The priority for the Church should be to save souls

The Marxist Roots of the Contemporary Family Crisis


BY EDWARD PENTIN

In a Register interview, Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea amplifies on insights she presented to other participants during last year’s synod on the family.


Romanian medical doctor Anca-Maria Cernea made waves at the synod of bishops on the family last year when she told the assembly of bishops that the primary cause of the family crisis is not material poverty or consumerism but an ideological revolution being waged by “cultural Marxism.”

“This ideology calls itself progressive,” she said, “but it is nothing else than the ancient serpent’s offer, for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation here, in this world. It’s an error of religious nature; it’s Gnosticism.”

In this recent interview with the Register, Dr. Cernea returned to the theme after giving a talk on the subject at the Rome Life Forum in May of this year. She called on the Church to return to her main task of the past 2,000 years: to lead people through what is primarily a spiritual war to salvation rather than placing priority on fighting earthly problems. She also explained why those who have had experience of living through communism are well placed to help the Church leave behind the cultural Marxism that she believes has infiltrated many institutions, including the Church, and rediscover the authentic truth of the Catholic faith.

Cernea currently serves as president of the Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest, Romania.

What were the main points of your speech at the Rome Life Forum?

I started by recalling the two interventions [talks] in the synod of bishops of last year, which I found very important. One of them was made by Archbishop Fülöp Kocsis, metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church from Hungary. He said that what we are dealing with are not actually sociological or economical challenges that challenge the family. It’s, rather, something that’s directly against God’s plan, and it comes from the evil one. He quoted St. Paul and said we are not fighting flesh and blood, but we are fighting the powers of evil. The other intervention was made by Bishop Tomash Peta, from Kazakhstan. He said that the “smoke of Satan” that was mentioned by Paul VI could also be perceived in some synod fathers’ interventions.

I thought that these two interventions somehow summarized the problem that I was addressing, which is that there is an assault of a religious nature against God’s creation, his moral and natural order. And this is not coming from flesh and blood, from consumerism and individualism, as we usually hear — the cause of the sexual revolution. It’s something deeper than that, an ideology that is a form of Gnosticism, which we are facing nowadays. Another problem is that the Church is fighting this assault not only from gnostic heresies coming from the outside, but this is also happening inside.

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Would you say Christianity, the Church, is being eclipsed?

It’s going through a crisis. It’s not the first one, but it’s very, very serious. We shouldn’t underestimate this, but this can be overcome. There have been many crises before, there have been invasions, other errors, big heresies, which also penetrated the Church herself, the councils and among the leaders of the Church. But God has told us not to worry; it’s his Church.

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