Saturday 30 November 2013

St Luis IX - Image Wikipedia

St Louis IX and the Crusader saints

It may surprise some people how many saints were associated with the Crusaders. Here are a few: St Ferdinand III, a great Spanish king who was very active in driving the Muslims out of Spain in the reconquest of Iberia; St John Capistrano, an Italian Franciscan who helped mobilise the Germans, Austrians and Central Europe to drive back the Ottoman Turks, - St John Capistrano at the age of 70 led them into battle to relieve the Muslim siege of Belgrade. St Thomas Aquinas was a good friend of King St Louis IX of France. Even St Francis of Assisi got in on the act and briefly joined the 5th Crusade in Egypt but walked into the enemy camp and tried to persuade the Sultan Al-Kamil to convert to Christianity. St Francis either wanted to convert the Muslims or martyrdom; he did not succeed however.
               St Louis IX led two Crusades, the Seventh and the Eighth.  He tried to take Egypt first because Egypt was the main economic powerhouse for the Levant. Unfortunately because of indiscipline among some of his headstrong nobles in trying to press ahead and win glory for themselves (particularly Robert of Artois), this Crusade was defeated and St. Louis was captured. Louis’s wife Queen Margret was besieged at the fortified Egyptian coastal city of Damietta and even though she was in labour and about to give birth she still manage to inspire the garrison to defend the city. The Crusaders defending the city managed to negotiate with the Muslim Mamluks a safe passage for the Queen, her newly born son and the garrison. They also paid a huge ransom for King Louis and the other crusaders. For further reading regards King Louis IX and his crusades I suggest the journals of one of his knights, John de Joinville, who portrays King St Louis as an inspirational leader.
               The mainstay for the defence of the Holy Land was the religious military orders mainly the Templars, the Hospitallers and sometimes the Teutonic Knights. These were fighting monks, or rather they were friars as they were not contemplative but active like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Their main opposition were the Mamluks. But whereas the Christian military orders were volunteers with a vocation the Muslim Mamluks were frequently the result of forced conversions; they were slave warriors, often captured Christians when they were young boys, indoctrinated and formed into slave warriors.
               When King Louis and Queen Margret returned to France, Queen Margret often had to deal with the formidable mother of Louis, Blanche of Castel who disapproved of her son’s pretty young wife. Louis and Margret had their rooms in the Royal Castle of Pontoise one living quarters above the other connected by a main stairs at the front. The servants were given orders that whenever Blanche approached her son’s rooms they were to alert the couple and Queen Margret would slip up a narrow back stairs to her own chambers. However, despite Blanche’s disapproval, Louis and Margret had eleven children.
               King Louis was always very saintly. He did his level best to inspire his countrymen and women to be good and loyal Catholics, loyal to the pope, and to defend the Church against heresy. He built the glorious Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns and brought back the Black Madonna of Le Puy from one of his Crusades.
               In 1270AD he launched the Eighth Crusade to try and take back the former Christian lands, north Africa and Egypt. This time he left Queen Margret behind in France. One can only imagine her sadness as she saw her husband leave to fight once again and her prayers for his safe return. She never saw her husband again for he died in Tunis, North Africa. He was canonised in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII

Friday 22 November 2013

St Leonard of Port Maurice

St Leonard of Port Maurice - image Wikipdia
St Leonard of Port Maurice on the Little Number of Those Who are saved

St Leonard was a Franciscan Friar, d.1751. One of his most powerful sermons was on the little number of those who are saved. It is not for anyone to judge the state of a person’s soul, but just to try and follow Jesus and His Church. It is out of charity that we include the following quote sent in by one of our supporters. Anyone who sits down in front of Coronation Street or East Enders or any other TV programme that depicts sin in a positive way should consider the below:

            ‘He represented the ugliness of the sin of impurity so forcefully that a woman fell dead of sorrow in front of everyone. Then, coming back to life, she said, "When I was presented before the Tribunal of God, sixty thousand people arrived at the same time from all parts of the world; out of that number, three were saved by going to Purgatory, and all the rest were damned."’
           
It very important to pray for the leaders and opinion formers both in politics and in the media; for if they are giving examples of lifestyles that are contrary to the Gospel they are in grave trouble. This is none more so than in their example to children, for Jesus said “But whosoever shall cause one of these little ones which believe on me to stumble, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6.

But what is considered family viewing today? Here is a cutting from the MailOnline

X Factor up to its old tricks as Gaga strips: Raunchy pre-watershed performance attracts 100 complaints MailOnline 29/10/2013

The X Factor is embroiled in yet another sleaze row after a raunchy performance by Lady Gaga prompted hundreds of complaints. The controversial singer stripped to her underwear and danced provocatively across the stage in a pre-watershed results programme watched by nearly a million children on Sunday night.

