"So, as the pope visits the Rocky Mountains this week, his teachings and policies on birth control can no longer be seen merely as the business of Catholics....[they] could now instead lead to the death of us all."-- Georgie Anne Geyer
August 10, 1993
Geyer correctly observes that the pope is a threat to everyone on the planet. He is our enemy. Yet we have this very positive image of Pope John Paul II (the most admired world leader with a favorability rating of 88 percent)262 and an equally positive image of his institution (the most admired political institution in the U.S. with a favorability rating of 89 percent). How can this be? How can our images be so far removed from reality? The fact is, there is a broad array of images retained by Americans that have been distorted by the Vatican to advance its own interests.
Since I began my study of the Roman Catholic Church, as it relates to population growth control, some 26 years ago, I have been amazed at the intensity of Vatican activity in the U.S. On numerous occasions, I have observed some activity (usually but not always a political activity) that did not seem reasonable. I would be offered explanations which, upon reflection, would not hold water. When I've explored these things, I would often find the Church deeply involved, seeking some gain or other.
In the U.S., the Catholic Church is a $200 billion operation, 263 composed of millions of highly organized workers with an intense sense of mission, a long history of political manipulation, and a superb track record of getting their way. Before I began my study, I had a very different idea of what church and religion meant, having been raised as a Methodist. I was completely unprepared for what I found. Many of the tears in America's social fabric are the result of Vatican attempts to advance its power, control, influence, wealth or security -- at the expense of Americans and American institutions. Rarely was there evidence of Vatican involvement in these activities on the surface, but upon probing, the role of the Vatican became evident. Usually it also became evident that considerable effort had been made to mask the fact that the Vatican was a significant actor. But before presenting specific instances of such activities, a question should be considered.
Thus far, the Vatican has had so much success at shutting down all serious efforts to control population growth that draconian actions have not yet been necessary. But what if the NSSM 200 recommendations had been implemented? Most likely, the Vatican would have done whatever it felt necessary to successfully intervene; perhaps, merely conspiring to force the resignation of a president would have been sufficient. Had they not intervened, self-destruction of the Vatican already might have been complete by now.
For example, almost surely there would be less crime, the welfare burden would be reduced and the drug problem would be smaller if the recommendations had been implemented. Why? Because family planning education would be much more widespread and integrated naturally into our pattern of family values; contraception would be encouraged; and safe, legal abortion would be much more readily available to all women. Unplanned births, about 50 percent of all U.S. births since 1975, would have been reduced dramatically. The number of poverty stricken adolescents, and men and women in their early twenties, would be much less than it is today.
Also, many negative changes in our lives have resulted from the initiatives undertaken by the bishops as a part of their Plan. The costs to us all have been enormous. Throughout the remainder of this chapter, examples of these changes will be offered. My first two books on this topic contain many more.264
As Byrnes concluded in his study, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and United States Catholic Conference (USCC) have been consumed by the abortion issue and this Plan since they were created 27 years ago.265 They have committed an enormous amount of energy, organization, direction and resources to the abortion and other population-related issues. This commitment has brought serious consequences throughout our society.
One of the more profound accomplishments of this Plan is the takeover of the Republican Party by the Vatican. In a July 28, 1994 Los Angeles Times wire service story, Jack Nelson describes the maneuvers of the Religious Right so that this takeover is all but an accomplished fact. According to Nelson, "GOP moderates have remained passive on the sidelines, unwilling to fight..."
On September 11, 1995, author, journalist and broadcaster, Bill Moyers, was given the American Jewish Committee Religious Liberty Award. In his acceptance remarks, "Echoes of the Crusades: The Radical Religious Right's Holy War on American Freedom," Moyers gives his assessment of the influence of the Religious Right: "They control the Republican Party, the House of Representatives and the Senate..."265a
But who are the Religious Right? The Spring 1994 issue of Conscience, the journal of Catholics For a Free Choice, exploded the myth that the Religious Right is a Protestant movement. It was designed, created and controlled by Catholics in response to the Pastoral Plan. These Catholics recruited opportunistic Protestants to give the appearance that Protestants were the instigators. The leadership is Catholic but the followers are often Protestant. The development of the Religious Right is described in some detail in the two books noted above, published 12 and 10 years ago, respectively. Also discussed is the Vatican takeover of the Republican Party already well underway at the time of their publication.
Even when the Pastoral Plan was first approved by the bishops, the National Catholic Reporter recognized that the plan would lead to a Vatican controlled political party in the United States and the newspaper went on record with this prediction.266 Rather than creating its own political party, the Vatican chose to seize control of the Republican Party.
At the Christian Coalition's 1995 "Road to Victory" Conference, Pat Robertson revealed his dream when the Coalition was founded in 1991. Writes Joseph L. Conn for Church & State: "His wish list was far from modest: a conservative majority in both houses of Congress, 30 state governorships in conservative hands and a conservative in the White House, all by 1996, and working control of one of the major political parties by 1994. During his September 8 speech, Robertson gleefully recalled those goals and boasted that his movement is not only on track, it's ahead of schedule on some points...."266b
A Church & State editorial on the Conference reported: "Pat Robertson triumphantly recounted the great distance the Christian Coalition has traveled in a short amount of time: `I said we would have a significant voice -- actually I said something else, but Ralph [Reed] said I can't say that because we got press -- I said we would have a significant voice in one of the political parties by 1994 and looks like we made that one.' Robertson reminded the audience of the findings of the poll conducted by Campaigns & Elections, which had shocked so many. What did Coalition Executive Director Reed want Robertson to keep under wraps? Five years ago the TV preacher said, `we want...as soon as possible to see a working majority of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family Christians by 1996.'"266c
"Throughout the...conference, organizational leaders, activists and political hangers-on made it clear that the Christian Coalition is not just another interest group in American public life. It is a highly partisan religio-political army wielding a disproportionate influence in U.S. politics."266b
Rob Boston writing for Church & State after attending the September 8-9, 1995 "Road to Victory" Conference in Washington, D.C.: "...once again Reed and Robertson are being less than honest. Christian Coalition activists, in fact, have formed a partisan machine that aims to seize control of the Republican Party and place Coalition allies in public office." Deception is openly touted: "At breakout sessions, conference participants were schooled in the art of concealing their ties to the Christian Coalition, in a continuing pattern of `stealth politics.'" Boston reports, "Speaker Cathe Halford, training director for the Texas Christian Coalition, declared: `You all know we're in a war, we're in a spiritual war, a war for our culture, however you want to say it....Don't get intimidated that this is a big political machine you're part of. Just try to focus on those people as your neighbors.'"266d
Boston described one session, "Building a Neighborhood Organization": "In fact, the session had little to do with neighborhood activism; it was devoted to explaining how to get at least one Christian Coalition operative in every county precinct and how to compile information on voters, with an eye toward turning out those who are likely to support Christian Coalition candidates on election day."266d This is the heart of the Coalition strategy.
The results thus far: According to a report prepared by Americans United and the Interfaith Alliance Foundation, 198 members of the U.S. Congress vote with the Christian Coalition at least 86 percent of the time. At a press conference, Lynn criticized the "tangled -- and growing -- links between the Christian Coalition and the Republican Party...the Christian Coalition now calls the shots for a major political party."266b
Arthur Jones of the National Catholic Reporter, concludes: "Robertson and Reed have emerged as a cunningly dynamic duo that understands the weaknesses of the soft underbelly of the U.S. democratic system..."266e The weakness, of course, is that a determined minority can identify voters in great numbers who will vote its way if they get to the polls, then by insuring that all vote, it can sway the majority of elections. However, given the enormous Catholic commitment to the Christian Coalition one must wonder who actually discovered this soft underbelly.
The implications of this takeover for American politics at the national, state and local levels are enormous, affecting us all. Thousands of politicians at all levels whose positions have opposed the Vatican have been victims of the plan, significantly changing the American political landscape. No politician has benefited more than Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. This fact is documented elsewhere.267-[270]
As noted earlier, the ultimate objective of the Vatican's political machine is passage of the Human Life Amendment (HLA). As Jack Nelson pointed out, "the 1992 GOP platform called for a `human life amendment' to the Constitution, outlawing abortion in all circumstances." It should be noted that the HLA need not be enforced to meet the needs of the Vatican. The Vatican requires only that the civil law not conflict with canon law. Then papal authority and civil authority are not pitted against one another. It is only legal abortion that threatens Papal authority.
We all have the illusion, carefully crafted by Papal propaganda, that "lives of the unborn" and "morality" are the issues. This is simply not so. It is survival of the Catholic institution and Papal power that is the issue, not the "lives of the unborn" or anything else. All countries in Latin America (all are Catholic) have higher abortion rates than the U.S. Nothing is said by the Church there. If abortion were the real issue, the Church would be speaking out even louder in Latin America than in the U.S. Only in the U.S., where it is legal, is it an important issue for the Church. Of course, few American Protestants are aware of this fact.
For example, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has 14.7 million members and is one of the most powerful Protestant denominations. In the early 1980s, a rift began to develop between fundamentalist and moderate Baptists which did not concern theology as much as it did an authoritarian style of ministry.271 The Catholic Church has an extremely authoritarian style of ministry. Nothing is left by the Papacy for lay interpretation. At the Baptist Convention's June 1988 meeting in San Antonio, a heated debate took place over an idea profoundly basic to all of Baptist heritage: the freedom of believers to experience God without priests, institutions or creeds acting as intermediaries." "The priesthood of the believer" is a Protestant doctrine that lay people have direct access to God and need no priestly intermediary to interpret Scripture. This is exactly the opposite of Roman Catholic belief. Baptist Convention delegates voted to invest more authority in pastors. Enraged moderates marched to the Alamo and tore up the resolution in protest. The moderates argued it would make the denomination more Catholic than Baptist.272
In journalist Bill Moyers's public affairs television series, "God and Politics Part II,"273 aired on December 16, 1987, the relationship between the Baptist rift and the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life activities became evident. It is obvious that the victory of the Baptist fundamentalists benefits the Papacy. Any split like that of the Baptists weakens the potential of a Protestant response to challenges to American democracy by the Vatican. However, in this schism, the Vatican benefits in another important way. As the so-called "conservatives" gain the upper hand in the SBC, the Baptists then enter the Catholic column on the abortion issue. The Pastoral Plan calls for the recruitment of as many non-Catholics as possible so as to mask the fact that this plan is a Catholic initiative. The bishops can now speak for 14.7 million Baptists on this issue and will wield the additional political power derived from this arrangement.
During Moyers's interview of Paul Pressler, Texas State Appellate Court Judge from Houston who engineered the split in the SBC, the Catholic connection to the Baptist rift became clear. During the interview, Moyers brought to light that Judge Pressler is on the board of directors of the Council on National Policy, along with fanatical Religious Right Catholics -- Richard Viguerie, Phyllis Schlafly and Joseph Coors.
