Modernist Gobbledygook at its Finest
“Pope” Francis:
‘No One Owns the Truth, it’s an Encounter’ —
‘Don’t Proselytize; Build Bridges, Not Walls’
The Vatican II Sect’s Modernist-in-Chief, Mr. Jorge Bergolgio, has done it again. In a recent sermon given under his pseudonym “Pope Francis” — the emphasis being on pseudo — he trashes the traditional Catholic concepts of truth and evangelization and replaces them with vague, worn-out notions of “dialogue” and “encounter with Christ”.
Since Michael Voris won’t tell you about this in his Distortex Vortex broadcast (more on that here), as it squarely contradicts the image of “Pope” Francis he wants to project, we will be happy to oblige and fill you in on these rather inconvenient facts about Mr. Bergoglio.
On May 8, 2013, His Phonyness delivered a sermon at his daily “Mass” in the Vatican, which is partially transcribed and summarized at the Vatican Radio site here. We will look at some of the salient points made and contrast them with true Catholic teaching:
Francis: “Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel: ‘When He shall come, the Spirit of truth, shall guide you into all the truth.’ Paul does not say to the Athenians: ‘This is the encyclopedia of truth. Study this and you have the truth, the truth.’ No! The truth does not enter into an encyclopedia. The truth is an encounter – it is a meeting with Supreme Truth: Jesus, the great truth. No one owns the truth. The we receive the truth when we meet [it].”
Get this? “No one owns the truth.” Actually, someone does: the Catholic Church, the Bride of Christ. (Not the Novus Ordo Church, for sure!) And, ironically, it is precisely the Scripture quote cited by Francis that serves as one of the biblical proofs for this, for the Church was born on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles. Other biblical prooftexts include the following, on which we would all do well to meditate:
- “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32)
- “I have not written to you as to them that know not the truth, but as to them that know it; and that no lie is of the truth.” (1 John 2:21)
- “The spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, nor knoweth him: but you shall know him; because he shall abide with you, and shall be in you.” (John 14:17)
- “But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15)
Regarding these matters, the Holy Office under Pope Pius IX reinforced the Church’s teaching that Christ “promised His Presence would never leave the magisterium, and the Holy Ghost would thoroughly instruct it about every truth” (Letter Ad Quosdam Puseistas, Nov. 8, 1865). Furthermore, consider the following facts about the mission of the Apostles in spreading the truth and the Church in possessing and guarding it:
“When about to ascend into heaven He sends His Apostles in virtue of the same power by which He had been sent from the Father; and he charges them to spread abroad and propagate His teaching. ‘All power is given to Me in Heaven and in earth. Going therefore teach all nations…. teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’ (Matt. xxviii., 18-19-20). So that those obeying the Apostles might be saved, and those disobeying should perish. ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believed not shall be condemned’ (Mark xvi., 16). But since it is obviously most in harmony with God’s providence that no one should have confided to him a great and important mission unless he were furnished with the means of properly carrying it out, for this reason Christ promised that He would send the Spirit of Truth to His Disciples to remain with them for ever. ‘But if I go I will send Him (the Paraclete) to you….But when He, the Spirit of Truth is come, He will teach you all truth’ (John xvi., 7-13). ‘And I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth’ (Ibid. xiv., 16-17). ‘He shall give testimony of Me, and you shall give testimony’ (Ibid. xv., 26-27). Hence He commands that the teaching of the Apostles should be religiously accepted and piously kept as if it were His own – ‘He who hears you hears Me, he who despises you despises Me’ (Luke x., 16). Wherefore the Apostles are ambassadors of Christ as He is the ambassador of the Father. ‘As the Father sent Me so also I send you’ (John xx., 21). Hence as the Apostles and Disciples were bound to obey Christ, so also those whom the Apostles taught were, by God’s command, bound to obey them. And, therefore, it was no more allowable to repudiate one iota of the Apostles’ teaching than it was to reject any point of the doctrine of Christ Himself.”
(Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Satis Cognitum, n. 8)
“[I]n none of these [Protestant] societies, and not even in all of them taken together, can in some way be seen the one and Catholic Church which Christ the Lord built, constituted, and willed to exist. Neither will it ever be able to be said that they are members and part of that Church as long as they remain visibly separated from Catholic unity. It follows that such societies, lacking that living authority established by God, which instructs men in the things of the faith and in the discipline of the customs, directing and governing them in all that concerns eternal salvation, they continuously mutate in their doctrines without that mobility and the instability they find one end. Everyone therefore can easily comprehend and fully reckon that this is absolutely in contrast with the Church instituted by Christ the Lord, in which the truth must always remain constant and never subject to change whatsoever, deposited as if it were into a warehouse, entrusted to be guarded perfectly whole. To this purpose, it has received the promise of the perpetual presence and the aid of the Holy Spirit.”
(Pope Pius IX, Apostolic Letter Iam Vos Omnes)
This sounds very anti-ecumenical, doesn’t it? The Apostles were given the truth by the grace of the Holy Ghost, and it was their mission to pass it on faithfullly in the Church until the end of time — modernist antipopes from Argentina, Germany, Poland, or Italy notwithstanding — and all who would be saved must accept that teaching, that truth, “owned” by the Catholic Church through the grace of God.
Yet, what Bergoglio seems to be implying in his sermon is that the Holy Ghost did not give the truth to the Church, but instead somehow “guides” and “enlightens” different inviduals at different times and keeps giving them a little bit of the truth here and there, so that no one ever “has” the truth, but only experiences bits and pieces of it, now and again.
This seems to be corroborated by his digging up the old “the truth is an encounter” nonsense. An encounter, as any dictionary will confirm, is essentially an experience. But the truth is not an experience. To an extent, it can be experienced, of course, but it is not an experience. Likewise, for decades the Vatican II Church has been telling us that the Sacraments, too, are an “encounter” with the Lord, as opposed to visible signs instituted by Christ to give grace (the traditional teaching).
“Encounter” is one of the favorite words of the modernist Vatican II sect, because it is so wonderfully nebulous and elusive of clear meaning; it is phenomenological at its core, precisely because it is an experience and therefore something that simply appears to consciousness (regardless of any objective grounding in reality, the question of which is left untouched); and because it just sounds so, so… “scholarly”, so “academic”, so “enlightened”! So totally-unlike-those-stupid-pre-Vatican-II-peasant-Catholic-folk of yesteryear, who only knew about black and white, truth and error, and none of the 1,500 shades of grey in between, which we finally discovered at the ever-enlightening Second Vatican Council in the 1960s!
The great anti-modernist Pope St. Pius X (incorrupt, by the way), warned us about this, as he sought to “protect the faithful from evil and error; especially so when evil and error are presented in dynamic language which, concealing vague notions and ambiguous expressions with emotional and high-sounding words, is likely to set ablaze the hearts of men in pursuit of ideals which, whilst attractive, are nonetheless nefarious” (Apostolic Letter Our Apostolic Mandate, n. 1).
The same Pope, three years prior, upbraided the Modernists for their absurd concept of truth as essentially an experience: “What is to prevent such experiences from being found in any religion? In fact, that they are so is maintained by not a few. On what grounds can Modernists deny the truth of an experience affirmed by a follower of Islam? Will they claim a monopoly of true experiences for Catholics alone? Indeed, Modernists do not deny, but actually maintain, some confusedly, others frankly, that all religions are true” (Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi, n. 14). And this is how Modernism eventually leads to atheism.
Francis: “The Christian who would bring the Gospel must go down this road: [must] listen to everyone! But now is a good time in the life of the Church: the last 50 or 60 years have been a good time – for I remember when as a child one would hear in Catholic families, in my family, ‘No, we cannot go to their house, because they are not married in the Church, eh!’. It was as an exclusion. No, you could not go! Neither could we go to [the houses of] socialists or atheists. Now, thank God, people do not says such things, right? [Such an attitude] was a defense of the faith, but it was one of walls: the LORD made bridges. First: Paul has this attitude, because it was the attitude of Jesus. Second, Paul is aware that he must evangelize, not proselytize.”
