A Fabulous Film: For Greater Glory

RUSH: I have to tell you about a movie that opens today. I saw some of it last night. I got started late and I had to go to bed. Yes, yes, as powerful, influential member of the media, I have a screener. And they captioned it for me but they captioned it in Spanish. So... (laughing) It's this Andy Garcia movie. They're sponsoring it here on the program. It is excellent. It's For Greater Glory. It's about religious freedom in Mexico, set 1917. And it's an attack on the Catholic Church.

Catholics are mowed down, gunned down in church. Senor Calles runs the country back then and says, "For the greater good, for freedom, we've got to wipe out all the religious people." It'll infuriate you but it's Andy Garcia's movie. It's a great movie. There's even a story about him this week. (I forget where, maybe USA Today.) It's such a departure for a major Hollywood star to take on a role that promotes Christianity, that does not impugn it, laugh at it, make fun of it. It promotes it.

And there are parallels to the attack on the Catholic Church today, to this movie. It's pronounced. It's called For Greater Glory, and it opens today. Now, Andy Garcia has been in a lot of things. He was in Ocean's Eleven. He is the owner of the Bellagio in Ocean's Eleven. I've seen him a bunch of times at the AT&T Pro-Am. I've never met him but I've said hi when walking past each other on the golf course. But this is set in Mexico 1917. It's Catholics who die. They're gunned down. They're stabbed.

It's not too gory but it's still explicit enough, and these devout Catholics are fighting a leader of the country who has issued a mandate. The first thing in the movie is he issues a mandate to take from them their religious freedom and to destroy the church. It's his ticket to total control over the country, is to take away Catholic religious freedom, and he sends his military people into the churches. There's no slowness to this thing. It gets right to it.

I'm gonna finish it tonight. They were so nice to caption this for me. They even sent me two DVDs. I said, "Well, maybe they sent a Spanish caption, too." So I put the first one in, Spanish captions. I said, "Well, no big deal; I'll just put the other disc in." I put the other disc in, and it, too, was captioned in Spanish. (interruption) No, no, no, I haven't gotten The Avengers. No, this is the most recent screener that I've got.

RUSH: I don't want to give away this movie, For Greater Glory. I don't have much of it left to finish. It was tough because the closed-captioning was in Spanish, and I was rewinding at times to hear some of the dialogue because it's important. But basically this movie (it's the Andy Garcia movie) is the story of Mexico in 1917 through the '20s. The President is Plutarco Calles in the '20s.

The President ordered every Catholic Church shut down, he made Mass illegal, and he set out on a campaign to murder priests. And the movie is about three different freedom fighters. One of the freedom fighters is Andy Garcia, but he doesn't start out that way. Andy Garcia shows up early in the movie, and he's unattached to the whole thing. He's looking at it from a bit of a distance. He then tries to make some money off of all this.

And in that process he gets caught up in the movement. He becomes a strident opponent of religious persecution. But it's eerie. The people that produced the movie and made it could not possibly have known at the time that they started this project that when their movie came out there would be a parallel to the Obama administration's war on the Catholic Church in America in 2012. Now, don't anybody misunderstand here. What happened in Mexico is not what's happening here in terms of the violence.

But the effort to run roughshod over religious freedom as a part of Obamacare is a close parallel. And for that reason the movie has a connection. Even if there was no connection, it's still a moving flick, and it is about what people do. It's about the honor and character, the devotion to beliefs of people who are committed to their God. It's as moving as it could be, and it's so unexpected. When's the last movie you saw, a mainstream Hollywood movie, that was pro-Catholic or pro-Christianity?

Or a movie that did not talk about priests or abuse of altar boys? When was the last time you saw anything like that reflected in the mainstream entertainment press or movies about religion, Christianity. Passion of the Christ is about it, right? And look at that. (chuckling) That's my point. It's my point. In the story I read yesterday about Andy Garcia and his role in the movie, he was asked, "Are you afraid what this role might do to the rest of your career?"

You know, he's Cuban. He's a fervent anti-communist. Not a big pal of Fidel like Sean Penn and some of the others.

What Obozo is trying to do through the Sebelius regulations, Mitt Romney ALREADY did with Romneycare in 2006 in Massachusetts, requiring the Church and/or its ministries to include abortion, sterilization, morning after pills (chemical abortions) and various forms of birth control including some abortifacients like IUDs. Romney did this AFTER claiming to have become pro-life in 2005. When Romney left office, any abortion, however complicated, could be had on demand for $50 (less than a 30 day cost for a non-generic prescription drug) and now, not to be outdone, Deval Patrick made it absolutely free of charge.

