I am a Catholic by upbringing who went for years away from the church and spent some time in a political cult, but am now mostly recovered and have re-entered the mainstream Roman Catholic church.

During my travels over the years I went through that period of cult-hopping that seems to affect so many after exit from a seriously damaging cult. Fortunately I had good specialized therapy as well as the help of this board and some of the old anti-cult activists and so my antennae were sensitive and I was not fully recruited into any new cults, although I had a couple of close calls.

Anyway, because the political cult I was in is notorious for infiltrating charity and church groups as well as because so many cults use similar tactics, I learned to notice the little sub-groups inside larger groups that seem to be feeding cults. 'Some of them act like funnels pulling people away from the parent church and some actually attempt to subvert and take over the congregation of the parent church.

I have noticed that there are not many threads on cults that are primarily Catholic or that seem to adhere to Catholic communities, although there are threads on pseudo-Christian cults that twist Bible theology into control tactics. I would like to open a discussion that will encourage Catholics to openly talk about this problem of destructive cults masquerading inside our big church. Some of them are dangerous and they often build a "starter" membership before being ejected and then, when they are no longer Catholic, they are able to convince the outside world that the only problem was they criticized the Pope or something like that. Some continue to characterize themselves as Catholic.

I have seen several of these serious cults inside the Catholic church, especially in the retreat system. These are usually handled by the Church "in-house", that is, the local priest or bishop will usually place some limits around their activity and warn people about them, but this does not always happen. Catholics are only alert to cult activity of that type if we are fully involved with our church enough to notice the discrepancies in the cult's theology and to hear these warnings. Non-catholics who are invited to the cult may think it is fully Catholic. Casual catholics who attend Mass occasionally but don't pay much attention to theology may also be fooled. The Catholic church is actually very tolerant of these groups (too tolerant, sometimes) and so it is up to the individuals to know how to respond to them.

(edit:) if this is in the wrong category, please let me know and I can re-post it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/2010 11:13PM by dsm.

Marian apparition cults can be problems. How many people know that Catholics are not supposed to participate in a Marian devotion that has not been approved by the Vatican? Medugorje is still very controversial and has a lot of New Age nuances that set it apart from the accepted apparitions like Fatima. The accepted devotions are limited to certain kinds of prayer acitivity and do not involve mediumship or fortune-telling style "messages". Fatima, for example, was limited to a set of messages given to three children and those messages concerned world events, not individual problems. Our Lady of Fatima was no gypsy fortune-teller!

There are many, many people devoted to Medugorje and there are whole pilgrimage businesses running pilgrims to it, yet there is still a chance that it will not be approved. My own opinion of it is not favorable because of the way it was promoted when I first encountered it, and criticisms I have seen of it all support the impression I got, which was that it is a sensationalist medium kind of thing. (Just My Opinion!). I saw nothing "Catholic" at all in the people in the USA who were aggressively proselytizing for that apparition. Now, if the Vatican does not approve it, what will happen to the people who have sunk so much belief into it during all these years of ignoring the traditional Catholic practice of waiting for approval?

They will pull themselves out of the mainstream and veer even further into a goddess-worship spirit-channeling cult that has nothing to do with traditional Catholic Marian theology or devotions. This will cause a lot of strife in parishes. Mainstream Catholics might not understand what is going on when they lose family members to cults that seemed to be accepted by the Church but later are rejected.

I opened this thread so that people could post concerns since many of the groups that form around an apparition like this are not reflected in the other Bible-based cults that are discussed in the Ross forums.

The cult I was in was NatLFed, which ran alongside Larouche in many ways but was much larger and more deeply rooted in the college student population. Larouche's own lack of education limited his following, but NatLFed grew out of a coalescence of disaffected 60's-70's radicals out of the old SDS and Weather Underground and Black Panthers and it parasitically rode along with the Cesar Chavez movement (founder Gerry Doeden aka Gino Perente masqueraded as a Chavez-type organizer to attract the white liberal trust-fund-babies who couldn't get their elitist attitudes past Chavez's people)

Here are the links in this site:
[forum.culteducation.com]

Right now I am interested in the religious cults and the cults that splinter off from religions.

