fake NOChurch news

A psychopathic warmonger is fired and virtually everybody is happy, except...

It has always amazed me just how wrong EWTN seems to get pretty much every news piece they report about. It's almost impressive.

EWTN is, of course, part of the problem in the Church because it has been a mouthpiece for NOChurch at least for as long as I have been watching them. However, its  views on most other issues are also misinformed. 

Perhaps I have an inkling for a mild form of broadcast self-flagellation, but I do watch some of their news from time to time. It is not one of my proudest boasts, but I also do subsribe to their YouTube channel where I am constantly bombarded with 'fake news from a NOChurch americanist perspective'.

Their reporting on Church matters misses the mark most often on account of omission, simply ignoring more obvious angles to front some viewpoint only NOChurch agents can find. When it comes to U.S. domestic policies, they are pretty much like Fox News, except they are anti-abortion and they cover more of what has been called the 'life issues', but they will generally hit and miss in roughly the same way. It is when they report on international politics that they miss the mark most, and that their reporting often veers into lies of commision, not unlike any of the mainstream press, it must be stressed. 

As most know by now, the arch-warmonger of the Trump administration - John Bolton - was fired, or quit, whatever the case may be. All the same virtually everybody was happy with this because they saw in him a man whose solution to everything seemed to be lobbing a few missiles, or starving a population. Even on Fox News there was jubilation - largely from Tucker Carlson, who is pretty much the only anti-warmonger on mainstream American television, but still. It had not occured to me that there would be mainsream 'Catholics' who would be against his fiering until I turned on EWTN.

There I was treated to this horrible show:

I still remember when he was hired. A lot of the people who voted in Trump saw it as a form of betrayal for Trump to appoint a man who has been directly responsible for much of the decision-making surrounding the 2nd Iraq war, which Trump had in a round-about way complained about while on the campaign trail.

They brought in someone who informed us that Bolton was a "great pick", I believe was the exact phrasing. It was a black woman, I remember. Normally, race would not be an issue, but I found it odd that they chose her to laud the pick of this warmonger, suspecting they did it to ease the optics given that the Trump administration (wrongly) and the neocons (not without justification) have been accused of being racists.

I should, in fairness, not have been surprised by their love-fest for Bolton upon his dismissal given how they covered his appointment, and given that EWTN is pretty much a warmongering neocon station. I normally call it Fox News for people with rosaries, or who don't mind them. They claim to present news "from a Catholic perspective", apart from any news which have anything to do with "just war", the inviolability of human life outside U.S. shores or such issues. Still, I must admit I was not expecting them to leap to his defence.

Now, some might argue that I only saw one piece of possibly many, some of which may have been anti-Bolton, and this may indeed be true. However, how we choose to present ourselves says a lot about us. If they did other critical pieces, they did not want these saved for posterity on the Internet. EWTN purposely chose to upload a piece which lamented that the Trump administration has lost a man who seemingly has never seen a war he didn't like. That says a lot, and frankly, it says all that is relevant on this issue.

If EWTN wants to propagate for war then "who am I to judge"? However, I resent most that they choose to front themselves as "news from a Catholic perspective". Never once , for instance, have I ever heard them discussing the most Catholic concept of the "just war doctrine". Their reporting on Iran is almost always uninformed when it is not outright lies, as can be evidenced in this clip. Iran kept its end of the nuclear agreementt, for instance, something which even the U.S. deep state apparatus confirmed, along with all other international organisations.

They make it clear to me why Catholics in the U.S. are so misinformed about the world at large. For instance, I have seen many reports from then on Syria, and not once have they ever mentioned that the U.S. has been working alongside Islamists to oust Assad - frequently presenting the U.S. as caring for Syrian lives. Even worse, not once have they ever mentioned - in the reports I have seen - that the Catholic and Orthodox bishops of Syria have condemned the Western intervention and are fully behind Assad. 

Here we have Catholics going out of their way to stay out of mainstream media lies, only to come to a neocon operation fronting itself as Catholic. 

It is profoundly sad that they have chosen to mislead Catholics and the only mitigating factor I can allow for is the possibility that they do this out of extreme ignorance and not out of sheer malice. 

Still, it is ignorance which obviously crosses into being sinful. The Roman Catechism is, after all, keen to stress that one  lies if one says something false believing it is true, but having been neglegent of finding out the actual truth. In other words, they have an obligation towards justice and truth to find out the actual truth instead of misleading their viewers, even if we accept the charitable notion that they misninform by accident, which I obviously do not.

 ...

