Dr Anca-Maria Cernea, Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest

Rome Life Forum – 7 May 2016

Our thanks to LifeSiteNews for the footage.

(scroll down for the entire video of the event, with the Q&A section included)

Transcript:

One of the best interventions during last year’s Synod on the family was made by Archbishop Fülöp Kocsis, Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church from Hungary.

He said that the attacks against the family were not mere “challenges”, as some Synod Fathers had suggested, and they weren’t explained by the economical or sociological factors presented in the Synod’s working document.

Archbishop Fülöp said that the Synod needed to make it clear:

These attacks are contrary to God’s plan, they come from the evil one.

And he quoted St. Paul:

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the Principalities and the Powers, against the dominations of the dark world, against the spirits of evil that live in the celestial regions.” (Eph 6:12)

Another brave intervention was made by Archbishop Tomash Peta, from Kazakhstan. Quoting Paul VI, he said that the “smoke of Satan”, could be perceived even in the speeches of some Synod Fathers.

These two interventions summarize our problem.

1. The war against family and innocent human life is a spiritual war.
2. This war is now also taking place within the walls of the Church herself.

As the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho has pointed out, unfortunately, more often than not, we hear nowadays two kinds of Church sermons: One is utterly ideological, practically in favor of the “principalities and the powers”. The other is exclusively directed against sexual immorality, material corruption, consumerism, hedonism and other earthly sins – which means, it is exclusively fighting “blood and flesh”, not the “principalities and the powers”.

1. The war against family and against innocent human life

When talking about the assault against the family in the West, a very typical cliché is to say that they are caused by consumerism, hedonism, individualism, interest groups driven by ruthless desire for material profit. We hear this very often in church.

This approach only deals with flesh and blood and forgets the spirits of evil.

Consumerism and individualism are not the causes, but favoring factors. They weaken the moral resistance of people and societies. But they are not the cause.

The attack against the family and human life is part of a wider revolutionary attempt to re-design human society and human nature.

Its motivation is spiritual. It is a form of revolt against God, against His moral Law and the order of His Creation.

Historically, abortion was decriminalized for the first time by Lenin, in 1920.

In America, it was only done 53 years later, in 1973, through the famous trick of the Roe vs. Wadecase.

No-fault divorce was enacted for the first time in the Soviet Union 1918, shortly after the Bolsheviks took power.

For America, it took 51 more years until 1969 no-fault divorce was adopted in the state of California.

Homosexuality was first decriminalized in the Soviet Union in 1922. Illinois was the first American state to decriminalize homosexuality – in 1961.

Radical sex education for school children was first introduced in 1919 in Hungary, by Béla Kuhn’s Bolshevik revolution, with the clear purpose to undermine the traditional family and morality by destroying children’s innocence.

In America it took until the 60s, when the perverse sex education under the influence of Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent “research”, widely publicized thanks to the funding from Rockefeller Foundation, made its way into the schools. Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist who pretended to prove that human homosexuality was far more extended in society than officially admitted (the famous 10%), thus should be considered as normal. It is important to note that Alfred Kinsey was a communist, and a friend of Harry Hay.

In 1950, Harry Hay founded the first gay-rights organization in history, called Mattachine Society, in the USA. It just happened that almost all of its members, starting with Hay himself, were also members of the American Communist Party – an agency directly managed from Moscow.

It’s not a spontaneous phenomenon. It’s a war, wedged by a gnostic-revolutionary ideology against the Judeo-Christian Civilization. It has been planned, and carried out over more than a century, leading to the situation we have now. This is far bigger than individual human selfishness, sexual lust or material greed. It’s the “principalities and the powers, the dominations of the dark world, the spirits of evil” . And their human instruments, some of whom decide in full awareness to serve Satan, others play the role of useful fellow travelers. In the last category we often find people with good intentions, often Christians, “for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Lk 16:8). 

Richard Wurmbrand’s book, “Marx and Satan”, is available online in English and many other languages. Wurmbrand had been a communist as a teenager, but he converted to Christianity and become an evangelical pastor. He spent 14 years in communist prisons in Romania, and was famous for his heroic behavior.  My father, who had met him in prison, used to speak very highly of him.

