Although there are many men within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism who bear personal responsibility for the wreckage of vast numbers of souls. These men have contributed to the worsening of the state of the souls of men and thus of the world, and they have been and continue to be found in formerly Catholic parishes, schools, seminaries, colleges, universities, professional schools and chancery offices that have been in control of the counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church since the “election” of Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII on October 28, 1958, the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude.
While many such revolutionaries have been and continue to be largely unknown outside their particular spheres of destructive influence, others, of course, stand out for being responsible for being pioneering trailblazers in behalf of the apostasies, blasphemies and sacrileges that continue to spew forth from almost every precinct imaginable within the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
The retired Antipope Emeritus, for example, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict helped to chart the course of the revolution against the Holy Faith represented by the “Second” Vatican Council and he attempted to use his twenty-three years at the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and his seven years, ten months, nine days as the conciliar “Petrine Ministry” to chart its “correct” course. The retired “pope” is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of the leaders and leaderettes, if you will, who have devastated the vineyard of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour of Jesus Christ during these long years of apostasy and betrayal.
One of the most notable of these revolutionaries has died. Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., who was the President of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, from 1952-1987 before he became the chairman of anti-family funder of eugenics and population control, the Rockefeller Foundation, which he headed between 1977 and 1982, died on February 26, 2015, at the age of ninety-seven years, nine months. The extent of evil done by Father Hesburgh has been incalculable, and justice cannot be done to documenting all of it in but one commentary.
This latter detail is not just bit a piece of useless trivia as Hesburgh started to work with the Rockefeller Foundation as early as the 1950s to provide a roadmap for a “reform” of Catholic higher education according to the lights of the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers and those they have funded have sought to play God with human life and the very institutions ever since John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil in 1870, created the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913.
To cite just one example, the Rockefeller Foundation funds and controls the abjectly evil of work of eugenics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, that devised model statutes for sterilization laws and mapped out a program of eugenics that Adolf Hitler himself used as the model for his own eugenics laws that were denounced in 1941 by Bishop Clemens von Galen of Munster, Germany (see Meet Some Catholics Truly Worth Admiring, part two. For an interesting history of the involvement of other industrialists and so-called “philanthropists” in the promotion of eugenics as part of the junk-science known as “Social Darwinism,” see The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi
Eugenics
. See also From Luther to Sanger to Ferguson).
By the time that Father Theodore Hesburgh, who, incredibly enough, had been under consideration by then United States Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota) to have been his vice presidential running mate in 1972, something that Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI would not have stopped, became its chairman in 1987 the work of the Rockefeller Foundation in support of “population control,” including the chemical and surgical assassination of the innocent preborn, was well-known and was annually and proudly documented by the foundation itself.
Alas, Father Theodore Hesburgh was a “progressive,” a man who wanted to miseducate Catholics to be leaders in a new “openness with the world.” He believed this before the advent of the “Second” Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, the Feast of the Divine Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is why he greeted President Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro so enthusiastically when this unreconstructed statist and pro-abort gave a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame du Lac at the invitation of one his, Hesburgh’s, successors, “Father” John Jenkins. This is also why the reigning caesar paid special homage to "Father Ted" on that occasion as follows:
So, good afternoon, to Father Hesburgh, to Notre Dame trustees, to faculty, to family. I am honored to be here today. And...I am grateful to all of you for allowing me to be a part of your graduation. And I also want to thank you for the honorary degree that I received. I know it has not been without controversy. I don't know if you're aware of this, but these honorary degrees are apparently pretty hard to come by. So far I'm only 1 for 2 as President. Father...Hesburgh is 150 for 150. I guess that's better. So, Father Ted after the ceremony maybe you can give me some pointers to boost my average. (Barack Obama -
Commencement Speech
.)
A bevy of pro-abortion and pro-perversity Catholic politicians feted Father Hesburgh on May 22, 2013, three days prior to his ninety-six birthday:
Testimonials rained down upon Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh, the retired president of the University of Notre Dame, during a bipartisan congressional tribute in the U.S. Capitol as the priest neared his 96th birthday and the 70th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood.
The May 22 reception, three days before the priest's birthday, included Vice President Joe Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., both of Indiana's senators, and former U.S. Ambassador to India Tim Roemer, a Notre Dame alumnus. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who issued invitations to the reception, could not attend because of various appointments, according to Pelosi.
