Pray for Artists

Praying with the Holy Father

August. This month the Holy Father asks us to pray “that artists of our time, through their ingenuity, may help everyone discover the beauty of creation”. What does Pope Francis mean by asking us to pray thus? Quite clearly, in the first instance, he means to tell us what he expects of the arts, returning to a theme raised in the first year of his pontificate: “In every age the Church has called upon the arts to give expression to the beauty of her faith and to proclaim the gospel message of the grandeur of God's creation, the dignity of human beings made in His image and likeness, and the power of Christ's death and resurrection to bring redemption and rebirth to a world touched by the tragedy of sin and death.”

Pope Francis meeting Martin Scorsese

An art in which beauty is concealed rather than revealed, faith is denigrated, creation is belittled in comparison with technological progress, humanity is degraded, and the spiritual knowledge necessary to the Christian encounter with the mystery of our redemption and that of the entire created order is resolutely excluded in favour of an atheistic materialism is not an art worthy of the name; it is an art we should shun for the good of our souls. An art which is not “an expression of our hope in the coming of that Kingdom whose beauty, harmony and peace are the expectation of every human heart and the inspiration of mankind's highest artistic aspirations” is unworthy of the dignity of those created in the image of the divine.

As is well known, the Holy Father does not watch television.

by Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard

BBC continue to undermine Christian values

The Carnival of Perversion

On TV and on our streets - a time to act

"Gay" agenda undermines modern civilisation

I still get exasperated by the continued infiltration of the "Gay" agenda into every aspect of our modern "civilisation", and I gasp an incredulous little laugh in amazement at every gain the LGBTQ lobby make. As faithful Christians, - those with traditional family values, who believe in honesty, decency and natural order -  retreat from the public sphere, I shake my head, as we are the bad guys now, we are the ones labelled evil, right wing, homophobic, queer bashers, even though we are just Christians and only want to save souls!

One day we will all answer to the Lord our God

However, I can't help laughing when I hear of another weird gender bending innovation. I'm one of those who take it seriously, because (a weak and poor Christian though I am) I take my faith seriously and if Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church call these acts grave sins then what am I do? Furthermore I believe these sins if unconfessed before death will lead to eternal damnation, therefore when I die and come before the Lord, He will ask me what did I do to try and save these souls, was I lacking in love and charity for these poor sinners - did I sacrifice enough for them.

Prayer Crusaders called to action, letters to your council, Your MP and to the BBC

Our Birmingham prayer crusader under the patronage of St. Bernadette has asked us what can we do as there is a Birmingham Pride as well. She wants us to write letters of polite protest. So please write a polite letter to your local council leader/mayor if there is a "Gay pride parade" in your town saying that you do object to such public displays in your town. Likewise to your MP. And last but not least to the BBC because of their Gay Britannia season. So, Prayer Crusaders, you are called to action and to prayer to help save your city and your country.

The child abusing LGBTQ lobby

Perhaps even worse than this is the LGBTQ lobby targeting of the young. This, more than anything, is the most evil thing they are doing. There are gender neutral schools, where calling boys, boys and girls, girls is now against the rules; boys can now wear dresses to school and many secondary schools have LGBTQ clubs (in my day it was chess or cricket). Catholic friends of mine are reporting that among other parents same sex dating among teenagers is becoming normal and it's getting common to see teenage boys holding hands, likewise girls. The poor creatures are trying out same sex, sex just to see if they are homosexual, so brainwashed by the media have they become. Things are getting so bad that it's almost time to pray the prayer of Abraham. As he did for Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18), so should we for London and Birmingham and most of the cities of the Western world.

