Nice to know that, when it comes to vast shadowy conspiracies, we’re still No. 1.

However – you mention the Knights of Malta over this side of the Atlantic, most people will automatically think of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, not the Crusaders.

Secondly, you’re right about the Knights Templar; it would have been so easy, as well! According to Wikipedia, “The Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312 and much of their property was given to the Hospitallers.”

So the Knights of Malta are the successors of the Templars. Ah, it all comes together now!

(Dear Mr. Hersh – Dan Brown writes fiction not history, you do realise?)

Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Those coins passed around are simply “challenge coins” which, if one is shown to a fellow soldier, he must then produce his own or stand you a drink. If he has his, you of course owe the drink.

Oh come off it, Seymour! You’re just trying to cheer me up, aren’t you.

Is the pen name of JARED LOUGHNER, Seymour Hersh?

Hersh only cites witnesses who cannot be identified in print, or who’s veracity is publicly protected under diplomatic accords.

Cheers

Tops the Zionists Conspiracies promulgated by certain others….

(nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.

Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact a self-proclaimed “Soldier for Allah” gunned down several military personnel a little over a year ago, less than a decade after 3,000 Americans were killed on the eastern seaboard, and in the wake of two pretty ugly wars, could it?

Well, heck, I already spent alot of time and effort preparing my signs for the next Zionist-Masonic-Gun Nuts-Bitter Clingers Conspiracy protest march and now I have to change all of them for the Papist-Opus Dei-Knights of Malta Conspiracy protest march. Sheesh! And with the Mayan end of the world coming up, who has this kind of time?

Ya know, things were alot easier back in the day when the Soviets, ChiComs and Rosicrucians were behind every tree and under every bed.

Oh, and I do hope Seymour gives those meds prescribed for him another try. Reality hurts at first, Sey, but it will get better over time.

Seymour, the sole reason I canceled my subscription. I just got tired of putting up with his venom and BS.

Wow. How many cathedral spires are now decorating the skyline of Baghdad? Too many to count, I’d imagine, given how much time our military has had to demolish mosques and replace them with Notre Dames.

I hope Iraqi Christians aren’t letting all their new power and influence go to their heads.

ROMAN CATHOLIC WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH

JEWISH WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH

vs.

ISLAMIC WORLD DOMINATION WATCH

As a 4th degree Knight of Columbus, I’m feeling awfully neglected.

I think I’ve got one of those crusader coins Sy Hersh babbles about. In 1999, the Royal Mint issued a medal honoring the 9ooth anniversary of the Order of St. John and I managed to snag one. I still have it and I love that thing. Big ol’ hunk of sterling silver. Wish I could find another one.

He left out the Jesuits. Unfair!

Stephen – shhhhh – don’t let on. The real power behind the whole thing is the KofC, the current face of the Illuminati, disguising themselves as middle class guys in bowling leagues hosting fish fries and tootsie roll drives.

If the leaders of the current military are casting themselves as the protectors of Christians in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, they’re not really doing that great of a job. Check the change in percentage of Christians in Iraq pre-war and now.
Unless their secret plan is to first get all of the Christians out of Iraq and then…. oooooooooooooo

This is great. Opus Dei and all. Cheney planning to build cathedrals. Sounds believable to me.

You know, it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between members of the elite media and bag ladies on the corner muttering about how the cats are in league with the Devil. The flight into the irrational is breathtaking, and thanks to the internet, for all to see.

[...] Hattip to Christopher Johnson at Midwest Conservative Journal.  Seymour Hersch, part time left wing loon and full time writer at the New Yorker, critiques US policy in the Middle East and blames us papists: [...]

And all of God’s children said riiiiiiiiiiight.

Of there is the ultra secret Franciscan conspiracy to make everyone go barefoot.

There is nothing new here. I remember Margaret Mead reporting tribal gossip as research. Kennedy’s press secretary said that Hersh was the most gullible reporter he had ever met.

Christopher:

O good Lord! Has Seymour cribbed from Dan Brown?
As to the military being anti Moslem. Lemme see:
Major Hassan guns down 14 soldiers ( I always include the pregnant soldier who dies with her kid) the absolutely brutal battles with Sadar (the Iraqi Shi’ite cleric that was openly backed by Iran); the Pashtuns who are past being deeply disordered and live in a perverted society (and I use it in the moral sense)

Yeah I guess the hostility has some logic.

