church’s response is to be toward “the problem.”  The primary problem is that none of the bishops have any academic or scientific knowledge concerning homosexuality nor even sexuality (given the absurdity of the


US Roman Catholic Bishops Conference on Homosexuality

unnatural and abnormal act of clerical celibacy).  They fund succor only in their interrelationship with evangelical Christian communities that damn the LGBT community on false interpretations and maligned translations of ancient scripture.  There is no reference to APA (neither American Psychological Association nor American Psychiatric Association) nor any medical association’s study and findings on the natural reality of homosexuality.  For Roman Catholic bishops, priests and nuns, many who are gay and others who are pedophiles, homosexuality remains a sin–without any Biblical justification for condemnation.  Because of this antiquated stand, they are saluted by evangelical churches worldwide.


Sandra Miesel

Some evangelical churches, including Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network attempted to suppress  in print and film the most unreliable and miserly scholarship is that of Sandra Miesel.  Miesel attacks, with no knowledge of Coptic or other early Christian languages before Eusebius of Caesarea was ordered to create fifty copies of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine, to send to the churches in the East,  Dan Brown for using the scholarly works and frequently and heavily cited translations of the renowned


Elaine Pagels

international scholar Elaine Pagels because of her “feminist scholarship”.  Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University.  Her PhD is from Harvard University and she is recognized as an authority on the Nag Hammadi library manuscripts.  Pagels has also exposed the Pastoral Epistles (1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus) as pseudonymous writings created to make it appear as if Paul was anti-Gnostic.  This is revealed in her work The Gnostic Gospels.

Miesel’s claim to credibility (marginal at best) is that she holds master’s degrees in biochemistry and medieval history from the University of Illinois.  Her publications do not attest to either discipline.  She is the co-author of two books: one on Brown’s book The DaVinci Code, the other on the writings of Peter Pullman who authored children’s books—whom she calls “the pied piper of atheism”, two works of fiction and one essay: Myth, Symbol, and Religion in The Lord of the Rings. T-K Graphics.  All are poorly written with faulty logic and reasoning, and startling errors.  A fervent Roman Catholic Miesel’s religion blocks serious scholarship and review.


Leonardo Da Vinci "The Last Supper"

Miesel’s primary purpose is in defending her church, with a concentrated attack on Brown’s use of DaVinci’s Last Supper, a painting that the leading expert on has declared that the image of “John” is definitely that of a woman. One article notes:  

Carlos Pedretti [born in Bologna, Italy, 1928  a professor emeritus of art history and Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is consulted whenever there is a dispute about the authenticity of a work ascribed to DaVinci], one of the world’s leading Leonardo experts and head of the Leonardo Institute in Florence offered a rare word of agreement, noting that a portrait of the figure next to Jesus, sketched by one of Leonardo’s top students, clearly appears to be a woman.


Carlos Pedretti authenticating Da Vinci work

The critics, who follow Miesel’s reasoning, for the most part are Roman Catholics and strict biblical constructionists.  It is no surprise that they would be against nearly all (if not all) of the tome.  Hank Hanagraaff is among those most determined to prove the infallibility of scripture (which already is being questioned by Jews and Christians) and rejects the reality of a massive suppression of documentation by the Emperor Constantine I and his clique of religious supporters opposed to Arian and other “heretics.” What upsets many is the claim that Jesus married, with the common response being that Jesus never married–a situation highly unorthodox in the days that the New Testament Jesus supposedly lived.

John Dominic Crossan of beliefnet.org argues that Jesus did not marry because (1) Jesus was considered to be living in a time anticipating an apocalypse and Jesus was a member of the Essenes at Qumran who practiced communal celibacy in anticipation of End Time; (2) the Essenes were living a “heaven on earth” by being celibate and contributing their money to unfortunate poor girls (Damascus Document 14:12-17); (3) Jesus actually believed that the Kingdom of God was already in place and for that reason marriage and procreation was no longer necessary (cp. 1 Corinthians 7).  If any of these reasons were/are true, then the Jesus of the New Testament was not (1) the Son of God but a son of a god, (2) had separated himself from the Law (requiring all to “multiply”), and (3) Jesus was ascetic in imitation of a nonsexual god. Crossan does add a few additional arguments for the celibacy of Jesus: (1) the times were prosperous for construction, but (2) at the same time there was great poverty.  The real problem is that the gospels give various and different accounts.  While it is commonly thought that Jesus worked as a carpenter (Matthew 13:55, 23:, Mark 6:3 says Jesus was a manual (unskilled) laborer (tekton); Luke 3:23 only says that Jesus was Joseph’s son (there is no hint that Joseph was either a foster or stepfather, but in fact is clearly noted as the father).  Jesus, Crossan concludes, was too poor to marry.  That I find highly amusing, as even the poorest “marry” and marriage in that age was not necessarily before any officiant, but only an announcement made to witnesses–and sex occurs (as does ovulation and the fertilization of an egg) without marriage and outside of marriage.  Marriage was not a requisite for having a baby, being a mother or father, or of raising a child.  My reason to argue that Jesus was married comes from the Jewish law. Jewish Mishnaic Law says “An unmarried man may not be a teacher” and celibacy was frowned on under Jewish law (TB 29 b; TB Yev. 62b, 63a).  Rabbis were supposed to be married, to best help their congregations. Jesus is frequently addressed as Rabbi (teacher, cf. John 1:49, Mark 11:21) and was addressed that way even before the Sanhedrin.


