Leon Podles now seems to use his blog mostly for discussing the history of his family, but he sometimes uses this as a peg for wider reflections.
He uses this post about a Quaker ancestress who dabbled in spiritualism to discuss the dangers of having anything to do with spirit mediums. In this connection he has some very disturbing information about Michael Ledwith. I always assumed that Ledwith formed his association with the deeply sinister spirit medium and preacher of gnosticism JZ Knight when he was at a loose end after his departure from Maynooth, but apparently he was attending her school of darkness a decade before his debacle, when he was actually President of Maynooth:
www.podles.org/dialogue/lydia-ann-lawrence-lawrence-lawrence-and-spiritualism-2852.htmEXTRACT
I think that the problem is not so much communication with the spirit world or communication with those who we love who are now in heaven, but with the use of mediums. God can certainly communicate with us, and he can let angels and the spirits of the departed communicate with us. But he does not use mediums to do this.
Two modern examples may make this clearer, and how dangerous such attempts are...
[The first example described is Vassula Ryden]
...Michaél Ledwith
Michaél Ledwith was the president of Meynooth, the principal seminary in Ireland. The Pope John Paul appointed him a member of the International Theological Commission, which is charged with advising the pope on theological matters.
Ledwith had been involved with sexual abuse in Ireland, and sexual abuse occurred in his new community. But there is an even deeper spiritual disorder. In the 1980s he became a disciple of JZ Knight, who is a medium who challes Ramtha:
“Ramtha”…is the name of a reputed entity whom Knight says she channels. According to Knight, Ramtha was a Lemurian warrior who fought the Atlanteans over 35,000 years ago.
The four cornerstones of Ramtha’s philosophy are:
The statement ‘You are god’
The directive to make known the unknown
The concept that consciousness and energy create the nature of reality
The challenge to conquer yourself
Ramtha’s teaching on sexual molestation is of special relevance to Ledwith:
“Thus the one who needs to molest and the one who needs to be molested—because he needs to understand it—are brought together for the experience. In the understanding called God, nothing is evil.”
In 2013 Melissa Genson, a reporter, recounted:
In 1988, JZ Knight told ABC’s 20/20, “If a person is ever sorry about what they ever did, then they will never learn, and they never progress and go forward.”
Those words must have had a ring to them.
The following year, Irish Monsignor Michael Ledwith began a double life, commuting half way around the globe to study under JZ Knight at Yelm’s Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE).
That was quite a coup for JZ Knight. At the time he joined RSE in 1989, Monsignor Ledwith was President of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, and head of the National Seminary in Ireland. He was one of a small handful of theological advisors to Pope John Paul II. There was talk of him becoming Archbishop. He had risen very quickly through the ranks, and was still quite young for all his achievements.
Others in RSE’s 1989 beginners’ group, Ahk Men Ra, said that Michael Ledwith started off in the rank and file. Soon enough, though, his remarkable credentials quickly vaulted him into JZ Knight’s inner circle. He became one of RSE’s most esteemed teachers.
Other RSE students felt honored that such an important man was part of their fledgling school in Yelm. They felt that Michael Ledwith’s presence gave legitimacy to RSE and JZ Knight’s teachings. Invitations to dinner parties with Ledwith were eagerly sought. He regaled the other RSE students with stories of his adventures around the world, hobnobbing with the upper echelons of power and prestige.
It’s a good guess that Monsignor Ledwith had kept his connection to JZ Knight a secret from his other life in Ireland and the Vatican. Knight teaches that there is no right or wrong, that not even murder is wrong. That there is no good or bad. That you should think only of yourself.
All of that didn’t jibe with the teachings of Jesus, to which Ledwith had pledged his life when he was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1967.
It turned out that Monsignor Ledwith had other secrets in his life, besides RSE. Dark, ugly ones.
Secrets that, when finally revealed, made him a hated man in Ireland. The Irish press reported that Ledwith “fled” Ireland to come…here. Where JZ Knight waited with open arms. No more double life. He apparently needed JZ for real, this time. And she certainly knew how to make good use of him.
When Michael Ledwith’s dark secrets finally came to light, angry Irish citizens demonstrated against the Church leadership who had punished and banished a whistleblower priest many years earlier. That brave priest’s life was ruined when he had tried to report Ledwith’s ugly secrets in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, Ledwith’s career had skyrocketed.
These same secrets were later discussed on the floor of the Irish Senate, with the Minister of State in attendance.
In the years following his disgraced flight from Ireland, Michael Ledwith has appeared to lose touch with reality. He has also spoken with increasing bitterness about God, the Judeo-Christian ethic, the Bible, and even the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy that fiercely protected him for so long…and punished another, in his stead.
In the 1999 JZ Knight video The Two Paths, Michael Ledwith gives a rambling talk about how wine grapes are not native to planet Earth. He solemnly explains that the original grape vines were brought here 450,000 years ago by space aliens on UFOs. These space aliens hung around long enough to make wine and mate with the locals.
According to JZ and Ledwith’s teachings, the wine grape is not all that came here from outer space. JZ Knight has long taught that Jesus was actually a space alien who came here on a UFO, and who hated God just like she does. Ledwith agrees.
Both JZ and Ledwith shared the stage for two hours, and revisited the Jesus-as-alien theme during a March 2011 RSE “wine ceremony”—what participants define as pounding a lot of wine, bottle after bottle. And chasing it with tequila, cocaine, marijuana, and Prozac. Among other things.
Michael Ledwith had to be helped to his feet and guided to the stage for this 2011 joint presentation with JZ Knight. It was now seven hours into JZ’s sixteen-hour wine ceremony. Ledwith wobbled on unsteady feet in disheveled clothes, and he stared at JZ with glazed eyes. Once on stage, he held himself up by clutching onto the back of JZ’s throne.
At that point, though, Ledwith appeared to be holding up better than his hostess. JZ’s hair straggled around her face. Her make-up was streaking. Her words were slurred. Her sentences rambled nonsensically, and were laced with profanities, like “f-ck Jehovah.”
Once Ledwith was safely escorted onto stage, JZ returned to her teaching that Jesus really was an alien, who came to this planet to teach the opposite of what is in the Bible. JZ and Ledwith explained that Jesus actually came here to teach the same things that JZ Knight teaches, and that the Bible got it all wrong.
During their joint presentation, Micheal Ledwith called the God of the Bible “fickle, capricious, psychotic, neurotic, and insecure, and we are supposed to believe that He is the Creator God.” JZ added that God is a “psychotic, insecure son of a bitch,” and Ledwith laughed.
Such is the man who educated Irish seminarians and advised the pope...
END OF EXTRACT