Editor’s Note: This article contains sexual language. 

This is grim stuff, so let’s start off nice and easy. With a challenging little puzzle, like those silly “test your knowledge” posts you see on social media. Can you match the quotation below with the author? Each is speaking about the connection between human sexuality and access to God:

1. “True sex-power is God-power and as such, the power of orgasm can be used by a man and woman for various gains, both worldly and spiritual.”
2. “[God] can make himself present when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm; and that orgasm, lived in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of the presence of God.”
3. “Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise.”
4. “Mankind must learn that the sexual instinct is … ennobling. The shocking evils which we all deplore are principally due to the perversions produced by suppressions.”

Here are the authors from which you’ll need to choose:

A. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

B. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, chief doctrinal authority appointed by Pope Francis, who recently approved same-sex blessings in Catholic churches — which will include St. Peter’s Basilica.

C. Aleister Crowley, 20^th-century British black magician and pansexual Satanist.

D. Paschal Beverly Randolph, 19th-century American occultist.

Sex Magick Posing as Christian Mysticism

Not easy, is it? The quotations all kind of smoosh together, saying much the same thing. No mention of marriage, pregnancy, or fidelity, much less chastity. Sex is presented by each of these authors as having some magical power in itself to connect us to the fundamental powers of the universe — the same kind of “spirituality” practiced in ancient fertility cults, which the Hebrew prophets condemned as the worship of demons. (See Jonathan Cahn’s Return of the Gods for exhaustive documentation.)

It’s all so unsavory and stupid. But don’t let these people hide behind their witlessness. “Intellectuals” with 95 IQs can be occultists too. And when they gain positions of influence and power, they can corrupt countless others, especially if they can hijack the authority of a Christian church and use it.

I’ll end the suspense. Quote 1 comes from Paschal Beverly Randolph, who was a huge influence (as I’ve documented here) on the author of Quote 3, sexual revolutionary Margaret Sanger. Quote 4 comes from Aleister Crowley. And Quote 2 comes from the chief doctrinal authority at the Vatican, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández. Appointed by Pope Francis, Fernández was almost certainly the ghostwriter for Francis’ revolutionary sex encyclical Amoris Laetitia.

From Freud to Aleister Crowley

I’m not some intrepid reporter who uncovered these dark connections. That credit goes to eminent theologian and scholar Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II before his conversion to Catholicism. In an erudite piece at The Catholic Herald, Ashenden lays out the grim, unsavory truth: This Argentine priest — for decades one of Pope Francis’ closest cronies — wrote and published a seedy, explicit book in 1998 that abandoned Christian attitudes toward sexuality for occultist ones. The title is Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality. And Pope Francis knew all about the book, but appointed him anyway.

Aleister Crowley, via Wikipedia.

In a Stream interview, Catholic philosopher John Gravino explained how Francis and his allies reject the apostolic Jewish-Christian approach to sanctifying and disciplining the human sexual urges, in favor of a Freudian “hydraulic” view of sexuality as a kind of crude steam power that needs to be vented out of some duct or other, lest it explode. Such approach is mechanistic and degrading, but at least it doesn’t traffic in sorcery.

Ashenden shows how what we face today comes from an even darker place than Freud’s pseudo-scientific scribblings. It comes from a weird tradition that began in the 15^th century (though it pretended to tap into ancient traditions going back to Egypt):

One of the most alarming aspects of the way in which Fernández has written, is that he shares the same presuppositions about sex as esotericists and those who practice (dark) magic. Sex for them is a means of instrumentation of the divine, as it is for Fernández; in esotericism – it is claimed – sex facilitates a direct experience of the Godhead. The Christian riposte to the esoteric tradition is that it mistakes deity.

It was during the Renaissance that we find the developments of this basic idea in thinkers who inhabited the crossover between Christianity, science and magic that the alchemical world produced. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) posited that the erotic principles of attraction, the occult powers of magic and the dynamic structure of the universe are all part of a single continuum.

The Spirituality of Grindr

Notice what isn’t present in Fernández’s quote, praising orgasm as a “sublime act of the presence of God” — any mention of marriage. Indeed, his statement could apply to two male strangers at a night club.

Since Fernández includes in his 1998 book a long, creepy discussion of a 16-year-old girl’s sexual fantasies (which he bizarrely links to Jesus), I must point out that Fernández’s lauding of orgasm in itself would serve very nicely in the rationalizations of a priest molesting a boy — as then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (another of Francis’ close allies) did, before Francis put him in charge of negotiating the still partly-secret  Vatican alliance with Communist China. Indeed, victims of clerical abuse have offered many testimonies of their molesters using precisely this kind of language as part of their grooming process.

Oh yes, and in his new position as prefect for the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), Cardinal Fernández is the highest authority in the church for resolving … cases of priestly sex abuse. 

I’m sticking for the moment to my charitable reading of Pope Francis’ motives, and my theory that he’s merely a Marxist materialist trying to liquidate the Church. But his cronies and allies seem to come from an even darker place. 

UPDATE: Gavin Ashenden has released a video going into much greater depth on the occult influences he discerns in the work of Cardinal Fernández :

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.