The grinch who stole Holy Week, or more honestly put, the attention whore who tried to upstage it - Sunday 25th to Saturday 31st of March - Holy Week

As we all should be aware, but most are not, the Holy Week reforms of the 1950s were quite sweeping. Berfore Holy Week, Rorate Caeli once again re-posted an article on " The Reform of Holy Week in the Years 1951-1956". It is well-worth reading, especially in connection with the news recently that some traditional orders had been allowed to celebrate the pre-1950s Holy Week on a 3-year experimental basis starting this year.

Traditionalists are nothing if not resourceful and it didn't take long before there was a resource for the pre-1950 Holy Week with English translations, aptly called Pre-1955 Holy Week (although I grant that it may well have been present before the announcement). Rorate Caeli also provided us with a clarification on who exactly may chant the Passion. These two interventions by Rorate Caeli were quite helpful to me personally, as I finally came to realise taht the Passion is not actually the Gospel reading for Good Friday, but that we actually have a Passion reading followed by a Gospel reading, at least in the traditinal liturgy, pre-1950s edition in any case. Rorate Caeli was also kind enough to provide us with pictures of Palm Sunday from the pre-1955 Holy Week celebration.

Anybody who knows anything about Christianity knows that Easter is the biggest event of the Church year (yet it seems that professional journalists writing for major state-sponsored publications don't have a clue about what Easter is all about, to nobody's surprise, and they are probably even proud about it). We shall also know that Holy Week is the most august week of the year. It is for this reason that the secular anti-Catholic world generally steps up its attacks on the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. It is also the week that the world's most popular attention-whore gets up to his usual attention-seeking antics in order to seemingly steal attention away from the Church's commemorations and celebrations.

This year was no exception, but having noticed that his Maundy Thursday foot fetish doesn't get the attention it used to , Bergoglio decided to get a little help from his now 93-year old atheist friend Euginio Scalfari. Every time he speaks to that an he can be guaranteed a few scandalous headlines and this time was no different. Just in time for the Holy Week Celebrations, in which Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist and died to save us from the fires of hell and allow us too spend eternity with God, Bergoglio told his friend that there is no hell, and that those who die in sin simply vanish, while those who repent before end up spending eternity in the presence of God. This interview was timed to coincide with Maundy Thursday, and naturally overshadowed his feet-washing ceremony, which was once more carried out in prison and against the rubrics of the Novus Ordo, rubrics which he himself amended, it has to be mentioned.

The reactions were not long in coming, and predictably, much of the Catholic press tied itself up in knots, blaming the poor atheist fool Scalfari, instead of pointing to Bergoglio as the culprit. The Vatican issued a non-denial denial, informing us, as we all know, that Scalfari does not record his interviews so it cannot be ascertained whether what was reported was the exact phrasing that Bergoglio used. In other words, they were saying loudly and clearly that Bergoglio is a heretic, as we all know, but we can use the he-doesn't-record-interviews card to get us out of a very serious doctrinal situation. They could really have done little else, for had they said that Bergoglio had actually admitted that he doesn't believe in hell, then they would efffectively have been confirming what we all know, that the man is not Catholic. Had they come out and denied that Bergoglio said that, then they would have had to explain how it is that a man who, as far as I know, hasn't faced many accusations of total misrepresenation in his work before - save for when he speaks to Bergoglio - could get such a fundamental thing so wrong.

Bergoglio himself did not come out and deny it, so we can rest safely in the knowledge that Bergoglio told his atheist friend that. It must be noted that this is not the first time that Bergoglio has denied that souls end up in hell, as Scalfari has reported on this before, and even in Church documents Bergoglio has written something to the tune of everything been on its way to Heaven. His defenders have pointed out that Bergoglio mentions the devil quite a lot, and so he must be misquoted if he has said that the devil does not exist. That is a logical fallacy if ever there was one, as it is entirely possible to believe that the devil exists and yet believe that nobody ends up in hell; that the devil would spend eternity in hell with his demons. In any case it was dishonest of them as they could easily have found multiple instances of Bergoglio telling us that those who die in mortal sin never end up in hell, assuming that anybody can even die in mortal sin, which Bergoglio does not seem to believe - save for traditional Catholics who use doctrine as stones to throw at people while sitting in the judgment seat of Moses. That's his phrasing, not mine, of course.

On the topic of attacking the Church's doctrines, Bergoglio could not resist taking a barb at the notion of truth, insisting that priests ought not to make "idols of certain abstract truths". This was in a separate speech, mind you, proving beyond doubt, if anyone is still not convinced, that the man is in constant heresy mode, and not just when speaking to his atheist anti-Catholic friends who, if you are to believe his enablers, have nothing better to do than...

Subscribe to fake NOChurch news