Rome Watch May/June 2005

As we go to press the announcement has come from the Vatican of the death of Pope John Paul II, the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Institution (we hesitate to use the term church).

We would not underestimate the suffering of any human being, yet Rome has even used the suffering and death of the Pope for the maximum propaganda value. The mass media, not to mention Heads of State and the religious leaders of the world have repeatedly referred to him as "Holy Father", "God's representative on earth", "The successor of Saint Peter" and even compared the physical pain and suffering of the dying Pope to the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus - what utter blasphemy!

The Pope is credited with the downfall of Communism in his native Poland and Eastern Europe - in its place he sought to promote the European Union - which has now extended into those former Warsaw Pact Nations. He made literally hundreds of speeches promoting a United Europe and was in the process of Canonising (making saints) of the E.U. Founders.

The Pope was hailed as The Champion of Morality - and we must commend his stand on the issues of Abortion, Gay marriage and the Feminist Agenda - yet he presided over a religious system inwardly full of moral corruption and the last 15 years of his Pontificate was the era of Clerical Sex Abuse -which had been covered up for years, not only in Ireland and America - but world wide.

The Pope was hailed as the Champion of the Poor - yet never once did the Vatican sell any of its vast treasures to help them; and we all remember the Vatican and the Calvi Banking scandal.

The Pope held to all of the false doctrines of the system - making more so called Saints than all other Popes combined, since the 1580's. Declaring October 2004 - October 2005 The Year of the Eucharist and promoting the Unbiblical Rosary Devotion.

The Pope - was a keen promoter of the cult of the Virgin Mary. His motto - "Totally Yours" was in reference to Her. He travelled to almost every Marian Shrine and apparition site in the world and even attributed his escape from death by assassination to the intervention of "Our Lady of Fatima."

Much is made of the Pope's plea for peace on his visit to Ireland and yet he never used his supposed power of excommunication to deal with I.R.A. terrorism.

He promoted the Prophesied One World Religion e.g. The Assisi Prayer Meeting with leaders of Non-Christian Religions.

Whilst claiming he was in Heaven, Romanists world wide held masses and prayed for the repose of his soul - no doubt hoping to speed his journey through a mythical purgatory.

The Pope's death should remind us all of the brevity of Human Life and the need to trust in Christ alone, not in works or sacraments for Salvation.

THE ban on Catholics marrying the British monarch came under attack as "illogical and discriminatory" in the House of Commons. Conservative MP Edward Leigh, who is a Catholic, wants members of the royal family to be able to marry a person of "any religion or none". He said laws which exclude Catholics are a breach of human rights and should be repealed. The Act of Settlement 1701 does not allow those who "are or shall be reconciled to, or shall hold communion with, the See or Church of Rome, or shall profess the popish religion, or shall marry a papist" to become king or queen.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Co Antrim born head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, has also called for the law to be repealed, branding it "blatant anti catholic legislation". Under current law, any member of the royal family who marries a Catholic is automatically excluded from the line of succession.

"Surely in this day and age it is intolerable for the constitution to pick out any minority on grounds of religion," he said. "The language of our constitution is itself derogatory. A member of the head of state's family can marry anybody apart from a Papist."

The bill, which has cross-party support, was unopposed when it was brought under the 10 minute Rule Bill mechanism. However, it stands no chance of becoming law due to lack of parliamentary time. The 10 minute Rule Bill procedure allows MPs to raise an issue with the government and put it on the public agenda.

THE Bishop of Derry will write to parishioners after scrapping a levy they unknowingly paid to raise cash for victims of clerical sex abuse.

Monsignor Joseph Donnelly, from Omagh, who spoke on behalf of the priests after the meeting, said: "A very strong recommendation came from the meeting and he [the bishop] has acquiesced to the decision that was taken?" Msgr Donnelly added that a much clearer explanation should have been forthcoming before any bid was made to raise cash for the Stewardship Fund from parishioners. But he added that there was also a recognition that priests do have a collective responsibility on the wider issues.

And he added: "It's one of the sad facts that we are facing a lot of people who have suffered abuse over the years. That issue has to be addressed, and also there have to be measures put in place to ensure that that type of situation isn't allowed to be perpetuated in the future. The meeting also acknowledged that we do have a responsibility to try and fund these measures nationally as well as at a diocesan level."

CALLS to abolish the 50/50 recruitment policy for the PSNI were dismissed by the Government recently during Northern Ireland Questions in the Commons.

Direct Rule minister Ian Pearson said the split between Catholic and non Catholic recruits was vital to correct an historical imbalance. He added that 440 Protestants had been discriminated against since the measures were introduced in 2001.

The DUP had protested that 80% of Catholic applicants were successful compared with 25% of Protestants. The public did not care what religion police officers were, said Jeffrey Donaldson MP.

