Critical
Catholic
Commentary
in the Twilight
of Reason
Why
... Why
did Christ Die on the Cross
...
if ANY
“religion”
whatsoever will bring you Salvation?
This question
— and any conceivable
answer to it
— is the most compelling argument against the
heretical project of what we have come to understand as
“Ecumenism”
(a word first coined in 1948) — the novel and ultimately
implausible notion that was the principal motivation
behind the convocation of the Second Vatican Council.
It is an unavoidable question that is absolutely unanswerable
in terms consistent with the teachings, doctrines,
and dogmas of the Catholic Church prior to that
catastrophic convocation we have come to call
“Vatican II” that rended the Church as the 21st
Ecumenical Council beginning, conceptually, in 1959
under John XXIII and formalized between 1962 and
1965. Paul VI ran with it for the next 15
years. The ball was subsequently handed on to John
Paul II who carried it for the next 27 years (as it
increasingly came apart at the seams) — and then to
all his successors since — until it became
threadbare and barely recognizable under Bergoglio
(Francis). Under PachaPapa the stitching was
methodically undone and all four panels discarded
(Magisterium, Tradition, Sacred Deposit of Faith,
Sacred Scripture). The deflated Church was now on
equal playing ground with every other “Spiritual ...
Idiom” on Earth — and all were
right and true despite their oddly
inherent and insuperable contradictions ... THAT
is Ecumenism. Allah, Buddha, Pachamama, Satanism,
and Brahma: just different names for the same deity.
This,
once again, brings us back to the same logical surd
that we began with:
WHY was it
NECESSARY
for Christ to die on the Cross
—
if
ANY religion, belief, cult, or superstition suffices
to bring man to God, offers salvation, and ultimately
leads men to Heaven?
Why do
we — indeed, how could we —
maintain the indispensability
of the Holy Catholic Church — in other words, on what
grounds do we maintain that it is necessary
— rather than merely redundant and ultimately superfluous
— if any and every other religion is
the sufficient means to the salvation of souls and the
attainment of Heaven?
Francis — the pre-eminent product and
culmination of Vatican II — recently and finally made
this clear — indeed even signed a
document with one of Islam’s Grand Imams declaring
that:
“The pluralism and the diversity of
religions,
color, sex, race and language
are willed by God
in His wisdom, through which He created
human beings,” … “This divine wisdom is
the source from which the right to freedom
of belief and the freedom to be different
derives. Therefore, the fact that people
are forced to adhere to a certain religion
or culture must be rejected, as too the
imposition of a cultural way of life that
others do not accept.”
Two
years earlier he had emphasized this radical insistence
on ecumenism through a different tack, the absolutely
clear terms of which by now we are all familiar:
“It is not licit that you convince
them of your faith;
proselytism
is the strongest poison against the ecumenical
path.”
1
For
Francis, it is not the proclamation of the Gospel
and the conversion of souls
to Jesus Christ and His Holy Catholic Church
that is unimpeachable — since it is an
obligation unequivocally mandated by Christ
Himself — in fact, they were His very last
words, His very last commandment, to His Apostles:
“Go therefore
and teach all nations; baptizing them
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost.
Teach them to observe all things
whatsoever I have commanded you.”
(St. Matthew 28.19-20)
No — for Francis
it is the
heretical
“IDEOLOGY”
of Ecumenism
—
formally condemned by Holy Mother Church in 1928
by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical “Mortalium
animos”.
It is absolutely vital that we understand that
“Ecumenism” is a novel
ideology
formulated in 1910 by an exclusively Protestant
collaborative in Scotland called the
International Missionary Conference.
It is this Protestant initiative that
Francis
(and each his Post-Conciliar predecessors) chose
as the paradigm for
post-Vatican II Catholicism; that is to say,
Catholicism
construed as an ideology 2 — not a unique
and indispensable religion.
It is no longer a
matter of the salvation of souls
(a now
antiquated and disreputable concept in the
“Post-Conciliar Catholic Church”)
but the construction
of a human federation of intrinsically and
mutually contradictory denominations largely promoting a
“social gospel” and social justice.