Gospel of Philip

The Gospel of Philip 63:35-36, 59 sq (a Coptic translation from the earlier Greek version) records that Jesus loved Mary Magdalene more than any of his other followers, and let her wipe his feet at the Last Supper–a statement that gives proof that she was there.  Furthermore, the  Gospel of Philip (the oldest scroll still in existence is dated back to the early third century) was accorded gospel status until politics intervened to have it removed because of its favorable passages on Mary Magdalen (Magdalene translates as “watchtower” and “kindle”) and its emphasis on marriage:

And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [...] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her [...].  The rest of the disciples [...] .  They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?”  The Saviour answered and said to them, “Who do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”


Gospel of Mary Magdalene (fragment; parts destroyed by rats)

In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Magdalene (it is a city: Magda, it does not mean “prostitute”) again takes a central role (5:2-6 and 9:4-10). In John 20, it clearly states that Jesus spoke first to Mary when he allegedly rose from the grave.


Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas, written at the same time as the canonic gospels, has the quarrel between Peter and Magdalene, but in this account Jesus vows to make Mary “into” or “equal” with a man/Peter (114:1-3) so that she can sit with the apostles.  In all of the Gnostic gospels, it is Peter who is angry, and Mary is the one who brings calm.  Mary is the guiding force, and isolated communities were not always composed of men; prior to the arrival of the Habiru, Palestine (and later “Christians” from the area) were matriarchal and matrilineal as found in numerous ancient scrolls and fragments.

Miesel minces towards the mercenary murdering of the truth in her zeal to protect the Roman Catholic Church that even the Arian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea confesses was formalized by Constantine I in 325 CE, and was far more tolerant than today’s imposter.  As Eusebius bishop of Caesarea wrote (History of the Church, Bk 10, para. 5): Ήδη μεν πάλαι σκοπουντες την έλευθερίαν της θρησκείας ούκ άρνητέαν ειναι άλλ’ ενος εκάστου τη διανοία και τη βουλήσει έξουσίαν δοτέον του τά  θεια πράγματα τημελειν κατά τήν αύτου προαίρεσιν έκαστον κεκελεύκ;ειμεν τοίς τε Χριστιανοίς … της αίρέσεως καί της έαυτων τήν πίστιν φυλάττειν. There is confusion about the words where I have inserted ellipses, as the Latin read pluribus hominibus, but the Greek has έν πολλοις άπασιν (pluribus omnibus). Eusebius was translating from the Latin text; a full translation of the Greek is: For a long time past we have made it our aim that freedom of worship should not be denied, but that every man, according to his own inclination and wish, should be given permission to practice his religion as he chose …. Every man may have permission to choose and practice whatever religion he wishes.


The burning of the books at the Library of Alexandria 392 CE

The Library of Alexandria, the largest and most significant library in the world, it was one of a kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country’s borders.  The Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world’s knowledge and had been endowed by pharaohs, emperors, potentates, and priests of numerous religions and theologies–but not that of the crippled community known as Christian. The library of the Serapeum in Alexandria was trashed, burned and looted in 392 CE at the decree of Theophilus of Alexandria one of the most evil of all bishops (popes) in the early church, who was ordered so by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I in 391 CE. It was here where


Coptic Pope Theophilus of Alexandria

Theodosius proudly proclaimed that all of the world’s ancient knowledge has been destroyed: over one-half million handwritten tomes representing the finest minds in the ancient world to  be replaced by the insanities, inaccuracies and fraudulent hysterics of illiterate Christians who would be hailed as wise men and Fathers of the Church.  These infamous Fathers would transmogrify thousands of years of science, history, geography, and the arts in favor of fantasies and illusions that people were ordered to memorize in the name of faith. It followed the obscene attacks on plurality, in the massive censorship campaign by Constantine and the burning of the books by Arius–attacks issued in the name of Christianity.  It was led by a barbaric band of cut-throat monks aligned to the despicably depraved Coptic Pope Theophilus, (Paulus Orosius, vi.15.32: unde quamlibet hodieque in templis extent, quae et nos uidimus, armaria librorum, quibus direptis exinanita ea a nostris hominibus nostris temporibus memorent - quod quidem uerum est -, tamen honestius creditur alios libros fuisse quaesitos, qui pristinas studiorum curas aemularentur, quam aliam ullam tunc fuisse bibliothecam, quae extra quadringenta milia librorum fuisse ac per hoc euasisse credatur). Theophilus was but one of the assassins of learning, for other rogue bishops rewrote scriptures to meet their particular ends, forbade the copying of the Gospels of Philip, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas, and silenced dissent with the slaughter of the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Ὑπατία (Hypatia; ca. CE 350 /370 – March 415 CE) the first notable woman in mathematics, astronomy and philosophy (Edward Jay Watts, (2006), City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, pages 197–198; Wilder, Kathleen (1986). “Hypatia” in Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 49–50; Dzielska, Maria (1996) [1995]. Hypatia of Alexandria. trans. F. Lyra.  Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, p. 105).  Hypatia preferred to teach, invent, write–things that the Christian Church thought were the domain of men.