Cardinal Napier attacks the BBC (At least Africa will stand up against the Western Media) See link

The BBC and the NHS Part 2

Casualties of 'Casualty'

Of course, with us the contraceptive mentality is combined with the moral and psychological effects of socialism. Socialism removes the ability to exercise choice and responsibility; as I have already said, it prevents psychological growth to adult maturity. It creates dependency, which in turn creates a sense of fear as people are made incapable of self-sufficiency and, like fretful children, demand protection from the vicissitudes of life. We have become the society that chose security over liberty and lost both. How often do our media echo with the cry for something to be done, as they call for more laws, more wars, more Government action, more gun control, more cameras, more taxes, more spending, more anything except more Christian freedom, more truth, more virtue or more self-restraint? Socialised medicine in particular created the state of dependency that brought us to our current condition as the country with the most CCTV cameras, where thousands of telecommunications interception warrants are issued every week, where every public authority can hire detectives and enlist paid informants (including children) or use advanced technology to enforce any regulation, and where an unarmed public lives in fear of terrorism and crime. Try looking up “garbage gestapo” or “town hall stasi” for news stories to illustrate this.

Beyond the political level this dependency “makes it much more difficult for” man “to recognise his dignity as a person” (Centesimus Annus 13) because the loss of responsibility destroys the sense of moral agency. Under socialism, people believe the materialistic claims inherent in socialism because they cease to be aware of their own capacity to exercise free will as 'autonomous subjects of moral decisions'. From this it follows naturally that conscience and the sense of sin are diminished as people feel themselves to be moved inexorably by circumstances beyond their control. Yet conscience, which is “strictly related to human freedom” is “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” and “constitutes the basis of man's interior dignity and, at the same time, of his relationship to God” (Vatican II, quoted Reconciliatio et Poenitentia 18); and as that relationship constitutes our humanity, we are truly dehumanised by this diminution in the sense of sin.

When did you last hear a British campaigner mention compulsory complicity?

The socialist institutions, with the NHS foremost among them, are structures of sin, meaning that they institutionalise injustice in such a way that no individual feels responsible for the way in which the system works, and compulsory complicity ceases to have moral meaning for anybody. The USCCB has rightly been criticised for having suggested that there should be legally mandated universal health care; but, faced with the reality of Obamacare, the American bishops have fulfilled their teaching office in campaigning vigorously against forcing anybody to fund contraception, abortion or sex-change operations – when did you last hear a British campaigner mention compulsory complicity? When the USCCB says that people and businesses should not be forced against their consciences to fund immoral procedures, they remind us that to fund such procedures as contraception, abortion, sterilisation and gender reassignment should be against our consciences. We should feel morally violated by being made to pay for these offences against God and mankind, we should feel righteous outrage against the bi-partisan socialist regime that forces us to do so; and we must pray to overcome the complacency and hardness of heart that allows us to tolerate the perpetration of these horrors in our midst, in our name, and with our unthinking collusion. Omnípotens et mitíssime Deus, qui sitiénti pópulo fontem vivéntis aquae de petra produxísti: educ de cordis nostri durítia lácrimas compunctiónis; ut peccáta nostra plángere valeámus, remissionémque eórum, te miseránte, mereámur accípere.  Pius XI noted that “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin”, and St. John Paul II wrote on the fact that all are affected by any sin at all; how much more true is that when we are actually made party to the offence andare  blinded to its horror? “With greater or lesser violence, with greater or lesser harm, every sin has repercussions on the entire ecclesial body and the whole human family” (Reconciliatio et Poenitentia 16).

A final consideration must be the relationship between the NHS and migration. Whether for economic or socio-political reasons many individuals and families find migration to be an unfortunate necessity; but migration is never desirable, it always means broken families and broken communities at the point of origin and may well mean significant social disruption at the destination. To solicit or encourage unnecessary migration is, therefore, always and invariably an act of injustice. The welfare state was always intended to be funded, at least in part, by migrant workers, initially from the colonies. The system is a pyramid (or Ponzi) scheme, which is sustainable only when a sizeable proportion of those paying into the scheme receives nothing from it; it was always hoped that that proportion would be supplied by migrants who would return home before they made significant claims, but those hopes were thwarted by the migrants' having to immigrate permanently as they were unable to earn enough here to go back home and live in luxury as the Attlee administration promised the Windrush generation would be possible. Beyond that structural feature of the welfare state, the NHS has always relied on immigrant labour. This amounts to asking less wealthy and less developed nations to subsidise health care in this country, and to live with the social costs of emigration. The greatest resource of a nation, and the source of its wealth is its population and their talents; to lure educated workers here is, therefore, an act of injustice against their countries of origin. That is even more true when countries shape their national economies with a view to exporting people and reaping remittance income from them instead of developing their domestic resources.

