By BRIAN CLOWES
(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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What Do the Dissenters Really Want? Nowhere is the modernist attack on the sacraments more intense than it is on Holy Orders. For decades, many faithful priests have been under intense pressure to conform to heterodox initiatives — sometimes even from higher authorities — and many have left the Church entirely as a result.
Orthodox Catholics must not for one instant be deluded into believing that the dissenters will be satisfied with married, homosexual, and women priests. Their goals lie far beyond this intermediate step. Their ultimate objective in fact, is a complete redefinition of the sacraments and of Christ Himself.
The First Step: Married and Women Priests. Dissenters always cloak their language in soothing “cotton candy” vernacular designed to anesthetize the mind of the listener and lull him into mental numbness — and therefore inaction and unawareness. Everything they say sounds so reasonable and seductive, just as were Satan’s words to Adam and Eve.
Sr. Christine Schenk, now retired from FutureChurch, has used this pacifying language:
“We believe in a God of abundance, not a God of scarcity. By confining priesthood to the male celibate variety, we are introducing an artificial scarcity in the Catholic Church. By choosing to do nothing about it, we are saying that the male, celibate priesthood is more important to who we are as Catholics than the Eucharist.”
Elizabeth A. Johnson of Parish Renewal Consulting Services (PRCS) goes so far as to claim that a male priesthood is not only unscriptural and deadly to the faith, but can “unbaptize” people:
“. . . Let it be plainly stated that women are icons of Christ, imago Christi, in every essential way. . . . To teach otherwise is a pernicious error that vitiates the power of baptism. The native physicalism that reduces resembling Christ to being male is so deviant from Scripture and so theologically distorted as to be dangerous to the faith itself.”
Sr. Theresa Kane embarrassed herself during Pope St. John Paul II’s 1979 visit to the United States when she read a statement in his presence demanding the ordination of women priests. Like other dissenters, Kane insists that a male priesthood constitutes a form of idolatry:
“We have a responsibility and an obligation to name and proclaim the discrimination that we experience as a form and an expression of idolatry, a modern-day idolatry. . . . In a sense, we have looked upon the male as being the creation of God, and, in a sense, the human representative of God, and what we have truly done is created idolatry, so that at our worship services, when we have services that are predominantly exclusively male, in a sense we’re promoting our present-day forms of idolatry.
“That’s truly what we’re doing. . . . If only a man can be Pope, if only a man can be a bishop, if only a man can be a priest, that is our present-day idolatry that we’re dealing with.”
The Ultimate Objective: Complete De[con]struction. Modernists claim that they merely want to “rejuvenate,” “reform,” and “renew” the Church — but their ultimate objective is actually to tear down what they call “the patriarchy,” and reconstruct it in their own image, with a pagan goddess at its center.
As “theologian” Rosemary Ruether asks: “The Crucified Woman: Is she only a victim, or can women bring forth redemption from their sufferings on the cross of patriarchy?. . . No token accommodations will satisfy us. What is required is total reconstruction of God, Christ, human nature, and society.”
Ruether does not mention what every construction engineer knows: Before you can reconstruct something, you must completely destroy what stood there before. If the modernists could succeed in this mission, their greatest alleged “oppressor” — the Roman Catholic Church — would not only be defeated; it would simply cease to exist.
Statistical Mendacity
Whenever you hear a liberal quoting numbers in support of his position, you can be certain that he is either ill informed or lying outright.
Examples of this type of statistical mendacity abound:
Liberals want free sex and abortion for everyone, including children as young as ten years old, but most people don’t accept this philosophy. So they publicize a “crisis” in teen pregnancy, give contraceptives to teenagers, and then demand abortion when the teens fornicate more and more and their pregnancy rate skyrockets as a result due to the failure of the contraceptives that the liberals gave them in the first place.
The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) insisted that 5,000 to 10,000 women annually died as a result of illegal abortions. The United States Supreme Court was heavily influenced by this claim, and handed down the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973. Pro-abortionists all over the world have used this tactic to push for legalized abortion.
Liberals dread the relatively rapid population increase in developing countries because they know that a large population means economic power and unwanted economic competition for the United States, a fear explicitly outlined in National Security Study Memo 200 (NSSM-200). So they scare everyone with grossly exaggerated projections of population growth and demand massive funding for population control programs in developing countries that destroy indigenous cultures and trample human rights on a massive scale, as in Vietnam, Peru, India, China, and dozens of other nations.
Environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, claimed that “practically 100 percent” of the entire world’s population would contract cancer due to the use of DDT, which a federal court found to be harmless. The National Academy of Sciences found that “to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT…in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that otherwise would have been inevitable.”
Yet many environmentalists continue to insist that mankind is in grave danger from the use of DDT, and that thousands of species could die out if its use is not banned worldwide. As it is, scientists estimate that the current partial worldwide DDT ban has cost 30 to 50 million human beings their lives. This is as many people as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Mao Zedong murdered.
Dissenters claim that the priest shortage is caused by mandatory priestly celibacy, and the Vatican’s failure to ordain women “priests.” Then they select large, round numbers at random to buttress their false claims, as so many other liberal alarmists have done in the past.
This is a classic example of a strategy that has worked so well so many times: “Never waste a crisis.” Liberals know that they cannot convince the public to accept their programs under normal conditions, so they manufacture a crisis and then ram through their agenda when the public has been concerned and confused enough by their wild claims, bogus statistics, and false stories involving [always anonymous] personal experiences of allegedly brutal oppression.
As Edmund Burke so famously said, “The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”
Regarding the supposed “priest shortage,” dissenters cannot convincingly agitate for the acceptance of women “priests” and the discarding of priestly celibacy unless they first convince Catholics that there is a true crisis called the “priest shortage.”
While the situation may be serious, it is nowhere near critical enough to even contemplate such measures as the dissenters demand.
Any defender of the Catholic faith should become very familiar with the lies used by dissenters, and should be able to refute them from memory. This topic will be covered in the next article.
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