Bishops are not protecting their flocks (TFP)

I am mad as hell at most Bishops throughout the world. In time, over a period of three or four Newsletters, I will tell all the reasons. I have long list of the great things Pope John Paul II tried to do to save the Church but was completely ignored by most Bishops. These same un-cautious have no respect for the authority of other bishops and do not bother to look into the harm that comes to the people God gave to them to protect.

Condemned apparitions, movements and heresies already condemned in other dioceses move on to contaminate these stupid bishop’s people and they pay no attention to it and do not seem to care as long as they are not bothered. I can and will give hundreds of examples in disobedience, misuse of money, donations to anti-catholic and pro-abortion groups with our money, and hiding the satanic sin of their own priests.

This is only one of the many examples of how they are not protecting their flocks and do not seem to care. One of the most heavily condemned (and anti-Catholic) groups in the world is from Brazil and called “The Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property”. No one who really knows the truth of this group (which is easy to know by calling their bishop) would think of them as anything but Satanic and nuts. However, they do not sell themselves around the world for what they really do, they pretend to be the voice of Fatima. You will only see them as “AMERICA NEEDS FATIMA” and they are going around collecting money on the pretence that they are promoting Fatima. Learn the truth and then see if you can wake up your sleeping bishop.

THE TRUTH ABOUT AMERICAN NEEDS FATIMA (TFP)

Originally Posted by CatholicSam

America Needs Fatima is a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is a front for raising funds for the "Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property" organization which is indeed a cult. It started in Brazil.

It has been condemned by the National Council of Brazilian Bishops as a cult, and breaks Canon Law 219. The founder, Dr. Plinio Correa De Oliveira, claimed (he's now deceased) to have a "private prophetic charism" and could tell a boy's vocation, or what he called "tao" by looking at his face. He would then select young boys to be "Our Lady's Warrior Monks" which the group considers to be a higher vocation than that of the married life or even the priesthood Members do not attend Mass, but rather gather outside saying "rapid fire rosaries" until it's time for Holy Communion. They refer to those who faithfully participate in Mass "White Heretics". Some members will even go so far as to replace the words of the Hail Mary with Plinio's name instead of Jesus and his mom, Donna Lucilla, instead of Mary. The group was also condemned by the Brazillian Bishops for "abuse of the Holy Name of Mary".

PLEASE do NOT give money to this group! By all means, please do gather to say the Rosary on October 13, but do not do it in the name of "America Needs Fatima." They try to show how good they are (heck, I just found out about this and had their pictures up in my house!), they use quotes from wonderful Saints and promote devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, which is a wonderful devotion. But all the funds raised go directly to the TFP, which is a cult and which we faithful Catholics should NOT be supporting. They are VERY deceptive!!

If any of you get "The Fatima Crusader" magazine from this group, you can see the article about the boys being taken away to be prepped as the bogus "Warrior Monks".

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/briefly.jsp?did=1009-briefly

Be Careful Conservative Catholics.

Many leaders of the American right are and have been Catholics, including William F. Buckley, Jr., Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich.

Weyrich organized a series of seminars in the early 1980s designed to teach conservative Catholics how to pressure progressive bishops on issues relating to war and peace, opposition to U.S. policy in Latin America, and support for the sanctuary movement. With the help of Cuban exile priest Enrique Rueda, an outspoken critic of liberation theology and a regular broadcaster on Radio Marti, Weyrich used the mailing list from the Wanderer and funds from Joseph Coors to create "truth squads" in cities with progressive bishops.

Seattle's Raymond Hunthausen was the first to feel the scorpion's sting. Petitions were circulated, letters were written, and Wanderer editorials regularly castigated Hunthausen for his alleged pro-communism. Rome responded quickly and eagerly to this campaign of vilification cooked up in Washington; in short order, Hunthausen was silenced and publicly humiliated.

All the above sounds great to us Conservative-Traditional Catholics, but do not look to fast.