What can we do? To start with, we should register our objection to socialised medicine every time the media say that 'everybody loves the NHS'; we should tell newly elected or re-elected Members of Parliament that we want change; and, if (having paid our taxes at the confiscatory rates the system demands) our means allow, we should disengage from the system. Pro-life and pro-family organisations should demand transition to a health care delivery model that fosters integral human development by promoting personal, family and social responsibility, and has due regard to the integrity of family structures – it means abolition of the current system, but will not frighten electoral candidates and will enable them to be held to account if they declare themselves to be pro-life. Finally, never forget to remind everybody you know that what they see on TV is written by people with personal and political agendas to push.    

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard 

BBC and the NHS socialised media and socialised health care

Part 1
Casualties of 'Casualty'

Last year the television programme 'Casualty' celebrated 30 years on screen and its writer gave celebratory interviews admitting that it had been created as propaganda on behalf of the NHS at a time when popular and political support for restoration of a system free from State control was rising, and it appeared possible to dismantle the socialist 'post-War settlement' in its entirety. There had been several earlier programmes, both British and imported, with health care settings, but 'Casualty' was never just going to be about tales of hospital life, it was always intended to have a political edge to it, defending the system and calling for increased funding for it. It is entirely typical of the BBC as a large, publicly funded State body, to broadcast on behalf of other large, publicly funded State bodies; it is institutionally statist because only people who support institutions of its type would work for one.

NHS socialised medicine

Of course, 'Casualty' was far from being alone in acting to rally support for the NHS; socialised medicine is a subject which illustrates perfectly the ability of the media taken together to form a narrowing aperture through which the world must be viewed. Some options are within the scope of vision, others are not merely unacceptable but invisible. When it comes to the NHS, the arguments against it have been entirely excluded from public discourse and the alternatives have been left undiscussed. The public has been given to understand that the alternative to the NHS is people dropping dead in the streets, and politicians have been given to understand that public worship of the system is such that to question its virtues would be a career-ending act of folly. The result of this stereopticon effect, to borrow Weaver's word, is, as we all know, that the NHS has become firmly entrenched, and abolition is almost literally unthinkable – it is never mentioned so the thought of it never occurs to most people. We are trapped.

The truth concerning the NHS is that it is a poisonously destructive system radically incompatible with the principles of Christian civilisation; it is implicitly condemned by the teaching of the Church, and should not receive the support of any Catholic. It made our country what it is today – drunken, dissolute, godless, promiscuous, and too beaten down and brainwashed to do anything about it – and its abolition is the sine qua non for the moral, social, psychological and spiritual regeneration of the nation.

The condition of our country is essentially due to a collective failure to develop to psychological maturity; there are no adults around, only grown-up children. It is simply impossible to build or maintain a society that is decent, moral and stable with one hand whilst using the other to tear up personal, family and social responsibility by the roots; and that is precisely what socialised medicine does. It infantilises people, reducing them to a dependency that stunts the growth of the moral faculties as the scope for the exercise of virtue is radically reduced in favour of a subhuman functionality. The Tablet's editor, Douglas Woodruff, saw a clear analogy between Britain under the NHS and a life of slavery as he condemned the replacement of 'the tradition of effective voluntary co-operation' “by the compulsory orders of a highly organised and paternal state, determined to see that all the hands on the plantation are humanely cared for, so that they may be able to do their work”.     

