- Demographics And Doctrine
- Pandemonium E-Book Now Available
- Steve Mosher Meets Chinese Virus Expert
Trouble Lies Ahead In Demographics And In Doctrine
Is demography destiny? Eric Sammons has done a lot of digging into the numbers, and he finds that the situation of the Catholic Church “is far worse than even the most pessimistic projections.”
Relying on figures from CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Sammons reports that America’s population is growing twice as fast as the Catholic population. Moreover, what growth the Church has enjoyed is due almost entirely to immigration. And there, the figures show that, the longer a Catholic immigrant is in the United States, the more likely he is to leave the Church.
Well, wherever the growth came from, one would expect families to grow and baptisms to increase, right? But between 1970 and 2019, “the number of infant baptisms decreased by almost half” in the U.S. And most of the decrease has occurred in the last twenty years.
Adult baptisms have also tanked. Since 2005, the annual number has fallen by 54%. And while our efforts to evangelize non-Catholics seem to be faltering, the situation is worse among cradle Catholics. The number of Americans identifying themselves as Catholic has fallen by ten percent since 2005. As the Pew Trust polls have found, self-identified “ex-Catholics” now constitute the second-largest religious denomination in America. CARA reports that their number has accelerated since 2000, and has now reached some 30 million.
And that number represents only those still living. How many millions of baptized Catholics have died outside the Church since Vatican II, deprived of the Sacraments in their final hours? Did they realize the danger that posed to their eternal souls?
Or did they receive in their lifetimes even a minimal catechesis that taught them to bear in mind every day the Four Last Things? Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell?
One pastor puts the question succinctly: “Pray for invincible ignorance.”
“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.”
Sammons uncovers even more trouble: although the nominal Catholic population is growing, the number of those attending Mass weekly has fallen by 50% since 1970. Again, most of the decline has occurred since 2000. And that figure represents the situation before the virus wreaked havoc in the Church.
Robert Cardinal Sarah sees things differently: “We need priests who are men of the interior life, ‘God’s watchmen’ and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians,” he writes.
And what about the laity? We have to prepare as the current crisis intensifies. In our view, it Calls For Confrontation, Not Capitulation
In Veritatis Splendor, his 1993 encyclical, Saint John Paul II, echoes Saint Paul and calls us to “obedience to truth” and to “turn to God from idols.” (1 Thess. 1:9)
Veritatis Splendor: A closer look at the Latin renders the “brilliant, bright light of truth,” the Truth Who is Christ, the Light of the world.
Saint John Paul writes to defend “certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied,” not only in the culture but “within the Christian community itself”:
“Also, an opinion is frequently heard which questions the intrinsic and unbreakable bond between faith and morality, as if membership in the Church and her internal unity were to be decided on the basis of faith alone, while in the sphere of morality a pluralism of opinions and of kinds of behavior could be tolerated … We are facing what is certainly a genuine crisis.” (emphasis in original)
John Paul’s chilling insight was written almost thirty years ago. Has the “Christian community” recovered in the years since?
The numbers reported by Eric Sammons don’t look good. Remember, his distressing figures described the deplorable condition of the Church before the virus hit last winter.
Since then, for the first time in history, attendance at Holy Mass was forbidden for months. Now, as churches slowly reopen, pastors wonder, how many will return?
Caesar Is Not Our Friend
Clearly the virus lockdowns wrought serious damage. Here in PRI’s home state of Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam declared abortion to be “essential,” while Mass was deemed “non-essential.” He received precious little pushback, even from Church leaders.
Northam’s views were no secret. A pediatrician, he had already declared his support of infanticide for children who survives late-term abortions. During the pandemic, many secular Caesars like Northam exploited the virus to deny eternal truths as well as fundamental, inalienable rights. For them, immorality was an asset, not a liability. And most of them got away with it.
They cannot be trusted. They must be confronted with the truth. No compromise.
During the long lockdowns, the natural bonds of community were frayed to the breaking point. However, the stringent measures brought many families together in unexpected ways. Parents and children spent time together as never before, meeting a demanding yet fruitful challenge that few of us will soon forget.
So let’s look at the “bright side” of truth and pray that this strengthening of family bonds will prepare us for the coming confrontation with a secular culture that is radicalizing at warp speed.
Compromise, A False Idol
The crisis that John Paul describes is dire indeed, but we cannot solve it by negotiating with the Culture of Death. Saint Paul calls us to “turn away from idols,” not reach a “compromise” designed to weaken our resolve and dilute our faith for the sake of a false sense of security (“OK, I’ll take this idol but not that one.”)
In Matthew 5, Christ tells us not to hide our light under a basket, but to “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in Heaven.” But wait, aren’t we “facing a genuine crisis”? How can we witness to the truth in these dark days, with the forces of darkness fighting hard not only to drive the light of truth out of the public square, but to extinguish it altogether?
