Pope Francis and his 'Lutheran turning point'
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by 'Francesca Romana' from
November 8, 2017
On October 31, 2016, Pope Francis inaugurated the year of Luther by meeting with representatives of Lutheranism from all over the world in the Swedish Cathedral of Lund. Since then, meetings and “ecumenical” celebrations ad abundantiam have followed one after the other in the Catholic Church.
A year exactly from that date, the 'Lutheran turning point' was sealed by a symbolic act the gravity of which very few have noticed. The Vatican Post Office issued a stamp which celebrates the birth of Protestantism on October 31st 1517, the date Luther hung his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral.
“V Centenary of the Protestant Reformation”can be read at the top of the stamp, presented on October 31st of this year by the Vatican Philatelic Office. The official communiqué describes the stamp: “It depicts Jesus Crucified in the foreground on a gold, timeless background showing Wittenberg city. In an attitude of penance, on their knees respectively on the left and the right of the the Cross, Martin Luther holds a Bible, source and point of his doctrine, while Philip Melanchthon, theologian and a friend of Martin Luther’s, one of the most important protagonists of the Reformation, holds in his hand the Augsburg Confession, Confessio Augustuana, the first official exposition of the principles of Protestantism drawn up by him.”
The substitution of Our Lady and St. John at the foot of the Cross with the two heresiarchs, Luther and Melanchthon, is a blasphemous offense that no Catholic cardinal or bishop has, to date, openly condemned. The significance of this image is explained by the joint declaration of the World Lutheran Federation and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, published the same day as the stamp.
The note refers to the positive outcome of the dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans, endorsing
the “new understanding of those XVI century events which lead to our separation” and affirms how both sides are “very grateful for the theological and spiritual gifts received through the Reformation”.
As if that weren’t enough, around the same time,
La Civiltà Cattolica, the Pope’s “unofficial” voice, celebrated Luther with an article by Father Giancarlo Pani
(Martin Luther, Five Hundred Years Later, in La Civiltà Cattolica , of October 21st – November 4th 2017, pp. 119-130)
Father Pani is the same priest who said in 2014 that
the Fathers of the Council of Trent had admitted the possibility of divorce and remarriage in the case of adultery, according to the custom established in the schismatic Greek Church. Now he is sustaining that Martin Luther was in no way a heretic, but an authentic “reformer”.
In fact, “ the theses of Wittenberg are not a challenge, nor a rebellion against authority, but the proposal to renew the proclamation of the Gospel, in the sincere desire for a “reform” in the Church”. (p.128).
Despite the claim “ by the Church of Rome and Luther of incarnating the truth in toto and being dispensers of it ” “ the role Luther had as a witness to the faith cannot be denied: He is “the reformer”; he was able to initiate a process of “reform” where the results of it have also benefited the Catholic Church.”
If this is the case then he has been unjustly persecuted and defamed by the Catholic Church for 500 years. The time has come to rehabilitate him. And in order to rehabilitate him we cannot limit ourselves to presenting only his prophetic side, but must make the Church accept and put into practice his demands of reform. And the Post-Synod Exhortation Amoris Laetitia represents a decisive stage on this path.
They are not wrong then - the authors of the Correctio filialis (to Pope Francis) when they underlined
“the affinity between Luther’s ideas on the law, justification and matrimony and those taught or favored by Pope Francis in Amoris laetitia and elsewhere.”
At this point it should be remembered that Pope Francis, like Father Pani, belongs to the Society of Jesus, whose Founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, was the champion of the Faith that Divine Providence raised up in the XVI century against Lutheranism. In Germany, apostles like St. Peter Canisio and Blessed Peter Fabro, fought every inch of the way against the heretics, and on the terrain of anti-Protestant fervor, no one can surpass St. Robert Bellarmino.
