Same-Sex Marriage: A Centuries-Long Diabolical Plan

by Bud Macfarlane

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
- St. Paul, Ephesians 6:12

The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don't be afraid, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.
- Sister Lucy, Visionary of Fatima, to Cardinal Carlo Caffara

The Supreme Court decree forcing states to include persons of the same sex to enter into civil marriage contracts will surely prove to be an ongoing blow to our free exercise of religion, and, as we shall see, is a further attack on women.

I want to share with you what I have not been reading in the conservative and religious media, namely: the hidden and unacknowledged role of Satan. Even Christians tend to forget that Satan, who was created as a majestically high level angel, has intellectual capacity almost beyond our ability to imagine. Intelligent by orders of magnitude more than any mere man or woman, he has the mental firepower, unbending will, army of demons, and freedom of movement as a non-corporeal being to coordinate his systematic efforts down to the finest detail for every person, institution, and government over the span of generations and centuries. In short, he is playing an internecine long game, and his goal is to have every single person born into our world spend eternity in hell.

Satan has been implementing a particularly effective worldwide plan in recent centuries to destroy families. Legalized same-sex marriage is a late-stage victory. Even many Christians lose sight of the plan's broader dimensions, which can be known through divine revelation, sacred tradition, sublime magisterial teaching, the approved apparitions of Our Lady, and our bitter firsthand experience within our culture. Through constant demonic influence, taking advantage of original sin and the temptations of the world, including using the lure of powerful "modern" ideas and philosophies, the evil one has been undermining Christian civilization with spectacular success through those who (mostly) unwittingly serve him.

Of course, few people wake up each morning with the conscious goal of serving the devil, or even, of dedicating themselves to evil. The openly godless, the functionally atheistic, and many fallen-away Christians either do not acknowledge God's existence or rarely think of God; they do not accept (and reflexively mock belief in) the existence of a powerful, super-intelligent personal being whose entire purpose is to oppose God; Satan thereby has more license to subtly and profoundly influence their presuppositions, disordered desires, and behavior.

According to Pope Leo XIII, who was privy to a conversation between Jesus and the devil in the late nineteenth century during which Satan boasted he could annihilate the Church if given more leeway and enough time, God permitted the evil one to be unleashed. The pope, shaken to his core, immediately composed his famous Saint Michael Exorcism Prayer, then directed a shorter version be prayed after every Mass; this took place faithfully until the mid-1960s. The text of the prayer follows; please pray it, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle,
be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

If you are a faithful Catholic, you know Satan is nothing compared to God—he is a prideful, blind usurper petulantly flailing against an all-powerful being of Triune Love with His own larger, massive army of good angels and saints in heaven and Who has already vouchsafed our salvation through the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As long as we remain brothers and sisters of Jesus within his Church we will ultimately triumph through time into eternity, but that does not mean that we will not be called to share the suffering, passion, and sacrifice of Christ during our particular journey on earth or that countless souls—perhaps billions—will not be lost during our lifetimes.

How Redefining Marriage Fits into the Satanic Plan
I made a point of referring to "civil marriage contracts" in my opening paragraph to emphasize that the dignity of human beings as male and female and the reality of marriage preexist any governmental definition of it. Civil marriage laws can either be in greater or lesser conformity with divine and natural law. In order for flourishing, loving, and just societies to exist, sexual activity between a man and woman under the law and in practice must be reserved for marriage and oriented toward, and open to, procreation. This has been proven over history by the exemplary lives of hundreds of millions of real families in Christian societies and by those, encouraged by prevailing Christian culture, who conform to the Christian norm without accepting fully the divine origins of the plan for families.

Male and Female
Every child inherently deserves to be born into a family with a mother and father who are faithful to each other to the exclusion of all others and thus they are truly free to raise their sons and daughters in love through adulthood in a society that supports them in every possible way. Furthermore, and largely lost amid the contemporary political debate, the differences between man and women are profound even beyond the biological differences, extending to the character of their souls, and these differences are necessary for a family to form, including requiring distinctive roles and responsibilities for each sex. This was God's plan: that the man sacrifice and humble himself in the manner of Christ (that is, in radical selflessness) to nourish, protect, and provide for the woman while the woman humbles herself by accepting his gift to make a total selfless gift of herself in response. She needs him. He needs her. Both must be humble, just as all Christians need humility to accept the saving grace of God: "Jesus, I need you." Our post-Christian world rejects this difficult, beautiful, and supernaturally-designed complementary sacrifice required to form successful families.

