The Next Scott Hahn
by E. Michael Jones
It is a perversion for
people to want to enjoy money, but merely to make use of God. Such people do not
spend money for the sake of God but worship God for the sake of money.
St Augustine, City of God, Book XI, chapter 26
It was a moment that Ruby Keeler might have savoured.
Myra Sletten, organiser of the Phoenix Call to Holiness Conference in November 1997
took me aside at that city’s huge civic arena and announced that one of their
speakers had unexpectedly cancelled at the last minute. Could I speak in his
stead? Actually the situation wasn’t quite so dramatic. I was already scheduled
to speak once that day, so the question was, could I speak twice?
I agreed to speak twice – once before lunch and once
after lunch. Since a written speech was pointless, unless I spoke very slowly,
I abandoned what I had brought with me and gave an expanded version of what I
had on my mind anyway, which was the story of how Catholics lost the Cultural
Revolution. I began by talking about how the west bank of Mostar reminded me of
North Philadelphia and went on from there to talk about how Paul Blanshard, who
said that Bertrand Russell’s greatest fear was that America was going to become
a Catholic country and that they were going to do it by the numbers, i.e by
outprocreating the until-then dominant ethnic group, the one which produced the
ruling class elite. The main instrument the other side came up with in this
struggle was the contraceptive. The Sexual Revolution was the solution to the
Catholic Problem. Culture Wars readers
are familiar with the thesis.
The average Catholic, however, is not. Nor was the
average attendee at the Phoenix Call to Holiness Conference. The audience was,
in my opinion – I may be biased, but there is a tape of the talk for those who
want to judge for themselves – electrified by what they heard. They had never
heard anything even remotely like this before, and, more importantly, it all
made sense to them the first time they heard it. Especially touching was the
testimony of the Hispanic participants, who felt in general that what happened
to the Irish during the 1960s was happening to them now. One Hispanic gentleman
suggested that I run for president A young Hispanic woman said that the talk
gave her goosebumps; everything I said was true, she said, but why had no one
said this before. A good question, I thought at the time. Little did I know that
before the year was up I would get the answer to that question in an unexpected
way.
So a lot of fired-up people came up to me after the
talk – people who wanted to know why the truth had been kept from them for so
long, people who wanted to invite me to speak to other groups. One of the
people who came up afterward, just as enthused as the rest of the crowd, was a
little bald guy by the name of Terry Barber. Terry was there with his family
running the tape machines for St Josephs Communications, the firm that was
taping the conference. Terry lost no time in telling me that he liked my talk
too. In fact, he liked it so much that he wanted to offer me a contract
according to which I would produce tapes for St Josephs Communications and he
would market those tapes to his people. Lest I think this was some small
inconsequential operation, Terry told me that he produced Scott Hahn’s tapes.
Hahn, the Presbyterian minister who went on to fame of sorts as a convert to
Catholicism, had made hundreds of thousands of dollars through St Josephs
Communications, and now Terry Barber was going to do the same thing for me. In
fact, Barber assured me that I was going to be “the next Scott Hahn.” I was
going to do tapes; I was going to speak at their upcoming conference in
California.
To be honest with you, I have reached the age at which
I can say that I’ve heard this thing before. I remember a wealthy businessman
once telling me that he was going to devote a significant part of his fortune
into making me “the next Rush Limbaugh.” By now, I feel like telling these
people that I have enough trouble being the first Mike Jones; I also feel like
telling them that if they hang round me long enough, they find out what I mean
when I say that. So I didn’t say it then. In the meantime, Terry was still
enthused, telling other people that the talk I gave was “exciting,” full of
facts, dates and places – unlike the usual conference talk. It was history. It
was true.
A few days later, when I got back to South Bend, I got
a call from Terry Barber, who was still interested in promoting my talks.
During the course of our conversation, he essentially fleshed out the terms of
the contract, all of which were amenable to me, with the exception of one or
two details which I specified in a return letter. Not only was I to tell
Catholics how they had been ambushed unawares by the Cultural Revolution of the
60s, I was also to tell them, in a separate taping which he would arrange, what
they could do about it – ten things they could do to bring the liberal regime
to its knees, or something like that. The details became vague at this point
because the negotiations suddenly stopped. There was no answer to my letter. A
few weeks later, in early March, I got disinvited to the conference Barber had
invited me address while still under the spell of what I said in Phoenix. The
letter was brief, if awkward: “we regret to inform you that due to some
unforeseen circumstances, we will not be able to place you on the speakers list
for the 1998 Call to Holiness Conference in Pomona, California” but I was not
to worry because I would be kept in mind for future conferences because they
had very much enjoyed my presentations.