Like Pope John Paul, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn grew up under the Communist boot. Both men were manifestly aware of the errors of Marxism, but they focused more on the “genuine crisis” in the West. That crisis continues today.
Solzhenitsyn put the problem bluntly: “Men have forgotten God.”
To confront the secular tsunami, he said in 1983, “we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned … it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested.”
In Ephesians 6, Saint Paul gives us our marching orders: “ Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”
Let us pray that we can bravely make the light of Christ shine before men in these dark days.
At the time Solzhenitsyn wrote, Russia and Poland were still under the heavy boot of communism. Christians in both countries – and Indeed countries all over the world that suffered under communism – were persecuted in every possible way.
One day some 40 years ago I met in Washington with members of several religious groups, including Catholic groups. Our host was Michael Novak, my good friend and mentor as well as one of the foremost Catholic social thinkers of his generation. I still recall how a heated argument arose regarding the socialist countries that were persecuting Christians all over the world. Several of the guests, all Christians who were prominent in various academic and professional pursuits, were very critical of our own relatively free society here in the United States.
A few of the participants actually argued that it would be good for the United States to move towards socialism, even if a secular government should be anti-Catholic and anti-Christian. Their view was, look – John Paul II grew up under communism , and he became one of the greatest Christians in recent history. So did Solzhenitsyn. Compare them to the United States and the shabby shape that the church is in, our colleague argued. We can certainly do better –and maybe living under the yoke of communism will make us better Christians, and more Christians, and bring more people to their senses and value the faith that they are now forgetting because of the luxury in which they are prospering. Yes, they are prospering perhaps, but they are not flourishing. Communism makes for great martyrs. When’s the last time the United States produced a martyr, anyway?
Well, I’ve heard a lot of arguments for socialism, but that one takes the cake. Yes, communism causes suffering , deprivation, and the loss of a vibrant practice of the faith. But John Jacques Rousseau was wrong: you cannot force people to be free, and you cannot force people to be good, or be good Catholics. John Paul the Second became a great saint not because of communism, but in spite of it. Now it’s true that we are all called to be great Saints. But we must seek a society in which the faith is allowed to flourish and were the faithful freely make the choice to follow Christ. There is no shortcut to sainthood, including communism.
Pandemonium e-Book Now Available Free on www.pop.org
As the Wuhan virus lingers on around the world, political leaders and other magnates in many countries have decided to take advantage of the confusion and uncertainty to strengthen their power and influence in various ways.
To investigate the approach that various governments and other institutions are taking to consolidate their power and change our culture , the Population Research Institute has published a free e-book offering the accounts of experts from several countries around the world. Their first-hand accounts report how those power plays have played out in their countries.
The book begins by looking at the origins of the virus in China , including an incisive analysis by Steve Mosher, President of PRI. His contribution is followed by studies hat pursue the use of data management – the Google of the world that already know everything about you put want to control you too. Then there are the media, and the disinformation manipulators they work with; the lawyers, and how they want to cash in; the United Nations, which considers itself the natural force to run a locked down world; and international organizations, industries, and elites seeking to gain prominence and power as the people continue to struggle under the measures still imposed by governments throughout the world.
You won’t find this depth of worldwide analysis anywhere else. And this e-book is available right now, free, on our website at www.pop.org.
It’s called “Pandemonium” – to get it now, just go to our website at www.pop.org and click on the banner to download your free copy in .pdf format.
Remember, you won’t get all this vital information in one place anywhere else. Just go to www.pop.org and download Pandemonium today.
Segment two
PRI President Steve Mosher Interviews the Chinese Scientist Who Defected to US
She says that COVID-19 not from nature but created in lab, Here’s his report, first published in LifeSiteNews.com
The coronavirus was man-made and did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, says a Chinese whistleblower and one of the first scientists to study COVID-19 in China.
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, 36, a medical doctor and virologist who fled to the US in April to tell the world about the origins of the virus, said that based on her own research the coronavirus “did not come from nature at all. It was created in a lab.”
Dr. Yan and her colleagues have just published a scientific paper summarizing how the “unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome suggest … sophisticated laboratory modification rather than natural evolution.” In it, she lays out exactly how the deadly pathogen could have been synthesized in the P-4 lab in Wuhan.
And now various scientists from around the world are saying she may be right.
In a lengthy interview with me two weeks ago, Yan, who is in hiding and fears for her life, said that the Chinese government knew the virus was man-made and knew about the dangers of person-to-person transmission well before it became a global pandemic.
Before she defected, Yan worked at Asia’s top virology lab – the P3 Lab at the University of Hong Kong. The lab is the global center for coronavirus research where its famous “SARS hunters” cracked the code of the first SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003.
