St Luis IX - Image Wikipedia

St Louis IX and the Crusader saints

It may surprise some people how many saints were associated with the Crusaders. Here are a few: St Ferdinand III, a great Spanish king who was very active in driving the Muslims out of Spain in the reconquest of Iberia; St John Capistrano, an Italian Franciscan who helped mobilise the Germans, Austrians and Central Europe to drive back the Ottoman Turks, - St John Capistrano at the age of 70 led them into battle to relieve the Muslim siege of Belgrade. St Thomas Aquinas was a good friend of King St Louis IX of France. Even St Francis of Assisi got in on the act and briefly joined the 5^th Crusade in Egypt but walked into the enemy camp and tried to persuade the Sultan Al-Kamil to convert to Christianity. St Francis either wanted to convert the Muslims or martyrdom; he did not succeed however.

               St Louis IX led two Crusades, the Seventh and the Eighth.  He tried to take Egypt first because Egypt was the main economic powerhouse for the Levant. Unfortunately because of indiscipline among some of his headstrong nobles in trying to press ahead and win glory for themselves (particularly Robert of Artois), this Crusade was defeated and St. Louis was captured. Louis’s wife Queen Margret was besieged at the fortified Egyptian coastal city of Damietta and even though she was in labour and about to give birth she still manage to inspire the garrison to defend the city. The Crusaders defending the city managed to negotiate with the Muslim Mamluks a safe passage for the Queen, her newly born son and the garrison. They also paid a huge ransom for King Louis and the other crusaders. For further reading regards King Louis IX and his crusades I suggest the journals of one of his knights, John de Joinville, who portrays King St Louis as an inspirational leader.

               The mainstay for the defence of the Holy Land was the religious military orders mainly the Templars, the Hospitallers and sometimes the Teutonic Knights. These were fighting monks, or rather they were friars as they were not contemplative but active like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Their main opposition were the Mamluks. But whereas the Christian military orders were volunteers with a vocation the Muslim Mamluks were frequently the result of forced conversions; they were slave warriors, often captured Christians when they were young boys, indoctrinated and formed into slave warriors.

               When King Louis and Queen Margret returned to France, Queen Margret often had to deal with the formidable mother of Louis, Blanche of Castel who disapproved of her son’s pretty young wife. Louis and Margret had their rooms in the Royal Castle of Pontoise one living quarters above the other connected by a main stairs at the front. The servants were given orders that whenever Blanche approached her son’s rooms they were to alert the couple and Queen Margret would slip up a narrow back stairs to her own chambers. However, despite Blanche’s disapproval, Louis and Margret had eleven children.

               King Louis was always very saintly. He did his level best to inspire his countrymen and women to be good and loyal Catholics, loyal to the pope, and to defend the Church against heresy. He built the glorious Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns and brought back the Black Madonna of Le Puy from one of his Crusades.

               In 1270AD he launched the Eighth Crusade to try and take back the former Christian lands, north Africa and Egypt. This time he left Queen Margret behind in France. One can only imagine her sadness as she saw her husband leave to fight once again and her prayers for his safe return. She never saw her husband again for he died in Tunis, North Africa. He was canonised in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII

St Leonard of Port Maurice

St Leonard of Port Maurice - image Wikipdia

St Leonard of Port Maurice on the Little Number of Those Who are saved

St Leonard was a Franciscan Friar, d.1751. One of his most powerful sermons was on the little number of those who are saved. It is not for anyone to judge the state of a person’s soul, but just to try and follow Jesus and His Church. It is out of charity that we include the following quote sent in by one of our supporters. Anyone who sits down in front of Coronation Street or East Enders or any other TV programme that depicts sin in a positive way should consider the below:

            ‘He represented the ugliness of the sin of impurity so forcefully that a woman fell dead of sorrow in front of everyone. Then, coming back to life, she said, "When I was presented before the Tribunal of God, sixty thousand people arrived at the same time from all parts of the world; out of that number, three were saved by going to Purgatory, and all the rest were damned."’

           

It very important to pray for the leaders and opinion formers both in politics and in the media; for if they are giving examples of lifestyles that are contrary to the Gospel they are in grave trouble. This is none more so than in their example to children, for Jesus said “But whosoever shall cause one of these little ones which believe on me to stumble, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6.

But what is considered family viewing today? Here is a cutting from the MailOnline

X Factor up to its old tricks as Gaga strips: Raunchy pre-watershed performance attracts 100 complaints MailOnline 29/10/2013

The X Factor is embroiled in yet another sleaze row after a raunchy performance by Lady Gaga prompted hundreds of complaints. The controversial singer stripped to her underwear and danced provocatively across the stage in a pre-watershed results programme watched by nearly a million children on Sunday night.

