In 2016, Pope Francis said that “Today, there is a global war trying to destroy marriage … they don’t destroy it with weapons, but with ideas.” What are these ideas? This booklet explores the Catholic understanding of marriage based upon biblical revelation and the objective nature of the human person. It explores the legal deconstruction of the family in many countries who adopt models based almost exclusively on the individual. Most critically, this booklet explains the five ideas:

• ‘Excarnation’ the belief which tries to deny that the human person is embodied, especially as a man or a woman;

• Gender Theory which denies the biological differences of sex between a man and a woman by detaching them from gender, which is the social manifestation of bodily sex, thereby claiming that it is a personal decision as to whether one is a male or a female;

• ‘Equalism’, the promotion of equality as an absolute and supreme value, such as its use in the political term ‘marriage equality’ and then obliterating genuine differences between couples of the opposite sex and of the same sex;

• ‘Dehumanised rights’ the tendency to make false claims to human rights, their falsity being illustrated by the denial of the humanity of others, such as the denial of the human right of a child to a mother and a father;

• ‘Adolescent progressivism’ an ideological approach which sees only the needs of the identity of its own advocates and who are intolerant of anyone who challenges their views by characterising them as phobic or reactionary.