A Chapter-by-Chapter Refutation of Dr. Taylor Marshall’s Book, Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. Part One.

I. Introduction: Setting the Table.

Recently, people have been talking about Dr. Taylor Marshall's Book, Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press 2019). After reading some favorable reviews of the book as well as some unfavorable critiques of the book, particularly those by my friend, David Armstrong, I bought the book (Kindle edition) for myself. Upon reading the book, I decided that my first real apologetics endeavor since my heart attacks and open-heart surgery in 2016 would be a defense of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church and her popes from the salacious conspiracy claims of Dr. Marshall.

The premise of Dr. Marshall's book is straightforward. He claims that the present-day Catholic Church is in an unprecedented crisis. He lays the blame for the said crisis on the minions of Satan who have infiltrated the Church seeking to destroy it from within. He names the culprits:

Satan uniquely entered the Catholic Church at some point over the last century, or even before that. For over a century, the organizers of Freemasonry, Liberalism, and Modernism infiltrated the Catholic Church to change her doctrine, her liturgy, and her mission from something supernatural to something secular.  

Marshall, Taylor. Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. Sophia Institute Press. Kindle Edition. Location 110.  

Dr. Marshall argues that at some point in the 19th century, a secret plot was hatched by a cabal of politically disaffected ne=er-do-wells to destroy the Church through the implementation of a plan that would cause the Church to adopt philosophical and theological principles designed to undermine the Faith. This conspiracy's goal was to replace the Supernatural faith, which is Catholicism with Naturalism, which he suggests is the faith of Satan. The aim of all this is as follows:

The Catholic Church is in crisis because the enemies of Christ plotted organized efforts to place a pope for Satan on the Roman Chair of Saint Peter.

Ibid.  Location 123

So basically, Taylor Marshall wants the reader to believe that the universal Church has been enthralled by the forces of darkness and the pope is now the pope of Satan instead of the vicar of Christ. He wants the reader to believe him over Jesus Christ, who at the founding of His Church told St. Peter and the other apostles:

And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18).

But yet, there is more, Jesus didn't really mean it when He said:

And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.  (Matthew 16:19)

For Marshall, "whatsoever" doesn't mean "whatsoever" when he and his fellow reactionary brethren disagree with what the pope teaches and says.

In short, Marshall's book advances a conspiracy theory about the Church. The book advances a conspiracy theory that has been peddled before. For example, These Last Day Ministries argues that Communist agents have infiltrated the Catholic hierarchy to destroy from within. Another website that I occasionally read published an article that claims the Catholic abuse crisis is likely no accident, but a strategy to destroy Church from within. The Church Militant group claims that in the 1920s-30s thousands of young communist men enrolled in Catholic seminaries to become priests subvert its doctrines in an article unsurprisingly entitled Infiltration! What is different about Marshall's book is that it postulates that Satan's conspiracy to take over the Church from within began in the early 19th century as opposed to the early 20th century. Instead of Communists, Marshall's bugaboos are Freemasons and the Carbonari.

What is one to make of this purported conspiracy? After all, it could be true, couldn't it? There are numerous instances where conspiracy theories are conspiracies-in-fact. For that matter, most popular conspiracy theories gain traction and gain a following because they often do contain a grain of truth. The one advanced by Dr. Marshall is no different. Scripture and dogmatic teaching inform us that Satan is implacably at war with the Church. There were indeed secret organizations in the 19th century opposed to the Catholic Church. (That said, there have been secret organizations, as well as not-so-secret ones, which have fought the Church in every age since Jesus founded it two millennia ago.) The Church has approved the Marian apparitions at La Salette and Fatima as worthy of belief. The Carbonari did exist. Freemasonry is still a great evil in this world. There is no doubt that the Soviet Union sought to destroy Catholicism and even attempted to have a pope assassinated. Vatican II did happen. The Church has been rocked with bank scandals and clerical sexual abuse scandals (What else is new?) The Novus Ordo Mass of Pope St. Paul VI is now the ordinary rite of the Latin Church. (Of course, the Tridentine Mass of Pius V replaced rites that existed before it, too.) There is no shortage of spiritual and worldly mercenaries in the hire of the Evil One who prowl about the world seeking the ruination and damnation of souls.