La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850, with the support of Pius IX, and had a role of doctrinal defense against the errors of the time for a very long time. From its very first edition, on April 6th 1850, it dedicated an extensive anonymous essay (by Father Matteo Liberatore) on
The Political Rationalism of the Italian Revolution, in which he saw Protestantism as the cause of all modern errors. These theses were developed, among others, by two famous Jesuit theologians: Fathers Giovanni Perrone
(Protestantism and the Rule of the Faith, La Civiltà Cattolica, Rome 1853, 2 voll.), and Hartmann Grisar
(Luther, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1911/1912, 3 voll.).
But the commemoration of the Lutheran revolt made by the Jesuit journal in October 1917, the fourth centenary marking the 95 theses in Wittenberg, takes on a special meaning.
(Luther and Lutheranism, in La Civiltà Cattolica, IV (1917), pp. 207-233; 421-430). The theologian of
La Civiltà Cattolica explained that
“The essence of the Lutheran spirit, or rather Lutheranism, is rebellion in all of its extension and in all the force of its word. Rebellion, therefore, which is personified in Luther, was varied and profound, complex and very vast; which apparently appeared but was in fact violent, angry, trivial, obscene and diabolic; deep down it was studied, and directed according to the circumstances, focused on opportunistic ends and interests, intended and wanted with measured, resolute determination.” (pp.208-309).
La Civiltà Cattolica continues,
"Luther initiated that contemptible parody, with which the rebel monk attributed to God, his ideas, blasphemies and the abominations of his perverted mind: he outraged the Pope in an unspeakable way in the name of Christ, he cursed Caesar in the name of Christ, he blasphemed against the Church, against bishops, against monks with absolute infernal impetuosity, in the name of Christ; he threw his religious habit onto the tree of Judas, in the name of Christ and in the name of Christ he was married sacrilegiously” (p.209).
“With the very convenient pretext of following Scripture, as that which alone contains the word of God, he conducted a war on scholastic theology, tradition, canon law, all the institutions and precepts of the Church and councils: in place of these august and venerated things, he, Martin Luther, perjured monk and self-proclaimed doctor, put himself and his authority! Popes, doctors and Holy Fathers were no longer of any worth; the word of Marin Luther was worth more than all of them! (p.212). [How very Bergoglian!]
The Lutheran theory of justification, in the end, “was born of Luther’s imagination, not by the Gospel or any other word of God revealed to the writers of the New Testament: for us, every Lutheran novelty finds its origins in the concupiscence he stimulated, and in his development of the falsification of Scripture or in formal lying” (p.214)
Father Pani cannot deny that the opinion he gives of Luther is a 360- degree turnaround from the one his confreres gave in the same journal, a century ago. In 1917, he was censured as an apostate, a rebel, a blasphemer; today he is being praised as a reformer, a prophet, [even] holy. No Hegelian dialectic can harmonize yesterday’s judgment with today’s.
Luther was either a heretic who denied some basic dogmas of Christianity, or he was a “witness to faith” who initiated the Reformation of the Church, brought to completion by the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis.
In short, every Catholic is called upon to choose whether to side with Pope Francis and the Jesuits of today, or be alongside the Jesuits of yesterday and the Popes of all time.
It is time for choices and to mediate precisely on St. Ignatius’s two standards -
"It will be here how Christ calls and wants all under His standard; and Lucifer, on the contrary, under his.” (no. 137, Spiritual Exercises) - which will help us make them in these difficult times.
St. Pius V and St. Charles Borromeo defending Catholicism against Islam and the Protestant Heresy, Giovanni Gasparro, 2017
I'm almost a week late in posting this, because I was hoping to find online the other painting referred to in the articlebt no luck so far.
But this has to do with one of those 'timeless' thoughts that we need to keep in mind these days...
A prayer to St. Charles Borromeo:
Bless the artists who stand firm
where priests and bishops are giving in
by Camillo Langone
IL FOGLIO
November 4, 2017
St. Charles Borromeo, flagellator of Protestants, I entreat you on this your feast day, concerning the infatuation many priests have for Martin Luther, witnessed recently in Milanese exhibitions and Vatican stamps. Yet, where priests are surrendering, painters are resisting.