About one-fourth of those at the reception applauded when Pelosi asked who had graduated from Notre Dame, although by the sentiments expressed later on, everyone felt a kinship with the Fighting Irish.
"In 1972 I ran for public office as a 29-year-old kid because of your passion for civil rights," Biden told Father Hesburgh, who uses a walker to aid his movement. "You're one of the reasons I've been so proud to be a Catholic."
Father Hesburgh, early in his 35-year tenure as president of Notre Dame, was appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower, becoming its chairman in 1969 until he was dismissed by President Richard Nixon in 1972 because the priest had voiced opposition to Nixon's policies.
Next to the podium was a photograph on loan from the National Portrait Gallery showing Father Hesburgh and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from a 1964 rally in Illinois, arms crossed in front and hands linked as they were singing the civil rights anthem "We shall Overcome."
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, prefacing his opening prayer at the reception, called Father Hesburgh one of "four great Americans." The cardinal, who is the retired archbishop of Washington, named three presidents whose likenesses are chiseled on Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But the fourth American he cited -- a "Teddy" -- was not Roosevelt but Father Hesburgh.
Each president brought a quality to his service to an emerging nation, and Father Hesburgh built upon each of those qualities in his priestly ministry, according to Cardinal McCarrick.
Just as Washington began to build a nation, Father Hesburgh showed "an understanding of what a country should be," Cardinal McCarrick said. Just as Lincoln showed his concern for the poor, Father Hesburgh showed how the poor "should be a concern for all of us," he added. And as Jefferson knew what freedom of religion was, Father Hesburgh, the cardinal noted, "has tackled the whole question of human relations."
Roemer, a former congressman and former ambassador whose parents worked at Notre Dame and who got his graduate and doctoral degrees there, said he conferred with Father Hesburgh when Roemer was approached about taking the ambassadorial post.
He said Father Hesburgh told him, "Tim, reach out to all faiths, and not just the Christians and the Catholics, but also the Muslims and the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Jains, the Sikhs."
"This room is filled with people who love you, who respect what you've done," Roemer said.
Father Hesburgh also had a private meeting with President Barack Obama prior to the congressional reception.
In his own remarks at the gathering, Father Hesburgh played down the adulation given him by the roster of speakers, which also included Indiana's Senate delegation, Dan Coats, a Republican, and Joe Donnelly, a Democrat. Father Hesburgh uttered a phrase in Italian, giving the translation as, "By golly, it may not all be true, but it sure sounds good."
"You made me sound good and I'm not all worthy of it," he added. "No guy can be worthy of all of it.
Father Hesburgh said he asks for the Holy Spirit's help each morning when he wakes. "If you're Notre Dame people, you're always out there trying to make this a better world."
Father Hesburgh was ordained to the priesthood June 24, 1943. (Bipartisan tribute on Hill celebrates Father Hesburgh's life, ministry.)
Father Theodore Hesburgh certainly has a legacy. Unfortunately for him, however, it is one of incalcuable devastation of souls.
The Supreme Architect of Spiritual Destruction at Catholic Colleges and Universities, Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C.
Although there were problems in Catholic universities and colleges dating back to the founding of Georgetown College when it doors opened on January 2, 1792, as Catholicism there was more or less compartmentalized in the theology department and did not permeate instruction in the secular sciences, Father Hesburgh was principally, though not exclusively, responsible the state of what passes for Catholic higher education in the United States of States of America.
A bit of background is in order at this point to do justice to the damage done by Father Hesburgh in just just ended lifetime to what passes for Catholic higher education today
Catholic universities and colleges once taught the Faith reasonably well when they were in the control of the Catholic Church, not her counterfeit ape. Catholic scholars were trained in a framework of orthodoxy during most of the Nineteenth Century. They were trained in Thomistic philosophy and theology, schooled in Patristics, well-groomed in dogmatic and moral theology, and trained to love the Mass of the ages and the Mother of God.
