Culture Of Life 101 . . . “How Dissenters Attack The ‘Holiness’ Of The Church”
By BRIAN CLOWES
Conclusion
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of the book Call to Action or Call to Apostasy, consisting of a detailed description of the current forms of dissent and how to fight them, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“Here it is well to note at once that, given this doctrine of experience united with that of symbolism, every religion, even that of paganism, must be held to be true. . . . Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true” — Pope St. Pius X, encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”), September 8, 1907, n. 14.
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Surrendering to the “New Age” Menace. Pity the poor dissenters. The “jesus” they believe in is a mere prophet and a good man, but no more divine than the rest of us. His only real perfections are tolerance and non-judgmentalism, so he is perfectly willing to accept us just the way we are. The dissenters have fallen into a form of idolatry; the “god” they pretend to worship does not exist.
The dissenters’ “god” only very approximately resembles the One True God, so they must cast about for a “supplement” that will make them feel better about their nagging feeling of spiritual incompleteness.
Satan Steps In. Satan has many tools, but the lie is the handle that fits them all.
One of his most effective tools has an almost infinite variety of forms — “New Age” practices, which have captured millions of souls for him.
There are only two sources of supernatural power: Jesus Christ and Satan (indirectly, since even he cannot act without the permitting will of God). Since the “New Age” is not of Christ, by a simple process of elimination, it must be of Satan.
Many dissenters have devolved to the point where their alleged faith is no longer Catholic or even Christian, but purely pagan. The “New Age” phenomenon is less a movement than a glittering rainbow of pantheistic and polytheistic practices with a flavor for every taste, no matter how esoteric.
In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope St. Pius X recognized the two causes of modernism as pride and curiosity about things that are injurious to one’s faith:
“To penetrate still deeper into the meaning of Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for so deep a sore, it behooves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth….We recognize that the remote causes may be reduced to two: curiosity and pride….A lamentable spectacle is that presented by the aberrations of human reason when it yields to the spirit of novelty…and when relying too much on itself, it thinks it can find the truth outside the Catholic Church wherein truth is found without the slightest shadow of error” (n. 40).
There are no Traditional Masses at Call to Action conventions. However, conference-goers may choose from a galaxy of “prayer experiences” which are unabashedly “New Age” rituals. The most popular of these, the “Dance of Universal Peace,” uses “chant and movement honoring the many spirit-filled traditions of the people of the earth.”
While ridiculing traditional Catholics and stereotyping them as “extremist” and “out of the mainstream,” dissenters often participate in activities that are outright laughable. A group called “Green Nation” distributed a flier at a Call to Action National Conference that read: “As the Green Nation takes root in your imagination, you rise from the industrial age the way a great Pine rises from the earth….You become a Pine Tree Chief. If it suits your ecological purpose you choose a primitive name that expresses your uniqueness, a name like Crazy Tongue, Feather Head, Wild Flower, Lemon Tree, etc.”
Well . . . at least one of the four suggested names is appropriate.
Former Catholic priest Matthew Fox has boasted that “I say ‘thank you’ for the orange that dies for me this morning when I drink a glass of orange juice by promising to be as succulent and round and radiant as an orange throughout the day.” Fox also speaks approvingly of a friend who “liberates” (steals) bags of ice cubes from freezers at gas stations by throwing them into nearby ponds.
G.K. Chesterton believed that when a man stops believing in God, he will believe in anything. While the dissenters claim repeatedly that they believe in God, they in fact only believe in themselves and in a limitless galaxy of half-baked modernist “New Age” idols. They describe themselves as “spiritual — but not religious.”
Dissenters and self-described liberal Catholics in general pray very little, and as a result do not really know God or have any kind of a personal relationship with Him. One study showed that only four percent of liberal Catholics prayed to God daily; only seven percent attend Sunday Mass; three percent said they have a personal relationship with God; only one percent believe that their own personal religious beliefs are “very important,” and none at all had a favorable opinion of Pope St. John Paul II.
What Is the Point of All of This? Rosemary Radford Ruether revealed the true motivation of many “Catholic” feminists when she described how early feminists hailed the worship of the “Mother Goddess” as part of “the golden age of human society that was overthrown by the regressive influence of patriarchal religion, which displaced an earlier era of women’s power.”
These “spiritual” feminists “sought to revive the ancient matriarchal culture and religion, with its female symbols of the divine, as the more appropriate vehicle for female empowerment.”
Feminist dissenting groups often pray to pagan deities. As one of many examples, a favorite chant at Woman Church “liturgies” is directed toward the Holy Virgin Huntress Artemis: “I am good. We are good. I am power. We are power. I am womb water. We are womb water.”
As comedy writer Dave Barry likes to say, “I swear I am not making this up!”
These feminist groups also jettison the holy saints of the traditional Church calendar and substitute for them pagan and other non-Christian holidays and events such as Kwanzaa, candlemas, oester (not “Easter”), yule, lammas, hallowmas, beltane, solstices, and equinoxes.
A Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) manual hints (shouts?) that the members of “women church” may someday shed all pretense of having a marginally Christian veneer, and also names as their source of power the pagan “Spirit of Sophia”:
“It is premature to say whether women church will remain Christian in focus, but it is important to name its roots as such. . . . As women church we are well accompanied by one another and by the Spirit of Sophia in our local groups and around the world. This accompaniment is the source of our power. Blessed be.”
Other dissenters and renegade groups boldly state that Christianity — and, indeed, all religion — simply has no place in their lives.
For example, the Young Feminist Network, which was organized by the Women’s Ordination Conference, says: “Younger generations are also more likely than their older counterparts to feel that it is possible to lead an ethical or moral life without organized religion.”
“Theologian” Mary Daly goes so far as to rave: “The myth and symbols of Christianity are inherently and essentially sexist. Christianity is idolatry.”
Going All the Way. Occasionally, a well-defined statement of purpose emerges from the dissenters’ reams of warped “femology,” psychobabble, and fraudulent history, showing that the authors are deadly serious about undermining and destroying the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Rosemary Ruether’s book Womanguides is an enduring favorite of dissenters. The author fumes that:
“Only the complete and total demolition of the social body will cure the fatal sickness. Only the overthrow of the three thousand year old beast of masculist materialism will save the race. . . . No token accommodations will satisfy us. What is required is the total reconstruction of God, Christ, human nature, and society . . . we know we will die unless a WomanChrist pops up (like a rabbit out of a hat) between breasted mountains.”
Chillingly, Ruether and other dissenting authors pay heed to Baal, to whom the ancient pagans sacrificed their infant sons and daughters. In Womanguides, she gushes:
“. . . We see the death of Baal, overwhelmed by the forces of drought and death . . . [the goddess Anath] buries him with rites of mourning. . . . From her sowing of the new wheat in the ground, Baal rises. With a cry of exaltation, we rejoice at the close of the drama: The Lord has arisen, is seated again on the throne. He reigns! Alleluia!”
We have seen how the dissenters seek to undermine and render ineffective the unity and the holiness of the Roman Catholic Church. In the next articles, we will see how they attack the universality of the Church by attempting to dilute the meaning of the sacraments, in particular the Eucharist, Holy Orders, and Confession.