I was never contacted for future conferences. So it
looks as if I’m not going to be the next Scott Hahn after all. End of story.
Right? Well, not quite. God often sends you where you would not otherwise go
for purposes you oftentimes do not understand at the time. And so, in the
fullness of time, I ended up at another Terry Barber conference anyway, not as
a speaker this time but as an exhibitor, selling, or attempting to sell, among
other things copies of my book The
Medjugorje Deception. I also got to meet Terry Barber again. This time,
however, he didn’t come up to congratulate me for giving a great talk. This
time he showed up with a phalanx of security guards considerably larger than he
to throw me out of the exhibit hall. So like Jesus who went from Hosannas on
Palm Sunday to being crucified five days later, I went from being promoted as
“the next Scott Hahn” in November 1997 in Phoenix to being thrown out of the St
Josephs Communications conference in Long Beach in July of 1998 by Terry Barber
himself, the same man who was going to make me the next Scott Hahn eight months
earlier.
Sic transit gloria mundi, the Romans used to say.
Before getting kicked out of the conference I tried to
reason with Terry, who was waving a contract, signed by someone else, which I
was seeing for the first time. It specified that the “Catholic Resource Center
reserves the right to pull any and all materials which do not adhere to the
Magisterium of the Catholic Church; this also includes any private apparitions
not approved by the Church.” It wasn’t great prose, but insofar as I could
understand it, it didn’t seem to apply to me. Feeling as if I were somehow the
victim of mistaken identity, I tried to explain to Terry that his caveat did
not apply because my book was most certainly not promoting an apparition – it
was in fact warning people against them – and it was, in addition to that,
promoting Church teaching on the matter, Church teaching being ostensibly the raison d’etre of conferences like this.
“Terry,” I said, pulling out the contract and pointing
to the crucial sentence, “This doesn’t apply. We are supporting the Church’s
teaching on Medjugorje.” I mentioned the statement of the Yugoslavian Bishops
at Zadar in 1991. I mentioned meeting with Bishop Peric of Mostar in March and
June of 1997 and his claim that he had changed his view from non constat de supernaturalitate to constat non de supernaturalitate. The
authority of the local bishop was given new emphasis by the papal document Suos
Apostolos which specified that bishops within an episcopal conference do not
lose their authority and that any bishop who disagrees with the conference
still retains his authority. Both Bishop Ratko Peric, the current bishop of
Mostar and Pavao Zanic, his predecessor, have condemned Medjugorje as a fraud.
Terry, however, would have none of this. “The people I
have talked to said that the Church hasn’t made a pronouncement”. At this
point, Phil Kronzer, who had paid for the tables and who had met with Bishop
Peric too and so knew where the Church stood, lost his cool and threatened to
sue Terry if he kicked us out. That, of course, was the end of the discussion
Try as I might, I still can’t understand the rationale
behind his contract. If he were simply saying that exhibitors were not allowed
to promote “unapproved” apparitions, that would be simple enough and
understandable enough and, according to those criteria, I should have been
allowed to sell The
Medjugorje Deception. But that is not his position. He wants to
prohibit all discussion, which means prohibition of the Church’s position as
well, which can only mean keeping people in the dark under the guise of
educating them. Education at fora like this is a selective process, one whose
criteria are not apparent at first glance. As The
Medjugorje Deception makes clear, people like Phil Kronzer and Robert
Stevenson became exposed to the apparitions which destroyed their marriages by
attending conferences like this one. The people who call themselves
“conservative” Catholics are the people who need to be warned most about the
dangers arising from phony apparitions, which are not a big issue as far as I
can tell among the Call To Action crowd. That’s why Phil was there. That’s why
I was there. That’s why people were coming up to the table in the few minutes
we were allowed. That’s why he and I got kicked out. The discussion got
suppressed in the interest of other values.
Apostolates make money when they tell people what they
want to hear. This is a fundamental law of the spiritual life. Everyone has to
learn it. Even Jesus had to learn it when he told his followers that unless
they ate his flesh and drank his blood, they would not have eternal life. The
City of God tells people the truth even if it is unpopular; the City of Man
tells people what is popular, even if it is a lie. The City of Man has many
organisations; all of them are in the business of subordinating the truth to
some desire. Conservative Catholic apostolates specialize in leading the people
who patronize them that they are the “real” Catholics because – and what
follows at this point is a political agenda. Ultimately it makes no difference
whether the agenda is of the left or the right. In both instances, truth is
suppressed by desire for political power, for popularity, or money. We are the
real Catholics, they tell us, because we don’t discriminate against women or
because we attend a Mass said in Latin etc, etc. This in turn becomes an excuse
in extreme cases to refuse to associate with the impure, which is another word
for schism, or in less extreme cases in feeling superior to those who don’t go
along with an agenda that is being manipulated for financial gain.