Simply put, the focus is
man,
not God; society, not salvation.
To reiterate the point:
Why,
then, was it necessary for Christ to die on the
Cross —
if “any religion” suffices to
bring man to God, offers salvation, and ultimately leads
men to Heaven?
The answer to this question had apparently
been peripheral to the “Council Fathers” and the answer
to it still eludes the sophistic casuistry of
Catholic and Protestant theologians alike, as it had
in their collaborative construction of the Council and
the spurious documents that emerged from it.
At first the heresy of ecumenism was confined to nominally
“Christian denominations” — but as the many ineluctable
contradictions unfolded, it increasingly and necessarily
moved beyond Christianity to encompass all religions
— and no religion at all.
Let us be as forthright as possible: why —
for what possible reason — was it necessary for
Jesus Christ to suffer and die on the Cross … if —
if — there was another way, another
religion, in fact any religion that suffices
(including that of the Canaanite god Moloch who required
child sacrifice, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli —
who also required human sacrifice), to say nothing of
the Trimurti of the Hindus, Allah of the Muslims, Mormonism,
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Gnosticism, etc. or, in fact,
no religion at all as Francis’s argument
implies?
The “god of surprises”?
Absurdity
may, in fact, be a prerogative of Francis’s
fabricated “god of surprises” — but it is
not the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;
not the God revealed in His Incarnate Son, and certainly
not the God worshipped in the Catholic Church.
If it was not necessary
for Christ to die on the Cross
to redeem man from his sins and so open
Heaven to men — then His immolation on Calvary was purely
gratuitous — He suffered
and died needlessly —
God the Father capriciously and wantonly crucified His
Only-Begotten Son. The Crucifixion was pointless, and
the agony of His Mother of no consequence. This is the
necessary conclusion to the spurious attempt to both
initiate and implement all that is inherently irreconcilable
in the disastrous project of “ecumenism”. Any
other religion would have been sufficient without
Christ and the Cross!
As a postscript I suggest that you not attempt to use
the “ut
unum sint” (“that
they may be one” ) citation from Holy Scripture. There
are too many citations to the contrary. Christ was clearly
speaking of His Apostles relative to this
biblical citation:
“And now I am
not in the world, and these are in the world,
and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep them in
Thy name whom Thou has given me; that they may
be one,
(“ut
unum sint”)
as We also are. While I was
with them, I kept them
[the Apostles] in Thy name.
Those
[the Apostles]
whom Thou gavest me have I kept;
and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition
[Judas],
that the Scripture may be fulfilled.”
(Saint John 17.11-12)
If you argue that the
revelation of God is a gradually evolving
and on-going process, a continual “up-dating” of His
most holy will so that He, Who created the world,
can keep pace with the times and man’s “evolving consciousness”—
then Jesus is not the final Word of God after all:
“God, after He
spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets
in many portions and in many ways, in these
last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom
He appointed heir of all things, through whom
also He made the world.”
(Hebrews 1.1-2)
The
revelation of God was completed in His Son, and ended
upon the death of the last Apostle, Saint John.
This is long-established Catholic Doctrine.
But now, we are to believe, God is going to
speak through Francis and abolish this doctrine
by revealing that Christianity (Catholicism) is
not the only way to the Father
despite what Christ Himself said:
“I
am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man
cometh to the Father, but by me.”
(Saint John 14.6)
Francis’s
proclamation — without precedent in Catholic history
— is nothing less than a betrayal of Christ, the Teachings
of Christ’s Church, the Sacred Deposit of Faith and
is a grievous wound in our Holy Mother the Church whom
he has also betrayed. It is heresy.
And if
this is not heresy (specifically the heresy of
Indifferentism) then nothing qualifies
for the definition.
________________________
1
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/pope-to-teen-girl-proselytism-is-the-strongest-poison-against-the-ecumenica
2
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/ecumenism.htm,
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/img/assets/6398/MRL12_WMC_FA.pdf
,
https://www.amazon.com/ECUMENISM-DECEPTION-Propagates-Philosophy-Anti-Christ-ebook/dp/B00W9K5HWU
Geoffrey
K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse
3.8)
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