ANZAC Day isn’t quite what it used to be.

It used to be a day for honouring those brave enough to die for their nation, their faith and for God (as they understood him).

Now powerful people are changing it — a disturbing symptom being the ditching of “God Save the Queen”, the anthem close to the hearts of most of the fallen.

In recent years, Australia’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) has been conducting an ever-bigger program of indoctrination of Australian youth, climaxing every ANZAC Day, April 25.

The DVA supplies schools with sophisticated curriculum materials, websites, virtual tours of battlefields etc., costing taxpayers $6 million a year.

Children hear about their debt to the fallen soldiers and the heritage of “freedom and democracy” that they left us.

It works. Children will literally recite that “if they had not fought at Gallipoli, we wouldn’t be where we are today”.

Historically, the 1915 Gallipoli campaign did little to protect Australia. But Anzac Day is no longer about history. It’s about whipping up a secular nationalistic “Anzac Spirit” in young minds.

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The lobby group orchestrating all this is the RSL (Returned and Services League) with its 1500 sub-branches and 240,000 members.

Anybody hoping to weaken their grip on the minds of Australia’s children — or on the nation’s purse-strings — will face a skilled, relentless, well-connected, implacable enemy, which makes Freemasonry look like Pollyanna.

Attend a memorial service tomorrow and look at it from this angle. It’s true, isn’t it?

But many present won’t notice.

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A newspaper editorial asserts that Anzac Day is now “the most significant date in the calendar of the nation”.

Yes, we take ourselves and our nationalism more seriously than we take God — making Anzac Day more “significant” than Christ’s birth, death and resurrection as celebrated at Christmas, Good Friday and Easter.

But disregarding God brings consequences in both time and eternity.

God revealed to Saint Catherine of Siena that he will call mortals on the Last Day, “Rise ye dead and come to judgment . . . you are who are dead to my love . . . .”

Is that us he was speaking about?

Are we so confident that God is irrelevant — that the “Anzac Spirit” is all we need to make a better world and to be happy in the after-life?