Francis: “It is not right to convince others of your Faith”

Bergoglio attacks the Great Commission…

Francis: “It is not right to convince others of your Faith”

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From the man who does away with sins such as adultery and fornication as belonging to a hopelessly outdated and rigid past, now comes the introduction of entirely new “sins”, such as supporting the death penalty, failing to recycle, or — the latest now — the “sin” of converting others.

We saw it a few weeks ago in Georgia, where Jorge Bergoglio — “Pope” Francis — denounced converting the Eastern Orthodox as a “great sin against ecumenism”, and we saw it again on October 13 of this year, the 99th anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, when Francis received in audience roughly 1,000 ecumenical (mostly Lutheran) “pilgrims” from Germany (photos here). The meeting was conducted in Italian and German, with translators present, and all the participants wore a colored scarf around their necks, either blue or yellow, to signify whether they were Lutheran (blue) or “Catholic” (yellow). Francis, of course, wore both. At the end of the audience, the papal impostor gave the people the usual Trinitarian blessing, but without making the sign of the cross — he was too busy holding the stupid scarf, and we know that the Cross just isn’t his thing anyway.

Snippets of the whole spectacle can be watched in this video:

It was during this audience, by the way, that Francis denied the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent, as we reported earlier, and of course his outrages didn’t end there. Aside from uttering heretical claptrap about Lutherans and Catholics supposedly sharing the same faith and both being members of the Body of Christ (see transcript here), Francis also spontaneously answered questions given him by people in the audience. When Francis speaks off the cuff, he is at his best, so to speak, because it is then that we get the most authentic Francis: unfiltered, unscripted, unplugged — and sometimes unhinged, too.

What’s curious is that the Vatican has apparently suppressed any reports of the Q&A session, because a transcript of it is nowhere to be found on its web site, nor has one been provided by the Vatican news organs. Thankfully, the Spanish Religión Digital and the American Life Site have provided at least partial transcripts in Spanish and English, respectively, which can be accessed here:

• El Papa a los Luteranos: “El proselitismo es el veneno más potente contra el camino ecuménico”
• Pope again criticizes ‘proselytism’: ‘It is not licit that you convince them of your faith’

The absolute highlight lowlight of the Q&A session was clearly Francis’ answer to the first question, asked by a 15-year-old lady who was presumably a Lutheran (wearing a blue scarf):

Dear Pope Francis, my name is Henriette. I am from Magdeburg and am 15 years old. In our state of Saxony-Anhalt, about 80% of the people are without any religious affiliation, 13.9% of the inhabitants are Lutheran, and only 3.5% are Catholic. Most of my friends do not go to church and do not believe in God. They are happy, helpful, and truly good friends. Do I have to convince others of my faith, or is it enough that they are good friends to me?

(our translation; taken from video @ 28:34 min)

Here is Francis’ answer:

The first question, the one that was posed in the context of the region having 80% of the population without a creed, is: “Do I have to convince these friends – good ones, who work and who are happy – do I have to convince them of my faith? What must I say to convince them?” Listen, the last thing you must do is to “speak.” You have to live as a Christian, like a Christian: convinced, forgiven, and on a path. It is not licit to convince them of your faith; proselytism is the strongest poison against the ecumenical path. You must give testimony to your Christian life; testimony will unsettle the hearts of those who see you. And from this unsettling grows one question: but why does this man or this woman live like that? And that prepares the ground for the Holy Spirit. Because it is the Holy Spirit that works in the heart. He does what needs to be done: but He needs to speak, not you. Grace is a gift, and the Holy Spirit is the gift of God from whence comes grace and the gift that Jesus has sent us by His passion and resurrection. It will be the Holy Spirit that moves the heart with your testimony – that is way you ask – and regarding that you can tell the “why,” with much thoughtfulness. But without wanting to convince.

(Life Site translation; underlining added)

Francis is certainly right on one point: Proselytism and ecumenism don’t go together. It’s one or the other; they are contraries. That he would prefer ecumenical feel-goodism over preaching the truth goes without saying — he wouldn’t be Jorge if he didn’t.

Francis has actually been very consistent in that: He hates evangelization. Sure, he always talks about “preaching the Gospel”, but he means without actually preaching the Gospel — which implies, of course, that the Apostles got it all wrong, because — horror of horrors! — they preached! “But they going forth preached everywhere…” (Mk 16:20). St. Paul elaborates:

For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved. How then shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe him, of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear, without a preacher? … Faith then cometh by hearing; and hearing by the word of Christ.

