The Downfall of Detroit

JULY 19, 2013 6:15 PM

It took only six decades of “progressive” policies to bring a great city to its knees.
By Mark Steyn



One of the thousands of blighted homes in Detroit.


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Mark Steyn


By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.


But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the “arsenal of democracy,” and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of “per capita income,” many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO seriesHung recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector work force, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

So, late on Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit’s bankruptcy “unconstitutional” because, according to the Detroit Free Press, “the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees.” Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.

So a bankrupt ruin unable to declare bankruptcy is now back to selling off its few remaining valuables, as I learned from a Detroit News story headlined “Howdy Doody May Test Limits of Protecting Detroit Assets.” For those of you under 40 — okay, under 80 — Howdy Doody is the beloved American children’s puppet, in western garb with a beaming smile and 48 freckles, one for every state, which gives you some idea of when his heyday was. The Howdy Doody Show ended its run on September 24, 1960, which would have made sense for Detroit, too. The city’s Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet — or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don’t get too excited — you can’t go to Detroit and see him on display; he’s in storage. He’s in some warehouse lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees. Instead of selling him off, maybe they should get him moonlighting as a gigolo and sell it to HBO as Hungy Doody (“When you’re looking for the real wood”). What else is left to sell? The City of Windsor has already offered to buy the Detroit half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”



After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith famously told a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” — and in a great city, too. If your inheritance includes the fruits of visionaries like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, and the Dodge brothers, you can coast for a long time, and then decline incrementally, and then less incrementally, and then catastrophically, until what’s left is, as the city’s bankruptcy petition puts it, “structurally unsound and in danger of collapse.” There is a great deal of ruin in advanced societies, but even in Detroit it took only six decades.


“Structurally unsound and in danger of collapse”: Hold that thought. Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host. But, pending an appeal, that’s “unconstitutional,” no matter how dead the host is. Beyond that, Detroit needs urgently both to make it non-insane for talented people to live in the city, and to cease subjecting its present population to a public “education” system that’s little more than unionized child abuse. Otherwise, Windsor, Ontario, might as well annex it for a War of 1812 theme park — except if General Brock and the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles had done to Detroit what the Democratic party did they’d be on trial for war crimes at The Hague.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Gay scandal at the heart of the Vatican: Pope Francis faces his first crisis

By Damian Thompson Religion Last updated: July 20th, 2013

Pope Francis is discovering just what a nasty place the Vatican can be. Having acknowledged that there was a "gay lobby" in the Curia, the Pope has been told that the man he's appointed to be prelate of the Vatican Bank, Monsignor Battista Ricca, has an allegedly scandalous gay past. Moreover, Ricca is not only Francis's personal representative at the bank: he's also Director of the Domus Santa Marta, where Francis has chosen to live. Indeed, the Pope often eats with the 57-year-old Ricca, whose supposed sexual indiscretions are the subject of an explosive article by Sandro Magister, Vatican expert of L'Espresso magazine.

The best guide through this troubling affair is Dr Robert Moynihan, one of the most respected of all commentators on Vatican affairs and the author of a new book about Pope Francis. I receive his email newsletter, the Moynihan Report, in which he sets out the sequence of events:

Ricca, a 57-year-old Italian prelate is a career Vatican diplomat who … in the past year, has directed the Domus Santa Marta, where the Pope is now living. In his post at the Secretariat of State, Ricca was in charge of accounting for all financial expenditures in all the nunciatures of the world. So he has a certain competence in economic matters.

His staff confirm that he is a considerate, thoughtful man. I myself, during recent stays in the Domus, have spoken with him several times, and he has spoken eloquently of the need for Christians to live out the Christian faith, especially through acts of charity toward the poor and needy.

During these years, Ricca got to know Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio [who] came not only to know Ricca, but to trust him.

When Bergoglio became Pope, and decided to remain in the Domus Santa Marta, he turned to Ricca, with whom he often took his meals at the great central table in the dining room, to help him in his work of cleaning up and reforming the Roman Curia, one of the main things the cardinals asked for in the days leading up to the conclave.

On June 15, the Pope named Ricca to perhaps the key post in the overall effort to reform the curia: his personal representative at the Vatican bank, to oversee every aspect of the managment and reform of the bank.

Since the Vatican bank is a very important "nodal point" for the Curia and for the Church, the Pope's decision to appoint Ricca as his "eyes and ears" at the bank immediately made Ricca much more important than he had ever been before, and a potential target of those who might wish that something up until now hidden at the Vatican bank might not come to light.

In other words, if there were any "weak points" in Ricca's personal or professional past that could be used either to condition, control, or discredit him, his appointment might have made it urgent (to some) to discover those "weak points," and then make use of them.

On July 3, Magister – himself a renowned Vaticanologist – ran an articleclaiming there was evidence that Ricca had engaged in "scandalous behaviour" while in the nunciature in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2000 and 2001. But there were no specifics. As Moynihan says, it seemed like a public warning to Pope Francis. Nothing happened. Then Magister published a much more damning article, entitled "The Prelate of the Gay Lobby". He wrote:

The black hole in Ricca's personal history is the period he spent in Uruguay, in Montevideo, on the northern shore of the Rio de la Plata, across from Buenos Aires.

Ricca arrived at this nunciature in 1999, when the mandate of the nuncio Francesco De Nittis was coming to an end. Previously he had served at the diplomatic missions of Congo, Algeria, Colombia, and finally Switzerland.

Here, in Bern, he had met and become friends with a captain of the Swiss army, Patrick Haari. The two arrived in Uruguay together. And Ricca asked that his friend be given a role and a residence in the nunciature.