Moreover, the Church has seemingly undergone a great many changes since Vatican II. The teaching of the post-Vatican II popes has engendered hesitancy and uncertainty among many Catholics. There is a natural resistance to change because change is unsettling, and many are yearning to return to the way things used to be when the world and the Faith made sense. And on occasion, one does feel overwhelmed and lost because of those changes.

Dr. Marshall's book demonstrates that he is one of those  lost ones who want the Church to turn back the clock and go back to the way things used to be: the Tridentine Mass, popes who exercise temporal as well as spiritual power, a Church patterned after the Council of Trent as opposed to the Church of the Second Vatican Council. He wants to hop in Mr. Peabody's Wayback machine and pretend that the Age of Enlightenment did not happen; that the French Revolution did not occur; that Italian unification did not take place; or, that the rise of nationalism, socialism, communism, scientism, existentialism, modernism, and emotivism/relativism, did not take hold in Western civilization. Upon reading Dr. Marshall's book, it comes across not so much of a diagnosis and cure for what ails the Church, but a salve to soothe hurt feelings of a group of Catholics who feel left behind by a Church seeks to proclaim the Gospel in a post-modern world. He longs for a world where the words
"Ressourcement" or "Aggiornamento" had never been uttered.

Joseph Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and co-author of the 2014 book American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014) quips "Conspiracy theories are for losers,"  The reason that conspiracy theories are popular is that they give unhappy people someone or something else to blame for their unhappiness or their worries. Someone or something has to be blamed for our loss of certainty or happiness. Witness the unhappy Democrats blaming Hillary Clinton's loss of the 2016 presidential election to a complete reprobate like Donald Trump.  They can only overcome their bitterness by concocting a conspiracy theory that Trump colluded with Russians to meddle and undermine the electoral process. Of course, the fact that Mrs. Clinton was a horrible candidate and ran an even worse campaign had nothing to do with her loss. Personally, I think a lack of humility is at the heart of such denialism.

I touch upon all this to point out that conspiracy theories are psychological phenomena. They are founded on feelings as opposed to reason informed by facts or evidence. Facts are made to conform to a narrative rather than used to form conclusions. They provide certainty in an uncertain world.  Someone or something is screwing with us and it is not our fault.  In Hillary Clinton's case, even though there have been two years of investigations, hundreds of witnesses interviewed, millions of documents reviewed, all of which determined that President Trump did not collude with Russia, many people still advance the narrative that Donald Trump still conspired with foreign agents to get elected.

Furthermore, conspiracy theories like the one postulated by Dr. Marshall are readily accepted due to our wish to explain why things seem to be the way they are. We need to create a framework or a world view to understand events or actions. Our brains are hard-wired to find patterns upon which to build our world view. St. Thomas Aquinas explains this is the way we intellect in his Summa Theologiae (ST I, Q.87). We tend to take our experiences and link them together to intellect. In other words, we use such cause and effect to reason. Indeed, efficient causation is one of the key ways we can prove the existence of God from nature.

In this case, Dr. Marshall attempts to link a series of events in the history of the Church and Europe such as Marian apparitions, the loss of the Papal States, the election of various popes, Freemason and KGB machinations, Vatican II, the Novus Ordo Mass, and the actions of Pope Francis, etc., with the Alta Vendita, a document allegedly concocted by Italian Carbonari in the early 19th century that outlines a plan to infiltrate and destroy the Church from within. He forges these links to show how that insidious plot of the Carbonari is now coming to fruition a hundred or so years later and is successfully undermining the Church. He wants the reader to see a pattern. He wants the reader to join his world view that the popes of the Church are now popes of Satan. And from the campaign he undertook on Amazon to get readers to buy his book, he well understands that if he can convince people through favorable reviews that other folks see the same patterns he does, the more people he can persuade to accept his world view that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church has been subverted and taken over by Satan himself.

Thus, to refute Dr. Marshall's conspiracy theory, I will not challenge the facts he uses as much as to attack the way he links those facts together. I intend to present the context surrounding the events and facts he uses in his book to demonstrate that the patterns he fabricates with those facts do not exist. I will leave it to the reader to decides whether Marshall's assertion of what those facts mean and whether his conspiracy theory is worthy of belief or should be consigned back to the hell from which it was spawned.

For I am the Lord thy God, who take thee by the hand, and say to thee: Fear not, I have helped thee. (Isaiah 41:13)