For Whom does the National Catholic Reporter Speak?

One week ago, the Lepanto Institute and Church Militant launched a petition to the Catholic bishops of the United States, asking them to formally condemn the National Catholic Reporter and deny it access to clergy and Catholic events. The reason for this petition is two-fold:

• National Catholic Reporter poisons its sizeable readership by regularly attacking the very core of Catholic Doctrine
• National Catholic Reporter steals the appearance of respectability and credibility from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops by gaining entry to its events and interview access to high ranking clergy, despite the fact that it has already been condemned by its local ordinary and told not to use the word “Catholic” in its masthead.

We’ve already provided a laundry-list of articles showing the National Catholic Reporter’s perversion of Church teaching regarding women’s ordination, contraception, and sodomy. But what is so incredibly insidious about this publication is how it mirrors the serpent from the Garden of Eden in its quest to turn souls against Our Lord and His Church.

In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam not to eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

“So the Lord God took the man and put him in his garden of delight, to cultivate and tend it. And this was the command which the Lord God gave the man, Thou mayest eat thy fill of all the trees in the garden except the tree which brings knowledge of good and evil; if ever thou eatest of this, thy doom is death. But the Lord God said, It is not well that man should be without companionship; I will give him a mate of his own kind.” (Genesis 2:15-18)

It is important to note here that God gave this command to Adam before Eve was created. Bear this in mind as we read the very first words the serpent speaks to Eve: “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1) First and foremost, if we remember that God gave this command to Adam before Eve was made, then we can see that it was Adam who passed on this command to Eve; Eve did not hear this directly from God. So, at the outset, the serpent is challenging Adam’s authority, his competence, and Eve’s trust in him. Secondly, the serpent perverts what God commanded, making His command appear to be absurd. Rather than restate the command as it was, “Do not eat the fruit of the tree which brings knowledge of good and evil,” the serpent asks if God forbade them to eat from ANY of the trees.

National Catholic Reporter employs this same luciferian rhetoric with its dialogue approach to already established Truths. Every good Catholic already knows that women cannot be priests, that use of contraception is a mortal sin, and that sodomitical relationships are abominable acts. Yet, National Catholic Reporter begins its dialogue, challenging the authority and competence of the Church while driving a wedge of distrust between the faithful and the Church Herself, by asking, in its own way, “Did the Church really say …?” And for its own part, National Catholic Reporter doesn’t directly challenge the already-established doctrine, but raises a tangent. For example, instead of directly challenging the Church’s teaching against acts of sodomy, National Catholic Reporter pretends that so-called committed homosexual relationships can be built upon mutual love, asking, “Has the Church condemned family life for those who struggle with their sexual identity?” This is the same script established by satan itself.

But for Eve, this was only the beginning of the conversation. The devil challenges Eve to be reasonable and not to believe everything she’s told! After Eve tells the serpent “We can eat the fruit of any tree in the garden except the tree in the middle of it; it is this God has forbidden us to eat or even to touch, on pain of death,” the serpent scoffs, “You certainly will not die!” Eve had never witnessed death. She had never seen anything die, and after having eaten fruit from other trees, Eve has never experienced any ill effects from the other trees … in short, she had no “reason” to believe that she would die, except that she was told that she would. And here, the serpent is denying the existence of death.

Similarly, National Catholic Reporter and its defenders deny that dissenting against established Church teaching will lead anyone to Hell. It has already challenged the authority and competence of the Church, so the next step is to scoff at the consequences the Church warns about with regard to sin. Just as the devil denied the existence of death, National Catholic Reporter denies the existence of Hell. In its denial of Hell, NCR denies that homosexual acts, contraception and women’s ordination are mortal sins that send people there.

The final blow for Eve was the serpent contradicting God by twisting that which is evil into an apparent good.  The serpent tells Eve that if she eats of the fruit, her eyes will be opened, and she will be like gods, knowing what is good and evil. At this point, Eve sees the beauty of the fruit and considers how delicious it appears, and so she takes a bite.

National Catholic Reporter does the same thing by writing puff-pieces on LGBT so-called “families,” the necessity of contraception in an allegedly “over-populated” world, and the liberation of women supposedly “ordained” to the priestesshood.

The devil was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, and it tricked Eve with rhetorical dialogue. The conversation was deadly to Eve, and ultimately to Adam and the rest of the human race. The same conversation is being rehearsed by National Catholic Reporter’s 200,000+ monthly readers, only this time, the death brought about by it is eternal.

Sign and spread the petition asking our bishops to formally condemn the National Catholic Reporter. It pretends to speak on behalf of the Church, but the reality is, it is following the devil’s script.