How Marxism Has Infiltrated the Catholic Church

How Marxism Has
Infiltrated the
Catholic Church

By Robert Chandler
Author of Shadow World




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Published by America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org 443-964-8208
 

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“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know
where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first
radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so
effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Saul Alinsky dedicates his book, “Rules for Radicals” to Lucifer.




PEOPLE & PLACES
Saul Alinsky, The Man Who Inspired Obama
Listen Now [4 min 49 sec] add to playlist | download
Day to Day, January 30, 2009 · You may not recognize his name at first, but Saul
Alinsky served as the inspiration behind President Barack Obama's initiative to become
a community organizer in Chicago. Friday is the 100th birthday of the founder of the
Industrial Areas Foundation. Alex Cohen talks with Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt
about his book Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky His Life and Legacy and the man.
Source: National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100057050

















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Introduction

By Cliff Kincaid, President, America’s Survival, Inc.

James Tyson, who worked for Accuracy in Media and the Council for the
Defense of Freedom, wrote Target America, a book about the impact of communist
propaganda, and Prophets or Useful Idiots?, a report about liberal church groups
opposed to U.S. policy in Central America in the 1980s. The latter was published during
a time when President Ronald Reagan was trying to prevent a complete Soviet- and
Cuban-sponsored Communist takeover of Central America. The Communist
Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979 and Communist terrorists known as
the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were threatening a violent
takeover of neighboring El Salvador. The Reagan policy of overt and covert aid for the
Nicaraguan freedom fighters, known as the Contras, forced the defeat of the
Sandinistas, leaving the FMLN in disarray. In 1983, Reagan ordered the liberation of
Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, from communist thugs.


One chapter in Tyson’s report
was devoted to the role of the
Catholic Church in facilitating this Marxist
movement in Central America. “For
decades after the Russian Revolution
in 1917 the Catholic Church
world-wide was one of the strongest
opponents of communism,” he noted.
But this stand softened after that.
John Paul II, who became Pope in
1978 and understood the reality of
communism, having lived under it in
 
his native Poland, publicly criticized
Obama conquers Notre Dame.
Marxism and Marxist-oriented Liberation Theology. A former Maryknoll Priest, Blase
Bonpane, is given credit for “initiating the historic dialogue in Latin America between
Christianity and Marxism” and today speaks around the country on “Building an
International Peace System” – a primary focus of the University of Notre Dame’s “Peace
Studies” department.

Despite the efforts of Pope John Paul II, which are highlighted in Malachi Martin’s
book, The Keys of This Blood, the U.S. Catholic Church remained “more consistently
radical” during this time, Tyson noted, and began to exhibit a “softening towards
communism and increasingly radical stances on economics and politics.” For instance,
the U.S. Catholic Bishops opposed the Reagan Administration’s policy of supporting the
Nicaraguan freedom fighters. Tyson identified the U.S. Catholic Conference, an agency
of the American bishops, as being under the influence of figures such as Father J.
Bryan Hehir, who in 1983 delivered a series of lectures at the far-left Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS) entitled, “Matthew, Marx, Luke, and John.” (emphasis added). Hehir
received an IPS award named after Orlando Letelier, a Chilean communist identified in
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briefcase papers found after his death as an agent of Communist Cuba. Hehir is today a
professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The Sandinistas have retaken power -- and the FMLN has taken power --
operating through techniques of infiltration and manipulation of the electoral process,
with the backing of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the Castro-influenced Sao Paulo
Forum.

Domestically, President Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame has to be
understood in the context of his hiring and training by Jerry Kellman, an apostle of Saul
Alinsky at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Kellman “led a group, the Calumet
Community Religious Conference, that had been created by several local Catholic
churches,” noted National Review writer Byron York. Tyson had noted that Saul Alinsky,
an organizer and socialist, originally had the support of Catholic Bishop Bernard J. Sheil
and was facilitated in the San Antonio, Texas, area by the Catholic Diocese there. It
became a center for support for Liberation Theology and opposition to the Reagan
policy in Central America. A documentary, “The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and
His Legacy,” noted that, “Alinsky envisioned an ‘organization of organizations,’
comprised of all sectors of the community — youth committees, small businesses, labor
unions, and, most influential of all, the Catholic Church.” The Citizen’s Handbook notes
that, “Much of IAF organizing occurs through Christian churches particularly the Catholic
church.”

Over the last 10 years, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD)
of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has given millions of Catholic-donated
dollars to the Industrial Areas Foundation and the Saul Alinsky-style ACORN
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). ACORN, which has
reportedly received more than $53 million in federal funds, has been implicated in voter
fraud on behalf of the Obama presidential campaign.

