Part of the Antichrist's allure is that he's born with evil intent by the "parent" but as they made him now, given that they manage to control him, he would be doing the churches bidding (as they see it). It makes no sense for Damien to be commissioned by people trying to improve their Christian congregation.
A better way it would fit is that they were clandestine Satanists trying to subvert the church instead.
These were my exact thoughts. The motive was a bit lame and not necessary considering we already get the idea if you have seen the Omen films.
We know from the original that the plan is for the Anti Christ to infiltrate all the important areas of power and get to the very top which works as a clever allegory for real life so they didn't really need that angle at all. They actually didn't need to explain Why they are doing it just the fact they are doing it is scary enough we can fill in the blanks
This is one of the problems in modern remakes is that a narrative or motivantions that are alluded to in the originals are given a whole movie overexplaining and expanding what was always better as a mystery.
Better than decent film though especially as far as Horror sequels and remakes go for the most part it was a good film
That was the way the author of the book and screenplaay, David Seltzer, envisioned it. Clandestine satanists. The renegade Catholics angle was stupid, and, frankly, offensive. In the book, they go into the motivations of the evil satan worshippers within the Church through Father Brennan's background and dialogue. He was actually involved in some inappropriate conduct but saw the errors of his ways and sought to make amends by stopping Damian from fulfilling his goals.
shareIt is quite dumb but this just like changing the mother from being a jackal are among the things this movie had to do in order to fit in the feminist, pro-choice and anti Catholic message. Same thing with the movie Immaculate which is very similar to this one. It is just “Church bad because abortion”.
shareIIRC, there were clergy involved in the original Omen.
Wanting an authoritarian church sounds like Satan's work. They were doing it for personal power, after all. I saw it as the members of this conspiracy trying to pervert the church to become more powerful, which I can see Satan being down with.