Vatican Hires Big Law to Expropriate Website Critical of Vatican
by Christopher A. Ferrara
My friend and fellow parishioner Michael Hichborn, head of the Lepanto Institute, has written an extensive exposé of the widely reported news that Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has hired the mega-law firm Baker & McKenzie to demand that InfoVaticana, a news aggregator website based in Madrid, turn over its web domain to the Vatican, thereby ceasing to exist.
Baker & McKenzie, an aggressive promoter of the “LGBT” agenda, asserts in its demand letter that the Vatican owns the rights not only to the symbol of the crossed keys, an image used by all kinds of businesses and organizations around the world, as InfoVaticana shows here, but also any use of the word Vatican in its name. But, as InfoVatican notes:
“There are many websites that include those letters in their domain and that are not being questioned. Without going any further a travel agency exploits the domain vatican.com , a web of religious information is covered on insidetheVatican.com and the newspaper La Stampa has a section of religion led by the renowned Vaticanist Andrea Tornielli under the Vatican Insider brand, among a dozen more examples that show what everyone has understood when reading the news.”
“There are many websites that include those letters in their domain and that are not being questioned. Without going any further a travel agency exploits the domain vatican.com , a web of religious information is covered on insidetheVatican.com and the newspaper La Stampa has a section of religion led by the renowned Vaticanist Andrea Tornielli under the Vatican Insider brand, among a dozen more examples that show what everyone has understood when reading the news.”
By now, in the fifth year of the Dictatorship of Mercy presided over by “the Dictator Pope” (now a Regnery book, giving it international credibility and reach), the reason for Parolin’s selective demand should be obvious: InfoVaticana has published articles critical of the Vatican, Amoris Laetita, the homosexual infiltration of the Vatican apparatus and the overall agenda of “reform” Francis is relentlessly pursuing despite rising opposition from the faithful, who do not accept his obvious plan to overthrow the teaching of Benedict XVI, John Paul II and all of Tradition in the area of marriage and sexual morality and, evidently, the teaching of even Paul VI on the intrinsic evil of contraception.
As Hichborn observes, the claim that a website cannot use “vatican” in its name and must hand over its domain to the Vatican Secretary of State is like “like the Federal Government of the United States telling USA Today that it must hand over its name and web domain to the U.S. government because the use of ‘USA’ is exclusive to the government. Perhaps, then, the state of New York should demand that the New York Times hand over its name and domain for the same reason. And the same with America Magazine.”
This is yet another example of the naked thuggery to which the Vatican is having to resort to in a vain attempt to silence opposition to an attack on faith and morals without precedent in the history of the Church. But, to cite a passage from Scripture so often cited by Father Gruner: “I say to you, that if these shall hold their peace, the stones will cry out.” (Lk 19:39-40). Thus did Our Lord Himself speak of His disciples when the Pharisees demanded that He silence them as they hailed His approach to Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.
Today, the neo-Pharisees who plague the Church, contriving elaborate arguments for the toleration of divorce and the relativization of the Sixth Commandment in the name of “mercy,” demand the silencing of the faithful who defend the Gospel of Christ against their neo-Pharisaical sophistry. They will not succeed. On the contrary, the more vigorously they try to suppress the Truth, the more insistently it will assert itself — if not on the part of the hierarchy, then on the part of the lay members of the Church Militant, who know they must obey God rather than men.