Francis “interprets” Galatians: St. Paul warned of Rigid Clingers to the Past!

False teacher denounces false teachers…

Francis “interprets” Galatians:
St. Paul warned of Rigid Clingers to the Past!

Every Wednesday, Jorge Bergoglio (“Pope Francis”) conducts one of his religious re-education sessions known as the General Audience.

It was no different yesterday, June 23, when the anti-Catholic wolf in shepherd’s clothing began a new catechetical series, this time on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. We’ll go through the main portions of Francis’ presentation and fisk them as needed.

Francis begins by noting that St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is “very topical”, that is, extremely relevant to our times, and in this he couldn’t be more right. After all, we find the following passage right in the first chapter:

I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Which is not another, only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema.

(Galatians 1:6-9)

Indeed, as Francis says, this letter “seems to be written for our times.” How true! No one has perverted the Gospel of Christ more obviously in recent times than this Argentinian apostate now presuming to catechize the whole world. But then of course that’s not what Francis means.

What he does mean, he is only too happy to let us know. Before he does so, however, he notes in a brief aside:

I received a letter last week, from a missionary in Papua New Guinea, telling me that he is preaching the Gospel in the forest, to people who do not even know who Jesus Christ was. It is beautiful! One begins by forming small communities. Even today this method of evangelisation is that of the first evangelisation.

(Antipope Francis, General Audience, June 23, 2021)

We want to draw attention to this because it flatly contradicts what Francis has been saying at other times about how we are never to try to preach the Faith but merely offer a “witness” of good works and a holy life, and then the rest will, supposedly, follow.

Remember, for example, what he told Henriette, a Lutheran teenager, during a special ecumenical audience on Oct. 13, 2016? She had asked him whether she should try to speak to her friends about her religion and try to convert them, or whether she should simply leave them be in their atheism and agnosticism. Francis addressed the matter as follows:

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.

(Antipope Francis, Oct. 13, 2016; Translation by Life Site)

So, when it comes to the indigenous of Papua New Guinea, it is “beautiful” to preach Jesus Christ to them, convincing them of the truth of the Gospel. Yet, when it comes to the secularists of Germany, preaching the Gospel is forbidden. It’s too bad Henriette doesn’t have friends in the forests of Papua New Guinea!

Likewise, during a trip to the Eastern European nation of Georgia that same month, Francis let everyone know that it was a “great sin against ecumenism” to try to convert the Eastern Orthodox to Catholicism. And three years earlier, he had said to pilgrims: “Do you need to convince the other to become Catholic? No, no, no! Go out and meet him, he is your brother. This is enough.” Granted, all that is par for the course for someone who believes that “being a Christian is not about adhering to a doctrine”.

Returning now to the General Audience of June 23, 2021, the papal impostor suddenly shows himself solicitious for the purity of doctrine. Introducing the Epistle to the Galatians, the Vatican squatter says:

Indeed, some Christians who had come from Judaism had infiltrated these churches, and began to sow theories contrary to the Apostle’s teaching, even going so far as to denigrate him. They began with doctrine – “No to this, yes to that”, and then they denigrated the Apostle. It is the usual method: undermining the authority of the Apostle.

Wait a minute. Francis is concerned about undue influence from his “elder brothers in the faith” corrupting the Gospel and subverting lawful authority? That’s a new one! Well, at least he’s got a sense of humor.

The false pope continues:

As we can see, it is an ancient practice to present oneself at times as the sole possessor of the truth, the pure, and to aim at belittling the work of others, even with slander.

Every time Bergoglio opens his blasphemous and heretical mouth, which is pretty often, he implicitly claims to be speaking the truth (obviously). The only time he discovers his opposition to the concept of dogmatic truth is when he can use it to blast the traditional Catholic claim that Catholicism is the only true religion, that the Catholic Church alone has been entrusted by God with the divinely-revealed truth, and that all must be Catholic if they wish to be saved.

For example, have we ever heard Francis dencouncing the idea of “one alone possessing the truth” when it comes to topics such as climate change or Coronavirus? Those things depend on empirical science, which can only ever yield provisional knowledge per se and never the certitude of faith, and yet there the “Pope” treats certain theses as unquestionable dogma.

The reason the Roman Catholic Church possesses the truth is that she is a divine institution whose Founder entrusted her with nothing but the truth: “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, 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” (Jn 14:16-17); “But when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will teach you all truth. For he shall not speak of himself; but what things soever he shall hear, he shall speak; and the things that are to come, he shall shew you” (Jn 16:13). In fact, the Church not only possesses the divine truth, God made her its very support and foundation: “…the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15).

Now it is ironic, but not really surprising, that Francis should criticize “belittling the work of others”, when it is he who is on record dissing the great popularity the Traditional Latin Mass enjoys among the young as “just a fad” (whereas, of course, that glorious Novus Ordo Missae is a rock for eternity) and continually denouncing pious traditionalists in his church as rigid whackos in need of psychological help.

Anyway, Francis continues:

These opponents of Paul argued that even the Gentiles had to be circumcised and live according to the rules of the Mosaic Law. They went back to the previous observances, those that had been superseded by the Gospel.