BAM! Francis shows himself to be the man of Vatican II that he is: “The last 50 or 60 years have been a good time.” Where does he get the idea that the bearer of the Good News must “listen to everyone”? Christ did not “listen” to everyone; He instructed good-willed [!] sinners in the way of the truth and preached the Gospel to them; He did not “dialogue” with them, rather, He spoke with authority and taught them as a superior instructs inferiors (cf. Mark 1:22). Those of ill will He rebuked and sometimes even refused to answer (for example, see Luke 20:1-8). The Apostles did likewise, even moving on where their preaching did not fall on fertile ground (see Mark 6:11, Acts 13:51).
Oh, but isn’t it horrible if we “shun” those who are invalidly married, or non-believers, by not going to their houses? That’s another one of those awful pre-Vatican-II ideas, which the Catholic Church upheld and practiced from the very beginning. Why? Because we must not condone sin or give the appearance of doing so. To accept those as married that aren’t, is a mortal sin. (St. Thomas More had his head cut off rather than budge on this issue.) The Apostle of Charity, St. John the Beloved Disciple, explains this a bit more, and gives us all a stern warning:
“And this is charity, that we walk according to his commandments. For this is the commandment, that, as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in the same: For many seducers are gone out into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh: this is a seducer and an antichrist. Look to yourselves, that you lose not the things which you have wrought: but that you may receive a full reward. 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. If any man come to you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house nor say to him, God speed you. For he that saith unto him, God speed you, communicateth with his wicked works.” (2 John 1:6-11)
The True Faith and Sanctifying Grace are our most precious possessions, and whatever endangers either of these must be avoided, hence we must be on our guard against familiarity (not contact but familiarity) with unbelievers, against the temptation, out of human respect, to acknowledge invalid “marriages” as valid, or to respect the false religions of others, even if they are of good will. (For a detailed article on respecting the people but not their false religions, go here.)
For Bergoglio-Francis, this pious protection of our Faith and the state of grace is a building of “walls”, not “bridges”. This is a typical modernist tactic Francis is utilizing here: Attack the pious customs and traditions of the Church by making them look weak, silly, fearful, ignorant, cowardly, pitiful. The modernists Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar and Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (“Pope” Benedict XVI) did the same thing, by calling for the “razing of the bastions” of Catholicism (see here), and the modernist Cardinal Angelo Roncalli (“Pope” John XXIII) likewise belittled the strong Catholic stance against the threats of the modern world (threats which, since the death of Pope Pius XII, have unlocked their full potential and devastated the world, bringing it to the brink of apostasy and moral chaos), accusing those who would put up “walls” as being weak in and unsure of their Faith. This is an insult to all Catholics and to the Church as a whole.
Resisting temptations to the Faith by ensuring we do not expose ourselves to the needless occasions of sin is not being cowardly or weak but prudent and humble. St. Philip Neri prayed often, “Preserve me, Lord, or else I will betray Thee.” In his humility, this saint knew how weak he was, and that only God’s grace could sustain him. These are the words of a humble man, a pious man, a Catholic man, a strong man, strong by acknowledging his own weakness apart from God’s strength: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is scandalized, and I am not on fire? If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things that concern my infirmity”, said St. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:29-30). Likewise: “Wherefore he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12), he warned. He also counseled the Hebrews to hasten to Eternal Life, “lest any man fall into … unbelief” (Hebrews 4:11). St. Peter, too, exhorted the faithful to “take heed, lest being led aside by the error of the unwise, you fall from your own steadfastness” (2 Peter 3:17).