Weyrich has also been quietly supporting a Brazilian-based group, Tradition, Family, and Property. Neo-fascist in orientation, TFP blends monarchism, mysticism, and zealous devotion to the group's founder, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, with a rigid anti-communism and extreme anti-modernism.

TFP was founded with the aid of land-owning bishops opposed to Brazil's agrarian reforms in the 1960s, and its members figure prominently in the Brazilian government and military. In other Latin American countries, TFP has been suspected of supporting political violence; in fact, Venezuela's government has outlawed the group. Even other Catholic rightist organizations regard TFP as cult like.

In the early 1980s, Weyrich helped TFP organize a Washington press conference where U.S. and Brazilian representatives denounced land reform and attacked liberation theology as a form of banditry.

In turn, TFP's American branch, the Foundation for a Christian Civilization, honored Weyrich at a banquet held at its elegant estate, Our Lady of Good Success, in Bedford, New York.

Later, at least according to Charles M. Wilson of the Saint Joseph Foundation of San Antonio, Texas, Weyrich forced the inclusion of TFP members in various "orthodox" Catholic roundtables and institutes, among them the Carroll Group and the Siena Group for Public Policy.

In a letter written to Fidelity magazine and published in its September 1989 issue, Wilson claimed that Weyrich had pulled a "railroad job" in getting TFP representatives involved in various projects over and against the sometimes strident objections of other organizations.

Fidelity, the monthly organ of the highly conservative Ultra-montanists, criticized Tradition, Family, and Property in its May 1989 issue. Writer Thomas Case noted that, in the mid-1970s, TFP had been repeatedly accused by the Brazilian authorities of "inducement to flight, reckless transfer, and concealment of minors"--and this despite TFP's own slavish devotion to the military regime.

Young men were alleged to have been deceitfully recruited by TFP, to be trained in their academies as "warrior monks" for the cause. According to the Brazilian government, TFP sought to obtain legal guardianship over the minor children of parents dedicated to TFP and then turned their sons against both them and the mainstream church, regarded by TFP loyalists as an institutional fraud.

TFP is so outlandish in its views that it regards the current papacy as "apostate" and only one generation removed from the biblical end of time. Even so, several of Weyrich's closest associates, among them Connaught ("Connie") Marshner, resigned from the board of Fidelity in anger over the magazine's expose on TFP and its American affiliate.

These, then, are Weyrich's associates on the fringes of Catholic anti-modernism. Indeed, Weyrich himself is so far removed from the Catholic mainstream that he fled to an ultra-traditionalist Byzantine Rite church, still technically within the pale of Rome's jurisdiction. He continues to work closely with the evangelical Protestant right in this country, providing logistical support for ventures like the Christian Coalition.

Bishop on Tradition, Family and Property (America Needs Fatima)

Here is a letter from Bishop Castro De Meyer on the group (he worked with them for years):

This letter was published in the Campos daily, La Folha de Manhà in 1991; the original text, however, is dated 1984, two years after Bishop de Castro Mayer's break with TFP. It appeared in Le Sel de la Terre, [no. 28, Spring 1999], in an article entitled, "Documents sur la T.F.P".

Dear XXXXX,
I owe a response to your grieving letter of September 24, which, as the postmark indicates, you sent me on September 25. [1991]

In this case, I can only offer the sole advice: pray, pray much, above all the Rosary or at least the five decades of the Rosary, asking the Virgin Mother, Mediatrix of all graces, to enlighten your son and make him see that TFP is an heretical sect because, in fact, although they do not say or write it, TFP lives and behaves in accord with a principle which fundamentally undermines the truth of Christianity, that is, of the Catholic Church.

In fact, it is de fide that Jesus Christ founded His Church------destined to maintain on earth the true worship of God and to lead souls toward eternal salvation---as an unequal society, composed of two classes: one which governs, teaches and sanctifies, composed of members of the clergy, and the other---the faithful---who receive the teaching, are governed and sanctified. This is a de fide dogma.

