What a Baas! Henk's Dutch fans speak out

De beweging 'Catholics for Choice' is een door eugenetische organisaties en abortusindustriëlen gefinancierde lobbybeweging, die noch Rooms-katholiek is, noch een spontane beweging is. Het is een ordinaire lobby. De heer Henk Baars is over zijn tijd. Hij is 57 jaar, maar steekt nog vast in het jaar 1968. Dat noem ik pas star denken; daarvan blijken met name vrijzinnigen last te hebben. Dat deze man, met zijn anti-katholieke uitspraken en tegenspraak met het rooms-katholieke geloof, meent ook nog bij de Kerk te moeten kunnen werken met volle bezoldiging, tekent zijn gebrek aan realiteitsbesef. De jaren '70 en '60 zijn voorbij!

Another white man joins the CFC team

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that Henk Baars crazy name, crazy guy has become the new Anti Catholics for a Porn Merchant's Choice European coordinator. Henk has a lifelong commitment to pretend Catholicism, ie abortion reproductive and sexual rights see, told you so and women's equality in the church and society which is why I'm sure you'll agree that notwithstanding the fact that he's got old turkey neck and gizzzards, he's just the kind of man who knows what women want, what they really really want . In addition, he has a deep-seated knowledge of Catholic theology which will stand him in good stead when it comes to telling lies about the Church's teaching on abortion and a long-standing dedication to working for social justice which he'd never dream of bragging about. Henk's leadership in various Dutch and European progressive Catholic organizations which are too numerous to name, not that he spreads himself thin or anything has enriched the movement which will one day storm the world but now only has a small number of enlightened devotees and the cause of progressive Catholicism which is miraculous since he has nothing to do with it and women's rights which is even more miraculous considering his gender. For the past four years, he has served as a member of CFC's European Advisory Group and is a regular contributor to the media though, despite his best green ink efforts, he has not always published by editors, most of whom are controlled by the Vatican on issues that are important to CFC. He is a key figure in CFC's investigative opposition research work in Europe the smear campaigns and witch hunts for which we are so justly famed. Henk will work to promote our perspectives in both the public policy sphere and the media in partnership with Anti Catholics for Choice's European Advisory Group. He is based in The Hague (Den Haag).

In addition to his work with Anti Catholics for a Porn Merchant's Choice, Henk manages a wide variety of social projects located in the poor and like really icky neighborhoods of The Hague for Stek (for City and Church or voor Stad en Kerk), the most important Protestant church in the city. In 1985, Henk co-founded and eventually became president of the Eighth of May Movement (named for the date the pope visited Holland), an organization that drew more than 10,000 (rough estimate) dur brains and pretend Catholics to its annual gatherings where he wowed the crowds with his funky clog dancing and mooning routines . As a result of his work with this organization and his insistence that he was a tomato who was being persecuted by an onion, he was refused employment with Catholic organizations and chose to continue his work for social justice and salad emancipation with Protestant-run service organizations without any fanfare whatsoever.Henk started out as a pastor as all Catholic clergy do in a steel mill in IJmuiden, and later worked in Amsterdam as a pastor in both the shipbuilding industry and the world of finance where he mastered double-entry accounting and was known as a complete banker. He was an unelected community leader in the diocese of Haarlem and the coordinator of a team that helped expand the work of Non Catholic parishes. Henk is vice president of Marienburgverenigin g, the most important progressiveetend Catholic lay movement in the whole wide world, the universe, the solar system and a board member of the oldest peace movement in Holland, 'Kerk en Vrede' (Church and Peace) in which capacity he has acted as a successful human shield in the following war-torn zones: Basra, Helmand Province, Sudoku and La la land.

I remain available to you for any questions or comments about CFC's international work, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas, as well as through the UN system. Please also feel free to contact Henk directly about CFC's European activities. We look forward to working together with you.

Very best wishes, Gladiolus Gorgonzola-Fandabidosi
Director, International Programs

Guess who's been peeking at Anti Catholics for Choice Watch

Someone at "Catholics" for a "Free" Choice, that's who.

Whoever it was - probably some intern - spent a long time here; checking in at 09.04 eastern and staying until 10.19, then taking a break (coffee and a Danish?) and coming back at 11.51 for a quick three minute review.

Poor sod having to trawl through all this content, make notes and feed them carefully into a database labelled "anti choice opponents" or whatever.

Look, just stick ACFCW on Opposition Watch and you and me are safe, yeah?

Anti Catholics for Choice Watch in America Magazine's Blog

Here

The work goes on.

Exposing the lies; revealing the truth.