Romney then and Obozo now propose to give our Church leaders (and everyone else's) the choice between a life of mortal sin (paying for this barbarism) or life in prison (for NOT funding this barbarism).

We are Catholics. Economics may be an important as a strictly political issue but the issue of economics is not equivalent in importance to the issue of abortion. Material cooperation with abortion causes an automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication under the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church. Just as many (including some bishops) would exclude from the Eucharist such notorious "Catholic" pro-aborts as Pelosi, Sebelius, John Kerry, Rosa DeLauro and others of their ilk as public pro-aborts, the same principle applies to Catholics in the pews. Thus we cannot vote for Obozo and we also cannot vote for Romney without a complete recantation of his pro-abort history and a credible recantation at that.

If by good conservative alternative you mean an electable one, we probably don't have one. If we sit still for Romney and his brazen tactics in buying the GOP nomination and his background as a pro-abort, we will never have a GOP candidate whom we can vote for. We have to repudiate his candidacy or the GOP has to repudiate his candidacy.

There are two issues: abortion and abortifacient procedures is the first. The second is active persecution of the Church. If the leaders of the Catholic Church can be coerced into a life of mortal sins (funding abortions) by threats of fines and jail if they refuse to obey the statist religion of Obozo or Romney, then next on the list are the other churches and not just Christian ones either. Orthodox Judaism will be on the list. Islam may be many bad things but just imagine trying to find an abortion mill in Saudi Arabia. Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not, it is a pro-life and pro-family religion and will be persecuted as well if it resists.

Francis Cardinal George of Chicago is now 75 years old and has submitted his resignation to B-XVI but it has not been accepted as yet. Cardinal George wrote in his Archdiocesan newspaper two years ago that he expected to die in his bed, that his immediate successor could expect to die in prison and the next successor could expect to be martyred in the public square. Cardinal George is NOT a sensationalist but a sober minded archbishop and worthy prince of the Church. Baltimore's new Archbishop Lori appears to be made of the right stuff as is Timothy Cardinal Dolan and the new Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez and Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput. Cardinal George is not the only prelate making dire predictions. The Vatican is sending us a steady stream of new and often better bishops, archbishops and cardinals. Just in time. Hartford and Bridgeport are awaiting new prelates.

For the foreseeable future, we are at war with the political powers that be. May that war be merely political and intellectual and spiritual by the grace of God! May God intervene with His good graces and touch hearts as necessary. OTOH, we must steel ourselves for whatever is to come and not be found wanting by those who have gone before us. We are living in times which will test whether our love for God is truly our priority.

Tom Hoefling is FR's Eternal Vigilance. He is an Evangelical and totally trustworthy on all the issues that count. I will vote for Tom. Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party is likely to be trustworthy as well on most of the important domestic issues but his party likes Ron Paul's foreign policy notions which are not my cup of tea.

Most importantly as Catholics, we are not faced so much with choosing the best candidate as we are with obeying the Church's mandate against material cooperation with abortion and with common sense resistance to persecution of our or anyone else's religion because of such religion's orthodox moral rules.

Many years ago, a very close friend became pregnant by a wealthy but utterly irresponsible young fellow who insisted on the baby being aborted (before such was legal). She had a good Catholic education but had become an atheist and was very determined to abort the baby. The abortion was to be performed secretly by a qualified OB-GYN at his home at a distance and in another state and the boyfriend would pay, would drive her there and drive her home. She was concerned that she might hemorrhage alone in her apartment but was adamant that she would take that risk if necessary but wanted to know if I would spend the night at her apartment just in case she might hemorrhage. She knew that she would not see the boyfriend again after he would drop her off and there was no one else available to her.

That seemed an insurmountable moral dilemma but I knew her well enough to know she was deadly serious that the abortion would go forward in any event. I tried to talk her out of it but she was adamant. I agreed to her request. My being available to protect her from death by hemorrhage was as morally acceptable as would be a doctor treating her in such an emergency or as would be a doctor treating the gunshot wound of a perp who instigated a gunfight. She had free will and was going to abuse it. If she were going to die as a wage of sin, it would not be by neglect. People like Herod Blackmun, Mitt Romney and Barak Obama are premeditated killers of many, many children, refuse to actually change on that or repent as publicly as they have sinned and the two who are living and running for POTUS are also rubbing our noses in it by persecuting our Church and other religions. Cooperating with such as these is the moral equivalent of knowingly and willingly nailing Jesus Christ to the cross to satisfy the mob at Jerusalem or Pontius Pilate.