Anyways, Seyemour’s an intellectually and morally superior imbecile. I suspect that that majority of Special forces’ soldiers have a more Evangelical bent. Personally, I’d like to see more Catholic/Orthodox special force members if only because the Evangelical can be wilfully blind to the fact that in the Mideast some of the Christians’ ancestors actually heard Jesus preach or were baptized by the Apostles themselves.

Seymour should actually read the contemporary accounts of Moslem piracy and raids. They shaped the human and urban geography of the western Mediterranean. And if he thinks the Special forces are contemptuous of the Moslems, he should read what the Europeans thought of them back in the day. Just look at the Knights of Malta during the siege in 1564

xavier
They didn’t end until 1830 when the French conquered the Maghreb

The New Yorker has gone so far down hill it rolled into the sewer and become a tabloid. The whole piece is preposterous.

Fact is, the Roman Church will never again have the kind of political or military power to force its will upon the populace that it once did. For the last ten or so years, the RC has lost 100,000 members in Germany and other European countries. In the US, the RC has closed hundreds of schools and parishes. Few now believe Roman Catholic Church is incapable of theological, political (internal or external) or sexual error. Few now believe the RC is the anointed OTC and boss of Christianity that it once proclaimed itself to be.

After posting this piece, which obviously owes much of its inspiration to substance ingestion, pulp fiction and a number of dark spiritual entities, Hersch will have a hard time walking into a bar full of journalists without being laughed out of the place.

That’s 100,000 members lost *annually* in Germany.

No, Hersh will do just fine, because IIRC he won a Pulitzer and what he writes is in at least alignment with journalists’ prejudices. They don’t want him to be invalidated.

Re Whitestone: Catholic Church sucks, going down the tubes, etc., needs to take ordersaccept correction from people just as screwed up as its own members, etc.

A slight correction: it’s only Army and Air Force members that belong to the Knights of Malta; Naval personnel belong to the Mystic Knights of the Sea. But seriously, it is a little known fact that during the energy shortages of the ’70s and ’80s the Knights of Malta sponsored the sale of a certain fuel-efficient Volkswagen as a way of striking back against Islamic economic power. The car was to be called…wait for it…the Crusader Rabbit.

JC Fremont: “Holy Mackerel!” and “Buzz me, Miz Blue”

This guy is clearly a mental defective propagating risible nonsense on organizations about which he knows less than nothing–Opus Dei, Knights of Malta, etc. But what is truly depressing is how many stupid people, in the comments to the article at the link you provided, believe the whole thing and don’t question any of it.

Whitestone – There’s an old saying that goes something like – “Best to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

You might want to tape this to your monitor and refer back to it before you start commenting about Catholic matters. I’m just sayin’…

Riddle me this, Riddler Seymour Hersh:

“Well den, who da frick is da Whore of Babylon den?”

ROMAN CATHOLIC WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH

Yeah, right.

Mark Windsor,

That would leave poor, clueless Whitestone with nothing to say. Poor thing, poor thing…

Just citing stats/facts in evidence.

Institutions being what they are…sometimes they act in their own best interest to the detriment of their people and that does tend to cause distrust and bitterness and since the people are no longer burned at the stake for dissent, they can leave and they are doing so.

How I wish it were different. Until learning about Maciel, Lahey, Sodano, others and the internal and external politics, history, unbiblical doctrines, teachings and practices, homosexual practice in seminaries and monasteries, sexual abuse and cover-ups, I considered the Roman Church, which is the church of some of my father’s family going back centuries in Europe. However, I also have ties to the Waldensians and the Protestant Reformation in Europe, to the Eastern Church in the Middle East and Asia, to Jerusalem, Alexandria and to Republic of Georgia. My mother’s side of the family were Anglican and Scots-Irish protestants. There truly were/are other viable and vibrant movements of the Holy Spirit and expressions of Christ’s Church outside of the confines and jurisdiction of the Roman Church.

Speaking of conspiracies…

Is there a conspiracy to NOT produce Obama’s original birth certificate?

Wazzup wit’ dat?

Da Libs demanded Bush’s National Guard documents and Bush released them. So why the blazes can’t Obama release his original birth certificate?

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,

I smell the blood of a Libber Conspiracy mum!

Whitestone: Your negative statistics are centered on western Europe and the USA. Worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church grew by 17 million in 2009 (latest stats available)or more than 20% of the entire world’s population growth that year. I suspect that 17 million was substantially more than half of the growth of all Christians that year. Not being triumphal. Just an attempt to put matters into perspective.

