How to think about Luther
in the church of Bergoglio
by James Kalb
CRISIS MAGAZINE
July 12, 2017
Traditionally, Catholics have viewed Luther as a heresiarch, and the Lutheran break from Rome as a religious and civilizational catastrophe. More recently, in line with current ecumenical and pastoral initiatives, that view has softened.
The softening has been
quite noticeable during the current pontificate.
['Quite noticeable' is a falsehood, as it is only with Jorge Martin Bergluther that Luther's heresy and the catastrophe his schism caused to the Catholic Church have now been set aside as if they had never really mattered! Pope Leo's Bull denouncing Luther's heresies, the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation - these were all sheer BS as far as this so-called pope is concerned! Before him, no pope had ever softened the Catholic view on Luther, not even for the pipe dream of ecumenism.]
The pope recently took part in a joint liturgy with the Church of Sweden to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s rebellion. He has also suggested informally that a Lutheran married to a Catholic might legitimately decide to receive communion from a Catholic priest, and that disputes between Catholics and Lutherans over the doctrine of justification, the basic point at issue in Luther’s split with Rome, are now a thing of the past.
More generally,
some papal language regarding law and mercy suggests movement away from the Catholic view that grace enables us to overcome our sins toward Luther’s view that it simply frees us from their consequences.
Examples include the comment in Amoris Laetitia that
...conscience can … recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking … while yet not fully the objective ideal.
So if you think it’s all you can do, that’s probably all God is looking for. Luther’s pecca fortiter, “sin boldly,” was based on a similar line of thought. [Does anyone doubt whose example JMBergluther has been following in setting up his church of Bergoglio?]
Are these moves in the right direction? The Church is hierarchical, and it is the pope and other clergy who are charged with teaching doctrine and determining appropriate pastoral and ecumenical efforts. Even so, laymen can hardly avoid forming their own views, and
many Catholics find that recent ecumenical efforts have done more harm than good, as has a tendency to confuse “pastoral” with “accepting that people do whatever they do.”
Laymen have the right and even obligation to present these concerns. The issues matter a great deal, and not simply for churchly reasons.
Our secular authorities are convinced they have the solution to all social and political problems, at least in principle, and can put it into effect through a global managed system that recognizes nothing human outside it, no authoritative God above it, no enduring human nature beneath it, and no significant history behind it other than the history of its own coming into being. Everything is a social construction, and they will do the constructing. The project is unfounded, overreaching, and destructive, and Catholics should oppose it.
But the ecumenical and interfaith movements, along with proposals for loosening sacramental discipline to accept common practices in the name of “accompaniment,” support it by sidelining specific religious principle. They turn it into something like the British monarchy, which lends historical depth and dignity to a modern utilitarian bureaucracy but does not affect its substance.
So those who view current political and social trends as anti-Catholic and anti-human have an additional reason for concern regarding ecumenical and pastoral tendencies in the Church that support them.
Concern regarding
the changing Catholic attitude toward Luther [At this point I doubt that it has already become that throughout the vast Catholic world, but it will very soon be, since 1) this pope is a relentless champion of the change, 2) the bishops of the world today are probably overwhelmingly compliant and willingly pliable to anything he says, and 3) most importantly, mass media report all of this as incontrovertible irreversible ‘gospel truth’!]
is all the more justified because he’s the man who initiated the Protestant split from Rome, a fundamental event in the emergence of the modern world, and a variety of liberal and radical movements have claimed him as an inspiration.
So if we are troubled by the trend toward a global society organized through and through on wholly secular and increasingly intolerant principles, and want to understand where the trend comes from, we should know something about his thought and deeds and their consequences.
A recently published collection of essays put out by the Roman Forum, an organization founded by Dietrich von Hildebrand, can help.
Luther and His Progeny: 500 Years of Protestantism & Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society includes pieces by a dozen European and American scholars of varying backgrounds, each with his own outlook and concerns, but all troubled by the man, the movement he launched, and current efforts to enlist them, along with Catholicism, in a grand scheme of political, social, and religious unification. Each essay is independent of the others, but collectively they cover the basic issues that led Luther to reject the Church, as well as the effects of his rebellion on European thought and society.