The Council on National Policy is one of the many Religious Right organizations created in response to the 1975 Pastoral Plan. By 1979, the Bishops had identified their man to engineer the Baptist rift -- no doubt with a lot of the bishops' help -- Judge Pressler. According to Dr. Daniel Vestal, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Midland, Texas, "I listened to a tape that Judge Pressler produced, in which he basically recounted the political plan and strategy [for conservative takeover of the SBC] that he set forth back in 1979." As Bill Moyers pressed the Judge on his relationship with the Council on National Policy -- which promotes the adoption of Papal policy -- the judge broke off the interview and refused to answer further questions. The Judge had been exposed -- as had been the real actors behind the Baptist rift.
The extensive fragmentation of the Christian Church has resulted in a heavy burden of guilt for Protestants. The reason? This fragmentation is patently un-Christian. It flies in the face of the religion's fundamental principles, a constant reminder that Christ's followers reject His teachings. Protestants generally believe that unification of all Christians must be achieved if they are to live as true Christians. Guilt motivates them to strive for unity. As one New Orleans Protestant commented, "If we're going to call ourselves Christians, we have to live like it."
Criticism of one branch of Christianity by another results in disunity. Protestants have been very sensitive to this fact for much of this century. As a result, the ecumenical movement has served to silence any criticism of the Catholic Church by Protestant denominations. The outcome -- complete institutional protection for the Catholic Church -- compliments of well-meaning Protestants.
This reality has not been lost on the Vatican. When the Bishops Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities was promulgated, Rome preempted the ecumenical initiative and began making major investments to promote ecumenism. In the last few years, Vatican interests in ecumenism have escalated sharply. "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," issued in March 1994 as an unofficial document, called on these two groups to recognize each other as Christians and to work together on common issues, such as abortion and pornography.
Adelle M. Banks reports for the Religion News Service: "The declaration was signed by such prominent evangelical leaders as Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson and Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright. Catholic signers included Fr. Richard Neuhaus, director of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York, theologian Michael Novak, a winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, Archbishop Francis Stafford of Denver, and Jesuit Fr. Avery Dulles of Fordham University."
"Introducing the document last March, Neuhaus contended that not since the 16th century have Protestants and Catholics `joined in a declaration so clear in respect to their common faith and common responsibility.' While calling the document unofficial, Neuhaus said he had `been in contact with appropriate parties at the Holy See and they have given their strongest encouragement for the project."273a
However, many key evangelicals, including the Rev. John Ankerberg, R.C. Sproul and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, balked, declaring that the document ought never have been written.273a Evangelical signers were some of the least influential in the movement while their Catholic counterparts represented the very top of the American hierarchy. This was a major initiative of the Vatican to promote the illusion that ecumenism is advancing in America. But it was only partially successful.
The National Catholic Register's Jean-Marie Guenois summarizes the encyclical. She quotes the pope: "Could not the real but imperfect communion existing between us persuade Church leaders and their theologians to engage with me in a patient and fraternal dialogue on this subject, a dialogue in which, leaving useless controversies behind, we could listen to one another, keeping before us only the will of Christ for His Church and allowing ourselves to be deeply moved by His plea `that they may all be one...so that the world may believe that You have sent Me?'"
Guenois continues: "Ut Unum Sint consists of three chapters, the first on the Roman Catholic Church's commitment to ecumenism, the second on the fruits of dialogue and the third on the way to the future." The third chapter "focuses on the importance of Christian unity for the work of evangelization." His message: We should not be wasting our energy attacking each other. We should concentrate our efforts on evangelization. Guenois continues: "While eager to preserve the Magisterium, he does express a sense of urgency about bringing Christians back together. He states bluntly in the encyclical that division among Christians `impedes the very work of Christ.'...The very fact of calling oneself a Christian means desiring to be one with others of the same name, the Pope writes: `To believe in Christ means to desire unity.'"273c
The pope goes much further. In the encyclical's point #40, the pope writes: "Relations between Christians are not aimed merely at mutual knowledge, common prayer, and dialogue. They presuppose and from now on call for every possible form of practical cooperation at all levels: pastoral, cultural, and social...Moreover, ecumenical cooperation is a true school of ecumenism, a dynamic road to unity. Unity of action leads to the full unity of faith...In the eyes of the world, cooperation among Christians becomes a form of common witness and a means of evangelization which benefits all involved."273d
Recalling that the pope prepared this encyclical for all Christians, his intent can only be described as "thinly veiled." He calls not only for Protestants to be silent about Vatican political manipulations in America so they can be the good Christians that God wants them to be, but also to cooperate with the Catholic Church in accomplishing its political agenda.
No Protestant leader protested the encyclical, though its intentions must have been clear to many. It received no negative press in the United States whatsoever. The pope's strategy is working. (It should be noted that in this encyclical, just as in Evangelium Vitae, the pope glorifies martyrdom. The message: the most wonderful thing one can do with one's life is to give it up in the defense of the Holy Mother Church: "This communion is already perfect in what we consider the highest point of the life of grace, `martyria' unto death, the truest communion possible with Christ..." Why all the emphasis on martyrdom?)273d
An example of changed attitudes appears on the front page of the August 6, 1995 edition of the National Catholic Register in an article: "Catholic-Baptist ties show signs of new life: Southern Baptists and Catholics show signs of rapprochement." At the 1995 Southern Baptist Convention, Father Frank Ruff, a Catholic priest who attended his first Southern Baptist Convention in 1967, was asked to speak. It was a ground-breaking occasion. As a field representative for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenism and Interreligious Affairs, his request to address the previous year's convention had been politely turned down.273e
Ecumenism compromises Protestant Americans. The resulting silence has effectively shut down public debate of Vatican interference in American public policy making, gravely jeopardizing the security of all Americans as described in detail in the NSSM 200 report. The Vatican has skillfully advanced the case that an attack on the pope and the Catholic Church is an attack on all Christianity. America is certain to be in deep trouble if Protestant denominations accept this proposition. This would mean that they give the papal interpretation of the defense of Christianity a higher priority than the defense of the United States and its democracy. The outcome would be catastrophic for us all.
All of the major Protestant denominations have been affected by the Pastoral Plan and its ecumenical movement in significant ways. The Catholic Church has identified individuals who are anti-abortion, or simply opportunistic, in all of the denominations and has aided these individuals to rise to power within their denominations. The Church has helped create the illusion that the vocal anti-abortion minorities in the various denominations are the spokesmen for the denominations. More important, all criticism of the Catholic Church has been silenced, a vital outcome for the Vatican. The Protestant press which held the Vatican imposition of the Papal agenda in check in this country for 175 years has been neutralized. This arrangement has permitted the Vatican to influence American policy-making to a greater degree than would have been possible otherwise. All of our lives have been significantly affected.
Our government institutions are intended to protect or advance the interests of Americans. However, we have this highly organized group of Papal loyalists who do everything possible within the institutions that employ them to protect and advance Papal interests, at the expense of American interests. We have patriotic Americans pulling one way in their respective institutions in order to complete the assigned missions of their institutions. Then we have the papists pulling the other way. Some examples from Bernstein's TIME magazine article will be presented later.
This constant struggle erodes public confidence and trust in these institutions because most people are unaware of the conflict taking place between papists and patriotic Americans. For 19 years I have personally witnessed this conflict, particularly within institutions that are concerned with family planning, abortion and population growth control, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Indeed, the patriots themselves are often not aware that they are involved in a conflict with the Catholic Church, which is represented by one or more of their coworkers. This constant tug-of-war is destroying the effectiveness of these institutions. Very few people recognize this serious problem -- total gridlock on some issues is caused by it.
Some of the most competent people in America take positions in our government, elected and appointed officials and civil servants alike, only to leave prematurely out of disgust because they find themselves caught up in this tug-of-war, either knowingly or unknowingly, and are unable to efficiently perform the duties they were elected, appointed, or hired to do. Nothing has contributed more to the loss of the best and brightest from public service than the bishops' agenda. Others do not seek public service because of cynicism developed as a result of their own observations of this tug-of-war.
The bishops have had no reservations about corrupting these institutions to advance Papal security interests. The intervention described in the Pastoral Plan is massive and far reaching, and efficiency has suffered significantly, affecting us all. From the bishops' perspective, this is a small price to pay to save the Papacy from extinction.
One of the best examples is the presidency. When President Clinton was elected, it was clear from routinely reading an array of conservative Catholic periodicals during the course of the following year that conservative Catholics were in a state of shock. They simply could not believe this had happened.
Almost immediately, a multitude of stories began to appear in these periodicals which were obviously intended to undermine Clinton's credibility. It soon became evident that conservative Catholics were going to do everything possible to insure that there would be no second term for President Clinton. No concern was shown for potentially lasting damage to the institution of the American presidency itself. Within days of Clinton's election, open warfare was launched against the American presidency.
As soon as President Clinton took office, he was hounded by charges that were intended to embarrass him and to serve to weaken his ability to govern effectively. None of these charges, even if they were true, would result in his removal from office. However, they did serve to weaken Clinton's credibility and capability to govern. The charges served to destroy faith in President Clinton and promote cynicism toward him.
Rush Limbaugh appeared out of nowhere. There is a never before witnessed steady attack from every direction -- from the floor of the House, the floor of the Senate, from radio and television talk shows, and newspaper and magazine reporters and columnists. It is an ugly, bitter, brutal, vicious attack such as Americans have seldom if ever seen a sitting president endure before. The conservative Catholic press and conservative Catholic journalists led the charge and have been the most aggressive of all.
Not surprising, Clinton's disapproval ratings have risen steadily and approximated 50 percent in mid-1994, the highest ever for a sitting president. This assault has been so intense and destructive, it is threatening to undermine the institution of the presidency itself. Cynicism toward our government has grown. Trust in our government has fallen.
Inevitably the President's ability to govern has diminished. If he does not govern well, he will be defeated in the next election. The zealots who want Clinton out of office seem to have no concern about destruction of the institution of the presidency itself. Who are these zealots? Nearly all identify with the Religious Right. Exceptions are ambitious men like Robert Dole who hungers to be the next president. The Religious Right is the design of conservative Catholics who were activated by the Pastoral Plan to advance Papal security-survival interests.
The tug-of-war taking place in our governmental institutions remains mostly unseen by the public. When a battle is perceived, such as the highly visible "Whitewater Affair," the underlying motivation is seldom understood. For example, on the August 8, 1994 "CBS Evening News," Dan Rather, in a segment on Whitewater referred to "the anti-Clinton activists" and the "Get Clinton Movement." However, no mention was made of the underlying motivation or engine of this movement. He makes no connection with the Religious Right or the Bishops' Pastoral Plan. Though Rather made no attempt to explain what is really driving the anti-Clinton campaign, we are often misled in similar circumstances.