St. Pius X wrote that the Church is, in its very nature, an unequal society, meaning that it comprises two orders of persons: shepherds and flocks, those who belong to the various ranks of the Hierarachy and the faithful multitude. These two orders are so completely distinct that the Hierarchy alone has the right and authority to guide and govern the members to the Church's ends, while the duty of the faithful is that of allowing themselves to be governed and to obediently follow the way given by the governing class (The Encyclical, "Vehementer", February 11, 1906) [7].

And the entire history of the Church, as can be seen in the New Testament, attests to this truth as a fundamental dogma of the Church's constitution. It was to the Apostles only that Jesus said: “Go and teach all nations”. Too, the Acts of the Apostles show us the life of the Church in the times following Jesus Christ.

Because of this, it is an heretical subversion to habitually follow a lay person, ---therefore, not a member of the Hierarchy--- as the spokesman of orthodoxy. Thus, they do not look to what the Church says, what the Bishops say, rather what this or that one says.... Nor does it end there: this attitude------even if not openly avowed---actually positions the "leader" as the arbiter of orthodoxy, and is accompanied by a subtle but real mistrust of the hierarchy and of the clergy in general.

There is a visceral anticlericalism in TFP: everything that comes from the clergy is prejudicially received. Basically, it holds that all priests are ignorant, not very zealous or interesting, and have other such qualities. Well, then, keeping in mind the divine Constitution of the Church which was instituted by Jesus Christ, TFP's habitual anti-clericalism, latent, makes it an heretical sect, and therefore, as I have said, is animated by a principle contrary to the dogma established by Jesus Christ in the constitution of His Church.

Nevertheless, TFP had a healthy beginning. There was a certain evolution of the apostolate carried out by the bi-weekly newspaper of the Marian Congregation of St. Cecelia, titled, O Legionario. As a serious and well intentioned movement, it sought to strengthen the intellectual and religious formation of the members of that Congregation and, consequently, of the bi-weekly’s readers. It was influential throughout Brazil. That was the era of [its] obedience to Monsignors Duarte and Leme.

I accompanied and approved its apostolate, also when it began to stray into an anticlerical spirit, which began by its consolidating its position and then reversing it by putting the clergy in tow behind a charismatic layman, with his monopoly on orthodoxy. Perhaps I gave it support beyond a licit point. I retracted it only when it became clear to me that my warnings were not being taken into consideration. They had become useless.

It is just to observe that the straying of certain members of the hierarchy, ....explains the “TFPistas'" scandal, but it doesn't justify the positions they came to take. Even less so, those of their leader, Plinio.

At this time, as I said at the beginning of this letter, the remedy is prayer. First, because without prayer nothing is obtained: “Ask,“ Our Lord says, “and you shall receive.” It is necessary to pray, because charismatic fervor produces a certain fanaticism: individuals become incapable of seeing objective reality, of perceiving even fundamental errors, because of this inversion of following a lay person instead of the legitimate Shepherds of the Holy Church. So much more so when, as I have observed, members of the Hierarchy unfortunately and frequently utter words and take positions which any Catholic can see are dissonant from doctrine and from the guidance of the Church of the ages.....

I ask Our Lord that he grant you, and your entire family, a holy and happy Christmas and many years filled with God's grace.

I ask that you pray for me, Servant in Christ-Jesus,

Antonio de Castro Mayer, Bishop Emeritus of Campos

The CESNUR Case

In the USA, neo-conservative think tanks - dedicated to changing the way the world views itself, through studies on military, cultural, religious and economic issues - have been successfully promoting a mentality based on the justification of inequality and on total freedom of enterprise, as opposed to all other human rights.

Not all think tanks of the new international right, however, come from the US. One of them, for example, comes from Italy. It is called CESNUR, the "Centre for the Study of New Religions". It puts itself across as a non denominational and non partisan study centre, whereas actually it is a militant organization, which draws its inspiration from a self-styled "counter-revolutionary" ideology. Although run by Catholic fundamentalists, CESNUR promotes a kind of ecumenism among transnational enterprises which preach global free market; as we can see, CESNUR brings together admirers of the Inquisition and supporters of Scientology, Catholic extremists and esoteric Freemasons.