Taken together they present the picture of a revolution in religion, politics, law, ethics, economics, and even the natural sciences, the effects of which profoundly shape our present world.
At bottom, what seems to have led Luther to break with Rome was his overwhelming sense of guilt over his inability to keep the moral law. He was in a mess, and the Catholic road of humility, penitence, forgiveness, sacrament, grace, and sanctification didn’t seem to be working for him, so he decided that the world itself is one huge irreversible mess. Man is totally depraved, reason a snare, free will an illusion, and the Church can do nothing and so is fundamentally useless. To make matters worse, God himself is willful, incomprehensible, and even self-contradictory, since he is good but makes man incapable of anything but evil.
Under such circumstances what do we do, if it makes sense to ask the question when we have no inclination or ability to think or choose rightly?
Basically, Luther’s answer was to rely wholly on the mercy of Christ, who might — or might not — choose to cover up our sins and accept us as justified even though we would inevitably remain as corrupt as ever. [Which is exactly Jorge Martin Bergluther’s rationale for his one-sided idea of mercy!]
These are
not reasonable views.
How, for example, is a God worthy of love, worship, and trust who condemns to eternal torment sinners he made incapable of acting otherwise, but then arbitrarily chooses some, who are no better than the others, for forgiveness and eternal bliss? The best that can be done for such views intellectually, one of the essayists suggests, is to view them as a precursor of German idealism, which treats contradiction as fundamental to reality and its dialectical resolution as the basis of the self-construction of the Absolute.
At the transcendent level that means, as Luther put it, that “God must first become the devil before he becomes God.” [Ooooh, another recent formulation by Bergluther. He must really have been taking adult instructions in Lutheranism to guide him in laying down the doctrines of Bergoglianism?]
And at the human level, it means faith goes through radically different stages, with the transitions involving overwhelming temptations to unbelief and blasphemy, and ultimate resolution not possible in this world.
Some people think that sort of explanation makes sense, others don’t. A more psychological and likely more comprehensible approach that some have recently proposed is
to portray him as a “mystic of mercy,” overwhelmed by the infinitude of divine grace, whose words cannot be taken literally. (Muslims take the same approach with their own mystics, whose words are rarely compatible with orthodox Islam.)
That approach may explain something of the man, but not the movement he started: People don’t look to the incoherent outbursts of mystics for practical tips on the reform of Church, State, and doctrine, but that’s exactly what Luther offered, and what people took from him.
The specifics are complicated.
His thought wasn’t coherent, so people took from it what suited them. [Again, remarkably Bergoglian!] At bottom, though, denying the practical effectiveness of religion tended strongly
to liberate secular affairs from religious concerns, and destroy the authority and the sacramental structure of the Church. [Idem!] And that, it appears, was the reason for the success of his rebellion.
By insisting on the irrelevance of divine law to what men actually do, Luther enabled secular powers to shake off the authority of the Church, set themselves up as absolute within their domains, and incidentally enrich themselves and their supporters with the property that an ineffectual Church could no longer justify possessing.
All of which remains relevant today. Secular authorities still don’t like religious limitations, so if a contemporary religious leader wants to exchange scorn for adulation, all he has to do is ignore distinctions, loosen restrictions, and proclaim mercy without penitence or emendation of life. Neither talent, virtue, nor rational coherence is needed, only a willingness to go along in order to get along. And there are many high-ranking churchmen who are eager to accept the deal.
I shall now post a couple of essays about Luther by Dale Ahlquist, perhaps the foremost scholar on G.K. Chesterton today. The first one came out in June, and he has written a sequel today, so I am posting them both here...
The Bible, the Reformation and G.K. Chesterton
The Protestants, in separating the Bible from the Church, turned the Bible against the Church.
Forgotten was the fact that it was the Church that gave us the Bible.
Forgotten was the fact that the Bible was, and still is, a Catholic document.