This is just one of the reasons why we ask all our Prayer Crusaders to adopt a celebrity and pray for them. We pray for their well-being and their success but most of all we pray for their conversion, true conversion to God’s one and only true Church: that they accept all her teachings and disciplines in all their wonderful glory.  Click on this link Adopt a Celebrity

BBC's Sex and the Holy City

BBC Panorama’s Sex and the Holy City, revisited

Image from Wikipedia

It is just over ten years ago now that the BBC broadcast one of its most biased and dishonest programmes on Catholic moral teaching to date.  The Panorama programme was Sex and the Holy City. Broadcast on 12^th October 2003, it purported to be an appraisal of 25 years of John Paul II’s pontificate, but was actually designed to do as much damage to the Pope and the Catholic Church’s moral teaching as possible. The BBC knows its strengths on the world media stage, and according to ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken it is massively self-confident when it come to promoting liberal moral values.

Sex and the Holy City created in 2003/04 the same kind of multi-level media discourse as the BBC had earlier (in the 1960s) created in favour of legalising abortion and homosexuality. Sex and the Holy City was an attack on the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception. Concentrating – though not exclusively - on the condom, the BBC blamed the Catholic Church for causing the AIDS crisis in Africa among other things. This encouraged other media outlets and pundits to join the attack on the Church. Many lay people changed their views as a result of this programme, and even some of our hierarchy faltered. But this satanic inspired attack was a breathtaking piece of mendacity by the programme’s producer Chris Woods and its reporter Steve Bradshaw, both of whom demonstrate an extremely strong left-liberal bias. Aitken also points out the link between the BBC’s Sexwise programme and its partnership with the IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation), contrasting this link with the requirement for the BBC to be impartial. BBC’s Sexwise is a programme that promotes abortion, contraception and homosexual activity.

Robin Aitken in his book Can we still trust the BBC? called Chris Woods’ impartiality into question, and thus the integrity of the whole documentary. Chris Woods had a history of anti-Catholic actions. He was also homosexual and a member of Outrage. He had been a journalist for homosexual publications such as Capital Gay, The Pink Paper and The Advocate. Woods and Outrage had identified the Catholic Church for attacks because of her strong stand on traditional family values. Woods and Outrage had ransacked the papal nuncio’s house in London and disrupted one of Cardinal Hume’s Masses in Westminster Cathedral. This was homosexuals trying to bully the Catholic Church into changing her laws on contraception, for they know full well that to do so would justify sex as a purely recreational activity, therefore ultimately justify homosexual activity. He and the BBC had the audacity to use their powerful position on the world stage to attack the Catholic Church and were quite prepared to engage in deceit to do so.

Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, then prefect of the Congregation for the Family, was interviewed for Sex and the Holy City. Upon seeing the programme he was extremely surprised by its bias, and wrote an excellent response. His Vatican document was called Safe Sex versus Family Values. In it he presented conclusive evidence that Catholic countries around the world have far fewer AIDS cases, while those countries that have adopted the condom have the most. Here is a striking piece of evidence from Safe Sex versus Family Values which shows how dangerous it is to rely on condoms to protect against AIDS. Safe Sex versus Family Values states, “In Thailand and in the Philippines, the first HIV/AIDS cases were reported in 1984; by 1987, Thailand had 112 cases while the Philippines had more with 135 cases Today, in the year 2003 there are around 750,000 cases in Thailand, where the 100% Condom Use Program had relatively great success. On the other hand, there are only 1,935 cases in the Philippines – and this considering that the Philippines’ population is around 30% greater that Thailand’s” - conclusive evidence that relying on the condom is killing people, while the Catholic Church’s support of abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it is being very successful.

How did the BBC react to this conclusive piece of evidence? As champions of liberal morality they reacted as one would expect, with omissions and bias, of course. The BBC and Panorama gave the evidence of Safe Sex versus Family Values little or no publicity, but brought out yet another Panorama programme called Can Condoms Kill? where they interviewed EU politicians and sex workers. One EU politician even went so far as to state that members of the Catholic hierarchy who support abstinence and not condoms should be tried for crimes against humanity. This was again picked up by various media outlets, and with the growing influence of the BBC, worldwide opinion was now at odds with the Catholic Church. We now have a worldwide situation developing whereby the BBC along with the United Nations is in complete opposition to the Catholic Church regarding morality. The anti-Gospel versus the Gospel.