Hypatia pulled from her chariot

Refusing marriage in favor of educating her disciples, Hypatia was torn from her chariot by a hungry mob of screaming Christians. Stripping her naked, dragging her to their church, she was inhumanely butchered on the instructions of Peter the reader who commanded the savage fanatics to rip her living flesh from her bones with pottery shards and their fingernails–the still quivering limbs was then delivered to the flames with sung praises to a Jesus no one met. The bitter hateful words of the mob and their subsequent laughter echoed the words, “Paul tells us women should be silent, now this one obeys.”  Christian monks, a source of inspiration for Josemaria Escrivá and his cannibalistic Opus Dei, became more enraged on seeing books other than scriptures in Hypatia’s library.  Following her martyrdom for wisdom, the monks glorified their assassination of Hypatia as the hallmark of the emerging bankrupt church (cf. David Engels: Zwischen Philosophie und Religion: Weibliche Intellektuelle in Spätantike und Islam, in: D. Groß (Hg.), Gender schafft Wissen, Wissenschaft Gender. Geschlechtsspezifische Unterscheidungen Rollenzuschreibungen im


Hypatia

Wandel der Zeit, Kassel 2009, pp. 97-124).  None could, however, erase the words of her father, a serious scholar in his own right, who taught his daughter: “All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final. Reserve your right to think, for even to think and be wrong is better than not to think at all.”To this message Hypatia penned:“Fable should be taught as fable, myth as myth, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truth is horrifying. The mind of a child accepts them and only through great pain, perhaps tragedy, can the child be relieved of them. Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth — even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”

Hypatia invented the astrolabe and the planesphere, devices used for studying the stars and planets, a device to distill water, another to measure the level of water, and a third to determine specific gravity of liquids. The latter was called a hydroscope.

 By the seventh century CE, the Christian Church tried desperately to present Hypatia as being in league with Satan (John, Bishop of Nikiu, Chronicle 84.87-103; in Greek), a charge later refuted by many, but with the defamation came the beginning of the Christian Church’s desire to rewrite history, to erase the past by claiming it to be pagan, and reinventing a god in line with the authors of the Pauline letters (Whitfield, Bryan J. (Summer, 1995). “The Beauty of Reasoning: A Reexamination of Hypatia and Alexandria”. The Mathematics Educator (University of Georgia) 6 (1): 14–21). With the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, the pathetic priests preying openly on the young, on women, and those unable to protect themselves declared that Christianity was sola fide–much in the same manner as today’s contemporary confessors and Rick and Karen Santorum.  
 
The Roman Catholic Church has never accepted dissent, and has frequently employed assassins to maintain its control over people and nations. The USA is under direct assault by the Vatican under the discombobulated ataxia rule of Karol Józef Wojtyła (John Paul II, a reputed secret member of Opus Dei), the malevolent ministry of the miscreant Josef Aloisius Ratzinger (Benedict XVI, a supporter and sympathizer of Opus Dei) and more than 3000 Opus Dei priests in the USA in anticipation of a Rick Santorum presidency and the establishment of a Roman Catholic theocracy over the shattered shreds of the US Constitution.


Rick and Karen Santorum (Des Moines IA Register photo) 2011

Based on their written and publicly spoken words, Rick and Karen Santorum have severe mental problems.  They pose a serious threat to civil and human rights, real (academic/science-based) education, equal opportunity and justice, the environment, the Constitution of the USA and to the American people who are not members of Opus Dei or the rigid-right of the Roman Catholic Church.

[Dig]

follow up from above author...

arthuride
February 7, 2012 at 4:06 AM

I hope you will read my article on Opus Dei. Not every nummery has access to the “hidden” material–few knew that Josemaria Escrivá would whip his body until the blood soaked his bathroom, or that many climbed ranks in the church because of ignoring or commissioning murder as is common in South America–and few see it for the sordid sect it has always been. It is because of the sanctions against speech put into place by the supernummeries, and blessed by John Paul II who was a “secret” member, that Opus Dei has thrived.

It is true that Opus Dei seeks well-trained minds–to lead others to its group, but check into who is leading whom and what freedom remains for those who join and what freedoms will be destroyed for those who do not accept the evil of Escrivá. To excuse its crimes is to continue the lie that Clement did not attack the Knights of the Temple, or to claim that the crusades were to restore the rights of Christians to visit the holy lands–even though Jerusalem was over 50% Christian. Yet these same Christians killed Jews on their march to Constantinople, the imperial city they overthrew, and their testimonies became part of the mythology of later generations.