Apostolates lose money when they tell their people
what they don’t want to hear. I learned this first hand at another Call to
Holiness conference when I was asked not to mention Medjugorje because, I was told, “they all support
it.” If we tell them the truth, in other words, they won’t support us. So in
order to be effective, we must suppress the truth. So’ let’s just not talk
about Medjugorje. It’s not that important anyway compared with – and what
follows is the whole list of conservative gripes. Well, things aren’t that
simple. We begin by suppressing truths we find financially inconvenient without
realizing that in doing so we have substituted money for truth as the thing in
life we hold most important.. Once that transaction gets made all the rest
follow from it because in making it we have established beyond doubt what we
value most, namely money or popularity or political power and not truth. What
follows next is the suppression of people who do not share those values. Even
though those people say many things we agree with, we have to prevent them from
speaking because anyone who associates with them or promotes them will be
threatened with the same sort of financial retaliation. All of this follows
naturally from the inversion of the natural order of things that occurs when
truth gets subordinated to money, which is another form of truth being
subordinated to desire. We begin by suppressing the discussion of the main
thing that needs to be discussed and, when that doesn’t work we begin to
suppress the people who do the discussing.
Which is a pity because there are many other things
that need to be discussed. To
begin with, there is the fact that Scott Hahn – the first Scott Hahn – promotes
Medjugorje in his tapes. He also promotes the doctrine of Mary as
co-redemptrix, a notion recently disapproved by the Vatican. In addition to
promoting Scott Hahn, Terry Barber also rented table space to EWTN so that they
could sell their satellite dishes at his conference. Now a satellite dish is
not a phony apparition, but neither is a book. If you use the EWTN satellite
dish to tune into Mother Angelica’s network, however, you will see that EWTN promotes
both Medjugorje and Garabandal. So how is that different than a book,
especially a book that does not promote phony apparitions, but in fact warns
people about their dangers? How is it that EWTN is allowed to stay, when they
promote phony apparitions, and I am asked to leave for promoting the Church’s
teaching on these same phony apparitions?
The answer is simple enough. Medjugorje has made huge
inroads into precisely the type of crowd that would attend a Catholic family
conference. If you told them the truth about Medjugorje, they might not like it
and, as I have found out, might threaten financial reprisals. So the statement
in the contract isn’t as simple as Terry Barber makes it out to be. It’s not
that people like Terry Barber don’t want to have anything to do with phony
apparitions. If that were the case he would cut his ties to Mother Angelica.
It’s more that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the truth about
phony apparitions. Like Daisy Miller, he says, “I don’t think I want to know
what you mean” and hopes he can leave it at that. But it’s not that simple. Nor
is Terry Barber alone in feeling that way. He is part of a network which calls
itself “orthodox” or “conservative” which knows that Medjugorje is an integral
part of what it means to belong to that crowd. This was obvious from the few
moments we were allowed to man the booth. A lady wearing a Steubenville T-shirt
came up and handled the book nervously asking what it was about “in three
sentences or less.” I gave her an answer in three words or less. To paraphrase
the Kinks, “she’s not there.” She then dropped the book and scurried off, and
shortly thereafter the first security guard arrived.
Something similar happened at the Church Teaches Forum
in Louisville on July 11th 1998. The Medjugorje ladies arrived at
our booth – I was upstairs at the time – and started threatening my wife and
daughters. My 10-year-old daughter was so frightened she ran out of the hall.
The difference between the people who ran the conference in Louisville and
Terry Barber is simple enough and can be expressed in one word: leadership.
Abbot McCaffrey, Pat Monaghan, William Smith know what the Church teaches on
Medjugorje and are willing to stand up for that in the face of the angry ladies
who threaten financial reprisal. Terry Barber is not.
The more things change the more they remain the same.
It used to be that only the liberals would fire you from your job or kick you
out of a conference if you supported the Church’s teaching. Now the soi disant orthodox are doing the same
thing. The purpose of their conferences is to suppress the very truth that
their constituency needs to know. Why? For the same reason that anyone
suppresses the truth, as a form of control, as a form of exploitation, as a way
of making money off of religion.
If we were just talking about suppressing the truth
about Medjugorje that would be bad enough, but Terry Barber is willing to go
beyond that. Remember he is the one who approached me in Phoenix; he is the one
who told me that the Ethnic Cleansing/Catholic Problem talk was a great talk
and that Catholics needed to know what I had to say. Why did he feel that way?
