In the last few days I electronically printed a couple posts (HERE and HERE) in which I talked about how the highly-organized, spiderweb-like Left, uses networks of small front groups to mask the activity of larger initiatives. I applied that to a splinter group of truly weird sisters in a dissident group called NCAN. They say openly what the LCWR would like to say openly. It doesn’t matter whether or not the arrangement is formal or informal. This is how the Left thinks and works.
In those posts I used what seems on the surface to be a far-out analogy to make my point. NCAN is something like a faction of the Viet Cong who fronted for a larger Communist political initiative. The Viet Cong were the true radicals who could do what the political party couldn’t do. The VC also opened up the Ho Chi Minh Trail (MSNBC, the lefty-MSM) to provide supplies, arms, personnel for their projects in the south. A stretch? Sure. But not so much of a stretch as one might think.
Today at the National Schismatic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) I found a piece by none other than Janice Sevre-Duszynska, she of the famous Ordination Tambourine. The NSR proudly accepts her claim that she is a “Roman Catholic Womanpriest”. She wrote about a talk given by a seriously radical nun, Sr. Teresa Forcades, from what I can tell pretty much a Communist. You can read the NSR article to get a sense of the rhetoric and her now cliché code. For example:
Francis has denounced the “idolatry of money” and implored world leaders to assure all people “dignified work, education and healthcare.” In a way, Forcades takes it further by advocating that the state must be challenged from the bottom up. The people must be the agents of change. [Get it? Review Paolo Feire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, strongly influenced by Marxism and which, in turn dovetail with Liberation Theology and Black Liberation Theology.]
“When I talk about church, we talk about how the Gospel inspired us. There are many kinds of church, [What sort of ecclesiology is that, exactly?] and I identify with the people at the bottom, at the base. [So, it’s “class struggle”.] Many people have a hope that the Catholic church might change because of the pope, but if you look at history, change comes from bottom up, not from top down,” Forcades said to a room overflowing with “local radical activists” invited to her March 18 talk at Baltimore’s Red Emma’s, a bookstore coffeehouse.
The NSR piece is full of this stuff.
What emerges, however, when you start drilling, is a web of connections between Women’s Ordination, Communism, Liberation Theology, health-care reform, workers cooperatives, Communist terror groups, the Black Panthers…
Think I am making this up?
I direct your attention back to the venue for this talk for “radicals”: Red Emma’s in Baltimore. The name itself took me to their site to explore for a while.
What sort of people are the excommunicated Janice, the Fishwrap, and the radical-Lefty sister in with?
Go crawl around in the Red Emma site for a while. Take a look at their “about us” and see who their patron saint “Red Emma” was. She “was among the first international observers to condemn the bureaucratic authoritarianism which would smother the initial promise of the Soviet experiment. Emma always understood that a revolution needed to be nutured [sic] by revolutionary culture….”
Moreover, they admit that they are anarchists and Communists, though they say they are “radicals”:
“At Red Emma’s, we’ve decided to call ourselves a “radical” project, rather than an “anarchist” or “communist” one. This doesn’t mean that we think anarchism and communism have nothing to offer as ways of thinking about what’s fundamentally wrong with the current world, and how to go about fixing it. But as a space that’s intended to welcome both people who have been in the struggle for decades and people just getting their feet wet for the first time, we felt that committing ourselves to a label and a specific ideological tradition was unecessarily [sic] limiting. The people working on the project may be anarchists or communists, but the space is both and neither, or something else entirely.”
The cafe/bookstore hosts lots of talks. Recently they have had presentations (I think these are more practica, “how to” talks, rather than merely historically informative) about The Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhof Group), and the Black Panthers, which keep popping up in their presentations and blog posts.
Looking at the bottom menu of Red Emma’s site you find links to the Industrial Workers of the World and US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
Moreover, the websites just mentioned, and Red Emma’s itself are pretty spiffy. They are not slapped together by amateurs.
What’s going on?
This is more than just “birds of a feather”. This is positive cooperation. All these ideas and speakers and events at places like Red Emma’s are integrated.
The National catholic Reporter reported positively about this event for this radical left-leaning nun, written up by an excommunicated women who attempted ordination.
