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One thing necessarily leads to another like a chain reaction in any serious criticism of this pope. The greater issue encompassing the problem of this pope's decision to spearhead the Protestant world's celebration of the fifth anniversary of the so-called Reformation is Jorge Mario Bergoglio's apparent conviction not only that all Christian 'confessions' are equal and equivalent means to eternal salvation, but that all other non-Christian faiths are similarly equal and equivalent to Catholicism.
As we all know, he has expressed this conviction in so many different ways since he became pope, and God knows how often and in how many different ways before he became pope. Early enough in this pontificate, I said that very clearly, JMB does not subscribe to DOMINUS IESUS, the landmark proclamation-reiteration in the Great Christian Jubilee Year 2000 of the unicity of the one true Church of Christ, as I had occasion to remark again in introducing the 2016 Lake Garda Statement in the post above.
At the next news conference he holds, someone should ask him pointblank: "What do you think of DOMINUS IESUS?", as some journalist ought to have done so by now. Let him try to wiggle out of that impasse by claiming "I am a loyal son of the Church", when no, he is not. Every time - and it is much too often - he proclaims by word and deed that he thinks all faiths and all Christian confessions are equal and equivalent means of salvation, he betrays the Church.
I think that even the most assiduous of Catholic commentators have failed to protest enough, and on every possible occasion, his singularly outrageous denial of the most basic elements of the Christian faith and of Catholicism, only because it has been unthinkable till now that a pope should explicitly deny the unicity of the Roman Catholic Church as the one true Church of Christ.
But if the nominal head of the Roman Catholic Church does not abide by DOMINUS IESUS, he has no business being pope, even if he had been legitimately elected without the least shadow of technical doubt whatsoever. Is Bergoglio's rejection of DOMINUS IESUS not more serious even than all the near-heresies he casuistically proclaims in AL which have been the object of widespread protests from the most articulate thinkers in the Catholic world today???
Clearly, if he espouses such a generic idea of 'God' and of 'faith', then all his other heterodoxies - that sin is not always sin, that people living in a chronic state of sin could be in a 'state of grace', that there is no hell, etc, etc - are all of a piece with his fundamentally anti-Catholic, pro-'one world religion' mindset.
Is Allah now the 'God' of Avvenire
and 'Comunione e Liberazione'?
Translated from
August 20, 2016
Yesterday, Avvenire published an editorial [which expresses the publication's official line on whatever the editorial topic is] and the heart of it was an enormous whopper that is decisively outside of the Catholic faith.
Unfortunately, the editorial is signed by one of my friends from Comunione e Liberazione (CL), but one must first be a friend of the truth, and thus, it is with sorrow that I must point this out: If the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference proposes what its editorial says, then we are a step away from the abyss (and also from total ridicule).
Here is the statement by which Avvenire constructs its entire theorem of Bergoglianism:
Indeed, for any believer - Christian or Muslim or Jew - God is one, great, omnipotent, and merciful. The difference is simply in how each one sees God.
As we can see, the [negative]'Bergoglio effect' is spreading. [What does it say if that negative effect now permeates the organ of the Italian bishops' conference? Do the individual Italian bishops who may think and act otherwise have any say as to what their newspaper passes on as an official line? Should they not speak out and protest each such presumptuousness made in their behalf?]
Reading this editorial in the CEI newspaper, one would think that the faith of Christians and Muslims [and Jews] is the same faith and that their conception of God is identical. [It simply is not so, of course. 1) Both Jews and Muslims reject the very thought that Jesus is God - to them he was, respectively, just another rabbi or just another minor prophet. And 2) Both Jews and Muslims think that Catholic belief in the Trinity actually makes Catholics polytheistic, not monotheistic.]
But has Avvenire's editor-in-chief, Marco Tarquinio, who was once a 'Ratzingerian', never heard of the Most Holy Trinity which is at the heart of the Christian faith and which Muslims consider to be the worst blasphemy against the one God?
The dome of the Mosque of the Rock, built by the Muslims over what is holy ground to the Jews, and which replaced the old Temple of Jerusalem, features an inscription that says, "God does not have a son".
Indeed, Islam was born out of the rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ and of the Trinity of God. This rejection was the most radical and violent attack at the very heart of the Christian faith.
[Which makes it all the more incredible that the current pope should go out of his way to defend Islam as a religion when it rejects and attacks the very essentials of the Christian faith. It's as if JMB and all his mini-me's did not know the most elementary facts about Islam, at all. Not all the well-intentioned kumbaya political correctness of Nostra aetate changes by an iota Jewish and Muslim dismissal of Jesus as a mere human.