Pastor Wurmbrand’s book is the result of his research on Karl Marx’s Satanist texts and practices.

It shows that in his verses, Marx expresses a profound hatred for God and for the entire human race. Marx doesn’t deny God’s existence, he is jealous of God; he hates Him and wants to take His place. Wurmbrand also quotes letters addressed to Marx by his son Edgar with the words “My dear devil”, and testimonies about strange ceremonies that Marx used to perform in his house, all of which indicate that he was definitely a worshiper of the devil.

This is the key to understanding what Marxist ideology really is about.

Ideology is an error of religious nature. It pretends to have a complete explanation of reality and to offer “salvation” here, in this world, by human means, without God.

There is nothing new or “progressive” about it.

It is the old Gnostic error, in a contemporary form. Gnosticism has been known to the Church since the first Christian centuries. It is an attempt by man to take over the control – with the instruments of knowledge, which would allow man to occupy God’s place and correct what’s supposedly “wrong” with God’s Creation.

The basic idea is the same as the serpent’s proposal to Adam and Eve, to eat the forbidden fruit, to ignore God’s commandment – “the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).

Pope Leo XIII in the 19^th century saw that communist ideology was an error of religious nature.

He called it “sect” of “socialists, communists, or nihilists” and he condemned it.

Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris (1937) said that communism concealed “a false messianic idea” and a “deceptive mysticism”.

But later on, until Centesimus Annus, the Popes no longer insisted on the religious nature of this error.

The modern-day ideologies have been described as religious substitutes and modern forms of Gnosticism rather by lay researchers and philosophers.

Eric Voegelin wrote as early as the 20s that Nazism and Bolshevism were “political religions”, with their own symbols, prophets, scriptures, hierarchy, liturgical ceremonies, calendars, etc.

Actually, they were fake religions, as Voegelin later explained; because they didn’t build any culture, they only destroyed existing cultures. These ideologies represent a particular form of the gnostic error, deprived of any transcendent dimension, pretending to be based on “science”, an “immanentized Eschaton”.

As Alain Besançon noticed, Nazism was a satanic inversion of Judaism – pretending to bring salvation through an “elected people”, usurping Israel’s election; and Communism was a satanic inversion of Christianism, pretending to bring universal salvation.

Our Lady of Fatima warned against “Russia’s errors”, which would spread all over the world.  And that is what happened since 1917.

Communism was spread in two ways. One was through brutal military invasion, concentration camps, prisons, political police and government terror, one hundred million people being killed by their own governments in times of “peace”.

It happened first in Russia, then in the rest of what came to be called “the Eastern Block”.

The other way was through insidious cultural subversion, aimed at destroying the moral resistance of the Free World, and making it unable to defend itself against Communism. This is what was done in the West, mainly through “cultural Marxism”.

These were Russia’s errors. They have not simply ceased to exist once the Soviet Union was officially declared dead.

Cultural Marxism was devised since the beginning as a tool to morally and culturally undermine the West and make it an easier prey for the communists to take over.

It appears nowadays to be even more revolutionary than classical Marxism – it pretends to reinvent the family, the sex identity and human nature, while classical Marxism was pretending to re-invent society on the basis of a violent take-over of property.

In fact, both forms of Marxism were aimed at the installation of a worldwide communist society. But, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, the aim of all totalitarian ideologies “is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself”. The differences of doctrine between the two forms of Marxism are less important than what they have in common: they share the same hatred for the order of reality and the will to destroy it.

Given the common traits shared by both forms of Marxism, many people in my country can recognize instinctively certain propaganda themes, certain policies imposed by the EU or UN, certain language clichés as “communist”. This is oftentimes visible on internet chats and forums, where, for instance there is an article about politically correct speech codes; many people react by saying “but this is communism!”. They sense it, and they are right, even if they can’t always indicate in detail the communist pedigree of these phenomena.