Why did he like the talk that was, in his words, full of facts and dates? I can
only come up with one explanation. He felt that what I had to say was important
and it could only be important because it was true. If that’s the case then –
and what else could be the case? – Terry Barber is willing to suppress the
truth. And why? Well, for some people some things are more important than the
truth. As I said before, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who
subordinate their desires to the truth and those who subordinate the truth to
their desires. Lust isn’t the only desire. There is the desire to be
well-thought of; there is the desire for money which St Paul calls the root of
all evil.
Terry Barber is not alone here. Father Paul Marx of
Human Life International called a few weeks back and told my wife that he would
love to invite me to speak at HLI conferences – not about Medjugorje but about
other things more germane to HLI – but the Medjugorje faction in his own
organization won’t let him. Medjugorje, in other words, has become the litmus
test for being antiabortion. How else explain the blockage here between an organization
which opposes abortion and a speaker who opposes the same thing. The answer is
that it is not enough to oppose abortion. You must also not oppose Medjugorje
or you will not be invited to speak. Medjugorje, which has nothing to do with
abortion, has taken over at least one anti-abortion apostolate. It has also
taken over the entire conservative Catholic movement which arose in protest to
Catholic collaboration in the sexual revolution in the 60s. This movement lost
its soul at some time in the last 30 years when it decided that some things
were more important than the truth. You may not have to burn incense to this
idol – not yet at least – but you are also not allowed to criticize those who
do. Anyone who criticizes this idol will not be allowed to address the assembly
– on any topic whatsoever. That’s the real bottom line. Terry Barber liked what
I had to say on Philadelphia and the 60s in Phoenix but was willing to suppress
what I had to say in Long Beach. A truth was suppressed, a truth he must have
recognized as such, or else why would he have invited me in the first place,
why offer me a contract, why volunteer to make me “the next Scott Hahn”?
This story is not about Terry Barber. It is about the
wreck of a reform movement that was colonized by a vampire from southeastern
Europe. The people who opposed the liberals made the mistake of thinking that
there was something more effective than the truth in opposing error, that
somehow the fruits, the numbers of pious actions, and the money could be
disconnected from the lie which begat them. St Augustine has a way of dividing
the world up into two camps – the City of God and the City of Man. The former
is involved in love of God to the exclusion of self; the latter involved in the
love of self to the exclusion of God. Love of God, Augustine makes clear, is
intimately bound up with the truth. “When a man lives according to truth, he
lives not according to himself but according to God. For it was God who said:
“I am the truth.”
Conversely, when a man does not live according to the
truth, he lives according to himself and not according to God. Catholic leaders
who suppress the truth can only think, therefore, that something in this life
is more important than God. We all know what those things are: money, sex,
esteem in the eyes of men, political power – things which are good in
themselves but evil when used as a substitute for the highest good. In the name
of serving the Church, this movement ended up serving an idol, and idol worship,
as the Bible makes clear, always involves punishment of those who will not
serve. Idols symbolize the exaltation of appetite over truth. The priests of
Dagon also promote idol worship as a way of consolidating power over their
followers. They do not proclaim the truth as service to the people who follow
them. They suppress the truth as a service to themselves. They also do it to
keep their followers in the dark. They are to the priests of the Lord God what
Dracula is to Jesus. Jesus shed His Blood so that we might have eternal life.
Dracula sheds our blood so that he might have eternal life at our expense.
Medjugorje, like Dracula, came out of southeastern
Europe and started feasting on the teeming population here. Like Dracula,
Medjugorje is a vampire which has inverted the order of being and can never be
satisfied no matter how many victims it claims. All that’s left behind is the
bloodless corpse of those who thought that orthodoxy was one thing and the
truth something else and ended up being too stupid to know they were one and
the same.
E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture
Wars.
This article
was published in September 1998 issue of Culture
Wars.
Share |
The Medjugorje Deception breaks the conspiracy of
silence that has surrounded one of the biggest hoaxes of our times. The
Medjugorje Deception tells the full truth from beginning to end, from the
bloody atrocities during World War II on the other side of Apparition Hill to
their bloody sequel in the ethnic cleansing of Mostar's Muslims with money
raised by Medjugorje groups. The Medjugorje Deception is more than a
book; it's a spiritual work of mercy, and it's available now for $19.95 plus
shipping and handling from Fidelity Press. [When ordering for delivery
outside the U.S., the price of the book is increased to offset increased
shipping charges.]
| Home | Books | ebooks | DVDs/CDs | Subscribe | Events | Donate |
Culture Wars • 206 Marquette Avenue
• South Bend, IN 46617 • Tel: (574) 289-9786 • Fax: (574) 289-1461
Copyright