Rather Expose Them Christian News Blog
A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
The diocese of Buffalo, New York, which is in the process of shutting down approximately half of its churches, has sold another historic sanctuary at a bargain-basement price.
The scandal-plagued diocese, which has been buried under an avalanche of clerical sex abuse lawsuits, has traded its historic Gothic St. Ann’s Church and Shrine for $250,000 to Buffalo’s Muslim community, for conversion into a mosque and an Islamic Center.
CATHOLIC BACKLASH
Catholics reacted with outrage after well-known Catholic priest, Fr. Ronald Vierling, drew attention to the sale on Monday. Vierling’s post on the social media platform X has attracted over 10 million views at the time of writing.
“No anger should be directed against the Islamic community,” wrote Vierling. “No doubt the changing demographics of the area and the inability to financially support the complex made the continuance of St. Ann as a viable parish impossible.”
“This scenario is being played out in once large, urban dioceses across the country,” the priest warned.
“Terrible. I know a dozen Catholics who would have pulled together to buy the building instead of letting it get sold off,” Catholic award-winning radio show host David J. Reilly replied, adding: “Sometimes the diocese chooses to not sell to certain groups like the SSPX & FSSP.”
“Muslims get a church for $250k but I can’t buy a house in a decent neighborhood for less than $500k,” a Catholic lamented.
Saint Ann’s Church, built by German immigrants in 1886, had fallen into disrepair and was decommissioned in 2013. Bishop Richard J. Malone – who in 2019 resigned as head of the diocese over allegations of sex abuse cover-up – had slated the building for demolition, as the diocese had estimated repairs could cost at least $12 million. Malone, however, changed his mind and said that the new plan was to put the property up for sale.
The Downtown Islamic Center, which purchased the property from the diocese through its affiliate Buffalo Crescent Holdings, said it would spend the millions of dollars necessary to renovate the historic structure.
“We’re looking to put several million dollars into this in the next year, in the church alone,” Talha Bakth, president of the Downtown Islamic Center, told the Buffalo News. “The space will be able to be used for worship within a year or two.”
Buffalo Crescent Holdings is also purchasing a former rectory at the complex that had been converted to apartments in a separate transaction, the media added.
QUEEN OF PEACE CHURCH CONVERTED TO JAMI MASJID
In 2007, the diocese sold the Queen of Peace Church for $300,000 to the Muslim Society of Buffalo, which converted the building into the Jami Masjid (mosque).
Since Islam prohibits the depiction of a human or living being in sacred iconography, Muslim volunteers painted all the Catholic murals sky blue, removed statues at the altar, and replaced the church’s well-preserved stained-glass windows with plain, frosted glass.
The main altar was removed entirely and replaced by a carpeted space for reading. The church’s former apse, the area behind the main altar where the choir would sing, has been screened off as a prayer space for women.
Today, the Jami Masjid has Turkish carpets instead of pews and Arabic calligraphy adorns the Gothic brackets. The orientation of prayer has changed so the imam stands along the eastern wall of the building, so that when worshippers can face Mecca when they offer their prayers and bow.
ST. AGNES CHURCH CONVERTED TO BUDDHIST SHRINE
In 2009, the Buffalo diocese sold St. Agnes Church to the International Sangha Bhiksu Buddhist Association for conversion to a Buddhist temple and meditation center. The historic church, which was consecrated on December 9, 1883, had served German and Italian immigrants for over a century.
The church closed its doors on October 21, 2007, and remained empty for two years before Vietnamese monk Thich Minh Tuyen bought it in 2009 for $250,000. It reopened in 2012 as a Buddhist temple after the iconography, including the crucifix and images of the Stations of the Cross, was removed.
The Buddhist occupants also added three 2,000-pound sitting Buddhas shipped from Canada, and six standing Buddhas, that cluster around a shrine in the narthex. The monks also replaced six pews with carpets for worshippers, but left the remaining pews intact for those who cannot sit on the floor.
The new owners also hung Buddhist banners alongside the intact stained glass windows, intending to combine Buddhist iconography with the existing Catholic themes.
‘CHURCHES ARE NOT POKER CHIPS’
Attorney Brody Hale, co-founder and president of the St. Stephen Protomartyr Project, which works to preserve Catholic churches for sacred use, lamented the sale and conversion of churches into non-Christian places of worship.