There is continuity from Marx and Engels, for whom the bourgeois family was obviously an obstacle to the revolution, to Lenin, who implemented the first sex revolution in human history, legalizing abortion and homosexuality, encouraging sexual promiscuity and making divorce easier than buying a train ticket (and no, it wasn’t because of “individualism” or “consumerism”, it was because of the Marxist-Leninist satanic ideology).

Then, there is continuity from Lenin to the Frankfurt School, which was initiated by Lenin himself, together with Georg Lukács and Willi Münzenberg, the head of Komintern – who was quoted saying: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks”.

The Frankfurt School started in Frankfurt, Germany, but later metastasized to the USA. It is also known as the “Critical School”, or “Critical Theory”, and it leads directly from Lenin to the present-day “gay rights” and “gender” ideologies, from Georg Lukács, through Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and many others, to… Judith Butler’s gender ideology.

The authors of the Frankfurt School concentrate their effort on the destruction of Western culture – by just criticizing, “unmasking”, discrediting, deconstructing every piece of it, but without proposing any explicit utopia in replacement; they just respond to the call of their founder, Georg Lukács:

“Who will save us from Western Civilization?”

One of the characteristics of this school is the use of terms and concepts taken from psychology, combining Marx and Freud, in order to question the basic moral principles and institutions of Western society, starting with the family.

There is also the other pathway, parallel to the Frankfurt School, trough Antonio Gramsci.

Unlike the Frankfurt School, Gramsci is clear about his purpose; his plan is to bring about a Soviet-type communist society. But in contrast with classical Marxist teaching, he recommends that “cultural hegemony” be conquered first – through gradual, imperceptible mutations in language and social patterns, introduced with the help of fellow travelers, like actors or other celebrities, as well as through the creation of false majorities, infiltration and take-over of institutions, media, education, and most importantly, of the Catholic Church – so that, one day, people would wake up in a communist society, without realizing how they got there.

This is what is generally meant by “cultural Marxism”.

Cultural Marxism is not originally a Western product, in spite of the fact that it has grown within the West.

We need to carefully discern between the Judeo-Christian Civilization and this virus, developed by its enemies, for the purpose of its destruction.

“The West” is not a compact block, like the Russian, Chinese, or Islamic dictatorships.

For us, pro-lifers and defenders of the family, the West is now a place of intense confrontations; we are far from idealizing the West.

Many people in the West, exasperated by the decadence they see and by the defeats in the culture war, are judging the West as completely lost and rotten, and are ready to look for allies against the West among its enemies, whom they idealize. Because they ignore the reality of those regimes, they are influenced by propaganda and by their own illusions for an exotic safe heaven, where order reins and virtue is protected by the State.

Thus some become allies of Putin’s Russia against their own civilization.

Some others even consider Islam as a possible ally in the defense of the family against the “rotten West”.

Such choice reminds the “liberal death wish” described by Malcolm Muggeridge.

The fact is that, as corroded as it is, at least the West has the advantage of still being a battlefield.

In the Russian, Chinese or Islamic regimes, there is hardly any battle. There can be very little or no opposition at all. Usually we find out about some heroic act of opposition the moment we are told that the brave people who attempted it have been either murdered or imprisoned.

State policies in such regimes are only determined by the leading establishment, no opposition can influence them. Actually, in those countries nobody knows or cares about what citizens really think.

Russia, or China or Iran can function as compact blocks. “The West”, “the Americans”, or “the Jews” cannot. However, they are being accused in block as enemies of Christianity, by the same propaganda that praises Putin’s Russia for defending it.

Saying that Putin’s regime is defending Christianity is as if Germany after WW2 was still run by the old Gestapo guys, pretending to be invested with the holy mission of fighting Anti-Semitism.

There has been no justice in Russia for the crimes of communism.

Moreover, there is no proof that the huge KGB structure that had infiltrated the whole world has been dissolved.

And even assuming it has been dissolved, the consequences of the Communist-inspired moral subversion of the West have not been suppressed anyway; they continue to develop and to spread. Because there has been no repentance, no examination of conscience, either in Russia, or in the West – in the case of the Communist agents and useful idiots that have served and still serve as accomplices of the moral and physical destruction inspired by Marxism.

The Russian government is anything but Christian. Russia still has not converted.

