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"Transsexual" youth depicted by a Development and Peace partner attend an LGBT march.

This is the second part in a multi-part series. Part one can be found here, and part three here.

April 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – The Canadian bishops’ foreign aid arm, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (D&P), is funding two explicitly Marxist groups in Brazil that support and encourage the depenalization of abortion and the homosexual political agenda.

The groups are two of the seven pro-abortion organizations known to be receiving funds currently or to have received funds in recent years from D&P. D&P is funded in part by donations from the Catholic faithful in Canada, collected by Canadian bishops during Lent. The first two D&P partners exposed by LifeSiteNews are in Paraguay.

The two Brazilian organizations are the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (“Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra” or MST) and the “Movement of Dam Affected People” (“Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens” or MAB). Development and Peace advertises both groups as aid recipients on its website (click on “Partners” tab), but continues to hide from the public the level of funding received by the two groups (as well as all of its partners).

The Movement of Landless Rural Workers

The Movement of Landless Rural Workers is a self-identifying Marxist organization that seeks to redistribute land to non-landowning peasants by means of occupying privately-owned property without permission, as well as disruptive protests such as blocking roadways and taking over toll booths for hours at a time to attract attention to its cause. Its extra-legal behavior results in violent clashes with police and private property owners. Elements of its leadership have been imprisoned under anti-terrorism laws, and the group is continuously complaining that its activities are being “criminalized.”

As an organization of the extreme left, the MST is allied with pro-abortion feminists and homosexualists seeking to legitimize and legally protect same-sex relationships. The MST not only advocates such anti-life and anti-family policies on its website, Twitter feed, and Facebook page, but also indoctrinates its own membership, including adolescents, with feminist and homosexualist ideology.

The MST advertises on its website its own members’ pro-abortion and LGBT protests.  In one post, published about three weeks ago, the MST announced that female MST members had united with women from other groups in the state of Paraíba to protest the “illegitimate” state government’s plans to privatize property occupied by the MST, and to celebrate feminist pro-abortion and homosexualist ideology.

“The event was distinguished by artistic interventions and talks that expressed the historical outlines of the feminist movement,” writes the MST, “such as the right to one’s own body, . . . for the legalization of abortion,  … against lesbophobia … ”

In another post, the MST tells us that in November of 2015 its members who gathered to speak to government officials in the state of Rio Grande do Sul “affirmed that there are still struggles that must be intensified to guarantee, among other issues, gender and pay equality, public policies, the right to abortion, and respect for sexual options.”

The MST also advertises pro-abortion marches on Facebook, announcing a march to be held in the nation’s capital, Brasilia, for “the defense of the decriminalization of abortion,” and associating it with its hashtags for “Landless Women’s Day” (“#JornadaSemTerra” and “MulheresEmLuta”).

A Brazilian feminist group, Sempreviva, reports that on September 28, 2016, MST women again took to the streets to demand the right to kill the unborn, at state expense (note: the website is currently down, and our link shows a PDF copy of the page). The event, held in São Paulo, was called “Our body belongs to us! Women without Fear!” and was held to commemorate the “Latin American and Caribbean Day of Struggle for the Legalization of Abortion.” A woman organizing the march told Sempreviva, “We’re demanding of the government sexual education for prevention, contraceptives to avoid getting pregnant, and legal abortion to prevent death.”

The MST also uses Twitter to promote the cause of legalized abortion. On its Twitter account, the organization agitates against a law proposed by pro-life Senator Eduardo Cunha (PL 5069/2013) that would increase the criminal penalties imposed on doctors and laymen who instruct or aid women in killing their unborn children. MST denounced the proposed legislation in 2015, using the hashtag “#MulheresContraCunha” (“Women against Cunha”), claiming that “Criminalization doesn’t prevent abortion. In Brazil one million abortions are done every year,” and mocking the legislation. They groused, “If men got pregnant, abortion would be done with a painless injection.”   

The MST has even sought to punish the legislators who supported Cunha’s pro-life bill, linking to a list of those in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies who have voted for it. They wrote, “See the deputies who voted yes to the proposal that makes abortion difficult for women who have been raped,” again using the hashtag “#MulheresContraCunha”.

MST promotes the gay agenda

The MST includes a subdivision, “Landless LGBT” (“LGBT Sem Terra”), which helps to indoctrinate the whole membership of the MST with gay ideology, explaining that sexuality is “fluid” and the image of the “bourgeois” traditional family must be overthrown.

In 2015, according to the MST website, the organization conducted an LGBT activism seminar entitled, “The MST and Sexual Diversity.” The MST tells its readers that “by bringing the LGBT debate into the Movement we are breaking the social image of the traditional family which is seen as the legitimate model, and so creating the possibility of glimpsing a social movement in which sexuality is fluid.”

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MST youth march to promote gay agenda

“We evaluate our family life in comparison to an idealized model of the family, a model that corresponds to the needs of the emerging bourgeois society of the mid-19th century,” explained a psychologist in a talk given to the group. “In fact, recent demographic studies indicate a tendency to depart from this pattern that the Brazilian middle class has adopted as an ideal and that doesn’t generally contemplate those who compose it.”

After many years of LGBT organizing, in 2017 the MST’s “Landless LGBT Collective” issued its first LGBT “militancy training handbook,” a 37-page manual which it apparently did not release to the public.

The MST involves its youth groups in LGBT activism as well, including them in marches for “Anti-Homophobia Agitation and Propaganda,” which involve male adolescents dressed as women. “Young people understand that to deny and to repress the diversity of existing identities among workers means to reproduce the logic of segregation and violence imposed by capitalism,” the MST explains on its site. 