The nuncio rejected the request. But a few months later he retired and Ricca, having become the chargé d'affaires “ad interim" until the appointment of the new nuncio, assigned Haari a residence in the nunciature, with a regular position and salary.

At the Vatican they let it go. The substitute for general affairs in the secretariat of state at the time was Giovanni Battista Re, a future cardinal, he too originally from the diocese of Brescia.

The intimacy of the relations between Ricca and Haari was so open as to scandalize numerous bishops, priests, and laity of that little South American country, not last the sisters who attended to the nunciature.

The new nuncio, Janusz Bolonek of Poland, who arrived in Montevideo at the beginning of 2000, also found that “ménage” intolerable immediately, and informed the Vatican authorities about it, insisting repeatedly to Haari that he should leave. But to no use, given his connections with Ricca.

In early 2001 Ricca also got into a scrape over his reckless conduct. One day, having gone as on other occasions – in spite of the warnings he had received – to Bulevar Artigas, to a meeting place for homosexuals, he was beaten and had to call some priests to take him back to the nunciature, with his face swollen.

In August of 2001, another mishap. In the middle of the night the elevator of the nunciature got stuck and in the early morning the firemen had to come. They found trapped in the car, together with Monsignor Ricca, a young man who was identified by the police authorities.

Nuncio Bolonek asked that Ricca be sent away from the nunciature and Haari fired immediately. And he got the go-ahead from the secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

Ricca, dragging his heels, was transferred to the nunciature of Trinidad and Tobago, where he remained until 2004. There as well he butted heads with the nuncio. Finally to be called to the Vatican and removed from diplomatic service on the ground …

In Uruguay, the facts reported above are known to dozens of persons: bishops, priests, sisters, laypeople. Without counting the civil authorities, from security forces to fire protection. Many of these persons have had direct experience of these facts, at various moments.

But at the Vatican as well there are those who know about them. The nuncio at the time, Bolonek, always expressed himself with severity with regard to Ricca, in reporting to Rome.

And yet a blanket of public silence has covered until today these past episodes of the monsignor.

But if the article was intended to force Francis's hand, it didn't work. To quote Moynihan:

Once again, the Pope was not moved. He authorized Father Lombardi [his press officer] to deny the allegations, saying that Magister's report was "not trustworthy," and he did not ask for Ricca's immediate resignation.

So now the world is wondering: what is the truth? Why are these allegations emerging now, instead of (for example) when the Pope decided to stay in the Domus, directed by Ricca?

Why is the Pope not asking for Ricca's resignation, removing even the suspicion of scandal from the initial efforts of his pontificate to reform the Roman Curia?

In the past week, a couple of well-informed priests have contacted me about this crisis. Both noticed the same detail in Magister's second report. When allegations about Ricca were flying around, one of the Vatican officials who apparently chose not to act was Giovanni Battista Re – who went on to become a cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Re is loathed by traditionalists, who blame him for undermining the pontificate of Benedict XVI; certainly as Prefect until 2010 he arranged the appointment of many bishops who were out of sympathy with Benedict's liturgical and theological opinions – and, also, he didn't handle the paedophile scandals with any skill. The last thing conservatives want is for Re to start flexing his muscles under the new regime; perhaps the Ricca affair will curb his ambitions.

What are we to make of all this? I agree with Moynihan that this is a crucial juncture in Francis's pontificate – his first crisis, and not a small one. But Moynihan hits exactly the right note when he writes:

I have been a Vaticanist for a quarter century. In those years, I have seen many cases when what seems to be true at first glance is not the truth, or not the whole truth. There is information, and there is disnformation. There are maneuvers to gain influence or to ward off change. This can even include discrediting a person with false charges. We must be very attentive to weigh all evidence and to ask: Is it true? Who provided the evidence? For what purpose or goal? Why now? And, could the facts have a more innocent explanation than appears at first glance? In short, we have to be cautious, and careful, and fair.

Tragic Worship

June/July 2013

Carl R. Trueman


The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music, stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking center stage, and a certain amount of Hallmark Channel sentimentality neglects one classic form of entertainment, the one that tells us, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, that “in the midst of life we are in death.”


It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry “Jesus is Lord!” assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesar’s. Christ’s lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesar’s by power.


Perhaps some might recoil at characterizing tragedy as entertainment, but tragedy has been a vital part of the artistic endeavors of the West since Homer told of Achilles, smarting from the death of his beloved Patroclus, reluctantly returning to the battlefields of Troy. Human beings have always been drawn to tales of the tragic, as to those of the comic, when they have sought to be lifted out of the predictable routines of their daily lives—in other words, to be entertained.


From Aeschylus to Tennessee Williams, tragedians have thus enriched the theater. Shakespeare’s greatest plays are his tragedies. Who would rank Charles Dickens over Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad? Tragedy has absorbed the attention of remarkable thinkers from Aristotle to Hegel to Terry Eagleton.


Christian worship should immerse people in the reality of the tragedy of the human fall and of all subsequent human life. It should provide us with a language that allows us to praise the God of resurrection while lamenting the suffering and agony that is our lot in a world alienated from its creator, and it should thereby sharpen our longing for the only answer to the one great challenge we must all face sooner or later. Only those who accept that they are going to die can begin to look with any hope to the resurrection.


Yet today tragedy has, with few exceptions, dropped from popular entertainment. Whether it is the sentimentalism of the Hallmark Channel, the pyrotechnics of action movies, or the banal idiocy of reality TV, the tragic sensibility is all but lost. This is further compounded by the trivial way in which the language of tragedy is now used in popular parlance. As with defining moment andcrisis, the words tragedy and tragic are now expected to perform Stakhanovite levels of linguistic labor. In a world where even sporting defeats can be described as tragedies, rarely do the terms speak of the catastrophic moral crises and heroic falls that lie at the heart of great tragic literature.