These tugs-of-war are occurring also in our private institutions and international organizations -- especially those related to population growth control -- with many of the same negative consequences, undermining organizational commitment and effectiveness.
Herman Kahn was the first of the three. I remember watching in the 1970s with amazement as he would offer one unsound argument after the other, outrightly ignoring all of the best data available. All along I wondered how it is possible that this man would be given this incredible world platform from which to speak. How could he be taken seriously by the media, when he was scoffed at by the world scientific community? He was almost completely alone. It just did not make sense.
Next, along came the publication of an article by Julian Simon titled "Resources, Population, Environment" in Science in 1980.274 This article dismissed the idea that the world has a population problem. That this article could appear in the most prestigious scientific journal in America was astounding. This article had nothing to do with science and was based on fiction as much as fact; it was a dishonest attempt to undermine the argument that the world has a population problem. The article was met with disbelief in the scientific community.
Then, along came Simon with his book, The Ultimate Resource, in 1981.275 Simon attempts to make the case that it is not possible to have overpopulation; that people are the ultimate resource, and the more the better. Simon is an economist. In this book, Simon intermingles fact with fantasy throughout and misrepresents his material as fact. It was one misrepresentation of reality after the other. Simon was ridiculed by the scientific community. I could not believe that Princeton University Press had published this book. How could Simon have possibly placed this book with this publisher? This was a very serious setback for the population growth control movement. Princeton University had put its prestige behind this intellectually dishonest treatment of the issue of population growth.
At this point it became clear to me that there had to be corruption involved in the publication of the Science article and of the book as well. To corrupt these institutions takes a lot of influence. Who has the motivation to corrupt in this way? The institution with the most to gain by publication of these fantasies is the Vatican. Is it capable of such corruption? Certainly, if the stakes are high enough, the history of the institution suggests that they will stop at nothing.
With the publication of his article in Science and his book, Simon found himself at the center of the world stage. His articles and his message began to appear everywhere in newspapers and magazines. For example, in June 1981, he published a lengthy article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, with the theme that nature is boundless.276 Then in August, 1981, he published another lengthy article in the Atlantic Monthly attempting to make the case: the more people the better.277a He became a sought after public speaker and appeared often on television and radio.
No one had ever done so much to undermine public confidence in the argument advanced by the world's scientists that humanity faces a serious overpopulation problem. Years of scientific education went down the tubes. Of course, we would all like to believe that overpopulation is not a serious problem. Simon's position, the Vatican's position, caught on like wildfire. Simon's work and its apparent widespread acceptance by "scientists" caused great confusion which persists today.
Not enough people realized that Simon's support came almost entirely from the religious right. Simon wrote his book while at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. While he was there, support of his work on his book came from the Heritage Foundation, a Vatican-leaning organization created in line with the bishops' Pastoral Plan.
Simon was a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation when he headed a 21-member panel of "scientists" commissioned by Heritage to re-examine the 1980 Global 2000 report, which President Carter had ordered the State Department and Council on Environmental Quality to prepare, exploring probable changes in the world's population, natural resources and environment through the end of the century. The report, issued after a year-long study, expressed deep concern about continued rapid global population growth and its contribution to the depletion of natural resources and destruction of the environment.
Simon released the Heritage panel's findings at the 1982 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, chalking up another remarkable Vatican accomplishment. In 1984, Simon teamed up with Herman Kahn to place a book with the scientific publisher, Basil Blackwell.277b This 585-page book was devoted to refuting the Global 2000 report.
In March 1985, I received a telling letter from Roger Conner, Executive Director of the American Federation for Immigration Reform. It read:
"Maybe the Heritage Foundation has finally gotten rid of Julian Simon after all. He has now started his own group, written up in the enclosed column.
"Patrick Burns, our director of research and publications, has called the new group's telephone number and discovered that it is housed in an exclusive girls' finishing school financed by Opus Dei -- an extremely right wing Catholic organization.
"I doubt that we've heard the last of Julian."
To learn of Simon's close ties to the Catholic Church did not surprise me. Let's examine some of his own words. In a September 15, 1986 letter widely distributed to journalists, Simon introduces his new organization, the Committee on Population and Economy: "Next time you work on a story concerning population, please call Committee on Population and Economy to get our point of view." In his "prospectus" he states, "The general purpose of the Committee on Population and Economy is to celebrate human life and its increase. We, plus the appended list of persons who have affiliated with us in some capacity -- intend to promote belief in the value and sanctity of human life. And we hope to increase understanding that an additional human being tends to benefit rather than harm others economically."
His "partial list of general goals" includes: "Educate the public to the good news that the physical limits of our environment are receding rather than advancing....Publicize such scientific findings as those which indicate that in the long run, on average an additional human being increases the standard of living of other people rather than detracts from it, and that there is no connection between population growth or size or density and the propensity of countries toward war and violence. These findings contradict assertions without supporting evidence by the U.S. State Department and the CIA, assertions apparently made simply because they seem reasonable." Perhaps Simon is referring to NSSM 200 here.
Simon lists "Some specific tactical objectives: Disseminate writings....Provide an organizational address that the media can turn to when they seek a "contrasting" viewpoint to the Population Crisis Committee, Population Institute...and so on. As with other issues, when a population news issue arises, newspaper reporters automatically turn to organizations who make that issue their business. In the absence of an organization that speaks in favor of human life and against a doomsday view of our future, the journalist is likely simply to resort to no one....Offer an alternate source of information to the Population Resource Center which now `briefs' government officials in a supposedly neutral fashion about population issues....Comment...on bills now before the Congress that would mandate U.S. and world "population stabilization" and that would create staffs and programs to achieve that end....'Infiltrate' church, environmental, and other groups that currently make pronouncements in favor of population control in order to provide another viewpoint."
Apparently, Simon is referring to infiltration of Protestant churches, as such discussion is forbidden in the Catholic Church. He goes on to say, "The organization will use all available education means to promote its beliefs..."
Simon lists specific planned activities: "Issue a series of articles, written for popular reading at the level of magazine articles or newspaper op-ed pieces, dealing with various aspects of our subject....This series will be sent to our list of newspaper and television journalists who cover population and the environment, many of whom we believe to be interested and who may diffuse our message." We must assume that he is referring to the Catholic journalists Pope John II referred to in addressing the International Catholic Press Union and the International Catholic Association for Radio and Television in his message, "Mass Media Need Catholic Presence," referred to earlier.
He continues, "The environmentalist and population-control organizations have developed into an effective tool the letter-to-the-editor, wherever news stories appear. We wish to create a grass-roots organization with this as one of its central tasks, both in communities and on college campuses. The present state of public belief was largely created by a deluge of communications of all sorts over two decades. It will be easier for us than it was for them..."
This statement is most telling. For some who have closely followed letters-to-the-editor and op-ed columns in several different newspapers for the last decade or two, it has been evident that an organized campaign advancing the Papal position on population and abortion has been underway for a long time. Simon refers to that highly successful campaign here. Unfortunately, most readers are occasional readers and have not recognized this fact.
Simon continues, "Yet a large volume of material will be necessary to establish the legitimacy of our message...as well as to hammer home our message to the public at large. A speakers' bureau may also be part of such a grass-roots organization....We will also maintain a list of high-level scholarly speakers whom we can recommend to the media when they seek interviews on television and radio for the press."
The language used by Simon identifies his employer. His repeated use of the term, "value and sanctity of human life," is rather suggestive. However, more conclusive evidence is evident in his list of persons he says "have indicated their desire to be associated with the project." This list includes Judie Brown of the American Life League, as well as representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, The Rockford Institute, The Cato Institute, and The Heritage Foundation -- all of which are identified with the Religious Right and emerged in response to the Pastoral Plan -- and Georgetown University.
The highly sophisticated and prolific propaganda machine created by the bishops, which includes Simon's organization, has been effective in creating illusions which serve to counter the realities we all see with our own eyes. These realities would, in the absence of Vatican inspired propaganda, be used to make decisions to support a more effective response to the overpopulation threat to American and world security. Today, the pope is winning this war because the massive propaganda efforts on his behalf have confused the American people. Such propaganda has killed the American political will to confront the population problem. But, given the stakes for the Vatican, we should not be surprised.
With propaganda machinery in place, the Vatican set out to create many wrong perceptions, serving to undermine the scientific consensus that world overpopulation is a grave problem for the U.S. These wrong perceptions and illusions, of course, serve as obstacles to a constructive response. Why? The constructive responses almost always include controls on population growth and immigration, threatening Vatican survival.
In June 1988, one of the nation's leading climatologists, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, declared himself "99 percent certain that the greenhouse effect is upon us." At a U.S. Senate hearing, he stated, "The greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate."278 During 1988, the United States sweltered in a heat wave and drought. News analysts warned, as Newsweek put it, "This year's weather was merely the foretaste of a warming trend that will, by the next century, cause unprecedented disruption in the environment, not just of the United States but of the world....This decade has seen the four hottest years of the last century and the first five months of 1988 are the warmest on record."279
The greenhouse effect is caused by an increase in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other gases, including methane, nitrous oxides, and low-altitude ozone280 -- all a result of human activity. The more humans, the more activity, naturally. This signals the inexorable links among population growth, energy consumption, and global warming. These increased levels act as a blanket which prevents heat received from the sun from being radiated back into space.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has risen 27 percent since the early 1800s, and 20 percent since 1960. The level is expected to double by the third quarter of the next century. If the buildup of other greenhouse gases such as methane is considered, the same effects could occur in 50 years or less.281
"Most greenhouse effect forecasts call for rising sea levels, less rainfall in the interiors of continents, and hotter summers," journalist Monte Basgall reported in July 1988. "The most unsettling scenarios include an increase in severe storms, and heat and drought conditions extreme enough to force population migrations."282
Other science writers made equally dire forecasts: "Conditions in Southern California will resemble Death Valley."283 "The central United States will become a desert, if predictions hold true....Three of the big models predict extreme drought to the point there will be no ability to have agricultural production in Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska."284 These are important food growing regions and their loss, along with other areas certain to be affected, will mean serious food shortages in the United States. It is unlikely that we will be able to feed even our current population. North Carolina State University's James Woodman believes that a climate that includes higher temperatures, elevated levels of ozone, and extreme variations in precipitation could only be bad for agriculture.
If the Earth's population, industrialization, and emissions continue to grow at present rates, a six-degree increase in temperature is expected by mid-century -- a temperature level last occurring two million years ago.285 "The potential for economic, political and social destruction is extraordinary," said biologist George Woodwell.286 "Who could have imagined man himself rendering the earth uninhabitable?"287
As Newsweek`s Jerry Adler and Mary Hager observed, "Trusting to luck is a risky strategy with the fate of the world at stake....The web of life is unraveling around us....The continuing thread of these environmental threats is the element of irreversibility."288
Norman D. Newell and Leslie Marcus have studied the positive relationship between population growth and the greenhouse effect for the period 1958-83 and found that the steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has closely paralleled the growth of world human population, with an amazing correlation of 0.9985. The authors suggest that this relationship is so precise that carbon dioxide measurements should probably replace inaccurate census taking.289
According to Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, what he and his colleagues fear the most is rapid change. Without action, they say, the change will happen so swiftly that all forms of life will be seriously disrupted.290
The greenhouse effect clearly has the potential of being lethal to our life-support systems. All of this new information on the greenhouse effect cited above appeared in the American press in 1987 and 1988. A reasonable person would expect that the American people and our government would have reacted to this alarming new information. What has happened instead?
