Ghouls and the Modern Errors of Russia

According to World Net Daily (May 26, 2005), women in the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics are being paid about $200 to have abortions and turn over their dead babies, which, in turn, are sold for over $9,000 for use in “youth injection” beauty treatments. Some women are even being paid extra for having late-term abortions, producing more valuable dead babies.

According to the London Observer (April 17, 2005), border guards stopped a train entering Russia from the Ukraine and arrested a “mule” carrying 25 cryogenically frozen fetuses hidden in two vacuum flasks. The driver said that he had bought them from a medical research center.

Racketeers are selling the aborted infants to clinics which claim to provide “fetal anti-aging therapy” treatments, which can cost up to $18,000. The salons offer injections of stem cells, the undivided cells present in embryos that can adapt into any kind of tissue, although they are still at the trial stage worldwide. Despite a Russian ban on all commercial treatments using human cells other than bone marrow, Moscow beauty salons which offer “fetal therapy” are flourishing. In these establishments, wealthy clients are told that the treatment can stop the aging process, or eliminate such debilitating conditions as Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. One fashionable Moscow clinic promises to “take ten years off your face.”

Ukrainian law allows an aborted fetus to be passed to research institutes if the woman involved consents and her anonymity is protected, but police say staff at state health institutions are selling them to private clinics offering the illegal therapy. “It is extremely difficult to detect this,” said one senior police official, “because there are corrupt agreements between respected doctors and academics.”

According to Sergei Shorobogatko, a former Kiev policeman who is investigating the trade, doctors can obtain fetuses to sell by telling women that there is “a medical reason for an abortion later than twelve weeks.” The women are then paid to wait until a late stage in their pregnancy, after which the aborted fetuses are passed to a middleman or institution, who cut them into separate organs and place them in cryogenic storage. The material is then sold and taken abroad.

Professor Vladimir Smirnov, director of Moscow’s Institute of Experimental Cardiology, describes the entire process as “a huge, corrupt and dangerous trade in quack therapies.” Although, in April, the Ministry of Health announced that 37 out of 41 clinics offering stem-cell treatments in Moscow were acting illegally, most continue to operate. Ukrainians, accustomed to tales of government corruption, are not surprised. “They used to say we were selling Ukraine,” said one reporter. “Now we are selling Ukrainians; moreover, in parts.”

Comment: One of the dictionary definitions for monster is “a person of unnatural or extreme wickedness or cruelty.” The pages of history stink of such figures, from the Roman Emperor Nero, who would cover Catholics with wax and pitch, impale them, and set them on fire, to dictator Pol Pot, who orchestrated the deaths of two million Cambodians through imprisonment, torture, overwork, starvation and execution.

In the early 17th century, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, “The Blood Countess of Transylvania,” added her name to the annals of monsterdom, when she mutilated and killed over 600 young girls. Her reason for this reign of terror? She killed the girls so that she could drain their blood, because she believed that bathing in “virgin’s blood” would preserve her youth.

Abortionists are the “respectable” monsters of today, slashing and scalding their lucrative paths across the tiny bodies of their fellow human beings without a look back. And now, monsters in Russia and the Ukraine are taking a page from Countess Bathory’s book. Murdered infants are sliced, diced and put into cold storage like commodities, so that wealthy patrons can indulge in a sort of bizarre “Peter Pan Vampirism,” intended to “take ten years off your face.” Meanwhile, “conservative” Catholics are trying to tell us that the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary has been performed just as Our Lady requested it, and that Russia has been converted. Sure, tell us another one!

 “The Fool Hath Said In His Heart: There Is No God”

Friday, May 20, 2005 marked the opening day of the first “All Atheist Weekend” in San Francisco, a gathering of atheists who came together, according to the Associated Press, “to discuss what they call the rise of fundamentalism in the U.S. and the blurring of lines between church and state.”

Five Bay Area atheist groups – from the “Godless Geeks” club of the Silicon Valley to the crew at the Rossmoor retirement community in Walnut Creek – have put together the weekend in order “to do what church people call outreach,” said Jim Heldberg, a Pacifica software salesman and onetime Methodist who coordinates the group, San Francisco Atheists. “We feel very threatened by what’s going on in this country, but we realize that we can’t just sit here in a corner by ourselves,” said Heldberg. “If we do, the religious right is just going to run us over.”

