Catholics Unplug your Televisions

CUT

Christians Unplug your Televisions

 

The Crusade of Prayer

Join CUT’s Campaign and Prayer Crusades

Join CUT and/or the Prayer Crusade (our prayer wing). Prayer Crusaders pray that the influence of celebrities may be countered. That the example of Christ may be our guide and not the cult of celebrity. Each Prayer Crusader chooses a saint or can have one allocated. We ask our saint to intercede before the Holy Trinity to counteract the bad example of celebrity culture. We will occasionally ask you to pray during certain media incidents that are contrary to the teaching of Christ or His Church. We will supply you with a prayer card with your saint and prayers on it. Prayer is something we ask you to do and we may also ask you to write to a broadcaster occasionally, but this is not compulsory.

Write to: CUT, Waun Llydan, St David’s Well, Llananno, Powys, LD1 6YP, UK

Television and radio celebrity presenters, role models to be avoided.

The priestly saints give us role models of sacrifice of putting others before oneself and of prayer and charity. Compare the example of St John Vianney to the television and radio presenters today. This cult of celebrity has great influence because their lives are communicated by the broadcast media. This can be very corrosive, particularly as role models for vulnerable and young.

St John Vianney, the priestly role model

The Holy Father has dedicated the year starting this June as the year of the priest. For the vast majority of our priests are good hard working men who live in very difficult times for traditional values and celibacy. We are making no excuses for bad priests who the media have exposed for their sins. However, the media rarely mentions the good priests or those are being martyred in various parts of the world even today. As a priestly role model we hold up the Cure of Ars and wonder what he would have made of the television with its blasphemy, its obscene dramas, and foul mouthed celebrities.

St Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859) Cure d’Ars, was born at Dardilly near Lyons. As a boy worked on his father’s farm as a shepherd and had very little schooling. During his formative years the French revolution took place; that also involved violence towards the loyal clergy which was then outlawed. Despite the suppression of the Catholic Church in France Jean-Baptiste wanted nothing more than to become a priest. At the age of twenty he started his studies for the priesthood but this was interrupted and he was conscripted into Napoleon’s army. He deserted from the army for he longed to become a priest. He continued his studies in secret until a general amnesty was granted. He entered the seminary first at Verrières and then transferred to Lyons. Despite finding his studies difficult, especially Latin, he was ordained at Grenoble in 1815, for he was also recognised as being very holy. In 1818 he was appointed the parish priest of Ars, a remote and obscure village. He was filled with joy that he should once more become a humble shepherd but this time of souls.

His lifestyle was very austere and he lived mainly on potatoes, and so vigorous was his attack on all kinds of immorality which he included dancing, that all the local taverns closed for lack of custom. One wonders what he would say these days. He was particularly determined to stamp out blasphemy. He excelled as a counsellor and preacher who was kind yet not afraid to speak out and local people loved him. His reputation as a good and holy priest spread beyond Ars. This caused jealously among some of the other priests in the diocese, and they circulated a letter to be signed and handed to the bishop condemning him as a bad priest. The letter inadvertently fell into Vianney’s hands and he also signed and passed it on. However, the Devil recognised him as a good priest and attacked him with violence even setting fire to his bed. He spent many hours hearing confessions every day and people came in their droves, reaching many thousands each week from all over France. His ability as a confessor was aided by supernatural gifts such as being able to read people’s hearts and the gift of prophecy. He set up a shrine to St Philomena to whom he attributed many of the miracles which happened in Ars at this time.

It is perhaps surprising that in a country which only a few decades earlier had outlawed all Catholic priests loyal to the successor of St Peter, the French government conferred upon Vianney the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his work. However, he refused to be invested as a knight and never wore the decoration. He died at the age of 73 worn out by his austerities and by the endlessly flow of visitors who came to his confessional in which he would spend up to 16 hours a day. He was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925 and is the patron of parish priests.

The Crusade of Prayer directs our thoughts towards the teachings and actions of Christ and not the cult of celebrities. However, the world is blinded by celebrity culture it is only when you directly highlight their lifestyles against Christianity that we can see how dangerous celebrities are.