CESNUR was set up in Turin, Italy, in 1988. From a legal point of view, there is "CESNUR Italy" and "CESNUR International", both however run by the same person, Mr Massimo Introvigne. In recent years, CESNUR has also set up autonomous branches in France and in the USA.

CESNUR calls itself an "international network of scholars who study new religious movements" and claims to be "independent from any religious group, movement, denomination or association". (1)

So it comes as a surprise to see that CESNUR Italy is synonymous with another political-religious organization, Alleanza Cattolica. However, surprises do not end here: Alleanza Cattolica started out as the Italian branch - or "sister organization" - of an extremely controversial and fanatical Brazilian organization, Tradition, Family and Property (TFP). Although Alleanza Cattolica is independent in terms of organization from TFP, it boasts of following the "counter-Revolutionary magisterium" of the eccentric founder of the TFP, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. Now, every leader of CESNUR Italy proudly styles himself a "militant" of Alleanza Cattolica, starting with the founder, Massimo Introvigne and his right-hand man, PierLuigi Zoccatelli, but also including Ermanno Pavesi, Andrea Menegotto, Aldo Carletti, Paolo Di Giovanni and Marco Albera. At the same time, the whole organization of Alleanza Cattolica works unceasingly to promote Massimo Introvigne's association in every possible way: each "militant", in his own field does whatever he can to promote CESNUR's activities.

TFP] upholds the need to recover the values of the privileged classes, of the families of high lineage, families of good origin, due to their titles and their traditions."

(Cardinal Bernardino Echevarria Ruiz in Cristianità, January 1996, p. 17

In a message to the Dutch scholar Anton Hein, Introvigne gave a few explanations about how CESNUR is funded. Introvigne boasted of earning a great deal of money from his own job (in a recent article in La Stampa he was among the top tax payers in one of Italy's richest cities) and also of coming from a very rich family himself; at the same time, other important sources of funds for CESNUR, according to Introvigne, are the Mormon lawyer Michael Homer (more about him below) and PierMarco Ferraresi,"a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Turin, but also from a wealthy family and an important shareholder in the main corporation his family controls". Introvigne forgets to mention that Ferraresi also happens to be a well-known militant of Alleanza Cattolica (where his field is to provide ideological justification for private property, especially in large quantities, from a point of view which he calls "free market right wing", based on the ideas of the British author Colin Clark).

CESNUR International (oddly enough, not CESNUR Italy) has been recognized as a "legal person" by the Piedmont Regional Government (by decree 150-11310). Whatever the structure of the various shell corporations may be, decisions are actually taken by a small group of people:

· Massimo Introvigne, millionaire lawyer, militant and leader of Alleanza Cattolica and a member of the Central Committee of the right-wing Catholic party CCD(2). He is also a member of the technical and scientific committee of the Nova Res Publica Foundation, whose task is to "enrich and extend the political action" of Berlusconi's party Forza Italia. We can get a better grasp of what Introvigne thinks by reading how the Nova Res Publica Foundation claims to be based on the teachings of US ideologue Michael Novak:

"Novak is an extraordinary figure on the scene of world culture… more than anybody in the last quarter of a century, he has contributed to showing the common roots, the common present and common future of Christianity and capitalism."