Yes, Maciel is such an outstanding exemplar of Catholic teaching that he was removed frmo the order he founded and sent to do penance the remainder of his life.

And what do all these familial ties to how many different theologies mean anyway except as a rhetorical device?

Actually, Arnold, even the U.S. Church has held relatively steady over the past 25 years. with marginal gains and losses year by year; overall the Catholic Church has formed 24%-26% of the U.S. population for a generation or more now. Parishes are indeed closing in the northeast, but opening in the southwest. This is due to Hispanic in-migration, population shifts from the “rust-belt” to the “sun belt”, and also due to parish consolidations made necessary by the priest shortage.

Well, I’ve had my whitestonefest for the week, but would like to make one comment in slight agreement with one statement:

Fact is, the Roman Church will never again have the kind of political or military power to force its will upon the populace that it once did.

The basic structure of this claim is fantasy – how many troops did the pope ever have? Whitestone, of course, lives in a world of protestant fantasies by and large, but there is something to say about this.

Were it true, I would say “Thanks be to God”. What Father doesn’t discipline the child he loves? Hebrews 12:6. The Church has been too rich, too lazy, too full of itself too often. While the supposed wealth of the Church is, again a fantasy of protestants, secularists, and liberal Catholics, there really has been too much of it. Bishops needed a serious humbling to learn again that they are shepherds, not corporate executives. Priests need to hear again the call to a simple, holy life devoted to prayer and their people. Catholics need to learn again to depend on the Lord, not on their bank accounts. The irony is that the poor farmers who built the great parish churches, schools, colleges, and hospitals are now rich and willing to see those same institutions turned from their founding charisms. To a large degree, the Catholic people will always reflect their culture, and the culture of the United States is profoundly narcissistic and materialistic. These things have crept into our souls, but when we repent and return to the pure springs of the Catholic Faith, God, who chastens, will restore to us the joy of His salvation.

Now, there was never a perfect time in the life of the Church. There have always been sinners (I’m a big one, personally) among the people of God and, as I said, Catholics will always reflect our culture. But that’s the mercy of God, for when we lose sight of that fact, we are really in trouble, because then we have lost sight of the ultimate reality: salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Whitestone please, for the sake of your soul, stop reading Dave Hunt. He is a blooming idiot.

Whitestone, you’re right. It’s a mess.

But that’s no news. There’s a mediaeval joke that goes something along the lines of “A rich merchant living in Bordeaux (or it may be Venice, or Bruges, or where you like) has a good friend, Abraham the Jew, whom he constantly tries to get to convert to Catholicism. But Abraham remains unconvinced, until one day he tells his friend that he’s going on a business trip to Rome and will have an opportunity to see the Church up close and in all its glory, so if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen there.

“Oh, crap!” (or words to that effect) says the Christian. “Don’t do that! If you see the state of the church at Rome, you’ll never convert!” (This is the first half of the punchline).

But Abraham is not to be dissuaded, and off he goes, and his friend is convinced that this is it, it’ll never happen now once he’s seen Rome. But Abraham comes back, and announces with great joy to his friend that he’s done it, he’s been baptised, and now he’s a Catholic too!

“What? How did this happen?” asks his friend. “Didn’t you see what Rome is like?”

“Indeed I did,” says Abraham, “and that is what convinced me. I’m a business man, my friend, and if any human organisation was run like that, it wouldn’t last a week. But the Church has been around for centuries, so it must be of God.”

(That’s the second half of the punchline).

Heck, this goes back all the way to the 4th century, as St. Augustine (allegedly) said “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother”.

It goes back all the way to the start: out of the Twelve, one was a traitor, one denied Christ three times, the rest ran away and hid at the crucifixion (except for John) and afterwards one wouldn’t believe until he saw for himself. Not to mention all the times they got the complete wrong end of the stick; I think my favourite example is when after the feeding of the four thousand, Jesus is warning the disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod, and they decide this means He’s cross with them because they didn’t bring any bread for a snack.

Can’t you just see Our Lord facepalming as He explains it to them One. More. Time.?

I realize that Newsweek is not the New Yorker but they offered me a whopping 91% discount to come back. I asked my wife, “Why would I pay $20.00 to be aggravated for another year”?

Why would you pay twenty dollars for a product, when the corporation that makes it is only worth one dollar? Just buy the company and save nineteen bucks!