Mr Donaldson welcomed the increase in Catholic recruits but demanded: "Isn't it time the Government scrapped discrimination against Protestants?" Mr Pearson replied: "The Government strongly believes that these temporary provisions are justified to rectify an acute historical imbalance in the composition of the police force in Northern Ireland."

Mr Pearson said there had been 44,000 applications to join since 2001. "Our figures in terms of the discrimination against the Protestant community by the policy say that to date we reckon 440 people have been discriminated against," he added. This was "unfortunate" for those concerned but necessary to address the historical imbalance, he reiterated.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph earlier, East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell, claimed that it was "totally and utterly unacceptable" that suitably qualified Catholic applicants to the PSNI were three times more likely to be recruited than Protestants.

Mr Campbell said: "Looking at the figures provided, it means that only a quarter of non Catholic applicants have been successful, whereas around 80% of Catholics have been successful which means that a Catholic applicant is three times more likely to be successful than a Protestant."

He added: "I will now table a question asking for a breakdown of the religious background of the 408 applicants rejected on the 50:50 rule."

The SDLP's Pat Ramsey welcomed "equal representation" and urged political parties to act as guardians for young people wishing to pursue a career in policing. Mr Ramsey said:

"The whole essence of Patten was for a new police service in Northern Ireland that would be much more representative than the RUC. Equality and proper representation for Catholics and nationalists is something we have striven for so we have to regard these figures as a success. All political parties must he guardians for the young men and women who wish to pursue a career in policing."

THE Vatican is expected to give the green light in the next few months to the use of deacons, including married men, by the Catholic Church in Ireland.

The Irish bishops submitted a revised blueprint for their training and use to Rome last month following their quarterly meeting in Maynooth. The revisions were carried out in accordance with instructions from the Vatican and the final nod of approval is now expected. It is more than four years since the hierarchy first signalled that they intended applying to Rome for permission to train and ordain deacons.

However, even if Rome gives final permission within a matter of months, as expected, it will still be at least another four years before they are seen in Irish parishes. Following approval from Rome, it will be then up to each bishop to decide for himself exactly how and where candidates for the diaconate should be trained. Training will take three years part time and will only start after a one year period of "discernment".

Deacons, like priests, are ordained, and can carry out many of the tasks of the priest, including performing some of the sacraments, such as marriage.

I would say to Catholic Mother, Newry (November 25) that I do not usually answer unsigned letters but I will make an exception in your case since I do not remember seeing your earlier letter. My straightforward reply to your question is: "No. It is not a sin to vote for Sinn Fein."

So get out there, Catholic Mother, at the next election next year and vote for Sinn Fein. And get all your friends to do likewise. The more votes Sinn Fein gets, the sooner we will be rid of the Brits and the sooner we will be able to make our own laws.

The fast growing cult of Saint Death in Mexico is looking for respect from government and Roman Catholic authorities. Recently, members of the Santa Muerte death cult, dressed in white and, clutching statuettes of their beloved skeleton saint, marched through Mexico City to demand recognition for their religion.

Santa Muerte is a centuries old pagan cult, which has sprung up again in recent years and claims around two million followers in Mexico, ranging from top politicians to gangsters. Adherents are often members of the Roman Catholic Church and their leader is a Catholic bishop, who has become the scourge of the established church order.

The followers see no contradiction between venerating death and being Catholics. In Mexico it is not uncommon for Catholic churches in indigenous villages to mingle unorthodox rituals dating back to pre-conquest times with Catholic ceremonies and veneration of their own saints.

A Catholic priest was recently remanded on continuing bail after appearing before Londonderry Magistrate's Court charged with indecency in a shopping centre toilet.

Fr Patrick McGarvey (37) from Main Street, Stranorlar, Co Donegal, appeared in person and without his collar, on a charge of observing another person carrying out a private act in a public toilet in Foyleside Shopping Centre, Derry, for the purposes of sexual gratification.

The charge relates to an incident alleged to have taken place on August 4. The case was adjourned at the request of a representative from the Director of Public Prosecutions. Resident Magistrate Barney McElholm has ordered McGarvey to appear back before the Magistrate's Court in Derry on February 11.

Churchgoers risk lung cancer because of unhealthy air caused by candles and incense, researchers say. The scientists found new forms of "free radicals" that could threaten Roman Catholic rituals. Most at risk would be priests and those who work in churches but "worshippers devout enough to spend several hours each day in church could also be affected", the scientists say.

After nine hours of candle burning, the normal daily amount, the atmosphere in the Roman Catholic basilica in Maastricht, Holland, had readings between 12 and 20 times higher than European clean air guidelines. The air quality was worse than in an area used by 45,000 vehicles a day.