All of this background is necessary in order to understand why President Obama
would be selected to speak -- and why he would be honored -- at the University of Notre
Dame. In this report Robert Chandler exposes how this has happened.

A strategist who has worked for the United States Air Force and several U.S.
Government agencies, Robert Chandler is a retired Air Force Colonel and Vietnam
veteran who holds a Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University. His
book, Shadow World, available from America’s Survival, Inc., analyzes the dangers we
face from the global Left, radical Islam, a resurgent Russia and China.

In this global struggle in the shadow world, Obama’s Marxist revolution seems to
have captured the American branch of the Catholic Church.




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By Robert Chandler, author of Shadow World

One protester’s sign said that Notre Dame, the most clearly recognizable
Catholic institution in the U.S., had spiritually “sold out”1 by giving President Barack
Obama an honorary doctor of laws degree. But this was the candidate who won a
majority of the Catholic vote in the 2008 presidential election. There certainly is a split
within America’s Catholic community, but Obama and his fifth column leftist or
“progressive” supporters and handlers seem to be winning.

What lies behind this confrontation is a
decades-long assault on the Christian religion, the
Catholic Church and its “Culture of Life” in particular,
which are regarded by modern-day Marxists as a major
impediment to their plans for a complete takeover of
American – and global – institutions. These Marxists
are guided by Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci,
whose writings were introduced to the United States
in the mid-1950s by Carl Marzani, a publisher and
Soviet KGB agent whose publishing house was
subsidized by the KGB. Marzani published The Open
Marxism of Antonio Gramsci in 1957. 2
Rev. Jenkins: President

of Notre Dame.
Gramsci’s Marxist theory of cultural revolution stressed that dominance over the
existing order in the West, including religion, was rooted in education, the media, law,
and a mass culture of beliefs, values, and traditions. He said that it was through these
elements that the “ruling class” exercised mind-control or “hegemony” over ordinary
people. Hence, to overturn the existing order and “Marxize the inner man,” one must
create a subversive program of “counter-hegemony” against its supporting culture. The
war against the existing culture would leave nothing outside of the struggle, especially
Christianity, to negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.

Christianity is considered a prime target in preparing the way for a “Marxized
America,” since religion, as an independent center of societal values, stands in the way
of creating a new culture based on what is deceptively called “social justice” and
“change.” Religion, in the Gramsci view, is the foundation for the Western values of
individual liberty, private property, and the traditional family, and must be abolished in
order for the new communist society to emerge.


Interestingly, Notre Dame has one of the leading Gramsci scholars on its
faculty. Joseph A. Buttigieg, a Professor of English at Notre Dame, is the editor and
translator of the complete edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and was a
founding member of the International Gramsci Society, of which he is now president. 3
He spoke at the Brecht Forum, home of the New York Marxist School, in 1994 4 and
was an endorser of the “150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto” conference,
held October 30 & 31, 1998, at Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York. 5

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The Gramsci Strategy

An essay notes that Gramsci came to see revolution not as something to be
achieved through violence and terrorism but “as essentially a long-term prospect
depending on the particular traditions and conditions that exist in each individual country
and needing above all as its prerequisite the gradual building of hegemony (his name
for ideological domination or penetration) in all the institutions of society by those
intellectuals with revolutionary ideas.”

It goes on, “Only when this task is
complete, and ideological unity between
intellectuals and masses (‘historic bloc’
is the term Gramsci uses for this) has
been achieved, does the time become
ripe for successful revolutionary political
action. For Gramsci this is the process
that has informed history; new ruling
classes have succeeded in establishing
a new social order only when they have
had effective ideologists to make their
 
ideas permeate the institutions of civil
U.N. General Assembly President Miguel
society.” 6
D’Escoto is a communist and Catholic Priest.

President Barack Obama is the head of this “new ruling class” who is dedicated
to bringing about the “new social order.” His background includes being mentored by
Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, close personal relationships with
members of the Communist Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,
and backing from the Democratic Socialists of America when he launched his political
career in Chicago.

The problem for this new ruling class, which used to be known as “liberal” and
now calls itself “progressive,” is that it is still out-of-step with the majority of the U.S.
population, only twenty two percent of which considers itself liberal.7 Majority support
for “progressive” values such as abortion-on-demand and homosexual marriage
continues to be sorely lacking. So the challenge of the “progressive” movement is to
convince the majority of the people through deception and propaganda to go along with
its left-wing agenda. One key part of this effort is to drop use of the term “liberal,” which
has been discredited, and use “progressive” because this term enjoys a higher
favorability rating. A report from the Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters
for America claims this effort has been so successful that America is now a “center-left
nation” because of “the rise of progressive demographic groups.” 8

Obama accepted the challenge at Notre Dame because he wants to count
American Catholics as one of these “progressive” groups. But knowing that his policies,
especially on abortion, are opposed to Catholic moral teaching, Obama, a master of
political double-speak, stepped up to the microphone at a Catholic institution and
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beguiled many Catholics when he called for an “open dialogue” of people with “open
hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” in an effort to find “common ground.” His syrupy
words were designed to drive a gigantic political wedge in the Roman Catholic
community, dividing the mesmerized from those Catholics who stood steadfast with
Church doctrine and the teachings of the bishops.

