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Not exactly a good one.

It seems the Vatican is annoyed at criticism on social media aimed at it, the hierarchy and Pope Francis. So a few days ago Rome dropped a "polite" document advising Catholics not to be divisive on social media, but rather behave "not so much as 'individual influencers,' but as 'weavers of communion': pooling our talents and skills, sharing knowledge and contributions."

Well, that's all well and good and certainly has some merit objectively, but (and this is a big — really big — "but") when you have people within the Church who are "influencers" in their own right and they are dividing the faithful and depriving them of actual Church teaching and making it up as they go along, what are faithful Catholics supposed to say in response?

Does the Vatican want us talking about how lovely the parish bake sale was after the 10 a.m. Mass and that the Smiths are very excited about helping plant the parish vegetable garden?

Give me a break.

This is war — spiritual war — and the only difference now (and which is likely eliciting the document from the Vatican) is that the true believers are pushing back against modernism and all its evils. Shut up and build community? Seriously?

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Saintly footwear created by Catholics for Catholics.

When Bp. Sheen, who could be a canonized saint by now if not for the scheming by various U.S. bishops to prevent that from happening, said it's up to us, the laity, to save the Church. he wasn't kidding.

So in addition to all kinds of efforts of the more high-minded sort dealing with the brain and intellect directly, there are also what we might term more down-to-earth efforts (literally, down to earth), like what you put on your feet while walking around. We're talking about Catholic devotional socks, the brainchild of Scott and Elizabeth Williams, who started up Sock Religious — home-based in Indianapolis and just having passed the 100,000 order milestone, making it the biggest Catholic sock company in history.

Scriptures do say, "How beautiful the feet of those who bring glad tidings." So those feet might as well be wearing beautiful socks as well, right? In fact, something we may almost never really pay any attention to in the Bible is feet.

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Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. If you also seek the truth, then please consider joining Church Militant today by supporting our work. Sign up for a Church Militant Premium account or simply make a donation. Feel free to contact Church Militant with your questions, comments, or concerns, at anytime. And now, let's begin with today's Vortex...

The tragedy of American veterans returning from Vietnam.

Obviously, here in the United States, this is Memorial Day weekend, where we honor those who gave the last measure in defense of freedom.

One war in the history of wars involving U.S. fighting men, the Vietnam War, comes with a black stain, and it is beyond time to talk about it. It was unpopular because the news media took advantage of turbulent times and began pushing the "America sucks" narrative, even going so far as to lambast our soldiers as "killers of children."

It was in those days that the Democrat politicians of today, like John Kerry, started cutting their teeth on the anti-American messaging. It was the first time that they aligned with media on a large scale and began pushing what has now, 50 years later, become their foundational message: America is bad.

But what about the experience of those young men who came home to scorn and ridicule because the media had labeled them as reprehensible (lies, of course)? If I sound like I have a dog in this fight, it's because I do. As many of you might know, I grew up in a U.S. military family.

My dad was in the Air Force and stationed in the Philippines during the last years of the war. The American POWs were flown from captivity to freedom and processed at Clark Airbase before being put on flights that eventually landed at Travis Air Base in northern California, where we were stationed stateside.

For quite a few weeks, servicemen were flown into Travis and processed out of the military. I saw quite a few of those planes landing. The young men — who had seen their brothers blown up and shot — were not monsters. They were young, brave guys who got caught in the crossfire of the beginning of the tearing down of America.

And, having achieved veteran status, were then dumped on by the still-forming communist contingent known as the Democratic Party. Those ungrateful, scheming politicians climbed over the bodies of our returning servicemen, as well as the "KIAs," to advance themselves and their emerging communist agenda.

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Corruption may be holding back his canonization.

Dr. Howard is a leading expert on the teachings of Ven. Fulton J. Sheen and the founder and president of the Fulton Sheen Institute headquartered in Sandpoint, Ohio, where it exists to continue the implementation of Sheen's mission and teachings. Howard is the author of "The Woman: Mary as Mediatrix in the Teaching of Fulton J. Sheen", the authoritative book on Sheen's Mariology. He has traveled the globe helping others discover this future saint and advancing his cause.

Petition: SET THE DATE FOR SHEEN.

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The Society remains rotten at its core.

Well, they're at it again. The schismatic sex abusers over at the SSPX are once again victimizing children and then revictimizing them as adults by lying and covering up their crimes.

It's an odd position to take for the society of clergy that thinks themselves, and often declares themselves, to be holier than the rest of the Church to be so closely aligned in this area with the Church. Their leaders are no better and, in some cases, actually worse because of their ecclesiastical hubris than bishops and clergy who are not in schism.

Ever since Pope John Paul II declared them to be in schism in 1988, they have created a fortress of unaccountability and zero transparency around the issue of sex abuse by their priests and, more importantly, the enabling cover-up by the illicitly consecrated bishops.

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Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. If you also seek the truth, then please consider joining Church Militant today by supporting our work. Sign up for a Church Militant Premium account or simply make a donation. Feel free to contact Church Militant with your questions, comments, or concerns, at anytime. And now, let's begin with today's Vortex...

They don't jump off the ship.

The Church is in woeful condition. Anyone who denies this either likely votes Democrat or is dead — or both.