The dire condition of our country can be remedied only by a reconstruction having due regard to the cause of the damage in the light of Church teaching i.e. we must tear down the structures of sin and build anew from first principles. To begin with, we must reject socialism absolutely and unequivocally; the Church condemns it as incompatible with Christianity because it is materialistic in its philosophy and inhuman in practice (cf. Quadragesima Anno 111ff.). The materialism of socialist institutions is fundamentally opposed to the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity; they propose always a technological solution to every social question, marginalising religious institutions and attempting to limit their activity solely to worship. The attempt to replace charity with a bureaucratic framework of rights and entitlements amounts to an attempt to exclude the God Who is love from public life, and to strip away the intermediate institutions that should stand between people and the State.  “Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate the human as such” (Deus Caritas Est 28). “In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Matthew IV 4, cf. Deuteronomy VIII 3) – a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human” (ibid.). The specifically human consists precisely in our relationship to and with the Creator in Whose image we are made and the socialist institutions fracture that relationship, leaving people unable to conceive of faith and hope in anything other than intellectual terms rather than in terms of confident trust in a divine providence which they receive daily.

Socialists hate the divine deeply and instinctively

Furthermore, the human life is one that is ordinarily lived in community, and lived through a variety of institutional communities; the first of which, in the order of nature, is of course the family into which the individual is born (cf. Summa II-IIae.10). It is the invariable practice of socialism to attack these communities because it is fundamentally opposed to the bond of love underlying them and binding them together; the social responsibility expressed in charitable action is a participation in the divine, and the socialists hate the divine deeply and instinctively because in their hearts they know that their materialist beliefs are empty and meaningless, they cannot withstand the light of truth, so they fly from the face of God Who is the very truth. The socialists have always intended to destroy all true communities, and to leave the individual naked and defenceless before the State, wholly dependent and utterly servile. The Fabian socialists in power after the War pledged themselves to achieve by democracy and bureaucracy, step by step, all the effects of a revolution; their Government was led by the man who had sent the Brigada Clement Attlee to do battle in his name as part of the Red horde fighting for a Spanish Republic whose persecution of the Church mirrored the imperial Rome of Nero, Diocletian or Severus in its atrocities.

The totalitarian 'cradle to grave' claims of the socialist State begin at birth when the NHS claims the child for the Government, issuing him or her with a number, and demanding rights of access in cases where a child has been born outside one of its facilities. The mother will, incidentally, receive stern advice to use birth control in future. Even in the case of a healthy child there is a good deal of fussing about and creating unnecessary records by way of an assertion of ownership and responsibility on the part of the State.  Where there is any weakness in a marriage this assumption of responsibility by the State will very often allow a couple to feel that they may part without difficulty, and without harm to the child. Such weaknesses are, in any case, made more common by the psychological immaturity induced by socialism as the adolescent mindset does not encompass permanence, stability or commitment.

Under the NHS the decision as to whether an unhealthy child is treated - is made and imposed upon the family. Re Charlie Gard, Ashya King and Charlotte Wyatt.

Where the child is unhealthy, the claim of the State is more explicit. A socialised system is always a utilitarian system in which efficiency and value for money are everything and the State employee takes precedence over the member of the public. The individual is made in the image of God and is, therefore, of infinite worth as an end in him or herself, and should never be treated as having a merely instrumental value. From this it follows that the care of the sick must be a work infused with supernatural charity, undertaken for the love of God seen in His created image, and ideally performed by religious or those under their direction. Under the NHS the decision as to whether an unhealthy child is treated and what treatment he or she might receive, is made by those employed within the system and imposed upon the family; if they dissent from the decision, legal action may be taken to remove parental responsibility and prevent the family's removing the child to a private, charitable hospital or from leaving the jurisdiction of the British courts. Most such cases do not reach the courts, and those that do are generally subject to reporting restrictions, so we only know a handful of names such as those of Charlie Gard, Ashya King and Charlotte Wyatt. 

Later in childhood the claim of the State over and against the parental responsibility derived from natural law is maintained through the legal fiction that the rights of the child are opposed to those of their parents. This notion is invariably applied to promote an anti-life agenda as the NHS works in partnership with State schools to subvert the morality of youth, giving explicit sexual instruction where parents have opted not to have it imparted by teachers, distributing or arranging various forms of artificial birth control and taking girls for lunchtime abortions. The Gillick (contraception) and Axon (abortion) legal cases established that parents need not be informed. In recent years the number of girls under the age of 16 placed on long-term contraception has been increased to seven or eight thousand a year as they often fail to take the daily pill.