I was a cradle catholic, born into a particularly nasty variant of Irish catholicism. My view of catholicism, and it is extremely biased, is that it predisposes us to all manner of fear-based ideologies in later life because of the emphasis on mysteries and authoritarianism that is the hallmark of the faithful.
I was educated by Jesuits and ran for my life at the age of 15. I then found that the Jesuit boast of "give me a child until he is seven and I'll give you the man" is only too true.
I do understand that for many practising catholics their faith is an immense comfort to them so I will keep my virulent hatred of all things catholic to myself from this point on, although I will read this thread with interest as it develops.

I thoroughly recommend the writings of Thomas Merton, SJ, for me it was the first and only time I came across a catholic priest who encouraged personal exploration of the 'mysteries' rather than just enforcing submission to the higher authorities- any higher authorities, on the basis of these 'mysteries'

Hi Stoic, thank you for jumping into this particularly muddy swamp.

I now see where your nic comes from... my mother was Irish Catholic and one of her favorite sayings was "a little pain never hurt anyone..." ;)

You know, I think that your mention of the Jesuits and your discovery of Thomas Merton make a good point.

The Jesuits were founded by a wounded veteran, Ignatius Loyola, whose adventures easily could translate into a completely stressed-out veteran of any of today's wars founding a priestly order in the course of managing his PTSD. Think about that! *LOL* Loyola was also developing the rule for his order during the Reformation which was a time of great upheaval between the old ritual/art-based Church, in which the written word was the property of those who had access to hand-written copies of books and the new intellect-based theology, driven by the wide availability of printed books, which were the "blackberries" of their time. Loyola embraced that technology and quickly set himself up as the leader of a new educational system. His biography is very interesting from a historical point of view as much as from any Catholic point of view, and then of course there is the history of the Jesuits being at times out of favor with the Vatican.

Now Thomas Merton comes along with the twentieth century alternate-states-of-consciousness interests when the printed word had started to give way to the old visual-participation model of consciousness. Thus, the Jesuits and Merton make good book-ends for looking at Catholic beliefs and practices related to cults. Merton lived in a Trappist monastery (commune) in Kentucky, from which he traveled into Asia to study meditation.

The "technology" of cult-group behavior is something the Catholic Church actually studied in the course of developing a system for setting up and approving monastic orders and their "rules" (or life-styles) and the degree to which vows of obedience would be required for each order (some looser than others) and also the distinction between these "religious" Catholics and the laity.

Even though a lot of the cults written about in this forum trace their belief-base back to the 1800's theosophy and spiritism, the real widespread upsurge of cult-style groups, in my view, doesn't get rolling until the 60's, when the teen-age Boomer youth provided a rich harvest for cult-leaders at the same time as mass media provided them with new tools. Now we are seeing a fine-tuning of cult-leaders using these tools with the internet.

Inside the Catholic Church the retreat system has opened a big door to cults. The Church is not as monolithic as it outwardly appears. The buttons that cult-leaders will push with Catholics often relate to catholicism in a confused way, making it very hard for Catholics to separate a local cult issue from a larger loyalty to what is as much our families' ethnic heritage as it is a religion, in many cases.

Apologies for lumping Merton in with the SJ's, he was of course a Trappist.

As far as Catholics and political cults, here are a couple of relevant links:

an article: [www.catholicculture.org]

and a search full of links on the main "hub" of political/social action cults inside the Catholic Church, some of which have been excommunicated but still operate:

[www.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/14/2010 01:29PM by dsm.