 “All Atheist Weekend” events included a fund-raising dinner, a speech by Ellen Johnson, national president of American Atheists (which was founded by atheist icon Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1963), and screenings of the film, The God Who Wasn’t There, by Los Angeles filmmaker Brian Flemming. According to the San Francisco Chronicle (May 20, 2005), the film “mashes up old movie clips, interviews, unauthorized clips from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and an interview with the director of the Christian school that [Flemming] attended as a child.”

Also on the agenda was a performance of The 10,000 Christs and the Evaporating Jesus, a one-man multimedia performance by David Fitzgerald, which purports to examine “the evidence for the historic Jesus” via a “lively, thoughtful and smartassed lecture,” according to San Francisco Atheists.

“It’s a great time to be an atheist,” said Fitzgerald, who was raised a Baptist in Fresno. “Five hundred years ago, we’d be burned for what we were thinking. Fifty years ago, we’d lose our jobs. But today, we’re free to be atheists.”

Comment: Take a look at the events scheduled for the first “All Atheist Weekend.” Brian Flemming’s film, The God Who Wasn’t There, preaches the following: Jesus Christ is likely a fictional character, a legend never based on a real human; Christian doctrine contradicts itself at every turn, and encourages immorality when it serves the religion; God simply isn’t there. David Fitzgerald’s The 10,000 Christs and the Evaporating Jesus purports to tell us where Christianity came from. Viewers are invited to “come see if Mel got it right, and learn what’s the deal with the Da Vinci Code.” We are also promised that, “whether you’re a believer or not, it’s guaranteed to change the way you look at Jesus.”

And what about past events sponsored by the San Francisco Atheists? Why should atheists care about a lecture titled “Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story,” by Richard Carrier, professor of philosophy at Columbia University? And why should David Fitzgerald even bother representing atheism in a debate on “The Trinity: Biblical or Heresy?” Most people don’t believe in leprechauns, and yet they don’t organize “Leprechauns Don’t Exist” events. That’s because they really, really don’t believe in leprechauns! If something doesn’t exist, you don’t obsess over it. Perhaps it is true that, as the poet and playwright, Edward Young (1683-1765), wrote, “By night, an atheist half believes in God.” It is simply irrational to get so angry over something that you claim is nonexistent.

The organizers of the “All Atheist Weekend” are selling an image of themselves as politically aware and caring people. They complain that they “feel very threatened by what’s going on in this country,” and that they must act, otherwise “the religious right is just going to run us over.”

This is utter nonsense. If these atheists, who love to tout their own intellectual superiority and reverence for the “facts,” had any insight into contemporary culture at all, they would have to admit that the United States is not and has never been a “Christian” country. In this land, partial-birth abortion is legal, while public displays of Christian symbols are not. In this land, homosexual couples can adopt children, and political deals are made with foreign allies of questionable (to say the least) ethics. What the atheist activists, fooled as they are by the evangelical prattle of many conservative politicians, do not know is that America is not a Christian nation simply because it has never been a Catholic one.

Atheist activists can pretend all they want that America is being ruled by “religious” forces, but the obvious fact remains that, as G.K. Chesterton put it, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” Only the truly paranoid, or the hopelessly deluded, imagine this nation turning into a “theocracy.” And these are the very people whose mania for attacking Jesus Christ belies their rationalist demeanor.

Curiously, it was one of America’s most notorious atheists, Sacramento’s Michael Newdow, the plaintiff in a 2002 lawsuit charging that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional (due to the phrase “under God”), who complained, in a San Francisco Chronicle article (May 20, 2005), that he avoids most atheist events because “there can also be a lot of bashing of Christians, which I’m not into.”

More “Ad Hoc Committee” Hijinks

According to the Stanford Report (Stanford University) for June 1, 2005, the Jewish Community Endowment Fund Lecture, sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, was delivered on May 19th by Dr. Paula Fredriksen, the William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University.

Titled “Jesus of Hollywood: Romans, Jews and Christians on the Silver Screen,” the lecture pointed to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as a “prime example” of how films “tamper with historical accuracy in order to achieve effects.” Because Mr. Gibson employed material from all four Gospels in the film, Fredriksen said that “Gibson may genuinely believe that what he has presented in his film is the same as history, but the claim itself is demonstrably false.”

