An invisible war is being fought for the life of the Catholic Church in the United States - and it is a fight to the death. The war is more than a century old now, and this is a key engagement. The war is not about pedophilia or homosexuality, as repugnant as those two symptoms are. It is about an attempted coup d'état within the Catholic Church - one of only two global institutions on this planet. Whoever gets the Keys of St. Peter walks off with the power to change the world - or so the betrayers think. I'll tell you why.

At the turn of the 20th century the popes had spoken out forcefully against socialism and communism. Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum novarum (1891) that acknowledged workers' rights but upheld the right to private property, a foundation of freedom.

The Christian worldview was under attack. A new worldview, Rationalism, was menacing all of Western Civilization. Rationalism had cut deep gorges in Christendom. Many no longer believed in Christian Revelation, that is, the scripture. If man could not prove a premise, man need not be bound by any given premise. The created order as given in the Bible could be re-ordered according to man's design; communism, utopia - fill in the blank. With the aid of science and technology, man did not need God or His musty old laws. A new order was coming of age.

In 1899, the pope also sent a weighty letter to the bishops of the United States, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, that warned against the dangers of "Americanism." Essentially, he warned the U.S. bishops that their primary identification had to be as Catholic shepherds. He cautioned against "new opinions" that some American bishops held that believed the gospel and doctrine should be accommodated to American culture: The Church must not "shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions ..." or "to tone down the meaning. ..."

Yet for a hundred years, many American bishops and theologians have believed that the American culture, dominant in the world, has something to teach the Church. They subordinated the command to evangelize the culture to their vision of an Americanized Catholic Church. For the first 50 years, these men were a small underground cadre of dissidents. By the close of the Second Vatican Council, the second generation of "modernists" had spread their Americanized vision of church in seminaries and universities.

Meanwhile, the American culture was growing ever more secular, and the sexual revolution, feminism and liberalism had a death grip on the foundational principles of the Christian worldview. Campus radicals and professors rebelled against authority - not parental or school authority, but the very idea of any authority with moral absolutes.

Catholic dissidents were swept up into the rebellion. They confidently talk of "structural change," meaning to shove over the Catholic Church and build a "democratic" church where "power is shared" and doctrine is determined by "consensus" rather than by scripture and Jesus' teachings.

These misguided "experts" would have us believe that if only the Church had been controlled by liberals, women priests and laity, this crisis would not have happened. Rubbish - they created the problem in the first place in an attempt to force changes in Church doctrine and discipline. If the U.S. bishops and theologians had been faithful to the teachings of the Church and their own vows, this crisis would be a footnote rather than a chapter in Church history.

It became fashionable for some American prelates to flaunt one's independence from the Church - to prove that they were not stodgy old time Catholics, but the sophisticated "American Catholics." Many of the bishops in Dallas today came of age in the '60s era of rebellion. They resent, as free Americans, being told what to do by the Vatican. As early as 1961, the Vatican issued an instruction, The Careful Selection And Training of Candidates For The States Of Perfection And Sacred Orders, prohibiting the admission of homosexuals to the seminaries. It was simply ignored by those bent on "changing the structure" of the Church to conform to the liberal American culture.

Others were weak and allowed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to push them into acquiescence. Soon, the internal committees of the NCCB were composed of homosexuals and modernists, feminists and even New Age devotees. They have a death grip on the levers of power within the Conference. An example is the pastoral letter from the U.S. bishops on homosexuality, Always Our Children. This flawed "gay positive" document was drafted by a committee - not by the bishops - and issued before the majority of U.S. bishops had even read the document. They did not vote on its contents (so much for "consensus"). The Vatican finally forced a revision of this squishy "pastoral" instruction. Even now, in Dallas, a similar committee set the agenda for the deliberations.

By the mid 1960s, the Rockefeller family had formed an alliance with Fr. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame University and sought an audience with Pope Paul VI in order to "advise" the pope to permit birth control. The Rockefeller interests were promoting population control. Hesburgh and others at Notre Dame, including Fr. Richard McBrien seen on "The O'Reilly Factor," worked feverishly to change the Church's teaching - if not in doctrine, at least in the practices adopted in millions of Catholic bedrooms. McBrien's book, "Catholicism" was so flawed it was - finally - censored by the U.S. bishops. But it is still on the shelf at Notre Dame University, infecting a new generation of graduates.