All generations try to claim the establishment of a special group–thus Hitler had the SA and SS, and I find little difference between them and the students who go to Opus Dei primary and secondary schools in Latin America, or those who study in universities in Europe and the USA. All are of one-mind: to turn all of the world Christian. What a frightening thought: for then the Holy Inquisition would sit again in judgment as to right and wrong, what books can be printed and which ones must be burned, and the wisdom of Galileo and Newton will be burned as the church burned the writings of Arius and Hypatia.

Rick Santorum is the weakest link in Opus Dei. His love of a dead fetus shows his mental instability. His boast that he would be a “Catholic President” and follow the advice of the Vatican is an insult to democracy–one that even the Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy repudiated, claiming that he would not tell Rome what to do nor would he do as commanded by Rome. It was the Baptists of Danbury CT who called on Jefferson to build a wall separating state and church, and it is in the writings of Escrivá that the faithful are told to tear down that wall (as is the chant of Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, et al) that has let America be a free and unfettered people. No one needs a pope, prelate, priest, or pastor–what people need is the opportunity to be free and think for themselves.

[Dig]

Breaking the Opus Dei Code
http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/news/inthenews/2006/200605cs_breakingtheopusdeicode.asp
Rob Boston  May 2006

The Secretive Catholic Group's Name Means 'Work Of God,' But In Washington, D.C., That Divine Task Has A Decidedly Political Bent

From the outside, the non-descript bookstore at 15th and K Streets in the heart of Washington, D.C., looks like any other shop selling religious literature and goods.

A small sign in the window reads "Catholic Information Center." Visitors are advised that mass and confession are offered daily. Inside, one can pick up titles like How to Raise Good Catholic Children, Celibacy in the Early Church and A Catholic Homeschool Treasury.

But off in one corner is a special section of books dealing with the life and philosophy of Roman Catholic priest (turned saint) Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer and the controversial organization he founded: Opus Dei.

Far from being just another religious bookstore, the Catholic Information Center is, in fact, a prominent American outpost for Opus Dei, an organization much in the news lately. The center, within walking distance of the White House, serves as a rallying point for ultra-conservative Catholics eager for a voice in the secular halls of government power.

Opus Dei, Latin for "work of God," has, according to media reports, at least 3,000 members in the United States but its influence, critics say, has been more substantial than its numbers would indicate. In 2002, an Opus Dei priest, the Rev. C. John McCloskey III, former director of the Catholic Information Center, converted U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) from evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. Brownback's conversion was shepherded by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a conservative Catholic and Opus Dei booster.

Long the scourge of progressive Catholics, Opus Dei, with an estimated 80,000 members worldwide, has enjoyed a close relationship with the church's conservative hierarchy, serving, as one writer put it in the mid 1980s, as a "holy mafia" to promote far-right views on "culture war" issues.

The organization has long had its own order of priests, and in 1982, Pope John Paul II granted Opus Dei special status known as a "personal prelature." That means the group is overseen by its own bishop, who reports directly to the pope. Opus Dei is the only organization to enjoy such unique privileges.

For many years, Opus Dei remained secretive and mysterious. Rumors swirled that some members engaged in strange rituals, such as "mortification of the flesh" by wearing a cilice, a small, spiked chain worn around the thigh that pricks the skin. The group was accused of targeting impressionable college students and restricting their access to family members. Some critics labeled Opus Dei a cult.

Although these charges frequently resurface, it's the group's ties to reactionary politics and ultra-orthodox forms of Catholicism that generate most interest these days. Under the conservative papacy of John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, Opus Dei is seen as an increasingly powerful organization dedicated to fending off liberalism in the church and advancing a hard-right political agenda.

The group's reticence to discuss its beliefs and operations only added to the sense of mystery. A few years ago, things began to change and Opus Dei was forced a little more into the open by a most unlikely source: a best-selling novelist.

Writer Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold 15 million copies worldwide. The fictional mystery/thriller deals with a centuries-old plot to cover up inconvenient revelations about the origins of the Catholic Church and a frenzied search for the Holy Grail. Opus Dei figures in the book, and one of the characters is a crazed Opus Dei monk who, in order to preserve the church cover-up, murders four people.

Although the book is fictional, Brown has insisted that it is based in part on real historical events, and many readers have apparently taken that to heart. Amazon.com lists several titles purporting to tell the "real" story behind the code. With a film adaptation of the book due out this month, interest in Opus Dei is likely to increase.

In New York City, the American headquarters of Opus Dei, officials of the organization are trying to turn the publicity to their advantage.

"We want to use the current public interest to talk about the reality of Christianity, the Catholic Church and Opus Dei," Brian Finnerty, Opus Dei's American spokesman, told O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, a trade journal.

Finnerty said Opus Dei officials recently agreed to sit for interviews with "The Today Show," "Good Morning America," "Meet the Press" and "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Reporters are also being allowed to tour its New York headquarters.