April 21 2005: Marjorie Reiley Maguire in the National Catholic Reporter

Marjorie Reiley Maguire used to be a member of Anti Catholics for Free Choice (CFFC) as it was then known in the 1980s. When she left the organisation, she wrote a letter about it to the National Catholic Reporter.

She described CFFC, as an "anti woman organisation" and that its agenda is “the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda of persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior.” It was groups like CFFC, not the Catholic Church, which was "hung up on sex", she noted.

In her letter she also included this killer statement: “When I was involved with CFFC, I was never aware that any of its leaders attended Mass. Furthermore, various conversations and experiences convinced me they did not.”

Memo to Sara Morello: Sue me, if you think you're bad enough

It's not libellous to say this:

[Anti Catholics for Choice is] an astroturf corporately-funded anti-Catholic group with next to no members, which tells lies about the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion, engages in witch hunts against Catholics in public life, has an adulterous population-controller as its in-house "theologian" and takes money from porn merchants.

I'm sure that Elfriede knows very well that she isn't a Catholic. She should stop telling public untruths and pretending that she is one.

Fact: The ultimate defence against a libel action is the truth.

Sara Morello, vice president of Anti Catholics for a Porn Merchants Choice, makes an unsubtle hint about libel and defamation law

Dear friends,

Although I do not usually post to this list, as vice president of Catholics for Choice and a canon lawyer, I feel I must offer some clarifications. First, the accusations posted here about Catholics for Choice are unfounded. At CFC, we strive to be an expression of Catholicism as it is lived by ordinary people. We are part of the great majority of the faithful in the Catholic church who disagrees with the dictates of the Vatican on a wide variety of issues, including sexuality, respect for women in the Church and the world, and the role of the institutional Church in public policy making.

We are part of the great majority who believes that Catholic teachings on conscience mean that every individual must follow his or her own conscience ― and respect others' right to do the same. Catholics for Choice's mission is to shape and advance sexual and reproductive ethics that are based on justice, reflect a commitment to women's well-being and respect and affirm the capacity of women and men to make moral decisions about their lives. CFC works in the United States and internationally to ensure that all people have access to safe and affordable reproductive healthcare services and to infuse our core values into public policy, community life and Catholic social thinking and teaching. None of this is grounds for excommunication. Second, excommunication is a very serious penalty in the Catholic Church, and accusations about a person’s standing in the Church should not be made lightly as they can be detrimental to a person’s reputation.

In regard to excommunication as a penalty for procured abortion, I recommend to you a brochure from Catholics for Choice which can be found on our Web site (Notes on Canon Law No. 1<http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/abortion/documents/2004notesoncanonlaw1_001.pdf>). At a most basic level, Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, has no jurisdiction over Catholics for Choice. To debate his claims of excommunication in this forum would give them more credence than they deserve and would further a false presumption of their merit. Catholics for Choice does indeed respect a woman’s right to make choices about becoming pregnant and about continuing or terminating a pregnancy, as only she knows what her conscience tells her is the right thing to do. None of us can make that determination for another. We understand that not every Catholic joins us in a prochoice position. However, we feel that ours is a position grounded in our tradition and our faith. We offer a brief exposition of our position here: Prochoice Catholicism 101<http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/abortion/documents/ProchoiceCatholicism101.pdf>. We respect others’ right to disagree, and ask them to respect us. In charity, it is inappropriate for any of us to make claims about another person’s relationship with her Church or with God.

I have known Elfriede Harth for many years, and her work for progressive Catholicism, both during her work with Catholics for Choice, and now independently, has been both admirable and dedicated. The public accusations made against her in this forum are unfair, ungrounded, and unkind. I hope that IMWAC members would disavow them as such. Catholics for Choice has long worked with IMWAC and other progressive Catholic groups throughout the world and we look forward to continued opportunities to do so. We are represented in Europe by our European Coordinator, Henk Baars, and are advised by progressive Catholics across the continent, and in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We stand ready to continue our work with IMWAC and others who look for a more progressive, representative voice of Catholics in the Church and the world.

Should any of you wish to contact me with questions about Catholics for Choice or the positions I have put forward here, I welcome your direct communiqué to me at http://uk.mc249.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=smorello%40catholicsforchoice.orgmailto:http://uk.mc249.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=smorello%40catholicsforchoice.org.