(Romans 10:13-14,17)

And so the Apostles preached, and not only the Apostles but all Catholics until… well, until Vatican II, where ecumenism made its great debut.

According to Francis’ reasoning, our Blessed Lord Himself must have been at fault, for He instituted the Great Commission from which all preaching and all evangelization and missionary activity take their origin:

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: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.

(Matthew 28:19-20)

But hey, what’s a divine commission when compared to Jorge’s latest revelation from the “god of surprises”? Perhaps Christ should have also turned the Sermon on the Mount into more of a Time of Observation & Encounter on the Mount.

Curiously enough, when St. Paul exhorted St. Timothy to preach (!) the Word of God — clearly, St. Paul hadn’t gotten Francis’ memo — in the same breath he warned his spiritual son of false teachers who would corrupt the very Gospel he was being charged to spread:

Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine. For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.

(2 Timothy 4:2-4)

We know who in our day has turned unto fables and away from the Gospel.

Let us also not fail to note the irony in Francis — of all people! — being the one to tell another to be silent: he whose endless stream of spoken and written words in just 3.5 years could fill an entire library; he whose compulsive moving of the tongue has produced truckloads of speeches, addresses, reflections, homilies, tweets, interviews, sermons, allocutions, encyclicals, exhortations, etc., ad nauseam, in just 43 months. Barely a day goes by when this man doesn’t have something to say, something to complain about, someone to rebuke. But when a young woman asks him what to say to friends whom she loves but who are unbelievers, Francis has two words for her: shut up. Don’t speak. Don’t argue. Don’t convince. – This says all you need to know.

Apparently St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albert the Great, St. Bonaventure, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Francis de Sales, St. John Chrysostom, and so many others — they all just wasted breath and ink in their disputations, their treatises, and their sermons, all because they didn’t know that it “isn’t licit to convince others of your faith”. Bummer!

Yes, we are aware that one can preach a sermon with one’s life, and that this is more powerful per se than the mere preaching of words, but the truth is that in most cases there isn’t half a lifetime available to observe another’s conduct; and in any case, preaching the Gospel through one’s actions in no wise precludes doing so through words as well, especially not if we keep in mind that we have been commanded to do so by God Himself. Besides, the human condition — original sin and its effects — makes words especially necessary and, in any case, extremely useful. After all, “Faith … cometh by hearing; and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17).

Imagine the absurdity if the Apostles hadn’t preached the truth of Christ but simply “encountered” the Jews and the pagans and invited them to observe: “Just look at how we live and what we do, how we interact with others, how we fogive and tithe, how we care for the sick, kiss the babies, and give a thumbs-up to the youngsters… Surely you will ask us eventually to tell you about what we believe, right? At least if you aren’t so unlucky as to die beforehand!” With that kind of “preaching”, the Church would be the laughing stock of the world and would still be confined to the outskirts of Jerusalem. Billions of souls would have never known Christ and would have died in original and mortal sin.

Francis’ intent is clear: He wants to suffocate and strangle the Gospel. He wants to stop conversions. He has shown this again and again in the past, as when he himself said he was not interested in converting Protestants, or when he affirmed Muslims in their errors, to cite just two of the many occasions of the last 3.5 years.

Francis’ answer to the German girl also proves once again that we at Novus Ordo Watch have been entirely right in identifying “proselytism” simply with seeking others’ conversion, and not, as bogus-ordo apologists like Jimmy Akin like to claim, with using dishonest tactics or putting undue pressure on others to get them to convert. Francis himself, as he made clear in his response to the young questioner, understands proselytism to mean trying to convice another of one’s own religious views. And this he rejects, he condemns, because he has no love for the truth, no love for Christ, and no love for souls: “…he that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mk 16:16).

Perhaps we should also mention briefly that, of course, Francis sees no need to distinguish Catholicism from the Lutheran heresy, even for purposes of evangelization. To him, it’s all the same, which is why he could take the girl’s question about preaching the Gospel at face value. Francis believes that the true Gospel of the Catholic Church and the false Lutheran “gospel” are essentially the same. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth: “Whosoever revolteth, and continueth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God” (2 Jn 9); “If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema” (Gal 1:9).

Then again, perhaps Tom Hoopes will have to write another book so we can all find out “What Pope Francis Really Said”. 😉

As though all this weren’t bad enough yet, Francis had even more to say in the Q&A portion of the meeting: He divulged his belief that there are Lutheran saints and that Lutherans can “truly follow the faith of Christ” without becoming Catholics — which perfectly echoes what we just said about Francis believing the Lutheran heresy is the Gospel.