(on the web site of Forza Italia)

· Gordon Melton, pastor of the Emanuel United Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois, USA. Melton has repeatedly appeared as a witness for the defence in trials involving the controversial multinational Scientology (for example, in 1981, he upheld the "fully religious" nature of Scientology, providing as evidence of his knowledge of the topic the fact that he once attended a wedding and a "Sunday service" of the group). For the Methodist pastor, the defence of the most controversial organizations has often turned into good business. For example, in 1995 Melton and his friend, James Lewis, set up "AWARE" - Association of World Academics for Religious Education - to defend the Japanese killer-cult Aum Shinrikyo. The cult, which had just carried out the mass murder in the Tokyo subway, paid the scholars in advance. The carried out their job with great loyalty: without understanding a word of Japanese, they landed in Tokyo and came to the conclusion, as James Lewis wrote, that:

"As an expert on world religions, I was already dismayed by much of the press coverage I had seen. AUM Shinrikyo was being relentlessly demonized by the media as an "evil cult."."

Melton has written several books directly ordered and paid for by several groups, including the Ramtha School of Enlightenment; the same groups then distributed the books themselves. Some years ago, the Moon cult did the same with a book by Introvigne in Italy.

· Eileen Barker, an English university professor, with life-long ties of friendship with the Unification Movement of Sun Myung Moon, founder of the murderous World Anticommunist League. Although some years have gone by, one does feel a bit startled to read that the German cult scholar, Pastor Haack, managed to document no less than eighteen "study trips" to various tourist locations by Professor Barker, entirely paid for by the Korean multinational.

These three are flanked by:

· PierLuigi Zoccatelli, who when he was young, was a member of the Crowleyite "Temple ov Psychick Youth", but is currently a militant of Alleanza Cattolica and a full time CESNUR employee.

· Jean-François Mayer, who comes from the French-Swiss "New Right", formerly of Opus Dei, and currently a Christian Orthodox. He works as a security policy advisor for the Swiss government.

· Michael W. Homer, a lawyer from Salt Lake City and an important leader among the Mormons, well known for their right-wing political commitment. As a young man, he spent time as a missionary in Italy. Just to make the CESNUR web a bit more complicated, one can add that whereas Melton belongs to CESNUR International, Homer runs a small outfit called CESNUR USA.

· Antoine Faivre, a French esotericist who works at the Religious Sciences Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, an outpost of the French New Right. He publishes a magazine called Aries. This magazine, which today appears as an academic publication, actually started in the esoteric circles of La Table d'Émeraude and Archè-Edidit. Faivre is the president of the association "CESNUR France".

· Olivier-Louis Séguy, another lawyer, is the secretary of CESNUR France. Séguy works in close touch, both inside and outside CESNUR France, with the lawyer Jean Marc Florand, who defends the Watchtower Society in trials, and who organized the meetings of the Watchtower Society at the French National Assembly on November 26th, 1993 and November 24th, 1995 (see L'événement du jeudi-4 del 10/11/96). Florand è is an unusual personality: in 1996, he set up the Observatoire national d'étude sur les sectes, in order to fight the French Parliament committees of investigation into cults. Oddly enough, Jean-Marc Florand and his assistant, Louis-Edmond Pettiti, have both been directors of the Association des juristes catholiques, considered to be very close to Opus Dei. In 1994, Florand unexpectedly broke with the association, and started devoting a large part of his time to defending the rights and the associations of homosexuals. Incredibly, at the same time as he was writing the legal text "Homoséxuels, 101 réponses pratiques" (1994), he was also publishing some studies on the liturgy which appear to have been very much appreciated among the "Lefebvrian" milieu which he also belonged to (L'Âge d'or de la chasublerie, 1992). If the picture is sufficiently confused, one need only add that according to the usually very well informed journalist Serge Faubert ("Les cathos au secours des sectes", L'Evenement du jeudi, June 13-19, 1996), both Séguy and Florand took part for many years in conferences organized by the xenophobic Front National party. No surprise then to find both Séguy and Florand highly praised in a web site belonging to Scientology.

· The third director of CESNUR France is Prof. Roland Edighoffer (University of Paris-III-Sorbonne-Nouvelle), who is also an editor of Aries. Edighoffer is a well known historian of Freemasonry, much appreciated among the more traditionally-minded lodges.

What is the meaning of CESNUR?