Oh, yes, as noted before, elements of Americanism were present at Georgetown College from its inception. Modernist elements began to seep into some universities and colleges by the end of the Nineteenth Century, which is one of the reasons Pope Saint Pius X required an oath to be taken against the errors of Modernism. He saw the dangers posed to the life of the Faith in Europe and in the United States by the rampant spread of Modernism, especially in the realm of Biblical scholarship (with the advent of the German Protestant school of exegesis) and in the realm of philosophy (where the "process thought" of Hegelianism, which emphasized the belief that truths evolve over time and can change, was being taught quite openly in some places). Pope Saint Pius X believed it was essential to safeguard doctrinal integrity in seminaries and colleges and universities, especially since it was the case that only those who were genuinely equipped for serious intellectual work were the ones who attended Catholic colleges and universities (unlike the case in our own era of egalitarianism, which asserts that everyone is equally as able as everyone else to perform well in college).
Over the course of time, therefore, the foxes began to invade the henhouse at at Catholic colleges and universities. In the United States, for instance, the Americanist ethos of academic freedom became such a clarion call among some Catholic intellectuals in the 1940's and 1950's that there began to be murmurings against any and all Church interference in the life of professional scholars.
Others, such as Father Theodore Hesburgh, believed that Catholic colleges and universities had been ghettoized because of their strict adherence to Catholic theology and philosophy, that our institutions of higher learning would never be taken seriously by "the world" if they were not open to the hiring of non-Catholic faculty, people who would bring a "diversity of opinion" into the academic marketplace of ideas. Also uppermost in the mind of Hesburgh was his belief that graduates of Catholic colleges and universities would not be able to achieve prominence in the economic, scientific, legal, and political realms if they were viewed as graduates of second-rate institutions which were closed-minded about the great issues of the day.
A major turning point in the de-Catholicization of Catholic universities and colleges occurred from 1965-1967 when seventy-five of some 500 professors at my own bachelor's alma mater, Saint John's University (New York), went on strike. Although the University's president at the time, Father Joseph Cahill, C.M., tried valiantly to maintain the right of the central administration to maintain control over the hiring and promotion and tenure of professors to assure their adherence to the Faith, the result was that the faculty won one of their central points: the devolution of personnel decisions to the level of personnel and budget committees in the individual academic departments. Dissenting Catholics and non-Catholics were hired in droves from that point on, resulting in the eventual re-casting of a once proud Catholic institution of higher education into a self-professed "multicultural" center of "urban" education. The battle at Saint John's University set the stage for the infamous meeting of Catholic college administrators at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, in 1967 that was convened by none other than Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., who had been President of the University of Notre Dame for fifteen years at that point and would serve in that capacity for another twenty beyond that.
As the late Monsignor George Kelly pointed out in his massive work, Battle for the American Church, the Land O'Lakes Conference was the forum in which the administrators of ten Catholic colleges and universities believed it was necessary for them to secularize their institutions by divorcing themselves voluntarily from the official control of the Roman Catholic Church in this country. The following excerpts are taken from the statement issued at the conclusion of the Land O'Lakes Conference:
STATEMENT ON THE NATURE OF THE CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
1. The Catholic University: A True University with Distinctive Characteristics
The Catholic University today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities as for all universities.
The Catholic university participates in the total university life of our time, has the same functions as all other true universities and, in general, offers the same services to society. The Catholic university adds to the basic idea of a modern university distinctive characteristics which round out and fulfill that idea. Distinctively, then, the Catholic university must be an institution, a community of learners or a community of scholars, in which Catholicism is perceptibly present and effectively operative.
2. The Theological Disciplines
In the Catholic university this operative presence is effectively achieved first of all and distinctively by the presence of a group of scholars in all branches of theology. The disciplines represented by this theological group are recognized in the Catholic university, not only as legitimate intellectual disciplines, but as ones essential to the integrity of a university. Since the pursuit of the theological sciences is therefore a high priority for a Catholic university, academic excellence in these disciplines becomes a double obligation in a Catholic university.
3. The Primary Task of the Theological Faculty
The theological faculty must engage directly in exploring the depths of Christian tradition and the total religious heritage of the world, in order to come to the best possible intellectual understanding of religion and revelation, of man in all his varied relationships to God. Particularly important today is the theological exploration of all human relations and the elaboration of a Christian anthropology. Furthermore, theological investigation today must serve the ecumenical goals of collaboration and unity.