The following is our translation of an excerpt of Francis’ answers from the audience based on the Religión Digital report linked above:

Who are the greatest reformers of our churches? I would say that the greatest reformers of the churches are the saints: those who follow the word of the Lord and put it to practice and walk on the path. This reforms the church. They might not be theologians — some are great, some are small — but they have a life full of the Gospel. These are the ones who reform the church.

There are such people in both the Lutheran and the Catholic church; people with a saintly heart, that follow the Gospel. These are the ones who reform the church.

Another question was: What do I like and dislike about the Lutheran church? I like Lutherans who truly follow the faith of Christ.

I do not like lukewarm Catholics, nor lukewarm Lutherans. I do not like these.

It is clear from these comments that Francis believes Lutherans and Catholics belong to the same church — which would only make sense if they also shared the same Gospel, as Francis heretically believes.

There is no need to quote once again the true Catholic teaching which refutes all this nonsense. Readers who are new to our site will find the necessary information at our topical page on ecumenism and interreligious dialogue here.

No doubt, everyone at the audience got Francis’ core message: Catholic or Lutheran? It just doesn’t matter. Simply “live the Gospel” — which, to him, is nothing but forgiving one another, caressing the sick, and feeding the hungry anyway. From there it’s not a very big step to the final apostasy — the merging of all religions into a one-world religion under the Antichrist — for what is distinctively Catholic or even Christian about such an idea of the Gospel? Could a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Zoroastrian, a Sikh, etc., not also forgive, caress, feed? Of what significance, then, is Jesus Christ? This is what we have called Francis’ Gospel of Man, and if you want a preview of where it’s headed, remember the January 2016 “Pope Video”.

Francis’ audience with the Germans Lutherans is hopefully a wakeup call to the last remaining conservatives in the Vatican II Church who always thought that ecumenism was just a means of getting people to convert to the Catholic Faith. It never was, it isn’t now, and it never will be. Ecumenism doesn’t aim at bringing about the conversion of non-Catholics to Catholicism — it aims simply at promoting indifferentism by making other creeds acceptable, but always under the guise of plausible deniability. Welcome to reality.

In a way, one may even say that ecumenism is basically an end in itself, at least de facto. Both sides always talk about “attaining unity” as ecumenism’s goal, but since they have explicitly renounced the idea of unity as being able to be brought about only by non-Catholics becoming Catholics (thus joining themselves to the already-existing unity of the Catholic Church), and since the status quo in which both sides find themselves is not one of unity — wherefore unity is mentioned as a supposed goal — the only possible conclusion is that both sides are aiming for a kind of unity that reconciles both sides by means of a compromise, as we see, for instance, in the Lutheran-“Catholic” Accord of 1999, which is heretical. But any such “unity”, based on compromise rather than conversion, is a contradiction of the only kind of unity acceptable to Catholic teaching, and hence a betrayal of the Faith.

Francis with a statue of Martin Luther in the Vatican on Oct. 13, 2016
(WENN US / Alamy Stock Photo)

The heretical buffoon that has illicitly and invalidly occupied the Chair of St. Peter since March 2013 is pushing everything to the limit. In vain does one look for new superlatives to describe the grotesqueness of the whole situation. And what do the “conservative” Novus Ordo adherents do? They wring their hands. They sit back and watch. They sign petitions. They hold conferences. They buy books by this or that “conservative bishop” to ease the pain for a while. They “recognize and resist”. Whoop dee doo. None of it will keep the apostasy from advancing because the one thing that continually feeds it is people’s recognition of these wicked impostors as legitimate Roman Catholic authorities. No one cares if anyone “resists” — they all do that with regard to one thing or another anyway. Others try to kick the sedevacantist can down the road by making themselves believe Benedict XVI is the legitimate Pope, not Francis. They have forgotten that Benedict differs from Francis only in style, not in substance.

All of this is a mere application of emotional bandaids, nothing more. At some point all must face the frightening but true diagnosis that is plain to see for all who are willing to look: Jorge Bergoglio is not the Pope of the Catholic Church, and the club he runs is not the Roman Catholic Church. For Heaven’s sake, Martin Luther has now been enthroned in the Vatican! That’s how far it’s come. But of course we sedevacantists are the “Protestants” because we won’t accept Luther as Pope.

Words fail.

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