The measurements were taken in a small chapel and large basilica of the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Basilek through the day, and before and after simulated services. Dr Theo de Kok and Colleagues from the Department of Health Risk Analysis and Toxicology at Maastricht University said they were "stupifled" by the readings.

"While we still have to assess precisely what level of risk these people are running and how toxic the newly identified free radicals are, the discovery is very worrying," Dr de Kok said.

Fine particulate matter (PM) is a key ingredient of air pollution and consists of solid particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less. PM10 levels are a standard way to measure air quality. After nine hours the church had PM10 levels that were 600 to 1,000 microgrammes per cubic metre, four times higher than those measured before the first morning mass.

"This is 12 to 20 times higher than the European allowed average concentration over 24 hours," says Dr de Kok in December's European Respiratory Journal. The EU standard is 50 microgrammes per cubic metre. He found high levels of aromatic hydrocarbons, which are well known carcinogens, and the free radicals "including undocumented ones".

Indonesian police fired warning shots to break up a mob of hundreds of stone throwing Roman Catholics in Atambua, angered after a Protestant man refused to eat a communion wafer during Mass.

The Diocese of Southwark has announced a Requiem Eucharist to be held for former Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard. Sheppard in his younger days exercised a keen gospel ministry calling people to put their faith in Christ alone as the means of their salvation. The Requiem is 'a mass offered for the dead' and assumes that the person had died without the full assurance of faith, and therefore the Church must perform such a service in the hope that this will have direct effect not on whether they go to heaven or hell but on how long they will spend in purgatory. This teaching is a denial of the evangelical gospel and an abomination to the reformed doctrine of the Church of England. That a Church of England Cathedral should be used in such an act of deception is a disgrace.

Rome is still issuing plenary indulgences. These, according to Roman teaching, release those possessing the Indulgence from all temporal punishment for sin. An announcement from the Vatican in January, in connection with the Year of the Eucharist that began last October, sets out the conditions. It will be "granted to all faithful and to each individual faithful under the usual conditions (sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion and prayer in keeping with the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff, with the soul completely removed from attachment to any form of sin), each and every time they participate attentively and piously in a sacred function or a devotional exercise undertaken in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, solemnly exposed and conserved in the tabernacle". Other ways are also set out by which the Indulgence may be gained.

The new RC Apostolic Nuncio to the UK is Archbishop Faustino Sainz Munoz, a Spaniard born in 1937. He was formerly the Apostolic Pro Nuncio to the European Community in Brussels.

Half the Roman Catholic priests under 40 in Italy come from other countries. To maintain the present ratio of one priest for every 1,500 people in the population the number of ordinations each year will need to be nearly doubled.

The report, Pastoral and Population Statistics of the Catholic Community in England and Wales, indicates a massive slump in Roman Catholic practice. Between 1958 and 2002 the number of those attending Mass regularly has fallen from over a half of the RC population to less than a quarter. Marriages have fallen from about 69,000 to 15,000, and infant baptisms by 61 %. While adult baptisms have increased the fall is still nearly 50%. Conversions and receptions have fallen by two thirds.

The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has received permission from Rome to ordain into its ministry a retired and married Scottish Episcopal minister. This is said to be the first such ordination from the Episcopal Church.

The campaign against the Lewes bonfire continues. Roman Catholic councillor, Joe O'Keefe, says that he has no objection to the bonfire itself but to the burning of papal effigies and what he describes as its "virulent anti Catholic nature". He claims that his own effigy was burnt last year.

MICHAEL HOWARD DISMISSES TORY CANDIDATE FOR DISPLEASING THE 'CATHOLIC HERALD'

The Tory candidate for Slough has been dismissed by an increasingly authoritarian and anti democratic Tory leader because his books which point out that the historic and present support of the (nation destroying) European State by the Vatican remains a threat to the freedom of the British people. This displeased the Catholic Herald newspaper. On the board of that newspaper is the euro corporatist anti-British and anti-American MP John Selwyn Gummer who demanded Dr.Adrian Hilton's dismissal.

The Catholic Herald should never be taken seriously by any democrat in Britain for it was a leading supporter of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The Herald wrote on 19th June 1938 that the policy of the British Union of Fascists 'is the nearest approach to the Social theory of the encyclicals that we have yet been offered by any prominent political party'.

The Catholic Herald also strenuously opposed war against Fascism even in 1939 after Hitler's rise to power, after concentration camps, after the march into the Rheinland, after the Nuremberg Race laws and after the Kristallnacht attacks on the Jews.

Nor does the bigotry of this newspaper stop there for more recently they produced the following gems of religious intolerance:

'Protestantism, once the foundation of our "glorious constitution in Church and State", is now something preached in small, back street chapels and among the fanatic fringes of Northern Ireland's criminal classes. It has become the battle cry of murderers.'

