Editor Amandala
Sir,
Kindly allow me to make a few comments about your editorial on the satanic leadership of Father Maciel in Mexico. Mexico, our neighbour to the North, has a history of revolutions and corrupt leadership including presidents. So readers must understand that for Father Maciel, Mexico was fertile soil for his wicked campaigns. And, I agree, the Vatican must have been getting its share of the wealth, so it stayed “quiet.”
Again, let’s look at Mobutu Sese Seko. He was president of Zaire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from 1965 to 1997. This dictator was ousted after stealing billions (a kleptocrat) and allowed asylum in France! If we examine various important historical events throughout the continents, we know that evil leadership has always been influenced by money…lots of it! Some other examples are Napoleon, Hitler, Idi Amin, Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein, Bin Ladin and Russia’s Communist bloc and at one time, yes, the Vatican! Read the history of the Crusades: they were financed by popes to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims, a slaughter that is hardly discussed in history today.
What about Belize? Not because there are “corrupt criminal cops,” the whole leadership of the Police Department is bad. There should be good leaders in government to take immediate critical measures to put back the country on the right track to prevent anarchy. Similarly, over the hundreds of years, we cannot condemn all Popes of the Vatican nor all Jesuits. There are great leaders in the Vatican and the Jesuits who must task themselves to do the same.
Having done a detailed history of the Vatican’s 1892 Papal Encyclical, the “Rerum Novarum” on Social Justice and the rights of the working man, I can say with much confidence that Pope Leo XIII is the Pope in history who prevented Communism from spreading across the globe in the early 20th century and after World War II. Read my “Brief History of the Trade Union Movement” at www.nickpollard.org. It was because of Leo that Europe became a powerful base for the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions which influenced the Western world through ORIT, Inter American Regional Organization of Workers(supported by the USA), and CLASC, Confederation of Latin American Christian Unions, a huge Latin American group of trade unions. And the men who planted the seeds in Belize for Social Justice and the rights of the working man were the Jesuits! The studies of the Rerum Novarum were started by the President of the Jesuits in 1946, and among its members were George Price and Nicholas Pollard, Sr.
The Jesuits’ history goes back to the arrival in the colony of four Gillett brothers who were English Jesuit priests sometime in the 1880s. Since then, the Jesuits have built a strong Roman Catholic Church with a formidable education institution, St. John’s College. I was never a close friend of the Jesuits like my father, Nick, Sr. But, I give them my respect for the education they gave me and my brothers and sisters and my three boys and my lovely daughter, Jolie, who studied on a part scholarship at a Jesuit university, Springfield College in the U.S.A.
This is not to say that Nick, Sr. didn’t have his clashes with the Jesuits, since it was a known fact that some of them supported Price’s effort in affiliating Belize to Guatemala in the 1950s. (Visit Cedric Grant’s Making of a Modern Belize.)
There are two issues that I found controversial in my writings of “The Jaws of Politics,” my manuscript. The first one is the questionable “boldness” of a political leader to hurt his opponent physically and mentally and then go receive the Holy Eucharist in Church. I cannot accept any theological teaching that will send me to confess to a priest and then go hurt my fellow man. The other is Jesuit casuistry. But I will refrain from going into its details: you can read about it on the internet.
The Jesuit Order was founded by Ignatius Loyola some 450 years ago. The homosexual scandals I am sure have saddened millions of Catholics all over the world, and it will not go away. It will happen again and again, for there is no way of “fixing” human unbalanced faults. But I agree with Chris Lowney, a former Jesuit and author of Heroic Leadership. Lowney writes: “Leaders, but not always Saints”, page #291:
“The Jesuit leadership way may not be a Trojan horse for Christianity, but a powerful vision shared by many of the world’s great religious traditions nonetheless flows just beneath the surface of these principles. Real leaders – real heroes – find fulfillment, meaning, and even success by shifting their gaze beyond self-interest and serving others. And they become greater – enhanced as persons – by focusing on something greater than self-interest alone.”
(Signed)
Nick Pollard, Jr.