Respectfully, Sara Morello, JCL Vice President, Catholics for Choice

Gladys Melo-Pinzón PhD. International Program Director Catholics for Choice 1436 U Str. NW. Suite 301, Washington DC 20009 Phone: 1 (202) 986-6093 Fax: 1 (202) 332-7995 www.catholicsforcho ice.org<http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/>

Elfriede Harth on Anti Catholics for Choice taking money from Porn Merchants

Now concerning the accusations about fundings received from "porn merchants" in the late 1970's and the first years of 1980, Playboy Magazine had a Foundation which supported causes like getting rid of the death penalty, reproductive rights and freedom of speech. CFC received several small grants from that foundation. Over 4 years, the total amount was $0,000 [NOTE: According to records filed with the IRS, Catholics For a Free Choice, of Washington, DC, has received thousands of dollars from the Playboy Foundation] At this time in the US, it was considered quite normal to receive this money. Religious groups working on the death penalty received it as did the Ms. Foundation for Women. In 1983 there was a reconsideration in the women's movement about this and some groups decided to stop taking the money. CFC decided not to "disown" this donor, but simply stopped applying for money and received no more after 1983. Most Americans did not consider Playboy pornography. It was mild eroticism, did not involve coercio,(sic) children, sexual torture or abuse.

Elfriede Harth, former European represenative of Anti Catholics for a Porn Merchants Choice

Friday, 6th December 2009 7.06

One reason I started this blog ...

was that it had been an idea which had been bubbling away in my mind for some time. "Catholics" for Choice is a filthy organisation which badly needs to be exposed for what it really is. There's some good material out there, especially C-FAM's brilliantly detailed War on the Faith paper but they come from American sources and largely have an American readership. Many Europeans aren't aware of the fact that Anti Catholics for Choice has parked itself in Brussels and is busily organising away to curtail Catholics' democratic religious rights, impose abortion as the law of the world everywhere and see to it that Catholics in public life have as hard a time of it as it can make possible.

Remember the Buttiglione affair? That was all CFC's doing. It produced the sensationalist "dossier" studded with selective quotations and nasty commentary about the man who was going to be a European Commissioner and it rushed it out to credulous politicians. Now, there may have been legitimate reasons for various activists and so forth to have had concerns about Buttiglione's candidacy but that CFC sponsored witch hunt stank to high heaven.

Witch hunts are CFC's style and Catholics in the UK and Europe should be made aware of the phoney group which conducts them and the aggressive, dirty tactics it uses against its opponents.

Incidentally, do check out CFC's deeply boring, muddy-looking website. It has a section called "opposition watch" - nice eh? How many Catholic organisations have something like that on their websites? "Opposition watch", as you would expect, is full of nasty dossiers, like the Buttiglione one, stuffed with selective quotations, - even possibly false ones - and snide commentary about Anti Catholics for Choice's opponents. One of the dossiers is about the World Youth Alliance.

I'm not the biggest fan of the WYA which is of the slightly nutty, useless but harmless type of organisation but CFC's attack on it is nasty. Emilia Klepacka, who used to work for the WYA is quoted in the document, thusly: “We have many social problems in Europe, and now we need a
paradigm shift … Every abortion is a violation of the human dignity, both the woman’s and the unborn child’s. Therefore it is not to be the choice of the woman.” Footnote 20 cites Faktum, Sveriges Television/Swedish Broadcasting, 10 February 2005 and a boxed text, reads: "Swedish national television recently broadcasted a program on abstinence trends in the US and the antichoice lobby in Europe. Emilia Klepacka, director of WYA Europe, was forthright in opposing all abortion."

Just one problem with that - I've been told by a reliable source that that quotation attributed to Emilia Klepacka was a load of made-up crap. This is what I've been told happened: Klepacka was invited to meet an MEP in her office; when she got there, she found she'd walked into an ambush: a television crew was waiting for her. She made her excuses and left, to put it into tabloidese but not before someone had put words into her mouth. The words were then translated into Swedish, translated back into bad nonsensical English - had the quotation been genuine it would simply have been taken from the original English and would have made sense - Klepacka is as articulate as you'd expect her to be, being a Cambridge graduate.

Klepacka was young and naive, she didn't know what she could and should have done about it: complained to the television company, to the Swedish version of the National Union of Journalists and to the MEP's whip for such grossly unethical behaviour. But making legitimate complaints about quotations is just the sort of thing which CFC would brand complaining early and often.

That quotation in all its nonsensical glory is on Anti Catholics for Choice's grubby WYA document. Given the fact that I have good reason to believe that quotation is made-up crap and given CFC's propensity to being, er, economical with the truth, how can anyone believe a damn thing it says about anything?

You can't. That's the whole point.

The Dirty Money Behind Anti Catholics for Choice

As of the end of financial year 2007, CFC had clocked up $7,405,664 in net assets. But every cloud has a silver lining, that was substantially down on the previous year when its net assets totalled $9,953,700 (source: Charity Navigator).

