By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 1
(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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“It remains for Us now to say a few words about the Modernist as reformer. From all that has preceded, it is abundantly clear how great and how eager is the passion of such men for innovation. In all Catholicism there is absolutely nothing on which it does not fasten. They wish philosophy to be reformed, especially in the ecclesiastical seminaries. . . . They desire the reform of theology. . . .
“As for history, it must be written and taught only according to their methods and modern principles . . . a share in ecclesiastical government should therefore be given to the lower ranks of the clergy and even to the laity and authority which is too much concentrated should be decentralized . . . and there are some who, gladly listening to the teaching of their Protestant masters, would desire the suppression of the celibacy of the clergy. What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed by them and according to their principles?” — Pope St. Pius X, encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”), September 8, 1907, n. 38.
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What It Means To Be “Universal”: The third of the four marks of the Church is “catholic” (with a small “c”), meaning “universal.” The Church is “universal” in the sense that she has Christ present in her everywhere, with the result that she enjoys “correct and complete confession of faith, full sacramental life, and ordained ministry in apostolic succession” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 830).
Faithful Catholics are comforted by the fact that, no matter where they travel in the world, the Mass and the sacraments are always available to them in a recognizable and valid form, and they are able to find priests who are in accord with the Pope and his bishops. This “sameness” throughout the world is a characteristic no other faith has. It is a bulwark and check against fleeting fashions and illogical innovations of every stripe.
Unfortunately, as I have seen at Call to Action conferences, many dissenters think that sameness is — well — boring. They expect to be entertained or at least distracted during Mass, instead of being focused on an intent worship of Jesus. The Mass is the same everywhere because it removes the need to be focused on procedure and redirects the focus to where it should be — on God.
If professional dissenters manage to enact their proposed “constitutions” and “charters,” every parish and every diocese will be unique in its liturgies, practices, and beliefs. The focus of worshippers will be on the entertainment factor, not on Jesus. This is plainly evident to anyone who has attended a trendy, noisy, and bright service at a Protestant church.
If the dissenters’ demands were to be implemented, the catholic (universal) Church would be reduced from uniform belief to a diverse and unruly riot of creeds, thereby injuring its mark of universality.
And this is exactly what the dissenters desire. If the Church is fractured in such a manner, it will be impossible for her to preach the truth of Christ. The Culture of Death will triumph.
What It Means To Be “Catholic”:
The central meaning of what it means to be authentically “Catholic” is really quite simple to explain. Every true Catholic ardently desires to attain Heaven. We cannot merit Heaven because we are profoundly unworthy of it. We can reach Heaven, but only through the graces given us as a gift by our Lord Jesus Christ. The primary channels of His grace to us are the sacraments. Therefore, every true Catholic cherishes and makes frequent use of the sacraments.
No sacraments, no Heaven. What could be simpler?
Dissenters, particularly of the feminist variety, do not seem capable of grasping this simple truth because of the pride that blinds them. Not only do they completely reject the sacraments in their legitimate form, but they have no use whatever for sacramentals such as the rosary, the scapular, and holy water, dismissing these as “mere superstition.”
In his timeless encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis [“On the Doctrine of the Modernists”], Pope St. Pius X explained:
“. . . It is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and lead it into error, and pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and lurking in its every aspect. It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. . . .
“It is pride which rouses in them the spirit of disobedience and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves, and that they are found to be utterly wanting in respect for authority, even for the supreme authority. Truly there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride” (n. 40).
It is this overweening pride that causes dissenters to radically change the source of power and grace in “sacrament” from God to the people.
Diann Neu and Mary L. Hunt of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) display this pride when they assert: “From a feminist perspective, a sacrament is an act of lifting to public expression the everyday life of people because such life is holy. Prayer is sustained attention which does not make the divine present, but simply recognizes it as so.”
Because dissenters have turned the sacraments upside down, so that their “power” flows from people and not from God, there is no need for a priesthood to administer them. And, for them, since priests have become superfluous, there is no need for a hierarchy. Dissenters agitate for a democratic church because, for them, the very meaning of sacramentality is absent.
For instance, the late Bernard J. Cooke, a theologian and Call to Action speaker, once said that “we still don’t know we are sacrament. The real presence is ourselves. Bread and wine are only instruments of the eucharist.”
Dissenters understand very well that the structure of the Roman Catholic Church, because it is sacramental, must be hierarchical. If it were not, it would degenerate into a jumble of competing sects, each with completely different “sacraments.” The Church must be hierarchical in order to ensure that the sacraments are administered to as many people as possible in their correct forms.
Hierarchy is necessary for any organization if it hopes to survive, regardless of its mission. Even the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s eventually disintegrated because everyone supposedly shared leadership responsibilities.
Dissenters have learned that it is impossible to destroy the hierarchy directly, so they are attacking it indirectly by subverting and diluting the meanings of the sacraments. They are concentrating their assault on those three sacraments that have the most immediate impact on those Catholics who still practice their faith: the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Confession, and the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
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