Others have also questioned the use of condoms as safe. Dr Helen Singer-Kaplan, of Cornell University Medical Centre, states that “Counting on condoms is flirting with death.” The Journal of the American Medical Association states that ‘“Understandably, for practical and ethical reasons few studies have actually used live couples to test HIV transmission rates”; however, a University of Miami Medical School study showed that three out of 10 women whose HIV-infected husbands faithfully used condoms contracted AIDS-Related Complex (ARC) in an 18 month period. This translates into an infection rate of 21 percent per year ... and 91% over 10 years.’ One Lancet (Feb 7 1987 page 323) article says ... ‘“Safe Sex” ... Condoms has a substantial failure rate: 13-15% of women whose male partners use condoms as the sole method of contraception become pregnant within one year ‘

Conclusive evidence in favour of Catholic moral teachings: but how does the BBC describe Catholic moral teaching? -  by using expressions and words like “hardliners in the Vatican say condoms can kill”. In Can We Still Trust the BBC? Chapter 11, “The Moral Maze”, Robin Aitken quotes the work of David Kerr, ex-BBC Assistant Editor. Kerr carried out a study of the BBC’s proclaimed impartiality, and used its treatment of the Catholic Church in Sex and the Holy City as an example. In Kerr’s independent study of Sex and the Holy City and the Catholic Church he appears to find in the Church’s favour in point after point.

  

The People of the Philippines who have been so loyal to the teachings of the Catholic Church and proved the BBC wrong, now need our help please see this link for donations to Aid to the Church in Need’s appeal to help the Philippines after the devastating typhoon. Click on this link ACN

The Media as a Paper Tiger 2

Fighting back against the Media

In my second article regarding the media I want to give expression to ways of fighting back it’s pernicious activities.

One of the better aspects of the old communist regimes is that most of the population were totally cynical towards their media. They were well aware most of it was totally dishonest. Unfortunately at least up to recently in the UK there has been this veil of respectability created by the BBC and the broadsheet newspapers. They had built up the reputation like respected members of the family. People like the Dimblebys and other employees of the BBC provided a sort of synthetic gravitas. Of course the BBC did have principles under such luminaries as Reith and Haley, but by the 1960s the “rats” those detritus of the left who had newly come from universities started their subversion and infiltration of the BBC and journalism at large.  Their egos knew no bounds in their task of attacking Christianity and traditional values. Some of them almost had rat like grins as they went about their mission. Their promotion of the culture of death and sexual perversion was the work of genius, a genius sourced directly from Satan.

Of course most of us are no longer hoodwinked, after the recent revelations of how the BBC turned a blind eye to all the sexual abuse within its organisation. This has finally given us proof enough of its rottenness to any doubters. The broadsheets sympathy for the BBC views, apart from a few exceptional journalists, is again proof of their venality. So how can we obtain sufficient information about the news without being the target of foulness emanating from such organs as the BBC?

Some of that information can be sourced from Catholic or some other Christian news agencies.  For instance although one cannot agree with the theology of the Evangelicals they are pro-life and against sexual perversions. They can be a back up for the Catholic news agencies.  Also one must always try to cross reference the news to foreign stations, which are available on the Internet. They too cannot be guaranteed for their integrity, but they are  useful for analytical purposes. It is important that we take on the same attitude of those people I mentioned earlier that lived in the former Communist countries, total disbelief of the media. What is also very important is we discuss with our neighbours, our working colleagues and friends, the bankrupt nature of the British media, bankrupt in honesty and moral values. A great deal of the undermining of the old Communist regimes was done by word of mouth, especially in the old East Germany, that is why a terrified regime recruited so many spies. We must do everything we can to undermine the credibility of the mainstream UK media.

We also need to have the tools to judge what is sound and not sound, the only way to achieve that is to relate to our moral and religious believes. Be very thorough in examining all we hear, read and see. It is no use sloppily accepting anything because everyone else does.  Sheep end up in the abattoir!

The Television has adopted the techniques of your average drug dealer. They cleverly put on programming that causes children and infants to become addicted to Television. The bright primary coloured cartoons with a certain childish subversive attitudes that is now the staple of young children’s viewing creating a lifetime of addiction.  For many people the media via the Television has in part become an addiction stemming from their childhood. This is why it has the power to inflict its values on so many of the population. What everyone needs to do is to wean people off this addiction and make them realise the evilness of the messages sent out. It will not be easy with Television and the Internet taking up such a large part of people’s lives, but our nation will not be free until it is done. People have got to understand that with media controlling them they are not free people, they have become slaves to those purveyors of poison whom we see on our screens and in our newspapers. The chains of mental subjugation created by the media must be broken and truth liberated, then we can once more restore hope and joy to many. Once people realise that for a lifetime they have been mislead into accepting values that are destroying any vestige of happiness in their lives, there will be a fury abroad.

