Gospel of Man vs. Gospel of God…
From the Supernatural to the Natural: How Francis neutralizes the Gospel while appearing to preach it
As always: He’s got plenty to say…
On Jan. 30, 2020, the Argentinian apostate Jorge Bergoglio (aka “Pope Francis”) addressed the plenary assembly of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Destruction of the Faith, currently led by his fellow-Jesuit “Cardinal” Luis Ladaria Ferrer. A translation of the speech has been made available by Zenit:
The discourse provides a good concrete example of how the false pope continually naturalizes the Catholic Faith — that is, he continually refocuses the essence of Catholicism. The Catholic Faith is essentially a set of divinely-revealed supernatural truths that include the command to aid people in their temporal needs, but it ultimately aims at the salvation of souls, that is, at man’s eternal happiness in the Beatific Vision. Francis, however, exaggerates the necessity of helping the needy to such a degree — while at the same time de-emphasizing, relativizing, and sometimes outright contradicting the supernatural essence and purpose of Catholicism — that he effectively turns the religion into a mere natural humanitarianism whose primary goal is making the world a better place on the putative grounds that Jesus told us to.
This constitutes a clear inversion of the true order: In Catholicism, the natural is lifted up to the supernatural through grace (cf. Mk 9:40); in the Novus Ordo religion of which Francis is currently the head, the supernatural is reduced to the natural level (cf. 1 Jn 4:5). It seems that according to what can rightly be called the “Gospel of Man” preached by Francis, all worship of God, all teaching of doctrine, all spiritual things are ultimately done merely to provide sufficient impetus for assisting the needy, for protecting the environment, for easing the temporal human condition. This subordination of the supernatural to the natural is applauded by the world, which has no regard for man’s eternal destiny and cares only about the here and now.
We will now look at Francis’ Jan. 30 address to the CDF, in which his naturalization of Catholicism was particularly evident.
After delivering the usual greetings and pretending to show concern for “the promotion and protection of the integrity of Catholic Doctrine on faith and morals”, when in fact he couldn’t care less about it, Bergoglio gets right down to business:
Christian Doctrine isn’t a rigid system closed in itself, but neither is it an ideology that changes with the passing of seasons. It is a dynamic reality that, remaining faithful to its foundation, is renewed from generation to generation and can be summed up in a face, in a body and in a name: Jesus Christ Risen.
Here Francis uses what might be called the “pretended golden middle” tactic: He justifies his Modernist position by contrasting it, on the one side, with the true Catholic position (which he basically rejects as simplistic, shallow, static, and triumphalist) and, on the other side, with a more clearly Modernist position than his own. This allows him to claim the golden middle, the supposedly orthodox synthesis that is situated in between errors on the left and on the right — thus he emerges as the “great moderate.” (This he did also for his closing speech of the Family Synod of 2014 — the rest is history.)
The fact is quite simply that Catholic doctrine is extremely rigid. As Fr. Francis Connell wrote in his 1947 essay “Does Catholic Doctrine Change?”: “Intelligent Catholics know that there is no need to apologize for the intransigence of their Church” (p. 331).
Yes, Catholicism is terribly intransigent, especially with regard to defined dogma. In 1907, Pope St. Pius X condemned the following as a Modernist proposition: “The dogmas which the Church professes as revealed are not truths fallen from heaven, but they are a kind of interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind by a laborious effort prepared for itself” (Decree Lamentabili Sane, error n. 22; Denz. 2022). Because dogmas are truths revealed by God, and because God cannot lie, make a mistake, or change His mind, dogmas too must be unchangeable.
Thus the First Vatican Council in 1870 declared on the immutability of dogma:
For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding.
(Vatican I; Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius; Denz. 1800.)
To refer to Christian doctrine as a “dynamic reality that, remaining faithful to its foundation, is renewed from generation to generation”, as Francis does, is mere Novus Ordo mumbo jumbo: It is lacking in clarity and uses high-sounding phrases with no clear meaning. What is there to “renew” every generation?
Francis being a master of his craft, he knows that it is very effective to move on from his meaningless definition to the incarnate Christ, hence he asserts that Catholic doctrine “can be summed up in a face, in a body and in a name: Jesus Christ Risen”. But what does this mean? More specifically, how is the Risen Christ a “dynamic reality” that is continually “renewed”?
Bergoglio doesn’t give his listeners any time to ask themselves these questions — he immediately launches into what he thinks the purpose of all doctrine is anyway: helping the needy.
Thanks to the Risen Lord, the faith opens us to our neighbour and to his needs, from the littlest to the greatest. Therefore, the transmission of the faith calls for taking into account its recipient, that he be known and loved actively. In this perspective, your commitment is significant to reflect, in the course of this Plenary, on the care of people in the critical and terminal phases of life.