Now isn’t that rich! Perhaps those Judaizers Francis now so hypocritically denounces had gotten hold of an early draft of Evangelii Gaudium, the 2013 “apostolic exhortation” in which Francis teaches that the Jews’ “covenant with God has never been revoked, for ‘the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29)” (Evangelii Gaudium, n. 247).

Or perhaps the Judaizers had an advance copy of the 2010 book Bergoglio co-authored with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, in which the then-“Archbishop” of Buenos Aires proclaimed: “The Church officially recognizes that the People of Israel continue to be the Chosen People. Nowhere does it say: ‘You lost the game, now it is our turn’” (On Heaven and Earth [New York: Image, 2013], p. 188). It’s too bad Bergoglio’s New Testament doesn’t contain St. Matthew’s Gospel (specifically chapter 21, verse 43).

The Judaizing idea that that the Old Covenant was not replaced by the New isn’t unique to Francis, alas; it is standard Novus Ordo doctrine. It was first enunciated by “St.” John Paul II in 1980, is part of the official Novus Ordo Catechism (see n. 121), and is taught also by Benedict XVI. Its roots, of course, are found in the apostate Second Vatican Council, specifically in the declaration Nostra Aetate (see n. 4).

It is amazing that Francis even uses the word “superseded”, since it is precisely the hated “supersessionism” that is vehemently rejected by Novus Ordo theology (see Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “The Gift and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” [2015], n. 17). Oh well, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet: It looks like Francis is willing to make an exception for the sake of sticking it to those in his sect that are still rigidly attached to some elements of Catholic Tradition.

The antipope continues:

The Galatians, therefore, would have had to renounce their cultural identity in order to submit to the norms, prescriptions and customs typical of the Jews. Not only that, those adversaries argued that Paul was not a true apostle and therefore had no authority to preach the Gospel. Let us think about how in some Christian communities or dioceses, first they begin with stories, and then they end by discrediting the priest or the bishop. It is precisely the way of the evil one, of these people who divide, who do not know how to build. And in this Letter to the Galatians we see this process.

One doesn’t have to be particularly gifted at reading between the lines here. Francis’ message is clear: Today’s traditionalists are the evil Judaizers of old, rejecting inculturation, falsely accusing true shepherds of being false ones, and gossiping about them so as to divide the people. Isn’t it amazing how everything Francis continually complains about is also found in Sacred Scripture all of a sudden?

In any case, for those who didn’t get the message, Bergoglio becomes more explicit:

This situation is not far removed from the experience of many Christians today. Indeed, today too there is no shortage of preachers who, especially through the new means of communication, can disturb communities. They present themselves not primarily to announce the Gospel of God who loves man in Jesus, Crucified and Risen, but to insist, as true “keepers of the truth” – so they call themselves – on the best way to be Christians. And they strongly affirm that the true Christianity is the one they adhere to, often identified with certain forms of the past, and that the solution to the crises of today is to go back so as not to lose the genuineness of the faith. Today too, as then, there is a temptation to close oneself up in some of the certainties acquired in past traditions.

If anyone has been disturbing communities, it is the Vatican II Sect through its Modernist revolution since the 1960s, with Francis (“Make a mess!”) meriting a particularly dishonorable mention. Does anyone remember how Francis treated the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate a few years back? Talk about disturbing a community!

So Francis uses his bully pulpit to once more rail against those evil “keepers of the truth” — note the scare quotes in his transcript; talk about belittling people! — who recognize that today’s Novus Ordo junk is incompatible with what the false pope euphemistically calls “certain forms of the past”, mere “past traditions” that have regretfully produced “certainties” that these hapless souls have had the great misfortune of “closing themselves up” in.

Here it is evident that the Frankster’s spin machine is firing on all cylinders.

We recall that it was St. Paul, of all people, who urged the Thessalonians: “Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle” (2 Thess 2:14). The Apostle gave this exhortation as a rule of thumb to keep from falling prey to the deceptions worked by the encroaching “mystery of inquity” (v. 7) that will one day culminate in the reign of the Antichrist:

Whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity.

(2 Thessalonians 2:9-11)

Thus it is evident that it is St. Paul and the other Apostles who “strongly affirm that the true Christianity is the one they adhere to” — duh! It is the legitimate shepherds who cling to the “certainties acquired in past traditions”, precisely “so as not to lose the genuineness of the faith”, for what they adhere to and defend “is not according to man” (Gal 1:11) but was handed down by Christ Himself (see Mt 28:19-20; Jn 14:16-17; 16:13)!

It is the heretics, those who “would pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal 1:7), who bring novelty and all kinds of pernicious errors. “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words, and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called” (1 Tim 6:20). They are false teachers, “false prophets” (2 Pet 2:1) deceiving those who “will not endure sound doctrine … having itching ears”, so that the people “turn away their hearing from the truth … unto fables” (2 Tim 4:3-4). And Francis is the most prominent one of them!

