Monday, February 12, 2007
GAMALIEL FOUNDATION
Their website indicates:
Four major organizing networks work throughout the United States: the Gamaliel Foundation, the Industrial Areas Foundation (both headquartered in Chicago), the Pacific Institute for Community Organizations and the District Action Resource Training group (in Miami).
They include churches across the ecumenical spectrum: Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, UCC, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopal, AME, CGOIC, independent, etc. And in most locals they are in racially mixed organizations, with white; black and Hispanic constituents.
"San Francisco Faith" carried a letter on the Industrial Areas Foundation in October 2002. There you can read:
- Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation...comunidades de base or base communities through which liberation theology is taught, and in every parish where they have created them, there has been either bitter division or no response. Lay people have not accepted the liberationist teachings coming from the chancery. People get disillusioned and leave the Church."
- Most disturbing to the Catholic is that Alinsky taught his people's organizations Machiavellian political action--that "the ends justify the means," that "truth to an organizer is relative and changing," and that "you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments." (See Alinsky's RULES FOR RADICALS)
- This IAF "Magnificat" is offered as an example of how one is "to reflect on the Gospels in order to find the proper response to our own situation" when using a see-judge-act pedagogy of conscientization.
- The religious and family values of Catholics are used to spark a conversation between them and the IAF. The IAF then uses the relationship built from those values to introduce another set of values--those of the IAF.
- One writer from San Antonio, Ed Hinojosa, attributes the incredible attrition in his diocese of Hispanic Catholics to other religions as directly related to the degree the IAF has been promoted there. He writes: "MACC and the San Antonio chancery have created and spread
Regarding those four points made in the SF Faith letter, I have the following comments:
- RULES FOR RADICALS is one of the books that constitute required reading for Gamaliel organizers. Doing what you can with what you have and then cloaking it in moral arguments amounts to a deceptive front costumed to be appealing to whatever the latest trend in the Church happens to be. For Catholics today, the latest trend is back to orthodoxy. Thus a promoter of Saul Alinsky-type activity would simply kneel before the Eucharist so as to look good to the gullible.
- See-Judge-Act pedagogy is the methodology of Pax Christi and the Sillon, two organizations that were involved with Polish communism. I blogged on them here.
- Liberation Theology has been condemned by Cardinal Ratzinger:
"An analysis of the phenomenon of liberation theology reveals that it constitutes a fundamental threat to the faith of the Church. At the same time it must be borne in mind that no error could persist unless it contained a grain of truth. Indeed, an error is all the more dangerous, the greater that grain of truth is, for then the temptation it exerts is all the greater."
- Fr. Paul Shindler, a member of the Gamaliel organization, is pastor of St. Bernard's parish and was the pastor of an El Salvadoran parish for ten years. He still makes trips back to the Central American parish periodically. He made one in January. St. Bernard's church is about as orthodox in its interior decoration as it is possible to be. There is an Hispanic community within the St. Bernard's parishioners.
I have been saying for some time that there are as many problems on the right as there are on the left. Those who would undermine the Church are shape-shifters. They will do what they have to do in order to accomplish their goals. Their goals are not the goals of the Church Christ founded and the Pope.