In late December, her supervisor Dr. Leo Poon asked her to look into a cluster of SARS-like bases that had originated in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China. She began to communicate with a network of medical contacts throughout China, and by December 31, learned that there was human-to-human transmission of the new virus — a fact that was suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and later by the World Health Organization, she said.
Yan took her concerns to Poon, who repeatedly warned her to “keep silent,” she said. He told her not to criticize the CCP or contradict them on their official line on the origins of the coronavirus, which they said was spread from eating wild animals at a wet market in Wuhan. “If you do, we will get into trouble and be disappeared,” she said he told her.
For three months, Yan took his advice to heart and continued her research, She soon discovered that COVID-19 has two artificial, man-made “insertions” that make it particularly deadly to human beings. The first “insertion” allows it to spread easily from person-to-person, while the second “insertion” allows the virus to infect different kinds of tissue once it is already in the human body.
“Any scientist who has this knowledge will know that it is not from nature,” she told me.
Around the world, virologists who are studying the virus are starting to back her claims that the virus is man-made.
“The properties that we now see in the virus, we have yet to discover anywhere in nature,” said Norwegian virologist Birger Sorensen in a July 13 interview with the scientific journal Minerva. “We know that these properties make the virus very infectious, so if it came from nature, there should also be many animals infected with this, but we have still not been able to trace the virus in nature”
“When we compare the novel coronavirus with the one that caused SARS, we see that there are altogether six inserts in this virus that stand out compared to other known SARS viruses,” said Sorensen who works for Immunor AS, a Norwegian company that researches and develops vaccines.
Nikolai Petrokvsy, the director of endocrinology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, also said that the virus could be man-made.
“Our own research, which is currently under review and was based on rigorous molecular modeling, revealed some highly unexpected findings for a virus postulated to have recently crossed from animal to humans,” he told me in an interview. “From the very earliest isolates it was uniquely adapted to infect humans above other species we tested.”
An internationally renowned scientist, Prof. Joseph Tritto, who is the president of the Paris-based World Academy of Biomedical Sciences and Technologies (WABT), has also published a book describing how the China Virus was created in the lab. I have summarized Prof. Tritto’s book here.
US researchers are being more cautious, but are not dismissing Dr. Yan’s claims.
“We can’t rule it out,” said Jonathan Latham, a virologist and co-founder of the Bioscience Research Project in Ithaca, NY, a non-profit that conducts scientific research. He said his team of researchers believe that the Wuhan Institute of Virology studied tissue samples from miners who were infected with the virus in 2012, but they don’t know whether those samples were later manipulated in the lab. “If they go wrong, then you have a man-made virus,” he told me. He also believes that the virus “almost certainly escaped” from the lab.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that although he disagrees with Yan’s theory of “insertions,” he would not rule out the possibility that the virus could have been lab-manipulated.
“It is important to note, this does not rule out the possibility the virus was laboratory constructed or laboratory-enhanced using methods that do not leave signatures,” he said.
Dr. Yan, in her new article, has convincingly rebutted the arguments of Lathan and Ebright. She points out that both are based on a belated claim, by the now disappeared director of the P4 lab in Wuhan, Dr. Shi Zhengli, that she “found a close relative to the China Virus in nature” way back in 2012. Dr. Shi only reported this “discovery” in January of this year after the outbreak of the pandemic, registering it under the name of coronavirus RATG-13. Its suspiciously similar to SARS-CoV-2 and, as Dr. Yan explains in her article, a close study of its genome shows that it is a fabrication.
For her part, Yan was desperate to get the truth out in order to save lives. She knew she would have to leave China to do so, she said. “I tried to persuade my husband who worked in the same lab to come with me,” she said. “But I failed.” Yan secretly bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles and landed in the US on April 28.
She spent her first two months in the country in hiding, while being debriefed by US intelligence officials. But with cases rising dramatically around the world, she began to speak out. She gave an interview to Fox News last month.
There are nearly 30 million cases of the virus and almost a million deaths globally, according to the most recent statistics collected by Johns Hopkins University.
Why would the Chinese government create such a deadly pathogen? Was it trying to create a bioweapon or a vaccine? Yan said she doesn’t know the answer, but noted that all labs in China are under the control of the government. And in Wuhan, research into the coronavirus is under the supervision of Chen Wei, an epidemiologist who is a bioweapons expert and major general in the Chinese military, Yan said.
Adding to the concerns about China’s bioweapons program is the fact that Major General Chen Wei was just last week given an award, called “The People’s Hero,” by none other than Chinese President Xi Jinping for her work on the China Virus.
According to Yan, the Wuhan lab had used a coronavirus owned by the People’s Liberation Army as “the backbone” for their “insertions.” The pathogen, internationally registered under ZC45 is the only one owned by the People’s Liberation Army biowarfare labs, she said.
