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Politics, Religion, Israel and the Seduction of the Catholic Voter Part 2

The Neo-Catholic Connection:

by Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.

Deal Hudson, George Weigel and Michael Novak are not alone in the Catholic connection to the Neo-con agenda. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, a former liberal Lutheran who has since converted to Catholicism but kept his liberalism, has made a name for his publication by promoting it under the Neo-con flag, and being endorsed in return by many of the prominent war-party ideologues.In a recent advertisement for First Things, various Neo-cons are solicited for their blurbs. Among them are William F. Buckley who writes: “How happy for right reason that Richard John Neuhaus disposes of much talent...”; and Robert L. Bartley, a writer for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (1992) says: “The time could not be more apt for First Things”; and Mary Ann Glendon, another CFR member (1992): “In my experience, no new magazine since the New York Review of Books has elicited so much interest...” The New York Times called First Things: “The flagship monthly of religious neoconservatism.” Richard Neuhaus then boasts in a four-page flyer that his writers, among others, include: Michael Novak, George Weigel, Midge Decter, Mary Ann Glendon, Bernard Lewis (another CFR member). In turn, Neuhaus has been giving lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, which, as we noted in our last article, specializes in globalization of American political interests through financial and militaristic means, while much of their income originates from the sale of munitions and armaments. Two other Neo-con war-promoters and radio talk-show hosts, Hugh Hewitt and Sean Hannity, have had Neuhaus as their featured guest, with the subject material, of course, focusing on America’s self-justifying invasion of Iraq. Neuhaus’ colleague, Michael Novak, was sent as the Neo-con envoy to Rome in order to persuade John Paul II to sanction the invasion of Iraq, prompting the Vatican to return the favor by telling America it has a Messiah complex and a fixation on materialism. Novak was also a guest on EWTN with Raymond Arroyo, touting the Neo-con agenda in Iraq and further solidifying the Neo-Con/Neo-Catholic alliance. Henry Hyde, noted Catholic from Illinois, took issue with the pope’s assessment of America in a July 2004 Chicago Tribune article. Not surprisingly, Hyde was recently recruited by Deal Hudson to write a financial appeal letter to Crisis subscribers, wherein Hyde touted it as “one of the most influential and important Catholic magazines in America today.”

Neuhaus, perhaps, deserves some consolation for finally realizing that: “There is a lively and legitimate argument about whether, knowing what we know now, this war was justified...” (First Things, Dec. 2004, p. 67). Similarly, William F. Buckley, while stating in an interview with Rush Limbaugh in July 13, 2004: “...with the intelligence we had, it would have been foolish not to attack Iraq...Libya is a good example of the good that came from it,” admitted a few months later: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.” This hand-wringing doesn’t go very far unless both Neuhaus and Buckley are willing to tell Mr. Bush, firmly and directly: “Get out of Iraq, and stop threatening the other Arab nations with American Imperialism,” since, in Catholic doctrine, preemptive war is never justified, and thus there is no place for the Neo-con agenda in Catholic thought and practice. Buckley, especially, needs to cease using National Review to brand as “anti-semites” those who don’t agree with the Neo-con party-line.

Other prominent Catholic institutions are tending in the same direction. Ave Maria School of Law, initiated by Dominos Pizza entrepreneur, Tom Monaghan, has on its board of directors James L. Buckley (brother to William F. Buckley, Jr.), who, while sitting on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is a member of the Skull & Bones society, class of 1944. Kate W. O’Beirne, Washington editor of William Buckley’s National Review, also sits on the Ave Maria board. That Skull & Bones members can infiltrate these Catholic institutions with impunity shows just how far the Neo-con agenda has advanced. Another Ave Maria director is Robert P. George. In March 2005, Crisis had a full-page ad touting the winners of the prestigious “Bradley Prize,” among them being Robert George. This is the same Neo-con outfit that funds Crisis from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which specializes in setting up Neo-con think-tanks to enhance Middle East war efforts for the Bush administration. In addition, George has had several meetings with Bush campaign mastermind, Karl Rove, the man who recognized first that without the Catholic vote Bush would not be in the White House. Unfortunately, Rove is only exploiting gullible Catholics. He is just as immoral as the rest of the bunch. His sexual preferences were recently exposed when in March 2005 reporters saw him enter a gay bar in Washington D.C., and there is much more to tell about Rove. Robert Bork, professor of law at Ave Maria and member of the American Enterprise Institute (a Neo-con war-party group), often collaborates with his wife, Ellen Bork, who has written about a dozen articles for the Project for the New American Century, the same war-party outfit that Kristol, Bennett, J. Bush, Cheney, Podhoretz, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are members. Incidentally, the website of the New American Century contains an article written on September 4, 2000 by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld titled “Rebuilding American Defenses.” In it the authors state that removing Sadaam Hussein was only a minor goal. The main objectives were: (a) to secure the oil fields of Iraq since they contain the world’s richest reserves; (b) to possess Iraq as a military launch base to the rest of the Middle East; c) to initiate sales of military hardware; (d) to train the military for urban suppression. Mind you, this is an official government document. Catholic bishop John Steinbock called its “using military power for political and economic interests” a threat to “the very future of humanity” (The Sentinel, 4-12-03).