Still it's a chunky war chest for CFC to dip into whenever it fancies buying itself a push-poll, or conducting a high-stakes witch hunt against Catholics in public life. Where does the dosh come from?

I've already mentioned the Playboy link. According to C-FAM's excellent and authoritative War on the Faith paper, the high priestess twice accepted grants from the Playboy Foundation. Mind you, the old girl baulked at the suggestion that she take, say, Larry Flynt's dollars. "There are boundaries of good taste," she insisted. I dunno, Fran, have you seen those scarves, Elfriede wears?

CFC, or CFFC as it once was used to claim that it had 5000 members. Some hope. In fact the evidence from tax-returns showed that those figures were fictitious and that a hefty 97% of its funding came from big fat private foundations and tax-exempt groups. That's when Kissling had to admit a little shamefacedly that CFC was "not a membership organisation. We have no membership". You can say that again.

C-FAM noted that Philanthropy magazine, which charts charitable giving, took a closer look at CFC's funding and found that it was, "without a single major supporter whose program focus is Catholic philanthropy," adding "one looks in vain at these organizations’ program areas for evidence of meaningful support of parochial schools, retired nuns, Catholic missions, religious vocations work, or parish ministry — the areas that are the meat and potatoes of Catholic philanthropy today.”

One commentator put it very crisply when he said of CFC that, "the voice of dissent, it turned out, was not a mass movement, but a spokesperson with a fax-machine."

CFC's funding comes from the Sunnen Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Buffett Foundation, and this that and the other foundation, virtually all of which have a record of funding pro abortion, pro population control causes.

(sources: War on the Faith, wikipedia, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights).

But no Catholics there. None whatsoever.

That's significant.

Who are they? #3 The Dumbo

The discreet earrings, the scarves draped around the neck just so, the ever so slightly vacant expression in her eyes as she bounds towards the first microphone in sight ... it could only be Elfriede Harth, Anti Catholics for Choice's soigneé European representative.

Not by any stretch of the imagination the sharpest knife in the box (it was of her that one cruel commentator said "you looked into her eyes and saw the back of her head") the half German half Latin American Elfriede has gone through various incarnations (no, Elfie, not those kind of incarnations) over the years. She's been the spokesperson for the appropriately-named WAC group, described as a "feminist theologian", probably by herself and is now the secretary of the European Parliament's separation of religion and politics working group - European Parliamentary working groups are the equivalent of Westminster's all party parliamentary interest groups and despite the impression Elfriede would like to give to various sovereign states, have no official standing.

In her role as CFC's point woman in Brussels, Elfriede is responsible for publicising CFC's push-polls, organising endless conferences with the likes of the National Secular Society, the European Humanist Federation and what have you and generally putting out anti-Catholic garbage.

Elfriede's English is hopeless, her thinking incoherent and she gets terribly upset, for some reason, when people point out that they've seen through her mob and that no, she's not a Catholic.

Who are they? #2 The Shoneen

Oleaginous goateed shoneen, Jon O'Brien is the current president of Anti Catholics for Choice. He used to work for the Irish Family Planning Association and then for its parent organisation, International Planned Parenthood Federation, arguably the biggest cheese in the birth-reduction world, as a program manager. Then he got taken on by Anti Catholics for Choice first as its director of communications, second as its vice president.
He succeeded the high priestess as president of the pro abortion anti Catholic cult in 2007.

He's the lucky recipient of various abortion gongs, persists in the fiction that he's a Catholic and "religious" and in 2007 was paid an impressive $176,667 by his well-endowed employers (Charity Navigator).

Source: Anti Catholics for Choice's own increeeedibly tedious and boring website.

Who Are They? # 1 The High Priestess

Frances Kissling, nee Romanski is the high priestess and former president of the pro abortion cult. In the financial year ending on December 2007 Anti Catholics for Choice paid her a whopping $483,960 (source: Charity Navigator).
An engaging oddball who was briefly a postulant at a convent - not, nota bene a professed nun, she left the convent, got her tubes tied and went onto operate two abortion clinics in New York, one of which, she boasted performed around 250 abortions per week. In 1976 she founded and became first president of the National Abortion Federation.

Never one to underestimate her own importance in the grand scheme of things, she sees herself as a femi-revolutionary leading a guerrilla war against the male hierarchical Church, not infrequently being quoted expressing such eccentric sentiments as, "When I say I came back to the Church, I never came back on the old terms….I came back to the Church as a social change agent; I came back to woman-church."