This list of adventurers involved in a great deal of unlikely business sounds so complicated that at a first glance, all one can make out of it is that CESNUR is certainly not what it makes it itself out to be. But what is it really?

One thing that does appear is that several originally quite different interests seem to converge together. The original project involved the self-styled "Counter-Revolutionary right-wing" Catholics of Italy; but it was later extended to other sectors: from some Anglo-Saxon "research mercenaries" to a French New Right, having quite different features from the Italian Catholic extremists.

The combination of right-wing extremism, Catholic intégrisme and esoteric interests is something typically French; and this world is certainly quite close to the more conservative lodges. According to the usually well-informed magazine Faits & Documents (n. 27, 15.5.97, p. 5), the whole leadership of the French branch of CESNUR - Faivre, Séguy and Edighoffer - are not only scholars who study Masonry, but are also members of the Grande Loge Nationale de France. This mystically minded and conservative lodge is the only one to be recognized by British Freemasonry. Its members are obliged to declare their absolute faith in a "revealed god", and any members who attend lodges accepting atheists or women. The lodge almost disappeared in the 1960's, when the US military personnel left France, but it grew again quickly, also thanks considerable financial help from the USA. At least until many scandals broke out in 1999, the GLNF was the Masonic group with the largest membership. However matters may be, Antoine Faivre was a writer for - and according to Faits & Documents also the director - of the official magazine of the GLNF, Les Cahiers de la Loge Villard de Honnecourt. On his own Internet page, Freemason Patrick Negrier of the GLNF, a scholar of Patristic studies at a Benedictine Abbey (here again we find an unexpected juxtaposition of apparently differing elements), boasts of having organized a conference to commemorate the author and esotericist Serge Hutin, attended by "eminent philosophers, esotericists and Masons", such as Marie-Magdeleine Davy, Antoine Faivre, Roland Edighoffer, Jacques Fabry, Robert Amadou, René Alleau, Jean-Pierre Bayard.

The third strain of CESNUR has to do with the US neoconservative movement. Introvigne - who has always been very much involved with the US - has for years been indicating the "neo-cons" as a model for creating a European right. This may be a slightly less romantic model than the Crusades dreamed of by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, or the esoteric and Indoeuropean fantasies of certain Frenchmen, but it is definitely far more efficient, being based on close partnership between a large number of religious enterprises and a large number of business enterprises, whose main enemy is the "secular state".

This explains something which always leaves people confused, at least in Italy: why does the offshoot of an extremist Catholic movement like CESNUR fight so strenuously against all those that Introvigne collectively labels as "anti-cult movements, ranging from the US A.F.F. to the Italian CICAP (3)? Introvigne accuses all such movements of fomenting "religious intolerance", of using barbarous methods ("deprogramming") and of basing themselves on "brainwashing" theories. Such accusations are largely false - for example, virtually no "deprogrammings" have ever taken place in Italy, and none have taken place in the US for many years; the term "brainwashing" was invented in the '50s to describe extreme forms of physical coercion, and is no longer used today.

CESNUR is especially virulent - as we can see in other articles on this website - against the testimony of former members of "cults", in certain cases even deliberately lying in order to discredit them.

Introvigne, sociologist or lawyer? Massimo Introvigne - still today the head of CESNUR - practices as a lawyer with the Jacobacci & Perani (4) study; his speciality is patents and copyright. Until our web site opened, he often styled himself as "professor" and "sociologist". Actually, he started teaching in 1994, for one week a year, at the Regina Apostolarum Athenaeum in Rome, a private organization belonging to the "Legionaries of Christ" and not recognized as a "Pontifical University" (5), a job which he seems to have been gently ejected from a couple of years ago.

Previously, he had also taught for two years at an Institute of Religious Sciences belonging to the Diocese of Foggia; the archbishop of Foggia, Mons. Giuseppe Casale was also President of CESNUR, until some time ago, but he seems to have closed off all relations since.