On May 6, 1989, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, a devout Catholic, rejected a proposal by William Reilly, who was at that time administrator of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and others who wanted U.S. representatives to call for an international convention on the greenhouse effect. Reilly and the others believed it would be a strong symbolic move for President Bush to urge a convention of nations to develop a framework for agreement on ways to combat the greenhouse effect. This move was killed by the White House.291
On May 8, 1989, the Bush administration admitted that its Office of Management and Budget had changed conclusions about global warming data in the Congressional testimony of Dr. Hansen, over his protests. The budget office edited his text to soften the conclusions and make the prospects of change appear more uncertain.292
When the information cited above began appearing in 1987 and 1988, immediately we began seeing counterpoint articles to confuse the public, as well as comments from scientists not directly involved with this issue. These counterpoint articles (and numerous letters-to-the-editor) were written by people who had little or no expertise in this field. Credentials were rarely mentioned. However, there was no controversy among the most competent people in the field.
The Vatican's vast disinformation effort gave the impression to the public that there was much controversy among the scientists themselves with respect to the need to begin addressing this problem, including international communications in meetings like the one proposed by EPA Administrator, Reilly. There has been no further action on the proposed meeting, which is most certainly opposed by the pope, as it would mean the release of additional convincing evidence that we face a grave threat from overpopulation. The bottom line: nothing at all has happened.
We don't hear much about the greenhouse effect anymore. The pope's disinformation campaign is working. The public perception of the greenhouse effect is one of confusion, which has resulted in paralysis, the goal of this disinformation effort.
Columnist, Molly Ivins describes our predicament: "Bill McKibben, author of Hope, Human and Wild, wrote in The Los Angeles Times that the most curious part of this phenomenon is not that it's taking place -- global warming is right where it's supposed to be, according to all the predictions by all the scientists who have studied it -- but that no one is paying attention. Denial of global warming is being aided and abetted by those whom McKibben calls `confusionists' -- ideologues and industry flacks who keep trying to discredit the scientists by using inaccurate and misunderstood statistics. Rush Limbaugh, for some bizarre reason, has taken it upon himself to crusade against the idea of global warming as some kind of left-wing plot."292a
Perhaps the single most remarkable example of succumbing to the opposition is the Clinton Presidency. Vice-President Al Gore's performance has been astounding, but highly instructive a lesson in the struggle for power. Mark Hertsgaard writes in The New York Times: "To read Vice President Al Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance, one would think that from the moment he took the oath of office he would have focused on nothing but grave threats of global warming, overpopulation and runaway consumption. Instead, the Clinton administration has compiled an environmental record of retreats, defeats and half measures."
"'Even after highly publicized warnings from virtually the entire scientific community...we are doing virtually nothing to address the principal causes of this catastrophe in the making.'"
"Those words were written by Sen. Al Gore in 1991, when George Bush was in the White House. But they are no less true today. The Clinton Administration's plan against global warming relies mainly on voluntary measures that Gore himself concedes fall short of what is needed."
"Indeed, the administration has failed across the board to live up to the grand vision outlined in `Earth in the Balance' of making `the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.'...[T]he Republican Congress [is] on the brink of rolling back 25 years of environmental measures."292b
For over 50 years, David Brower, one of the founders of the environmental movement, has been active in the struggle. Currently a Sierra Club board member, his assessment of the President is that: "Clinton has done more to harm the environment and weaken environmental regulations in three years than Presidents Reagan and Bush did in 12 years." He characterizes President Clinton as the "Great Capitulator."292c
One thing is certain. Everyone expected the Clinton-Gore team to be a great positive force for the environment and that by the end of their first term, significant steps would have been taken to deal with the "greenhouse effect." Not only has nothing been accomplished, but both men have fallen silent on this vital issue.
The power of the Presidency alone has not been sufficient to overcome the strength of the opposition. But where does such power lie? Certainly not with those usually credited. Only the Holy See exerts such control in our nation's capital. The Vatican dominated Republican Congress and numerous bureaucrats throughout the government, both Catholics and opportunistic nonCatholics, have succeeded in aborting the Clinton/Gore environmental effort. The Clinton-Gore team has been no match for the Vatican team on the greenhouse effect issue, despite the convincing evidence that rapidly continues to accumulate.
William K. Stevens writing for The New York Times: "Earth has entered a period of climatic change that is likely to cause widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century if emissions of heat trapping gases are not reduced...according to...a new assessment of the climate problem by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...a United Nations Group. The new features of the assessment -- the first in five years by the panel -- is that the experts are now more confident than before: That global climatic change is indeed in progress. And that at least some of the warming is due to human action...A continuing rise in sea level...most of the beaches on the U.S. East Coast would be gone in 25 years...An increase in extremes of temperature, dryness and precipitation in some regions....There is a 90 percent to 95 percent chance that climate change caused by the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide is responsible....The panel forecasts an increase in droughts like the current one in the Northeastern United States, heat waves like the one in Chicago this summer, and more fires and floods....A `striking' retreat of mountain glaciers around the world, accompanied in the Northern Hemisphere by a shrinking snow cover in winter....Deserts are expected to expand, and the heartlands of continents to become drier. There would be more rain throughout the world....Forest trees could not migrate northward fast enough to keep up with shifting climatic zones, and some forests would disappear, the panel says."292d
In another The New York Times article, Stevens observed that 1995 was the warmest year globally since records first were kept in 1856 according to the British Meteorological Office. "The average temperature was 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the previous record set in 1990....The British figures reveal the years 1991 through 1995 to be warmer than any similar five-year period, including the two half decades of the 1980s, the warmest decade in the record to date....The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York shows the average 1995 temperature slightly ahead of 1990 as the warmest year since 1866....Dr. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute predicted at least a couple more new global records will be set before 2000....The UN panel predicted ...the average global temperature will rise by a further 1.8 to 6.3 degrees, with a best estimate of 3.6 degrees, by the year 2100."292e
George Moffett reported that the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1980, the two warmest, since 1990. (Christian Science Monitor)292f
Kathy Sawyer of the Washington Post remarked: "After years of alarms, an international panel of scientists and government experts agreed in writing that human activities are affecting the global climate....The following language was adopted by consensus: `The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.'" The delegates at a meeting in Madrid of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented 75 nations.292g
Robert Lee Hotz reported (the Los Angeles Times): "Spring is arriving earlier every year throughout the Northern Hemisphere -- possibly due to global warming -- with the result that the growing season in many countries today is a week longer than 20 years ago, scientists announced...in the journal Nature."292h
Phil Mintz for Newsday: "Ocean waves that towered 100 feet -- the highest ever observed in the North Atlantic -- formed during two East Coast winter storms in recent years, leaving scientists wondering if storms are becoming more intense because of global warming." Previously storm records had led them to believe that 100-foot waves should be no higher than 72 feet.292i
Carol Kaesuk Yoon warned in The New York Times that: "Plant species living high in the Alps are climbing farther up their summits to escape the heat of a warming climate, but they risk going extinct when they run out of mountain, a study has found. Surveying 26 summits, Austrian researchers reported species migrating skyward at a rate of about 3 feet a decade in this century, with some moving as fast as 12 feet a decade." If temperatures increase as predicted, all of these species will run out of mountain and become extinct.292j
Washington Post Columnist Jessica Mathews advised that the National Climatic Data Center has combined five indicators that greenhouse models predict will change in a warming world into a single index of climate change. "The measures include elevated temperatures, drought in the summer months and the proportion of rainfall that comes in torrential downpours....The results show that since 1980 U.S. weather has become more extreme, with an index 40 percent higher than natural fluctuation should produce. Every one of the five measures showed this trend. The study concludes that the likelihood is 90 percent to 95 percent that `the climate is responding to increases in greenhouse gases.'"292k
From the Cox News Service: "Heavy downpours and howling blizzards are occurring more often than they did in the past, and some of the nation's leading climate experts say the trend is yet another sign that the Earth's climate is changing. Researchers at the National Climatic Data Center reported that `extreme precipitation' events -- the heavy downpours and snowfalls that are most likely to cause flooding, erosion and crop damage -- are on the rise, not only in the United States but elsewhere in the world. `Overall, there isn't any trend in total precipitation; we're just getting more extreme events,' said Thomas Karl, senior scientist at the Center." (292l)
This is not an exhaustive list of the American press coverage over this 18-month period. But we can say with certainty that it was sparse. "Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet," a newspaper column written by Steve Newman for Chronicle Features, offers specific and convincing evidence that, when taken collectively, change is probably underway. Some newspapers carry this column on a weekly basis. From this, we can derive a list, albeit hardly comprehensive, of world events serving as evidence that the effects of global warming are already being felt, events, largely ignored by the press, and listed below by week's ending:
The past year produced the warmest weather on record in 220 years across Austria; 1994 was almost four degrees warmer than the last record-warm year of 1775. January 6, 1995292m
Vast numbers of warm-water sea creatures are migrating farther north each year along the California coast in response to rising ocean temperatures. This Stanford University study begun in the early 1930s, shows that the average shoreline temperature has risen by 1.35 degrees since then. The average summer water temperature has gone up four degrees.
Even while flood waters steadily receded in rivers across northern Europe, a worsening drought in Spain wilted crops and caused water reserves to fall to dangerous levels. The drought has spread relentlessly over the Iberian Peninsula since the early 1990s and shepherds could not remember a worse drought this century. February 10, 1995192n
The British Antarctic Survey reported that a giant iceberg broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula. While less than 100 feet thick, the massive chunk of ice covers 1,100 square miles of ocean. The British team concluded that the breaking off of the iceberg is due to the gradual warming in the region of 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1940s.
Tibet was battered by its worst snowstorm in half a century. The northern grasslands, with 12-foot snowdrifts, were hardest hit. March 3, 1995292o
A surge of subtropical moisture unleashed another round of record flooding in California's Wine Country. Flooding in the Napa Valley was expected to crest at 10 feet above the record flooding of 1986. March 10, 1995292p
Argentine scientists warned that Antarctica's ancient ice shelf has begun to break up in warming seas. "The first thing I did was cry," lamented Dr. Rodolfo del Valle, who discovered a 40-mile long crack in the northernmost part of the Larsen Ice Shelf that runs 600 miles up the Antarctic Peninsula. United States scientists predicted in the 1970s that the melting of Antarctica's ice shelf would be one of the first clear signals of accelerating global warming.