She's also got neurotic hang-ups about pregnancy and birth: "For me to be pregnant would be an enormous violation of my own personal integrity."

and a downright creepy fixation with abortion:

“I would like to see a huge underground of activist women learning how to do menstrual extractions and vacuum aspiration abortions, mothers teaching their daughters, sub rosa classes at campus women’s centers….”

She's also visiting scholar of abortionology and applied bigotry at some outfit or another.

Sources: War on the Faith, C-FAM, wikipedia.

More on Anti Catholics For Choice

can be found in this excellent carefully-researched paper by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute here

CFC's Lies about the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion:

The personhood or ensoulment lie

In its last statement on abortion, the 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion,
theVatican acknowledged that it does not know when the fetus becomes a person:
“There is not a unanimous tradition on this point and authors are as yet in
disagreement.” This disagreement has a long history as well; neither St. Augustine
nor St. Thomas Aquinas, two of the most important theologians in the Catholic tradition, considered the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy to be a person. (Anti Life Lies about Catholicism, Jon O'Brien and Sara Morello)

The Truth

the Church’s constant condemnation of abortion, a teaching 2,000 years old, never relied on any particular theory of personhood or ensoulment for its binding force.16
For instance, both St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas speculated as to the exact moment of ensoulment. Yet both of these saints, as well as all the saints who have addressed the issue of abortion, denounced abortion as an abominable crime; Jerome referred to it as the “murder of an unborn child.”17 The two issues had nothing to do with one another. As St. Basil the Great put it, “The hairsplitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us.
C-FAM ibid

CFC's lies about conscience and probabilism:

The lie that Catholic teaching allows for pro abortion views

Church teachings, tradition and core Catholic tenets—including the primacy
of conscience ... leave room for supporting a more liberal position on abortion. (O'Brien and Morello ibid)

“if you found five or six theologians, known for their ‘prudence and learning,’ who held the liberal dissenting view, you could follow them in good conscience even if the other ten thousand theologians — including the pope — disagreed." Daniel Maguire quoted in C-FAM's War on the Faith.

The Truth

The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that"conscience can make either a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law or, on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them". It goes on to say that erroneous judgements result from, "Ignorance of Christ and His Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy."

“[CFC's position] betrays a serious misunderstanding of the theory of probabilism. It has never been seen as authorizing deliberate disobedience to the clear moral teaching of the Church, and has always been seen as invalid when one’s action could lead to the killing of an innocent human being."

Richard Doerflinger associate director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.

The lie that CFC is a Catholic organisation:

CFC's we're-Catholics-in-good-standing lie

"I'm a Catholic in good standing", Frances Kissling, former president of CFC.

At CFC, we strive to be an expression of Catholicism as it is lived by ordinary people. We are part of the great majority of the faithful in the Catholic church who disagrees with the dictates of the Vatican on a wide variety of issues, including sexuality, respect for women in the Church and the world, and the role of the institutional Church in public policy making." Sara Morello, IMWAC, 6th December 2009.

The Truth

[T]he media should not look to CFC for Catholic opinion — because CFC is not a Catholic organization. It is, instead, composed of a very small group of non-Catholics and ex-Catholics, and perhaps even excommunicated Catholics, who do not believe the Church’s fundamental dogmatic teachings (sexual or otherwise), and who advocate extremely radical steps towards further sexual permissiveness. CFC’s funding comes from sources like Playboy and Planned Parenthood, not Catholic parishes and charities; its theologians endorse a mixture of moral relativism and New Age thought, not Christianity. (C-FAM War on the Faith)

In 1996 Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln excommunicated members of "Catholics" for Choice. The excommunication was upheld by Rome.

That's just three sets of lies to be getting on with; there are plenty more where they came from.

A telling fact about Anti Catholics for Choice

By their funding shall ye know them


It is funded by porn merchants. No, seriously. It used to be known as "Catholics" for a Free Choice and according to records filed with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) it has taken thousands of dollars worth of funding from the Playboy Foundation. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course but it's not something Catholic organisations would do.

Anti Catholics for Choice tells lies about what it is.

Welcome to this blog; what it's all about

This blog is dedicated to watching, analysing and exposing the background and activities of an anti-Catholic organisation which has the chutzpah to call itself "Catholics" for Choice. It's NOT a Catholic organisation, it's an anti Catholic organisation which pretends to be Catholic so that it can do damage to the Catholic church and advance the cause of abortion as a form of population-control everywhere.

Since it is pro-population control it is not really for choice. And since it is anti Catholic it is not Catholic. Therefore this blog calls it by its real name: anti-Catholics for Choice. Ok, since it's not for choice either we should miss out the choice bit. But hey, we like the succession of Cs in its title. So Anti Catholics for Choice it is.