“The Wuhan lab was collecting hundreds of coronavirus from all over China,” she said. “They claimed it was to better predict future coronavirus epidemics that might emerge from nature. But if they were worried about a coronavirus epidemic, why weren’t they making any effort into vaccine research, as we were doing in our lab in Hong Kong?”
As to how the virus might have escaped from the “high containment” Wuhan lab, Yan said, “It was not an accident. No one in the lab got sick or died. There are always two people in the lab. No live virus would be able to escape.”
Yan said she doesn’t know if the escape was caused by a disgruntled employee or whether a more sinister plot involving the Chinese government was afoot.
What we do know is that the Great Chinese Cover-up continues. Dr. Shi, who created the China Virus in her lab, has disappeared. The Wuhan Lab itself remains off-limits to foreigners. The Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to hide the origins of the virus.
Since she began speaking out last month, Yan has been fired by the University of Hong Kong which also dismissed her findings that the virus is man-made. Her husband has distanced himself from her, and her parents have publicly called her a “traitor,” she said.
“I do this because I am a scientist and I know the truth and I want to tell it to the world,” she told me. “But if they find me, they will kill me.”
Segment Three
New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday the reason why “mostly uneducated” Trump voters support the president is because Trump just has hate for liberal elitists.
But what about the “educated Left”?
The Left has used various terms to dismiss without argument or logic or evidence the conservative position – alt-right, conspiracy theory, radical, far right, lunatic fringe, and more.
And of course they have their favorite epithets as well.
For instance, “Nazi” and “Hitler” are not historical terms for the indolent Woke – they’re verbal weapons of choice. They are the only two words in their vocabulary for “evil.” If they’re taking Ethics 101 at a typical college these days, that absolves the Woke from knowing anything else in class. They get an “Instant “A.”
But we presume that folks like Friedman are educated. So why don’t they demand evidence and argument?
Because they are trapped by their ideological blinders – but frankly, it’s more like handcuffs. If they accepted argument, they’d be stuck: their hypotheses might be proven wrong.
So they refuse to engage in honest conversation. Their feelings are their argument. They won’t even agree on the meaning of simple, basic words.
Without a language in common, there is no community of discourse. Which means we can’t communicate at all. Simple, plain words become political, and then politicized. They are brickbats to badger and silence, not to discuss and persuade.
But George Orwell was right – words are very important. Remember the Ministry of Truth, where the meaning of words and the facts of history changed all the time? And remember Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice that he could make a word mean whatever he wants it to mean, as long as it keeps him in power ?
And speaking of power:
Stalin wrote a book on language. Confucius recognized the importance of restoring the proper meaning of words. Unfortunately, two generations of school students have been deprived of the tools with which to analyze critically the language and arguments and assertions used not only in politics, but in science, culture, and religion. As a result, these graduates, until they learn by the seat of their pants and common sense what’s going on, are prisoners in a cacophony of words
Their ”anointed” superiors, like Freidman, will use their power language not to educate but to control, to subjugate, and boss people around. Those who resist their superior vision will be punished, severely.
Memories of Conventions Past
In the summer of 1960, I was demonstrating outside the Republican National Convention at the Chicago Stockyards. My homemade placard read, “Out The Door With Eleanor,” a tribute to the wife of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eleanor was an itinerant leftist termagant in those days, and she was not beloved among conservatives of that era. Or of any other era, for that matter.
So there I was, cheering for Barry on the streets on Chicago’s South Side, when a guy from my Indiana high school hailed me. His father was a national committeeman – from Kansas, I believe – and he had an extra pass to the convention floor. Would I like to use it?
Well, use it I did. I handed my sign to my sister and went in the first door I saw, a service entrance, and wandered into what looked like a cavernous storeroom. I turned out to be just outside the entrance to the main floor, I saw a group of attractive young women, dressed up in matching black cocktail dresses, lined up four abreast like a high-school pom-pom troupe. This was the old days, when real bands played and real balloons festooned the hall’s ceiling Sure enough, the gals were part of the “demonstration” that would spontaneously erupt the moment Nixon’s nomination was put forward later that evening.
They were all wearing white sashes emblazoned with “Nixon” in blue.
Nixon? No way. I had to do something.
So I went up to one of them, a cute blonde twenty-something. “You CAN’T be for Nixon,” I cried. “He doesn’t stand for anything!” I was pleading in my most mature possible 13-year-old voice.
The gal smiled and turned over the right shoulder-strap of her dress to show me the campaign button hidden there.
“Kennedy for President,” it read.
“I’m gettin’ paid for this, honey,” she cooed.
For the past sixty years, the voice of this accidental oracle has hovered close by. In my book of American politics, her line is Genesis I, Verse 1. Her unvarnished wisdom penetrates every page.