This is just one of the reasons why we ask all our Prayer Crusaders to adopt a celebrity and pray for them. We pray for their well-being and their success but most of all we pray for their conversion, true conversion to God’s one and only true Church: that they accept all her teachings and disciplines in all their wonderful glory.  Click on this link Adopt a Celebrity

Friday 15 November 2013

BBC's Sex and the Holy City


BBC Panorama’s Sex and the Holy City, revisited

Image from Wikipedia
It is just over ten years ago now that the BBC broadcast one of its most biased and dishonest programmes on Catholic moral teaching to date.  The Panorama programme was Sex and the Holy City. Broadcast on 12th October 2003, it purported to be an appraisal of 25 years of John Paul II’s pontificate, but was actually designed to do as much damage to the Pope and the Catholic Church’s moral teaching as possible. The BBC knows its strengths on the world media stage, and according to ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken it is massively self-confident when it come to promoting liberal moral values.

Sex and the Holy City created in 2003/04 the same kind of multi-level media discourse as the BBC had earlier (in the 1960s) created in favour of legalising abortion and homosexuality. Sex and the Holy City was an attack on the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception. Concentrating – though not exclusively - on the condom, the BBC blamed the Catholic Church for causing the AIDS crisis in Africa among other things. This encouraged other media outlets and pundits to join the attack on the Church. Many lay people changed their views as a result of this programme, and even some of our hierarchy faltered. But this satanic inspired attack was a breathtaking piece of mendacity by the programme’s producer Chris Woods and its reporter Steve Bradshaw, both of whom demonstrate an extremely strong left-liberal bias. Aitken also points out the link between the BBC’s Sexwise programme and its partnership with the IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation), contrasting this link with the requirement for the BBC to be impartial. BBC’s Sexwise is a programme that promotes abortion, contraception and homosexual activity.

Robin Aitken in his book Can we still trust the BBC? called Chris Woods’ impartiality into question, and thus the integrity of the whole documentary. Chris Woods had a history of anti-Catholic actions. He was also homosexual and a member of Outrage. He had been a journalist for homosexual publications such as Capital Gay, The Pink Paper and The Advocate. Woods and Outrage had identified the Catholic Church for attacks because of her strong stand on traditional family values. Woods and Outrage had ransacked the papal nuncio’s house in London and disrupted one of Cardinal Hume’s Masses in Westminster Cathedral. This was homosexuals trying to bully the Catholic Church into changing her laws on contraception, for they know full well that to do so would justify sex as a purely recreational activity, therefore ultimately justify homosexual activity. He and the BBC had the audacity to use their powerful position on the world stage to attack the Catholic Church and were quite prepared to engage in deceit to do so.

Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, then prefect of the Congregation for the Family, was interviewed for Sex and the Holy City. Upon seeing the programme he was extremely surprised by its bias, and wrote an excellent response. His Vatican document was called Safe Sex versus Family Values. In it he presented conclusive evidence that Catholic countries around the world have far fewer AIDS cases, while those countries that have adopted the condom have the most. Here is a striking piece of evidence from Safe Sex versus Family Values which shows how dangerous it is to rely on condoms to protect against AIDS. Safe Sex versus Family Values states, “In Thailand and in the Philippines, the first HIV/AIDS cases were reported in 1984; by 1987, Thailand had 112 cases while the Philippines had more with 135 cases Today, in the year 2003 there are around 750,000 cases in Thailand, where the 100% Condom Use Program had relatively great success. On the other hand, there are only 1,935 cases in the Philippines – and this considering that the Philippines’ population is around 30% greater that Thailand’s” - conclusive evidence that relying on the condom is killing people, while the Catholic Church’s support of abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it is being very successful.

How did the BBC react to this conclusive piece of evidence? As champions of liberal morality they reacted as one would expect, with omissions and bias, of course. The BBC and Panorama gave the evidence of Safe Sex versus Family Values little or no publicity, but brought out yet another Panorama programme called Can Condoms Kill? where they interviewed EU politicians and sex workers. One EU politician even went so far as to state that members of the Catholic hierarchy who support abstinence and not condoms should be tried for crimes against humanity. This was again picked up by various media outlets, and with the growing influence of the BBC, worldwide opinion was now at odds with the Catholic Church. We now have a worldwide situation developing whereby the BBC along with the United Nations is in complete opposition to the Catholic Church regarding morality. The anti-Gospel versus the Gospel.