A public-relations blitz is probably necessary, because Opus Dei clearly has an image problem. One of its prominent critics, Dianne DiNicola, runs the Opus Dei Awareness Network (www.odan.org) from Massachusetts. DiNicola was moved to begin investigating the group after her daughter joined while a student at Boston College in the late 1980s.

DiNicola accused the organization of urging her daughter to break off contact with her family, a charge Opus Dei officials firmly denied. Tammy DiNicola later left Opus Dei, saying it caused her to "shut down" all of her emotions.

Some of Opus Dei's problems stem from its devotion to secrecy. In 1995, the Rev. James Martin, a Catholic priest, wrote a seminal piece on Opus Dei for the Jesuit magazine America. Although Martin found much of value in Opus Dei, he was clearly frustrated by his inability to obtain a copy of its governing constitutions a request that seemed non-controversial. An Opus Dei staffer gave the documents to Martin, but they were in an obtuse form of church Latin. He would not provide English translations.

When Martin pressed the issue, the staffer would only say, "The document belongs to the Holy See, and the Holy See does not want it translated. I'm sure there's a reason."

Martin found examples of secrecy in other contexts. He interviewed two priests (who asked to remain anonymous) who were involved with Opus Dei while studying at Princeton University in the mid-1980s. While working at a campus ministry, the priests came into conflict with an Opus Dei prelate.

One of the priests told Martin, "Opus Dei was rather defensive about being secretive. They'd say, ‘No, we tell it like it is.' And, yes, they'd answer your questions, but it was like peeling away an onion. But if you didn't ask the right question to peel away the next layer you simply weren't told. You just never had the full picture. And I suppose it wouldn't have been so annoying if they hadn't been saying all the time how open they were."

Ann Schweninger, a former Opus Dei member, told Martin, "Opus Dei plays by its own rules. If they don't want to have something out in the open, they won't make it accessible."

Schweninger added that during her time with Opus Dei, members could not even read the group's official catechism without the permission of a higher up.

"It's kept under lock and key," she said.

Opus Dei does not publish a directory of members but is known for its interest in targeting the rich and powerful. Over the years, rumors have surfaced that certain high-profile Catholics might be members. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito have been fingered as possibilities. There is no proof in either case, but Newsweek magazine reported in 2001 that Scalia's wife has attended functions at the Catholic Information Center, and his son Paul, a Catholic priest, has spoken there.

Santorum is also pegged as a possible member. In 2002, Santorum attended an Opus Dei event in Rome, during which he attacked President John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 endorsement of church-state separation. Santorum said the Kennedy vow not to enforce Catholic doctrine through civil law has caused "much harm in America" and went on to describe President George W. Bush, a Methodist, as the nation's first true Catholic president.

"From economic issues focusing on the poor and social justice, to issues of human life, George Bush is there," Santorum told the National Catholic Reporter. He has every right to say, ‘I'm where you are if you're a believing Catholic.'"

Further adding to the mystery, Opus Dei employs terms that sound odd to non-Catholics and even many church members who have never encountered them before. "Numeraries" are unmarried members who pledge a vow of celibacy and normally live in centers with other members. Numeraries work at secular jobs but turn their salaries over to Opus Dei and receive a stipend for living expenses. Male numeraries are often encouraged to enter the priesthood.

"Supernumeraries" are married members who support Opus Dei mainly through financial contributions. "Associates" are single members who do not live in Opus Dei centers. "Cooperators" are not full-fledged members but support Opus Dei financially and pray for its success.

The most lurid tales about Opus Dei focus on numeraries and some of the more exotic features of their daily routine. Much of what they do is non-controversial. For example, numeraries attend mass every day and set aside time for private prayer.

But some engage in mortification of the flesh essentially, inflicting discomfort on themselves. (Some Opus Dei critics assert that all numeraries engage in mortification for two hours daily.) On its Web site, www.opusdei.org, Opus Dei insists that for most members, the practice consists of "small physical mortifications occasionally, such as giving up certain items of food or drink" or sleeping on the floor.

But the site goes on to note, "Within this spirit, numeraries and associates (celibate members) sometimes practice traditional Catholic penances such as using the cilice and discipline." ("Discipline" is a corded whip some members use to strike themselves on the back and buttocks. Escriva used both and practiced other forms of mortification, such as sitting in a special chair that put him in an uncomfortable posture where his feet could not touch the floor. He also often denied himself water and gave up salt and sugar.)

Continues the site, "These are practices that Catholics have used for centuries and are commonplace in the lives of the saints, for example: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas More, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Padre Pio and Blessed Mother Teresa."

Practices like these were once common in Catholic orders during the Middle Ages but faded away as the church entered the modern era. Their reemergence today has led some critics to liken Opus Dei to a medieval movement that seeks to oppose liberalism and modernity in the church.

Opus Dei's Washington operative McCloskey is certainly no fan of progressive movements within Catholicism. He once opined, "A liberal Catholic is oxymoronic. The definition of a person who disagrees with what the Catholic Church is teaching is called a Protestant."

McCloskey, who is now a research fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture in Washington, D.C., spends a good deal of his time penning columns lamenting secular government and opposing dissent from church teachings.

