A few weeks ago, I shared my thoughts relating to a personal encounter with a highly ranked member of the fraudulently named group "Catholic United," which dedicates itself to giving "Catholic" cover to their favored left-leaning politicians as well as to minimizing said politicians' aiding and abetting of the culture of death (which they do by trying to create some kind of warped moral equivalence between opposing murder in the womb and the destruction of human embryos for unproven scientific research with issues that carry considerably less moral weight, such as socialized health care, environmental legislation, welfare reform, and minimum wage increases). You can revisit that post by scrolling further down or by by clicking here.
I've been checking their website since this past Saturday, waiting for their inevitable statement praising Notre Dame's invitation to Barack Obama as its 2009 commencement speaker and their equally inevitable denunciations of those who have engaged in their Catholic moral obligation to denounce this scandalous action. That statement came yesterday, courtesy of a blog post. Predictably, they say that "President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame will be nothing short of an honor for all Catholics."
Groups like Catholics United sadden me more than they anger me. The movement of dissent among so-called "Catholic" individuals and groups in this country has been going on for decades. There is no one cause to this, as a number of factors have converged to make it happen.
There is credible evidence, for instance, that Communists succeeded in infiltrating the Church at different levels to foment seeds of dissension, though this is something that various enemies of the Church have tried since the Church's founding, and this alone would hardly account for the woeful state we find ourselves in today.
The takeover of a large number of Catholic seminaries by modernists - which resulted in the formation and ordination of many men who never intended to abide by their vow of obedience (and in numerous unfortunate cases, the vow of chastity) - helped pave the way for dissent by gradually weakening the leadership of the Church in this country, and with it the laity's resistance to unsound teaching.
The advent of liberation theology, with its Marxist leanings, is certainly a contributing factor, directing the minds of many towards salvation from earthly forms of oppression while blinding many to the greater realities of spiritual salvation and the life of holiness we are called to live in order to show God our desire for that salvation and our desire to please Him above all else.
The widespread misrepresentation of the documents of Vatican II by faithless apostates was a large contributor, as many enemies of doctrinal orthodoxy have tried to create the impression that there is some kind of discontinuity between Vatican II and the twenty ecumenical councils that came before it, so as to foment the notion that the Church has taken a radical turn in its belief and practice since 1965 (which it has not).
In the aftermath of Vatican II, the previously detailed Land 'O Lakes Statement was a big step towards promoting dissent in Catholic universities (though such dissent was already brewing at the time of the statement, this document had the effect of "legitimizing" it in the eyes of many in the academic world).
Land 'O Lakes, in turn, was a stepping stone to the Charles Curran-led "academia" protest of Pope Paul VI's wonderful 1968 encyclical affirming the Church's long-held ban on artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae. The disingenuous campaign waged by Curran and his cohorts thrust the notion of "conscience" into the mix by stating that individuals could in good conscience dissent from those Church teachings - such as contraception - by which they could not "reasonably" be expected to abide (absent from dissident discussions of conscience, of course, was talk of the need to form one's conscience according to Catholic belief and the role the four cardinal virtues - prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude - played in this formation).
In 1976, Detroit hosted the so-called "Call to Action" conference - originally convened for the purpose of addressing post-Vatican II abuses but which was quickly hijacked by post-Vatican II abusers - an event often seen as a starting point for organized dissent among the hundreds of heretical groups that have cropped up since. Make no mistake: these dissident groups - such as Call to Action, the abhorrently-named pro-abortion group Catholics for a Free Choice, Voice of the Faithful (formed after the media coverage of the priest sex abuse scandals in order to exploit public outrage to promote married clergy, women's ordination, and acceptance of homosexual behavior as "remedies" for the crisis), FutureChurch (largely focused on promoting women's ordination, but which is more generally an outlet for radical feminist ideology), the Association of Rights for Catholics in the Church (or ARCC, which is dedicated to destroying the power of the clergy in favor of a "democratic" Church led by dissidents), and yes, Catholics United - exist primarily to confuse the faithful about what the Church truly teaches on matters of faith and morals, to downplay the Church's emphasis on sin and repentance, and to breed distrust of the Magisterium. The ultimate goal of this for most dissenters is to replace the Church founded by Christ with one created on their own image, and which enshrines their warped moral, philosophical, and political views as the new law of God. Others simply want to erase the existence of an entity that is an impediment to the promotion of their agenda.
I would normally be inclined to say that Catholics United falls into the first category, were it not for the fact that I am now familiar with some aspects of its leadership, and am more inclined to believe that the group is an unwitting puppet whose strings are being pulled by more sinister forces that fall into the second category.
Nevertheless, the actions of Catholics United in giving uncritical support to Obama and in trying to give cover to the scandalous actions of the administration of the University of Notre Dame in extending their invitation to Barack Obama are nothing short of a scandal unto themselves, and should be exposed as such. Do not be deceived by Catholics United or other groups into thinking that the Notre Dame commencement controversy is anything less than the scandal that it truly is. God bless!
In Jesus and Mary,
Gerald
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