Masterful! Here Francis demonstrates precisely how to reduce the supernatural to the natural: He hijacks our Blessed Lord, risen from the grave, to promote the idea that the Faith is about alleviating the temporal needs of our fellow man. The bridge that allows him to go from talking about Christian doctrine to focusing on caring for the sick is the pretext that “the transmission of the faith calls for taking into account its recipient, that he be known and loved actively.”
Note well: What he says there is not wrong — the problem is what he does with it, namely, he uses it to refocus the subject matter from eternal to temporal things, once again placing excessive emphasis on man’s natural life. But St. Paul exhorts us: “Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God: Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth” (Col 3:1-2).
Now, let’s be clear: There is no question that our Faith includes the moral imperative to practice the corporal works of mercy, such as giving drink to the thirsty and clothing the naked. This is not optional: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me”, Christ warned (Mt 25:45).
However, the simple fact of the matter is that no one needs supernatural faith — the Catholic Faith — merely to help those in need. Any atheist can do that, and many atheists do do that — not to mention Protestants, Orthodox, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics, Masons, etc. By placing one-sided and excessive emphasis on the corporal works of mercy, to the detriment of the truths of the Faith, Bergoglio gradually makes revealed truth practically irrelevant. That’s why he constantly rails against doctrinal rigidity and condemns convincing non-believers of the truth of the Catholic religion. It is also why he can say that Faith without works is not true Faith — which is a heresy condemned by the Council of Trent (see Denz. 838) — and believes that “good” atheists go to Heaven.
But Christ didn’t rise from the dead so we would open soup kitchens. He rose from the dead so the way to the Beatific Vision — the attainment of which is the only true reason for our existence — could be re-opened. Ultimately, we were created to be happy with God forever, not to help each other overcome life’s difficulties before physical death renders our own existence pointless.
It is true that our Blessed Lord said at the Last Supper: “I give you a new commandment: That you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (Jn 13:34). However, He called it a new commandment not because showing charity for all was a new concept in itself — it had, after all, been commanded even in the Old Law (see Lev 19:18,33-34; Prov 25:21) — “but because we love one another, as [Christ] has loved us: not as men love one another, as being fellow creatures, but united in love, as being all the children of the Most High; that so we may be brethren to his only begotten Son, bearing to all the same love that he has borne to us” (Haydock Commentary on Jn 13:37).
It is essentially a supernatural love that Christ teaches in His new commandment: the love of neighbor for the sake of God, aided by His grace, which alone can render all good works supernaturally fruitful, that is, meritorious. Without this grace, there is no true love of neighbor because there is no true love of God: “And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” (1 Cor 13:3).
That Francis is not interested in helping the needy with the supernatural aim of their eventual conversion and salvation is evident from the fact that he continually denies the Gospel to those who are most in need of it, experiences “bitterness” at hearing about conversions, and has gone so far as to blasphemously declare that God wills there to exist a variety of different religions: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, 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 (“A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together”, Vatican.va, Feb. 4, 2019).
Of course, Bergoglio constantly forbids people from “proselytizing” to boot:
- Francis: “Evangelization is not Proselytizing”
- Francis: “Do you need to convince the other to become Catholic? No, no, no!”
- Francis: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense”
- Francis: “Never Proselytize in Schools!”
- Francis: “It is not right to convince others of your Faith”
Furthermore, the Jesuit apostate made clear what he thinks about Catholic doctrine when he declared in Morocco that “being a Christian is not about adhering to a doctrine, or a temple or an ethnic group” (Address of Mar. 31, 2019). This is in direct contradiction to divine revelation and therefore heresy: “Whosoever revolteth, and continueth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that continueth in the doctrine, the same hath both the Father and the Son” (2 Jn 1:9).
His copout in the following sentence that being a Christian “is about an encounter, an encounter with Jesus Christ” does nothing to make his heretical statement any less heretical. If anything, it aggravates it, for an encounter is an experience, and to say that the foundation for Faith is an internal experience of God, is Modernism: “If anyone shall have said that divine revelation cannot be made credible by external signs, and for this reason men ought to be moved to faith by the internal experience alone of each one, or by private inspiration: let him be anathema” (Vatican I, Dei Filius, Chapter 3, Canon 3; Denz. 1812; see also Pope Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi Dominici, n. 14).
The Frankster continues his address to the CDF assembly:
The present socio-cultural context is eroding progressively awareness regarding what makes human life precious. It, in fact, is valued ever more often by reason of its efficiency and usefulness, to the point of considering “discarded lives” or “unworthy lives” those that don’t respond to such criteria. In this situation of loss of authentic values, the imperative human and Christian duties of solidarity and fraternity also fail. In reality, a society merits the qualification of “civil” if it develops antibodies against the throwaway culture; if it recognizes the intangible value of human life; if solidarity is actively practiced and safeguarded as foundation of coexistence.
