I decided to write this article - which is quite different from my usual ones - in an effort to convince my Catholic brothers and sisters who are concerned about the current papacy, yet are unable to (a) bring themselves to criticise the pope's words and actions or (b) comprehend the scale of what is happening.
There are many good Catholics, well-meaning and faithful, who, in trying to take the most charitable approach when evaluating this disastrous papacy, find themselves coming perilously close to justifying sin. While it is true that 'the gates of hell will never prevail' against the Church, this often-quoted verse gives no guarantee that the person of the pope will be saintly, or even personally faithful. In fact, there are many legitimate prophecies which tell us that there will be a time when Rome herself will become completely corrupted. It may be that this time is upon us now. Obviously, this shouldn't be cause for despair, but rather hope, since Our Lord has promised to be with us through every imaginable crisis this worldly pilgrimage has to offer.
Since Infiltration was released, there have been some extremely negative and strange comments flying around social media, even to the point of suggestions that Dr Marshall is 'another Luther.' This is ironic, since Pope Francis has publicly stated that Luther was admirable. That accusation was countered by the comment that if Dr Marshall is in fact like Luther, then the Pope may see fit to issue a stamp in his honour!
Let me state at the outset that I don't agree with all of Dr Marshall's ideas in Infiltration - or outside of it - but agree in a general way with his thesis. (For an example of our points of disagreement, Dr Marshall believes that there is no reason to investigate the election of Pope Francis, whereas I think that it warrants close examination, on several grounds.) I say this only to illustrate the fact that I haven't jumped on a bandwagon: Infiiltration confirms much of the research I've been doing on my own during the last nine months. The fact that the book's foreward was written by the illustrious Bishop Athanasius Schneider should make the most hardened skeptics think twice about condemning it out of hand.
That nine-month timeframe marks the release of Archbishop Vigano's first letter: it was at that point that I found myself no longer able to defend the 'idiosyncracies' of the current papacy. Prior to that moment, I had judged traditionalists as 'mean' (mea culpa!) and Pope Francis as the man for our times. I still believe he certainly is the latter, but for entirely different reasons. In this age of relativism and indifferentism, he has taken ambiguity to new heights and Holy Church to new depths of worldliness.
By now, some of my readers will be extremely vexed with my comments. If this applies to you, then please keep reading and carefully look at the questions posed below. Can they reasonably be answered in ways other than those proposed by Dr Marshall? I wonder. And I challenge the skeptics to ponder the implications raised by these questions, to think very deeply about the level of sin and corruption we are facing, and to honestly examine its source - which is undoubtedly diabolical. If satan's smoke has indeed entered the Vatican, then how was this able to happen? Who let that smoke in? If there is smoke, is there not also fire at its source?
Our faith is full of mysteries, to be sure, but not everything is meant to remain hidden behind a veil of supernatural opacity. Answers do exist, and as time goes by, further evidence is coming to light. But the global media machine - those same journalists who hide the true numbers at pro-life marches, applaud vapid celebrities and homosexual couples, and accuse us of harassing women outside abortion mills - those very same men and women love Pope Francis, and amplify the sound bytes of his liberal rhetoric while failing to investigate the charges made against him - even though he publicly invited them to do so. It would be disingenuous of anyone to claim that they see through the mainstream media's Fake news, yet fully trust them to deliver the truth about the pope. Thus it falls to the alternative media, blogsites and smaller news sites to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I believe Dr Marshall's book makes a valuable contribution to this process.
20 Questions for the Sceptics
1. What is the Alta Vendita - is it a fraud, or is it, as it is claimed, a document writen by freemasons as a blueprint for their infiltration of the Church? [Click here for a podcast version of the Alta Vendita and click here for the pdf.]
2. If it is false, could Pope Pius IX, who personally paid for copies of the Alta Vendita to be printed and distributed in 1859, have been deluded?
3, Why did pre-conciliar popes write encyclicals against freemasonry, but no popes have done so since the Council? (In 1983, Pope John Paul II opened an investigation, under the guidance of then Cardinal Ratzinger, into the Church's stance on freemasonry. This was in response to calls for clarity since Masonic associations were not mentioned in the new Code of Canon law. Cardinal Ratzinger's conclusion was that membership in such associations remains gravely sinful for Catholics. See here for more information.)
4. If the Alta Vendita is authentic, then how successful have the efforts - as described in that document - of the Freemasons been?
5. Why did Pope Pius XII fail to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary?
6. Why did Pope John XXIII fail to release the third secret of Fatima on the date asked for by Our Lady?
7. Was former Communist, Bella Dodd, telling the truth about the inflitration of the Church by 1000 communist seminarians in the 1930's and 40's?
8. If so, where would those priests be now? Would some have become bishops? Cardinals?
9. Saul Alinksy conscripted Catholic priests to his social programmes in Chicago during the 1940's. Some, such as EWTN's Fr Mitch Pacwa, moved away when they realised that Alinsky had another agenda. [See this video for an indepth analysis of cultural Marxism in the US. Fr Pacwa is mentioned.] What of those who stayed? Where are they now and how have they potentially introduced Alinksy's Rules for Radicals into the Church in the US?