And I certainly hope that, as a result, Catholic schools have not been teaching what this pope now says on every occasion that he can - all religions that believe in 'god' in any way, shape, or form, are as good as each other. Because if that's what he thinks, he should step down as pope and have himself crowned at the United Nations as Jorge Magnus, Lord of the World, which is really what he aspires to be.]
St John wrote:
Who is the liar? Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist. No one who denies the Son has the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well. (1Jn 2, 22-23)
That seems very clear. It is obvious that the abysmal difference in the conception of self (the person) between Islam and Christianity derives precisely from the abysmal difference in their conception of God.
But Avvenire ignores this. I know for sure that Tarquinio has heard of the Most Holy Trinity and of Christian belief in the Trinity.
However, the times - in the Church as well as within CL - are such that the truths of the faith have now come to be happily set aside in order to give voice to the most absurd whoppers.
It seems to me, watching what is taking place in the Church (and the sad spectacle of CL's 2016 Meeting in Rimini [once a signal annual milestone for the orthodox Catholic world, when CL was still close to what founder Luigi Giussani wanted the movement to be, not the bend-with-the-wind organization it has appeared to become], that we can say many 'ciellini' (from the Italian 'ci' and 'el' for the letters C and L) now seem 'ashamed of Christ', as don Giussani lamented in his last interview (he died in 2005). Now this tendency has become dominant in CL as well as in the Church.
[Things must be so bad in CL today if Socci, a longtime 'ciellini', can say that, and things must be so much worse in the Italian Church than I thought if the official organ of the Italian bishops can dare to articulate its anti-Catholic idea that the God proclaimed by Christians, Jews and Muslims is one and the same.
But why should we be surprised when the heresy does not seem to be considered heresy by most Catholics, and certainly not by the current pope who leads in proclaiming it - so much so that those who follow religious news and commentary seem to be taking it for granted???
That happens to be the dynamic of communications in this Internet-woven global village: repeat anything often enough which is not pro-actively contested, and it soon becomes established as 'fact', and eventually, as 'uncontested truth']
Merely by way of a reminder, I reproduce here some passages from DOMINUS IESUS which tells everyone what the Catholic faith is:
4. The Church's constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).
As a consequence, it is held that certain truths have been superseded; for example,
- the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ,
- the nature of Christian faith as compared with that of belief in other religions,
- the inspired nature of the books of Sacred Scripture,
- the personal unity between the Eternal Word and Jesus of Nazareth, - the unity of the economy of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit,
- the unicity and salvific universality of the mystery of Jesus Christ,
- the universal salvific mediation of the Church,
- the inseparability — while recognizing the distinction — of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the Church, and
- the subsistence of the one Church of Christ in the Catholic Church.
5. As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
In fact, it must be firmly believed that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), the full revelation of divine truth is given: - “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt 11:27);
- “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him” (Jn 1:18);
- “For in Christ the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9-10).
Faithful to God's word, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation”.
Furthermore, “Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, sent ‘as a man to men', ‘speaks the words of God' (Jn 3:34), and completes the work of salvation which his Father gave him to do (cf. Jn 5:36; 17:4).
To see Jesus is to see his Father (cf. Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through his words and deeds, his signs and wonders, but especially through his death and glorious resurrection from the dead an,d finally with the sending of the Spirit of truth, he completed and perfected revelation and confirmed it with divine testimony.
The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim 6:14 and Tit 2:13).
Thus, the Encyclical Redemptoris missio calls the Church once again to the task of announcing the Gospel as the fullness of truth: “In this definitive Word of his revelation, God has made himself known in the fullest possible way. He has revealed to mankind who he is. This definitive self-revelation of God is the fundamental reason why the Church is missionary by her very nature. She cannot do other than proclaim the Gospel, that is, the fullness of the truth which God has enabled us to know about himself”.
Only the revelation of Jesus Christ, therefore, “introduces into our history a universal and ultimate truth which stirs the human mind to ceaseless effort.
So, even Socci does not pursue his citation of DOMINUS IESUS to underscore and belabor the fact that this pope, in effect, does not subscribe to the most important point of the declaration - even if he continues to cite Jesus and his Gospel in his 'religious' statements (because it would be sheer apostasy if he did not!).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/08/2016 19:53] |