In Imola, Sergio Padovani at present is exhibiting a portrait fittingly entitled "Martin Luther, the Heretic" while in Aldefia Giovanni Gasparro is busy putting the final brushstrokes to his work of the following sensational title: "St Pius V and St. Charles Borromeo defending Catholicism against Islam and the Protestant Heresy." Commissioned, naturally, not by an ecclesiastic, but a member of the laity.
He who was called “a blind heresiarch” by St. John Bosco and an 'impious blasphemer" by St. Peter Canisius is depicted alongside a pig and with swinish eyes himself: inclined to evil, to guzzling and nuns (in fact) his contemporaries used to call him Porcus Saxioniae [the pig of Saxony].
St. Charles, bless these two artists who frequently paint Saints and who, today, with courage and coherence, are showing who this man really was whom the Saints attacked rightly for his sins against the faith.
P.S. Fr Z called attention to the ff article as a 'tour de force' that "puts into perspective the lack of enthusiasm some of us have regarding 'celebration' of the 500th anniversary of the revolt." And indeed we must be thankful to Mr. Stagnaro for providing this lengthy J'accuse of Protestantism, but i just wish he had done his account of his forgiving all this nonetheless with some logical system (i.e., at least chronological and thematic) instead of tossing it off at random as the items come to his mind.
For instance, why does he wait till the middle of the least to state the most significant definitive fact of all, namely: "... I truly forgive them for the Great Tragedy, that is, their sixteenth century split with Rome."... I have also taken the liberty of omitting the introductory "I can forgive them for..." that precedes each of the items Stagnaro lists.
MrStagnaro is a journalist and editorialist for the National Catholic Register (USA) and the Catholic Herald (UK) specializing in apologetics and catechetics. He has written a number of popular books (meant for the layman) on Catholic theology.
Calling a spade a spade
ANGELO STAGNARO
November 10, 2017
I can forgive Protestants and Protestantism for most things.
- For the Know-Nothing Party and their murderous Philadelphia Nativist Riot, the Intolerable Acts, Bloody Monday and the Orange Riots in New York City in 1871 and 1872. I forgive them for the “Blaine Amendments” which forbade tax money be used to fund Catholic parochial schools.
- For the KKK and for funding the Mexican atheist genocidal maniac Plutarco Ares Calles in his efforts to kill Catholics during the Cristero Wars. I can forgive them for calling any, and all, popes, the “Anti-Christ(s)” and “Whores(s) of Babylon.”
- For supporting Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy by which the Church gained many of her modern martyrs; for the Recusancy Acts and the fictitious, so-called “Popish Plot”... and for the fact that as a Catholic, I shall never sit upon the British Throne though literally everyone else is allowed to do so.
- For 'The Troubles' in Ireland and Oliver Cromwell and his engineered Potato Famine and the slaughter and military occupation of that country.
- For the enslavement of 50,000 men, women and children who were forcibly removed from Ireland and sent to Bermuda and Barbados as indentured servants ― America’s first slaves.
- For the Canadian Gavazzi Riots and the Orange Order and Ontario Regulation 17 that doomed Catholic schools in Quebec; ...for the American Protective Association and their Canadian counterparts, the Protestant Protective Association.
- For forcibly converting Catholic convicts and political prisoners to Anglicanism in Australia; forced conversions is something that Muslim terrorists have been doing for 1400 years.
- For 500 years of venom and vitriol spouted by every street preacher and door-knocker ― the seething anti-Catholic hatred that is at the core of primitive Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism and Jehovah’s Witnesses ― but not them exclusively. Indeed, it makes up a great deal of traditional Anglicanism, Methodism and many other forms of “mainstream” Protestantism.
- For those of them who refuse to refer to Catholics as Christians.
- For intentionally ignoring the 1500 years that occurred prior to Martin Luther when everyone in Western Europe who was a Christian was, by necessity, a Catholic.
- For Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, the inspiration for the current assault upon religious liberty in America and Europe. (Don’t worry, Jack Chick and your ignorant and poisonous “Chick Tracts” and for calling Catholics, “Mackerel Snappers” ― all is forgiven.)