Yet human life is still truly tragic. Death remains a stubborn, omnipresent, and inevitable reality. For all of postmodern anti-essentialism, for all the repudiation of human nature, for all the rhetoric of self-creation, death eventually comes to all, frustrates all, levels all. It is not simply a linguistic construct or a social convention. Yet despite this, Western culture has slowly but surely pushed death, the one impressive inevitability of human life, to the very periphery of existence.


Pascal observed the problem in seventeenth-century France when he saw the obsession with entertainment as the offspring of the fallen human desire to be distracted from any thought of mortality. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room,” he said. And: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”


Today the problem is even greater: Entertainment has apparently become many people’s primary purpose of existence. I doubt that it would surprise Pascal that the world has increased the size, scope, and comprehensiveness of distraction. It would not puzzle him that death has been reduced to little more than a comic-book cartoon in countless action movies or into a mere momentary setback in soap operas and sitcoms. Indeed, he would not find it perplexing that the bleak spiritual violence of mortality leaves no lasting mark on the bereaved in the surreal yet seductive world of popular entertainment.


But he might well be taken aback that the churches have so enthusiastically endorsed this project of distraction and diversion. This is what much of modern worship amounts to: distraction and diversion. Praise bands and songs of triumph seem designed in form and content to distract worshipers from life’s more difficult realities.


Even funerals, the one religious context where one might have assumed the reality of death would be unavoidable, have become the context for that most ghastly and incoherent of acts: the celebration of a life now ended. The Twenty-Third Psalm and “Abide with Me” were funeral staples for many years but not so much today. References to the valley of the shadow of death and the ebbing out of life’s little day, reminders both of our mortality and of God’s faithfulness even in the darkest of times, have been replaced as funeral favorites by “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “My Way.” The trickledown economics of worship as entertainment has reached even the last rites for the departed.


Yet tragedy is a vital part of entertainment. Aristotle in his Poetics famously argued for the personal and social benefits of tragic drama. The audience, swept up into the vertiginous moral crises, the magnificent flaws, and the catastrophic falls of the heroes, enjoyed the experience of catharsis—running the gamut of relevant emotions—without being agents in the events depicted on the stage. They left the theater cleansed by the experience and knowing more deeply what it means to be human. They were wiser, more thoughtful, and better prepared to face the reality of their own lives.


Of all places, the Church should surely be the most realistic. The Church knows how far humanity has fallen, understands the cost of that fall in both the incarnate death of Christ and the inevitable death of every single believer. In the psalms of lament, the Church has a poetic language for giving expression to the deepest longings of a humanity looking to find rest not in this world but the next. In the great liturgies of the Church, death casts a long, creative, cathartic shadow. Our worship should reflect the realities of a life that must face death before experiencing resurrection.


It is therefore an irony of the most perverse kind that churches have become places where Pascalian distraction and a notion of entertainment that eschews the tragic seem to dominate just as comprehensively as they do in the wider world. I am sure that the separation of church buildings from graveyards was not the intentional start of this process, but it certainly helped to lessen the presence of death. The present generation does not have the inconvenience of passing by the graves of loved ones as it gathers for worship. Nowadays, death has all but vanished from the inside of churches as well.


In my own tradition, the historic Scottish Presbyterian tradition, the somber tempos of the psalter, the haunting calls of lament, and the mortal frailty of the unaccompanied human voice helped to connect Sunday worship to the realities of life. There are indeed psalms of joy and triumph. The parents rejoicing in the birth of a child could find words of gratitude to sing to the Lord, but there are also psalms which allow bereaved parents to express their grief and their sorrow in words of praise to their God.


The psalms as the staple of Christian worship, with their elements of lament, confusion, and the intrusion of death into life, have been too often replaced not by songs that capture the same sensibilities—as the many great hymns of the past did so well—but by those that assert triumph over death while never really giving death its due. The tomb is certainly empty; but we are not sure why it would ever have been occupied in the first place.


Only the dead can be resurrected. As the second thief on the cross saw so clearly, Christ’s kingdom is entered through death, not by escape from it. Traditional Protestantism saw this, connecting baptism not to washing so much as to death and resurrection. Protestant liturgies made sure that the law was read each service in order to remind the people that death was the penalty for their sin. Only then, after the law had pronounced the death sentence, would the gospel be read, calling them from their graves to faith and to resurrection life in Christ. The congregants thereby became vicarious participants in the great drama of salvation.


There was surely catharsis in such worship: The congregants left each week having faced the deepest reality of their own destinies. Perhaps it is ironic, but the church that confronts people with the reality of the shortness of life lived under the shadow of death prepares them for resurrection better than the church that goes straight to resurrection triumphalism without that awkward mortality bit.


Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I have described; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than the entertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one does occasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppola or a Scorsese.


A church with a less realistic view of life than one can find in a movie theater? For some, that might be an amusing, even entertaining, thought; for me, it is a tragedy.


Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

July 19, 2013
An interview with Dom Alcuin Reid about Sacra Liturgia 2013
CWR Staff


Mass is celebrated at the Basilica of St. Apollinare in Rome during the Sacra Liturgia 2013 conference.


At the end of June more than 300 people gathered in Rome from over 35 countries to participate in Sacra Liturgia 2013, an international conference on liturgical formation, celebration and the mission of the Church, convened by the bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, France, Bishop Dominique Rey. CWR asked Sacra Liturgia 2013’s principal organizer, Dom Alcuin Reid, about the conference and its impact.

CWR: This was a large international conference. Were the organizers happy with how it unfolded?