Roncalli, Ratzinger, and Bergoglio – and all the Vatican II Antipoes – have gloried in the foolhardiness of modernism. It is the pride of the modernists that sits at the foundation of their rejection of the True Faith. As Pope St. Pius X warned:
“But it is pride which exercises an incomparably greater sway over the soul to blind it and lead it into error, and pride sits in Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere in its doctrines and lurking in its every aspect. It is pride which fills Modernists with that self-assurance by which they consider themselves and pose as the rule for all. It is pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and makes them say, elated and inflated with presumption, ‘We are not as the rest of men,’ and which, lest they should seem as other men, leads them to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind. It is pride which rouses in them the spirit of disobedience and causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be the reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves, and that they are found to be utterly wanting in respect for authority, even for the supreme authority. Truly there is no road which leads so directly and so quickly to Modernism as pride. When a Catholic layman or a priest forgets the precept of the Christian life which obliges us to renounce ourselves if we would follow Christ and neglects to tear pride from his heart, then it is he who most of all is a fully ripe subject for the errors of Modernism.”
(Pope St. Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, n. 40)
This modernist pride, exemplified by “Pope” Francis, is now telling those poor souls in the Novus Ordo Church that they must dialogue and witness, not proselytize; they must build bridges, not walls. And what is the result? They lose the Faith. This isn’t some off-the-wall conjecture; it has been proved again and again in the last 50 years. But Francis elaborates on this point and hurls some more insults at Catholics:
Vatican Radio: “Citing his predecessor, Pope Benedict, Francis went on to say that the Church ‘does not grow by means of proselytizing,’ but ‘by attraction, by witnessing, by preaching,’ and Paul had this attitude: proclamation does not make proselytization – and he succeeds, because, ‘he did not doubt his Lord.’ The Pope warned that, ‘Christians who are afraid to build bridges and prefer to build walls are Christians who are not sure of their faith, not sure of Jesus Christ.’ The Pope exhorted Christians to do as Paul did and begin to ‘build bridges and to move forward’: ‘Paul teaches us this journey of evangelization, because Jesus did, because he is well aware that evangelization is not proselytizing: it is because he is sure of Jesus Christ and does not need to justify himself [or] to seek reasons to justify himself. When the Church loses this apostolic courage, she becomes a stalled Church, a tidy Church…, a Church that is nice to look at, but that is without fertility, because she has lost the courage to go to the outskirts, where there are many people who are victims of idolatry, worldliness of weak thought, [of] so many things.'”
Quite conveniently, Francis denounces proselytizing but without defining it. This will allow him – and, more importantly, his defenders – to claim later that he was simply “misunderstood.” Modernism thrives on vague and ambiguous expressions, on lack of precision, on lack of clear definitions, because Modernism, being sinister, detests clarity, which is one of the hallmarks of truth and orthodoxy: “For every one that doth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved” (John 3:20). Modernism seeks to make what is certain, doubtful, what is clear, confusing; it tries to make the straight paths of True Catholicism crooked, and so becomes the anti-Gospel. Just as Our Lord had His blessed forerunner, St. John the Baptist, who made crooked paths straight (see Mark 1:2-3), so the modernist Vatican II Sect had its own forerunner to prepare the way for the Modernist Church and make straight paths crooked: John XXIII. Is it coincidence that Angelo Roncalli chose the name John, perhaps indicating he is the Anti-John-the-Baptist?
Absent any other definition of proselytizing, we will have to consult the common dictionary definition, for that is how the hearers of this homily will understand it: A proselyte is “a person who has changed from one opinion, religious belief, sect, or the like, to another; [a] convert”. The verb proselytize is defined as “to convert or attempt to convert as a proselyte; [to] recruit” (see Dictionary.com, s.v. “proselyte” and “proselytize”).
So, let’s be very clear here: When Francis talks about “evangelizing” and “dialoguing” and “witnessing”, he does not mean converting anyone, because he contrasts it with that very notion, which he calls “proselytization”. (In 2012, Benedict XVI explicitly admitted that “dialogue does not aim at conversion”.) This is a common strategy of Modernists, who redefine Catholic terms so that they can gradually subvert the meanings behind the words, while retaining the same terminology. Are you listening, Michael Voris?