By RIGBY

15th Prayer Crusade for Pope Francis

15th Prayer Crusade will start on the 1st November All Saints day.

As is usual on All Saints Day we call for our year long Prayer Crusade which we ask our members to try and pray every day. There may of course be mini prayer crusades during the year in response to media attacks on Christians and our values.

This year’s Prayer Crusade will be for the Pope and the Media




The Cross is the emblem of the Portuguese

 Military Order the

Knights of Christ.

They were successful in the Reconquista

of Iberia in helping to drive the

Muslims out of Spain

 

- that the Media will report what Pope Francis is actually saying and not be selective or quote him out of context. And that the Pope will understand that he must be careful and clear when making statements especially on Catholic moral teaching.

A prayer to CUT’s patrons for Pope Francis

Our Lady Mother of Good Counsel, pray for Pope Francis and lead him to your Son.

So that Jesus may open his mouth and bridle his tongue.

And St Michael the Archangel please block the influence of the Satanic Media on the Church.

Pray also this Halloween for all those poor souls sadly led astray by the media's promotion of Halloween which should
Mean the eve of All Saints of course.

But now this pagan festival has gained much popularly in recent decades. But it is ultimately Satanic.

The Face of the BBC

Jimmy Savile – The Face of the BBC

The BBC appears to be trying to distance itself from any responsibility for the conduct of Jimmy Savile and other paedophiles at the Corporation. They seem to be trying to adopt the honest broker ‘we were mere media reporters, it’s not us gov’ attitude: we are not responsible, it’s the individual who should be held to account. For they know this could (and should) cost them millions in compensation claims from victims. So we ask HOW DID JIMMY SAVILE, a known pervert, avoid being exposed for so long? The reason is quite simple: the BBC failed to report on his known conduct. More to the point, they protect their own, which they can do because they control the news.

But the truth will out as they say. Now the BBC are beset by crises and scandals and they are doing their level best not to report them on air. The sheer number of paedophiles at the corporation and the extremely high pay-offs the managers are getting has lead to a crisis of trust, so much so that the BBC brand has become toxic and MPs are beginning to talk about withdrawing the licence fee.

The chairman of the Conservative Party Grant Shapps has told the Telegraph that unless the BBC undertake dramatic changes regarding the sex scandals and what is concerning the Tories the most, bias (don’t Catholics know all about BBC bias), the government will consider whether the BBC can keep the licence fee. “Mr Shapps said the Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall scandals, as well as disclosures about pay-offs to executives, had raised questions over the corporation as a whole” (Telegraph 26 Oct 2013). He warned that the £3.6 billion the BBC gets from the licence fee could be withdrawn.

At CUT we say that the licence fee funded BBC has long past its sell-by date, and that the pay-off scandals and paedophiles cover-up at the Corporation has meant that the stench of corruption is being smelt in every household in the county. It’s time that the BBC is buried along with its true mascot Jimmy Savil in an unmarked grave at midnight, never to be resurrected.

Are you a Caveman?

Irish TD for media Pat Rabbitte says those who do not watch TV are Cavemen

Well, on the news front. Mr Rabbitte will be introducing the household broadcasting charge. It will come in to effect on Jan 1^st 2015, sheer totalitarianism.

          RTE will be introducing a new childrens channel. Get them younger. With libraries closing down with school costs rising and more

and more children going to school on an empty stomach because their parents can’t afford to feed them, I was going to say, you’d wonder whose interests are being served here but you don’t have to wonder, as if the children didn’t have enough distractions as it is.

         During the recent abortion legislation it was the same pro abortion media. On a couple of instances he was on the Pat Kenny show, where he would refer to pro life people as, ‘so called Pro life people’. I texted him saying ‘his chickens would come to roost’. Not much later he was told by RTE that his front-line TV programme was being axed. RTE said they couldn’t pay a presenter over 500,000 euros per annum. So poor Pat said he was leaving rte. He was by far their most celebrated presenter with RTE for 41 years. He would be an RTE version of Terry Wogan. Even more of a celebrity than Wogan would be in England. He has however picked up a lucrative post with Newstalk Radio with a 2,500,000euros for a 2 year contract. Newstalk is an ultraliberal station, pure poison, with programmes of graphic content even in the afternoon. It has what I can only describe as a homosexual apologetic programme on a Saturday evening. The first guest on Kenny’s programme 2^nd Sept was the archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin, very much loved by the media.