Our Lady has named “Russia”, not “the Soviet Union”.

In the wake of the Fatima’s centenary, Russia is still the most important threat to peace and freedom, not only in the part of the world where I come from.

So the devotion to Our Lady of Fatima is now timelier than ever. Russia and the whole world affected by Russia’s errors urgently need consecration to Our Lady. And conversion.

It’s particularly shocking to see that so many Catholics ignore the dramatic appeals of the Ukrainian bishops (both Latin and Greek-Catholic), and instead of showing solidarity to our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, they admire and support their deadliest enemy, Putin, celebrating him as a “pro-lifer”!

It is true that the Western world has now the worst set of leaders in recent history.

But the West is still pluralistic, there is good, there is evil, there are many tendencies, some of which are positive, some others are subversive or even suicidal for the Free World.

As Olavo de Carvalho wrote, we cannot expect to have a just society here on earth; the best we can hope for is a society where we can still fight for justice.

So, Western Civilization is our only chance.

1. The Church and the war against family and innocent human life

The Popes have constantly condemned communism since its earliest days.

Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII have all radically rejected communism.

And they have also explicitly warned that communism was a threat to the family.

During the Second World War and in the 50s, this unyielding anticommunism expressed by the Pope and the Church has inspired the resistance to communism of millions of Catholics in Europe.

In Western Europe, Christian Democracy, directly inspired by the Catholic Church, along with the American military presence, preserved the countries beyond the Iron Curtain from becoming communist after the war. Christian-Democrats laid the foundation of the postwar European community, based on the principle of subsidiarity.

In Eastern Europe an entire generation of Christians opposed communism, suffered terrible persecution and martyrdom. The Church provided her sons and daughters with faith, moral guidance, courage and strength. And the faithful followed the Church and trusted her to the end.

One of them was my father, Ioan Bărbuș, the students’ leader of a Christian, pro-Western, political party, very popular in Romania. My father was imprisoned by the communist regime. At that time, my parents were engaged to marry. My mother waited 17 years for her fiancé and prayed for him. He survived by miracle. They got married after he was released.

My father passed away on May 7^th 2001, exactly 15 years ago.

In the huge file the Securitate (the communist secret police) was keeping on him, my sister and I found information about his behavior in the prison. For instance, in Aiud, in the 50s, they noted that my father had in no way changed his beliefs. They described him as a “hostile element” for the regime. The other prisoners of conscience knew he was Greek-Catholic and they respected him and listened to him.

And he was telling them that the Catholic Church was the strongest spiritual force in the world fighting communism.

This shows that his faith in the Church was giving him courage, and he was able to encourage his colleagues, most of whom were not even Catholic.

Our Greek Catholic Church in Romania was suppressed by the soviet occupation. Our bishops refused any compromise with the communists. That’s how our Church survived the persecution. The bishops warned the flock in sermons against communist ideology and prepared the faithful for martyrdom. They gave example of resistance to terror, prison and torture. None of the twelve accepted to give up his fidelity to the Holy Father. Seven of them died in prison. Pope Pius the XII is quoted saying that he had been more fortunate than Our Lord; from among the twelve apostles, there had been one traitor, but none of the 12 Romanian Greek-Catholic bishops had betrayed the Pope.

But Pius the XII was followed by John the XXIII.

And the Second Vatican Council did not issue a condemnation of communism – in spite of the fact that many Council Fathers had insisted for it.

Along the 2000 years of Church history, the purpose of all Councils (except Vatican II) was to react to error and warn against it. Councils condemned errors. That’s how Catholic theology has been formulated.

But Pope John XXIII said the Church in his time preferred mercy and was not going to pronounce condemnations.

So the biggest church event of the 20th century ignored the most terrible, the most homicidal error of the entire human history, an error that was growing at that very time, throwing into slavery half of humanity and insidiously eroding the moral spine of the other half.

Starting from that point, the Church still was not favorable to communism, but stopped treating the fight against it as a priority.

Some Catholic bishops went on fighting communism – the most outstanding example is the Polish Church under the leadership of Cardinal Wyszyński.