More on Skull and Bones

Skull & Bones, according to the book by Anthony Sutton (a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University from 1968-1973) America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones (1983, 2002), is a secret society that originated at Yale University in 1832 and has been instrumental in instigating many of America’s wars and rumors of wars. For example, Henry Stimson, prominent Skull and Bones member of the Truman administration, prides himself on being the major influence upon Truman, based on his April 25, 1945 memorandum to the president, to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. What we know now, of course, is that Japan had been attempting to surrender for the entire six months prior, but their pleas couldn’t get past the deaf ears of Stimson, the Secretary of War. It is probably no coincidence that Hiroshimi and Nagasaki had the largest Catholic populations in Japan. (The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950 by Godfrey Hodgson, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992 ).

Today there is little difference between Stimson’s policies and the “pre-emptive” war policy of Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz and the Bush Skull and Bones cartel. It is probably no coincidence that Wolfowitz, appointed as head of the World Bank by George Bush; Michael Chertoff, appointed as secretary of Homeland Security by George Bush, along with Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer who are very active in the Bush administration, all have dual citizenship, with Israel as their second country of allegiance. No one seems to have paid attention to the U.S. Law, section 1448, that prohibits dual citizenship, especially when this duplicity puts them in very powerful governmental positions. In March 2005 the American Free Press reported that Michael Chertoff’s mother, Livia Eisen, was an Israeli national involved with the Mossad. Consequently, unless Chertoff renounces his Israeli citizenship then Israeli law considers him one of its own. To know the extent of Chertoff’s present power one only needs to read the Patriot Act, one of the most abusive stretches of government power against the citizenry ever devised. You can depend upon it that Chertoff will use it for Israel’s interests. Benjamin Chertoff, Michael’s cousin, has spent the last four years trying to stall independent investigative reports on 9/11, which many critiques have begun to compare to Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag building to foment his rise to political power. There is a mountain of evidence that the New World Order tyrants knew of 9/11 long before it happened and that Osama bin Laden is their patsy. There is simply not enough room to demonstrate it in this article.

Robert H. Goldsborough, familiar to many traditional Catholic readers, has investigated Skull and Bones and has concluded that its members seek nothing less than the rise of the New World Order to replace the Christian World Order. Skull and Bones was originally called “The Order” in its 1833 formation under the Russell Trust. Quoting Anthony Sutton, Goldborough writes: “The Order is the core, the inner circle of the conspiracy for change which run the outer circles including The Council on Foreign Relation, the Trilaterals...a terrifying long range conspiracy that seeks to control our lives from cradle to grave...The Order is a Bush family tradition” (Washington Dateline, 7-26-99).

In fact, the Bush family has 8 generations of Skull & Bones inductees, which includes grandfather Prescott Bush, notorious for digging up the skull of the Geranimo, the Indian chieftain, and placing it at Yale. According to the Associated Press, Prescott Bush was “director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler’s rise to power,” leading in 1951 to a $1.5 million kickback from stock invested in slave labor at the internment camp in Auschwitz (The Sentinel, 10-18-2003; Chris Millegan, Fleshing Out Skull and Bones, 2003; Toby Rogers: “How the Bush Family Wealth is Linked to the Jewish Holocaust,” Clamor Magazine, May-June 2002; John Buchanan, The Guardian, 2003). His son, George Herbert Walker Bush (the first president to use the phrase “New World Order”) is a member of Skull and Bones, as is George W. Bush and John Kerry, class of 1968 and 1966, respectively. In fact, Bush and Kerry are distant cousins. That two presidential candidates with the same pedigree could run against each other shows the grip that these anti-Catholic societies have on America. A shining example of the naivety of Catholics appeared in a July 22, 2004 political ad in the Wanderer advising people to vote against Kerry because he “is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the infamous secret society based at Yale, ‘Skull and Bones,’” neglecting to mention, of course, that Bush has a much deeper pedigree than Kerry. For Bush and Kerry to run against each other presents no contradiction to the society, since the same Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) has been the philosophical/political engine of Western culture for the past two hundred years. Hegel’s philosophy is the only way men with opposing designs on controlling the rest of the world can be curtailed from pushing the red button and ending it all. Of course, the same Hegelian dialectic eventually led Skull and Bones to accepting homosexuals (as long as they had high SAT scores), and thus it is no surprise that George Bush seems to have no problem hiring homosexuals for high-level posts in his administration.