Forgotten, too, was that the Protestant Bible is an abridgement of the Catholic Bible.
By Dale Ahlquist
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
June 19, 2017
“I suppose it will take centuries to unwind the coil of confusion and stupidity, which began when the Reformers quite irrationally separated the Bible from the Church.”
Although G.K. Chesterton is admired by both Protestants and Catholics and even non-Christians, the above line does not exactly ooze with Ecumenism. But since we are this year observing the 500thanniversary of the Reformation, we may as well point out how Chesterton exactly identifies the problem that has plagued the Christian world for half a millennium. It has to do with the best of all books: the Holy Bible.
Beginning five centuries ago, Martin Luther, then John Calvin and the other leaders of what is known as the Reformation, opened a giant rift in Christian Europe by separating themselves and their followers from the Catholic Church. They replaced the authority of the Church with the authority of Scripture.
They not only separated the Bible from the Church, to the exclusion of the Church, they separated faith from reason, to the exclusion of reason. Confusion followed.
- Protestants began to believe that somehow Catholic teaching was not “scriptural” and consequentially, they deprived themselves of the Sacraments.
- Baptism and Communion became mere symbols, devoid of their supernatural power.
- There was no longer any need for Confession, because salvation came through one act of grace on the cross, and Christ was then removed from the cross, lest we should dwell on that unpleasant business, or worse, worship a graven image on a crucifix.
- The wedding of man and woman lost its divine element, and subsequently sex became separated from marriage, and the family began to dissolve.
- Priests went from being spiritual guides, ushering souls into heaven, to being regarded as agents of hell and darkness.
The Reformer’s separation of the Bible from the Church was aided by the invention of the printing press —
a Catholic invention in a Catholic society, Chesterton points out, but one that “has been largely used to turn out whole libraries of lies against that society.”
The Protestants continued to protest not only against the Catholic Church but against each other, as new groups splintered away into even narrower sects with even narrower interpretations of the Bible and what Christianity should be. Purity and righteousness was replaced by Puritanism and self-righteousness, where, rather than condemning the bad uses of good things, the good things themselves were condemned.
Calvin’s emphasis on the Sovereignty of God unwittingly introduced a long string of philosophies that were fatalistic, to the exclusion of free will.
What was first a theological predestination paved the way to biological, economic, political, social and psychological determinism, where people were no longer responsible for their own actions but could lay the blame on something outside of themselves that they could not control.
The chaos of the modern world, says Chesterton, “did not come from Christendom but from the disruption of Christendom.”
The Protestants, in separating the Bible from the Church, turned the Bible against the Church. Forgotten was the fact that it was the Church that gave us the Bible. Forgotten was the fact that the Bible was, and still is, a Catholic document. Forgotten, too, was that the Protestant Bible is an abridgement of the Catholic Bible. The Reformers discarded several books and relegated them to the category, “Apocrypha,” which means doubtful. Doubt, the opposite of faith.
But then secular scholars spread the doubt to the rest of the Bible. They began taking apart Scripture through the pretence of textual criticism, and the Protestants found that their one authority had collapsed. They were left with nothing. And most of them left.
The irony is that the very people who warned against an idolatry of sacred writings created a culture that suffers from an idolatry of all writings. Chesterton says,
“There is seldom so much superstition in kissing the Book as in consulting the dictionary. Modern people, especially urban people, think that anything which has got itself printed has somehow passed an examination and received a diploma; has somehow, in fact, shown itself to be true… They will believe an encyclopedia against an eyewitness; nay, they will believe a newspaper against the naked eye. They buy the newspaper next morning to find out what the meeting they attended last night was really like.”
And all this left the Bible in a rather curious position. Chesterton summarised that position almost a hundred years ago, but it is still mostly accurate. He’s especially right when he says “ignorance is increasing about these things.”
- First, there are the Fundamentalists, who appeal to the Bible without daring to appeal to the authority which actually fixed the Canon of the Bible. It is, says Chesterton, “a mythology asserting that the elephant stands on a tortoise and the tortoise stands on nothing.”