4. Interdisciplinary Dialogue in the Catholic University
To carry out this primary task properly there must be a constant discussion within the university community in which theology confronts all the rest of modern culture and all the areas of intellectual study which it includes.
Theology needs this dialogue in order:
A) to enrich itself from the other disciplines;
B) to bring its own insights to bear upon the problems of modern culture; and
C) to stimulate the internal development of the disciplines themselves.
In a Catholic university all recognized university areas of study are frankly and fully accepted and their internal autonomy affirmed and guaranteed. There must be no theological or philosophical imperialism; all scientific and disciplinary methods, and methodologies, must be given due honor and respect. However, there will necessarily result from the interdisciplinary discussions an awareness that there is a philosophical and theological dimension to most intellectual subjects when they are pursued far enough. Hence, in a Catholic university there will be a special interest in interdisciplinary problems and relationships. . . .
8. Some Characteristics of Undergraduate Education
The effective intellectual presence of the theological disciplines will affect the education and life of the students in ways distinctive of a Catholic university.
With regard to the undergraduate -- the university should endeavor to present a collegiate education that is truly geared to modern society. The student must come to a basic understanding of the actual world in which he lives today. This means that the intellectual campus of a Catholic university has no boundaries and no barriers. It draws knowledge and understanding from all the traditions of mankind; it explores the insights and achievements of the great men of every age; it looks to the current frontiers of advancing knowledge and brings all the results to bear relevantly on man's life today. The whole world of knowledge and ideas must be open to the student; there must be no outlawed books or subjects. Thus the student will be able to develop his own capabilities and to fulfill himself by using the intellectual resources presented to him.
Along with this and integrated into it should be a competent presentation of relevant, living, Catholic thought. . . .
10. Characteristics of Organization and Administration
The total organization should reflect this same Christian spirit. The social organization should be such as to emphasize the university's concern for persons as individuals and for appropriate participation by all members of the community of learners in university decisions. University decisions and administrative actions should be appropriately guided by Christian ideas and ideals and should eminently display the respect and concern for persons.
The evolving nature of the Catholic university will necessitate basic reorganizations of structure in order not only to achieve a greater internal cooperation and participation, but also to share the responsibility of direction more broadly and to enlist wider support. A great deal of study and experimentation will be necessary to carry out these changes, but changes of this kind are essential for the future of the Catholic university.
In fine, the Catholic university of the future will be a true modern university but specifically Catholic in profound and creative ways for the service of society and the people of God.
Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin
July 23, 1967 (Land O'Lakes Conference Statement.)
Other than Father Hesburgh, two of the twenty-five signatories of this hideous statement were none other than the President of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, an apostate named Monsignor Theodore McCarrick, who, as the retired conciliar "archbishop" of Washington, District of Columbia, has gained some fame for his support of "civil union" legal status for those engaged in sins of unnatural vice (see Giving Unto Caesar What Belongs To God Alone), and a Father William Walsh, S.J., who was the President of Boston College at the time.
No "theological or philosophical imperialism"?
Translation: Scholasticism must go in order to make room for a "living" theology.
The Aftermath of Father Hesburgh's Land of Lake Conference
Father Hesburgh's Land O'Lakes Conference opened the way for Catholic institutions of higher education to take down the Crucifixes from classroom walls, hire a glut of non-Catholics (as well as dissenting, heretical Catholics), and to go about their business as though the salvation of souls of the students entrusted to them did not matter at all.
Indeed, if there is no such thing as objective truth which exists in the nature of things and exists definitely in the person of the God-Man, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who deposited His teaching in Holy Mother Church, then there is no need to be concerned about educating students in the framework of Christian truth. Catholic education thus became thoroughly Protestantized, concerned about the business of training good apparatchiks who would make a lot of money in the professional world -- and who would therefore donate money back to the institutions which gave them the ability to become successful financially.
The result of this has been to make formerly Catholic colleges and universities dangerous places for the temporal and eternal welfare of souls. This includes the "conservative" colleges where students are taught to view the Fathers of the Church through the eyes of the "Second" Vatican Council and the "magisterium" of the conciliar "popes"!
