By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 2
(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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“If they must be Christians, let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian coloring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing. The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship” — The master demon Screwtape instructing his student demon Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters: A Devil’s Diabolical Advice for the Capturing of the Human Heart, XXV.
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To defeat an enemy, you must destroy his heart. Therefore, dissenters focus on the heart of the Church — the Holy Mass — by diluting its meaning to the point where it becomes just another social gathering, devoid of the saving power of the Eucharist.
Reconstructing the Mass. There are two primary methods by which dissenters hope to remake every parish into a reflection of its members and their individual beliefs instead of a mirror of the Truth of Christ. These are 1) mandating “constitutions” down to the parish level, as previously described, and 2) a complete overhaul of the Sacred Liturgy.
The Mass is the focus of an authentic Catholic’s spiritual life, and is the most powerful source of our Lord’s sacramental grace. Organized dissenting groups intend to reduce the Mass to a mere collection of “rituals” and “celebrations” which are centered around various personal and earthly events. For them, the “eucharist” (always with a small “e”) is not the actual re-enactment of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for us. It is a mere meal, a symbol devoid of sanctifying grace.
Dissenting Catholics go to Mass not to be sanctified, but to be entertained.
The Blessed Sacrament is never reserved for adoration at Call to Action or other dissenting conferences, and speakers never mention the “Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” the “True Presence” or the “Blessed Sacrament.” Since the Mass is merely symbolic to them, dissenters refer to it as a “liturgy,” “celebration,” or “eucharist.”
In fact, the dissenters have gone so far as to state outright that the Mass is not an unbloody re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ. As one example, during her 1997 keynote address at a Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) convention, Sr. Mary Collins, OSB, said that “a priest centered theology of the eucharist is defective and inadequate,” and that using the word “sacrifice” to describe the Mass means that the actions of the priest are “cult-like.”
This outlook shifts the people’s focus from the limitless power of God through His sacraments to the extremely limited power of “humankind,” with all of its flaws and imperfections. This would allow the dissenters to easily control the disorganized remains of the Catholic Church. They would also fulfill the prophecy of Romans 1:22 23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man.”
This Scripture passage, of course, describes Humanism. Pope St. John Paul II recognized this danger in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio:
“History is not simply a fixed progression towards what is better, but rather an event of freedom, and even a struggle between freedoms that are in mutual conflict, a conflict between two loves: The love of God to the point of disregarding self, and the love of self to the point of disregarding God” (n. 6).
The reason given by the dissenters for gutting the Mass is to shift “power” from the hierarchy to the laity. It does not seem to occur to the dissenters that they will lose the real power, the primary source of God’s grace, because they truly believe the New Age dogma that “god” is in all of us, and that we humans are the source of all holiness.
The Reconstructors. Diann L. Neu is one of the foremost “practitioners” attempting to reconstruct the Mass.
Immediately after graduating from the Jesuit College of Theology in Berkeley, she founded WATER, the “Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual,” a New Age group masquerading as a Catholic theological “think tank.”
A series of talks given by Neu concerning “Creating Feminist Liturgies” provides a detailed outline of how she and other revisionists plan to retool the liturgy.
Neu’s reasoning is quite simple. She claims that the current liturgy does not meet the “needs” of the people. Her solution is to institute a system of feminist “liturgies” that will “destroy the patriarchy” by “transferring power from men to women.”
Neu claims that “feminist liturgy brings to public expression the faith life of the community, free from hierarchy, patriarchy, kyriarchy….It’s more than women only, it’s supportive men and children who need such liturgies. They’re inclusive liturgies, they’re feminist liturgies. And I use that word ‘feminist’ because I think it’s important for us to have the edge that we are moving away from the kind of a church that can excommunicate us — that can tell us what we’re doing is not ‘church’.”
Neu is extremely specific in her plans. She says that New Age liturgists can use three strategies to “create a feminist liturgy:”
1) making a completely inclusive liturgy,
2) reclaiming religious tradition and symbols, and
3) creating new ceremonies.
Some Catholics recognize that these changes are gradually being introduced into their own parishes. Pastors and liturgical directors don’t make these aberrations up on their own; they get their ideas, either directly or indirectly, from dissenting groups like WATER.
Strategy n. 1: A Fully Inclusive Liturgy. The purpose of an “inclusive” liturgy is to “empower” all victim groups that believe they have been dominated by or excluded by the Church throughout history. These groups, of course, include women, homosexuals, the “differently abled,” and (in practice) anyone who is not a healthy heterosexual white male.
Diann Neu says that “we speak of ‘women first’ to signify a power change.”
In order to “shift power,” of course, we must first modify our language. As one example, Neu claims that Haggar was slighted in Scripture merely because she had dark skin: “Darkness gets bad play. There’s a power in darkness, there’s a womb life in darkness,” says Neu. “There’s a power in darkness as there is a power in light. We as liturgists need to be careful not to speak of darkness as negative, it’s a positive.”
Setting aside the absurd racial connotations, Neu has obviously forgotten the chilling words of John’s Gospel (3:19 20): “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” Anyone who accepts and embraces spiritual darkness, as Neu has, is turning their back on Jesus, who is the “light of the world” (John 8:12).
According to Neu, liturgists should never use words such as “vision” or “hearing” in the Mass because such terms are “ablist,” or discriminatory against those who cannot see or hear. She recommends “dreams” as a more inclusive term than “vision.” She says, “In order to include those of other nationalities, liturgists should use other languages, even if the majority of the people in the congregation don’t understand them.”
So we might ask this question: What is the purpose of attending a liturgy if you have no idea what is going on and can’t understand a word that is being said? Such an exercise is as useless as watching a movie in a language you don’t understand while wearing a blindfold. In other words, it would be a complete waste of time.
Neu carries “inclusivity” to its logical conclusion when she claims: “We all wait for women to have the fullness of our powers used in a recognized [way], in priesthood, I think we need to stretch to a co-papacy, not only a pope that’s a woman pope, but we need a decision-making co-papacy involved as well. There’s always one more step in inclusivity.”
Indeed there is. Such fanatical meddlers utterly lack patience and the inner peace granted by Jesus, and are relentlessly driven to agitate for endless change, suffering from the delusion that they are doing something useful or beneficial.
These self-described “reformers” will never be satisfied until they have completely made God over into man’s image, and until the Church follows man instead of man following God speaking through His Church. Those misguided Catholics who believe that the feminists will be satisfied with a male/female inclusive lectionary will soon find that the dissenter’s appetite for change is truly insatiable.
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