- Martin Luther for foisting a desecrated and greatly redacted Bible upon the world pretending that God “would have wanted it that way.” Luther removed seven books and parts of three others from the Old Testament ― the fullness of which is called the Septuagint and was used by Christ himself when he walked among us.
- Martin Luther for accepting funding from Suleiman the Magnificent, the Sultan of the Muslim Ottoman Empire as he “struggled” to secede from the Catholic Church.
[Luther schemed to throw Christendom under the bus for fun and profit, as he urged his fellow Protestants to side with the Muslim Turks in defeating the Catholic Church and, with it, Europe. Suleiman even extended his munificent kinship to any and all Protestants in Hungary and Romania now that they were no longer “Christian” (i.e., loyal to the pope). The sultan urged Luther and Protestants to unite under the Muslim banner to defeat both the emperor and the pope. Please recall that Suleiman the Terrorist wanted nothing less than to wipe Christianity from the planet ― talk about politics and their strange bedfellows!]
- For the ridiculous 700 Club television show and their tiresome attacks on the One, True, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
- For taking 500 years to realize that Sola Scriptura is a great deal of nonsense and that even Luther had a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary ― the first Christian, the Mother of God.
- For their cognitive dissonance in simultaneously insisting that: 1) everyone is allowed to interpret the Bible as they wish and they are all equally correct and 2) Catholics are wrong in the way they interpret the Bible no matter how they do it.
- For their anti-Catholicism, which is what historian John Highham called “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” and what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. has called, “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.”
- For their support of the violence towards Catholics during the so-called “Enlightenment” and for the development of Freemasonry and the Brazilian “Religious Question” and the Columbian La Violencia and the Michelade Massacre of 1567. [By the way, Freemasonry’s exotic magicalism greatly contributed to the development of Mormonism, Unitarianism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witness’ Arianistic perspectives.]
-For making Fr. Nicholas Copernicus put the brakes on his heliocentric theory and data until after his death even though his friend, Pope Paul III, urged him to publish while the scientist was still alive. [Apparently, Fr. Copernicus hoped to avoid upsetting Luther and Melanchthon who were both contemptuous of the priest’s heliocentric paradigm and feared that
his theories would further alienate Protestants against the Church from which they originally sprang.
[This does not make sense - they would have wanted the Protestants further alienated from the Catholic Church!]]
This isn’t an empty Christian platitude ―I truly forgive them
for the Great Tragedy, that is, their sixteenth century split with Rome.
- For John Calvin’s, Ian Paisley’s and the Westboro Baptist Church’s reductive, tiresome and poisonous bluster and posturing.
- For their support and schadenfreude as they stood back and did nothing during Spain’s Red Terror and during Hitler’s repression of the Catholic Church especially for The Night of Long Knives.
- For the Dutch Protestants’ explicit support of the Tokugawa Shogunate when they slaughtered tens of thousands of Japanese Catholics in the sixteenth century.
- For the 500 years of anti-Catholic stereotypes typical in their literature as in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian.
- For their support/coddling of the rabidly fundamentalist atheist “Americans United for Separation of Church and State” which was originally an explicitly anti-Catholic organization called “Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”
- For crucifying European history with their insidious and indecorous “Black Legend” which poisoned the minds of hundreds of millions of people who would rather believe lies about the Inquisition rather than risk reading a book on the subject.
- For the countless false prophecies concerning the end of the world that have proved time and time again to be absolutely false.
- For ignoring Scriptures that specifically explain how to distinguish between one of God’s real prophets and a false one:
You may wonder how you can tell when a prophet’s message does not come from the Lord. If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what he says does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message. That prophet has spoken on his own authority, and you are not to fear him. (Deut. 18:21-22)
- For ignoring Christ’s own words when he commissions St. Peter as the Church’s leader:
And so I tell you, Peter: you are rock, and on this rock foundation I will build My church, and not even death will ever be able to overcome it. (Matt. 16:18)
Protestants ignore the salient fact that Christ’s One, True, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church will never fail. Not even the Gates of Hell will prevail against it.