Personnel decisions have been made at the more "mainstream" institutions that once belonged to Holy Mother Church to favor most deliberately the hiring and promotion of faculty members who are either non-Catholics or those deemed to be "progressive" Catholics. Those adjudged to be reactionary "conservatives" found themselves unable to obtain positions in our colleges and universities or they were denied tenure and/or promotions. Many are the horror stories of faithful Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their orthodoxy while teaching in formerly Catholic universities. Naturally, the harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are open-minded and receptive to all people. College administrators at these institutions of apostasy have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of higher learning.
All of this has had a devastating impact on the intellectual and spiritual formation of young Catholics, many of whom now enter a formerly Catholic college or university after having received the relativistic theological training provided them in a Catholic high school that is in conciliar captivity. Ironically, these badly catechized young Catholics entering what they think, albeit falsely, to be Catholic colleges were taught in high schools by the graduates of the very institutions intent on brainwashing them with the same sort of advanced disinformation possessed by their high school teachers. The cycle thus perpetuates itself ad infinitum.
Most of the graduates of formerly Catholic colleges and universities have learned nothing that is true about the Faith, coming to believe they can do anything they want as long as their "fundamental option" is for God, including the practice of contraception and the procuring of an abortion. Remember, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton received his undergraduate degree from Jesuit Georgetown University in the direct aftermath of Georgetown's having secularized itself. (Georgetown's sister Jesuit university, Fordham, was the first historically Catholic institution in the nation to divest itself of official Catholic control and to voluntarily remove Crucifixes from the walls of its classrooms in the Fall of 1966 a full ten months before the Land O'Lakes Conference.) It is thus is no wonder that a large number of the Catholic pro-aborts in public life are graduates of once Catholic institutions of higher learning.
A good deal of Catholic collegiate and university education in the past used to integrate the truths of the Faith into every aspect of their academic programs. While non-Catholics who had a specialty in mathematics or science might have been hired from time to time to teach in their fields of competency, they were expected to familiarize themselves with how the Catholic Faith imbues all fields of knowledge, as Pope Pius XI noted in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. Such scholars were also expected to remember that they were never to place in doubt the truths of the Catholic Faith, never to use their classrooms as a forum to profess that which was contrary to what the Catholic Church held was received teaching of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man, Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Catholics who taught in Catholic universities and colleges understood that they had the obligation to be scholars who were faithful to the totality of the Deposit of Faith and to see in their students redeemed creatures who were looking to them, the faculty, for a model as to how to live the faith in the midst of one's own professional responsibilities. There was an integrity to the teaching of the Faith which flowed over into all aspects of a college or university.
Pope Pius XI noted the following in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929:
This norm of a just freedom in things scientific, serves also as an inviolable norm of a just freedom in things didactic, or for rightly understood liberty in teaching; it should be observed therefore in whatever instruction is imparted to others. Its obligation is all the more binding in justice when there is question of instructing youth. For in this work the teacher, whether public or private, has no absolute right of his own, but only such as has been communicated to him by others. Besides every Christian child or youth has a strict right to instruction in harmony with the teaching of the Church, the pillar and ground of truth. And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false.
In fact it must never be forgotten that the subject of Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural, such as right reason and revelation show him to be; man, therefore, fallen from his original estate, but redeemed by Christ and restored to the supernatural condition of adopted son of God, though without the preternatural privileges of bodily immortality or perfect control of appetite. There remain therefore, in human nature the effects of original sin, the chief of which are weakness of will and disorderly inclinations. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
Pope Pius XI's words are very clear: "And whoever disturbs the pupil's Faith in any way, does him grave wrong, inasmuch as he abuses the trust which children place in their teachers, and takes unfair advantage of their inexperience and of their natural craving for unrestrained liberty, at once illusory and false." No one is free to lead himself or others into temptation.
We pray every day in the Pater Noster that we will not be led into temptation (Et ne nos inducas in tentantionem). There is no "freedom" to deny or to put into question the truths contained in the Deposit of Faith. None. There is no "balancing" of the Faith and "academic freedom," as a spokesman for "Father" John Jenkins, C.S.C., the President of the University of Notre Dame, noted two years ago in an article in The New York Times. "All sides" must must not be taught as equal to the Faith, as the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, an ardent Americanist and a fierce apologist for the Kennedys, argued during the first controversy involving Father Charles Curran in 1967. Every Catholic must be faithful to the Deposit of Faith at all times. No one must be hired to teach in any Catholic education institution who dissents from even one iota of the truths of the Holy Faith. It is that simple.