The Obama appearance was arranged by
the Rev. John I. Jenkins, president of Notre Dame,
in violation of a document published by the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that
Catholic institutions should not honor or provide a
platform to politicians who stand in opposition to
Catholic moral teaching on abortion and the “culture
of life.”

Jenkins has made common cause with those
backing Obama, who have a secular global agenda
that includes the establishment of global institutions
in direct competition with the Roman Catholic
Church. Jenkins is a board member of Millennium
 
Promise, an organization dedicated to fulfillment of
Veteran left-wing operative
the U.N.’s “Millennium Development Goals” for the
David Cortright is a research
U.S. and the world. The cost of fulfilling the
fellow at the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies
Millennium Development Goals, which were
at Notre Dame.
integrated into Obama’s Senate legislation called
the “Global Poverty Act,” was estimated at $845 billion. Other board members of the
Millennium Promise include former President Jimmy Carter, Josephine Linden of
Goldman Sachs, and Stewart Paperin of the George Soros-funded Open Society
Institute. 9 In 2006, Soros pledged $50 million to the Millennium Promise.10

Not coincidentally, Soros has been a major backer of the Democratic Party,
including Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The late Vatican scholar Malachi Martin, author of The Keys of This Blood,
understood the stakes, having written a book whose title included a reference to the
ultimate battle for “control of the New World Order.” 11 Martin was an expert on how the
global left had embraced the Gramsci philosophy.

The University of Notre Dame itself operates the “Kroc Institute for International
Peace Studies,” named for Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, and
offers a Ph.D in “Peace Studies.” One of the faculty members is David Cortright, a
veteran left-wing activist who has been a consultant or adviser to various United Nations
agencies. 12 Interestingly, his own website includes a link to a National Public Radio
program entitled “Saul Alinsky, The Man Who Inspired Obama.” Alinsky’s own book,
Rules for Radicals, was dedicated to Lucifer as “the first radical...”

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On the global level, the Gramsci strategy has been enormously successfully, as
evidenced by the fact that the current president of the United Nations General Assembly
is Miguel D’Escoto, the former foreign minister of Sandinista Nicaragua and Catholic
Priest of the Maryknoll Order who received the Lenin Peace Prize from the old Soviet
Union. 13 D’Escoto is an advocate of Marxist-oriented liberation theology, which is quite
similar to the anti-American and anti-white ranting of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that
Obama and his family enjoyed for about 20 years in Chicago. Obama only cut his ties to
Wright’s church when a media controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign
convinced his handlers that most people rejected this “religious” view.

George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C., called Obama’s foray to Notre Dame a “high stakes
‘political game.’” 14 Obama’s plea for “open dialogue” certainly will mollify many
Catholics and Christians unaware of the real nature of the “game” he is playing. While
he speaks soothing words from his teleprompter, however, his far-left political base
works at the same time to expand efforts to weaken the cultural and religious influence
of Catholicism and Christianity across America.


Obama was elected President
last November on the backs of the
radical left, a blended group of fifth
column progressives, socialists,
Marxists, and a large number of
capitalism-hating political extremists.
Since the 1960s, this community of the
far-left has been preparing the way not
only for a revolution in cultural affairs but
a massive extension of government and
Gramsci is the inspiration for the Marxist
union power. My book, Shadow World,
“progressives.”
documents the activities of many of these
fellow travelers and their stealthy subversive tactics designed to undermine America’s
political system, its free-market, and its robust culture of individual liberty and
responsibility.15

The First 100 Days


After the January 20, 2009, swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation’s forty-
fourth President, the new head-of-state and his radical progressive-socialist-Marxist
advisers hit the ground running. They were intent on fulfilling the words of Rahm
Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff and himself an accomplished politician from Chicago,
to “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”

The battle at Notre Dame has to be understood in the context of current events:
Obama and his far-left fifth column supporters exploited the world financial crisis by
nationalizing U.S. banks, insurance companies, and automobile and truck
manufacturers. Next on the agenda are health care and energy. Free enterprise, as
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known in America, is being quietly suffocated in a coordinated effort to redistribute
wealth in terms of what Marxist-trained community organizers might call “human needs”
and “social justice” to create a socialist and secular society.

