Should Catholics Respect False Religions?

Vatican II thoroughly demolished…

Continuity or Contradiction:
Should Catholics “Respect” False Religions?

by Michael O’Halloran


A Mexican Indian brushes John Paul II with herbs as they burn incense in a traditional cleansing ritual at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City Thursday, August 1, 2002. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

[Novus Ordo Watch Preliminary Note: Kudos to Michael O’Halloran! The article excerpted and linked below appeared in Christian Order magazine, February 2013 issue. With great competence and razor-sharp analysis, he completely deconstructs the false modernist theology of the bogus Second Vatican Council, showing that despite all sorts of talk about a “hermeneutic of continuity,” the truth is that the pre-conciliar teaching cannot be reconciled with the post-conciliar teaching, because the two simply contradict. The only flaw in the ointment here is that Mr. O’Halloran, who is not a sedevacantist, does not draw the necessary conclusion from this, which is that the Vatican II church is a false church and not the Catholic Church, because the true church cannot teach error. O’Halloran reduces the problem to one of infallibility and of the person of the Pope, and convinces himself the post-conciliar teaching isn’t infallible, so it’s still the same church. This is not only false but also a red herring because the problem is not one of infallibility, essentially, but one of authority, and not only one of the person of the Pope but also of the Church as such, for a Catholic is not permitted, under pain of mortal sin, to depart from Church teaching even when it is not proposed infallibly. In addition, the author omits to consider that if the Novus Ordo Church were the true Catholic Church, then, even if his other arguments about the council were right, nevertheless Vatican II teaching would definitely now have reached the status of infallibility, because the teachings would have reached the status of being part of the universal ordinary Magisterium, which is infallible: all the bishops in union with the Pope teaching on faith and morals. The links we provide below as part of our “Reality Check” will give further explanation and insight to this. The first step to a true solution is to recognize that this strange New Church is not the Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII and his predecessors. Again, however, we wish to commend the author for having done a very fine job imploding the Conciliar heresies of the Vatican II sect.]

Excerpts from the Article:

Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Fulgens Radiatur, praises the zeal of the great St. Benedict and quotes from St. Gregory regarding Benedict’s dealings with the idol-worshipers:

“… on [Cassino] stood an old temple where Apollo was worshipped by the foolish country people, according to the custom of the ancient heathens. Around it likewise grew groves, in which even till that time the mad multitude of infidels used to offer their idolatrous sacrifices. The man of God [St. Benedict] coming to that place broke the idol, overthrew the altar, burned the groves, and of the temple of Apollo made a chapel of St. Martin” [n. 11].

St. Benedict thus showed no respect for idolatrous paganism, but rather a horror for these non-Catholic religions which led him to destroy their idol. On the other hand, another Benedict (Benedict XVI), has evidently condemned idol-smashers as “fanatics” in the following words: “There were in fact Christian hotheads and fanatics who destroyed temples, who were unable to see paganism as anything more than idolatry that had to be radically eliminated.” In other words, the pope’s namesake St. Benedict evidently lacked the conciliar gnosis which would have enabled him to see the many elements of goodness present in systematized idol-worship. (And so it seems did Pope Leo XIII, Benedict XVI’s predecessor, since in Ad Extremas he praised St. Francis Xavier as follows: “Through his extraordinary perseverance, he converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus from the myths and vile superstitions of the Brahmans to the true religion”). On each feast day of the great saint of Nursia, therefore, the present pope must recite the Breviary office of the day venerating someone whom he apparently regards as a fanatical hothead. Nor is there any “continuity” apparent between the teachings of St. Gregory the Great, Pius XII, and Leo XIII, who extol idol-smashing or denounce paganism as “vile superstition,” and that of Benedict XVI, who seems to deplore the “fanaticism” of such people. Not even a hermeneutic of continuity can square that circle.

[…]

Now of course if the Church was wrong for 2,000 years, as Modernists do not hesitate to assert, then there is no guarantee that the modern authorities themselves are not also wrong. This was the argument that Archbishop Lefebvre used in replying to Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempt to resolve contradiction between preconciliar and postconciliar teaching on religious liberty. Pius IX’s Quanta Cura, said the cardinal (now the pope [Benedict XVI]), was good for the times of Quanta Cura, but we are no longer in the time of Quanta Cura, Your Excellency. Well, Your Eminence, replied Archbishop Lefebvre, if you are saying that the truth can change with the times, then this means that your Vatican II truths can also change with the times. Therefore there is no need for me to accept them, since soon they will be outdated just like you said of Quanta Cura. Therefore I will wait for tomorrow. A devastating response from the archbishop, an unanswerable one, and most importantly, a true one.