          A headlines in the irish times last month ran, ‘new abortion law used in irish hospital’, it was misleading, giving the impression that a woman’s life had been saved by the introduction of the abortion law. Though the legislation has been signed into law it hasn’t actually received a commencement order. Hence the lies and bias from the media. The headquarters of this newspaper were picketed by sixty protesters protesting at this coverage.

        On a Saturday afternoon in July just before the abortion legislation was introduced over 60,000 people took to the streets of Dublin to protest at this legislation. I listened to a news bulletin on Spirit radio after the march. It is a Christian broadcasting station. On a previous march they had a correspondent on the ground and had given an accurate account of proceedings with accurate numbers of people. However on this occasion in their bulletin they said 30,000 people marched. I couldn’t believe my ears. So I rang up the station to inform them that they were in error as regards the figures they were giving out. They put me through to the person in charge who explained that their news team were on holiday their staff were all volunteers and they were using Newstalks news bulletins. But I said you can’t give out false reports it would be better to have no bulletin than these false figures.  He said he knew the figures were wrong and said he felt terrible himself when he heard the misreporting. He said, by law they were required to have a news bulletin and that they could lose their licence if they didn’t. I explained it would be better to run the gauntlet of the law than to misrepresent actual figures by such a wide margin and also stated that those who were promoting life were coming under constant attack from the secular media and I thought I could have expected better from a Christian broadcaster. He kept on apologizing and saying he had no choice. There had also been a small counter demonstration by pro abortionists numbering about 200 yet the same report put their numbers at five thousand. It was incredible. When he was apologizing I said to him ‘it seems to me in a similar situation you would do the same again’. He just kept reiterating that he had no choice. He said he would put the director of the station in touch with me when he came back from holidays. I said ok but he never got in touch. No credit to the government for implementing a law that forced them to do that yet even so they should have been able to see right and wrong and acting accordingly. Looking back on the incident you can see the irony of the situation. Here was a station set up to proclaim truth yet wouldn’t proclaim a truth in case they would lose their licence to proclaim the truth. The Pontius Pilate situation springs to mind. It also reminds me of a passage of Thomas a Kempis where we think we’re good until God sends some situation to test us and we fail miserably.

             Back to Pat Rabbitte, on the RTE Radio 1 morning news 7am-9am, Aug 26^th approx (you may want to listen back to it it  may have been 25^th or 27^th) on being interviewed about the household broadcasting charge and people not having a TV. He referred to those who do not watch TV as cavemen. Or rather he said, ‘I don’t believe we have cavemen here in this Country. What he was really saying was. There are I believe,  lying deceptive cheats who don’t pay their licence and if there are some people who don’t happen to look at TV they are cavemen, that is, an anathema to society and should feel the full weight of his censure. Rabbitte probably sees those who don’t watch TV as a greater danger to (his idea of) society than those who don’t pay their TV license.

          Following his remarks, there was a flurry of calls to the radio shows (if you wanted to listen to it). One such was RTE radio 1 liveline 1.45pm to 3pm. (The programme shifts back and forth between different issues so when he goes of the topic he will return to) these programmes come with a health warning. There were many people ringing up to say how incensed they were by his remarks that they didn’t watch TV and they weren’t cavemen. It was interesting to hear all the different reasons why people weren’t watching TV. Also from a sociological point of view it was interesting. Unfortunately there were too few disposing of it for altruistic motives but they were disposing of it nonetheless and that is to be welcomed.

             A TV cable co has called to my house asking if they could put a little box on the side of my house. Some years ago they laid cables through my garden under the garden wall. They weakened the foundation and cracks came in the garden wall. I live in a corner house so the work was done through my garden and so through the garden of the next garden house. A few months ago they came to do more work I told them about the wall. I asked them if they could do something with it. They said ‘yes yes we will tell our boss about it but I never heard from them again. Now about two weeks ago they came back again saying they wanted to do more work. I pointed out the wall to him. He said he would have to go and check the records at this stage he offered me free cable TV. I told him I don’t have a TV he said to me your one of the few. I said more and more people are giving up the TV he nodded in agreement. He then offered me free super fast broadband. I refused, I said to him I won’t be bought off.  He came back about a week later saying that their engineers said it was a tree nearby that was causing it. I disagreed. He said go down to the council and they will fix it. I said I will do that. But in the meantime you’re not doing any work on my house.

If you should post this letter here is a question I pose to other CUT members should I accept the broadband and allow them to work or refuse the broadband and not allow them to work? Your advice suggestions and opinions welcome.

               

The ‘caveman’ -  Dublin

Better known as the Prayer Crusader under the patronage of St Rita