- Secondly, there are the “Broad Churchmen” who are actually quite narrow, proposing to use only selections of the Bible in public, the rest being unsuitable.
- Thirdly, there are the Modernist scholars who accuse the Catholic Church of having done in “the midnight of the Dark Ages” what the Broad Churchmen are now doing: making arbitrary selections from the Bible and keeping back the rest from the people. (This is the accusation made against the Church in the popular book The Da Vinci Code.)
The Church, says Chesterton, “has been accused of hiding the Bible; but had it been true, it would have been a less astonishing achievement than that of the Reformation, which succeeded in hiding everything else.”
Mainline Protestantism succeeded in concealing Western civilization from its own history.
And then there is the one Church that has kept the unabridged Bible, filling its liturgy with it, chanting its prayers day after day, and applying its ageless wisdom to this age. It has also painstakingly preserved the other ancient documents that not only testify to the truth of Scripture, but demonstrate on the face of them the difference between an inspired and uninspired text.
The Catholic Church, which still teaches the whole Scripture, that can point to all of its own doctrines in the Bible: that baptism is being born again (John 3:5),
that marriage is a permanent bond (Matthew 10:11) reflecting Christ and his bride the Church (Rev. 19:7), that we must confess our sins (James 5:16) and show ourselves to a priest (Matt. 8:4),
that Jesus founded a Church and appointed its first leader (Matt. 16:18), that he gave his apostles the authority to forgive sins (John 20:23), that unless we eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood we have no life in us (John 6:53).
Which brings us back to Ecumenism in the wake of the Reformation. We still have a great duty to appeal to a common love for God and His Son with our Protestant friends, but we also have a responsibility to get them to look honestly at the Bible and at the whole story of what really happened when the Reformers separated the Bible from the Church.
It is not an impossible task. I’ve seen it done quite successfully. It was a faithful, loving, truth-telling Catholic who patiently ushered me from the Baptist church to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. First he appealed to what we had in common. Then he made me realize what I was missing. It helped because he had gone through the same journey himself. His name was G.K. Chesterton.
Further thoughts on Luther, the Reformation – and Chesterton
Martin Luther had the opportunity to become one of the great saints in the history of the Church.
But he did not believe he was reforming a Church simply because it needed some house cleaning.
By Dale Ahlquist
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 11, 2017
So, I took some heat from my previous article on the Reformation
because I implied that the Reformation was started by Protestants. Apparently I did not spend enough time attacking the Catholic Church, which, as everyone knows, was responsible for the creation of Martin Luther and company.
But since we are still in the midst of our [Not ‘our’ – ‘their’!] year long observance of Luther’s Halloween treat at the door of the Wittenburg Cathedral and all that followed, we can certainly afford to draw out this discussion a bit longer.
So let’s make it clear.
There was plenty of corruption in the Catholic Church five hundred years ago. Bishops and Abbots openly kept money and mistresses and used their ecclesiastical privilege to gain political power. The sales of indulgences were going unchecked and did untold damage not only to true piety but to the correct understanding of Purgatory and prayers for the dead. It was a far-reaching scandal throughout Christendom.
But it was not just Martin Luther who spoke out against it. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden and others fearlessly and sometimes very effectively confronted the hierarchy. And it wasn’t as if this had not happened before. Three and half centuries earlier a little friar named Francis of Assisi turned a worldly Church around simply by choosing to live out his own life according to what Jesus preached in the Gospels. The result? Genuine reform. [At least for a time. Luther's schism would bring the next great wave of true reform - the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation.]
Martin Luther had the opportunity to become one of the great saints in the history of the Church. But he did not believe he was reforming a Church simply because it needed some house cleaning.
He said explicitly that one should not condemn a doctrine on the basis that the man who holds it lives a sinful life [i.e., you don’t condemn Catholic doctrine because Honorius was declared a heretic for being silent about heresies, or Alexander Borgia was a shameless libertine, or Jorge Bergoglio is anti-Catholic]. On the contrary, Luther said,
“The Holy Spirit… is patient with the weak in faith, as is taught in Romans 14:15… I would have very little against the Papists if they taught true doctrine. Their evil life would do no great harm.”