[…]

The doctrinal discussions with the Society of St. Pius X seemed to reveal this argument as Rome’s go-to strategy for defending Vatican II: You must accept Vatican II, because we made it, we are the authorities, and the authorities cannot be wrong. But in reply we note that if the current authorities are actually rejecting the teaching of prior authorities as untrue, claiming that those who taught hatred for false religions are wrong, and that we must really respect religious error, then the present authorities deprive themselves of their greatest leveraging point. They have sawed off the branch on which they were sitting, and now, plummeting to the ground, they prefer to blame the branch (rather than themselves) for their imminent and painful crash landing.

Let us finally deal with one pressing objection to these assertions of contradiction: the claim that false religions really do contain “elements of truth and goodness,” and that for this reason they should be respected as being more or less near approaches to our own true Catholic religion. In reply we note that this objection treats the difference between the true religion and false religions as a difference of degree but not of kind. But this is a false distinction; St. Pius X identified it as one of the root errors of Modernism. Msgr. Joseph C. Fenton explains this well, rejecting

“the false implication that the false religions, those other than the Catholic, are in some measure a partial approach to the fullness of truth which is to be found in Catholicism. According to this doctrinal aberration, the Catholic religion would be distinct from others, not as the true is distinct from the false, but only as the plenitude is distinct from incomplete participations of itself.” [Fenton, The Catholic Church and Salvation, p. 47]

To illustrate the problem, suppose that divine revelation can be expressed in 1,000 truths, that the Catholic faith (the “fullness” of the truth, in modern lingo) professes all 1,000 truths, that the Eastern schismatics profess 980, Protestants, 700, Jews, 500, Moslems, 300, and agnostics, 50. Modernism, which sees false religions as mere “incomplete” versions of the true, would say that the Catholics have slightly more faith than the schismatics, who in turn have a bit more than Protestants, who have a bit more than Jews, and so forth. But this is not at all the case. As St. Thomas points out, if 1,000 truths are divinely revealed, if a man believes 999 of them, and if he pertinaciously rejects even one, he has the same amount of supernatural faith as an avowed atheist: none at all. This is because the formal or distinguishing cause of supernatural and divinely-given faith (as opposed to merely natural, human faith) is the authority of God revealing. A man with true divine faith believes in divinely revealed truth because the all-truthful God has revealed it. And since God is all-truthful, the man with true faith believes, not 99.9% of what God has revealed, but absolutely all of it. If he rejects even one truth, he rejects the authority which upholds them all, which means that he does not have an “incomplete” or “imperfect” faith, but no faith at all. Pope Leo XIII stated this clearly:

“The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degreefrom any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium” [Satis Cognitum, n. 9. My italics].

To say that formal adherence to Protestantism means to have “more” of the true faith than formal adherence to Judaism, or that formal adherence to Judaism means more true faith than atheism, is like saying that someone fatally shot in the head is “more living” than someone fatally shot fifty times in the head, since the first form of death was less severe than the latter. But of two dead people, both have exactly the same amount of life: none.

[…]

And there are those will chide this article for its failure to incorporate the “hermeneutic of continuity,” a delightfully vacuous postconciliar slogan which tells us nothing at all about how to actually resolve the self-evident contradictions which obtain between preconciliar and postconciliar praxis. You can lead a sycophant to the principle of non-contradiction, but you cannot make him think….

>>> CONTINUE TO FULL ARTICLE

Reality Check:
The True Church, Her Infallibility, and the Required Submission to ALL her Teaching

The Vatican II Sect and False Religions

  • Voodoo You Trust? John Paul II’s Betrayal in Benin (1993) John Weiskittel exposes apostate John Paul II’s veneration of Voodooism
  • Wojtyla Gets a Third Eye John Weiskittel analyzes apostate John Paul II’s pilgrimage to India
  • “Cardinal” Bergoglio hosts Jewish Memorial Service in Catholic Cathedral The true face of “Pope” Francis
  • The impious “Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism” (1993), promulgated by Antipope John Paul II
  • John Paul II blasphemes in his 1979 encyclical Redemptor Hominis: “What we have just said must also be applied–although in another way and with the due differences–to activity for coming closer together with the representatives of the non-Christian religions, an activity expressed through dialogue, contacts, prayer in common, investigation of the treasures of human spirituality, in which, as we know well, the members of these religions also are not lacking. Does it not sometimes happen that the firm belief of the followers of the non-Christian religions–a belief that is also an effect of the Spirit of truth operating outside the visible confines of the Mystical Body–can make Christians ashamed at being often themselves so disposed to doubt concerning the truths revealed by God and proclaimed by the Church and so prone to relax moral principles and open the way to ethical permissiveness” (sec. 6).
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