Overtly Marxist and lesbian feminist indoctrination of women

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MST women indoctrinated in Marxism and feminism

The MST proudly announces on its website that it holds annual weeklong “courses” to indoctrinate its female members with what it explicitly calls “Marxist” and “feminist” ideology. The courses frame the political economic struggles of the MST as a form of class warfare against “capitalism” and private property, encouraging the women to fight against the “patriarchy” of the traditional family, which they identify as a component of neoliberal economic systems.

Among the crimes of the capitalist “patriarchy” is, according to an expert interviewed by the MST, the imposition of heterosexuality on women. Heterosexuality, the organization claims, is nothing more than a “political institution.”

“Heterosexuality is a political institution, replete with values that reinforce the logic of domination and the perception of the family as a tool of private property,” the MST writes. “Patriarchy also affects sexual diversity, and therefore we need to debate these questions and struggle for freedom in all areas of politics,” said Mariana Oliveira, of the Brazilian League of Lesbians and Popular Consultation, when interviewed in association with the 2015 “Marxism and Feminism” course.  

In a recent post about its 2017 weeklong “Course on Feminism and Marxism,” the MST says it included classes such as “Feminism and the class struggle,” “The advance of capitalism in the Northeast and violence against women,” “Tactical and strategic challenges in the class struggle and of Rural and People’s Feminism,” and “Political and organizational challenges of Landless Women in the construction of the People’s Agrarian Reform.”

“These topics are indicated by Landless women as being necessary for the understanding of the structure of this capitalist, neoliberal, patriarchal, racist society,” explains the MST.

The course, “has, as its objective, to create female solidarity in an organizational process of struggle  against patriarchy, against Capital, against agribusiness and against the attack on our rights,” said Margarida Silva, who supervises the instruction for the MST.

In addition to the 2017 and 2015 courses, explicitly “Marxist” and feminist indoctrination courses were given in 2016 and 2014, according to the MST.

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Image of Fidel Castro with MAB logo on lower right, displayed in MAB article covering the final speech given by Castro before his death in 2016.

Marxism in particular and socialism in general have been repeatedly condemned by the popes, most recently by Pope St. John Paul II in his encyclical letter Centesimus Annus. There he noted that “class struggle in the Marxist sense and militarism have the same root, namely, atheism and contempt for the human person, which place the principle of force above that of reason and law.”

“The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature,” the pope wrote. “Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism.”

Movement of Dam Affected People (MAB)

The Movement of Dam Affected People (MAB) is an explicitly Castroite Marxist organization that seeks to fight the construction of hydroelectric dams throughout Brazil, claiming they are instruments of capitalist exploitation, and that “water and energy are not commodities.” Like other organizations of the Marxist left, the MAB endorses the legalization of abortion on its webpage and occasionally participates in pro-abortion marches. 

In 2016, the MAB joined with the MST in the city of São Paulo to celebrate the “Latin American and Caribbean Day of Struggle for the Legalization of Abortion,” according to the feminist group Sempreviva (see paragraph above on MST participation in the same march).

In the same year, the MAB published a list of “threats” to “human rights” that included the pro-life bill PL 5069/2013, the same bill attacked repeatedly by the MST (see above). MAB complained that the proposed law “criminalizes women and health professionals even more” who involve themselves in abortion.

In 2014, the MAB published a pro-abortion feminist manifesto on its website endorsing the Global Women’s March and declaring that “we denounce the imposition of maternity as an obligation of women and we reaffirm our autonomy to make decisions about our own bodies. We demand the right to decide if we want to continue an undesired pregnancy or not. We therefore struggle for the legalization of abortion to be carried out by the SUS [Single Health System], free of charge and safely.”

In the same year, the MAB declared on its website that it had participated in a feminist march in the city of Belo Horizonte that accused the Catholic Church of causing the deaths of women by opposing the decriminalization of abortion. “During the march there was a pause in front of the prefecture and another in front of the Church, where the women denounced … the position of the church in criminalizing abortion, which makes it an accomplice to the death of many working women,” wrote the MAB.

In 2012, the MAB published an article advertising and linking to a “human rights” report to which it had contributed. The MAB article specifically mentioned the pro-abortion section of the report, which advocated the elimination of penalties for the killing of the unborn.

Like the MST, the MAB promotes Marxist ideology on its webpage. They list “Ten Formulations of Fidel [Castro] as a legacy of the revolutionary struggle.” They also have published a Portuguese translation of Castro's last speech before his death in 2016 in which he laments the fall of the Soviet Union and says, “Another 70 years should not have to pass so that another even like the Russian Revolution can occur, so that humanity can have another example of a great Social Revolution.” The Castro speech is accompanied by an image of Castro together with the logo of the MAB on the lower right (see above).

Contact information (please be polite and respectful in all communications):

Click here to receive contact information for the bishop of your diocese (Canadian residents).

Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) Standing Committee on D&P

Deacon René Laprise, Director of Media Relations   
Address: 2500 Don Reid Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1H 2J2, Canada
Phone: (613) 241-9461 ext. 225
Fax: (613) 241-9048
Click here to send an email.

General Secretariat of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops

Msgr. Frank Leo, General Secretary
Address: 2500 Don Reid Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1H 2J2, Canada
Phone: (613) 241-9461 ext. 206
Fax:     (613) 241-8117
Click here to send an email.

Bishop Douglas Crosby, president of the CCCB:
Phone: (905) 528-7988 x2222
To send an email, click here and click on “email” link to the left.

Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace
Phone (local number): 416-922-1592
Toll-free: 1-800-494-1401
Fax: 416-922-0957
E-mail: [email protected]