What, then, is the Catholic understanding of academic freedom?
Again, the answer is simple.
A Catholic understanding of academic freedom affords individual professors great latitude in presenting the truths of the Faith in accord with their own personalities and temperaments. We have different communities of religious men and women in the Church. Those communities, at least traditionally until they were infected with Modernism and the blight of perverse moral problems condemned in no uncertain terms by Saint Peter Damian, expressed the truths of the Faith in different ways. Each had different charisms and missions. The Benedictines and the Cistercians and the Carmelites and the Dominicans and the Franciscans and the Jesuits and the Pallotines and the Vincentians and the Redemptorists and the Passionists--and countless others--served the cause of the sanctification and salvation of human souls in many and varied ways. In like manner, you see, two Catholic professors of the same subject matter might teach the same course in very different ways without ever once putting any truths of the Faith into question. That's a legitimate understanding of academic freedom.
For example, one professor might prefer the Socratic method of instruction, peppering his students with questions during class time to get them to discern and to defend the truth. Others, including this writer and forcibly retired college professor, prefer the lecture method of instruction. Neither is received from the hand of God. Both are legitimate forms of instruction.
Similarly, some professors may prefer students to respond at length to essay questions in order to demonstrate a profound grasp of the subject matter, more or less forcing the students to "teach" the reader of their essay about a question as though the reader knew nothing about the subject. Other professors may prefer short-answer essays to cover to variety of topics. Still others might desire students to answer "objective" questions (multiple choice, true-false, fill-in-the-blank, which is one of my own favorite devices to test the breadth of student comprehension). Once again, none of these things are de fide. Professors and teachers should be given the widest latitude in the method of instruction and examination they believe will best inform and then challenge their students.
To be sure, there can be lively intellectual discussions and arguments among students and faculty members even when the Faith is transmitted in all of its purity and integrity. Catholic scholarship does not argue about what is true (no less about whether there is such a thing as truth). Rather, authentic Catholic scholars can and do argue, sometimes quite forcefully, about the application of received teaching in concrete circumstances. What sort of governmental system is most conducive to the establishment of the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? Is the contemporary state by its very definition and composition a threat to the life of the Faith? What particular policies are the best way to protect the primacy of the Divine positive law and the natural law? What is the correct interpretation of a particular philosopher or a passage from a piece of literature or the correct translation to be used in a piece of scholarship. These, and many other areas, constitute legitimate forms of academic freedom as understood by the Catholic Church.
What is inarguable, however, is the fact that the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by our Lord upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, and that He has revealed truths which are clear, certain and immutable. Anyone who argues about that is an abject heretic. Anyone who contends that an "opposition" to the Catholic Faith must be presented on equal terms with the Faith, as opposed to examining errors so as to be able to recognize and refute them (which is a necessary part of the educational process), is in league with the devil.
No one has to be "fair" to the "opposition," as the instigator of the secularized "Catholic" university, the late University of Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh himself noted in The New York Times thirteen years ago. We must not be "fair" to the devil, the progenitor of all falsehoods. We learn about errors to refute them. For Catholics, you see, must be faithful to each and every one of the truths of the Faith without giving a moment's credibility to anything that is in opposition to those truths and thus harmful to the souls for whom Our Lord shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood. Professors need to aspire to the holiness of Saint John Cantius, not the worldliness of our present day.
The late Father John A. Hardon, S.J,. said in a conference given at Saint Ignatius Loyola Church in New York, New York, in August of 1978 that the implantation of doubt in the souls of the young was a crime almost as great as that of killing an unborn child by abortion (whether by chemical or surgical means.) "To cause a young person to doubt the Faith is to help to abort that soul," Father noted, moving his head from side to side, looking straight as his audience for emphasis. Sadly, though, much of what passes for Catholic education (including elementary and secondary schools) in the conciliar structures does precisely this, doing so in the fallacious belief that there can be no true faith without doubt. While it is true that some people may have crises of faith in their own lives from time to time, we are not to encourage doubt. One of the spiritual works of mercy is precisely to counsel the doubting.