“A church as defined by canon law is a sacred edifice,” he told FrontPage Magazine. “Churches as sacred buildings have fundamentally more protections under canon law than parishes.”
“This is not what churches are supposed to be used for according to canon law. Churches are not poker chips a bishop can use to cash out when he’s in a bind,” Hale stated.
MILLIONS SPENT ON CLERICAL SEX ABUSE SCANDALS
Earlier in May, the Buffalo diocese announced plans to merge approximately 34% of the 160 parishes across Western New York and reduce places of worship by 38%.
Bishop Michael Fisher said the mergers were due to financial pressures brought about by the filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, after scores of clerical sex abuse lawsuits were filed under the Child Victims Act; as well as a priest shortage, aging congregations, and declining Mass attendance.
The consolidation would bring the number of parishes from 160 to a projected 106, and the number of worship centers from 196 to a projected 121.
Last year, the Buffalo diocese offered $100 million, in addition to any insurance funds, to settle 891 clerical sex abuse cases. The diocese said it would sell its 795 Main Street headquarters, the former Christ the King Seminary campus, and other “non-essential” property to cover half the settlement.
More than $15 million has already been paid to attorneys for the diocese in its bankruptcy and the state Attorney General’s investigation.
DIOCESE FAILS TO EVANGELIZE THE LOST
Interestingly, the diocesan website has a drop-down menu titled “How We Evangelize” on its opening page, but the word “evangelization” seems to be re-defined with no mention of any attempts to reach people of other faiths or no faith.
Instead, the subcategories under the menu lists buzz phrases such as “Cultural Diversity,” “Catholic Education,” and the controversial “Catholic Charities,” with events like a diocesan “Multicultural Mass” and an annual “Cultural Diversity Celebration Dinner.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral. This article is cross-posted with the author’s permission from Souls & Liberty.
SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-convert-planned-ramadan-attack-on-21-idaho-churches/; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
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[Pre-order a copy of Daniel Greenfield’s first book, Domestic Enemies, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on April 30th.]
Coeur d’Alene, an Idaho city with a population of over 50,000, had too many churches. Alexander Scott Mercurio, a new teen convert to Islam, had a plan to “fix that real soon.”
Ramadan was almost over and Mercurio was unhappy because he believed that he was a bad Muslim who hadn’t even assaulted, let alone killed any Christians, and would go to hell.
“I am a hypocrite who has not even spat in the face of a kafir (non-Muslim),” he complained in online chats. “Let alone spilled their blood and induce terror into their hearts and minds.”
Mercurio wasn’t sure if he could be considered a good Muslim without killing Christians.
“I really don’t want to miss out on the opportunity for jihad in Ramadan,” he worried.
While the bloody Islamic holiday of Ramadan is often used as a pretext to warn America, Israel and other countries to stop fighting Islamic terrorists lest it offend Muslims, it’s a time of redoubled terrorism. Mercurio wanted to get in on that murderous spiritual opportunity.
“I’ve been thinking about Jihad. Well, I always am, but I mean it’s Ramadan,” Mercurio agonized. “I have motivation for nothing but fighting, like some kind of insatiable bloodlust for the life juice of these idolaters, a craving for mayhem and murder to terrorize those around me… primarily against churches.”
There are “three or five churches within walking distance of me” who would be objects of his “insatiable bloodlust: for the blood of non-Muslims.
Mercurio decided that he would strike on “the last few days of Ramadan, probably on Sunday, their special day.”
The special day was April 7th also known as the Octave Day of Easter or the Sunday of Divine Mercy, and would have been well known to the Muslim convert who was raised as a Christian by his parents. But Islam has no mercy, certainly not divine and not human either, and neither did Mercurio who fantasized about massacring Christians on “their special day” of mercy.
Alexander Scott Mercurio started out as a white supremacist before converting to Islam at the age of seventeen. He took on a user name meaning ‘total submission’ in Russian (because of his Russian immigrant mother) and whined about North Idaho and his “very Christian and conservative parents” who “want me to stop being Muslim” while he fantasized about building weapons that would allow him to “heap massacres upon the kuffar (non-Muslims) daily”.