10. Why did John XXIII eliminate the Oath on Modernism?
11. Why did so many pre-Vatican II popes write against Modernism, yet none have done so since the council?
12. Does Vatican II represent a continuity or a rupture of Catholic theology? For example, is 'Salvation is not found outside the Catholic Church' consistent with 'There is a reasonable hope that all might be saved'? Is the former consistent with 'God willed the plurality of religions'? Is 'The death penalty is per se contrary to the Gospel' consistent with 'the death penalty is legitimate?'
13. Cardinal Ottaviani and the other authors of The Ottaviani Intervention were well-known for their orthodoxy. Is it of no concern that they were willing to challenge the theology of Vatican II, despite initially welcoming the council?
14. Cardinal Daneels admitted that he and other liberal cardinal-electors met together in Sankt Gallen to plan the elction of a pope of their liking. Is it mere coincidence that ex-Cardinal McCarrick also spent an unusual amount of time in Sankt Gallen?
15. Pope Francis kept liberal Cardinal Cocopalmerio working with him in the Vatican, even after that Cardinal was known to have been present at a homosexual orgy, which also involved cocaine. Is this really a case of 'keeping one's friends close and one's enemies closer'?
16. What explanation can be offered for the consistent promotion by John Paul II of liberal and corrupt, if not heretical prelates, including ex-Cardinal McCarrick?
17. What proportion of Pope Francis' statements and documents can be interpreted as being bridled to the ideology of modernism?
18. Why was Cardinal McCarrick laicised without an investigation and with no right of appeal?
19. Could it be that such an investigation would expose incriminating behaviour by the hierarchy, including the pope and his predecessors?
20. What is the connection between ritual sodomy, Freemasonry and satanism? (Hint: why is homosexuality an instrinsic part of the contemporary corruption of faith and morals?) There is a good deal of information available on this topic, but it is not for the faint-hearted.
I urge my fellow Catholics to consider these questions, among the many others which could be raised. Please note that I don't consider myself wiser or more intelligent than the many Catholics I know, who still cling to the hope that this papacy is acting under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I simply have one thing going for me that most don't, which is, that I have nothing to lose.
There are many good Catholic professionals with doctoral theses or published books that rely on post-conciliar theology, and who would feel the need to defend their works. Some lecture on the merits of Nouvelle Theologie or post-modernist philosophy. But it would be shameful to discover that the only thing keeping my more learned friends from coming to the same conclusions that Dr Marshall, and many other Catholics have come to was intellectual pride. (I may be accused of the same fault for writing this article: so be it. God knows my motivations.)
There are many of us who formerly championed Pope John Paul II, Pope Emeritus Benedict, Pope Francis, and Vatican II generally. In fact, until recently, I credited my return to the Church to the influence of Pope John Paul II. But - and it breaks my heart to say this - no longer. The Luminous Mysteries are no longer said in my home; I no longer invoke him in my prayers.
In my opinion, there is one person alive who can shed light on all these questions and who has access to the documents and evidence to back it up. That is Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. He, like many theologians who attempted a fusion of Catholicism and Modernism, made attempts to reverse the disasters that poured out of Pandora's Box after the council, but didn't take the action needed to halt it completely. He knows the truth, but whether or not he will reveal it remains to be seen.
A note on Maritain, from the past.
According to Infiltration, the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, played a prominent part in introducing modernist and communist ideas into the Vatican. While contemplating writing this article, I happened across the following in a book by Roberto de Mattei. It was written in 1998 and is the biography of an exemplary Catholic layman from Brazil, named Plinio Correa de Oliveira. While the text is written by de Mattei, the footnotes reveal that Plinio Correa de Oliveira was writing with concern about Maritain in the 1940's - over ten years before Maritain introduced Saul Alinsky to Cardinal Montini (later to become Pope Paul VI) and decades before the council over which he (Maritain) wielded such great influence.
"Jacques Maritain's work, Integral Humanism, published in 1936, was the manifesto of a new philosophy of history and society that offered the foundation for an evolution of Catholic Action in an opposite direction to the programme prepared by Pius XI in the Quas Primas.
Maritain in fact wanted to replace holy Chirstian civilisation with "the concrete historical ideal of a new Christianity, a profane civitas humana, taken as a temporal regime of an age of civilisation whose inspiring form would be Christian and would respond to the historical climate of the times into which we are entering". At the root of his philosophy of history that seeks an hypothetical 'third way' between the 'medieval ideal' and the 'liberal one' is the determinist thesis of the irreversibility of the modern world and the Marxist postulate of the 'historical role of the proletariat'....
.... Despite the declared adhesion of Maritain to the principles of Thomism, his philosophy of history and his sociology converge with the Neo-modernism appearing among the young religious of the Jesuit and Dominican Orders. Priests, such as the Dominican Yves Congar, were already at that point convinced that their generation should 'recover and transfer into the patrimony of the Church any worthwhile element that could emerge from an approach to modernism.'
Catholic Action was, along with the 'liturgical movement', the preferred sector for the infiltration of especially the political and social modernism that, after a silent incubation period, had reappeared at the beginning of the 1930's."
from The Crusader of the 20th Century: Plinio Correa de Oliveira by Roberto de Mattei (1998)