By reducing Jesus Christ to “a first-century Jew engaged in disputes with other first-century Jews over issues important in first-century Judaism,” Fredriksen believes that the historical context for Jesus’ life has been lost.  She believes that the idea of Christ’s Passion, of redemption through suffering – arose only in the Middle Ages, and became the basis for the vilification of Jews. She also believes that “allegorical images began to take on more literal meanings,” so that the wine of the Last Supper became the literal blood of Christ, and medieval art depicted Jesus as “a grape being pressed.”

According to Fredriksen, history provides facts and theology infuses facts with meaning, and that “bad history will result in bad theology” and anachronism.  Her hope is that the opposite also may be so: Good history—that is, accurate history—will result in good theology.

Comment: Anyone who may feel that too much space in The Remnant has been devoted to Mel Gibson’s magnum opus should stop and consider just what the enemies of the Gospel have done to the film. Being unable to poison hearts against it, although God knows they tried hard to do so for the year prior to its release, they have “adopted it” as a kind of opening-line for their anti-Gospel tirades. It happened over and over before the Passion opened, and now it continues. The equation “The Passion = Anti-Semitism = The Gospels” has become mainstream.

Dr. Fredriksen’s approach is somewhat novel. She won’t say that the Gospels are “anti-Semitic” in themselves. No, they were merely interpreted as such by the ignorant, hateful Catholics who read them later on, the same fools who even went so far as to believe that the wine consecrated during Mass becomes the actual Blood of Christ! It makes you wonder how those medieval oafs managed to design cathedrals, invent polyphonic music and create perspective in the art of painting.

And, remember, in Gospel-trashing, anything goes! Fredriksen, a renowned New Testament scholar, believes that “the idea of Christ’s Passion, of redemption through suffering – arose only in the Middle Ages.” What kind of “scholarship” is this? The very first time we encounter Jesus Christ in St. John’s Gospel, He is called “the Lamb of God ... Him who taketh away the sin of the world.” The sacrificial LAMB. Get it, Dr. Fredriksen? If the numerous references to Our Lord’s redemptive suffering found throughout the New Testament aren’t enough, perhaps we can steer the former “Ad Hoc Scholar” to the writings of the earliest Church Fathers, such as St. Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote: “There is one Physician, Who is both flesh and spirit, born and not born, Who is God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first able to suffer and then unable to suffer, Jesus Christ Our  Lord.” And who was St. Ignatius of Antioch? Born around the year 50 AD, he was the third Bishop of Antioch, the successor of St. Evodius, who was himself the immediate successor of St. Peter. No, the  “idea of Christ’s Passion, of redemption through suffering,” did not arise “only in the Middles Ages.”

So much for Dr. Fredriksen’s “accurate history” and “good theology.” Of course, if you wanted to paint the gloriously Catholic Middle Ages as a time of superstition, ignorance and bloodlust, then you might want to fabricate the theory that the people of that time were enamored of pain and torture, and ready to believe anything. That’s “good history”, according to the former Ad Hoc Scholar.

New Apostolate Honors the Blessed Virgin

My Life With Mary, a Marian apostolate which began in December of 2004, is predicated on the belief that the great crisis in which the Catholic Church today finds herself “is essentially due to the lack of imitation of Mary in the Church, which in turn is caused by a lack of sharing our interior life with Mary, of listening and obeying Her, and of striving conscientiously to live our Christian duties under Her mantle, since without Her inspiration it is impossible to live authentically the Christian life.”

This apostolate was begun by Brother Alexis Bugnolo, a traditional Franciscan brother and member of the Militia of the Immaculata (MI), a worldwide movement to advance the Reign of Christ through the Immaculata, founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe in 1917, which encourages total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a means of spiritual renewal for individuals and society.

“As a disciple of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe and member of the M.I.,” says Br. Alexis, “I want to do all that I can to serve our Blessed Mother, to bring souls to Her so that they may bask and be refreshed, strengthened, reinvigorated, nurtured and grow in Christ more and more.” To this end, he is making available the My Life With Mary Prayer Booklet. It is a 32-page booklet designed to help Catholics live their daily lives as children of Mary.

Copies of this booklet (which is also available in French) are distributed free of charge. Those wishing a single copy can help out by sending a SASE big enough to carry a 4.5" x 5.5" booklet. To request copies, write to:

My Life With Mary

P.O. Box 123

Mansfield, MA  02048