The three traditional enemies of the Church are the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Most of us could muster, with God's help, the strength to tell the Devil to go back to hell where he belongs. Similarly, most of us CAN muster the moral strength to turn our backs against sins of the Flesh, whatever Planned Barrenhood may imagine. The absolutely sinister enemy is the World because it is all that most of us know. It surrounds us and amorally drowns us. Seducing us to go along in order to get along is the weapon of the World. If you have not read C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, he understood the weapon of the World better than most of us Catholics and he was a Presbyterian IIRC. Read also his The Great Divorce which seems to be an allegory on Purgatory. Lewis had a lot of Catholic friends at Oxford like J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. They influenced him but he did not quite bring himself to swim the Tiber.

Voting for officeholder candidates who intend (by all reasonable analysis) to enforce a policy of abortion availability, abortion subsidy and Church persecution are a different matter. That is material cooperation and not merely protection after the fact. As Catholics, we may not do such things.

I do not mean to bully you but only to cause you to ponder the meaning of voting for either Obozo or Romney. That final decision is, as it must be yours and yours alone. I will pray for you and ask you to pray for me.

Again, whatever you may decide, may God bless you and yours!

I read a lot and sometimes write a little. I’ve found that no matter how I feel on a subject or what I write about it someone has already had those same thoughts or written the same words. Truly there is nothing new under the sun!

This conflict between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church has been on my mind a lot lately and I’ve read the words and thoughts of dozens of people as they’ve tried to rationalize the situation.

So I’ve put together a compilation of a number of essays by people whose names are hidden behind pseudonyms but whose ideas deserve wider circulation. The following is what I have gleaned/plagiarized from blogs I can’t even remember the names of. I hope it is well received.

These Too, Are Times Which Try Men’s Souls

Unfortunately the 2012 election and the hoopla that goes with it is a distraction from the undeniable fact that we are truly and quite possibly in the final battle for the soul of America. Past elections have been child’s-play compared to the ultimate outcome of this struggle. We simply must grasp the magnitude of this pivotal conflict. It is a concerted war against individual freedom of conscience and personal development within the moral society of our nation and it has been underway for years.

The Judeo-Christian society born on American soil in the 18th century established a Republic and forged a gentle giant of a nation which offered its inhabitants hope and freedom. For the poor or oppressed around the globe, it raised a beacon drawing millions of them to us. That hope is now being challenged by the political descendants of despots from past tyrannical governments. As long as the people could openly acknowledge and seek guidance from God these masters of deceit could never capture men’s hearts.

The first step was to separate the young from their parents’ influence and substitute a far reaching government bureaucracy. Public schools, originally designed for the poor, was recognized as the primary vehicle with which to begin the eventual transformation of our nation. By the middle of the last century the progressive liberals virtually “owned” - and for the most part operated - both elementary and secondary education in America.

The educational “dumbing down” of Americans involved more than the rewriting of history. It had to include a reformation of conscience and the destruction of Judeo-Christian morality to accomplish the intent of those wanting to break the backs of Bible toting, flag waving patriots who clung to their guns and provided “prosperity for themselves and their posterity”. Unlike the sudden and brutal Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which awakened a sleeping giant, this sneak attack was a long, silent but deadly poisoning of the minds and morals of a nation until that nation began to compromise its values in the name of “tolerance” or “fairness” or “social justice”, weakening its will to staunchly defend the principles on which it was founded.

These enemies of liberty with their newly established politically-correct language defining our values and legislative agendas are now not just within our society but in political control of our lives too. Politics is being used as the tool or weapon of the real enemy. We must understand the real enemy is EVIL in all the forms of suggestive information, entertainment, or political theory it can deceitfully use to conceal its character. The only remaining obstacle to its complete success is the waning moral fiber left in the values held by Judeo-Christian patriots of this country.

Thus, it is altogether fitting that we not hesitate to use the words and tone of those founders which gave birth to our nation to demand that candidates for government office, especially the presidency, profess those precious values and vow to govern justly by them and to boldly face the critics who dare suggest they are not relevant in today’s political arena. We can pray our hearts out but we also need to assure the Father willingly and publicly that we cherish our faith and freedom and deserve His help.

Time is running out. It’s now or never. As students of history and/or as ardent believers in the word of God as given to us in the Gospels, who among us can deny or naively ignore the rampant Evil that is staring us in the face today?

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