DOES DR. JOHN PILCH PLUS THE REVEREND JEROME KODELL AND ALL CALL US TO A "HEROIC " SOVIET-UNION STYLE OF SO-CALLED CHRISTIANITY??!!

Why NOT a Marxist-Leninist alternative to that mundane Christian opiate of Professor John Pilch's and Rev. Jerome Kodell's supposedly ignorant peasant masses, addicted, as all such peasant masses are, to their pathetic trance experiences? Yes! That's right! Boys and girls! Now, here is a golden blast from out of the past. When Joe Stalin's Russia bravely set out to prove itself as the living, breathing, embodiment of You-Know-Who's Sermon on the Mount, Eight Beatitudes and all.

An ideal which in today's South Africa such intoxicated evangelists as Dr. Pilch are still trying to perpetuate in some neo-Marxist think tank in Pretoria.

All fine and dandy if Professor Pilch was writing for some professional journal with a name like "The Journal of Marxist Anthropology," and if the Rev. Fathers Jerome Kodell and Robert C. Harren plus their respective American Catholic Bishops, J. Peter Sartain, of Little Rock, Arkansas, and John F. Kinney, of St. Cloud, Minnesota, had all had the good sense and wisdom to have kept the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur stamps off both Professor Pilch's book and Catherine Upchurch's guide to it.

And, in fact, if you scroll down far enough you can see where we have quoted from both Pilch's and Upchurch's works.

Why? So what difference does having those latin stamps make, anyway?

Good point! Number one: Professor Pilch is using a classic Marxist-Leninist tecnique of political subversion called, if my feeble memory serves me, Unperceived Ideological Trans-shipment and Dialogue.

Number two: This same technique calls for the use of something called either the talismanic word, or the talismanic phrase. We're talking now about something that was very, very current maybe twenty years ago, folks, ok?

Number three: the talismanic component to all this is to impress upon the population selected and targeted for political subversion the false idea that this is all good and comfy stuff they are hearing, even though it might sound a little strange, at first.

Thus: these latin stamps are critical in achieving the desired effect. They have the necessary "magic" of the talismanic word - talismanic phrase.

Number four: this psychological warfare gimmick's ultimate goal is to alienate the reader/ believer from her (or his) previously held beliefs and make them all but cling with a new dependency upon something (or anything) glibly packaged as both new and revolutionary, while getting the targets' wholehearted support and cooperation in their own long-term psychological and emotional self-destruction.

In this last sense, anyway, all this is just an extension of the lectures given to us by our old Iranian Professor of International Law at the University of Houston, way back in the Fall of 1976.

For Dr. Razi never tired of patiently explaining to us certain realities of world law and politics, with such memorable zingers as:

"It is absolutely essential, when making a hostile nation the target of political subversion and propoganda, that one of two things must first transpire: Number one, that you already control the means of mass communications within the targeted country itself, or, number two, that you are successful in creating the impression within the targeted population itself, that you do. It really doesn't make much difference which method you chose. Both techniques are equally effective in destabilizing a hostile regime." Damn! That guy told us undegraduates the "way it is!" No sugar coated if ands or buts!

Believe you me, this all applies to Professor John Pilch's book, Cultural Tools for Interpreting the Good News, and the symbolic reassurance given both it and Upchurch's Guide using this same Marxist-Leninist technique of Unpercieved Idoleogical Transshipment and Dialogue with its built-in Talismanic word - phrase sub-component.

It is working fine here, at least, in Bishop Ochoa's Diocese of El Paso, Texas, and we might assume, elsewhere as well.

Here's a sample from Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon giving the philosophical mindset of the Dr. John Pilchs of this world, or at least of their own political handlers, or commissars, followed by a roughly remembered paraphrase from some book on Mexican politics and history; it may be from Alan Riding's excellent Distant Neighbors, but I'm not real sure. Anyway, the last quote deals with the pithy, succinct views of a lifetime party hack in Mexico's Revolutionary Institututional Party.

First, the Romance and Glory of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union!

Pages 43-44

"The Party can never be mistaken," said Rubashov. "You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in History does not belong in the Party's ranks. The Party's course is sharply defined, like a narrow path in the mountains. The slightest false step, right or left, takes one down the precipice. The air is thin; he who becomes dizzy is lost."

Regarding this last: Nope! Neither Pilch nor Kodell are in any danger here, so far as losing their supernatural credentials as "Historical Revolutionary Apostates" is concerned. Instead, they are both locked in solid, perhaps for all enternity, in the service of some "Master," and, one might ask, all for what?

"To faithfully execue their Master's every whim?"

Really?

Well, then, just who is their "Master?"

One guess!

Since it's obviously not Jesus Christ, then it is...........??!!

And, if so, how will Messers Pilch and Kodell be suitably rewarded??!!

As one such "revolutionary" cadre years ago in Mexico confessed on being honored for surviving in that dog-eat-dog world for fifty years:

"Comrades, you ask me: Jefe, Boss, what have you learned in fifty years of faithful service to La Partida, The Party? Well, you see, the answer is really very simple. I have come to learn that all my friends were false, and that all my enemies were real. And that as others were prone to do to me, so, too, did I also do to them."

Koestler, Arthur. Translated by Daphne Hardy. Darkness at Noon. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941. Page 43-44.