The Muslim convert was allegedly working on sending cryptocurrency donations to ISIS while taking part in an online group that attacked the Taliban for not being murderous enough.
Mercurio had allegedly begun chatting with a Muslim terrorist in Gaza who was moving money to ISIS, but then his pal, whom the FBI only says was “believed to have died”, presumably in fighting with Israel, went offline and an informant took over the account and became the receptacle for the convert’s fantasies about killing all the Christians.
“Walk to the nearest church. Stop close by the church, equip the weapon(s) and storm the temple, kill as many as possible…. then burn the temple to the ground, flee the scene, then move onto the next church, rinse and repeat for all 21+ churches in the town until killed.”
Later, the Muslim convert elaborated that he would “walk into a church and then start beating people with the baton; hit them first on the kneecaps and elbows… I will beat them only to incapacitate them, I will use my knives and machete to slit their throats and kill them.”
Then he would set the church on fire.
While Mercurio searched for knives and axes, he really needed something more powerful. After exploring the possibility of building some sort of flamethrower, he decided to get his dad’s guns. Initially he thought about killing or beating his father over the head with a pipe to get the key to the gun safe, and then decided he could just break in and grab the guns while his dad was out.
Mercurio got his ISIS flag, developed his plans, and finalized a script for his ‘martyrdom’ video which included responding to the call of the Islamic State by “killing Jews and Christians” and “his message to the disbelievers to go to hell”.
But his plan to massacre churchgoers with guns, knives and fire ended when he was busted.
What had worried Mercurio most of all was not being caught, but having his act of Islamic terror misrepresented by the media. He was concerned that they would “slander me in the media and call me a mentally ill psycho who did this out of desperation and not as an act of religiously motivated terrorism.”
It would be easy for the media to dismiss Alexander Scott Mercurio as a teen who fantasized about killing people, and if he hadn’t done it for Islam, would have done it as a Neo-Nazi or just a random school shooter. And yet the documents released show that he agonized about trying to be a good Muslim. Failing at other traditional Islamic practices and prone to lapsing into pornography, he found a traditional Islamic loophole to get into 'paradise' through murder.
Mercurio is one of a growing number of American teens who convert to Islam, often in out-of-the-way places and then get involved in Islamic terrorism. Recent cases include Trevor Bickford, 19, of Maine, who tried to attack NYPD officers in Times Square with a Machete, Xavier Pelkey, 18, also of Maine, who tried to recruit two teens for a terrorist attack in Chicago, Cole James Bridges from Akron, Ohio, Mateo Ventura, a high school student in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Xie, a 20-year-old from a New Jersey suburb.
There is a pattern of teenage boys, resentful of their parents and society, with nothing to aspire to and nothing to believe in, drifting into fantasies of violently terrorizing everyone around them.
Islam, like Neo-Nazism, gave Alexander Scott Mercurio something to believe in and kill for.
“I will not live to see the day that the flag of Tawheed (Islam) flutters over every land, nor the day that the entire Earth is governed by the Sharia of Allah,” he wrote. “I will gladly spill my blood again and again to make that a reality.”
Both Islam and Neo-Nazism offered and offered young men the opportunity to kill and then die for a glorious cause, destroying everything around them so that a new dark order will rule the earth.
This primal evil impulse at the heart of Nazism, Communism, Islam and so many other evils is a perversion of the good impulse to build, uphold and to protect that America once used to offer.
Troubled young men seeking direction used to join the military, but now they find only wokeness there. The culture banishes young men, telling them they suffer from toxic masculinity as they drift into movements like those run by Muslim convert and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate or into Islam itself which preaches they can find meaning by killing Christians.
America needs to do more than spy on these young men, it needs to give them something to fight for. Because if it does not, Islam will. And they will become agents of our ancient enemy to kill, burn and bring down America, Europe and the entire civilized world under the flag of Islam.
