Traditional Catholics founds themselves targeted by the FBI last year. In August 2023, the <em>Herald</em> reported that “leaks revealed that the FBI focused in particular on Catholics who were interested in the Traditional Latin Mass as the group within the Church allegedly the most likely to be sympathetic to violent extremist activities.”
What begins in America often swiftly finds its way to the UK.
Yvette Cooper, the recently appointed UK Home Secretary, has just commissioned a swift review of what have been described as “extremist ideologies” as part of a new government anti-extremism strategy.
We live in a world of new politically charged euphemisms, and, as so often happens, “extremist” has come to mean views that an authoritarian left-wing government disapproves of. Cooper has vowed to crack down hard on people whom she considers to be pushing “harmful or hateful beliefs”.
The problem of course, and the accompanying potential threat, lie in the definitions of what constitutes harm and hate. In the Left’s new lexicon, anything that counters the authoritarian dogma of progressivism is harmful and hateful.<br><br><strong><em>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/what-has-happened-to-british-justice-and-will-our-church-speak-out-or-continue-its-descent-into-two-tier-catholicism/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">What has happened to British justice and will our Church speak out or continue its descent into two-tier Catholicism?</mark></a></em></strong>
The writer and commentator Brendan O’Neill sounded the alarm recently on behalf of Catholics when he <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/yvette-coopers-chilling-crackdown-on-harmful-beliefs/">wrote</a> in the <em>Spectator</em>:
“Indeed I can envision entire belief systems being reimagined as harmful. Some already have been so. Traditional Catholics, for example. They think marriage should only be between a man and a woman, that sex is determined by God not scalpel-wielding gender surgeons, and that only followers of Christ to go to heaven. That’s homophobic transphobic and Islamophobic right? In other words harmful. Shut them down.”
One of the consequences of secular opprobrium is that it places a lot of pressure on us as Catholics to dilute Catholicism in order to be thought better of by others.
But this is a form of ideological <em>Danegeld</em>, that tax levied in Anglo-Saxon England to raise money to pay or see off Danish invaders. The more one gives away in order to placate one’s enemies, the more they demand.
Instead, it might be better to consider the content of the beliefs and why we hold them.
In his influential 1902 book <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em>, the psychologist William James, an agnostic, suggests that the claims of special religious experience should be stress tested by means of assessing the effect they have on the moral behaviour of their adherents.
Since our increasingly authoritarian government is using the contemporary language of heresy in order to socially excommunicate heretics, and the currency of heresy is “hatred” – by which they mean a repudiation of their value system – we might suggest looking at the moral effects of the value systems under the spotlight.
Why does the Catholic Church see marriage in terms of two heterosexuals coming together with the effect of producing children? Because of divine revelation of course, but also because without children there is no society.
Because the pyramid of relations and mutuality that flows from grandparents, through parents to their children and then to their children’s children is the structure out of which a stable and a generative society, with multiple skills and resources, flourishes.
Perhaps one reason why the Left does not like heterosexual marriage and dismisses its proponents as hateful, is because the family acts in competition to the State. A society made up of extended families is less reliant on the state.
Authoritarian governments of the Left always target the heterosexual family as competition. It is not phobic to recognise that changing the definition of marriage changes the capacity to build and enable society.
Whatever the individual and moral virtues of individual same-sex-attracted couples, the redefinition of marriage to include homosexuality changes what marriage is. It writes biological sterility into the “marriage-project”.
It also changes the model of marriage from one which is outward looking to one that is inward looking; harnessing sexual desire to recreation instead of taming it for procreation. As a result, mutual pleasuring becomes a higher value that the self-giving of parenthood; self-sacrifice is replaced by self-fulfilment with all the solipsistic implications such a shift involves.
And in the market place of surrogate motherhood, children are demoted to become commodities whose rights to have access to their biological parents are denied, forever.
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Transphobia is yet another attempt to replace moral discrimination with fake therapy.
The normalising of gender dysphoria is not about bestowing a gift of “alternative becoming” on our children; rather it is the abandonment of adult responsibility and facilitating the permanent surgical sterilisation on an adolescent whose mind is at war with the biology of the body.
Adults ought to know that the mind changes. But worse than this is the preferencing of the unstable imagination over biological reality, the relative over the unforgiving absolute.
This has played a significant part in creating a climate of uncertainty and anxiety amongst our children that is expressed in never-before-seen levels of depression, uncertainty and angst.
The adoption of trans rights and identities fails the Benthamite test of maximising social happiness, and that's before we even get to the abdication of medical, psychological and parental responsibility towards our troubled children.
Where does the hate really lie? True caring takes responsibility for protection; liberty and unrestricted license is the abandonment of care; a kind of passive aggressive hatred.
Believing that only Catholics go to heaven is a superficial misrepresentation of Catholic faith. Only God knows the secrets of our hearts and our choices. But since the sacrifice of Christ on the cross offers each human being forgiveness before God, why do so many of our politicians seem set on repudiating Jesus and instead placating Mohammed?
Why preference a prophet who would turn war lord to kill his enemies over a saviour who changed his enemies into friends and raised them from the dead? Why preference a religious creed that insists on submission over the saviour who forgives? Why orientate towards the unknowable and implacable Allah, when Jesus introduces you to the existential intimacy of the great “I am that I am” (Jahweh). They are two different kinds of divinity.
It is an abdication of truth and reality to mask certain choices as a phobia. By all means let there be choice, but to work against the possibility of informed choice – evangelisation – in order to prevent a fake phobia, that is the real extremism.
The deceit of a government criminalising choice, conscience, virtuous outcomes, potential transformation of individuals and communities as extremist hate, tells us more about the amorality and insincerity of the political project than it does about the integrity of Catholicism.
Thus, far from accepting criminalisation, relativism and the rhetoric of absolutism, Catholics should do what until today we always had a right to do: take the facts and the arguments to the public square and defy the threat and intimidation that lies behind describing us as hateful extremists.
Let us tell the truth about our priorities, moral choices, experiences and values. Because the Truth will set you free.
Which is exactly what a controlling authoritarian government appears to be afraid of.
<em><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/fbi-spied-on-traditionalist-u-s-catholics-from-coast-to-coast-new-evidence-reveals/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">FBI spied on traditionalist U.S. Catholics from coast to coast, new evidence reveals</mark></a></strong></em><br><br><em>Photo: This combination image illustrates closed circuit television cameras that look down on the UK's capital city of London, England, 2 November 2006. A report released at the time, entitled 'The Surveillance Studies Network', stated that there are up to 4.2 million surveillance cameras across the UK. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.)</em>
