Lady Diana's parish priest and confessor until the day she died, Father Frank Julian Gelli in Kensington, a
suburb of London, continues to confound the enemy of Christianity and liberty with startling logic.
He writes about fifth columns:
"In 1936, early in the Spanish Civil War, General Franco had five armies, or military columns, investing
the enemy government in Madrid. Four of them were converging on the capital from the outside but the
fifth column was inside. They were Franco's supporters, lurking within republican areas, waiting
the right moment to strike at los rojos.
"Fifth columnists, they were called. Three years later, Franco won.
"According to a well-known British journalist, we have a fifth column in our midst. Muslim extremists -- who
else? So she wrote in a major tabloid newspaper not too long ago.
"Last week a speaker in a mosque, whilst fingering rabid Islamophobes, drew my attention to her. Well,call it sheer coincidence or Jungian synchronicity,
next day I found myself in a media gathering that boasted that very lady�s presence. Blandly, I raised
the issue: are fifth columnists really at work in this country? Interesting answer I got, only it should be
confidential, sorry."
Answer: Yes.
We have known since hired assassins tried to murder President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II -- the
two men most responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union, with a shared moral vision and contagious optimism, as John O'Sullivan recounted in
his wonderful book, "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed The World," Regnery
Publishing Inc., 2006.
Fifth columns are spies and organized opposition groups within our own communities who meet and plot to
undercut us with support from international groups and financiers who have continuously plotted against the
United States and placed spied and traitors in high places -- Whittaker Chambers, an acknowleged communist
party member and Soviet spy as top editor of Time magazine during the 1940s and 1950s, and his
accomplice, Alger Hiss at the State Department and first U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and succeeding President Harry Truman for example.
Fifth column spies allied with Marxist socialism, worldwide communist expansionism, paid by the Soviet
Union, and traitors against the United States.
Father Gelli recounts: "History abounds in fifth columns, real or imagined. Centuries before the phrase
got coined, Roman Catholics in Protestant England fitted the bill. When Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen
Elizabeth I, ipso facto he absolved CatholicEnglishmen from oaths of allegiance to their heretic
queen. With a clear conscience, they could conspire against her.
"For Protestants, that rendered any Catholic person potentially disloyal, a traitor. Indeed, numerousfoiled plots against Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian
monarchs involved Catholics. QED. In consequence, Catholics in England had to suffer much persecution and discrimination ever since. Even today, the fires and frenzies of the Reformation totally banked, if
Prince William married a Catholic girl, he would forfeit his right to the British throne. Isn't that
crazy?
"The Armenians, too, were branded fifth columnists by the Young Turks during WWI. 'This alien Christian race
is in collusion with the Russians. Want to stab us in the back,' the decadent Ottomans claimed.
"Despite the fact that Armenians have served under the Sultans for hundreds of years. In military capacity too, e.g.
as sappers at the siege of Vienna. The wholesale massacres of innocent Armenians quickly followed.
"Japanese Americans suffered not so horrifically in WWII but the U.S. authorities saw them as potential pawns of the Rising Sun in America. So they were
herded into concentration camps. When the Soviet Union still held sway, and the red menace loomed, comrade
Krushchev truculently warned the capitalist West: 'We shall bury you!' (Not much of a prophet he.)
Communists and their sympathisers in 'the free world' were deemed quintessential fifth columns.
"Mind you, Soviet agents and spies and fellow travellers did not exist only in Senator McCarthy's
fertile brain. There actually were people like that. Besides, consider this counterfactual: if the Russian
tanks had ever swept into France and Italy , to set up people's republics, on whose side would local
communists have fought?
"Well and good. But let's get a bit analytical about this thing. Franco's fifth columnists lay murkily
hidden. What made them dangerous, however, was their link with el-generalissimo's other four columns, plus
Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. (The Republicans had Stalin, of course.)
"Our native aspiring jihadists, by contrast, who can they count on? The al-Qaeda column? Maybe it exists.
Now and again, it causes real havoc with its nasty suicide bombings and low-tech shenanigans. And big
casualties. But its chances to topple the mega-armies and gigantic, sophisticated police and security
machineries of the West are actually less than zero.
"9/11 and 7/7 were directed against the innocent and so they were atrocious and despicable acts. But they
never came anywhere near destroying the states involved. And please, do not muddy the waters by
bringing in Iran, the nuclear threat and that kind of garbage.
"The Shia State has as much love for Sunni al-Qaeda as Bush does. True, the Shia support liberation movements
OK. I doubt, though, that Iran is behind the Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru or the Free Alaska Eskimo
faction. Part of a loose, worldwide guerrilla force our home-bread radicals may well consider themselves
to be lethal fifth columnists, posing a threat to our very survival, they are not.
"Don't relax, yet. A fifth column may be real, after all. A malignant cabal, a spiteful spider that wishes
to destroy Britain , yep. A hundred times more damaging than the Luftwaffe was.
"But where is it? Here is my surprise candidate. It's called the British government. An internal 'column' in
active collusion with malevolent external columns. Called the EU.
"You see, controlling the social policy of its member states, the European Union has gradually eroded and undermined key religious and ethical values. For instance, the ideal of the family based on the New
Testament.
"Cohabitation and same-sex partnerships have become the legal equivalent of marriage. Divorce is almost
the norm. Abortion and contraception are palmed off as 'reproductive rights.'
"Under the banner of obsessively repeated shibboleths, talisman-like slogans like 'equality' and
'anti-discrimination,' the British government gleefully works in tandem with the EU gang to
dismantle the core values constitutive of the very fabric of British society.
"A dire state of affairs. And a challenge for Christians especially. From the beginning, we
Nazarenes had to object to certain pagan practices of the Roman Empire: Abortion, infanticide, human
fighting in the arena, sacrificing to the deified emperor and so on.
"To the extent of suffering martyrdom. Of course, Christian resistance to paganism was not violent --
that is the significant, qualitative difference withtoday's men of violence. Christians were peaceful
fifth-columnists.
"The weapons they fought with were spiritual. As Saint Paul lists them: 'the shield of faith, the breastplate
of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, and sword of the spirit.' (Ephesians 6:13 -17).
"With same unbloody weapons the church -- the true, visible and invisible church of Jesus Christ -- must fight today. In concert with innumerable other
columns: those of the angelic hosts in Heaven.
"So it turns out that I myself am a fifth-columnist. Amazing. You know what? I am going to enjoy i."
Go Father Frank Julian Gelli, As the hymn says:
"Onward Christian soldies, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ the royal
master leads against the foe. Forward into battle, see his banners go."
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