Normally, we would be extremely cautious about making a distinction between the "Church" and the "Faith," but in this case (meaning what has arisen from the current chaos), a special treatment of this is somewhat necessary. The Church is the vehicle for the Faith. It brings us the physical truths of the faith, the sacraments, as well as the intellectual life of the faith, the teachings. Likewise, theology, which plumbs the depth and mysteries of those teachings, is also transmitted via the Church.

Mind you, we are speaking here of the Church in the singular dynamic of its human composition. It's divine and mystical dynamic, that which makes it the indefectible Bride of Christ, is not what we are speaking of in this episode.

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Francis is bad, but he is the pope.

Controversy continues swirling around Pope Francis regarding whether he is actually the pope or not.

And these questions are being fueled by online Catholic personalities who are either 1) misinformed, 2) poorly educated, or 3) a grifter happy to profit monetarily by keeping the fires of controversy stoked and all the clickbait they get from it.

Of course, it could also be some combination of those factors, but whatever the case, they keep the question of Francis' legitimacy alive.

And then, every now and then, the controversy erupts in a very pointed way. For example, Catholic internet personality Patrick Coffin has begun an online effort called "Hope Is Fuel," wherein he presents to Catholics (although anyone is welcome, presumably) various topics and speakers about the Faith and its application in all sorts of areas (mental health, for example).

But in the last week or so, various speakers and hosts began dropping out and stepping down from being presenters because of, according to them, Coffin's claim that Pope Francis is not really the pope.

Of course, the problem with that claim — and there are many problems with it — is that if he is not the pope, then who is, or is there a pope at all, and, if not, how would we ever get another pope? The Church would descend into anarchy and completely splinter apart if this were the case.

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Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. If you also seek the truth, then please consider joining Church Militant today by supporting our work. Sign up for a Church Militant Premium account or simply make a donation. Feel free to contact Church Militant with your questions, comments, or concerns, at anytime. And now, let's begin with today's Vortex...

A nation controlled by scumbags.

Barack Obama, the America-hating communist bastard that he is, is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to this nation. He set the stage for the transformation of the country from a somewhat tattered constitutional republic to a top-down-controlled socialist state.

During his tenure, he quietly converted the intel and law enforcement agencies into his own personal police state to ensure that all political opposition would eventually be suppressed. His IRS targeted conservative groups with audits, and Church Militant was one of those organizations audited under his despotic regime.

In the summer of 2016, when the presidential campaign was in full swing, he, at the very least, went along with a plot to spy on the Trump campaign, based on totally bogus information concocted by Hillary Clinton, and unleashed the full force of the federal government against then-candidate Trump. The plan was to smear Trump so badly that he would have no chance of winning, thus giving the White House to Hillary and continuing the Obama conversion of America into a godless, socialist country.

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Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. If you also seek the truth, then please consider joining Church Militant today by supporting our work. Sign up for a Church Militant Premium account or simply make a donation. Feel free to contact Church Militant with your questions, comments, or concerns, at anytime. And now, let's begin with today's Vortex...

Truth doesn't care about your feelings.

Religion, all varieties, is in a decline, a downward trajectory in America. There are many reasons for this, but one overriding one, culturally speaking, is the emergence of a belief that religion is a matter of opinion, as in personal taste. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, but that is where we are as a nation.

This is not altogether surprising either. The "do your own thing" mentality from about 30 or so years ago has really set the stage for it to bleed over into religion. But in reality, all of this, in the culture and religion specifically, is owing to the heresy of Protestantism, with its "every man is his own pope" foundation.

When you tell hundreds of millions of people that the only authority is Scripture and then follow that up with "you get to interpret Scripture," well, what other outcome could you expect? Protestantism is not rooted in truth. True, it does profess some individual truths here and there, but overall, it always comes back to the proposition that when the rubber hits the road, it's how you think and feel about this or that particular Bible passage.

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Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary. If you also seek the truth, then please consider joining Church Militant today by supporting our work. Sign up for a Church Militant Premium account or simply make a donation. Feel free to contact Church Militant with your questions, comments, or concerns, at anytime. And now, let's begin with today's Vortex...

It's more than just boys.

We reported in yesterday's Vortex on the legal hellhole the archdiocese of Baltimore has fallen into, owing to a flood of 600 lawsuits over sexual predation of minors.

It is very likely that, in short order, Abp. William Lori will file for bankruptcy protection for his archdiocese — the first diocese established in America.

Aside from the symbolic blow such a move would be to the Church in the United States — joining 30 other dioceses in filing for bankruptcy for the same reason — there is an entirely overlooked aspect to all this as well.

It isn't just minors that have been sexually assaulted, although those cases are the ones that make headlines because of the victims' ages.

There are also vulnerable adults — especially seminarians who have been and are assaulted by homopredator clergy.

Recall that most of Theodore McCarrick's victims were not minors, although significantly some were, but were mostly seminarians at his Jersey Shore beach house — and then this went on for years.

Charges and accusations just like this have plagued seminaries and their faculties for decades now, up to and including the prestigious bishop factory in Rome: the North American College.

Most of the time, corrupt leaders circle the wagons and get rid of the whistle-blower seminarians and then return to business as usual.

One such leader who is accused of this is the Baltimore archbishop, William Lori, the chaplain of the Knights of Columbus who, by the way, has yet to release any statement on the Maryland attorney general's report proving Lori kept predators and cover-up personnel in place.

He knew what had happened and participated in the cover-up. For that alone, if he doesn't resign, he should be removed by Pope Francis.

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