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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“I appeal to you, brethren, to take note of those who create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by fair and flattering words they deceive the hearts of the simple-minded” (Romans 16:17-18).
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The great Chinese military strategist General Sun Tzu wrote more than 25 centuries ago in his classic The Art of War: “All warfare is based primarily on the deception of an enemy. Fighting on a battlefield is the most primitive way of making war. There is no art higher than to destroy your enemy without a fight — by subverting anything of value in your enemy’s country.”
Sun could never have imagined that, in the Third Millennium, his strategies would be used to attempt to undermine and destroy the very identity of a church — the Roman Catholic Church.
The dissenter’s primary objective is to undermine the four marks of the Church, the marks by which we can unerringly identify a church that is truly Roman Catholic.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “These four characteristics — one, holy, catholic, and apostolic — inseparably linked with each other, indicate essential features of the Church and her mission” (n. 811). The Catholic Church possesses all four of these marks, which identify her positively as the one true Church founded by her bridegroom, Jesus Christ.
If the dissenters can succeed in subverting and thus destroying one or more of the four marks of the Church, they will have remolded her into their own image — a liberal Protestant church that is not of God, but of man. The dissenters may have done all of the physical work, but the secular humanist construct that will result has as its author none other than Satan himself.
This is all part of a much larger strategy pursued by the Culture of Death. In order to understand this process, we should understand how a fundamental moral revolution takes place in a society.
How a Quiet Revolution Works. In every nation, a small cadre of the elite — numbering no more than about one-tenth of one percent of the population — produces and promotes the ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which the rest of the population lives. These people are those who lead the eight focused sources of influence in every society:
The United Nations;
The executive branches of the national governments, regions, and states;
The courts, particularly the national court systems;
The legislatures at the national, regional, and state or provincial levels;
The leaders and boards of the professional associations, particularly the medical and legal professions;
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, and public-interest groups;
The media, particularly the entertainment industry (motion pictures, television, radio), the print and news media (newspapers, magazines, book authors, and publishers and newscasters), and the arts; and
School leaders, from grade school board members to the policymakers at medical and legal colleges.
As we have seen in all of the “developed” nations (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and South Africa), the anti-lifers have taken over the power structures of society by prosecuting a “quiet revolution” in our values over the past 50 years. Having largely succeeded in the West, they are now diverting floods of money into promoting the Culture of Death in the Southern Hemisphere.
People tend to listen to those in authority. If, over a long enough period of time, the courts, the politicians and the media repeat the message that abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and physician-assisted suicide should be permitted in the names of freedom and tolerance, and that opposition to it is “judgmental” and “violent,” then the people are going to begin thinking this way as well.
The objective of anti-life infiltration and subversion is to get talented people into the leadership positions of the focused sources of influence over a period of decades. Once they accomplish this, the new anti-life leaders introduce their agendas, stifle all opposing initiatives, and subvert these sources of influence so that their voices are added to the ranks of those loudly chorusing for “progress” and “change.” Suddenly, the liberal clarion call “Question Authority” becomes “Obey Authority Without Question.” All of the hierarchical sources of influence in society are vulnerable to this tactic.
Once the leadership of a nation has been subverted, there are only two sources of influence remaining as obstacles to the completion of the anti-life revolution: the Church and the family. These are the more diffuse sources of influence, where, instead of a tiny elite, millions of priests, ministers, and parents transmit their values to the next generation. This diffusion of influence makes it much harder to subvert and pervert Church and family.
As long as the Church and the family remain strong, the Culture of Death cannot succeed. This is why the Church and the family are under such savage and sustained attack today. If they fall, there is little hope to salvage the society.
Why Dissent Is Deadly. This is why we must defend the Roman Catholic Church from dissent, because dissent is all part of the overall strategy of the Culture of Death. If the Church can be neutralized and sidelined, the greatest remaining obstacle to total victory of the Culture of Death will have been removed.
We should not be deceived, by either our friends or our enemies, into thinking that the targets of anti-life infiltration and subversion are limited to the most obvious targets — the prime example being the male-run “patriarchal” Catholic Church. Indeed, radical feminists and others want to destroy all current societal structures and replace them with entities they can control.
“There are two ways of getting rid of a structure. One is to put a bomb under it, and the other is to dig around and undermine it until it topples. . . . [Women should fight] on all fronts at once. There is no linchpin to patriarchal power; no Winter Palace which can be assaulted collectively and appropriated once and for all — though all the contributors [to feminism in Canada] are united in their recognition of the control of reproduction as one of its fundamental constituents. The mechanisms of male dominance are multiform and interconnected (they have had a long time to grow and consolidate) — the family, the economy, the church, and the educational system, for example. These pivotal points of control have to be undermined, not merely assaulted, but dismantled bit-by-bit from the ground up” (The Feminist Takeover: From Patriarchy to Matriarchy in Two Decades by Betty Steele).
The sustained attack on the four marks of the Church is not some formal, scripted conspiracy. There was no important meeting of dissenting groups decades ago, where the moderator said “All right, Call to Action and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious will attack the oneness of the Church. Dignity USA and Catholics for a Free Choice, you go after the catholicity of the Church….” and so on.
The dissenters simply understand — correctly — that attacking the four marks of the Church is the most efficient and effective way to destroy her. Like all of us, they have witnessed the tragic examples provided by the mainline Protestant denominations. They have seen that, once the marks of a church have been subverted and discarded, that church becomes a fractured kaleidoscope of conflicting beliefs and practices, thus rendering it completely ineffectual at either saving souls or societies: “If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand” (Mark 3:25).
In summary, therefore, all Catholics of goodwill must educate themselves and then stand against the sustained and pernicious assault of both organized dissent and the dissent we see in individuals around us. We must enlist in and then strengthen the ready-made army that has always stood against evil, and we must fearlessly oppose the enemy wherever he or she exists — and often that enemy will be in our own families.
By defending the faith, we are strengthening the only entity that can ever stand against the evils of our day — the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
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