Kelso: “Buzz me, Miz Blue” Kingfish never did get that figured out, did he?

Fuinseoig, that’s actually a short story from the period.

Does the New York Times have any sane people writing for it these days?

Getting back on topic: The Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and of Rhodes,did not become the knights of Malta until at the earliest 1530, when the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V gave them Malta as a base after their eralier expulsion in 1522 from Rhodes by the Turks. In Malta they had their finest hour when they repelled an invasion by the Turks seeking to expell them permanently from the mediterranean during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565.

It is at that time that the Order formulated its plan and developed its strategies for world domination together with the secretive Opus Dei (if you look up the internet you will find out how secretive it is: adresses, phone numbers and contact details as well as objectives and programs all displayed) and by taking over the US Miltary (after all such an easy thing to do since they are all Catholics atarting with George Washington himself). Oh hang on: neither organization existed at the time of our finest hour.

How do I know all this: I was their Grandmaster during that Great Seige.

ROMAN CATHOLIC WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH

Did Obama swim the Tiber?

Did George Soros swim the Tiber?

How ’bout Oprah?

The best thing about these secret organizations like Opus Dei is that just about anyone can join – what a nefarious trick, hiding their secrecy by being wide open!!

Few now believe the RC is the anointed OTC

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we’ll start talking real numbers.

Seriously though, since when has majority belief equalled the truth?

(Took me a while to figure out OTC – Over the Counter? Is the RCC now traded on NASDAQ? No longer need an MD’s prescription to join? Offshore Technology Conference -the RCC is now in the oil biz (I am in Houston after all)? Oh… the One True Church.

“Seymour should actually read the contemporary accounts of Moslem piracy and raids. They shaped the human and urban geography of the western Mediterranean.

Not going to happen, because after all the Barbary Pirates were an Islamic society, and he would then have to acknowledge that we have been fighting Islam on and off for over 200 years now.

Whitestone is a proof that the RCC is the OTC.

He emphasizes the fact that this Whore of Babylon is billions strong after 2000 years, despite VERY bad behavior that really should have destroyed her long since. God’s favor, indeed. He is the illustration of the Devil’s disdain of intelligent argument, continually pointing at what the Church never claims to get right (human behavior) and declaring that this invalidates what she does claim to get right (solely doctrine on faith and morals, as promulgated OFFICIALLY from the Chair of Peter.) Papal opinions and the views of “The Vatican” as interpreted by the AP aren’t doctrine.

Thank you, Mr. Whitestone. Believe it or not, you encourage me. Will knowledge of your errors keep you from repeating them? Not while it feels so tingly good to do it, it won’t.

I have a serious (well, semi-snarky, but not really) question: can anyone point me to a Catholic source that actually uses the phrase “One True Church”?

I ask for two reasons: the phrase seems to come more from protestants who use it to dismiss (rather than argue against)the claims of the Catholic Church. I’m sure Catholics (surely converts) have used it, though I can’t think of any examples.

The second reason is that the Catholic Church explicitly affirms that the Eastern Orthodox (maybe the Oriental Orthodox as well?) are truly particular Churches, though not in Communion. Thus, the Church says that we are not the “One” True Church, though we are truly that Church founded by Jesus through the apostles.

Kathy C – Whitestone is a “she” btw, and her obsession has done a lot to confirm my Faith, as well.

Well, seek and ye shall find, google and the links shall be opened. I should have done it before the last post.

Google “one true church” and you will, indeed, find a couple of Catholic sources using the term among many non-Catholic sources using it to either deny the claim they think the Church is making, or to refine the term to fit their own ecclessiology, and in one case, to list various religious bodies (including the Catholic Church) which regard themselves as the “One True Church”.

Interesting stuff, indeed, but the best I found was a Fr. Neuhaus gem I read back in the day:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/03/the-one-true-church-35

It says it all. And well, as always.

Actually, I learned the meaning of OTC in these comments. I always thought it was an anacronym for one of the new Episcopal organizations.

‘scuse me, that would be “an acronym.”

[...] ROMAN CATHOLIC WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH– In a speech billed as a discussion of the Bush and Obama eras …. [...]

Actually Kathy C your spelling was close to anachronism which fits quite well when
using Episcopal organization in the same sentence.

[...] ROMAN CATHOLIC WORLD DOMINATION CONSPIRACY WATCH– In a speech billed as a discussion of the Bush and Obama eras …. [...]