Promising Rumbles From Under The Rubble

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

The Democrat Party is slouching toward unanimous support of abortion in every stage of pregnancy. Unfortunately, Catholics Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are leading the way. Every Democrat candidate in the country supports policy — or else.
Joe Biden pounds the table, promising that he will sign a bill authorizing abortion up to birth nationwide as soon as Congress passes it. Because Joe routinely blurts banalities, his Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre makes it clear: Yes, Joe means it.
The position is so extreme that only North Korea and Communist China and their ilk allow it. But Nancy Pelosi distinguishes her support from theirs on theological grounds: It’s “sinful” to oppose abortion, she said last week. For her source, she quickly shifts to the dialectic of our old friend, the class struggle, claiming that restrictions on abortion are an “assault on women of color and women [in] lower income families.”
Progressives in the Catholic hierarchy aren’t doing much better these days. In Germany, members of the “Synodal Path Assembly” came so close to adopting changes in the Church’s moral teaching on homosexuality, contraception, and gender identity that losers quickly accused opponents of “treason.” Reinhard Cardinal Marx, their leader and a close adviser to Pope Francis, was “disappointed,” even though these champions of sodomy and feminism, its corollary, threaten the most dire prospect of a genuine schism in our lifetime.
In Rome, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the Pope’s hand-picked wrecking ball, continued his deconstruction of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, with the Pope’s appointment of an atheist abortion crusader as a new member.
And then we have synodality, which all too often borders on sin idolatry, promising to churn Catholic hearts and headlines through 2024 not only in Germany but throughout the Catholic world. As the Catholic “Path of Synodality” crowd continues to careen into disaster, its marching orders are to blur, distract, and deform.
In the midst of this abundance of clerical confusion, the faithful have been blessed with the straightforward and courageous views of a few sensible prelates who have parted ways with their cowering colleagues to step forward and bravely insist on making distinctions, rather than destroying them.

Calling Things By
Their Proper Names

When Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, appeared on EWTN’s The World Over two weeks ago, host Raymond Arroyo asked him about the synodal “reports” sent to Rome by various countries in preparation for the Synod next year.
“Regarding the ‘LGBTQ’ community,” Arroyo asked, “the U.S. report states that ‘The hope for a welcoming Church expressed itself clearly with the desire to accompany, with authenticity, . . . our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.’ What do you make of this focus on the ‘LGBTQ’ community?”
“The aim of this ideology . . . was to instrumentalize [the] Catholic Church on the face, for promoting their own ideas. It’s best for us, human beings, to follow the way of Jesus Christ and to change our life according to His Commandments and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not to self-creation, to self-redemption,” Cardinal Mueller replied.
“This occupation of the Catholic Church is a hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ,” he continued. “If they succeed, it will be the end of the Catholic Church.”
Here Cardinal Mueller calls ideology by its proper name — the denial of reality, and its replacement by a dream world (more accurately, a nightmare) revolving around the ego of its creator.
The “Synodal Way” is a classic case: The ideologue imposes it by first infecting (“Free speech! We deserve a voice!”), invading (“Welcome to the parish council!), manipulating (“Homophobe!”), controlling (“Item: Cardinal McCarrick’s allies appoint new U.S. bishops”), and finally, destroying its target — in this case, the Catholic Church.

But Wait — It’s Still
“The Church,” Right?

When the ideologue can’t destroy his target altogether, he preserves the label of his victim and wraps himself in it.
It is indeed a hostile takeover. One historian describes the process: “the parasites infiltrate the institution, kill it slowly from the inside, flay it, and wear its outer shell as a skin suit while masquerading as the real thing.”
Cardinal Mueller knows his Karl Marx. The gnostic ideologue envisions a “second reality,” as Eric Voegelin calls it, and embraces it as a revelation that justifies destroying the evil reality that the gnostic vision will then replace.
“Everything that furthers the revolution is ethical,” said Vladimir Lenin.
“Forget history. We’re talking about the future,” says Nancy Pelosi.

Let’s Make The
Truth Unanimous!

Two American prelates have bravely addressed the errors of the times by adopting the approach of Confucius and calling things by their proper names. In August 2021, Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge published A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology, a careful and charitable treatment of the current craze that aims to destroy our children, our families, and our culture.
As Cardinal Mueller points out, they will destroy our Church as well.
Transgender ideology “claims that a person’s biological sex and personal identity have no necessary connection and could in fact contradict each other,” he writes. “According to this view, ‘human identity’ is self-defined and ‘becomes the choice of the individual’.”
Bishop Burbidge cites Amoris Laetitia, where Pope Francis writes, “It is one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life, and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality.”
These fundamental insights clear the air of the smog — and often the stench — that “all ideas are equal.” They restore the proper critical meaning of the term “ideology” — not merely any “system of ideas,” but a specific class of system that excludes or denies part of reality — even of creation itself — in order to replace it with one’s personal preferences, most often leading to the acquisition of power and perpetuating it.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has not unanimously embraced Bishop Burbidge’s Catechesis as its own.
One wonders, what’s stopping them?
After all, the USCCB’s president, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gómez, rendered a masterful analysis of the problem in a speech to a Spanish audience just a year ago.
His remarks, “The Rise of New Secular Ideologies and Movements for Social Change in the United States and the Implications for the Church,” focused on “the wider context of the global movement of secularization and de-Christianization,” and his analysis was as brave as it was stunning.

Erasing Christian Language

“An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures,” he said. “This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values, and technocratic ideas about organizing society.”
Here we see the process reported live: the infiltration, the infection, the manipulation, the control, and finally the power. None of these players has changed its name or the logo that appears on its package or its website. But it has destroyed its roots while by all outside appearances it hasn’t changed at all.
“In this elite worldview,” he continued, “there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.”
As a result, “for years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.”
Perhaps it’s time for our shepherds to awake, defy the idols of the age, and begin calling things by their proper names.