Bemoaning the decline of Christianity in Europe in a 2005 column, McCloskey wrote, "Here in America, the increasing chasm between alternative worldviews evidenced by the election of November 2000 and the bitter battles over the confirmation of federal judges shows our need to learn from Europe's lesson. Whatever the outcome, the United States is at most only decades away from taking a decisive turn one way or another either becoming a largely Christian nation, in keeping with our origins, or following Europe into a radical secularism on its way to obsolescence, overwhelmed by demographic shrinking and immigration."

In a May 2004 column, McCloskey wrote, "As the sole remaining world power today, America's influence is enormous, for good or evil. I believe that either America will become a largely Catholic country in the course of this century or America may well cease to be (at least in the form we now know)…."

McCloskey also celebrates the trend of church-going Catholics to closely identify with the GOP. In a column published earlier this year, he wrote, "Since the 1960s, there has been a clear shift towards the Republican party and away from the Democratic party by Catholic voters. When the polls differentiate between church-going and non-church-going Catholics, Republicans dominate by a wider margin among the church-going, and Democrats among the non-church-going.

"I would extrapolate," he continued, "that the more orthodox in belief and regular in church attendance the Catholic American, the more likely he is to vote for Republicans, whose national platform, particularly on non-negotiable matters such as abortion, homosexual marriage, and embryonic experimentation, is more in sync with the Church's teachings."

In a Catholic World Report essay published in 2000, McCloskey outlines a futurist fantasy with chilling religious and political implications. Supposedly written in the year 2030 by "Father Charles" (McCloskey's rarely used first name), it alludes to a brutal 21st-century persecution of the Catholic Church in America that results in "tens of thousands of martyrs." This intense cultural conflict ultimately leads to the breakup of the country into the "Regional States of North America" after a "short and relatively bloodless" civil war.

Some states "worship at the altar of the ‘culture of death,'" says Father Charles, while others adopt Christianity as a governing principle. It's the red states/blue states divide carried to the ultimate extreme.

While the prospect of religious persecution and civil war may sound horrific to most Americans, McCloskey sees a bright side.

"The outcome was by no means an ideal solution," observes his fictional priest, "but it does allow Christians to live in states that recognize the natural law and divine Revelation, the right of free practice of religion, and laws on marriage, family and life that reflect the primacy of our Faith."

In the essay, McCloskey foresees a smaller Catholic Church in the future, but he predicts that it will be much more obedient and will include "hundreds of thousands of Evangelical Protestants" who convert to Catholicism. (Other faiths will be targeted for proselytism as well; "We will convert those Moslems yet," his fictional priest adds exultantly.)

Perhaps to help cement their bonds to the GOP, Opus Dei and other ultra-orthodox Catholic groups began sponsoring a "National Catholic Prayer Breakfast" in Washington in 2004. The annual event is essentially a feast for the Catholic right and features Republican Party operatives and elected officials. Bush spoke at the 2005 breakfast and appeared at this year's gathering as well. (McCloskey served on the board of advisors for the inaugural breakfast.)

Religion News Service reported that at the 2004 event, only one Democratic lawmaker attended and noted its heavy partisan feel, writing, "At times it seemed the only thing missing was a Republican elephant."

In Washington, Opus Dei relies on influential senators like Santorum and Brownback to advance its agenda. The two are known for frequently pushing "culture war" issues, including ardent opposition to abortion and gay rights and the promotion of "intelligent design" in public school science classes.

Since Brownback's conversion, he has become even more vocal on social issues. A recent Rolling Stone profile titled "God's Senator" notes that the Kansas Republican is co-sponsoring legislation called the Constitution Restoration Act.

Labeling the measure Brownback's "most bluntly theocratic effort," Rolling Stone described the bill like this: "If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine."

McCloskey and other Opus Dei leaders deny any political agenda. They note that Escriva founded the group on Oct. 2, 1928, after what he said was a command from God. The son of a Spanish textile merchant was on a spiritual retreat at the time and claimed that God ordered him to establish the organization and to limit it to men only. Two years later, Escriva said, he received a revelation from God to open the group to women.

In 1946, Escriva moved to Rome and began traveling throughout Europe to spread the message of Opus Dei. Four years later, Pope Pius XII officially recognized the group.

Escriva died on June 26, 1975. In 1992, he was beatified, the first step to sainthood. His official canonization as a saint occurred on Oct, 2, 2002, during a ceremony at St. Peter's Square in Rome attended by thousands of devotees.

Yet there has always been another side to Opus Dei. Escriva's critics were less than pleased with his fast-track to sainthood, noting that in 1958, Escriva had written a fawning letter to Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain, congratulating him for extending official recognition to the Catholic Church.

The May 28, 1953, missive reads, "Although alien to any political activity, I cannot help but rejoice as a priest and Spaniard that the Chief of State's authoritative voice should proclaim that, ‘The Spanish nation considers it a badge of honor to accept the law of God according to the one and true doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, inseparable faith of the national conscience which will inspire its legislation.'"