Celebrity homosexuals use the media in a mission to subvert

BBC’s various radio stations often give air time to celebrity homosexuals. For example whiles driving home I heard a programme one evening late last year where the militant homosexual Peter Tachal had a congenial discussion with a conservative MP discussing that there should be at least forty openly ‘Gay’ MPs in parliament. Therefore, there should be some kind of quota. Already reeling from listening to an earlier interview with the homosexual member of the pop group Boyzone Stephen Gatley, I found the very young are to be subjected to a pop video with homosexual content. Same sex kissing is very common in pop videos these days. Boyzone are a band that appeal directly to the younger teenager and particularly to very young girls.

There are numerous celebrity homosexuals that have entered the national consciousness they even acquire certain kudos due to their lifestyle. They are quoted by the media when they defend homosexual lifestyles particularly against church leaders such as the Pope. The strong attack by Elton John on the late great Cardinal Winning for his out spoken defence of traditional family values in the late nineties a case in point. The media repeats Elton John’s anti-Christian diatribe often. This kind of browbeating can have an effect, for example Stephen Gatley’s recent death was describe by Daily Mail reporter Jan Moir as having struck a blow to the "happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships" she questioned that Gatley’s death was due to natural causes and that "For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see." The Homosexual lobby and their supporters flooded the Press Complaints Commission with over 1000 complaints against Moir’s article. This has caused Moir to back track a little and to make supportive statements of homosexuals. This is how mediated pro-homosexual browbeating works, to the point that very few in the public sphere will speak up.

This next year we ask all Prayer Crusaders to pray for celebrity homosexuals in all charity that they may accept the teachings of the Church and Sacred Scripture.

St Thérèse of Lisieux: a missionary to heal the modern world

Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon in 1873, the youngest daughter of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and his wife, who themselves have recently been beatified. When Thérèse was four years old her mother died, nevertheless her father made sure she was brought up in a very traditional and pious household where separation from the world was preferred. The family moved to Lisieux in 1877 where Thérèse went to school at a Benedictine convent. Thérèse at the age of fifteen was the third of Louis Martin’s daughters to become a Carmelite nun; eventually four of his daughters became nuns.

The events of St Thérèse’s life are soon told; she lived a simple short life as a Carmelite and died at the age of twenty-four in September 1897. She never held an important position but was the assistant to the novice-mistress from 1893. In fact she never did anything extraordinary at all, except, that is live her life as a true Christian. She carried out every element of the austere Carmelite rule exceptionally well.

She felt called to be a missionary and wished to volunteer for the Carmelite missionary foundation in Hanoi Vietnam. However, this was not the mission Our Lord wanted for her and about this time she had her first haemorrhage from the tuberculosis which would kill her, so instead she stayed in her convent sometimes suffering heroically in silence. It is unlikely we would ever have heard of her, but Our Lord had plans for her and under obedience from her superior she wrote a short spiritual autobiography called L’Histoire d’une Àme. Soon after Thérèse’s death the popularity of this book became evident, and the quite holy life of this enclosed nun became known to the world for the book was soon translated not only into European languages but also Asiatic ones. At her intercession there have been many miraculous cures, and a large number of ‘favours’. This led to her beatification in 1923 and her canonization in 1925. These favours are as she promised before her death. She has since been declared Patroness of the Missions and a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

There is at the centre of her spirituality an extreme but sweet simplicity that renders the Gospel so beautiful and accessible. Her writings are full of Gospel inspiration and her love of the Catholic faith is so complete that she writes ‘I feel as if I’d got the courage to be a Crusader, a Pontifical Zouave, dying on the battle-field in defence of the Church’ (Letter to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart). She saw that the Gospel of Jesus Christ when lived to its fullness and carried to its logical conclusion requires the self-sacrifice of a martyr, self-forgetting for the love of salvation, and the courage of a Crusader for the Church. A self-forgetting Crusader who is willing to fight for the hard truths of the Gospel with all the love and endurance of a martyr, to be a missionary on the front line.

It is not surprising that this Doctor of the Church and Patroness of Missions is today still on the front line and her relics are travelling from country to country, from church to cathedral. It is to us Catholics whom she speaks through her work; she is imploring us to live the Gospel and fight for the church in the face of secularising influences. How many in the Church instigate personal initiatives cloaked in the language of ‘love’ but it is really the language of secular dysfunction and ultimately leading nowhere. To this she recommends complete obedience to the teachings of the Church and of Sacred Scripture. She is asking us not to turn a blind eye to the mess of the modern world which is encroaching on the Church.

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