The modernists were in lock step with American culture. Worse, they adopted Marxist strategies to achieve their goals. Msgr. Jack Egan, Chicago icon of liberalism in the '60s and '70s, befriended Marxist Saul Alinsky, author of "Rules for Radicals," a manifesto for tearing down a community or institution and rebuilding it in the communist image. The Marxist vision of androgynous masses, where the State is Father and families are those who share a domicile portioned out by the State-Father, appealed to those who cry for "justice." This "justice" is enforced by an all-powerful state that would erase any distinction between groups of people; they call it "power-sharing." These rules were promoted as "liberation" and applied to major issues in the Church, such as "liberating" women from "patriarchy" or "liberating" homosexuality from homophobic old men in the Vatican.

They no longer believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church, but like communist moles, they burrow in to make changes from within. They are instructed to "defect in place" as feminist nun Miriam Therese Winter advises. Prominent theologians have taught that those who control religion control the culture. Defrocked theologian Hans Kung promotes a "Global Ethic" (not the gospel) that mirrors the agenda of world ideologues. He and American Catholic dissident organizations want a "Vatican III" where new structures will include a constitution for the Church and a lay co-pope. Those who have grand visions for a re-ordered world based on Rationalism rather than Revelation seek a means of global governance to enforce their vision of "peace and justice."

These and others, pernicious men and women, promote abortion as a "choice" and applaud population control as a religious duty that preserves the environment (they love the Earth Charter). They accept euthanasia as "merciful" and do not object that nations like Sweden have moved to make it a crime to preach or teach against homosexuality.

The liberal media in the U.S. understand this point. They also defend homosexuality in the culture. They do not want to use this crisis in the Church to advocate against homosexual activity but to promote changes in the Catholic Church: married priests, women priests and acceptance of homosexuals.

That's why CNN trots out folks like Anthony Padavano to advocate for married priests. But Padavano is also keynote speaker for the dissident organization Call to Action that promotes homosexuality in the Church. Or CNN's guest "expert," Sr. Bridget Mary Meehan, who calls for "structural changes" that allow laity greater say. Meehan and others of her ilk expect that once the laity is given control of the Church, it will relax sexual morality and resemble the Democratic Party, that is, liberal American culture. Because the American bishops have worried more about their independence from Rome than allegiance to the gospel, they have become more easily controlled by the liberal agenda - often without realizing it. The media has hushed up past foibles, but the price now is high - a lesson learned too late. The American bishops are a means to an end: The titanic battle is for the Keys of St. Peter - to control the structure and doctrine of the Church. The issue isn't homosexuality, it is to empty the Church from within of the truth of Revelation. But why?

To silence the lone international voice for morality, that's why. Hate the Catholic Church or love it, it must be admitted that it publicly teaches and preaches against the totalitarian, utilitarian worldview. The Catholic Church insists on the dignity and value of every person, born and unborn. The world ideologues howl when the Church stands up for life as sacrosanct. At Cairo, at Beijing, at the World Summit for Children and behind the scenes in nation after nation, the Church parries those who would impose a utilitarian global vision on us all.

The moral voice of the Catholic Church stands between modernists and their New World Order vision that is opposed to the old order of Revelation. What the ideologues need is to put a cork in the mouth of the Church and control the Keys of St. Peter in the near future. To use the Church and her universities and schools and hospitals the world over - to use them for their diabolical agenda.

Notice the timing of the Boston Globe's "breaking" story. The Globe and others have known for over a decade about the growing gay sub-culture in the Church, but the Globe and others simply winked - they are no less guilty of a cover up than Cardinal Law. It did not seem worthy of print. Until, that is, Pope John Paul II, the disliked "reactionary" pope faltered during Christmas masses and seemed so frail that new teams of correspondents were dispatched to Rome in anticipation of a papal conclave.

The goal among modernists, clerical and secular, is to use this crisis to create chaos so large that a new pope will have to deal with the crisis as his first order of business. If a momentum is built that insists that the old order is the problem, perhaps the cardinals can be stampeded into electing an unusual pope: a candidate approved by the New York Times and the United Nations.