When a paragraph begins with the words “The present socio-cultural context…”, you pretty much know where it’s going. What he says here isn’t wrong, but it’s abundantly clear that Francis has made the switch from talking about God’s truth to talking about taking care of our neighbor.
If Francis were at least preaching the Catholic position with regard to caring for our neighbor, things would not be quite so bad, but of course he does no such thing. He says: “Human life, given its eternal destiny, keeps all its value and all its dignity in any condition, also of precariousness and fragility, and, as such, is always worthy of the greatest consideration.”
Here he slips in, almost unnoticed, a brief reference to man’s “eternal destiny”, but he immediately hijacks it for his own nefarious end, namely, for the proposition that human life never loses its value or dignity, which is not true, at least not in the sense in which Francis means it. It is this error which allows him to declare to the unbelieving sodomite that he need not amend his ways; it is this false position which makes him oppose the death penalty in principle, as though the human life of the innocent preborn child or the terminally-ill patient were no different from the human life of the convicted abortionist awaiting his execution.
Bergoglio adds: “Saint Teresa of Calcutta, who lived the style of proximity and sharing, keeping up to the end the recognition and respect of human dignity, and rend[er]ing dying more human, said thus; ‘One who in the path of life has lighted even just one torch in someone’s dark hour has not lived in vain.'” A better example of the Naturalist perversion of the Gospel in the Vatican II religion could hardly have been asked for!
Here we can see it clearly: Francis and Mother Teresa propose that one’s life has not been in vain if one has done a good deed for a fellow-man, yet there is no reference to Faith or to grace or to anything supernatural. That is Naturalism. As Pope St. Pius X said, “…merely naturally good acts are only a counterfeit of virtue since they are neither permanent nor sufficient for salvation” (Encyclical Editae Saepe, n. 28). One’s life has been in vain if and only if one ends up going to hell for all eternity (cf. Mt 16:26). It has not been in vain if one ends up attaining the Beatific Vision (cf. Apoc 21:4-7; Mk 10:31).
So here we can see quite clearly Bergoglio’s false gospel at work: After paying lipservice to man’s “eternal destiny,” he first uses it to advance a false doctrinal proposition and then neutralizes it by making an assertion that totally ignores and contradicts that very destiny. The man is a master manipulator!
The rest of Francis’ address can be skipped over. The phrase “socio-cultural context” makes another appearance, and the antipope lauds the CDF members “for the recent publication of the document elaborated by the Pontifical Biblical Commission regarding fundamental topics of biblical anthropology”. In other words, it’s more of the same.
It is not difficult to see, given the foregoing, how Bergoglio’s naturalization of Catholicism accomplishes a neutralization thereof, because in this gross distortion of the true religion, anything that is distinctively Catholic is effectively relegated to the status of insignificant personal preference, a glorified but optional add-on, to dogmatically insist upon which would “divide” people and constitute the shameful crime of “triumphalism.”
How far removed this is from the true Gospel is shown by Pope St. Pius X in his condemnation of Sillonism:
We wish to draw your attention, Venerable Brethren, to this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men. True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness.
But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue, and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors.
Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but He instructed them in order to convert them and save them. Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality. Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience. Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them.
He was as strong as He was gentle. He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.
Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross. These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one’s personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.
(Pope St. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique; underlining and paragraph breaks added.)
Since charitable works to benefit man’s natural life can be accomplished by believers and unbelievers alike, transforming Catholicism into a kind of philanthropy-with-liturgy facilitates a convergence of all religions into one, with each one keeping their credal and ceremonial particularities, but all united in and around the Golden Rule. Assisting others in their temporal necessities and promoting peace, harmony, fraternity, and mutual understanding will eventually be considered the only essential purpose of all religion. And God? God will be invoked to ensure you follow the Golden Rule. It is frightening to see how far along we are already to seeing such a scenario become a reality.
To sum up: Antipope Francis does not promote works of charity in order to ultimately save people’s souls so that God may be glorified. Rather, he promotes works of charity for the sake of man’s temporal happiness, a happiness which must necessarily end at the death of the body (cf. Lk 12:16-20). Any appeal to God — as in: “the face of the migrant is the face of Christ” — is merely used as a marketing gimmick to get believers in Christ to comply. For Bergoglio, the end and purpose of it all is not to save souls but to save bodies; not to worship God but to worship man. Saving bodies is not wrong, of course, and very much necessary, but it is certainly subordinate to the higher purpose of saving souls: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” (Mk 8:36); “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28).
In other words: Fear Francis.
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