But not all Catholic bishops in the world did the same. Some even actively promoted communism inside the Church – for instance, under the form of liberation theology in Latin America, a very successful KGB operation.

No wonder that Christian-Democrats not only failed to oppose communism in Latin America, they even became instruments of the communist take-over of their countries – Salvador Allende took power in Chile thanks to the support of Eduardo Frei. Rafael Caldera was Hugo Chávez’s godfather, both in the literal and the political sense.

Starting from the 60s, when already tens of millions had been killed in the name of communism and other tens of millions of souls and minds had already been infected with the virus of cultural Marxism, the problem of communism just blurred away from the Church’s visual field.

Preaching against communism ceased to be systematic, as it used to be before Vatican II, and many Catholics came to think that the previous condemnations of communism were no longer binding.

The language of the encyclicals after Vatican II differs from those of the previous Popes as far as communism is concerned.

Pius XI had dedicated an entire encyclical, Divini Redemptoris (1937), to fighting communism. He didn’t hesitate to name the Soviet Union and to speak about the atrocities committed by communists against Christians in USSR and in the Spanish civil war, and stressed that they were not just isolated excesses, but the natural fruit of the communist system.

Pius XII said that the Church would protect the individual and the family against communism. He said “The Church will fight this battle to the end, for it is a question of supreme values: the dignity of man and the salvation of souls.”

Before John XXIII, the Popes were not idealizing capitalism either, but they made clear that communism was to be totally rejected, while capitalism had things that needed correction.

Starting with John XXIII, the official Church documents moved from explicit anticommunism to a position of neutrality between the “two blocks”, communist and capitalist, equally blaming them for being materialistic, for endangering peace through the arms race of the Cold War, and for competing over the Third World in their equally imperialistic expansion plans.

This neutrality of the Church, her symmetrical appeals to the two blocks to disarm, had of course no real effect on the Soviet bloc, but in the West they did weaken the position and the moral authority of anticommunist politicians.

By asking governments and international organizations, to assume new roles and take up new tasks, the Church contributed to the development of the present-day welfare state.

And also to the buildup of super-national power structures, like the UN and the current day EU, that are now the main entities carrying out the attacks against life, family and Christian presence in public life.

Thus the Church has contributed to the secularization described by Pope Benedict XVI.

Charity, the help for the poor and for the sick, hospitals, schools and universities, that had been the invention of the Christian Church and a part of her mission in the world, almost all have been gradually taken over and secularized by governments and international institutions after WWII.

In the Catholic Social Doctrine after Vatican II, the rejection of Marxism became less radical, at the same time as hostility to economic freedom increased. The language of the encyclicals moved from normal Christian language to ideologically contaminated media language.

Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris still recommended Christian charity as the main remedy for poverty.

John XXIII in Pacem in Terris defines social services in terms of human rights. He asks the public administration to take care of social progress and provide all aspects of welfare, even “aids to recreation”.

While in 1963, the year of Pacem in Terris, half of the planet had already succumbed to Soviet-dependent Marxist dictatorships, the Pope was happy that “all over the world men are either the citizens of an independent State, or are shortly to become so”. He celebrated the end of colonialism, but didn’t seem to notice that most of the newly “independent” countries had actually fallen under a much worse colonial domination, the Soviet one. He exalted the United Nations.

In Populorum Progressio (1967), Paul VI blamed the poverty of the Third world exclusively on the effects of colonialism – the old, Western one, of course, not the new, Soviet one. He didn’t mention the fact that most of the regimes running those countries were deeply corrupt, incompetent and cruel dictatorships. Populorum Progressio criticized “unbridled liberalism”, “free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right”, but didn’t expand on the economic and moral disasters caused by Marxist economy in absolutely every country where it had been applied. The Pope praised the role of concerted planning in promoting economic and social progress and used arguments taken from the neo-Marxist theory of unequal exchange to say that “the principle of free trade, by itself, is no longer adequate for regulating international agreements”.  He also called for an “effective world authority”.

This is more or less the approach to communism of the Catholic Social Teaching until Pope John Paul II issued Centesimus Annus.