The goal of Satan's "final battle," therefore, as Jesus' mother informed Sister Lucy of Fatima, is to destroy families, and his means is to undermine the reality of the complementary natures of man and woman. One can further state that his goal is to harm women in particular, because they and their children benefit most from the Christian family template (legalized abortion being the most obvious illustration). The legal imposition of so-called same-sex marriage is thus a flagrant denial of the complementarity of man and woman. This is also why the liberal elites are increasingly promoting acceptance of "transgenderism" with overbearing enthusiasm: biological men (humans with male DNA) tragically "identifying" as women (and vice versa) supports the erasure of male and female complementarity.

Catholic Sexual Ethos Honored and Protected Women
Only my most elderly readers remember living in a society where the profound differences of women and men were universally supported and celebrated as the natural order of reality. Pre-Christian pagan societies (whose members had access to divine law "written on their hearts" and to natural law by way of reason) embraced some aspects of the blueprint for a civilization of love, but over the course of history, it took the sacrifice and revelation of Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit infallibly guiding His Church, bolstered by centuries of hard-fought, disciplined sexual chastity in practice to gradually reorient pagan culture toward the Christian vision in the Western world.

It is helpful to recall that women were often treated under the law and in practice as little more than chattel before Christendom, and contrary to the leftist propaganda, they were drawn to Christianity which explicitly raised women to equal dignity with men in the eyes of God, and in certain respects, as above men in their roles as mothers and mirrors of divine love. After all, with Mary, God made a woman spouse of His Holy Spirit and mother of His Incarnate Son. The radical, new Christian mandate for males to strive for sexual purity before marriage and then practice fidelity within marriage was a benefit to both sexes, but especially females. It is easy to underestimate how new, revolutionary, and transformational the Christian (which before the sixteenth century, meant "Catholic") sexual ethos was for human society.

Divine Gift to Human Society
Thus, the Christian conception of marriage was a foundational gift to all of humanity from God, primarily bequeathed via Catholic moral teaching, sexual ethos, and faithful practice. This priceless gift, in terms of producing stable, healthy family life oriented toward the divine, provided the first just, peaceful, well-ordered societies in human history during Christendom, including the fertile practical and intellectual soil from which sprang modern education, medicine, economics, and science—almost exclusively the fruits of western Christian civilization.

Today the great majority no longer even knows about this inheritance it owes to Christianity, having convincingly told itself a false, alternative account that science and its impressive manipulations of the material world resulted from the spurning of Christianity. Having rejected the blueprint of holy family life, based upon the reality of the natural, biological, and soul-based complementarity of male and female, and now quickly draining what remains of the inheritance, the modern world is coming to be more defined by disorder, sexual insanity, and the inevitable abuse of mothers and their children, unborn and born.

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
- Feminist Slogan

Detaching Marriage from Procreation
Additionally, the modern view of sexuality, explicitly proclaimed in the recent Supreme Court ruling, is that its purpose is to provide physical and psychic pleasure detached from procreation. Practically, this separation depends (for the 99% of the population without same-sex attraction) upon the use of contraception backstopped by abortion. It is helpful to grasp that contraception itself is a rejection of male/female complementarity. Its advocates from the beginning promoted and still promote contraception in terms of equality. "Women must be able to engage in sex without getting pregnant—just like men!" and so on. If contraception fails, recourse to abortion retains the "equality." Thus, Women Do Not Need Men is the constant echo and foundational philosophical principle of secular feminism.

Christians Began Embracing Contraception a Century Ago
Protestants first separated from the Catholic Church and its divine guarantee of moral truth five hundred years ago. It took centuries, but eventually the non-Catholic Christian denominations formally began disconnecting marriage from procreation by approving contraception in the late 1920s after years of pressure and contrary practice within the various congregations. (Planned Parenthood, by the way, by far the largest abortion provider in America, began in 1916 as the American Birth Control League as an openly racist, eugenics organization which later formed close ties to Nazi eugenicists.) Sadly, by the end of the 1960s, even a very large majority of Catholics had embraced contraception (and now self-sterilization) as a seemingly indispensable or even "natural" part of sexual practice in marriage—almost always with the blessing or resigned silence of parish priests who either personally rejected magisterial teaching or were too cowardly to winsomely catechize it.

At this juncture I must be clear. Aside from the liberal mainstream Protestant denominations—which have dwindled drastically in numbers and influence—devout Christians are generally wonderful, active allies to Catholics in the Culture Wars. Most recognize the Catholic Church is the only truly reliable, world-spanning organization holding the line against the Culture of Death. Oh how I love my Protestant brothers and sisters! I invite them to humble themselves, open their hearts to grace, study the vast body of pro-family Catholic theology and social support mechanisms developed over the past half century, and accept the authentic teachings of even their own denominations before 1929: that contraception is a grave moral evil, contrary to God's laws, prohibited in the Bible, a frustration of God's plan for humanity, a rejection of the promise of divine providence, an impediment to truly loving Jesus, and a profound detriment to all marriages which embrace it.