The eastern Mediterranean Sea has suddenly warmed up far below the surface due to a new current in the Aegean Sea. The seabed has become about one degree Fahrenheit warmer in the last few years which could result in regional climate changes.
Vietnam's central highlands province of Darla is in the grip of its worst drought in several decades with most reservoirs completely dried up. March 31, 1995292q
A state of emergency has been declared in four northern states of Mexico, where a severe drought has withered crops and killed hundreds of thousands of cattle.
Unseasonable frost and snow across the northern half of Spain destroyed a large section of the wine crop and damaged fruits and vegetables. April 28, 1995292r
Searing heat and cloudless skies over Bangladesh in recent weeks have sent temperatures rising to deadly levels and helped cause the flow of the Ganges River to shrink to a trickle. May 5, 1995292s
Several waves of severe thunderstorms rumbling across the American Midwest and Deep South unleashed some of the worst flooding in centuries and triggered deadly tornadoes in several states.
Asia's only permanently ice-capped tropical mountain is rapidly losing its mantle of glacier ice, another sign of global warming. Ice once covered almost eight square miles of the top of the mountain in Indonesia, but now spans only one square mile at its peak. May 12, 1995292t
Relentless storms which have pounded the United States took a more northerly course, allowing record flooding to recede in Louisiana. Now seemingly endless waves of rain have turned the fields in the fertile Great Plains to mud, preventing cultivation.
The heat wave and drought in the eastern half of the Indian subcontinent was broken by a monsoonal storm which devastated crops and property. May 19, 1995292u
The southwest monsoon shows no sign of ending the unrelenting spell of high heat in parts of India and Pakistan. This year's monthlong record heat has dried up the wetlands of the Himalayan foothills, threatening endangered species.
Freakish late-season snow and rain continued to pound western parts of Canada and the United States where swollen rivers and streams swamped large tracts of farmland. Extremely rare June rains threaten a wine crop in California. June 16, 1995292v
Scientists studying weather patterns over the Amazon are puzzled by the discovery of sudden and violent downward-blowing winds that are destroying parts of the rain forest, causing planes to crash and threatening human life. A single episode of these sinking winds demolished a 10-square-mile jungle area in only 20 minutes. June 30, 1995292w
Bangladesh called in the Army to help rescue millions of people marooned by the latest floods that have swept northern parts of the country.
China continued to battle the massive flooding that has swamped 10 provinces and displaced millions of people since late May. July 14, 1995292x
Monsoon floods that have swept across almost half of Bangladesh since early July have killed scores of people, thousands of cattle and damaged approximately 1000 bridges and culverts.
The death toll from a brutal five-day heat wave in the American Midwest was expected to surpass 800. Temperatures soared to an all-time record of 106 degrees in Chicago, causing the greatest death toll from one event in that city since the Great Fire of 1871.
In the journal, Nature, scientists reported an acceleration in the melting of the Arctic ice cap, possibly signifying a long-term global warming.
Also in the journal, Nature, a team of European scientists wrote that Siberia is now warmer than it has been for the past 1,000 years. July 21, 1995292y
Tass news agency reported that the global warming has stimulated the migration of venomous snakes into the Russian Arctic. July 28, 1995292z
Called the floods of the century, the Chinese Army evacuated almost 1 million people in Liaoning Province where floodwaters covered 1.3 million acres. August 4, 1995292aa
Extreme heat and blazing summer sun sparked a new round of wildfires in the western United States, northern Mexico and parts of North Africa. In northern Baja California the mercury soared to 125 degrees. August 11, 1995292bb
Barely six months after experiencing some of the worst flooding in Europe this century, Holland now faces a severe shortage of water that threatens farmers with ruin.
Argentine military and civilian authorities launched a massive relief effort to bring food and supplies to southern parts of the country cut off by three weeks of severe snowstorms.
Across southern Chile, the coldest Antarctic chill in 40 years killed 250,000 sheep, cattle and horses. August 18, 1995292cc
The prolonged dry spell throughout northern Europe worsened with high heat and clear skies, is now taking a severe toll on the region's agriculture. Ireland's potato harvest is cooking in the earth under the hottest and driest summer on record that threatens to decimate the crop.
Savage winter conditions that lashed southern Argentina for a second week killed an estimated 1.5 million sheep and halted transportation in Patagonia.
Eastern Australia broke the record for the longest dry spell since records began 137 years ago with a total of 37 days without rain. August 25, 1995292dd
The luxury British liner QE2 was hit by a 95-foot tidal wave generated by the remnants of Hurricane Luis as the ship crossed the North Atlantic.
The spate of severe flash flooding around the Northern Hemisphere during the past few years may be a result of global warming, according to the U.S. Climate Analysis Center. Its findings show that the added warmth can cause clouds that burst suddenly into downpours. September 22, 1995292ee
A sudden and unseasonably severe snowstorm sweeping southeastern Mongolia killed nomadic herdsman and sent their 10,000 unattended head of cattle fleeing into neighboring China.
Metropolitan Denver may not recover from a freak late summer snowstorm for at least two years. Some foresters estimated that four out of every five trees in the city were destroyed or damaged when heavy and wet snow fell on the still foliated branches. September 29, 1995292ff
A chunk of ice measuring 82 square miles has broken loose from Antarctica due to warming waters. November 3, 1995292gg
Blinding blizzards moved through southern Scandinavia bringing much of the region to a standstill. "I have been a weatherman for 20 years and have never seen such a long-lasting and forceful snowstorm," said Swedish forecaster Lars-Erik Larsson.
Britain is sending $23 million in aid to southern Africa to combat a worsening drought across the region. Maize harvests have plunged 91 percent. November 24, 1995292hh
An international gathering of scientists and government experts in Madrid formally agreed that global warming is already occurring. The opinion of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that recent temperature rises cannot be explained by natural climatic variations, leaving human influence as the only possible cause. December 1, 1995292ii
Scientists at the British Meteorological Office announced that the world's average temperature was 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal during 1995. As predicted by computer models, some regions of the world were significantly hotter than average in 1995, like parts of Siberia where it was 5.4 degrees above normal. January 12, 1996292jj
British scientists reported that Antarctica's ice shelves are melting away as temperatures over the frozen continent rise by about 0.12 degrees Fahrenheit per year. At least five of the thick ice shelves that make up Antarctica have retreated dramatically over the past 50 years, during which temperatures have risen by 4.2 degrees, according to the British Antarctic Survey. January 26, 1996292kk
After months of fierce blizzards and temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees in western China, the army moved more than 50,000 nomads and millions of head of livestock to safer ground. Bitterly cold arctic weather also descended on much of central Canada and the midwestern United States, breaking many temperature records. February 2, 1996292ll
The worst blizzards of this century continue to plague much of China's Qinghai Province, threatening more than 100,000 people with starvation. March 1, 1996292mm
Two more waves of heavy snow in the northeastern United States put the season's snowfall totals over record levels. The 13th winter snowstorm exceeded New York City's previous record set in 1946-47.
This has been the Ukraine's harshest winter in decades. March 8, 1996292nn
The World Meteorological Agency announced that analysis of global weather data from 1995 reveals it to be the hottest year in recorded history. The agency's 11-page "Statement on the Status of the Global Climate 1995" also reported that there were more Atlantic hurricanes than in any year since 1933. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane "greenhouse gases" are blamed for the continued increase in the average worldwide temperature.
Kenya announced it will build walls around part of two tiny islands to protect them from imminent swamping caused by the rising sea level. It is believed that the changing climate is responsible for the discernible rise in ocean levels during recent years. May 3, 1996292oo
Bitterly cold snowstorms, artificially-induced by cloud-seeding to put out huge fires raging across the steppes of Mongolia killed at least 5,000 head of cattle.
The worst snowstorm to strike China's northwestern Xinjiang region in half a century killed 469 swans. May 17, 1996292pp
A second year of severe drought in China's wheat belt has parched 17.5 million acres of crops and caused the lower reaches of the Yellow River in Shandong Province to dry up five times since January.
Unrelenting high winds after a nearly snowless winter in southern Alaska fanned huge wildfires that blackened tens of thousands of acres of forest. June 7, 1996292qq
Researchers in Canada announced that the permafrost, which covers a vast area of the nation's far north, is retreating. A six year study by the Geological Survey of Canada, found that the permanently frozen ground in the Mackenzie Basin has retreated by 63 to 125 miles over the past 100 years. This retreat is attributed to global warming. June 14, 1996292rr
The United Kingdom Climate Change Impacts Review Board announced that the country will undergo major changes during the next 50 years, with northern England and Scotland becoming wetter still and the south warmer and drier. The board warned that such changes would have a significant impact on wildlife, agriculture and ranching. The climate zones are predicted to shift 125 miles northward. July 5, 1996292ss
Unprecedented winter storms raging across South Africa were responsible for a blanket of heavy snow, with drifts as high as 8 feet, across the normally temperate nation. July 12, 1996292tt
This barrage of specific examples of what are probably the results of the greenhouse effects does get one's attention -- but only if you are aware of them. Earthweek is always buried deep in the second or third section of the newspaper, with little visibility. Who cares whether we are only 90 or 95 percent certain that the greenhouse effect is causing these unprecedented events? If it should develop as predicted, the results will be catastrophic. Billions of people will die prematurely in the coming century, including millions of Americans. The ramifications of this catastrophe may well end our form of government as well. Individual security would largely disappear. With the stakes so high, why is the press largely ignoring this mountain of evidence -- which literally grows weekly?
Articles appearing in the press often contain counter claims, with the result that the reader becomes skeptical of the validity of the greenhouse effect research findings. For example, the first Stevens article cited devotes nearly one-fourth of the text to opposing views and dwells on the controversy among "the scientists": "Climate forecasting is a difficult and often controversial science. One major subject of dissension is the computer models....Skeptics continue to assert, however that models fail to simulate the present climate realistically....But given the natural variability of Earth's climate and the wide fluctuations in temperature known to have occurred in the distant past, climate experts until now have been almost unanimous in saying they could not prove that emission of greenhouse gases related to human activity was playing a part in the warming....The human contribution to global warming could range from highly significant to trivial. The panel scientists say it is not yet possible to measure how much of the warming has been caused by human activity and how much is a result of natural causes."292d
In his second article, Stevens diminishes the importance of the findings thus far, referring to the position of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director, Dr. James Hansen: "Hansen has been one of only a few scientists to maintain steadfastly that a century-long global warming trend is being caused mostly by human influence....Other experts would go no further than the recent findings of a U.N. panel of scientists: the observed warming is `unlikely to be entirely natural in origin' and that the weight of evidence `suggests a discernible human influence on climate.' Previously, few scientists apart from Hansen had been willing to go even that far, contending that the relatively small warming so far could easily be a result of natural climate variability." (292e) Obviously, just by reading his own words here, it is apparent that Stevens is underscoring his case that there is much disagreement and confusion among "the scientists."