In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II reminded what the Popes before Vatican II used to notice – that these ideologies are errors of religious nature. He warned against “political religions”, those utopian theories that pretended to bring about a perfect society here on earth.

On the other hand, the Popes, especially Paul VI and John Paul II, defended life and family, maintained and explained the Catholic teaching on marriage and procreation, in landmark Church documents, like Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio, which represent powerful fortresses of the culture of life and family against the assault of revolutionary ideologies – actually, against cultural Marxism, although it is not explicitly named in those documents.

Thanks to Pope John Paul II, to the Polish Solidarity and to President Reagan, classical communism was defeated in most countries in 1989. But that defeat turned out to be in fact rather a mutation towards cultural Marxism (that may also shift back to violent Marxism, this shouldn’t be surprising for those who are familiar with Marxist dialectics).

Russia’s errors mentioned in the Fatima prophecy continued to spread.

The fact that, over decades, fighting classical Marxism had ceased to be treated as a priority by the Catholic Social Teaching has weakened the capacity of the faithful, especially of Catholic politicians, to recognize and fight cultural Marxism.

One consequence of preaching only against flesh and blood – only blaming capitalist individualism and consumerism for the Cultural Revolution, and not ideology – is that people come to think the remedy is to limit capitalism with more regulations from governments and international authorities. So the left wins elections thanks to the catholic vote, and implements more revolutionary changes and the Church leaders blame them again on consumerism, and then once more Catholics vote for the left, who promises to limit capitalist individualism and consumerism, and the spiral continues.

Thus, the Catholic vote in many places around the world ends up favoring cultural Marxism.

Catholic politicians had firmly and successfully opposed violent Marxism in Europe the 50ies.

But only some decades later, other Catholic politicians ended up helping to implement cultural Marxism in their countries. Christian-Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti ratified the abortion law in Italy in 1978. Wilfried Martens signed a similar law in Belgium in 1990. German Christian-Democrat leaders proudly participate in gay parades. Jean-Marc Ayrault, who has started his political career in the Mouvement rural de jeunesse chrétienne was heading the French socialist government who imposed homosexual marriage, and violently repressed the protests of pro-family movement LMPT.

The European Union rejected its Christian roots, rejected the foundation laid by Christian politicians like Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer. It became an ideologically-inspired super-state, led by former radicals of the 60s (converted in the meantime to liberal-social-democracy), constantly imposing the cultural Marxist agenda to its member states – through legislation, and to other countries – through political and economic pressure.

In Latin America, the violent communist terror movements of the 60s failed to win the people on their side. But over the decades, they shifted to cultural Marxism, they created parties which they didn’t call “communist” any more, they competed in democratic elections and won almost all over the continent. This was possible thanks to the fact that the language and the program of those leftist parties coincided with the language and the priorities of the Catholic Church – social justice, fighting inequality, imperialism, pollution and climate change. Once they got to power, the Marxist terrorists of the 60s like Mujica in Uruguay, Dilma in Brazil, some former montoneros associated with the Kirchners in Argentina, came to lead their countries and started legalizing things like abortion and gay marriage.

Hostility to economic freedom and calls for government control in Catholic Church documents are now coming back, in an even more striking language, in Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium andLaudato Si. Terms like “inclusion”, “exclusion”, “marginalization”, “inequality”, and “sustainable development” are frequent. The criticism of economic freedom we find in Pope Francis is one of unprecedented firmness: “Such an economy kills”.

Having lived under a communist regime, I can bring witness for the fact that government control over economy not only does not give life, but it invariably ruins countries that used to be prosperous, causing immense injustice, suffering and humiliations. In socialist countries, robbery and violence are state policy; corruption becomes the only chance for getting basic goods. And an enormous gap, far deeper than any previous one, emerges between the new privileged class and its enslaved subjects.

In fact, in the world today, the problem is rather the excess of regulation than the lack thereof; it is very difficult to find a place where government does not regulate economy in detail. But where there is less government intervention, there is less poverty. The greatest poverty and the greatest inequality between privileged and poor citizens in Latin America today is found in Cuba and Venezuela, where economy is most regulated.