As for the legal foundations for moral acceptance of contraception, by 1965, now two generations in our past, in Griswold v Connecticut, the Supreme Court conjured a mythical "right to privacy" to strike down a (non-enforced) law banning the sale of contraceptives to married couples; the law of the land now reflected what had been the practice of the great majority of Americans for over half a century: that sexuality in marriage was not primarily or necessarily oriented toward begetting children. The legal seeds for same-sex marriage took root in this ruling. Only eight years later, the right to privacy was cited as a bedrock rationale to legalize the murder of unborn boys and girls in the womb via Roe v Wade. Today, over 95% of baptized Catholics and likely well over 80% who attend Mass on Sunday fail to understand and in practice reject divine law with regard to contraception.

With this social and legal history in mind, it becomes clear that the orientation toward openness to life within marriage as God ordains for human flourishing had already been lost in America over the past one hundred years. Thus the law, in union with the practice of many of her citizens, no longer recognizes that sacrificial, beautiful, life-affirming man/woman complementarity in marriage is the only civilized, acceptable human environment for begetting and raising children. Before the legalization of the fiction that marriage should include persons who are by scientific nature incapable of conceiving children (man with a man or woman with a woman) came the social and legal acquiescence of the diabolical lie that sexuality could have little or nothing to do with children.

The War on Truth: Modernity
One of my main points here is that the evil one meticulously planned and manipulated this state of affairs, most openly with the Protestant revolution over five hundred years ago, and by specifically reorienting Christian culture toward a false understanding of the delicate balance of marriage and procreation. Concurrent with that, building through recent centuries, the evil one played a role in promoting a body of ideas often referred to as the Enlightenment (not all of which was harmful or anti-religious), which in general proposed that Man, instead of God, was the measure of all truth. Fallen man is an unreliable, subjective, and often contradictory yardstick; inexorably, modern philosophy in the past few centuries then rejected the principle that there is objective or absolute truth (known as skepticism or relativism). Philosophy inevitably devolved toward a depressing, dark nihilism, whereby power, in the absence of truth, is worshipped as the triumphant principle.

The Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage was supported, implicitly and at times openly, by these modern, anti-truth philosophies. Recall Justice Kennedy's infamous claim in his 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey opinion (affirming the "right" to abortion in Roe v Wade) that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." His is an excellent summary of the Enlightenment principle that man, not God, is the measure of all truth.

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
- Denis Diderot, French Revolutionary Leader

You could categorize all these world philosophical trends together under the term Modernity, which early on bared its bloody teeth in the terror and viciously anti-Catholic French Revolution in the late 1700s. Over thirty thousand nuns, brothers, and priests were brutally executed in assembly-line fashion during the Red Terror. These destructive philosophical tides have been anticipated, exposed, and traced across the centuries by Christian (mostly Catholic) scholars, popes, and saints. In a very real sense, however, none of these powerful ideas were in any way difficult for the evil one to comprehend and promote, given his vast intellectual capacity, in order to deceive individuals and societies.

Culture of Death Depends Upon the Dictatorship of Relativism
With the prevailing belief within elite political, educational and media circles that Christianity is the enemy (because it proclaims divine, moral, or any transcendent truth), an a-religious or anti-religious cadre promote and now increasingly enforce what Pope Benedict defined as the Dictatorship of Relativism to implement what Pope Saint John Paul II described as the Culture of Death. The Supreme Court dictated a hyper-relativistic definition of marriage to an entire country contrary to the beliefs of a vast portion of her citizens and numerous ballot initiatives to the contrary.

The Pornocracy Requires an Ocean of Innocent Blood
Our society is now, in practice and under the law, a grinding sexually-deviant death machine, wherein pornography (a particularly addicting form of obtaining sexual pleasure divorced from procreation) is a legal multi-billion dollar juggernaut available on devices most children carry in their pockets; wherein every materially-advanced nation in the world is rapidly disintegrating culturally and economically due to radically below-replacement populations; and wherein the worldwide surgical and chemical abortion toll without which sexual license could not be so ubiquitous numbers in the billions.

I've been outlining all these things for you for years, with a certain bluntness, and God bless you for your faithfulness.

