Login 
The Theatre at Ushaw College near Durham - Site of the latest conference.
We recently reported that, due to lack of interest, a conference supporting the so-called ''Spirit of Vatican II'' had been cancelled in the Archdiocese of Liverpool. At the time, we gave thanks for the fact that we had all been spared the public scandal of Archbishop Malcolm McMahon colluding with false teachers.
His Grace had been scheduled to welome the speakers and delegates to that conference; and to offer Holy Mass on its concluding day. Keynote speakers were to have included the dissenting homosexualist Fr. Tim Radcliffe OP and Dr. Massimo Faggioli. This latter appears to view Vatican II as some kind of ground-zero for the Catholic Church. Also, he had only recently described the heroic American Kim Davis with the word toxic; and he had given a webinar to the dissenting, and well-funded, homosexualist group Dignity USA. If his name sounds familiar, it might be because he was also one of the unsporting academics who penned that infamous letter against Ross Douthat to the New York Times.
With all that has been happening recently, and because we never read the modernistic Tablet, we did not know until today that there had been another autumn conference billing the two Dominicans, Archbishop Malcolm McMahon and Fr. Tim Radcliffe, on the same sheet.
Oh and a few other names...
It seems that Ushaw College - which is no longer a seminary - hosted the Tablet 175th Anniversary Conference: The Spirit of Catholic Renewal: Signs, Sources and Calling, between the 2nd - 4th November.
In the limited time available to us today, we have discovered that this conference was also to have featured the sacrilege-proposing, and Bergoglian favourite, Cardinal Walter Kasper. Although, it seems that Kasper did not get there in the end, there were plenty of other problematic speakers from a Catholic perspective.
Let us consider just a couple:
Prof Tina Beattie
The name Tina Beattie will perhaps be more familiar to English readers; because her public dissent from the Magisterium over the issue of same-sex-''marriage'' is notorious in this country.
Again, when the Catholic Truth Society (CTS) issued a booklet defending traditional Catholic teaching on contraception and divorce, Beattie described it as ''a perverted publication written by and for people with a perverted understanding of the meaning and reality of sexual love in all of its joys, struggles and ambiguities.''
Worse than these things, Beattie has described the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in sacrilegious and offensive terms as, ''a celebration of homosexual love.''
Beattie has also spoken in favour of that other theological impossibility - women priests.
Sr. Elizabeth Johnson
The feminist nun Elizabeth Johnson, who abandoned her religious habit years ago, will likely be more familiar to American readers, because a committee of the American bishops accused her writings of violating doctrine as long ago as 2007.
Last year, she accepted the 2014 Leadership Award from the radically dissenting Call to Action group. Call to Action dissents from the Magisterium over the issues of contraception, homosexuality, women priests and liturgical discipline. As well as incorporating wiccan practices in America, Call to Action conferences have even aired films supporting abortion.
Sr. Elizabeth Johnson has written works attempting to portray feministic interpretations of God, promoting feministic and gender-neutral prayers to God and supporting the ordination of women to the priesthood.
Fr. Tim Radcliffe OP
As mentioned above, Radcliffe is infamous for his homosexualist agenda. Apparently, during his keynote speech at the Ushaw conference last month, he suggested that, ''Pope Francis is rebelling against the culture of control.''
Culture of Control
In light of the infamous - and totally undeniable - manipulations of both Synod 14 and Synod 15, this line of Radcliffe's is nothing short of remarkable.
For me it also has a special ring of irony.
If you've been reading this blog for long enough, you will know something of the dark experiences suffered by orthodox seminarians at Ushaw seminary. Only this week, our articles on some of these experiences have been linked to by sites such as Big Pulpit, Et Cum Spiritu Tuo, Faith in Our Families, One Peter Five, Pewsitter, Restore DC Catholicism and St. Louis Catholic. We express special thanks to those good people for these links.
Last week we discussed Ushaw seminary in an article entitled About those Rigid Seminarians...
Back on the 29th May this year, we also wrote an article about the attendance of the ''Liberation Theologian'' (Fr.) Jon Sobrino (pictured below) at another conference in Ushaw, which took place in May 1999. As a seminarian there at that time, I had no option but to attend this conference; and to be observed closely by a modernist priest who had earned the nick-name ''Mr. Topcliffe'' - in homage to the cruel Elizabethan priest-hunter of the same name...Â
In that earlier article, we were talking about the publicly-known links between the KGB and some of the founders of so-called Liberation Theology. For example, Ion Mahai Pacepa, former head of Romania's secret police force, asserts that the KGB helped to create the Liberation Theology movement; and that the same KGB was at work behind the scenes in the Bishops' Conference meeting at Medellin.
Further to that, Catholic News Agency had suggested that Jon Sobrino, the excommunicated Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo, Pablo Ricard, Ignacio Ellacuria and Gustavo Gutierrez, had all been part of a de facto advisory board to the Sandanista government in Nicaragua; even though Pope John Paul II did not want any priests to be involved in the Sandanista leadership.Â
That same government had sent all of its high-level officials, and some of its mid-level ones, to Communist East Berlin for training by the infamous Stasi secret police.
When I wrote about all this back in May, I noted that one of the seminary high-ups introduced and closed the sessions, at the 1999 Ushaw conference with Jon Sobrino, by putting his clenched fist in the air - Communist style - and speaking with a faux Latin American accent about the famous Medellin conference.
During that Jon Sobrino conference, a meeting which featured distressing liturgical innovations at Mass, Sobrino suggested: ''Martyrs tell us that truth is possible in a world of lies.''
At the time, my seminary friends and I found this rather ironic. Amongst ourselves, we described the atmosphere at Ushaw as a tightly controlled ''Culture of Fear'' for the orthodox. For us, young men who were not allowed to kneel for the Consecration at Holy Mass or to speak out about our love for the True Faith for fear of being kicked out of the seminary, Sobrino's words were therefore filled with a cruel sense of irony. One wag suggested that we should all don black cassocks and protest with banners bearing the motto: ''Blacks have rights too!''
Here we come back full circle from our ''Culture of Fear'' to the dissenting homosexualist Fr. Tim Radcliffe's claim, at the latest Ushaw conference, that Pope Francis is supposedly ''rebelling against the culture of control.'' Photos on Twitter demonstrate that Radcliffe said those words from the very same stage, in the theatre at Ushaw, upon which (Fr.) Jon Sobrino spoke all those years earlier to his, quite literally, captive audience.
It is a stage I know well, because it was also the platform for a woman vicar, clad in a Roman collar and full-length black cassock, to address us, one sorrowful Ash Wednesday, about her enjoyment of a tasty bacon sandwich on the train up to speak to us all on that central day of fasting and abstinence...Â
Archbishop McMahon and the Local Contortionists...
As we've spoken about Oscar Wilde's conversion this week, let us reflect on one of his famous witticisms: ''To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.''
When it was revealed that Archbishop Malcolm McMahon was due to welcome radical dissenters and homosexualists to the Archdiocese of Liverpool recently, some Traditionalists in the area got themselves in to some pretty remarkable contortions to suggest that this could not have been his fault; after all he is bringing in the FSSP to run a parish ''don't-cha-know''...
All we can do, in light of today's discovery that Archbishop Malcolm McMahon was to lead Holy Mass, Divine Office and reflections at this latest Ushaw conference, with various radical dissenters and homosexualists in attendance again, is to paraphrase Oscar Wilde to our local contortionists: To help lead one conference of dissenters might be considered a misfortune; but to help lead two looks like carelessness...
Or does it?