The letter asks God to bestow on Franco "abundant grace to carry out the grave mission entrusted to you."

Opus Dei members subsequently ingratiated themselves into important positions in the repressive Franco government. Alberto Moncada, a Spanish journalist who has researched the period, says Opus Dei operatives were entrusted with turning around Spain's anemic post-war economy, but the effort collapsed after numerous scandals.

The group also flourished under dictatorships in Chile and Argentina during the 1950s and '60s.

Opus Dei first appeared in the United States in 1949. Growth was initially slow, but its presence in the country today is far-reaching. Opus Dei runs 60 centers in 19 cities, among them Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

The group runs Lexington College in Chicago, a women's institute that offers degrees in the culinary arts, event planning and hotel hospitality. (The school's emphasis on the domestic arts may reflect Opus Dei beliefs about women. At Opus Dei centers, women are usually tasked with cooking and cleaning; the organization does not encourage women to take leadership roles.)

In addition, Opus Dei runs five secondary schools, two near Washington, two in the Chicago area and one in Boston.

In the nation's capital, the Catholic Information Center, now directed by the Rev. William H. Stetson, an Opus Dei priest ordained in 1962, serves as a clearinghouse for the Catholic far right and a bridge to the mostly fundamentalist Protestant Religious Right. Prominent Catholic thinkers often appear at the center. It has recently hosted Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute and the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, a journal that frequently attacks church-state separation.

Also appearing at the center last month was Bridget Maher, a Family Research Council analyst, who gave a talk titled "The Culture of Divorce and the Church." Maher is perhaps best known for her extreme views on sex education. Last year, she opposed the use of a new vaccine to protect young women from the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes genital warts, arguing it would encourage promiscuity.

Globally, Opus Dei's reach is significant. Harper's magazine reported recently that the organization holds assets of $2.8 billion.

Wrote author Terry Eagleton, "[I ]t runs fifteen universities, seven hospitals, eleven business schools, and a large number of primary, secondary, and technical schools. Assiduously courted by the late Pope John Paul II, it has become a formidable underground force for traditionalist values and political reaction within the Catholic Church."

How far-reaching is Opus Dei's political agenda? Officially, the group claims it does not have one. But critics like Eagleton assert that Opus Dei is by default linked to the far right, since its views on social issues are so reactionary. U.S. members, Eagleton writes, are "overwhelmingly conservative" and the "great majority" vote Republican.

More importantly, the group's American arm, many of whose members are wealthy, influential and politically connected, promotes ultra-orthodox church views on matters of reproductive choice, human sexuality and "culture war" issues. (The group feels free to downplay the church's more liberal positions on social justice and care for the poor.)

Frequently aligning with fundamentalist Protestants, far-right Catholics are an often-overlooked, but powerful, segment of the Religious Right. Their influence is felt nationally in battles to extend voucher subsidies to religious schools, block the funding of stem-cell research in Congress, persistent efforts to further restrict access to legal abortion or curb "right-to-die" statutes and laws that forbid federal funding of sex education programs if they so much as mention a condom.

In other policy areas, traditionalist Catholics take positions well beyond what even the Vatican holds. Several Vatican officials have recently spoken out against "intelligent design" creationism; many far-right Catholics back the idea.

Opus Dei's political agenda is overlooked in the United States but is strongly felt in other parts of the world, says one progressive Catholic leader.

"The claim that Opus Dei is merely a humanitarian organization with no political agenda is simply not credible," said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice. "While Opus Dei has been more circumspect politically in the U.S., its hand is all over European politics."

Kissling notes that these overseas activities may provide a model for more American involvement by Opus Dei. In European nations, she notes, charities affiliated with Opus Dei often tap the public purse, a practice that could be emulated in the United States as "faith-based" initiatives continue to spread.

"Opus Dei frequently sponsors political meetings in the European parliament and seeks funding from governments for its charitable work, often incorporating charities that appear independent of Opus Dei," Kissling said. "In the developing world, the number of Opus Dei members in government is noticeable, and their positions too often follow the agenda of the Vatican on critical health and social policy matters to be merely coincidental."

[chris jones]

  Cultism, not realy, the Opus Dia's leadership is an extension of the elites, the followers are simply under their controll.
Rick is not a sold out cultist ., , he is a powermongering sociopath.
 It gets confusing, any path of power under any disquise,  be it under the context of   mental or spiritual can be and is used by by these pyscos to manipulate.
 We don't have to search that far back in the history of the Holy Roman chruch to see the end result of mind controll, just do a body count and follow the money trail.
 

[Satyagraha]

The puppet masters are directing a play. A stage drama, the prequel to the big production: the 2012 election.

The script in a nutshell:

Act 1: A field of candidates for the Republican nomination stands before the public.
Act 2: A 'winner' emerges... Romney, Gingrich - a heated race..
Act 3: Gingrich is subjected to mass scrutiny (cut to media coverage; take down Gingrich as serious opponent)... Romney prevails.
Act 4: A 'winner' emerges... Romney, Santorum - heated race...
Act 5: Santorum is subjected to mass scrutiny (cut to media coverage; take down Santorum as serious opponent)....Romney prevails.