'The days of the Anglican Church are numbered, and most of its worshippers will return to the true faith of their distant mediaeval forebears.'

The Catholic Herald regards attacks on the imperial political aims of the Vatican (historically and in today's European Union) as "bigotry". But look at these central tenets of Roman Catholic belief:

The Pope is not subject to any temporal power (Idem, Decreti, pars i. distinct. xcvi. can. Vii).

World leaders ought to obey, not command, the Pope (Idem,Decreti, pars i. distinct. xcvi. can. Xi).

If one needs proof of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the creation of the European Union (and hence the destruction of the democratic nation state) we need only look at the 30 year war waged by the Vatican against the embryo Italian nation state at the end of the 19th century, its historic support of every attempt to destroy the British nation and quote the Catholic Herald itself:

'We will be joined to a Europe in which the Catholic religion will be the dominant faith and in which the application of Catholic Social Doctrine will be a major factor in everyday political and economic life'.

It is perfectly obvious that Michael Howard has become not only a tyrant but he is a dangerous, historically ignorant dupe, oblivious of the desperate danger in which our nation finds itself.

The Campaign for UK Conservatism, 1 Sands Road, Swaiwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE16 3DJ

A double killing within the pope's Swiss Guards will be subject to full legal examination, as a result of the decision of a Swiss court to conduct an inquiry into the deaths in 1998 of Swiss Guards' commander Alois Estermann and his wife.

The move comes amid a flurry of books on the killing, including Victor Guitard's L'Agent Secret du Vatican containing an extensive interview with Giovanni Saluzzo, a friend and former colleague of Tornay.

Saluzzo claims that Estermann was murdered after Vatican officials discovered that he had been a spy for the East German Stasi secret police in the 1980s. However, in another book, Garde Suisse Au Vatican, a former Swiss Guard Stephane Sapin supports the Vatican's version of events that Tornay killed the couple in a fit of 'premeditated madness' prompted by drugs and a tumour on his brain

In connection with Roman commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the papal declaration of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary a 10 foot tall icon has been commissioned for a Roman Catholic church in the City of London, St Joseph's in Bunhill Row. It is said that it "will depict Mary the Mother of God as Mary Mother of the City". During the December celebrations in Rome itself the Pope entrusted the whole Church to the protection of Mary asking that she would "obtain peace and salvation for all the peoples".

"PROTESTANT" CLERGY IN CELEBRATION SERVICE AT ST. PETER'S ROMAN CATHOLIC CATHEDRAL

SOLEMN SERVICE: Monsignor Tom Toner of St. Peter's Cathedral, Belfast, and Dean Houston McKelvey, of St. Anne's Cathedral, pour water blessed by Bishop Patrick Walsh into the baptismal during the dedication of the new altar of St. Peter's.

Senior Protestant churchmen were present at a re-opening Service in St Peter's Roman Catholic Cathedral in West Belfast on 6th February.

Presbyterian Moderator the Rev Dr Ken Newell, Church of Ireland bishop the Rev Alan Harper, Dean Houston McKelvey and Methodist cleric the Rev Ivan McElhinney joined Roman Catholic prelates from Ireland, Scotland and Rome.

The cathedral, built in 1866, has undergone restoration work costing £5 million.

During the service the Papal Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Gisseppe Lazzarotto, delivered a message from the Pope and presented the gift of a chalice to the bishop of Down and Connor, the Rev Dr Patrick Walsh.

Joining Dr Walsh were Irish Roman Catholic primate the Rev Dr Sean Brady, former primate Cardinal Cahal Daly, former Archbishop of Dublin Cardinal Desmond Connell and Scottish Archbishop Cardinal Keith O'Brien.

The Lord Mayor of Belfast Councillor Tom Ekin attended. Representatives of the 88 parishes in Down and Connor diocese were among the 750 strong congregation.

Bishop Walsh praised the strong partnership between St Peter's Cathedral and St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast.

"Father" Patrick Convery - President of the Irish National League (1882-1895) was the Administrator of the cathedral 1883-85, when to celebrate the opening of St Peter's Tower and Bells, those same bells chimed out such republican tunes as "The Wearing of the Green" and "Let Erin remember." Parish Priest McGreevey wrote:- The Bells of St Peters, The Bells of St Peters, Ring them out gaily and never forget - The voice of their chiming from yon lofty steeple, Shall echo the shouts of our Liberty yet.

It is not the aim or intention of Rome Watch to incite hatred of Roman Catholics but rather, by use of International Press reports already carried in newspapers, to show the religious and political advances of the Papacy in the light of Bible Prophecy, which foretells an end-time World Religion, Government and Economy.