Contemporary Catholic higher education in conciliar captivity, at least in most instances, does more that encourage doubt. No, it actually does much to destroy faith by the promotion of atheist, leftist, collectivist, relativist, statist, redistributionist, feminist, positivist, environmentalist, pantheistic, evolutionist, indifferentist and other naturalist ideologies, including those of the New Age ilk. Its participation in the rot of explicit instruction in matters pertaining to personal purity feeds the myth that human beings are beast who are incapable of controlling themselves by means of Sanctifying Grace. And more that a handful of practicing homosexuals and lesbians have been recruited into a lifestyle of perversity and self-destruction as a result of propaganda in favor of sodomy disseminated on the campuses of formerly Catholic colleges and universities (where openly pro-abortion and sodomite-friendly groups are permitted to meet and to participate in the life of those campuses).
As though the hiring of non-Catholic and heretical Catholic faculty members has not caused enough damage to souls over the last forty-five years, the messages transmitted by those faculty members in their classrooms is forcefully reinforced by speakers brought in to address students during special events (or at their graduation ceremonies). Workshops are held and retreats are sponsored to brainwash students in the ways of "progressive" Catholicism. Zen meditation rooms are to be found on supposedly Catholic college campuses. Some of these colleges have even actively recruited a large body of non-Catholic students so as to force anyone who might be inclined to speak authentically as a Catholic (whether students or faculty members) to be dissuaded from doing so in order not to offend the sensibilities of multiculturalism and pluralism and diversity. "Liturgies" held at most Catholic colleges and universities are generally the worst offered in the world of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, and that is putting the matter very, very mildly. This has all been very insidious, very demonic.
The bottom line of this is all really quite simple: a Catholic does not possess the right to deny the received teachings of Christ the King. No one is free morally to lead people into error. Indeed, the whole secular notion of academic freedom is itself both an exercise in relativism and hypocrisy. It is an exercise in relativism in that it asserts that scholars must be free to distort history and to relativize known truths into meaninglessness, much in the manner promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is an exercise in rank hypocrisy in that those who dissent from the prevailing cultural orthodoxy, no less hold fast to the Church's authentic Tradition, have no freedom at all to teach as they desire in the classroom. In an utter perversion of a right principle, the very people who profess to be the guardians of academic freedom jealously fight off perceived heresies, denying to others the very freedom they extol. The very people who want liberation from the Church, who is our mater and our magister, make themselves into a magisterium which will impose harsh penalties upon those who dissent from its defense of cultural orthodoxy, theological relativism, and liturgical irreverence.
Although the problems that exist in the fraud and sham that is "Catholic" education at all levels in the conciliar structures today antedate the "Second" Vatican Council, to be sure, the errors of the past fifty years have made it possible for the nascent Modernism of the 1940s and 1950s to become institutionalized so as to deform countless numbers of souls.
One of those errors that has made it possible for Catholic institutions to maintain something of a Catholic "identity" while divesting themselves of their official, de jure connection to the Church is the error of episcopal collegiality. The unwillingness of one conciliar "pope" after another, starting with Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, who did not intervene in the matter of Father Charles Curran's open dissent from Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968), no matter the legitimate problems with that document (see Forty-Three Years After Humanae Vitae, Always Trying To Find A Way and Planting Seeds of Revolutionary Change), while serving on the theology faculty of The Catholic University of America in 1968, to require that Catholicism be taught in supposedly Catholic colleges and universities is the result of their own Modernism and, at least in part, to be seen to be in the least critical of any of their "bishops" or institutions. Even Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesia motu proprio, issued on August 15, 1990, which was meant to require theology professors to seek an episcopal mandate in order to teach in a Catholic university or college or seminary, was opposed vigorously by many "bishops," including Sean O'Malley's disgraced predecessor, Bernard "Cardinal" Law. Souls have thus been lost and/or grossly deformed by heretics and infidels, causing incalculable damage to the the right ordering of the world itself, which depends upon rightly ordered Catholics to provide it with the leaven of Our Lord's truth and the assertion of His Social Reign over men and nations.