A contraceptive society is an exploitative and a violent society.

It must be noted that young people in this country are invariably found to be amongst the least happy or most miserable in the world, and that three causes have been identified for it. They are early sexualisation, substantial use of social media and the disintegration of civil society due to the welfare state (i.e. the NHS, pensions and benefits systems combined); the most recent OECD report is particularly insistent on this third cause and the passivity of civil institutions and social networks in this country. The deliberate fostering of a contraceptive mentality exacerbates the social disintegration initiated by the creation of the socialist institutions. The contraceptive mentality is one that views others in instrumental terms; they are seen not even simply as a means to an end, but as a means of self-gratification. This attitude extends beyond the sexual to all areas of life; and is, incidentally, promoted in many ways by broadcast media which appear to present others to us for our pleasure at our own convenience. A contraceptive society is an exploitative and a violent society.

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard

BBC's massive "Gay" season

The BBC and Gay Britannia

With the BBC's Gay Britannia season in full swing we can have no doubts just how far from the teachings of Christianity the Corporation has come. It was of course one of the leaders in the brainwashing of the country into accepting the ancient but always prohibited perversion of sexuality.

They talk of victims and suicides, leaning on our empathy and our sympathy until most can no longer tell right from wrong. LGBTQ activists target children through the media and the schools and no one dare speak up for fear of being labelled "homophobic". What a nasty made up word to subvert and silence goodness it is.

The BBC have put together programmes on and for homosexuality on all of the many channels and mediums i.e. radio, television, magazines, and the internet with its own and various platforms: - You Tube, websites, live streaming podcasts etc etc. Yes, lesbian Auntie Beeb is also using every genre - news, current affairs, drama, film, comedy, romantic comedy, near porn, actual porn all put together by the henchmen (and henchwomen or henchothers, whatever) of perversion, i.e. celebrities, personalities, pop stars, actors, presenters, producers, directors and even I suspect cameraothers! Here we have a multi-level attack platform to attack what little resistance there is left in the country to the "Gay" onslaught. Oh, I forgot sport - but the BBC haven't, ever wonder why their main sports channel radio 5 Live keeps up the homosexual promotional rant, like a cracked David Bowie/Lady Ga Ga record or an advert for Vaseline? They have a documentary on why no footballer has come out produced by Gay Rugby player Gareth Thomas and Gay Lawyers to make Alfie v Homophobia: Hate in the beautiful game. That's another word the "Gay" community and their henchpersons like to throw in the face of anyone who stands up to them. But football is all about hate, or at least chants like for example "We hate Liverpool and Hate Man U but Chelsea Chelsea we love you"; it all depends which team you support of course. And if a supporter can upset a opponent's player by chanting at him then all the better. 

Only the other morning I heard an extremely indignant Rachel Burden of BBC's Five Live Breakfast show stridently exclaim "If two people love each other what the HECK does it matter what sex they are!" Well Rachel, leaving aside any religious objections, it's because they are using their bodies in unnatural ways that lead to disease, pain, suffering and an early death. Let alone the disproportionately large number of paedophiles there are in the LGBTQ "community". Ever heard of Boy Love Rachel? Well most Queers have. I'm using the word Queer here, it's a word I don't like to use as it's been used in an abusive way in the past. As Christians we should never stoop to using language to hurt. However, the BBC are not only using it, they have even made up a logo to splash across their Gay Britannia programme.

This year it's 50 years since the legalisation of homosexual acts and abortion in Britain, 100 years since the Russian Revolution and rise of Communism, 300 years since the first Grand Lodge of the Freemasons, and 500 years since Luther started the heretical Protestant revolt. However, there is an antidote to it all for it's also 100 years since Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared at Fatima.