In this stage drama, the candidates are ritualistically held up as "winners", only to be torn down by a complicit controlled media.
The only candidate that emerges through the fire is Romney.

There's only one thing that could go wrong with this script.

There's that guy Ron Paul, who would not fit into the play... the part where he's given media coverage, that won't work...
There are no skeletons in his closet; no Space Mirrors, no Opus Dei, nothing ... that act won't work.
So keep him out of the news; if he's going to win a caucus - then FIX it so he doesn't. That is not allowed. Because the puppet masters have identified their candidate for the election, it's going to be Romney, and this play serves the purpose of making the American public believe it is their own votes that are making the choice. A grand deception.

We're watching this play happening now, almost curtain time... the final acts are about to be played out. But we know the script, in the end the 'winner' will be Romney, it was decided long before the play began; it was decided by those who were busy scripting the big sequel drama: Election 2012.

[All4truth]

All those groups Opus Dei, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Nights of Malta, ect...  Are all Jesuit organizations.  If you want to know more about this, I'm reading a really good article right now about the black pope and his army of Jesuits.

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/blackpope.htm

[angel]

All those groups Opus Dei, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Nights of Malta, ect...  Are all Jesuit organizations.  If you want to know more about this, I'm reading a really good article right now about the black pope and his army of Jesuits.

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/blackpope.htm

and all these roads ultimately lead back to their source; Rome.

[All4truth]

the guy's a Jesuit! 

Rick Santorum traveled in 2002 to Rome to speak at a centenary celebration of the birth of Saint Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei. He and his wife were invested as Knight and Dame of Magistral Grace of the Knights of Malta in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on November 12, 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum

[angel]

the guy's a Jesuit! 

Rick Santorum traveled in 2002 to Rome to speak at a centenary celebration of the birth of Saint Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei. He and his wife were invested as Knight and Dame of Magistral Grace of the Knights of Malta in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on November 12, 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum

WOW!  we'RE in trouble if he gets in!

[All4truth]

WOW!  we'RE in trouble if he gets in!

yes and it appears that Gingrich is also the same.  I'm still looking into it. 

If any of these people win, the Jesuits will control the White House. 

[Dig]

yes and it appears that Gingrich is also the same.  I'm still looking into it.  

If any of these people win, the Jesuits will control the White House.  

In international news, the Roman Catholic president of Germany has unexpectedly and abruptly resigned.

[All4truth]

In international news, the Roan Catholic president of Germany has unexpectedly and abruptly resigned.

But wasn't that due to all the fraud/corruption that people found out about him.  Maybe if the media was doing their job in the US and elsewhere we would be able to throw them all out, and put in honest and respectful people.

[All4truth]

In international news, the Roan Catholic president of Germany has unexpectedly and abruptly resigned.

Also just wanted to add, that being a Roman Catholic doesn't make you a Jesuit.  It's the company you keep, and the secret societies that you belong to.  Like The Knights of Malta, The Knights of Columbus, Opus Dei the society of Jesus, St. John of Jerusalem ect....  All Jesuit organizations.

[Dig]

CNN: Santorum says those who oppose fracking are DOMESTIC TERRORISTS
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/09/santorum-takes-on-environmental-terror/
Posted by CNN's Adam Aigner-Treworgy 8 days ago

Oklahoma City (CNN) - Speaking in one of the top energy-producing states in the country, Rick Santorum tailored his stump speech here on Thursday to appeal to a raucous crowd of domestic energy-loving Okies. Reaffirming his support for domestic natural gas production using hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), Santorum called those who oppose the process purveyors of a "reign of environmental terror." "We have to have all sorts of government regulations because of the threats of hydrofracking," Santorum said. "It's the new boogey man. It's the new way to try to scare you." This tactic is used primarily in areas less familiar with the process than Oklahoma and Texas, Santorum said.  "They're preying on the northeast, saying look what's going to happen," he said. "Ooh, all this bad stuff's going to happen, we don't know all these chemicals and all this stuff. What's going to happen? Let me tell you what's going to happen, nothing's going to happen."

-------------------

CNN then goes on to combine Santorum's unconstitutional trampling of property rights with fracking with those who legitimately expose climategate...

------------------

Santorum's disdain for environmentalists was palpable and largely shared by the crowd of nearly 1,500 people here at the Meridian Convention Center. Perhaps sensing he was preaching to the choir, Santorum expounded upon his position that manmade global warming is a myth and a plot by the left to take freedoms away from the American people....

[Dig]

But wasn't that due to all the fraud/corruption that people found out about him.  Maybe if the media was doing their job in the US and elsewhere we would be able to throw them all out, and put in honest and respectful people.

they are all corrupt, but this is an indication of a kink in the Roman Catholic armor in Germany as the greenies move in.

[All4truth]

they are all corrupt, but this is an indication of a kink in the Roman Catholic armor in Germany as the greenies move in.

True.  We'll have to see who moves in.