Pope Pius XI wrote directly in Divini Illius Magistri about the dangers of leading students into temptation. His words have direct application to various plays and "queer film festivals," including those that have been held at the University of Notre Dame in the name of "diversity" and "openness":
It is no less necessary to direct and watch the education of the adolescent, "soft as wax to be moulded into vice,"[58] in whatever other environment he may happen to be, removing occasions of evil and providing occasions for good in his recreations and social intercourse; for "evil communications corrupt good manners."
More than ever nowadays an extended and careful vigilance is necessary, inasmuch as the dangers of moral and religious shipwreck are greater for inexperienced youth. Especially is this true of impious and immoral books, often diabolically circulated at low prices; of the cinema, which multiplies every kind of exhibition; and now also of the radio, which facilitates every kind of communications. These most powerful means of publicity, which can be of great utility for instruction and education when directed by sound principles, are only too often used as an incentive to evil passions and greed for gain. St. Augustine deplored the passion for the shows of the circus which possessed even some Christians of his time, and he dramatically narrates the infatuation for them, fortunately only temporary, of his disciple and friend Alipius. How often today must parents and educators bewail the corruption of youth brought about by the modern theater and the vile book!
Worthy of all praise and encouragement therefore are those educational associations which have for their object to point out to parents and educators, by means of suitable books and periodicals, the dangers to morals and religion that are often cunningly disguised in books and theatrical representations. In their spirit of zeal for the souls of the young, they endeavor at the same time to circulate good literature and to promote plays that are really instructive, going so far as to put up at the cost of great sacrifices, theaters and cinemas, in which virtue will have nothing to suffer and much to gain. (Pope Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)
It is clear that most formerly Catholic educational institutions today, the products of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the conciliar church, reject such sage advice as they promote the very things denounced by Pope Pius XI. It is also clear that most formerly Catholic educational institutions today reject the only purpose of Catholic education: to form souls faithfully according to the mind of the Divine Redeemer as He has discharged it solely in the Catholic Church. Once again, the words of Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri are apposite:
The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism, according to the emphatic expression of the Apostle: "My little children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you."[63] For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ: "Christ who is your life,"and display it in all his actions: "That the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh."
For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.
Hence the true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ; in other words, to use the current term, the true and finished man of character. For, it is not every kind of consistency and firmness of conduct based on subjective principles that makes true character, but only constancy in following the eternal principles of justice, as is admitted even by the pagan poet when he praises as one and the same "the man who is just and firm of purpose." And on the other hand, there cannot be full justice except in giving to God what is due to God, as the true Christian does.
The scope and aim of Christian education as here described, appears to the worldly as an abstraction, or rather as something that cannot be attained without the suppression or dwarfing of the natural faculties, and without a renunciation of the activities of the present life, and hence inimical to social life and temporal prosperity, and contrary to all progress in letters, arts and sciences, and all the other elements of civilization. To a like objection raised by the ignorance and the prejudice of even cultured pagans of a former day, and repeated with greater frequency and insistence in modern times, Tertullian has replied as follows:
'We are not strangers to life. We are fully aware of the gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Creator. We reject none of the fruits of His handiwork; we only abstain from their immoderate or unlawful use. We are living in the world with you; we do not shun your forum, your markets, your baths, your shops, your factories, your stables, your places of business and traffic. We take shop with you and we serve in your armies; we are farmers and merchants with you; we interchange skilled labor and display our works in public for your service. How we can seem unprofitable to you with whom we live and of whom we are, I know not.'
The true Christian does not renounce the activities of this life, he does not stunt his natural faculties; but he develops and perfects them, by coordinating them with the supernatural. He thus ennobles what is merely natural in life and secures for it new strength in the material and temporal order, no less then in the spiritual and eternal.
This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day. It stands out conspicuously in the lives of the numerous Saints, whom the Church, and she alone, produces, in whom is perfectly realized the purpose of Christian education, and who have in every way ennobled and benefited human society. Indeed, the Saints have ever been, are, and ever will be the greatest benefactors of society, and perfect models for every class and profession, for every state and condition of life, from the simple and uncultured peasant to the master of sciences and letters, from the humble artisan to the commander of armies, from the father of a family to the ruler of peoples and nations, from simple maidens and matrons of the domestic hearth to queens and empresses. What shall we say of the immense work which has been accomplished even for