Others have also questioned the use of condoms as safe. Dr Helen Singer-Kaplan, of Cornell University Medical Centre, states that “Counting on condoms is flirting with death.” The Journal of the American Medical Association states that ‘“Understandably, for practical and ethical reasons few studies have actually used live couples to test HIV transmission rates”; however, a University of Miami Medical School study showed that three out of 10 women whose HIV-infected husbands faithfully used condoms contracted AIDS-Related Complex (ARC) in an 18 month period. This translates into an infection rate of 21 percent per year ... and 91% over 10 years.’ One Lancet (Feb 7 1987 page 323) article says ... ‘“Safe Sex” ... Condoms has a substantial failure rate: 13-15% of women whose male partners use condoms as the sole method of contraception become pregnant within one year ‘

Conclusive evidence in favour of Catholic moral teachings: but how does the BBC describe Catholic moral teaching? -  by using expressions and words like “hardliners in the Vatican say condoms can kill”. In Can We Still Trust the BBC? Chapter 11, “The Moral Maze”, Robin Aitken quotes the work of David Kerr, ex-BBC Assistant Editor. Kerr carried out a study of the BBC’s proclaimed impartiality, and used its treatment of the Catholic Church in Sex and the Holy City as an example. In Kerr’s independent study of Sex and the Holy City and the Catholic Church he appears to find in the Church’s favour in point after point.
  
The People of the Philippines who have been so loyal to the teachings of the Catholic Church and proved the BBC wrong, now need our help please see this link for donations to Aid to the Church in Need’s appeal to help the Philippines after the devastating typhoon. Click on this link ACN

Saturday 2 November 2013

The Media as a Paper Tiger 2


Fighting back against the Media

In my second article regarding the media I want to give expression to ways of fighting back it’s pernicious activities.

One of the better aspects of the old communist regimes is that most of the population were totally cynical towards their media. They were well aware most of it was totally dishonest. Unfortunately at least up to recently in the UK there has been this veil of respectability created by the BBC and the broadsheet newspapers. They had built up the reputation like respected members of the family. People like the Dimblebys and other employees of the BBC provided a sort of synthetic gravitas. Of course the BBC did have principles under such luminaries as Reith and Haley, but by the 1960s the “rats” those detritus of the left who had newly come from universities started their subversion and infiltration of the BBC and journalism at large.  Their egos knew no bounds in their task of attacking Christianity and traditional values. Some of them almost had rat like grins as they went about their mission. Their promotion of the culture of death and sexual perversion was the work of genius, a genius sourced directly from Satan.

Of course most of us are no longer hoodwinked, after the recent revelations of how the BBC turned a blind eye to all the sexual abuse within its organisation. This has finally given us proof enough of its rottenness to any doubters. The broadsheets sympathy for the BBC views, apart from a few exceptional journalists, is again proof of their venality. So how can we obtain sufficient information about the news without being the target of foulness emanating from such organs as the BBC?

Some of that information can be sourced from Catholic or some other Christian news agencies.  For instance although one cannot agree with the theology of the Evangelicals they are pro-life and against sexual perversions. They can be a back up for the Catholic news agencies.  Also one must always try to cross reference the news to foreign stations, which are available on the Internet. They too cannot be guaranteed for their integrity, but they are  useful for analytical purposes. It is important that we take on the same attitude of those people I mentioned earlier that lived in the former Communist countries, total disbelief of the media. What is also very important is we discuss with our neighbours, our working colleagues and friends, the bankrupt nature of the British media, bankrupt in honesty and moral values. A great deal of the undermining of the old Communist regimes was done by word of mouth, especially in the old East Germany, that is why a terrified regime recruited so many spies. We must do everything we can to undermine the credibility of the mainstream UK media.

We also need to have the tools to judge what is sound and not sound, the only way to achieve that is to relate to our moral and religious believes. Be very thorough in examining all we hear, read and see. It is no use sloppily accepting anything because everyone else does.  Sheep end up in the abattoir!

The Television has adopted the techniques of your average drug dealer. They cleverly put on programming that causes children and infants to become addicted to Television. The bright primary coloured cartoons with a certain childish subversive attitudes that is now the staple of young children’s viewing creating a lifetime of addiction.  For many people the media via the Television has in part become an addiction stemming from their childhood. This is why it has the power to inflict its values on so many of the population. What everyone needs to do is to wean people off this addiction and make them realise the evilness of the messages sent out. It will not be easy with Television and the Internet taking up such a large part of people’s lives, but our nation will not be free until it is done. People have got to understand that with media controlling them they are not free people, they have become slaves to those purveyors of poison whom we see on our screens and in our newspapers. The chains of mental subjugation created by the media must be broken and truth liberated, then we can once more restore hope and joy to many. Once people realise that for a lifetime they have been mislead into accepting values that are destroying any vestige of happiness in their lives, there will be a fury abroad.

By RIGBY