A favorite meeting place of Skull and Bones members is the Bohemian Grove in northern California, a 2,700-acre fortress 60 miles north of San Francisco. As the Wall Street Journal reported in July 15, 2004, most people think of the Bohemian Grove as a place for beatnicks to listen to Grateful Dead music and “gab...drink and urinate on trees.” But that’s how good their cover has been since the Grove’s 1872 inception. As of 2000, its underworld machinations were finally exposed. Investigative reporter Alex Jones infiltrated the highly secured compound with video camera in hand. He recorded nothing less than mock human sacrifices by robed and hooded individuals chanting and groveling in demonic ecstacy to a giant statue of an owl. They engage in a ceremony called the “Cremation of Care,” an attempt to rid themselves of their consciences so that they can proceed with world domination unabated by human sympathies. They themselves claim to be worshiping the Canaanite god Molech (Lev 18:21; Jer 32:35). And you thought such things were confined to the Old Testament? The film was distributed by the BBC, since they had financed Jones’ work. The Bohemian Grove should be of interest to us since its members include: William F. Buckley, Warren Buffet, George Bush, Jeb Bush, Jimmy Carter, Richard Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Alexander Haig (also on Advisory Board of Crisis), Jack Kemp, Henry Kissenger, Colin Powell, David Rockefeller, Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich, Ed Meese, Richard Nixon, Manuel Noriega, Elliot Richardson, Karl Rove, George Schultz, Casper Weinberger and hundreds of other prominent officials we don’t have room to list, both foreign and domestic. To his credit, David Gergen resigned from the Bohemian Grove in “disgust.” Jones possesses a photo of George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush standing next to the giant owl at the Bohemian Grove. Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of Germany, in his autobiography, Men in Power, states that although he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (the same as Weigel, Novak, Buckley, et al) and the Trilateral Commission, he maintains that his greatest thrill was performing Druid death-rituals every July 15th at the Bohemian Grove in California in the company of hundreds of other world leaders. Schmidt stated that it is at the Bohemian Grove that major national and international deals are struck between the world leaders.

Having Protestant evangelicals already in their pocket, today’s Neo-cons are desperately seeking Catholics and their voting block to shore up their party’s anticipated victories. As the two faiths are melded together in the Neo-con crucible, naive Catholics have been “Protestantized” as never before. As C. Joseph Doyle has noted: “What we’ve created in the past 30 years is a whole new generation of public Catholics who are cultural Protestants.” Or as Likoudis says:

“The Catholic Church is taking hits from every side of the Protestant power spectrum: from Episcopal bishops claiming the Church is promoting violence against homosexuals, to Pentecostals claiming the Church is a Babylonian mystery cult, to neoconservative Christians claiming the Vatican is a rogue state for opposing the war in Iraq” (The Wanderer, June 10, 2004).

Typical examples of leading Catholic figures who have been ensconced by the Neo-con agenda (or, worse, are mere plants posing as Catholics) are Sean Hannity who, having advertised his stance against the pope’s opposition to the Iraq war, had the temerity to host Protestant Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) on his popular Fox television show, allowing him to chastise the pope. So enamored is Hannity with the Evangelical agenda that his best-selling book, Deliver Us From Evil, contains the Protestant, not Catholic, version of the Our Father on the inside cover. Hannity’s real loyalties were revealed when, after his bellicose rantings against Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinski, he was confronted with an even more sordid tale in the exploits of his Neo-con colleague, Newt Gingrich, a regular commentator on Hannity’s program. Ignoring Gingrich’s improprieties, Hannity continually treated him like a knight in shining armor, much like Rush Limbaugh treats William F. Buckley. All the while Gingrich was committing serial adultery on his second wife during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The adulteress was a young Congressional aide. She was also a Catholic who sang as a member of the prestigious choir at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. Showing no repentance, Gingrich divorced his wife and married the young aide, and the newlywed couple continued to attend the Shrine, now under the protecting arm of the pedophile protector, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. I myself was in Washington at the time to hear her sing the glories of the Christian faith. Hannity also knows the cruel way in which Gingrich treated his first wife, insisting that she come to terms for divorce while she was recovering from cancer surgery in a hospital bedroom. But this is to be expected. Gingrich’s behavior and Hannity’s looking the other way is the convenient morality of the Neo-con political machine. As John Galbraith stated it:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Hannity also buys into the same biblical eschatology as Billy and Franklin Graham, which, for most of the last century, has been awash with Puritan millennium-seeking. Their ultimate goal is to prepare the Middle East, particularly Israel, for the Second Coming of Christ who, they think, will soon begin a physical, 1000-year reign from Jerusalem. Naturally, in this eschatological schema the good guys are the Neo-cons, the Evangelicals and the Zionists, while the bad guys are anyone who opposes them, including but not limited to the Arab nations and the world of Islam. Moralist icon, William Bennett, prior to the exposing of his gambling habits, thought nothing of gambling away American lives when on September 12, 2002 in a CNN interview he said so self-righteously that America was “in a struggle between good and evil,” and that “overwhelming force must be used against militant Islam.” Bennett then proceeded to name the nations of his war-mongering fury: Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and China. As Buchanan writes: “Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists.” By the way, Bennett is also on the advisory board of Crisis magazine.