Dom Reid: More than happy, yes. Practically speaking, hiring the facilities of the Pontifical University of Santa Croce provided an excellent venue in the heart of Rome and the warm welcome accorded us by the rector of the adjacent Basilica of St. Apollinare gave us a beautiful environment in which to celebrate the sacred liturgy together. Of course, organization can always be improved, but I think we were able to provide delegates with a conference well worth attending and which made a significant contribution to the Year of Faith.

In terms of content we were blessed with first-class speakers from beginning to end. We deliberately varied the topics around different aspects of liturgical formation and celebration and their relationship to the life and mission of the Church in the 21st century so as to provide a wide-ranging “diet,” as it were. This was not a conference for “sacristy specialists” or even necessarily for liturgical experts. Rather it was for those wishing better to understand the unique and fundamental role of the sacred liturgy in the life of the Church—an understanding which his necessary for all of us if we are to form and evangelize others.

CWR: Can you say something about the different participants?

Dom Reid: Delegates came from more than 35 countries and from very different backgrounds. Lay men and women involved in different aspects of ministry in their parishes and dioceses, many priests of course, religious men and women, as well as students and seminarians. Many of these delegates were young—including one group of college students from the United States who saved up to come—showing that the “question of the liturgy” is very much alive for their generation. Some bishops and an abbot came as delegates in order to further their own liturgical formation. So too there were a number of professors of liturgy and liturgical formators from seminaries and universities present. We also were honored by the participation of the ambassadors to the Holy See of Great Britain, Australia, and South Korea.

Speakers too, came from around the globe. Cardinal Ranjith came especially from Sri Lanka, and we were fortunate that Archbishop Sample, Bishop Elliott, and Professor Rowland were all in Rome for other engagements during that week and could join us. Roman residents Cardinals Canizares, Burke, and Brandmueller, Msgr. Heid and Father Gunter joined us. Bishop Aillet and Abbot Nault came from France, Msgr. Newton and Father Lang from England, and others from Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

One thing that struck me about the participants was the overall tone, particularly in the discussions. There was no negativity or focus on past problems. Rather, it was evident that all were looking forward with great hope and confidence to future renewal in liturgical formation and celebration. In a way this encapsulates the spirit of Sacra Liturgia 2013: no one present denied that there have been serious liturgical problems in recent decades, but all were united in the conviction that we must play our part in solving them. There was a tangible spirit, a momentum, in the participants that will bear much fruit in the future.

CWR: You spoke of problems that need to be solved. In the ongoing reform of the liturgy, what still needs to be done, and how?

Dom Reid: There are many things that need to be done, and our speakers each discussed this question according to his own area of competence.

The fundamental reform that is needed is a reform of our understanding of the liturgy itself: what is it? What is Catholic liturgy? If we understand this and imbibe its sprit, if we study the liturgical theology of the Second Vatican Council, of Pius XII’s Mediator Dei, of the popes and authors before that, we discover that they are as one in asserting that the sacred liturgy is the continuing salvific action of Christ in his Church in which we participate by means of our baptism and give Almighty God the worship that is his due. The liturgy is not about us, as Cardinal Ratzinger once said, but about God.

If we have this fundamental orientation correct then the “problems” of liturgical rites, ministries, music, architecture, vesture, language, and so on can be viewed in a clearer light. If I come to the liturgy—cleric, religious, or lay man or woman—as a humble worshipper seeking that living connection with the action of Christ in his Church (which is what “active participation” should mean), then the liturgy does not need to reflect me, my tastes, those of my community or of “modern man,” whatever that might mean. Rather, it needs to speak of God in ways that our Mother the Church has developed in her tradition. It is the Church’s liturgy, not ours, and we must celebrate it according to her ways and spirit.

In this spirit we can see the need for something of an examination of conscience in respect of recent decades, and even for a reform of the reform, as it were. For some liturgical practices that have been widely discarded or introduced seem to speak more of me, of us, than they do of God.

Cardinal Ranjith underlined the importance of Latin in the liturgy and did this, interestingly, as the bishop of a diocese whose native language has no Latin roots. Yet even for such a people, he pointed out, it serves to enhance peoples’ connection with Christ in the liturgy. We can make the same observation about the celebrant facing East for the offertory and Canon of the Mass: this posture bespeaks worship at a time when the human personality of the celebrant is of no importance and can often get in the way. Professor Steinschulte made a powerful case for the importance of truly liturgical music, as envisaged by the Council, to replace the “de-evangelizing,” relativistic music that we often encounter in our churches.

An honest liturgical examination of conscience will identify other reforms that follow from this principle that enable the spirit and power of the liturgy to touch those who come to our churches and which will empower us for Christian life and mission.

CWR: So the connection between reverent, proper liturgy and a vibrant spiritual life was a constant theme at Sacra Liturgia 2013?

Dom Reid: Without doubt. The conference’s subtitle was “Culmen et fons vitæ et missionis ecclesiæ,” underling that the liturgy is the source and summit of all of the life and the mission of the Church.

Let’s come back to the word “connection.” We all know about connectivity these days and how frustrating it is if our various devices don’t have it. Well, the sacred liturgy is our fundamental means of connectivity with Jesus Christ. Period. Whilst there are differing spiritual practices that can bring us to Christ, the liturgy has absolute primacy in the spiritual life, as the Council said. And if our connection with Christ is somehow impeded or limited, we lack the fundamental means necessary for Christian life and mission: we aren’t in touch with the power source, as it were.