It follows that if an organization that claims to be inspired by the Holy Spirit actually fails miserably, that means the Holy Spirit wasn’t truly with them such as the Anabaptists, the Shakers and the Puritans.
11 Protestant churches close every day in America. It’s impossible to determine how many close every day around the world. There are 41,000 Protestant churches around the world currently and that means at least 40,999 are completely wrong. This doesn’t include the many tens of thousands of Protestant churches that have failed in the past 500 years. God clearly isn’t dictating different messages to intentionally sow discord, confusion and lies … however, this does remind me of another lesser spirit who enjoys doing exactly this
(John 8:44).
But what I can’t forgive them for, not yet at least, is their insipid restorationism ― the idea that God somehow made a mistake 2000 years ago when he gave control of the his, One, True Church to the Catholic Church and the papacy, whose progenitor was St. Peter as testified by Christ not once but twice in the New Testament (Matt. 16:18-19, John 21:15-17).
Restorationism is the belief that Christianity should be restored to how it was during the Apostolic Era using nothing but Scriptures ― a project doomed to failure. Their goal to re-establish Christianity in its original form has been a part of Christianity for 2000 years and, indeed,
St. Francis of Assisi hoped to “get back to the basics” also but he didn’t make the mistake of believing that God had made a mistake in putting St. Peter and his successors in charge. Rather, he hoped to refocus the Church ― not to change dogma and authority.
This is not something that can be generously glossed over as their previous genocide of Catholics on multiple continents or even the desecration of our holiest places over the past 500 years. The trillions of Protestant lies about Catholics are as naught in comparison to this blasphemy.
To suggest that God was somehow mistaken in anything he does is scurrilous impiety and profane heresy.
Luther’s “Ecce ego sto!” (Here I stand) sounds more and more like Lucifer’s “Non serviam!” (We will not serve).
Restorationism is anathema. God makes no mistakes
(Ps 19:7-10). He doesn’t mumble or backpeddle like Allah
(Ps 12:6-7). He’s not confused or addlebrained
(Neh 9:6). He needs no assistance from anyone or anything
(Col 1:6). His decisions are final and perfect in their love and justice
(Prov 16:10). He doesn’t need to explain himself
(Rom 1:20). He accepts no counsel
(Ps 33:11).
When God bestowed stewardship upon Peter and his successors, God didn’t mean “well … you can be in charge until people in the sixteenth century come to know better.”
Restorationism is beyond comprehension. God isn’t imperfect and thus, anyone who worships an imperfect God isn’t worshiping the Trinity
(Ps 18:30).
Muslims also celebrate a restorationism of sorts in that they believe Islam is what Allah always had in mind but was simply not sure how to implement it successfully until the advent of Mohammad. They believe that both Jews and Christians have become corrupted along with their sacred scriptures, which are “untrustworthy” due to Allah’s machinations. And that only they have a perfect and complete understanding of God’s “true plan.” Sound familiar?
But if this is true, as in the case of Protestantism, then how did God’s message get garbled in the first place? Wouldn’t God have known his message was going to get hinky? If he’s omniscient and omnicompetent he would. A lesser god would easily fall into this error.
How was he so foolish in trusting the wrong people initially? How could mere mortals come to realize something that he couldn’t
(Job 38:1-41:34)?
But, more importantly, how can we ever trust this imperfect deity now that new messengers, none of whom are divine, have come along? Perhaps this deity is confused once again. It’s a slippery slope and one that is easily proven wrong.
I don’t see a difference in what these Christian restorationists believe and that which Islamic restorationists proffer. It’s not odd that Protestants had received Muslim financial, political and ideological support 500 years ago birds of a feather, as it were.
But the main reason I condemn restorationism is that it’s a non-starter. If someone believes in evil grand conspiracy theories, they make themselves out to be the hero/champion that God has been looking for. It’s up to them and no one else! They are the thin holy line that separates Order and Chaos ― between Heaven and Hell. And as they are assured of their sanctified state, anything and everything they think, say and do is acceptable. After all, this is what “God wanted” all along…
Here is a George Weigel essay I inexplicably missed at the time....