The Final Battle
Satan hates the innocent, especially children. Our entire world is soaked in their blood. He hates you. He hates your spouse and your children. He hates your awesome manhood and fatherhood. He hates your profound womanhood and motherhood. He hates the freedom to practice religion (legally and brutally banned in self-proclaimed atheistic Communist regimes where he gained sway such as the former Soviet Union and China).

He will now motivate his unwitting followers to use the Supreme Court ruling to marginalize, silence, persecute, punish, incarcerate, or otherwise destroy individuals and institutions who exercise their religion in accord with the divine, natural, rational, and absolute truth there is no "right" to marry a person of the same sex.

A Loving God Chose this Time in History for You
So we find ourselves living in the culmination (and in certain painful respects, let's not mince words, on the losing side) of a centuries-long satanic war during what Our Lady and Jesus in numerous other approved warnings has characterized as a final battle.

It is comforting to remember that our loving God chose to place us in this particular time in history, and gave us, either through our own loving families or via the supernatural grace of conversion, the priceless gift of baptism into the Catholic faith. It is a blessing, not a curse, to live in these dark times, no matter how difficult it might be to remain faithful and to experience the heartbreak of losing people close to us (hopefully not permanently) to the flesh, the world, and the evil one.

The happiness, fruitfulness, and peace we enjoy by partaking of supernatural reality with God, on the other hand, is worth any sacrifice. We have each other. We have Confession and Holy Communion. We have Jesus.

Our Response
Sadly, I fear the battle might not be turned decisively toward victory until our bishops are stripped of much of their worldly power, property, and are perhaps incarcerated (in the same fashion as the jailed bishops and cardinals who preceded then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla in Communist Poland). Then, finally, may they lead us in prayer and fasting for supernatural intervention. Echoing the wisdom of Our Lord, as a part of living holy lives, I believe only prayer and fasting can drive out the demons that dominate our age. Sadly, most of our bishops, almost all good men, do not seem to grasp the abjectly dire scope of the struggle as outlined above.

You likely know what I'm going to write next: we must fast and pray. "Pray the Rosary of peace in the world," Our Lady of Fatima urged. I'm inviting you to receive Holy Communion (the ultimate prayer) every day with me for each other, our loved ones, for the conversion of our society, and for perfect application of divine mercy and justice upon those who cooperate knowingly or unknowingly with the diabolical conspiracy. I'm inviting you to fast with me at least one day every week (Wednesday and/or Friday) for the rest of our lives.

We should also sacrifice whatever time and treasure needed to evangelize our mostly good-hearted, fallen-away relatives and friends, fellow parishioners, and work associates in the truth of the Catholic faith.

Those who are called to pour themselves out in the legal, prolife, and cultural battles, locally and nationally, must persevere. Some should engage the fray in these ways for the first time or to a greater degree, depending on their talents, opportunity, and state in life. Virtually every CatholiCity Citizen reading my words has opportunities for increased or altogether new teaching and service roles in every parish in the United States, especially in the area of religious education of children and adults. Go for it. Put your "hand to the plow" and don't look back.

Good Cheer and Honor
We should remain realistic, but importantly, of good cheer. We are honored to labor alongside the heavenly angels, the saints in heaven, our beloved mother Mary and our brother Jesus during this battle for souls. I still believe, as I wrote to you two years ago in my booklet, A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America, that a devout yet still very small minority within the Catholic Church is exploding in size and quickly gaining influence.

Counterintuitively, there is also certain sense that the Supreme Court ruling was playing a final card. What more can be done than to redefine into absurdity the marriage laws of all of human history? Without sound marriages, just and peaceful societies eventually cease to exist. Here is an interesting analysis from George Weigel:

Freedom untethered from truth is freedom's worst enemy. For if there is only your truth and my truth, and neither one of us recognizes a transcendent moral standard (call it "the truth") by which to adjudicate our differences, then the only way to settle the argument is for you to impose your power on me, or for me to impose my power on you. Freedom untethered from truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy; and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy, tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of order is just around the corner.

Even polygamy, unjust to women as it is, most often conforms to the natural order of sexual complementarity, so if it were legalized, it does not carry the same potent legal and social impact as same-sex marriage. The primary danger is not that a tiny percentage of people with tragic same-sex attractions will play-act at civil marriage, but that their supposed "right" to do so will be used as a legal cudgel to limit the free exercise of religion and further erase male-female complementary within normal marriages.

The stealth satanic philosophies of Modernity animate the power elites in government, courts, almost all higher education, and media. Now comes the struggle to more extensively micromanage the minds, behaviors, and hearts of individuals—the dictatorship part of the Dictatorship of Relativism—which will doubtlessly include the legal marginalization of Christian practice, impoverishment of the Church via the tax laws and other laws (such as the massive fines leveled on the Little Sisters of the Poor for refusing to provide contraception under Obamacare), incarceration for some and then more people, and so on, all the way into soft or open political authoritarianism—the loss of the "first" freedom, that of free exercise of religion, will end with the loss of virtually all freedoms.