We are worried to see the Church descending into an earthly ideologically-contaminated activism that encourages some “progressive” groups that have a perfect plan on how to build a perfect world (after they are done with this one) – like the “popular movements”, environmentalists, pacifists, indigenists, “anti-discrimination” activists, and “population experts”.

Unfortunately, representatives of these groups seem to be regarded as honorable dialogue partners by the Vatican nowadays, along with characters like the Castro brothers and Evo Morales.

Caritas Internationalis cooperates with them in the World Social Forum, an organization that promotes abortion, homosexuality and communism worldwide.

As the old Spanish communist leader Santiago Carrillo once said, as a result of the dialogue between Catholics and communists, no communist has ever converted to Catholicism, but all Catholics involved have become communists.

Cooperation with the communists on practical issues, but without questioning the evil ideology of Marxism, transforms Catholics into fellow travelers of the revolution.

Instead of preaching the True God to pagans and convert them, they get used by the pagans against the True God.

Jesus was very severe about priorities when he said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.” (Mt 16:23)

In the Ten Commandments the prohibition of idolatry comes before the prohibition to kill, to steal, to commit adultery.

Many souls are lost because of sexual lust or greed for possessions. But it’s even worse when all these sins are inspired by a satanic power-lust that makes people try to replace God. They become elements of a gigantic worldwide system, spreading resentment and hatred in communities, moral perversion of entire societies, mass murder, robbery and material corruption on a scale never seen before.

Thus, for the eternal salvation of millions of souls, the Church should be leading the fight against ideologies, and especially against cultural Marxism, both in public teaching and in confession.

Jesus told the Apostles “you give them something to eat”. This is the how the principle of subsidiarity is formulated in the Gospel. Jesus never said “go ask Caesar to organize an imperial welfare system and ensure social justice”.

The family is the first and best institution for fighting poverty and social exclusion.

If we want to help people out of poverty, we should start by defending the family – and Christian morality, because Catholic charity cannot be separated from evangelization.

We can’t defend life and family at the same time as we ask for an increasing government role in society, or the creation of a world government.

Christians should never support nor accept the concentration of power in the hands of a few, no matter what a wonderful world they promise.

The revolutionaries will always use this power against Christianity.

Then we shouldn’t be surprised if society is secularized, charity is replaced by welfare, education is replaced by ideological indoctrination and outright moral perversion, the care for the sick is replaced by euthanasia, freedom of conscience and of speech is replaced by government-imposed political correctness, and citizen’s life is regulated in detail by social engineers, the culture of life and family is constantly losing ground. We shouldn’t be surprised when governments succeed in corrupting Christian charities by forcing them to give up their Christian spirit in exchange for funding, or by imposing them practices that are contrary to Church teaching, and thus many Catholic NGOs end up losing their Christian spirit, giving up evangelization and only providing social activism.

If we want to defend the family, we need to take the world back from the revolutionists.

We need a Reconquista – first in the spiritual, then in the cultural and also the political sense.

In order to make the family safe, we have to win the larger war for our civilization.

Because family and human life are only safe in the normality of Judeo-Christian civilization.

Our pro-life and pro-family goals are vitally important. However, if we only focus on them and don’t care about the rest, we won’t be able to keep them either.

If we let the other side control everything else – language, culture, media education, legislation, economy, public life, government, health care, everything – then we shouldn’t be surprised that any victory we may happen to win for the family, in the best of the cases, will be short lived.

Clear language is an important condition for victory in the spiritual and in the cultural battles:

“Let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Anything more than this comes from the evil one”. (Mt 5:37)

The Christian vocabulary has all it needs to describe reality. We should simply speak Christian,hablar cristiano, as they used to say in Spain. We don’t have to borrow language tools from the ideologies we are confronting; this allows them to occupy the moral high ground and relegate us to a defensive position, before any debate has even started.

Even terms like “peace”, “justice”, “freedom”, familiar to Christian language, are being used ideologically, thus their original meaning being distorted or reversed.

The shepherds’ duty is to make this distinction clear.

They should preach the Kingdom of God and His justice, not socialist “justice”, understood as government control over economy, or income redistribution.