Optimal connectivity is necessary for a “vibrant spiritual life.” Yes, it suffices that Mass and absolution in confession are valid, but these are minimalist concerns—they are “one bar” connections. The sacred liturgy is about nourishing our mind, body and spirit fully—it is a feast, not a fast. That is why our rites and chants, our gestures, our architecture and art, our vessels and vestments have such importance. These things, which have often been devalued in recent years, are in fact the means of our connection with Christ. Abbot Zielinski underlined this in his fascinating examination of “Liturgy, Ritual, and Contemporary Man,” which underlined our innate psychological and anthropological need for ritual as human beings.

CWR: Given this, how did the conference explore the relationship between liturgical renewal and the New Evangelization?

Dom Reid: This relationship is the raison d’être for Sacra Liturgia 2013. Bishop Rey is not a liturgical scholar, he is diocesan bishop, and it is from the standpoint of that particular vocation that he so profoundly appreciates the role of the liturgy. As he said in his introduction to the conference: “As a bishop it is my duty to do all I can to promote the New Evangelization initiated by Blessed John Paul II...the New Evangelization must be founded on the faithful and fruitful celebration of the Sacred Liturgy as given to us by the Church in her tradition—Western and Eastern.” When first we discussed the possibility of a conference this focus was clear and we invited speakers to base their considerations on it.

Abbot Nault made some important observations about this. Drawing on the work of Louis Bouyer he noted that the liturgy “cannot be reduced to being an instrument for something else, which would end up being a pick-and-mix of catechesis, formation for Christian living, and ritual;” i.e., the liturgy is not primarily a tool of catechesis or evangelization. Rather, he argued that “a correct ‘use’ of the liturgy” is necessary, “a ‘use’ which can be a source of great pastoral and evangelical fruitfulness.” As he pointed out, “it is only when we let liturgy be ‘useless’ that it reveals the extent of its ‘usefulness’ in the life of the Church and the New Evangelization!”

Professor Rowland made a powerful argument for the role of the usus antiquior—the older liturgical rites—in the New Evangelization, pointing out their value as an antidote to the sterile rationalism of the culture of modernity and as at least a partial answer to the hunger of the post-modern generations for an immersion in a liturgical tradition which is oriented to God and eternity. “The usus antiquior should be a standard element of the cultural capital of all Latin Rite Catholics since it so effectively resists secularism and satisfies the post-modern hunger for coherent order, beauty, and an experience of self-transcendence,” she asserted.

Professor Rowland, who has known and appreciated these rites since her youth, challenged some of the “practices and attitudes” that can deter others from coming to do so. A media interview recently took parts of her nuanced argument about this out of context and caused some controversy. But her point is valid: the riches of the older liturgical rites will remain largely untapped if we who know and treasure them behave like members of a sect or perpetuate a cultural, social, or ideological ghetto. The usus antiquior is too potent a connection with Jesus Christ, too important a basis for Christian life and mission, indeed for the New Evangelization, to be occluded by the limitations and even wounds of some which, given the appalling treatment encountered by many attached to these rites, are understandable, certainly, but not always helpful. Ironically some of the reactions to Professor Rowland’s assertion of this problem proved her point. We need to move beyond this sort of thing.

CWR: Speaking about older rites, what about the worship of the early Church? There was much talk of going back to its “purer” forms after the Council. Where do we stand with that today?

Dom Reid: Cardinal Ranjith spoke of this issue in his keynote address, decrying “a kind of false archaeologism which echoed the slogan: ‘let us go back to the liturgy of the early Church.’” His Eminence continued: “In this theme was a hidden understanding that only what happened in liturgy in the first millennium of the Church was valid. This was supposed to be part of the process of aggiornamento. Mediator Dei indicates that this view is in error when it states: ‘the liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity’ [MD 61]. Moreover, since information on the liturgical practice of the early centuries is not so clearly attested to in the written sources available to us from that era, the danger of a simplistic arbitrariness in defining these practices is greater and runs the risk of being pure conjecture. Besides, it is not respectful of the natural process of growth of the traditions of the Church over the subsequent centuries. Neither is it in consonance with the belief in the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church down the centuries. It is also highly pedantic and unrealistic.”

Of course, today we know that what scholars 50 years ago thought was the liturgy of the early Church is not necessarily what scholars hold now. The clearest example of this is the so-called Eucharistic prayer of Hippolytus, which was assumed to be the earliest example of a Roman anaphora and was accordingly used as the basis for the creation of Eucharistic Prayer II promulgated by Paul VI. Today scholars recognize that these assumptions were inaccurate, which is embarrassing to say the least. So too the assumption that the early Church celebrated the Eucharist “facing the people” in the manner that became popular in the 20th century has been shown to be false. These are the dangers and limitations of archaeologism—as opposed to respecting the organic development in the liturgy in history.

CWR: As well as conference presentations Sacra Liturgia 2013 involved liturgical celebrations. Can you tell us something about them?

Dom Reid: As Bishop Rey said in his introduction to the book printed for the conference liturgies, “Before we speak about the liturgy, we must be liturgical.” We opened the conference with solemn Vespers, celebrated two Masses and closed the conference with solemn Vespers, Te Deum, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The first two celebrations were according to the modern rites, the last two according to the older ones.

The splendid Basilica of St. Apollinare enabled the dignified celebration of these liturgies and the assistance of a Roman choir comprising some members of the Sistine Chapel choir and others ensured the chant and polyphony, though it was very moving to hear our participants singing Vespers and the Gregorian Mass common together, without rehearsal.

The liturgies were celebrated in Latin—as Sacramentum caritatis recommends for international gatherings—and ad orientem. Comprehension of the liturgical texts was facilitated though the translations in the five conference languages printed in the liturgy book. Photographs of the liturgies—and of the conference itself—can be viewed on Flickr.