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/switzerland-zurich-churches-to-pass-on-2262000-in-tax-money-to-islamic-associations; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
The caliph Umar said the jizya payments from the dhimmis were the source of the Muslims’ livelihood: “Narrated Juwairiya bin Qudama at-Tamimi: We said to `Umar bin Al-Khattab, ‘O Chief of the believers! Advise us.’ He said, ‘I advise you to fulfill Allah’s Convention (made with the Dhimmis) as it is the convention of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents (i.e. the taxes from the Dhimmis.)’” (Bukhari 4.53.388)
The UK jihad preacher Anjem Choudary said in February 2013: “We are on Jihad Seekers Allowance, We take the Jizya (protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims) which is ours anyway." The normal situation is to take money from the Kafir (non-Muslim), isn’t it? So this is a normal situation. They give us the money. You work, give us the money. Allah Akbar, we take the money. Hopefully there is no one from the DSS (Department of Social Security) listening. Ah, but you see people will say you are not working. But the normal situation is for you to take money from the Kuffar (non-Muslim) So we take Jihad Seeker’s Allowance.”
“Zurich churches pass on tax money to Islamic associations,” translated from “Zürcher Kirchen leiten Steuergeld an Islamverein weiter,” HeimatKurier, March 15, 2024 (thanks to Medforth):
The Catholic and Protestant Church in Zurich wants to give away a whopping two million francs in tax money to Islamic associations. What is sold as a gesture of goodwill is a cash injection for Islamization. With the gift of money, the Swiss are involuntarily helping to finance the Islamic conquest of land.
In Zurich, only recognized religious communities are entitled to state funding. Currently these are three Christian and two Jewish communities. Since the Protestant and Catholic churches seem to be swimming in money through tax contributions, they now want to give the “Association of Islamic Organizations Zurich” (VIOZ) a cash gift of around two million francs.Islamization and false tolerance
A staunch supporter of the project is the reformed church council president and former SP cantonal councillor Esther Straub. She promotes the idea and speaks of it as a sign of “interreligious cohesion”. This kind of accommodation is, of course, sought in vain in Islamic countries with Christian minorities. The church uses this money to distribute money to Islamic organizations, which are often noticed in Switzerland with fanatical tendencies.Promoting moderate Islam?
The former left-wing politician argues that the move is intended to finance decidedly non-radical and moderate Islamic associations. With over 40 facilities, VIOZ operates around 90 percent of the mosques in the canton of Zurich. There are also other associations. In addition to the three VIOZ facilities in Winterthur, there is also the “An nur Mosque”, which, according to security authorities, is a real hotspot for jihadism. How interconnected or separated the VIOZ is with such communities cannot be clearly determined. In the past there have been cases in which the moderate mask slipped off the faces of radical Islamists in SwitzerlandIslamism from the streets to the universities
In October 2023, a 25-year-old Syrian also had to appear in court in Winterthur. He had previously been convicted of a jihadist trip to Syria. However, due to a cozy sentence, he was little deterred and continued to carry out terrorist propaganda for IS. The University of Bern provided another case of Islamism. After the Middle East war broke out last fall, an “Islam expert” and lecturer at the university expressed his joy at the event. The author was even the husband of the head of the Islamic Institute. The couple quickly distanced themselves from violence and terror, which meant they were probably back within the definition of “moderate”. In Schaffhausen it even became known that a convicted “ex-terrorist” was teaching in a mosque.Switzerland withdraws passports from Islamists
The Islamist side effects of the population exchange have led to a return of passport withdrawals in the Swiss Confederation. Since 2020, a total of seven people have had their citizenship revoked, and corresponding proceedings are pending for another dozen. Just a few weeks ago, Zurich became the scene of an Islamic terrorist act in which a 15-year-old Tunisian injured a Jew with a knife on the street.Remigration instead of Islamization
Due to numerous jihadist incidents and their involvement in Islamic cultural associations, it is uncertain whether the two million francs of tax money that the local churches want to give to Muslim associations will ultimately end up with questionable organizations. In addition, the Swiss people have repeatedly spoken out clearly against further Islamization in the past, for example with the ban on minarets in 2009. By continuing to finance Islamic associations, the canton continues to cultivate a parallel society for itself. This gives rise to Islamist activities and clans, as a look at neighboring states makes clear. Instead of giving further impetus to Islam and the Islamism associated with it, the canton should strive for a policy of remigration. Muslims who want to live strictly according to their beliefs and customs then have the opportunity to do so in an Islamic country.