In his cited Los Angeles Times article, Robert Lee Hotz does much to raise doubts in the minds of readers, devoting about one-fourth of it to promoting uncertainty: "In a key but controversial report last year, a U.N. panel concluded for the first time that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are probably responsible for changing the global climate...Despite the growing scientific evidence, the controversy over global warming and climate change shows no signs of abating. At the Geneva meeting earlier this week, more than 100 European and American scientists issued a joint statement condemning any major steps to reduce global warming....There is, they argue, still no scientific consensus on climate change."292h Who were these 100 people in Geneva? No mention is made that the United Nations panel consists of 2500 carefully selected scientists. How were these 100 people chosen? Who sponsored this meeting in Geneva? Was it arranged by the Vatican? We can be absolutely certain that Rome will make every possible effort to insure that there is never a "scientific consensus on climate change" no matter how catastrophic the greenhouse effect becomes.
Other publications simply reject the greenhouse theory. A Scripps Howard News Service article published this spring, "Global warming in dispute: Scientist raps theory of greenhouse gases," offers no reporter's name. The article begins, "The scientific squabble over global warming heated up again Wednesday with a Harvard astrophysicist's report that weather records provide `no evidence' of a coming climatic catastrophe." (292uu) The article then blatantly misstates the data in which only scientists in the field would be familiar enough to recognize deception.
George Seldes recognized the use of these very same techniques to deceive Americans about the Spanish War of 1936-1939. And he thoroughly documented the Vatican's role in their use. There is little doubt that we are witnessing a repetition of a successful strategy as the Vatican goes about protecting its security-survival interests at any costs.
In his articles, Stevens fails to mention the enormous potential costs in lives, health, personal security and literally everything else of value to us. Why await a 100 percent certainty? A probability of 95 or 90 percent is far more than needed to act responsibly. When we suspect that a dam might break, even if there is only a 10 percent chance, we evacuate all the communities below the dam as quickly as possible. Why aren't we responding as responsibly by addressing the greenhouse effect threat? We all know that population growth control must be at the top of the list of the many solutions to the greenhouse effect problem. So does the Vatican. General acknowledgment of the problem will drive population growth control onto the public agenda as nothing has before. The threatened Vatican would prefer to prevent this realization and has a vested interest in maintaining as much confusion and skepticism as possible regarding the greenhouse effect.
If we continue on our current course, it is likely that the greenhouse effect will ultimately bring about a full-blown confrontation between Americans and the Church hierarchy. No one will be able to ignore the full fury of the consequences of the greenhouse effect. As the droughts and floods increase, as our beaches which draw 100 million Americans each year disappear, as our forests begin to die on a massive scale, and our deserts relentlessly expand, as the sea floods our coastal communities, as powerful hurricanes, huge winter storms and sweltering heat waves strike with increasing frequency, the greenhouse effect is certain to get our attention. Americans will begin to demand solutions, as well as explanations for the decades of grossly irresponsible inaction. The Vatican is going to surface as the culprit.
In her book, Population Politics: The Choices That Shape Our Future, Virginia D. Abernethy systematically destroys the credibility of this theory. When researchers closely examined the basis for this theory in the early 1970s, they discovered that the early proponents had made assumptions about the industrialized countries that were historically dead wrong. Actually, the fertility transition to small families had occurred in the midst of desperate poverty and very high infant mortality in Europe.293 In a Wall Street Journal article, "Experience Teaches Population Control Can Precede Development, and Spur It," published just before the Cairo Population Conference in September 1994, Tim Carrington cites compelling evidence that this theory is bogus. He writes that the view "Development is the best contraceptive" was widely held 20 years earlier. However, much has changed: "...there is broad agreement that the old maxim can be fully retired. Its weakness lies in the implicit suggestion that efforts to reduce fertility work only after a nation has lifted itself out of poverty. Reality suggests otherwise."293a
Discovery that this theory was not valid has not diminished the use of it to support the Vatican position on population growth control.
The Vatican has also promoted the illusion that U.S. foreign aid is good. For the Vatican, U.S. foreign aid is good. It puts tens of millions of dollars into Vatican coffers through grants to the various Catholic relief organizations. But more important, this redistribution of wealth is good for the Vatican because it discourages developing countries from facing up to their overpopulation problems and gives them a false sense of security. Abernethy makes a compelling case that in the intermediate and long run, our foreign aid is certain to result in catastrophic consequences.
Abernethy reports, "The scale of the global effort to help the third world (and the deception it fosters) can hardly be overstated. Harper's Index (March, 1989) reports that forty countries rely on foreign aid for at least a quarter of their national budgets....[when all aid is considered, of which AID money is just a small part] the United States dispersed $92 billion to developing countries in 1988 (Harper's Index, December 1989)294a...Experts think that, by the year 2000, 64 out of 117 third-world countries will have become dependent on donated food, and the majority of these 64 countries will be unable to support as many as half of their projected numbers."294b
Egypt, for example , will be dependent on imports for 80 percent of its food in the year 2000.295 What will become of it? Where will the food imports come from when the greenhouse effect begins to take its toll on U.S. food production in a couple of decades as currently projected? The United States provides the bulk of the world's food exports.
Food is not the only problem. Abernethy summarizes, "Three billion people will lack adequate fuel wood or other energy sources. Water demand, spurred by population growth, will exceed rainfall in most of Africa, the Middle East, North Asia, and parts of Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. And, warns environmentalist Cynthia Green, `The growing volume of untreated human wastes and toxic substances could render as much as one-fourth of the world's water supply unsafe for human consumption.'"296
U.S. foreign aid has made it possible for the Vatican to postpone its extinction by delaying serious population growth control efforts. But, what have been the costs to the developing countries? Developing countries have been given the implicit message that they cannot help themselves, eroding self-confidence. Says Abernethy, "Dependence on others is not a happy adult condition: Failure can be blamed on someone else; energy that could go into work or planning is dissipated in resentment when things go wrong, or in resentment simply at being dependent. Poor countries that count on foreign aid risk losing their resolve to become self-reliant. When dependence undermines self-confidence and stymies both foresight and planning, how can the future get better?"297
China, on the other hand, kept a firm grip on reality. It adopted self-reliance as a core tenet of national policy. In China, the one-child family is now widely, if not universally, accepted as a patriotic duty. Americans have long understood the importance of self-reliance. How much did the Vatican influence the decision-making of our law-makers in the formulation and implementation of our foreign aid policy?
Another myth promoted by the Vatican is that poverty is a distribution problem. It claims that rich countries will always have enough to share if they choose to. It adamantly rejects the idea that there is a problem of absolutely limited resources. Many developing countries buy this myth. Abernethy notes the danger of accepting it, "The results are sadly counterproductive: Poor countries are encouraged to live beyond their means in the belief that they will be bailed out, and third-world couples go on thinking that large families are affordable."298 The results obviously meet the pope's needs.
Welfare programs in the U.S. were and continue to be strongly supported by the Vatican. As is the case of foreign aid, the Church derives billions of dollars in income from domestic welfare programs. According to the National Catholic Reporter, Catholic Charities USA, the nation's largest private network of local social service organizations, relies heavily on the government for its financial support: "In 1993, the latest year for which figures are available, 65 percent of Catholic Charities' income was provided by state, local and federal governments."298a In its March 14, 1996 issue, The Wanderer, a conservative national Catholic weekly, reports: "The American Church is a principal subcontractor for the government in housing, welfare, child care, health care, and education, and gets billions of dollars for its services, for which it receives very generous administrative overhead fees that keep chanceries running and provide salaries and benefits for thousands of Church bureaucrats. Thus, maintaining the welfare state -- under the guise of `compassion for the poor' -- takes priority over the traditional Catholic social principles espoused by Buchanan."298b
But, more importantly, these programs have significantly increased fertility, especially among new immigrant arrivals299 (most of whom are Catholic). However, these programs have had a devastating effect on the American family and social fabric. The predictions of critics of these programs at the time they were made the law of the land are now reality. The Catholic Church has taken credit for the enactment of this legislation for decades.
For years the Vatican has complained that there would be no population problem in Central and South America if the wealthy there simply redistributed their wealth. This cynical act makes the Church look like the good guys to the masses and musters support from the masses for the Church. It allows the masses to blame their problems on the wealthy. It permits the poor to avoid blame for their own conditions which are a result of simply having more children than they can afford. The Vatican wins -- the poor lose.
Abernethy makes another important point: "Urging redistribution on policymakers in poor countries is almost certainly inappropriate. Hard thinking and difficult decisions seem in order because, where there is overpopulation, those who are destitute will consume, before they die, the future potential productivity of any part of the environment to which they have access. Witness the Sahel, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Haiti...Nepal, and Bangladesh."300 The land will be denuded and the topsoil stripped away.
The Vatican is also responsible for the myth that immigration is a win-win situation when in fact the exact opposite is true. Abernethy summarizes why: "Perceived opportunities to emigrate may be just as corrosive as large-scale aid. Emigration appeals to many of the most energetic people of a society -- exactly those people who would be most likely to promote constructive reform at home. One quick way to stop dissent is to expel the troublemaker....Driving out the tree-shaker does make for soothing politics. At the same time, emigration creates a safety valve for excess population. The understanding that some people will remove themselves lifts the pressure that would otherwise encourage everyone to confront the limited nature of resources....These aspects of emigration...narrow considerably the options for helping third-world countries to help themselves."301 Thus the developing country loses.
The American bishops lead the cry against the national identification card exactly because they know that illegal immigration control will not be possible without it. It is true that this card will infringe upon the privacy rights of citizens. (Those of us who served in the military will find this card nothing new because we were required to carry such a card throughout our service.) However, without limiting immigration through enforcement of our immigration laws, notes Abernethy: "Citizens go on losing jobs, most people's real income falls, energy security becomes a bitter joke, the environment suffers, the carrying capacity is exceeded, and Americans lose cherished values along with their privacy rights."302 America loses.
The Vatican has created the illusion that it is not a major actor in U.S. policy making. Few Americans are aware of the intensive involvement of the Vatican in U.S. immigration policy development, most recently in the 1990 Immigration Reform Act. Abernethy acknowledges that public complacency over the Act can be traced in part to the inaccurate portrayal of future U.S. population by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Bureau's 1989 projections were criticized almost as soon as they appeared. Demographers Dennis Ahlburg and James Vaupel determined that legal and illegal immigration were being grossly underestimated.303 However, using more accurate data for legal and illegal immigration, it was later discovered that the projected population for the U.S. in the year 2080 was 300 million off! Had this deliberate miscalculation not occurred at the Census Bureau, there is no way that the 1990 Act which further liberalized immigration law would have passed.