That is what is coming: you know it in your heart and in your bones. If this seems far off into the future, consider how rapidly same-sex marriage was imposed: liberal California voted against it via referendum in 2008 and even otherwise enthusiastically pro-abortion President Obama made a cynical political calculation to nominally support traditional marriage until 2012.

Fathers and mothers (especially fathers), in the meantime, you must not let the government, the entertainment media, or the secularist educational complex raise your children. Be the voice and example of truth to those for whom you are responsible. You already know this so I add it by way of encouragement.

Additionally, during the "reign of satan," foster a deep, trusting, and daily devotion to the man with the title Terror of Demons, Saint Joseph. Dependence on Saint Joseph's constant help is absolutely necessary. Fathers, ask him to help you be Joseph in your family.

Reality Versus Rhetoric
Yet, in terms of personal action we can take, it is helpful to note the satanic elites are myopic regarding certain realities. Regardless of the laws, propaganda, and vast cultural and financial resources being spent on the Culture of Death agenda, the reality is that most men and women are aware on some level of their profound differences and complementarity: emotionally, spiritually, and biologically. Most women, despite feminism, still long for a man, for a healthy marriage, and for motherhood. Most men, on some level, despite the pleasures and distractions offered by sexual license and the empty, unfulfilling pornocracy, sense the call to fatherhood—for a life with the weight of meaning of raising children. The satanic regime, having rejected objective, religious, and transcendent truth as a first principle, offers no substantive guidance to our mostly good-hearted fellow citizens; instead it encourages the shallow seeking of power, material wealth, and selfish pleasure—none of which are ultimately fulfilling. Much of our calling as devout Christians, after being living examples of virtue and apostles of action, is helping heal the damage to people harmed by modern lifestyles.

This is explained well in the best article I have ever read on current secularist regime, which the author calls the Technocracy, and how it has compromised the leaders of the Church:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/08/technocracy-now

Moreover, some of our pop culture still pays tribute to the romantic ideal of finding one person to love and have children with, and that men bear the responsibility of cherishing, nourishing, and protecting women so that they can bloom in full beauty as mothers. This is human nature; even the pagans sought it. These realities are built into our bodies while divinity is designed into our eternal souls. There remain tens of millions of American Christians, lukewarm but still practicing Catholics, and those who claim to believe in some kind of benevolent God while unaffiliated with any church, however misguided regarding sexual ethics, who seek happiness through marriage.

Therefore we should do all we can to promote the reality of the differences in the sexes, especially regarding the celebration of the courage, sacrifice, responsibility and power of authentic Christian fatherhood and concomitant nourishing, loving, and protecting of wives and motherhood. One friend of mine, along these lines, suggested starting a movement to promote men opening doors for women, since it is no longer the taboo it was during the height of 1970s feminism. Christian women, along the same lines, should continue to dress in such a way that promotes their beauty, femininity, and modesty, and we men should encourage and help them do so. These are just two examples, not ultimate solutions. No one thing, initiative, or movement will suffice. There are countless ways in countless battlefields to show the world that God made us male and female to serve each other.

Be a Saint
In conclusion, allow me to urge you to be the holiest saint you can be, every hour of every day, during whatever time you have left on this planet. If you are consecrated to Immaculate Mary, you are serving her son even while you sleep. Whatever you are doing, however you are suffering or thriving (or a combination of both) in your own particular circumstances, you know you can do much more. You can pray more—probably much more. You can fast more. Many of you can receive the Eucharist more. You can read more and teach more. You can forsake more worldly entertainments, distractions, and relationships. You can likely give much more of your financial treasure to effective Catholic apostolates.

As a starting point, I recommend Fr. John McCloskey's brilliant, simple, and effective booklet, Seven Daily Habits for Faithful Catholics. Almost every problem in your life and in our society can be addressed by all of us spending more time with Jesus, and Fr. John outlines exactly how to do so in five minutes of reading.

In summary, be a saint. Saints transform the world. If you're married, raise saints. The world needs you and your children to be saints; God designed and calls everyone to sanctity, and in this sense, nothing is different now than when Jesus sent out the first apostles, inflamed by the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth.

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Bud Macfarlane, founder of CatholiCity.com and the Mary Foundation, is the author of three bestselling Catholic novels, available free of charge from Saint Jude Media. You can comment on his articles here.