All of this federal control, deficit spending and debt come on top of a growing
financial disaster involving paying for Medicare and Social Security in the years ahead.

Cultural Marxism


The strategy and tactics of the progressive-socialist-Marxist fifth column directing
the Obama Administration’s drive toward socialism and secularism are drawing upon
the cultural Marxism strategy and tactics developed by Antonio Gramsci, who made it
quite clear that his non-violent approach toward cultural revolution included Vladimir
Lenin’s geopolitical perspective of world communist domination. But, unlike Lenin,
Gramsci’s more subtle, stealthy blueprint does not focus on “conquering cities and
streets” through violent revolution.

As Vatican scholar Malachi Martin explained, Gramsci would use Lenin’s
framework “. . . to conquer the mind of civil society” and “acquire a Marxist hegemony
over the minds of the populations that must be won.”16

Carl Boggs, an expert on Gramsci, notes that “Gramsci was the first to insist that
religion as a hegemonic ideology would have to be confronted within the context of
transforming popular consciousness as both the pre-condition to abolishing capitalism
and a central aspect of liberation itself.”17 For Gramsci, Catholicism and Christianity
performed a great service to bourgeois political authorities and their hegemonic
philosophy and tools used to control the minds of the people. Religious ideology, he
argued, reinforced existing structures, such as private property, the family, and diluted
the importance of collective action to change the world. Gramsci’s strategy and tactics
focus on culture and education to combat modern ideologies, including religion. “Man…
is a product of history,” Boggs quotes Gramsci as saying, “not nature . . . . This means
that every revolution has been preceded by an intense labor of social criticism, of
cultural penetration and diffusion.”18


Gramsci’s philosophy is a guiding part of the revolutionary process. Through the
use of trade unions, schools, churches, and the family, Gramsci promised an entirely
new system of values, attitudes, beliefs, and morality, while other cultural and societal
elements would be redefined. Through revolutionary action in each of these cultural
areas, a new worldview would be created that challenges the ideological control and
socialization of daily life by the existing civil political structure.

Religious faith was singled out by Gramsci as being especially troublesome,
since Christianity has a tendency to create an “apolitical fatalism” among the oppressed.
He believed that Catholicism and Christianity must be combated through a strategy of
driving a wedge between the churches and their followers to establish a new civil
society.19
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In operational terms, these insights mean that “if socialism is to assert its
ideological hegemony, it must create its own culture. . . .” Gramsci stressed that the
overall struggle against the bourgeois-Christian (and Judeo-Christian) civilization would
have to sweep away all aspects of the old order, including the cultural, economic, and
political elements. For Gramsci, a cultural revolution included all hidden dimensions of
mass consciousness, especially the religious principles that guide the people’s thoughts
and actions. This struggle for ideological hegemony and destruction of capitalism are
essential preconditions for socialist transformation. Cultural Marxism is the key to
creating an integrated society that will achieve political and economic control in the
name of “social justice.”20

Malachi Martin explained that
Gramsci’s quiet, anonymous revolution
would do everything in the name of man’s
dignity and rights, and in the name of the
claims and constraints of Christianity:
“Accomplish that, said Gramsci, and you
will have established a true and freely
adopted hegemony over the civil and
political thinking of every formerly Christian
country. Do that, he promised, and in
essence you will have Marxized the West.
The final step -- the Marxization of the
politics of life itself -- will then follow. All
classes will be one class. All minds will be
proletarian minds. The earthly Paradise
will be achieved.”21

Gramsci admonished his followers
that non-violence did not mean sitting back
 
The Keys of This Blood by Malachi
and waiting for revolution to happen –
Martin exposed the Marxist infiltration
people had to make it happen. “What was
of the Catholic Church.
essential insisted Gramsci,” Malachi Martin
stressed, “was to Marxize the inner man.”22 Hence, for nearly five decades a
revolutionary Marxist fifth column has been working openly to transform American
culture from one founded upon a free market and personal liberties to one that could be
made amenable to a socialist governance and secularization. These subversive
activities were expected to pay-off after fifteen to twenty-five years of effort -- the
estimated time needed for successfully instilling a new set of socialist-Marxist values in
America’s youth—to “Marxize” the inner man.

Education was a major channel for this transformation. Professor Mary Grabar, in
her America’s Survival, Inc. report on the educational methods of former Obama
associate Bill Ayers, quotes Ayers as saying “teaching invites transformations, it urges
revolutions small and large,” “capitalism promotes racism and militarism,” and
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