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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“They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved. . . . For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, the dog turns back to his own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mire” (2 Peter 2:18-19, 21-22).
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What It Means To Be “One”: The essence of the Roman Catholic Church is the unity she derives from her bridegroom, Our Lord Jesus Christ. The worst wound to the unity of the Church does not come from the attacks of outsiders, but from the separation of people from the Church through dissension and sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes this principle:
“Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes. Where there is virtue, however, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers” (n. 817).
This contrast is vividly illustrated by professional dissenters such as those in Call to Action (CTA), the National Coalition of American Nuns, WATER, and “Catholics” for [a Free] Choice (CFFC), who variously embrace and even celebrate such mortal sins as contraception, sterilization, masturbation, abortion, homosexual acts, and divorce and remarriage.
As the dissenters strive for more and more open acceptance of what everyone formerly agreed to be sinful, the unity of the Church becomes more and more splintered.
The professional dissenters promote an endless array of stunted and unholy imitation “churches” such as AmChurch, HouseChurch, GreenChurch, FemChurch, NewChurch, WomenChurch, HumanChurch, FutureChurch, FreeChurch, WeChurch, USChurch and MeChurch — anything and everything but the authentic Roman Catholic Church.
Ultimately, as they implement concepts such as CTA-style “small faith communities” and “constitutions” at every level, the dissenters hope that the Church will be reduced from a single immovable rock to a disorganized heap of pebbles, each of which is completely unique, with no connection to or unity with any other.
In other words, the dissenters hope to reforge the Roman Catholic Church into a gaggle of liberal Protestant denominations, none of which would present the slightest threat to the Culture of Death.
Institutionalizing dissent through “constitutional” action: The Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) was founded in 1980. Its primary objective is to agitate for shared decision-making between the clergy and the laity through the implementation of a “Constitution for the Catholic Church.”
ARCC’s suggested Constitution closely parallels its “Charter of the Rights of Catholics in the Church,” which itself is modeled not on Scripture, Revelation, or sacred Tradition, but on the Charter of the United Nations. Fundamental to ARCC’s Constitution and its Charter is a belief that all Catholics are “radically equal,” whether they be ordained or laity, dissenting or faithful, living in a sustained state of grace or wallowing in mortal sin.
The Charter was signed by Call to Action and many other members of Catholic Organizations for Renewal (COR), and all of the major dissenting groups support its articles.
Many of the articles of ARCC’s Charter seem reasonable to most uninformed Catholics, but their implementation would unquestionably lead to total anarchy within the Church, its devolvement into just another liberal Protestant denomination, and the loss of tens of millions of souls.
All of the articles in the Charter strongly emphasize personal autonomy, freedom and the absolute supremacy of conscience — not personal sanctification, self-control, and sacrifice. This reduces ARCC’s document to nothing more than an arrogant list of demands.
The First Article. The first article of ARCC’s Charter is the most important of all. It states that “All Catholics have the right to follow their informed consciences in all matters.”
Dissenters passionately believe that the final arbiter of any decision must be the person’s conscience, regardless of whether it is properly formed. Of course, if the Church accepts this “ideal,” the original standard — reliance on an informed conscience based on the authority of the Magisterium — will be swept away, to be replaced by a mandate for pure moral relativism.
Anthony Padovano, cofounder and president of CORPUS, the National Society for a Married Priesthood, concluded his talk at the 1996 Call to Action National Convention by openly advocating the replacement of the Holy Catholic Church with a humanistic construct. He effectively called for the destruction of the Church as he said:
“When the cathedral is destroyed, a new temple of conscience and the spirit is built by more than human hands…our fundamental question in the Church should not be about whether something is Catholic, but whether it is healthy and holy and human, for if it is all of these, then it is Catholic also.”
Those who embrace the absolute supremacy of human conscience by definition discard objective truth, because the unfettered “conscience” is notoriously fickle, compromising, and rationalizing when temptation strikes. Just as important, since a person whose conscience reigns supreme will inevitably fall into sin and then accept that sin, he will also be more tolerant of sin in others.
Another cofounder of CORPUS, Frank Bonnike, says that “I keep all the rules, but I also respect people who don’t keep all the rules. The key is to respect their conscience.”
Dissenters are very fond of quoting the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom), in support of their contention that we should be able to do anything our “conscience” does not object to.
However, Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ, principal author of the Declaration on Religious Freedom, anticipated this kind of dishonesty. He stated in a footnote to the Abbott Gallagher edition of the Second Vatican Council texts:
“The Declaration does not base the right to the free exercise of religion on ‘freedom of conscience.’ Nowhere does this phrase occur. And the Declaration nowhere lends its authority to the theory for which the phrase frequently stands, namely, that I have the right to do what my conscience tells me to do, simply because my conscience tells me to do it.
“This is a perilous theory. Its particular peril is subjectivism — the notion that, in the end, it is my conscience, and not the objective truth, which determines what is right and wrong, true or false.”
The dissenters also conveniently neglect to mention paragraph 8 of the Dignitatis Humanae, which notes that “not a few can be found who seem inclined to use the name of freedom as the pretext for refusing to submit to authority and for making light of the duty of obedience.”
The correct connection between freedom and truth as it should be perceived by the conscience, and the proper role of the Magisterium, was outlined by Pope St. John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor [“The Splendor of Truth”]:
“Consequently ‘in the practical judgment of conscience,’ which imposes on the person the obligation to perform a given act, ‘the link between freedom and truth is made manifest.’ Precisely for this reason conscience expresses itself in acts of ‘judgment’ which reflect the truth about the good, and not in arbitrary ‘decisions.’
“The maturity and responsibility of these judgments — and, when all is said and done, of the individual who is their subject — are not measured by the liberation of the conscience from objective truth, in favor of an alleged autonomy in personal decisions, but, on the contrary, by an insistent search for truth and by allowing oneself to be guided by that truth in one’s actions” (n. 61).
We can say with some certitude that the dissenters don’t really believe that “all Catholics have the right to follow their informed consciences in all matters,” because, when orthodox Catholics “follow their consciences” and oppose abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and contraception, the dissident groups stridently condemn them and ridicule their views. As with “tolerance” and “non-judgmentalism,” the glorification of “conscience” is a mere smokescreen that dissenters use to further their goals.
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