Want proof? It’s very simple: Just pick up the pre-Vatican II Catholic catechisms and theological manuals approved by the Church at the time and see if what you find in there is what “Pope” Francis preaches and acts in accordance with. It is definitely not, specifically not on such topics as religious unity, the last things, Faith and reason, Church-state relations, and Catholic morality.

Firing his final salvo, Francis lets it rip:

But how can we  recognise these people? For example, one of the traces of this way of proceeding is inflexibility. Faced with the preaching of the Gospel that makes us free, that makes us joyful, these people are rigid. Always the rigidity: you must do this, you must do that… Inflexibility is typical of these people. Following the teaching of the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Galatians will help us to understand which path to follow. The path indicated by the Apostle is the liberating and ever-new path of Jesus, Crucified and Risen; it is the path of proclamation, which is achieved through humility and fraternity – the new preachers do not know what humility is, what fraternity is. It is the path of meek and obedient trust – the new preachers know neither meekness nor obedience. And this meek and obedient way leads forward in the certainty that the Holy Spirit works in the Church in every age. Ultimately, faith in the Holy Spirit present in the Church carries us forward and will save us.

But of course, rigidity! That terrible evil afflicting hordes of clergy and laity throughout the Bergoglian sect!

Remember how the prophet Jeremias once denounced the rigidity found in God’s people. He declared: “Thus saith the Lord: Stand ye on the ways, and see and ask for the old paths which is the good way, and walk ye in it: and you shall find refreshment for your souls. And they said: we will not walk” (Jer 6:16). The rigidity Jeremias denounced was that of stubbornly remaining in new, sinful ways and of not returning to “the old paths which is the good way”!

One of the most rigid fellows in the Bible, by the way, was St. John the Baptist, whose birthday the Church celebrates today, June 24. Clinging to rigid certainties of the past, which have since been clearly abandoned by Francis in his infernal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, St. John told King Herod that he was living in adultery an irregular situation: “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife” (Mk 6:18). In other words, the Baptist was precisely one of those “you must do this, you must do that” people the Frankster likes to whack over the head. In any case, those who cannot recall how the story with St. John and King Herod ended, can flip forward in their missals to the feast celebrated on August 29.

Speaking precisely of the grave sin of adultery, by the way, Pope Pius XI commended that “rigid attitude which condemns all sensual affections and actions with a third party” and concludes:

The force of this divine precept [found in the Sixth and Ninth Commandments] can never be weakened by any merely human custom, bad example or pretext of human progress, for just as it is the one and the same “Jesus Christ, yesterday and to-day and the same for ever” [Heb 13:8], so it is the one and the same doctrine of Christ that abides and of which no one jot or tittle shall pass away till all is fulfilled [Mt 5:18].

(Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Casti Connubii, n. 73)

The truths of the Gospel, although “new” in a sense (see Mt 9:16-17), are timeless. The Faith cannot be changed by anyone, not even by a true Pope: “For, the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might disclose new doctrine, but that by His help they might guard sacredly the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it forth” (Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, Ch. 3; Denz. 1836).

In any case, so Francis is trying to make people believe that the antidote to this terrible rigidity can be found by “[f]ollowing the teaching of the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Galatians“, namely “the liberating and ever-new path of Jesus, Crucified and Risen.”

While it is certainly true that St. Paul preached the liberating path of the Gospel to the Galatians, we must remember that that path is always the Way of the Cross, because it is the Cross that liberates, giving us “the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free” (Gal 4:31). That path is not “ever new”, as Francis claims — at least not in the way in which he means it, namely, as continually cranking out novel ideas proposed by “the god of surprises” that just so happen to align perfectly with the Bergoglian ideology.

Francis then goes on to claim that “the new preachers know neither meekness nor obedience”, when of course it is he and his clique of apostates that are those very preachers. (This was perhaps never illustrated better than by Fr. Yves Congar, O.P., in the early 1960s.) The type of theology Francis adheres to wasn’t called “New Theology” (Nouvelle Théologie) for nothing when it came out. In fact, in 1946 Pope Pius XII leveled the following criticism at it:

But that which is immutable, let no one disturb it or change it. Much has been said, but not enough after due consideration, about the “Nouvelle Théologie”, which, because of its characteristic of moving along with everything in a state of perpetual motion, will always be on the road to somewhere but will never arrive anywhere. If one thought that one had to agree with an idea like that, what would become of Catholic dogmas, which must never change? What would happen to the unity and stability of faith?

(Pope Pius XII, Allocution Quamvis Inquieti, Sep. 17, 1946)

After roughly 60 years of the New Theology in action, which has been the “official theology” of the Vatican since the 1960s, we have sadly experienced the answer to that question: There is nothing left of real Catholicism.

We will end this critical review of Bergoglio’s audience catechesis with a final exhortation to rigidity by St. Paul, the same apostle Francis now appropriates for himself: “Now I beseech you, brethren, to mark them who make dissensions and offences contrary to the doctrine which you have learned, and avoid them. For they that are such, serve not Christ our Lord, but their own belly; and by pleasing speeches and good words, seduce the hearts of the innocent” (Rom 16:17-18).

No one can say that we weren’t warned.

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License: fair use