ROME, January 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Readers may be surprised to hear that Jesus Christ was the first socialist; every word of every article in the Vatican newspaper is “virtually dictated” personally by Pope Benedict; every country in Europe – indeed in the whole world – is socialist; the Catholic Church “thrives” under socialist regimes; and Fidel Castro’s mass murdering regime is on a moral par with the Catholic Church because they both allegedly want to “eradicate” homosexuals.
All of these assertions have come from the mouth of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who recorded a strange and confused 3.5 minute tirade against Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas address, in which the pope warned that abortion and the advance of the homosexualist political and social agenda is a threat to the stability of human societies.
O’Donnell included several astonishing whoppers, including the assertion that a vow of celibacy automatically renders those who make it “tragically ignorant about marriage.” This despite the indisputable fact that the Pope, as well as nearly all clergy, are themselves the product of marriage, are surrounded like everyone else by married people and minister to married people, in addition to presumably being in possession of the normal human rational capacity that would allow them understand common cultural concepts.
Mr. O’Donnell appears not to have noticed that the Catholic
Church, whose clergy have been celibate for centuries, has been
administering the sacrament of marriage, counselling married people and
generally been intimately involved in the institution of marriage since
the founding of Christian civilization.Another jaw-dropper was the astonishing news that Jesus Christ “was the original socialist” because he fed the poor and admonished the moneychangers in the Temple. Because apparently in Mr. O’Donnell’s odd universe, no one other than socialists have ever done any of these things.
Demonstrating his deep penetration of Vatican affairs, O’Donnell goes on to say that “everything in the Vatican newspaper [L’Osservatore Romano] is virtually dictated by the pope”. To which assertion many long-time Catholic observers of the Vatican scene will doubtless respond – after they pick themselves up off the floor – “Oh, would that it were so!”
But it is when O’Donnell equates the Catholic Church’s teaching on the meaning of human sexuality with the mass murders undertaken by Fidel Castro’s regime after his takeover of Cuba, that the Wonderland Whirl really begins. So dizzyingly bizarre are the comparisons and insinuations that it becomes difficult to sort out just what point Mr. O’Donnell is trying to make.
“The most hard-core socialist practitioner of all time was also viciously anti-gay,” says O’Donnell. Castro, “who started life as a Roman Catholic,” rounded up homosexuals “and sent them to re-education camps.”
“In Fidel Castro’s socialist utopia, gay sex was a criminal act,” O’Donnell continues. “Castro believed he could actually rid his country of all homosexuality, and he did everything in his power to achieve that.” Therefore, O’Donnell said, socialism “has not been a special friend to gay people”.
At the same time, O’Donnell claims, the Catholic Church “has thrived in socialist countries around the world,” although it “this week seems to want to pretend it is suddenly threatened by socialism”. These socialist countries, he says, include Italy. “Yes, Italy is a socialist country, as is every country in Europe, as is every country in the world, to varying degrees,” he adds.
He declined, however, to mention the countless thousands of Catholic inmates who perished in the Gulag system, prisons and torture chambers of the countries of the Soviet Union. He seems also never to have heard of any of the writings of any of the popes, largely before the 1960s, warning the world of the threat of socialistic Communism.
Untangled, O’Donnell’s message seems to be that the Catholic Church is socialist, because it follows Jesus Christ, the “first socialist,” and it is therefore exactly like Castro in its desire to persecute, torture and murder homosexuals – presumably with the approval of its socialist Founder.
Fortunately, Pope Benedict, who has been known to read a book or two now and then, was rather more coherent in his message for Christmas. However little Mr. O’Donnell may be aware of it, there is very little dispute in academia or among the more serious-minded public commentators that the “gender theory” driving the far-left, homosexualist political agenda is an offshoot of radical academic feminism, that is itself the child of Marxist theory. So much can be discovered by simply Googling the search terms “Engels, monogamous, family.”
It is hardly credible to dispute the connection of the “LGBTQ” agenda with the left, particularly in Europe where it forms a cornerstone of all the socialist, leftist and green parties’ platforms. Benedict is among the many who have personally experienced the effects of socialistic theories put into practice in various totalitarian regimes in recent European history, and is well placed to issue warnings against its re-growth under new names.
In the Christmas address that Mr. O’Donnell was at such pains to ridicule, Benedict warned that the attack on the family “goes much deeper” than was previously believed. It is a product, the pope said, ultimately of a foundational error about what it means to be human. It is a refusal to accept the very notion that there is such a thing as human nature, connected to their “bodily identity,” which we all share.
“While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question,” Pope Benedict said. Gender theory’s adherents, and the many more people they have seduced, “deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves”.
In the gender ideology, “sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”
The theory denies the immutable, dual nature of humanity, that “being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature.” But, “this duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about,” Pope Benedict said.
“If there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation,” he said.
“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”
L’Osservatore Romano followed up the pope’s address with the observation that the new theory of a mutable, essentially self-determined human nature, is part and parcel of the socialist attempt to entirely re-write the nature of human beings and human societies. Lucetta Scaraffia, an eminent Italian historian who has also presumably read a few books, wrote that gender theory and its political causes are in fact the ultimate expression of Marx and Engels’ initial call for the abolition of the two-parent, biologically-based family.
She warned that the societies will “pay a high price” for the attempt to found a society on these premises, “as has already happened in the past when we have tried to achieve a complete economic and social equality.”
Pope Benedict warned, perhaps most ominously of all, that the final results of the implementation of this theory is the total objectification of human beings, particularly children. “From being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain.”
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SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba, FEB. 24, 2008 (