They should preach peace as offered by Christ, not as stated by the UN.

They should not be preaching against freedom – as if they implicitly agreed that freedom means “sexual libertinage”, as defined by the proponents of “sex liberation” (cultural Marxists), or that it means “financial ruthlessness”, as maintained by the proponents of planned economy (classical Marxists).

The Church shepherds should preach real freedom, which is liberation from sin, from the slavery of Satan. Veritas liberabit vos. Real freedom means salvation, and thus can never be bad or excessive.

The use of confusing, politically correct, ideologically-contaminated language by Church leaders, instead of God’s Word, leads many Catholic societies into moral and political confusion, and to defeats in the culture war.

The faithful become unable to identify the source of the attacks against life and family and to fight them successfully.

Such language used by Church leaders is a signal for the lay people who engage in politics to “turn left only”. It makes it practically impossible for Catholic politicians to support free market, to oppose the nanny state, to oppose Muslim immigration, to be skeptical about climate change, and about the role of the UN. Because if they do, they will have to say things that are different or opposed to what the world hears from the Church. So they either get discredited as Catholic politicians, or they get forced to support leftist causes.

This is one of the reasons why in most Catholics countries, Catholics cannot have a political representation. This is also why so many Catholic countries are now being governed by cultural-Marxists, in spite of the fact that the real situation on the battlefield – which is the public space, disputed by revolutionary ideologies against Christianity – is far from being as bad as it seems if you only take your information from the media.

There is still a silent majority of normal people, about whose existence you don’t hear in the TV news. These are the millions who came for the funeral of John Paul II, much to the “surprise” of journalists and analysts.

These are the millions who have recently taken to the streets here in Rome against gender ideology. And the millions who are now rallying against communism in Brazil.

These people only need to be led by their shepherds in the spiritual battle.

We should pray more for our shepherds. We should pray more for the Church.

When the shepherds lead their people in the spiritual battle, then also culture wars are won, and then political battles are won as well.

We saw such victories recently in Poland, where the shepherds preached conversion and led the people in massive “prayer offensives”; where the shepherds are able to break the magic of contemporary ideologies, by simply exposing them, like St Irenaeus did with Gnosticism in his time.

The secret for the success was not that the Church had supported a certain party. But the Church inspired and created around her an entire living universe, made of innumerable charities, cultural associations, clubs, media outlets, citizens’ initiatives.

Such an environment could give birth to a political party that effectively defends Christianity, family and human life.

So, how do we fix the world?

“Seek ye therefore first the Kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Mt 6:33)

The earthly normality of Christian civilization with all its benefits is just a secondary product of evangelization; it belongs to “those things that shall be added” unto us, if we “seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice”.

The real priority for the Church should be to lead us in the spiritual battle, to save souls, to tell the whole world, now that we have just one year left until the centenary of Fatima:

“Repent of your sins and turn to God, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” (Mt 3:2)

The Kingdom of God, which is not from this world.

Paradise cannot be achieved on earth, good and evil will still coexist in earthly realities, until the Lord Himself will come in glory to judge the world and sort everything out.

But at least a certain degree of normality can be brought about through evangelization and conversion of persons and societies.

That’s the best we can do to “fix the world”.

When there is enough holiness and virtue in our communities, when enough people share the same objective moral criteria (the Ten Commandments), then we don’t need to rely on almighty government bureaucrats to keep society from becoming a lawless jungle.

Then people can trust each other, and citizens, as well as society as a whole, may enjoy freedom.

Then the institutions stick to their job and do it decently, the family is safe, and the culture of life wins over the ideologies of death.

Then civilization is morally strong, and apt to successfully defend itself from barbarism – and also to preach the Gospel to the barbarians and convert them to Christianity.

That’s how the Church has created Christian culture and civilization, that’s what the Church should keep doing.

***
Entire video of the event, with the Q&A section included:

Also on:

Dr Anca-Maria Cernea – le marxisme culturel: une menace pour la famille (complete French translation)
https://www.cqv.qc.ca/dr_anca_maria_cernea_le_marxisme_culturel_une_menace_pour_la_famille