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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As we have seen, the first article of the “Proposed Charter of the Catholic Church,” formulated by the dissenting group Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC), calls for conscience to be the supreme arbiter of moral decision-making. ARCC makes no distinction between properly formed and unformed consciences. This means that, under the charter, there would be complete freedom to commit whatever acts are considered acceptable by the individual.
Succeeding articles of the charter are equally dangerous.
The Second Article: Article n. 2 of the charter asserts: “Officers of the Church have the right to teach on matters both of private and public morality only after wide consultation with the faithful prior to the formulation of the teaching.”
In addition to its other defects, this article highlights the primary shortcoming in the Catholic Common Ground Project (CCGP).
If a group of people with diverse backgrounds meets to discuss the morality of a particular act, and if one of the ground rules of the discussion is “tolerance for the viewpoints of others,” the inevitable result will be the “lowest common denominator” — only that position that is most tolerant and nonjudgmental, or, in other words, most liberal.
This, of course, is exactly what the dissenters want — a “democratic” system of consultation that guarantees that their objectives will be voted in by the people in a carefully controlled process with a pre-ordained conclusion.
More fundamentally, article n. 2 of the charter completely rejects objective truth by subjecting morality to a public vote.
The Fifth Article: This article states that “all Catholics have the right to a voice in all decisions that affect them, including the choosing of their leaders.”
Under the regime envisioned by this article, authority is not conferred by God through Holy Orders, but by the will and the vote of the people. The Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) and other dissenting groups agree that priests should be replaced by “community ordained facilitators” or “practitioners” who are given their positions by the votes of the people in the parish. These “facilitators” could, of course, be women as well as men, married as well as unmarried.
According to ARCC, a priest does not offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass or confer any other sacrament by the authority of Christ, but instead by the consent of the people. This means that the ARCC style “sacraments” are not of Christ; therefore, they have no power to sanctify. They become empty rituals of the type commonly practiced at Call to Action conferences, where all of the assembled lay people speak the words of consecration.
Article n. 5 dovetails nicely with article n. 16, which states that “all Catholics, regardless of canonical status (lay or clerical), sex or sexual orientation, have the right to exercise all ministries in the Church for which they are adequately prepared, according to the needs and with the approval of the community.”
This call for women’s ordination is repeated in article n. 26, which claims that “all Catholic women have an equal right with men to the resources and the exercise of all the powers of the Church.”
The dissenters are fully aware that if women were “ordained” under their system, they would all be extremely liberal since orthodox Catholic women would automatically exclude themselves from the process. The result would be a flood of untrained ersatz “priestesses” who would enthusiastically promote contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, and who would relentlessly condemn the remnants of the “patriarchal” Church from the pulpit.
The extreme liberal leanings of potential women “priestesses” were revealed by a March 1999 survey conducted by the Women’s Ordination Conference. Of 265 women interviewed, three-fourths supported premarital sex and abortion; 85 percent were in favor of homosexual genital activity; 95 percent supported contraception, divorce and remarriage, married priests and the elimination of priestly celibacy; and 99 percent demanded the use of “inclusive and gender-neutral” language in the liturgy.
The Episcopal Church in the United States is suffering from the malignant effects of a female “priesthood.” When its 72nd General Convention in Philadelphia approved women’s ordination in July 1976 after years of pressure by radicals, its membership was about 2.88 million. Almost immediately, women “priestesses” began leading the way on church “reform” on every moral issue, pulling it sharply to the left.
One woman “priestess” went so far as to run an abortion mill out of her church basement, and publicly proclaimed that abortion is a “sacrament.” Such decisions are likely a large part of the reason that the membership of the Episcopal Church USA plunged to its current 1.7 million, a decline of 41 percent in less than 40 years.
Intelligent Catholics should study the sad consequences suffered by trendy churches that have ordained women, and then they should firmly reject the fatal concept of women “priestesses.”
The Eighth Article. This article holds that “all Catholics have the right to express publicly their dissent in regard to decisions made by Church authorities.”
Modernist organizations frequently justify their actions by claiming that their dissenting activities are “for the good of the Church.”
The organization Celibacy is the Issue (CITI) shows that, in reality, dissenters pursue institutionalized humanism and situational ethics, which would lead to the end of the Church:
“Catholic Christianity is a living faith, not a dead imitation of a past which no longer exists. Catholic theology is a contemporary reflection in today’s thought categories on present questions and problems about what it means to think and live as a Catholic Christian in this concrete world. To parrot the past is to pervert it. To be a Christian means to make what Jesus thought, taught, and wrought understandable and applicable in today’s language and life. Christian life and theology must be something dynamic, not dead, and therefore at its heart there must be deliberation, dissent, dialogue, decision. . . .”
The encyclical Veritatis Splendor shows us that systematic and widespread dissent actually disconnects human freedom from truth, thus blinding people to the distinction between licit and illicit freedoms:
“[A] new situation has come about within the Christian community itself, which has experienced the spread of numerous doubts and objections of a human and psychological, social and cultural, religious and even properly theological nature, with regard to the Church’s moral teachings. It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of certain anthropological and ethical presuppositions.
“At the root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth” (n. 4).
When justifying systematic dissent, liberal Catholics often speak of Vatican II, and occasionally justify their actions by quoting Lumen Gentium: “By reason of the knowledge, competence or pre-eminence which they have, the laity are empowered — indeed sometimes obliged — to manifest their opinion on those things which pertain to the good of the Church” (n. 37).
However, liberal Catholics ignore the passage that immediately follows: “Like all Christians, the laity should promptly accept in Christian obedience what is decided by the pastors who, as teachers and rulers of the Church, represent Christ.”
Even more telling is Lumen Gentium (n. 20), which proclaims that “. . . the bishops have by divine institution taken the place of the apostles as pastors of the Church, in such wise that whoever listens to them is listening to Christ and whoever despises them despises Christ and Him who sent Christ.”
If a person cannot distinguish between licit and illicit freedoms, he becomes lost in the featureless landscape of moral relativism, and there is no hope that he can discern the objective truth. This is one of the most effective tactics used by Satan to ensnare souls.
The central hypocrisy of situational ethics lies in the fact that, when its practitioners gain power, they ruthlessly stifle dissent to their opinions and regulations. For example, at its inauguration in Detroit in 1976, Call to Action systematically suppressed, excluded and ridiculed orthodox Catholic speakers.
The CTA type “New Age” liberal claims that he or she will “fight to the death for your right to free speech,” and then draws up a long list of exceptions to this lofty claim. They say that orthodox Catholics may not assemble outside abortion mills because this causes a “climate of fear and violence;” may not speak out against the homosexual agenda because this creates “an atmosphere of homophobia;” and may not oppose women’s ordination, because this is “misogynist.”
In other words, orthodox Catholics may say anything they want to say — as long as the dissenters approve of the message.
The followers of the Culture of Death loudly chant “Question authority!” until they have the authority — and then they use a wide array of excuses to crush any dissent from their agendas.
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