Which Reformation? What reform?
In reality, there were multiple, contending reformations
in play in the first centuries of modernity
by George Weigel
October 25, 2017
Despite the formulation you’ll hear before and after the October 31 quincentenary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, there was no single “Reformation” to which the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” was the similarly univocal response.
Rather, as Yale historian Carlos Eire shows in his eminently readable and magisterial work
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650, there were multiple, contending reformations in play in the first centuries of modernity.
- There was the reformation of European intellectual life led by humanists steeped in the Greek and Roman classics: men like the Dutchman Erasmus (whose scholarship deeply influenced those who would become known as “Protestants” but who never broke with Rome) and Thomas More (who urged Erasmus to deepen his knowledge of Greek, the Church fathers, and the New Testament in its original language).
- There were at least four major flavors of “Protestant” reformation— Lutheran, Zwinglian, Radical, and Calvinist — and plenty of subdivisions within those categories.
- There were impressive pre-Luther Catholic reformers like the archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros.
- There were Catholic reformers who left a mixed legacy: the French educator Guillaume Budé, for example, influenced both the Protestant reformer John Calvin and the Catholic reformer Ignatius Loyola.
- There was the failed Catholic reform mandated by the Fifth Lateran Council but never implemented by Pope Leo X (the first and last pontiff to keep an albino elephant as a pet).
- And there were the Catholic reformers, of various theological and pastoral dispositions, who shaped the teaching of the Council of Trent and then vigorously implemented its reforms.
[Inexplicably, the above list omits the English Reformation launched by Henry VIII's schism from the Church when she would not allow him an adulterous marriage.]
There were, in short, multiple Reformations. Their sometimes-violent interaction created much of what became the modern world, for good and for ill.
The bad bits are the concern of Notre Dame’s Brad Gregory in
The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, a book aptly described by one reviewer as “brilliant, extraordinarily learned, eccentric, opinionated, variously wrong-headed, and utterly wonderful.”
In Gregory’s argument, among the things “The Reformation” — in this case, the v
arious Protestant Reformations — bequeathed the modern world were hyper-individualism, suspicion of all authority, moral subjectivism and relativism, skepticism about the truth of anything, the banishment of religious thought from western academic life, and the reduction of all true knowledge to what we can know from science.
That’s a broad indictment, to be sure. But amidst Gregory’s dense prose and complex presentation, serious readers will get a glimpse of how bad ideas — such as the mistaken notion of God as a willful (if infinite) being-among-other-beings — can play themselves out in history with devastating results.
The 500th anniversary of one of the emblematic acts in this cultural tsunami of Reformations should lead to a deepening of ecumenical dialogue about what these many early modern reformers wrought — and not just for the world, but primarily for the Church. That deepened conversation would do well to focus on what makes for authentic “reform” in the Church.
In the Fall issue of
Plough, the quarterly of the Bruderhof Community, I propose that
all authentic reform in the Church must begin from a recovery of some part of the Church’s essential “form” or constitution (in the British sense), which was given to the Church by Christ.
True ecclesial reform is thus always re-form. It is not something we make up by our own cleverness. It does not mean surrender to the spirit of the age. It does not involve substituting our judgment for God’s revelation. True Christian reform always involves bringing into the present something the Church has laid aside or misplaced, and making that Christ-given something into an instrument of renewal.
And how, on this quincentenary of the Ninety-Five Theses, should we measure the authenticity of renewal? The evangelical criterion seems decisive here.
If the reform and renewal in question really does restore to the Church something of its Christ-given “form,” then the results will be evident evangelically — in an increased harvest of souls who have come to know the Lord Jesus, who walk in his Way, and who share the gift they have been given with others, thereby healing a broken and often death-dealing culture.
By the same criterion, empty churches, flaccid evangelization, and surrender to the prevailing cultural mores signal false reform and failed renewal, which can be dressed up in either romantic-nostalgic or progressive livery.