Abernethy does not identify the driving force behind the corruption at the Census Bureau. However, she does identify a driving force for the 1990 Act, The Heritage Foundation "whose champions are," as she says, "Julian Simon and Ben Wattenberg." As noted earlier in this chapter, The Heritage Foundation is a creation of the bishops' Pastoral Plan and is headed by a conservative Catholic, Edwin J. Feulner, Jr.
One of the great successes of the bishops' disinformation campaign has been the misleading of America in the identification of the forces encouraging an open borders arrangement for the U.S. If you ask individuals on the street who these driving forces are, they might mention a few but they never mention the Vatican. In that the Vatican is surely the most significant force, this is quite an achievement.
Perhaps its greatest success has been creation of the illusion in the U.S. that all is well within the Church, and between the Church and American democracy. This illusion is largely owed to the success that the Church has achieved in suppressing virtually all criticism of the Church in the press. A corps of Catholic organizations is committed to this activity. The pit bulls of this corps are found at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, as described in the previous chapter.
The Vatican has no use for the civil rights of American patriots -- freedom of thought, of expression, of the press. Patriots have a moral responsibility to speak out when their country is threatened. This sort of intimidation over the last hundred years has resulted in a populace woefully ignorant of the threat to American democracy and security posed by the Church. This illusion has made it possible for the Church to go unchallenged.
The Vatican has also created the illusion that it does not involve itself in international organization policy making. Of course this is not so. In a recent interview, Professor Milton P. Siegel detailed how the Vatican seized control of World Health Organization (WHO) population policy making from the very beginning.304 Siegel was Assistant Director General of WHO for its first 24 years and is considered among the world's foremost authorities on the development of WHO policy. During the third World Health Assembly (1950), the Vatican threatened to kill WHO and start their own organization if the director general, Dr. Brock Chisholm, did not stand up before the Assembly and specifically state that WHO would not get involved with family planning. He did. WHO did not get involved at all for more than a decade.
Siegel put his finger on the Vatican's motivation. Without the separation of population dynamics from WHO public health policy, the Vatican subsequently would have found it much more difficult to manipulate governments on family planning and abortion. National leaders would have been able to refer to the international consensus, as demonstrated by WHO policy. WHO, they could have insisted, has determined that family planning and abortion -- like clean water, good nutrition, and immunizations -- are necessary to protect public health. This was deeply threatening to the Vatican. This astounding example is reported on in greater detail in an article based on this interview found in Appendix 3.
In its 45-year history, WHO has had a deplorable record in family planning. Its commitment has been minuscule, and even today, family planning accounts for only a tiny fraction of its budget. The Vatican continues to have considerable influence at WHO. For example, it recently succeeded in having appointed as director of the Human Reproduction Program a professor from a Catholic University in Rome, Dr. Giuseppe Benagiano, the son of Pope John Paul II's dentist. Benagiano promptly set out to kill any further clinical studies of the most important development in fertility control since the birth control pill was developed in 1960 -- the quinacrine pellet method of nonsurgical female sterilization.305 This permanent method has already been used by more than 100,000 women in 15 developing countries. There have been no deaths or life-threatening injuries and it can be delivered in developing countries for under $1 US, in primitive settings by paramedical personnel. Given the current Vatican influence within WHO, it would be much better for humanity if the organization removed itself from fertility control altogether. Its behavior is similar in its relations with all other international organizations that bear on population growth control. The Vatican has succeeded with its illusion.
The Vatican's disinformation campaign has worked hard to create illusions of abundance and prosperity, that wealth is renewable and that nature is inexhaustible. The right-wing Catholic literature is full of these distortions of reality but the Vatican is also responsible for the appearance of these kinds of messages throughout media. These cornucopian fantasies are nurtured and promoted to protect the Vatican position on population growth control and thus its security-survival. The Vatican has discouraged the concept of national self-reliance, including public debate of this concept, because it recognizes that achievement of such self-reliance would be impossible without population growth control.
At the same time, the Vatican, through its disinformation efforts, has fiercely attacked the concept of carrying capacity, apparently because it makes so much common sense. But this concept immediately implies the requirement of population growth control. It has also created the illusion that Earth has an infinite capacity to absorb ever growing quantities of wastes and pollution. We get mixed signals as a result and none of us is as concerned as we would be if the Vatican were not so successful in implanting disinformation.
The steady stream of "human interest news" regarding new arrivals and regarding the plight of would-be immigrants and refugees is intensely promoted by the bishops to advance the Vatican's security interests.
The greatest accomplishment of this sophisticated and well-financed disinformation program has been its success in making immigration and population policy almost taboo subjects for public debate. Given the overwhelming importance of these subjects for the security-survival of all Americans, this success is most disheartening. If the Vatican can succeed in this country with these issues in this manner, what else may be in store?
Who stands to gain from the disuniting of America? Who is threatened by a united, organized, committed America? Who stands to gain from social disorganization in America? Who has the sophistication, resources, organization and motivation to set about disuniting America?
Certainly the Vatican is a sophisticated political institution and recognizes that America's bonds of national cohesion are fragile and that factionalism can tear our country apart. Obviously, the Vatican would be gravely threatened by an influential, united, organized America committed to population growth control. It would be hard to deny that the Catholic Church has a vested interest in ethnic identification and that it has repudiated the ideal of assimilation, an American institution.
Schlesinger recognizes a serious danger relevant to the death of NSSM 200 which I will discuss further at the end of this chapter: "And when a vocal and visible minority pledges primary allegiance to their groups, whether ethnic, sexual, religious, or...political, it presents a threat to the brittle bonds of national identity that hold this diverse and fractious society together."308 The bishops also recognize this and have used this threat on occasions too numerous to count. They are certainly prepared to use it again and again.
"The bicentennial of American independence, the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, the restoration of Ellis Island," says Schlesinger, "all turned from tributes to the melting pot into extravaganzas of ethnic distinctiveness."309 There was a similar outcome with the 500th anniversary celebration of the arrival of Columbus in the West Indies (not America) in 1992. I watched each of these four tributes in disbelief. It looked as if these events were staged by the Catholic Church. Support for this suspicion can be found in a later section on presidents Reagan and Bush.
Schlesinger identifies an ethnic upsurge today that "threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as `one people,' a common culture, a single nation."310 He goes on to say, "The cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities. The endgame is self-pity and self-ghettoization."311 And further, "The cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement of American history, producing a nation of minorities -- or at least of minority spokesmen -- less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation...."312 In the end, the cult of ethnicity defines the republic not as a polity of individuals but as a congeries of distinct and inviolable cultures.313 This set of circumstances has set the stage for the fragmentation and anarchy that we already see in our inner cities today.
The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 has not worked out as planned, except if the Catholic bishops were the real planners, an intriguing possibility. In practice, bilingual education retards rather than expedites the movement of Hispanic children into the English-speaking world and it promotes segregation more than it does integration. It nourishes self-ghettoization. Bilingualism encourages concentrations of Hispanics to stay together and not be integrated.314
As a result, Catholic bishops now claim to speak for the millions of Hispanics living in the U.S., a status from which the bishops derive power -- political power. This appears to be the only positive outcome of this Act for anybody and the bishops continue to fiercely protect the Act which has squandered billions of tax dollars. Through this Act, the bishops have made significant progress in transforming the United States into a more segregated society.
Schlesinger also notes that when a religious group claims a right to approve or veto anything that is taught in public schools, the fateful line is crossed between cultural pluralism and @BULLET = ethnocentrism.315 The Vatican successfully claimed this right and vetoed in public schools all mention of the anti-democratic and anti-American teachings of the Catholic Church and all mention of history which places the Catholic Church in a negative light. As a result, we have an American populace that is blatently ignorant of the true nature of the Catholic Church, the threat posed by the Church to the rights we claim as Americans, as well as the lengths to which the Church has gone in the past to protect its interests.
There is scant question that an attack on the common American identity is underway and that this attack has been instigated by the Vatican to promote its own interests which are presently seriously threatened. The bishops have made progress in transforming the United States into a more segregated society. They have succeeded in their efforts to impose ethnocentric, Afrocentric, and bilingual curricula on public schools, designed to hold minority children out of American society and have remarkably advanced the fragmentation of American life.
There are several advantages the bishops derive from this arrangement. One obvious advantage depends on acceptance of the bishops' proposition that they speak for these groups. At present, this proposition is thoughtlessly accepted by the media. Fragmentation will make population policies, such as those suggested by the Rockefeller Commission and NSSM 200, far more difficult to agree on and implement, a fact the bishops surely recognize. If the bishops find that anarchy in the U.S. is necessary to protect the Papacy (a likely proposition), this fragmentation sets the stage.
According to Schlesinger, "The American creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities"316 -- accountable to their bishops or whomever. He continues, "The Constitution turns on individual rights, not on group rights" -- which can leave out the bishops if their faithful choose not to follow, as with family planning and abortion.
The American creed, which he defines as the "the civic culture -- the very assimilating, unifying culture,"317 is today under siege because we let the Catholic bishops degrade history -- European, Latin American, North American, and Church -- allowing them to dictate its contents. Unaware of the dangers that we would have learned from a full and truthful history of the Church, we have permitted the bishops and their representatives to run grandly amok in the halls of our government. This has resulted in Papal influence on U.S. public policy making beyond what most Americans can imagine. Due to this interference, we are increasingly threatened with a grave global population problem.
"The Vatican's campaign of intellectual terrorism is advanced enormously by some feminists....Although feminists ought, theoretically, to be opponents of the pope, because they generally believe in choice on contraception and abortion, they sometimes seem more like the pope's handmaidens. A significant segment of the International Women's Movement denies that population growth is a problem and accuses anyone who disagrees with them of racism. They portray any concern with global population growth as being in inherent opposition to advancing the rights of women. Because there have been abusive population programs in the past, they argue that any program must be inherently abusive. This segment of the International Women's Movement is in danger of hijacking the whole movement."
"Because the book, Power, Population and the Environment Women Speak, arose from the "women's tent" of the Earth Summit, I presume it is indicative of the direction that the intelligentsia of the international women's movement is taking. That is scary, because the book is the work of idealogues, not of analysts or scholars."
"On June 5, 1995 I attended a public meeting organized by various groups, who are participating in an international effort to discredit the first conceptually new development in contraceptives in 20 years: antifertility vaccines. The development of one of these vaccines has been funded in part by the [Canadian] International Development Research Centre (IDRC]. The meeting was organized by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women...Canada's largest feminist organization and Inter Pares...which has numerous Catholic sponsors. The women at that meeting were anti-science. The comment that there was a scientific consensus that the world was overpopulated was met with a comment that it was scientists who brought us the atomic bomb. Any questions pertaining to how we will solve the problems we now have were attacked with statements laying the blame for everything bad on the west. According to some of the speakers, to be concerned with population was to be genocidal toward people of other races."