There you have it from the Reformer’s mouth.
He did not part ways with the Catholic Church because of ne’er-do-well priests and bishops. He thought and taught that Catholic doctrine was false. He rejected the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church.
If the bishops had rent their robes and donned sackcloth and ashes, it might have done great good for the Church and the world, but there is no evidence it would have changed Luther’s mind, because what was in his mind was a new theology. Hypocrites have turned away potential followers of Christ throughout the history of the Church. Still happens. But that argument only goes so far.
If the unbeliever wants to blame corrupt bishops for his own doubts about the truth of the Catholic faith, why is he not drawn back to the Church by the witness of the saints? Why isn’t St. Francis of Assisi or St. Catherine of Siena, or more recently, St. Teresa of Calcutta, enough to make him overcome his misgivings about the Church? Saints inspire holiness because they are holy. Rebels inspire rebellion. Even against themselves. Sainthood is always a better option than breaking away from the Church founded by Jesus Christ and set into motion by his chosen Apostles. It was that Church that built Christendom.
But as one observer has pointed out, what Martin Luther’s rebellion was not against a corrupt Pope, it was against a quiet Dominican friar who had been dead for over 200 years. St. Thomas Aquinas. G.K. Chesterton says,
“It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy.”
St. Augustine, a true saint and a giant among converts, was limited in one respect. The only philosophy he knew was that of Plato. St. Thomas Aquinas introduced Aristotle into Christian philosophy, and the Augustinian Platonists never really accepted it. They had a different approach to objective reality. One of those Augustinians was a monk named Martin Luther.
Chesterton argues that the Reformation was really the revenge of the Platonists. You could say it started with a difference in emphasis, you could say it started as a quarrel among monks, but Luther’s emphasis on emotion rather than reason, on subjective truth rather than objective truth, and most unfortunately, on Determinism rather than Free Will, opened the door for an attack not just on Scholasticism but on all philosophy.
[But none of those negative things can be imputed to Augustine! First of all, Augustine (354-430) had nothing to do with founding the order named for him, which came into being only in 1244 when several communities of hermits living in the Italian region of Tuscany came together to ask Pope Innocent IV that they be united under one common Rule of life and one Superior General like other Orders that had recently been founded. The Pope gave them the so-called Rule of Saint Augustine based on about five documents Augustine wrote in his lifetime that served as an outline for religious life lived in community. St. Benedict borrowed much of it when he developed his own Rule in the sixth century. But the Rule of Augustine was never really adopted by any religious order until the 11th century when some clerics thought that the Rule of Benedict, which had prevailed for five centuries, needed to be ‘replaced’ by something more ascetic. The clerics came to be known as Canons Regular or Augustinian Canons whose Rule was approved by the Lateran Council of 1059. But the Augustinian order to which Luther belonged was the Order established in 1244.]
Lutheranism, says Chesterton,
“…had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless.
Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain”.
St. Thomas and Luther are “the hinges of history,” and Luther managed to loom large enough to block out the huge figure of Aquinas.
“Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual…. He was a forceful personality. He was a bully. He claimed Scripture as his authority and then altered Scripture itself, adding a word here and there in his own translation to accommodate his own theology]. When confronted with the act,”he was content to shout back at all hecklers: ‘Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!’ That is what we now call Personality… He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion”.[More eerie pre-figurations of Jorge Martin Bergluther!]
[Luther and every other Reformer cannot blame the Church for the consequences of their own actions. It is typical to talk about the corruption of certain bishops in Germany, but no one seems to want to discuss the actual heresy of Martin Luther and all that happened in its wake,
from the splintering of Christianity into thousands of different denominations to the disintegration of philosophy into one detached and narrow and bizarre speculation after another because we lost the plain common sense, the reason and reality that was once so clearly articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/07/2017 23:36]