Here is a quote from a Catholic website that describes a cult that has been very upsetting to many of us, who mostly do not discuss this with media. It is ten years old, but the inner-Church cult it is describing is thriving (The title refers to the idea many Catholics have that there has been an internal Protestant Reformation that finishes the work Martin Luther started in the 1500's. That part is irrelevant to the cult that it describes and the cult is why I am posting:)

[www.catholicthought.com]

FATHER MICHAEL SCANLON: Father Scanlon has achieved international notice as the head of Franciscan University at Steubenville as well as a member of the Vatican approved "New Evangelization" team. Father Scanlon is well known in Charismatic circles, claiming to have "really found" Jesus years ago through his involvement with Cursillo – a Charismatic movement associated with Hispanic culture. A book by John DeTar, MD entitled TO DECEIVE THE ELECT spends a great deal of time documenting and presenting the case that Cursillo is actually Communist in the end.

Scanlon was associated in his early days with a cult like commune known as Servants of Christ the King that was investigated by the local Bishop, disciplined and forced to sever its ties with "Sword of the Spirit" (an offshoot of the Ann Arbor Word of God Community run by fellow New Evangelization team member Ralph Martin and sidekick Steve Clark. In very strong language, Bishop Ottenweller of Steubenville charged in a letter that "the lives of members have been controlled by coordinators and heads...(members) were forced to accept patterns of living, relationships, even the choice of marriage partners, and that great psychological harm had been done." He charged that the Servants of Christ the King had..."an arrogance that is elitist...a lack of compassion and love for those in need, and a fundamentalist outlook in scripture on the world as evil, and an unhealthy secrecy about the affairs of the community." Father Scanlon was not a mere participant, but the founder of Servants of Christ the King.

Scanlon instituted the "households" at Franciscan University at Steubenville which some ex-members of Word of God say is to prepare the students for the questionable communitarian (see more in the cell-church communitarian lifestyle promoted by the Evangelical"new church" joined, apparantly by their Catholic Charismatic friends) style living that Word of God represents. This should come as no surprise when one reads such statements as "I just want to make it clear about the Franciscan University of Steubenville. IT IS the Power of the Holy Spirit. IT IS being baptized in the Holy Spirit. IT IS the Charismatic Renewal that launched and is reponsible for the growth and maturity of this University, and I thank God for that." (Father Michael Scanlon at the 30th anniversary of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal held in Pittsburgh, Pa., June 1997.)

Do good Catholic parents, convinced that Steubenville represents only Orthodox Catholicism due to the promotional help of EWTN realize that they are actually turning their children over to Charismatic Catholicism as opposed to Orthodoxy as known throughout modern history? Do they realize that their children may subconsciously be prepared to live a communal life that more often than not turns totalitarian despite the best of intentions?

Is it only the Charismatic and communal that has connections to Father Scanlon? Not really. For instance, one of Father Scanlon’s strongest political allies just happened (s?) to be a man named Dick Prosser. Prosser was a top aide to Saul Alinsky…"The Main Man" who is responsible for most of the problems within the Catholic Church even today…(Call to Action – Detroit in the turbulent ‘60’s) Alinsky acknowledged Lucifer as their leader in the book RULES FOR RADICALS. Wouldn’t you know that it would be Dick Prosser who would turn up "on a July morning 1968" (LET THE FIRE FALL, p.79) to help Father Scanlon establish a reputation as a community person able to bring peace among men on a community level –at the same time he established himself as the head of the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Father Scanlon is a part of the New Evangelization team along with Ralph Martin, Father Tom Forrest (head of this team) and Father Benedict Groeschel who also has some very strange alliances, although he is not a part of the St. Louis extravaganza known as "Celebrate Jesus 2000."

"Prosser was a top aide to Saul Alinsky…"The Main Man" who is responsible for most of the problems within the Catholic Church even today…(Call to Action – Detroit in the turbulent ‘60’s) Alinsky acknowledged Lucifer as their leader in the book RULES FOR RADICAL"

Great source, again, DSM. You really are becoming a serious time-waster on this board.