All in all the liturgical celebrations were sober—as befits the Roman rite—worthy and beautiful, and I think it is fair to say that our large and diverse gathering were able to participate fully in them. Please God we all came closer to Christ through them.

CWR: What are the most evident fruits of the conference?

Dom Reid: In some ways that question is premature. Certainly those who participated seem to have come away encouraged and better equipped to promote and insist on the absolute necessity of sound liturgical formation and the celebration of the liturgy as the Church gives it to us, as the necessary foundation for Christian life and mission.

In a way this marks a significant development in what has begun to be called the “New Liturgical Movement”—something Cardinal Ratzinger called for. This is a movement insisting that the Sacred Liturgy is the true and necessary foundation for the whole of Christian life, for the New Evangelization and for any of the Church’s activity. It is a movement which insists on the necessity of liturgical formation as envisaged bySacrosanctum Concilium, and which knows that the true celebration of the liturgy—everywhere—in accordance with the Church’s norms and the true spirit of the liturgy is crucial. To borrow Cardinal Ratzinger’s words, it is “a movement toward the liturgy and toward the right way of celebrating the liturgy, inwardly and outwardly” [The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 8-9]

I think that Sacra Liturgia 2013—and especially its published proceedings—will help to connect our efforts towards liturgical renewal today with the broader liturgical tradition in line with the best intentions of Sacrosanctum Concilium. It will enable clergy, religious, and faithful to look again at the liturgical reform and see what needs to be done to enrich the liturgical life of our parishes and chapels so that all of Christ’s faithful are more fruitfully nourished through the liturgical rites.

The book that will result (to be published by Ignatius Press, hopefully in 2014) will also serve as something of a textbook for liturgical formation. As I said above, the topics are wide ranging and each of the 19 speakers’ presentations is worthy of careful study. They will provide students, pastors, and others involved in liturgical ministry and formation much from which to draw in the future.

CWR: Finally, are there plans for “Sacra Liturgia 2014” or other similar initiatives?

Dom Reid: Sacra Liturgia 2013 was a one-off international event. Perhaps similar events could be organized at a national level for different language groups? We have no plans for future initiatives at present, though with Bishop Rey one never knows what may be next!

The Eye of Sauron Is the Modern Surveillance State

Tolkien, not Orwell, understood today’s spying best.

By David Rosen and Aaron Santesso

Posted Wednesday, July 17, 2013, at 4:57 PM




The Eye of Sauron, here in the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Courtesy of New Line Cinema


What can literary fiction teach us about recent revelations that the National Security Agency has aggressively been gathering massive amounts of data on American citizens? The novel one usually turns to, of course, is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its terrifying vision of the Thought Police. Even President Obama, in response to questions about the NSA, has been forced to deny that the government has engaged in “Big Brother” tactics. Orwell’s book, however, isn’t the most compelling or accurate literary prediction of modern surveillance. That award goes to a less obvious title: J.R.R Tolkien’sLord of the Rings.


Tolkien’s most potent and intimidating image of centralized surveillance, the Eye of Sauron atop a tower, taking in the whole world, has resonated with those who are paranoid about government monitoring. But it’s Sauron’s vulnerability that has the most relevance for America today. Consider the basic premise of Tolkien’s trilogy: a small group of dedicated subversives willing to sacrifice their lives slips in under the surveillance system of a great power, blends in with an alien population, and delivers a devastating blow to the heart of its empire, leaving its security forces in disarray and its populace terrified. Even a tower or two crumbles to dust. Far from being covert, much of this operation is conducted in plain sight, with the great power aware of its enemies’ existence, if not their intent. Given its prescience about modern-day terrorism, Tolkien’s vision offers at least three lessons for present-day America.


1. All-Seeing Is Not All-Knowing


The most salient fact about Tolkien is not that he was a fantasist, but that he wasCatholic: His Christian beliefs drove him out of realism and into a world of orcs, ents, and Dark Lords. That’s why The Lord of the Rings has been dismissed, as Edmund Wilson put it soon after the book’s publication in 1954, as “a children’s book which has some how got out of hand.” Yet the world he created allowed Tolkien to address problems that conventional realism had seemingly abandoned. The most important of them was the distinction between omnipotence and omniscience. In Orwell’s work (as well as that of other dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin) those two terms are nearly synonymous: The Thought Police always know what Winston Smith is up to. But for a believer like Tolkien, only God can know everything. And in Sauron, Tolkien is able to imagine a figure of godlike power and seemingly infinite resources, but crippling interpretive fallibility.


Sauron’s main problem, in a nutshell, is a lack of empathy: He is unable to conceive of anyone possessing a set of values fundamentally different from his own. For Sauron, power—embodied by the one ring—is self-evidently a good in itself. Therefore anyone who possesses the ring will attempt to use it and thus fall into his clutches. The thought that someone might choose instead to destroy the ring (and possibly destroy himself in the process) never crosses Sauron’s mind. He suffers from a crippling case of “confirmation bias”—a fundamental problem for every intelligence agency. We see the things we want to see, which is a problem when one’s enemies have worldviews utterly different from one’s own.


2. The Enemy Controls the Plot


Tolkien’s second lesson for us: Surveillance is typically reactive. Intelligence professionals try to anticipate and counter the actions of their opponents; this leaves them on the defensive. For all our justifiable fears of the “watchers,” the advantage is often on the side of the watched. Every act of surveillance entails a struggle over meaning, narrative, and plot, with the infiltrator often creating the story in a way that exploits the surveillance mechanism’s weaknesses. In The Lord of the Rings, determined individuals (Frodo, Gandalf) with an adequate understanding of the enemy’s blind spots are able to rebel in plain sight.
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This isn’t to say, however, that Tolkien was naive about the very real abuses of totalitarian power. Quite the opposite: He was every bit as repelled by the KGB and the Gestapo as Orwell or Arthur Koestler. In this respect, the most interesting sections of LOTR are the final chapter of Book IV and the first of Book VI. This is the sequence in which Frodo and Sam slip past “Homeland Security,” as it were, and evade the vast security apparatus on the borders of Mordor.