Tradition, Family and Property

Alleanza Cattolica, as we saw, claims to be based on the "magisterium" of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (1908-1995), "a man of faith, thought and action", spiritual leader of the very rich organisation T.F.P., Tradition, Family and Property, active in "25 countries and 6 continents".
T.F.P., which recently underwent a split, is one of the most extreme movements ever to have arisen in Latin America. Its founder presented himself as "the preeminent philosopher" of such a doctrine and the author of "15 books and over 2,500 in-depth essays and articles". In his militant essays, which range from In Defence of Catholic Action and Revolution and Counter-Revolution to The Church in the Communist State: an Impossible Coexistence, he openly calls for setting up a world-wide 'Christian' regime based on Medieval hierarchy and repression.

"The sacred slavery to the Virgin [...] This consecration is of an admirably radical nature. It includes not only the material belongings of man, but also the merits of his good deeds, his life, his body and his soul. It has no limits, since the slave, by definition, owns nothing. In exchange for this consecration, the Virgin works inside her slave in a marvellous fashion, setting up an ineffable union with him"

(Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, La devozione mariana e l'apostolato contro-rivoluzionario, in Cristianità, the official magazine of Alleanza Cattolica, Nov.- Dec. 1995, p. 15.)

T.F.P. has repeatedly been called a "cult" by those whom Introvigne would label today as "anti-cult movements" hostile to religious experience in general, although in the past, a few years before the establishment of CESNUR, he expressed - several times and with a certain intensity (6) - opinions quite similar to those he currently opposes, ridicules and fights against.

"During its 23rd plenary assembly, the Council of Brazilian bishops approved a note concerning the 'Brazilian Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property', advising Catholics not to join the above mentioned Society […]. Its esoteric character, its religious fanaticism, the personality cult of the founder and of his mother […] can absolutely not be approved of by the Church"

(Osservatore Romano, July 7, 1985, p. 12, n. 408, weekly Spanish edition quoted in Tradizione Famiglia Proprietà: Associazione cattolica o sètta millenarista?, Rimini 1996, frontispiece)

In 1984 the local T.F.P. branch was outlawed in Venezuela, accused by a special parliamentary commission of being a "cult [...] of the far right [...] which warps the minds of young people, turns its members into fanatics and brainwashes them". (7)

"The TFP cult, at least in Brazil, maintains a paramilitary structure of warrior-monks, called the 'sentinels of the West', who go through tough paramilitary training and wear a habit with a chain as a belt (they learn to use this as a weapon), high military boots, they make vows of silence and regularly practice flagellation. This 'army' is made up of highly fanatic and violent young people."

In the years immediately following, the dynamic and undoubtedly capable Massimo Introvigne established CESNUR, launching an unceasing campaign, often in the pages of the official magazine of Alleanza Cattolica "Cristianità" (in the column "The Good Fight"), and quickly becoming, together with J. Gordon Melton and Eileen Barker, one of the most important cult apologists in the world. T.F.P. in the meantime continues to uphold the same views as CESNUR, views which share several features with the visionary propaganda of groups like Scientology  - "that there is a worldwide 'anti-cult conspiracy' manipulated by 'psychiatrists and Communists. Unluckily, T.F.P. was recently named in a list of destructive cults drawn up by the French Parliament.

Reference

(1)This and the following, from the web site of CESNUR.

(2) Materialien zur Konferenz Streitfall Neue Religionen Internationale Tagung, Marburg/Lahn, 27. bis 29. März 1998 Veranstalter: CESNUR - Center for the Study of New Religions, Turin; REMID - Religionswissenschaftlicher Medien- und Informationsdienst e. V., Marburg .

(3)A body devoted to research and information, the Italian partner group C.S.I.C.O.P., Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

(4) The Jacobacci & Perani Lawyers' Study, see here. Oddly enough, Dr Introvigne's name does not appear in the List of Lawyers of Turin.

(5) From a note signed by His Excellency Mons. Michael L. Fitzgerald, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, prot. n. 2291/96, Vatican City.

(6) Look here.

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