In 1949, the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII was adamant that the only way to find unity with Protestants was to convert them to the true Faith:
“Therefore the whole and entire Catholic doctrine is to be presented and explained [in meetings with Protestants]: by no means is it permitted to pass over in silence or to veil in ambiguous terms the Catholic truth regarding the nature and way of justification, the constitution of the Church, the primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, and the only true union by the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ. It should be made clear to them that, in returning to the Church, they will lose nothing of that good which by the grace of God has hitherto been implanted in them, but that it will rather be supplemented and completed by their return. However, one should not speak of this in such a way that they will imagine that in returning to the Church they are bringing to it something substantial which it has hitherto lacked. It will be necessary to say these things clearly and openly, first because it is the truth that they themselves are seeking, and moreover because outside the truth no true union can ever be attained.”
(Holy Office, Instruction On the Ecumenical Movement, sec. 2)
BAM! Such are the words of the true Catholic Church, teaching true doctrine. How refreshingly clear and simple! No nonsense about dialogue, encounters, bridge-building, or anything of the kind.
The New Testament itself, of course, mentions that conversion was the mission of the Apostles: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20); “And the Lord increased daily together such as should be saved” (Acts 2:47); “And the multitude of men and women who believed in the Lord, was more increased” (Acts 5:14).
Francis insults not only Almighty God, His Gospel, and the mission He gave to His Church, but also the many saints and martyrs who were missionaries in the true sense of the word, who risked their very lives not to “witness” merely and to “dialogue” but to convert and seek to “recruit” the poor lost souls to which they had been sent. St. Boniface Winfrid, for example, did not “dialogue” and “listen” to the pagans whose souls he wanted to save. He disproved their false religion by cutting down their “sacred” oak tree:
“To show the heathens how utterly powerless were the gods in whom they placed their confidence, Boniface felled the oak sacred to the thunder-god Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the prince of the Apostles. The heathens were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak marked the fall of heathenism.”
Well, Mr. Bergoglio? Was the pre-Vatican-II St. Boniface building walls or bridges here? These “walls” were very fruitful in making converts and saving souls, whereas the modernist-ecumenical drivel of the Vatican II Church does not convert people but simply puts a smiley face on their errors. Unlike St. Boniface, John Paul II would have congratulated the German pagans for their “sense of celebration” in honoring the oak tree, for their acknowledgement of a power higher than themselves, for the common “human spiritual values” that they share with Catholics, and for the many “myths” that have clearly been enriching them throughout their lives, etc., ad nauseam.
Think of St. Isaac Jogues, St. John de Brebeuf, and all the North American Martyrs who underwent the most horrific tortures – and for what? Because they talked? Because they listened? Or because they converted and recruited to the True Faith, to the Truth (which they possessed!), the poor Indians steeped in idolatry?
St. Francis Xavier wasn’t exactly the dialoguing-ecumenical kind, either. Commenting on his efforts to convert pagans to Catholicism, he related:
“After their baptism the new Christians go back to their houses and bring me their wives and families for baptism. When all are baptized I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed and all the idols to be broken in pieces. I can give you no idea of the joy I feel in seeing this done, witnessing the destruction of the idols by the very people who but lately adored them.”
Walls or bridges, Your Phoneyness?
We will end this lengthy analysis by contrasting Francis’ impious words with the true Catholic attitude of reaching out to non-Catholics, as explained by Pope Pius IX:
“But God forbid that the sons of the Catholic Church ever in any way be hostile to those who are not joined with us in the same bonds of faith and love; but rather they should always be zealous to seek them out and aid them, whether poor, or sick, or afflicted with any other burdens, with all the offices of Christian charity; and they should especially endeavor to snatch them from the darkness of error in which they unhappily lie, and lead them back to Catholic truth and to the most loving Mother the Church, who never ceases to stretch out her maternal hands lovingly to them, and to call them back to her bosom so that, established and firm in faith, hope, and charity, and ‘being fruitful in every good work’ [Colossians 1:10], they may attain eternal salvation.”
(Pope Pius IX, Encyclical Quanto Conficiamur Moerore, n. 9; Denz. 1678)
Wake up, everyone. The Vatican II Sect is not the Roman Catholic Church.
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