It is here that we get Tolkien’s canniest depiction of Mordor’s workaday employees: the orcs—Sauron’s TSA agents, to continue the metaphor. Here is a conversation Sam overhears between two of them about Frodo, who has been captured:


“What is it, d’you think? Elvish it looked to me, but undersized. What’s the danger in a thing like that?”



“Don’t know till we’ve had a look.”


“Oho! So they haven’t told you what to expect? They don’t tell us all they know, do they? Not by half. But they can make mistakes, even the Top Ones can.”



“Sh! ... They may, but they’ve got eyes and ears everywhere; some among my lot, as like as not. But there’s no doubt about it, they’re troubled about something. … Something nearly slipped.”


Isn’t this a more convincing depiction than Orwell’s hyperefficient Thought Police (orZamyatin’s Guardians) of how power actually works in a surveillance state? Without in any way shorting the terror of living under the secret police, Tolkien captures the way that power mistrusts its own agents, and how it deprives them of information. He captures both the cynicism and paranoia of surveillance work—and also how, in this mix of suspicion, disgruntlement, and incompetence, things do slip through. The security apparatus, of Mordor or the United States, is only as strong as its weakest link, and weak links abound.


3. The Louder the Noise, the Fainter the Signal


As a common saying in the intelligence community would have it, processing raw intel is like drinking from a fire hose. Most dystopian authors cheat their way around this problem, ignoring huge swathes of the population to get the volume of information down to garden-hose levels. Huxley lops off “eight ninths” of the populace through eugenics. Orwell imagines the proles—85 percent of Oceania—to be politically neutered and not worth watching. By contrast, Sauron, like the NSA, has no such luxury. As Tolkien understands, nothing is harder to parse than visible anonymity. And that is the state Frodo and Sam remain in, so long as they don’t wear the ring.


How to recognize the treacherous or psychopathic needle in the haystack? As recent months have proved, it’s not so easy. Our surveillance state, in contrast to Orwell’s, has had its share of failures. A dangerous assumption underlies many contemporary debates about government surveillance: the assumption of interpretive competence. Without diminishing the seriousness of the recent NSA revelations, Tolkien is finally more convincing about why total surveillance often fails than Orwell and his endless progeny are in imagining its inevitable success. That’s at once some small comfort and reason for concern.

Have we lost reverence in Church these Days? How can we recover it?

By: Msgr. Charles Pope

Jul 17

In the first reading this morning at Mass there was the familiar story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush on Mount Horeb. Approaching the Theophany, and thus the presence of God Moses received the following instruction:

Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground. I am the God of your father,” he continued, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. (Ex 3:4-5)

And here we see an ancient form of reverence.It is interesting that, to my knowledge, Jews no longer use this sign of reverence. But Muslims still do. I remember being outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and seeing hundred of pairs of shoes lined up on the patio outside. A Muslim would not think to enter the Mosque without first removing his shoes.

The Jews however are very strict in insisting that men, Jewish or not should not go before the Western Wall or pray with heads uncovered, and there are men nearby, at the Wall who enforce the rule strictly and provide carboard-like yarmulkes for men who did not bring one or some other head covering.

Here in America, the thought of taking off ones shoes or being in Church without shoes would be thought of as highly irreverent! And for a man to go into a Church without removing his hat is often scolded by an usher. It would also seem that the Gentile world had this norm since St Paul, though himself a Jew, wrote Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head…A man ought not to cover his head, (1 Cor 11:4,7). He further indicates in the same place that a woman ought to cover her head.

And thus we see that culture has influence on signs of reverence and, while there have been different forms of it here and there, some equivalent of “Remove the sandals from your feet…” has been observed.Until now.

Until now? Yes, it would seem that there is really no observable and/or agreed upon way in our modern American culture that we “take off our sandals” and show some sort of reverence and acknowledgement that we are on holy ground, when we come before the Lord in our parish churches.

It is not just that women have shed veils (sadly I would opine – more on that here and here). But beyond that, almost no one dresses in any special way for Church these days. “Extreme casual” would seem to be the norm of the day, to look in most parishes. Most people don’t even think to change their clothes for church, there is a “go as you are” mentality. Further, other signs of entering the Church such as sacred silence, and genuflecting are increasingly absent.

It was not always this way. Even in my own short life I remember when going to Mass on Sunday was a formal affair, at least before 1970. As a young boy and teenager I had special Sunday shoes, hard black ones, and would not dream of going to church in jeans or a t-shirt. We were expected to wear pressed trousers, a button down shirt and tie, along with a jacket in the cooler months. The ladies all wore dresses and veils. (See picture of a youth Mass from 1968 above right). Church was a special place, Mass was a sacred occasion. On entering Church we were expected to maintain a sacred silence, and, upon entering, to bless ourselves with Holy Water and genuflect on entering our pew. Silent prayer was expected of one prior to Mass.

These were ways we “removed our sandals” and acknowledged we were on holy ground and before the Presence of the Lord.

Today this seems all but gone. A few “old folks” keep the traditions, and, interestingly, some younger twenty-somes as well! But for the vast majority of Catholics today, at least here in America, there is little visible or tangible equivalent of removing the sandals from our feet.