Of course, the underworld is not limited to Skull & Bones and the Bohemian Grove. Similar secret societies bent on world conquest have been around for quite a while. We know some of them as the Freemasons, the P2, the Illuminati, and about a dozen other such illustrative names. We need not be naive – big money and man-made philosophies control almost every sector of this world. That’s what the Apostle John tells us in the Apocalypse. This is not, as some try to dismiss it, a “conspiracy” theory. Catholics got a good taste of reality when in the 1970s-80s they saw that many of the prelates they trusted had already succumbed to its power. One very revealing source was a list of Freemasons discovered by Italian police and later sent to Pope John Paul I by Mino Pecorelli, editor of L’ Osservatore Politico (who was soon afterward assassinated, mafioso style). Among the names on the short list of Masons were 121 Catholic prelates, including prominent office holders such as: Augustin Cardinal Bea, Secretary of State to John XXIII and Paul VI; Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, creator of the Novus Ordo mass; Agostino Cacciavillan, Secretary of State, and until very recently, Papal Nuncio to America; Agostino Casaroli, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Achille Lienart, Bishop of Lille, France and designated as “Masonic Grand Master” and very active in slanting Vatican II in the liberal direction; Leo Cardinal Suenens (leader of the Charismatic movement) and Jean Cardinal Villot, the Secretary of State. These names came complete with Masonic code names and numbers. Villot’s name was “Jeanni” with number 041/3 and he was enrolled in the Lodge on August 6, 1966. So vast was Villot’s power and influence that when Paul VI had excommunicated Pasquale Macci for heresy, Villot, after the pope’s death, had Macci reinstated and saw to it that he was elevated to Cardinal. Pio Laghi, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States is also on the list, and it is no coincidence that he is a great friend to the Bush family.

Paul Marcinkus, Director of the Vatican Bank and numerous money laundering schemes, was also on the Freemason list. It was John Paul I’s stated quest to Cardinal Villot to remove Marcinkus and his collaborators, such as Cardinal Baggio (also on the Freemason list). But Villot and company silenced the pope before he could act. All this is common knowledge now, thanks to David Yallop’s book “In God’s Name”; Paul Williams’ book “The Vatican Exposed,” as well as the work of Richard Hammer, Claire Sterling, Nick Tosches and John Cornwell. What we also know is that, immediately after becoming the new pope, John Paul II closed the door on all the internal investigations initiated by John Paul I, and thus it became business as usual at the Vatican. Instead of ousting Marcinkus the pope elevated him, on the third anniversary of John Paul I’s death, to the position of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City, which is more or less like being its governor. Instead of reporting the misdealings of the Banco Ambrosiano (which was the source for Marcinkus’ money laundering schemes as he defrauded its depositors), John Paul II paid off the creditors with $250 million of the Vatican’s money. When appeals came to the Vatican from the Italian government to help prosecute Marcinkus, John Paul II protected Marcinkus by citing the immunity granted by article 11 of the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini, as he also did in protecting, Bernard Law, the infamous pedophile shuffler. Cardinals Benelli and Rossi pleaded with the pope to expel Marcinkus but to no avail. It was later discovered that Marcinkus’ money laundering allowed the funneling of $100 million to the Solidarity Trade Union of Poland, a favorite project of the pope’s. Unfortunately, for every Yallop and Williams we can depend upon to expose these historical facts, we have authors such as Carl Bernstein (“His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time”) and George Weigel (“Witness to Hope: John Paul II”) who refuse to mention them.

Next Installment: The Protestant/Evangelical Connection

Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.
4-28-05

Catholic Apologetics International