The rainbow flag and the Sacred Heart: a battle for the soul of June
Gavin Ashenden• June 9, 2025
The rainbow flag, flown everywhere in “Pride month”, is not what it pretends to be. Its ubiquitous success feeds off our naivety and gullibility. It presents us with the challenge of distinguishing God from evil.
Jesus never took it for granted that the Church would find this task easy. His own experience was set in the context of a desert confrontation with the Devil at the beginning of his public ministry. During these confrontations, evil lied to him under the pretence of offering good outcomes. Jesus was to later warn his followers not to take people and their mission at face value, since evil could be expected to masquerade as good.
St Paul begged the early Christians to “test the spirits”. The presumption is that we will be faced with different strategies of evil presenting itself as good.
Perhaps the single most effective example of this strategy today is the “Pride flag”. June is “Pride month”. The Pride flag is everywhere. Compassionate Catholics are urged to add their moral and emotional weight to the Pride project. Its components are powerful. They combine two potent impulses, one spiritual and one secular. The first is a deeply compelling moral imperative for the Catholic to reach out to the underdog, the victim, the marginalised, in order to offer the love of God to those on the edges. The second is the protection and promotion of those who discover their true identity through the prism of whom they want to fall in love with.
Immediately we are in euphemism territory, where one word or idea is used to replace or disguise another. Falling in love, the search for the perfect other, became the new religion in the 20th century. We overdosed on the promises of romance. The quest for romance and sex became the most well-trodden path in the search for personal fulfilment and happiness. We looked to romantic love to solve all our problems. Initially coy about the sexual element, the 1960s discarded Christian inhibitions. The tentative search for love became an addiction to the erotic.
If the Church dared to question the wisdom of pursuing sex free from moral constraints, it was accused of prudery. Christians were told to suspend their moral legalism and allow for the same-sex attracted, who had been confined to the sexual margins, to find love, affection, and yes, sex, on the same terms as everyone else.
So gay Pride was born. It quickly morphed from a defensive strategy to protect same-sex attracted victims from social exclusion, into a weapon aimed at Christian morals and the faith itself.
The Pride flag turned out to be a Trojan horse. What appeared to be an innocent movement celebrating compassion and justice concealed a host of more aggressive ideologies. The culture shifted from an invitation to express solidarity to threats against any expression that upheld heteronormativity.
Compassion had been used as bait. At the end of the hook lay a new and very different authoritarian world order.
Many were naïve in how they understood “love” as presented in the language of the same-sex attracted. It was not simply a quest for affection, but a determined pursuit of pleasure. The prominence of leather and bondage gear in Pride parades might have been a clue, but few picked up on it. Even if they had, the celebration of sex outside heterosexual marriage was not the most serious threat. Behind the redefinition of sexual ethics lay a deeper power struggle to reshape the politics of the social order.
Sexual appetite might seem the more dramatic of the moral challenges Christianity confronts, but the lust for power is more dangerous. Sex is loud, but power is deadly. The Pride flag presents itself as a symbol of love and sexual identity, but at its heart it is about politics and control.
The movement claims to be rooted in compassion and love. Yet it masks a commitment to hedonism, which in turn masks a quest for ideological dominance. Who sees, beyond the initial call to inclusive compassion, the demand for total compliance? Who notices the iron fist of the totalitarian state? Within just a few years, the rainbow flag moved from a plea for inclusion to a compulsory symbol of cultural conformity. Deviating from the new anti-heterosexual norm now invites social and professional exclusion.
True inclusion would have allowed for Christians and neo-pagans to coexist. But that was never the intention. Inclusion was always a means to blind Christians who, too seduced by the appeal of compassion, failed to see the contradiction between hedonism and continence.
The Pride flag represents a new world order fundamentally hostile to Christ and the message he brought – that we are accountable to a moral cosmos created by a holy God. The new order began with demands for love and sex, slid into hedonism, and is now solidifying into a political totalitarianism intent on enforcing its values. Its ambitions were greater than many realised. It did not just want to overturn Christian morality, but to destroy the Christian vision altogether. Undermining heterosexual marriage was only the beginning.
The moral responsibility of the individual is being replaced by the ideological demands of the collective. Identity politics defines who you are and where you rank in a hierarchy of victimhood.
But the slogan of inclusion hid a more exclusive agenda. It excluded unborn children from protection. It excluded the frail elderly, who are no longer valued as human beings but seen as dispensable. It excluded confused teenagers, offered irreversible surgery by a medical establishment only too eager to diagnose and intervene. Sterility became the cost.
The rainbow flag is as layered in meaning as it is in colour. It signals exclusion for non-conformists, sterility for the gender-confused, and untimely death for the vulnerable.
Only recently have Catholics and others begun to recognise that the Pride flag was misrepresented. It was never a banner of inclusion, but the flag of an enemy seeking, first by subterfuge, now by force, to obliterate Christian truth. The iron fist within the rainbow glove is no longer hidden. Cultural Marxism, a modern expression of the totalitarian impulse that crushed churches behind the Iron Curtain, has become the apt description.
Its roots lie in the French Revolution, which, like Marxism, sought to destroy the Church as a necessary step to establishing a secular utopia.
The Church, too, has a symbol for June: the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Its mission is also liberation, compassion, and love. It is no coincidence that although Jesus first revealed his Sacred Heart to St Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1674, the first official dedication of June to the Sacred Heart took place during the French Revolution. These two visions of humanity – Christian and secular – came face to face at the dawn of the modern age.
Evil cannot create. It can only distort and pervert. So secular totalitarianism disguises its quest for control beneath the language of justice and compassion. The real battle for the soul of humanity may be best understood as a choice between the love of the Sacred Heart and the ambition of a secular state in totalitarian mode.
That disguise is wearing thin. The rainbow coalition is starting to implode. Trans activists now turn on feminists. The real terms of engagement are beginning to show.
With June upon us, and rainbow flags flown across the disintegrating West, Catholics should not only turn away from its symbolism. They should renew their allegiance to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Let the image of the Sacred Heart be raised outside every Catholic church and displayed in the windows of Catholic homes.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is the antidote to the campaign to reconstruct our society without God. True love confronts disorder. Forgiveness challenges rage. Created purpose stands against collective coercion. And the call to Heaven rebukes the engineered violence of enforced compliance.
Paganism fell once before at the feet of the Sacred Heart, rescuing our ancestors from its unforgiving grasp. If Catholics return to this most sacred of devotions, it will fall again.