I will not even argue that ALL the old traditions should return, (even though I would like that). But at least we ought to recover SOME way of signifiying that we are on holy ground and before the presence of the Holy One of Israel, the Lord of glory.

I am aware that I will get some who say all this “stuffiness” will “turn people off.” But of course Mass isn’t just about pleasing people, it is about adoring the Lord who is worthy of our praise and our reverence. I am also aware that some will take the critique I offer here further than I personally think we need to go.

All that is fine. Where exactly to reset the line is debatable, but the bottom line seems to be that there ought to be some culturally appropriate that we fulfill the admonition of God to “Remove your sandals for the ground on which you stand is holy, I am the God of your fathers.”

How say you? Perhaps we can together start a trend (old) trend.

Video: Mass in the 1940s, as artistically remembered. It is a wedding Mass, albeit, but people usually dressed close to this way on Sundays too (perhaps minus the corsages ), according to old pictures:

Accused child-porn maker marched with Trudeau and Wynne in Toronto Pride 2013

BY PETER BAKLINSKI

Fri Jul 12, 2013 15:03 EST


Dr. Benjamin Levin sitting in prominent front-row seats right next to Trudeau, who was next to Premier Wynne at Toronto's Gay Pride celebratinos.

Co-authored with Patrick Craine.

TORONTO, July 12, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Only a week before he was arrested for allegedly making and distributing child pornography, the Ontario Liberal government’s former Deputy Minister of Education attended Toronto’s Pride Parade with federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Footage of the June 30 “Church on Church Street Service” shows Dr. Benjamin Levin sitting in prominent front-row seats right next to Trudeau, who was next to Wynne.

The sermon’s theme at the annual Pride event was “Celebrating Everyone” and highlighted the catchphrase of the ‘sexual diversity’ movement that “all are welcome”.

Jack Fonseca, project manager at Campaign Life Coalition, told LifeSiteNews.com that while Levin has not been convicted, people should not “dismiss concerns” about his influence on Ontario’s “increasingly sexualized school curriculum”.

“By telling themselves, ‘C’mon he’s just one guy: how much influence could he possibly have had?’ they avoid dealing with the ramifications of a person accused of very serious crimes against children and how he may have brought his alleged personal fetishes to bear upon the curriculum so as to sexualize kids and get them sexually active at younger ages.”

Fonseca said that Levin’s place of prominence in the Pride event where he was “sitting with arguably two of the three most powerful people in the country” makes it “very clear that Mr. Levin is not just ‘some guy.’” 

“Is it reasonable to assume that this powerful man might possess the wherewithal to bring to bear his personal influence on the comprehensive Equity & Inclusive Education Strategy curriculum?”

“Heck yes, it is,” he said.

Levin, 61, was arrested Monday in the wake of an international child pornography and child exploitation investigation that led to his doorstep. He was charged with making child pornography, distributing child pornography, and agreeing to or arranging for a sexual offence against a child under 16.

Added to those charges later this week were charges of possessing child pornography and accessing child pornography.

With Levin’s extensive involvement in education of children police were reportedly concerned to what extent he had access to schools and school-age children.

Under Levin’s 2004-2009 watch as Ontario’s top education official a provincial sex-education - with an underlying “sexual diversity” agenda - was developed. It began with 6-year-olds being introduced to concepts such as “gender identity” in grade 1. “Sexual orientation” was brought in by grade 3, masturbation by grade 6, and anal and oral sex by grade 7.

The curriculum was shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty in 2010 after strong backlash from outraged parents.

Wynne told reporters in January that she would like to resurrect the controversial program.

“We are going to evolve the physical health and sex education curriculum,” Wynne said on January 27th, reported Xtra. “We have developed curriculum in this province for decades, and we have done it in a way that has integrity.”

Joe Warmington, police reporter for Sun News, said on Sun News’ Byline that he was not surprised to find someone in Levin’s level of government, with the “kind of power” he had, “charged with this kind of heinous act.”

“What we need to do as a society is to find out the influence that this former deputy minister [had],” he said, adding that by the very act of Levin sitting right next to Trudeau and Wynne at the Pride event “indicates power”.

Warmington said that investigators and concerned citizens should look into who put Levin “into power,” who Levin appointed to “key positions,” and what curriculum was he responsible for.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, this investigation is not over.”

Warmington said that when sexually explicit posters start showing up on classroom walls and children are encouraged to visit links from their school board’s website that lead to graphic sexual content, “it makes you wonder, how did these things end up there?”

“The reality is that this is bigger than one person. [Levin] is the person that basically is allegedly the coach, the colonel, the teacher.”

“I think this story is going to go down in the history books if it is delved into properly,” he said.

Gay activists have made the case that school-aged children must become sexualized through sex-ed programs that focus on inclusivity and diversity if the gay-sex movement is to survive and gain ground.

“Why would we push anti-bullying programs or social studies classes that teach kids about the historical contributions of famous queers unless we wanted to deliberately educate children to accept queer sexuality as normal?” wrote Daniel Villarreal in a 2011 piece that appeared on the popular gay site Queerty.com.

“We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it.”

“Recruiting children? You bet we are,” he said. “And I would very much like for many of these young boys to grow up and start f**ing men.”

Fonseca called it a “strange coincidence” that the two provinces where Levin served as Deputy Education Minister (Ontario & Manitoba) are the same provinces pushing controversial legislation involving a “radical sexual agenda, under the guise of anti-bullying.”

“It’s rather interesting too that these three amigos (Trudeau, Wynne and Levin) have been at the forefront of advocating for sexual diversity,” he said.

Fonseca said that since “there’s nothing more precious than our children, we are compelled to closely scrutinize curriculum that has already been accused by parents of sexualizing and confusing children.”