"I later found out that the IDRC had offered to sponsor the Indian scientist who has been directing the research on one of these vaccines for 20 years [Prof. G.P. Talwar] to attend the meeting. The offer was turned down. The women had advertised a demonstration against the vaccine, which was mysteriously canceled...I found out that they had been planning to do a skit, but had been told that IDRC would challenge them if they misrepresented facts....What we heard at the meeting was not an objective analysis of the pros and cons of the vaccines, but a rant against genocide, eugenics and racism. To be concerned with population, we are told, was to be racist, anti-woman and anti-poor."317a
Unfortunately, anti-fertility vaccines are only the latest target of these feminists. They were instrumental in the near total elimination of the intrauterine device (IUD) option for American women. Today only about one percent of American women use this excellent method, while it remains the most popular one in many countries, including Finland, Norway and Sweden where medical care standards are very high. Those feminists were the storm troopers in the opposition to Depo Provera, which, though now available, was unnecessarily withheld from American women for 20 years. The latest victim is the most promising contraceptive method developed to date for people who want no more children, the quinacrine pellet method for nonsurgical female sterilization. With 26 years of experience in contraceptive development, I can attest to the extraordinary effectiveness of these destructive feminists.
Dr. Weld continues: "These feminists are very influential, because I have never seen the population issue addressed in any women's organization or publication....Yet the women at the...public disinformation...meeting I attended are impeding a solution to the world's crisis through intimidation and by spreading confusion. What motivates them?...Unfortunately, far too many sensible women are silenced by the intellectual terrorism of the feminist hijackers. To make an analogy with the U.S. civil rights movement, the Martin Luther King types of the women's movement have been shunted aside by the Louis Farrakhan types, with their own agenda of hate."
To be sure, there are Martin Luther King types. As we noted earlier, Dr. Virginia Abernethy has identified overpopulation as the single most important women's issue. Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, has concluded that unchecked population growth demeans the status of women and often ruins their lives. (317b) Fran P. Hosken, Women's International Network, in her comment for the cover of this book, says that nothing is more important than control over reproduction which forms the basis of all democratic institutions and equality.
"The pope's handmaidens," as Dr. Weld refers to them, must be identified and thoroughly isolated from the international feminist movement -- whatever it takes. If sincere feminists fail to succeed in a complete separation from these women, the credibility of the feminist movement will share the fate suffered by the Roman Catholic Church. It will plummet. Feminist have a vital role to play in population growth control. If we fail to achieve population stabilization in the near future, all investments made in the feminist movement, by women and men alike, will be for naught.
According to Alan D. Hertzke, author of Representing God in Washington and a professor at the University of Oklahoma, "There's pretty good evidence that most Church members have no knowledge of what their national Church leaders are doing....Despite its absolute theological stand on many issues, the Catholic Church has proved to be one of the most effective religious forces in practical politics."318
David Briggs, in a December 1990 series for the Associated Press, stated: "And the Catholic Church may become the strongest power because it is willing to form coalitions with a wide range of allies."319 These allies sometimes include opportunistic people and institutions with little concern for the well-being of this country or our people. Governments tend to fall in behind public opinion and public opinion is led by the Church on nearly all issues important to its own security. (b) In an August 1990 "Member Alert," Robert Maddox, executive director of the mainstream organization, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, placed in perspective just how powerful the Catholic lobbying effort really is: "The U.S. Catholic Conference enjoys an unprecedented veto power over all social legislation." That's powerful! The Catholic Church's influence is unmatched by any other U.S. institution.
The Catholic extremist Paul Weyrich heads the Center for Catholic Policy within his Free Congress Foundation. However, he also heads up the Siena Group, a coalition of 40 Roman Catholic public policy organizations.320 If the Catholic Church were not deeply involved in the making of U.S. public policy, why would it need so many public policy organizations? Undeniably, the most powerful of all remain the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference, operating out of their imposing office building near the Capitol.
The Church's lobbying effort is tens of thousands of people strong on the national, state and local levels. These people are knowledgeable about the workings of government, well financed, highly organized, and deeply committed. And they are successful. For example, in November 1995, a bill prohibiting over 1 million federal employees and their dependents from choosing health insurance that covers abortion, was enacted. That same month a measure that denies abortion services for military women stationed overseas, including women serving in Bosnia, became law.320a On the state level, for example, in 1989 the Church managed the introduction of 270 bills in 41 state legislatures on the abortion issue alone.321
The costs of policies adopted as a result of the Catholic lobby, in dollar terms alone, are horrendous. For example, the costs of implementing immigration policies (policies which are shaped almost entirely by the extensive Catholic lobbying effort) were estimated by Dr. Donald L. Huddle, Professor of Economics, Rice University, to be $45 billion in 1992 alone. He projects the immigration costs to be $668.5 billion over the next decade.322 A significant part of this money goes into Vatican coffers as the U.S.'s leading immigration service contractor. American taxpayers are footing this bill with barely a whimper.
One of the most important questions facing Americans today is: Should representatives of the Papacy be permitted any access to U.S. policy making whatsoever, given the fact that Papal security-survival interests are diametrically opposed to the security-survival interests of all Americans?
The National Catholic Reporter, a major national Catholic weekly newspaper, published a most revealing report in its December 29, 1989 issue. Doug Wead, special assistant to President Bush, was interviewed and quoted as saying: "He [President Bush] has been more sensitive and more accessible to the needs of the Catholic Church than any president I know of in American history." Wead indicated he felt that Bush's relationship with the American Catholic leadership was much closer than Reagan's had been: "We want the Church to feel loved and wanted, and we want them to have input." This relationship was maintained through five U.S. cardinals: Bernard Law, Joseph Bernardin, Edmund Szoka, John O'Connor, and James Hickey.
Within a month after Bush became president, all five of the cardinals had been included in meetings in the Bush family quarters. Both Law and O'Conner spent at least one overnight at the White House as guests of the president. "This has been a Catholic year," said Wead. "This administration has appointed more Catholic cabinet officers than any other in American history."
I think many Americans would be surprised to learn of this cozy relationship. It was never mentioned in the secular press -- and we were left with another illusion.
However, the relationship between the Catholic Church and President Reagan is much more revealing, as described by Carl Bernstein in the cover story of the February 24, 1992 issue of TIME magazine, with the title: "Holy Alliance: How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism." The agenda of the Church is far more obvious. In Chapter 7, excerpts appear from Bernstein's article regarding the Reagan Administration's adoption of the Vatican's position on birth control and abortion in U.S. foreign aid programs.
"The Catholic Team" as Bernstein described it, wielded enormous power. Bernstein reports, "The key administration players were all devout Roman Catholics -- CIA chief William Casey, Allen, Clark, Haig, Walters, and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They regarded the U.S. -- Vatican relationship as a holy alliance: the moral force of the pope and the teachings of their church combined with...their notion of American democracy." Protestants in the Reagan Administration were apparently unaware or unconcerned about this far-reaching maneuver. Or they simply felt there was nothing they could do about it.
Bernstein quotes Protestant Robert McFarlane, who served as a deputy to both Clark and Haig and later as National Security Advisor to the President: "I knew that they were meeting with [Vatican ambassador to the U.S.] Pio Laghi, and that Laghi had been to see the President, but Clark would never tell me what the substance of the discussions was." "The Catholic Team" did not include Protestants. If this was truly an American operation with strictly American interests at stake, why weren't Protestant Americans represented too? What was being hidden?
Reagan and the pope undermined and seized control of the Polish government because the Polish government seriously threatened papal security interests in Poland when that country outlawed Solidarity in 1981. Regarding direction of their operation to overthrow the Polish government, Bernstein quotes Laghi: "But I told Vernon [Vernon Walters, American ambassador to the U.N.], `Listen to the Holy Father. We have 2,000 years of experience at this.'"
Laghi seemed to take great pleasure from the fact that the Papacy has had 20 centuries of experience in overthrowing governments. This suggests that the Vatican would stop at nothing to defend its own interests. One must read the lengthy article in TIME to fully appreciate the enormity of what took place, much of it illegal.
What would prevent the Vatican from putting together a team of "devout Roman Catholics," as Bernstein called them, to protect Papal security interests at the expense of U.S. security interests -- if a conflict of security interests did arise? Nothing. Because that is exactly what happened.
Simple logic suggests that "The Catholic Team" was well aware of NSSM 200. Vernon Walters was the deputy director of the CIA and Alexander Haig was President Nixon's Chief of Staff when NSSM 200 was being researched and written. The Catholic Team knew that NSSM 200 had clearly determined that overpopulation gravely threatened U.S. and global security. Yet they chose to protect Papal security interests fully knowing that they were gravely undermining U.S. security. Should this behavior not be considered treasonous? Meanwhile, patriotic Americans assumed that the Reagan Administration was concerned about all aspects of U.S. security.
Bernstein's TIME article shows that the pope overthrew the Polish government to protect Papal security, after putting together a secret Catholic team (which excluded non-Catholics) within our government. Why would he not be prepared to assemble another "Catholic Team" to overthrow the U.S. government to further protect Papal security interests? This is a vital question to ponder.
The "Catholic Team" described by Bernstein are not American patriots. They showed only a warped love of country and certainly did not support its interests.
In the quote appearing at the beginning of this chapter, Georgie Anne Geyer says that the pope's teachings and policies on birth control could now lead to the death of all of our countrymen. The pope's insistence on open borders for the U.S. most certainly threatens the welfare of our country and our countrymen.323 The honest position for a patriot is a position opposed to the pope's teachings and policies on population control.
Given the obvious conflict in security-survival interests, Catholic Bishops and priests, who must place the interests of the Papacy above all else, cannot claim they are American patriots. They represent a foreign power -- now rightfully recognized as our enemy. This is also true for the Catholic laymen who made up the "Catholic Team" in the Reagan Administration. Catholic Bishops have created the illusion that they are patriotic. They have defined patriotism differently from Webster -- in such a way that Papal security interests are not threatened. At the same time, they have trivialized patriotism when they find it threatening.
Abernethy sums up what the American position must be: "Every nation has the sovereign right to pursue a course leading to its own survival and territorial integrity. E pluribus unum means that we, citizens of the United States of America, are morally obligated to act for, and avoid acting against, the best interests of our country and fellow citizens. The many became one. That is patriotism. It means loving and defending one's motherland and its people."324 This is the moral position.
None of the illusions that I have discussed in this chapter evolved spontaneously. Given their manifest success, it is apparent that their creation has required dedicated effort and craft. The Vatican is very good at what it does. However, with sufficient effort, these illusions can be shattered, replaced with reality, accelerating the self-destruction of the Papacy.
I'll conclude this by quoting the whole of the couplet, the first line of which heads this chapter. It's from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore:
"Things are seldom what they seem --In this case, Vatican security/survival policy invaded and has been masquerading as U.S. population policy, with almost certain cataclysmic results, unless we act forcefully now.
skim milk masquerades as cream."