NOTES ON TONY BLAIR'S CONVERSION
TO ROMAN CATHOLICISM

Tony Blair's Middle East activities call for careful watching.  A closet Roman Catholic as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he was the most influential world leader collaborating with President George Bush in the invasion of Iraq.  The President himself has made no secret of his entanglement with the papacy, and has been commended for his catholicity by such Roman Catholic stalwarts as Paul Weyrich and Rick Santorum.  Is it possible that Bush and Blair pursued their war policy with the tacit approval of Rome, in spite of papal declarations to the contrary?  In A. T. Jones' 1895 General Conference sermon titled "The Papacy," remarkable for the depth of  his insights into the papal policy of Leo XIII, Jones' analysis established two critical points.  The first was that Leo XIII had an intense interest in the American experiment in democracy, and proposed to put it to practical use to achieve the ends of the papacy.  Is it mere coincidence that George Bush and Tony Blair set about the spread of democracy in the Middle East, to begin in Iraq?  The second point (and this is startling) is that a world which appeared to be "in its death agony" was seen by the papacy as the opportunity "to exalt herself once more to the supremacy over the nations, as she did of old" (per A. T. Jones Sermon, pp.12-13.)

Jones' analysis in his sermon is compelling.  It exposes a papal plan of action, not just for the time of Leo XIII but for the future, and we are now witnessing that future come to pass.  The Church of Rome has an institutional memory of a millennium and a half.  Just over a century is relatively but a short span of time, and Pope John-Paul II demonstrated in his lifetime that he was well acquainted with the vision of Leo XIII.  In an article titled "Sunday and the Eucharist," in WWN 11/03, Elder Wm. H. Grotheer cited a report in L'Osservatore Romano for July 23, 2003, that on Sunday July 20, the Pope in a Catholic devotional at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, had (among other remarks) reminded the pilgrims gathered together in the courtyard of his summer residence, that July 20 was the 100th year "of the death of Pope Leo XIII" who was to be "remembered above all as the Pope of Rerum Novarum, the Encyclical that marked the beginning of the modern social teaching of the Church." Elder Grotheer went on to write:

While this Encyclical placed the Roman Church's approval on Trade Unions, Leo's social teaching was also at variance with the concept of separation of Church and State. He termed it a "fatal theory"  because "the profession of a religion is necessary in the State,"  and "that one must be professed which alone is true." (Libertas praestantissimum naturae opus, May 20, 1888).

From the time of Leo XIII to the present an exception was made for the United States because the population was largely non-Catholic. This acceptance of separation of Church and State was considered, "not indeed as the ideal arrangement, but as a modus vivendi." The situation is now different more than a century later. Leo's dictum of 1888 still stands - "It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights which nature had given to man." (Ibid. See also Facts of Faith, pp. 256-272).

Thus we see that Leo XIII out of his own mouth provided proof that he was no friend of Democracy.  Jones was absolutely correct in his analysis of Leo's intentions, and John-Paul was as committed as any of his predecessors to the achievement of the ultimate goal.  The "Theocratic Dictatorship" page on this website documents the role of named Roman Catholic activists in the conception and organization of the religious right organization, "The Moral Majority."  Three more Roman Catholics are named in the July/August, 2007, issue of Liberty Online in a review of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker.  The review states:

The theocons achieved their political objective in the election of a president who had courted Neuhaus beginning in May of 1998. The theocons had access to the White House. One of their own, Michael Gerson, was director of the Speechwriting Office. A full-time liaison to conservative Christians, Timothy Goeglein was formulating policies to advance the theoconservative agenda. The establishment of a religious America was slowed by the attack of September 11, 2001. The war on culture would become less important than a military war. But the theocons joined in the military war. They declared it to be a just war between Christian civilization and its enemies. Neuhaus characterized the most likely opponents of the war as “our morally debilitated professoriate,” the “inveterate complexifiers, offering detailed analyses of the seven sides of four-sided questions while declaring their achingly superior sensitivities that make them too sensitive for decent company.”

Wiegel supported the war in Iraq in a lecture at the Catholic University School of Law entitled “Moral Clarity in a Time of War.” The lecture, later republished in First Things, provided moral and theological justification for the president’s Iraq policy.

Wiegel maintained that America has a duty to enforce international justice, to further the good of all decent human beings. He went on to say that statesmen are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, a charism of political discernment, in deciding whether to go to war. This gift, he said, is not shared by religious authorities or agencies.  (Emphasis added.)

Could the three men named above have adopted their positions entirely independently of the Vatican?  We can never know with certainty; however, there is the clearest evidence that Bush and Blair were political leaders approved by the hierarchy and eager to please the papacy.  It is a certainty that as U.N. Envoy to the Middle East and a Catholic with access to the highest levels of the hierarchy, Blair is serving the interests of the Vatican as much as the U.N. .  The fulfillment of Daniel 11:45 is pending.  (There is a school of thought in the Seventh-day Adventist community which holds that Daniel 11:45 refers to Turkey. Exegetically, verses 36-39 clearly identify the "king" as the papacy. Once this is established, the conclusion follows that the “him” and the “he” of verses 40-45 is that same “king.”  See "Report on the Eleventh Chapter of Daniel," by the SDA Biblical Research Institute.)