February 2013

A Question of Authority

THE EDITOR

"I think therefore I am" (Descartes); "Religion is the opium of the people" (Marx); "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet" (Mohammed); .... Whispered by serpents and attributed to sinful men, it is the Evil One who holds the intellectual copyright to all such corrupting catchphrases. Encapsulating the errors, delusions and lies he has spewed forth down the centuries, they have popularised apostasy; turning hearts and minds away from their Creator and the Church He established to guide them.

Since, as Cardinal Manning insisted, all conflict is essentially theological, this warring against the precepts of the one true Faith is the unreported news behind the daily headlines of strife and scandal. Not that the controlled and superficial media would ever broach that possibility, any more than it would risk universal mockery by positing that corruption of souls through metaphysical chaos, first and foremost, accounts for the routine carnage associated with atheistic regimes and false religions.

Preferring sensation to first principles, the emoting entertainment-media also fails to see that in this realm of false ideas and bloody consequences the totalitarian designs of violent Socialist and Islamic demagogues, though handy, are not a prerequisite. Indeed they have all been outdone by a peaceful Catholic philosopher who avoided confrontation with the Church. By replacing "I AM WHO AM" [Ex. 3:14], the self-existent Triune God of absolute and eternal Truth, with his humanistic 17th century equation, Descartes raised the pestilential breath of relativism, blowing and gathering since Luther, into a Force 10 hurricane. Unleashing the full potential of that unholy wind it was his Cartesian dictum, not the diktats of Marx, Lenin, Mao or Mohammed, that reaped the greatest whirlwind. For the combined spiritual and physical damage perpetrated by committed disciples of the latter — all the apostasy, horrors and genocides — pale against the measureless silent holocausts of the relativistic West; institutionalised atheism/indifferentism and surgical/chemical abortion-on-demand. ("I cannot forgive Descartes," wrote his contemporary Blaise Pascal, awake to the inexorable effect of his godless cause.)

If the endlessly tragic outcomes of deviating from the path of Catholic truth vary in nature and degree, however, the essential object of the attack is constant: the authority of Christ.

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," He royally proclaims in Matthew 28:18. As grasping worldly powers well understand, only one religion can rationally lay claim to that authority delegated by Our Lord [Matt. 10:40, 28:19; Lk 10:16], ever protected by the Holy Spirit [Jn 15:26; 16:13], enshrined in the divine institution of the papacy [Matt. 16:18], and embodied in His Supreme Pontiff — the infuriating figure in white forever obstructing their godless designs.

This is why, of all the toxic soundbites that litter the annals of salvation history, the most destructive are "Non serviam!" and "sola scriptura." The quintessence of demonic pride and defiance, the former declaration, uttered by Lucifer himself, inspired the latter contrivance that shredded the Catholic fabric of Christendom; the seamless robe of Christ the King.

Sola scriptura absurdica
A contradiction in terms better designated sola absurdica (since it is mentioned nowhere in the Bible to which it appeals for validity), sola scriptura is forever spun as "justification by faith alone" (salvation according to one's private interpretation of Scripture without the need for good works) as if it were theological rocket-science; the product of deep and disinterested thought and worthy of endless study. Pfff... Allow me to cut through 500 years of wasted time, breath and ecumenical weasel words:
an Augustinian monk traded poverty, chastity and obedience in the service of God for sex, money and power in the service of the Self. — Voilà, Luther!

Too simplistic? Not a bit.(1) Undiplomatic? Perhaps. Especially in these ecumenical times. Yet while the art of diplomacy has its vital place in international affairs (as my ambassadorial kin would testify), when it comes to religion, forever tying the plain Catholic truth in diplomatic knots to avoid offence is the most dangerous kind of false charity. Insulting to grass-roots Catholics and Protestants alike, it undermines the faith and zeal of the former while confirming the latter in their fatal errors. In so doing it flies in the face of pre-conciliar Vatican demands that non-Catholics be addressed "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."

Telling the unvarnished truth about Luther and his fellow heresiarchs is surely fundamental to that end. Yet as one Protestant blog now gloats: "The Roman Catholic Church has done an about face in its attitude toward Martin Luther. Today Catholic scholars are among Luther's greatest apologists, extolling him as a devout Reformer who tried to better the church in an age of corruption and greed." It is no exaggeration. Treading on ecumenical eggshells, our leadership can no longer bring itself to speak "clearly and openly" to non-Catholics with the apostolic charity once called for by Rome: to simply say, for instance, that Brother Martin's "justification by faith" was all about self-justification. Not so much a principled reaction to ecclesial corruption (typically intimated by Archbishop Chaput in his generally excellent piece herein), as a selfish scam; one that resonates with the Me-Now! "modernity" it set in motion. Let me once again condense this to Luther for Dummies:

Like today's "pro-choice," sola scriptura was a deceitful slogan coined by a notorious liar (2) to rationalise his sins: the abandonment of his solemn vows in order to indulge his lusts. With the political winds behind him, this thoroughly modern yearning for radical autonomy and self-gratification led immediately to familiar consequences: the destruction of religious and social peace, blood on the floor, and brutal state intervention.(3) In the same contemporary vein it destroyed Luther himself, who, like so many non serviam rebels of our  day, died in spiritual ruin; the whispering serpents still bending his ear as he railed against the pope to his last breath (which final impenitence he had predicted and prayed for — sinning against the Holy Spirit).

Rehabilitating Luther
Despite the furious anti-papal diatribes for which Luther was renowned, not to mention the stark contrast between John Paul II's "preferential option for the poor" and the ex-monk's preferential option for the world, the flesh and the devil, in 1983 the Vicar of Christ himself praised "the profound religiousness of Luther." In the same year, Lutheran-Catholic dialogue on justification produced a 24,000-word joint report stating in the preamble that "Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, cannot disregard the person and message of this man." Catholic historians have called him "one of the greatest witnesses to the Christian faith" and re-examination of his writings are said to be of "critical importance" in the quest for "unity." Otto Pesch, O.P., compared his concept of justification with that of Aquinas and concluded that Luther was a Catholic and "one of the greatest witnesses to the Christian faith and a gift to all Christendom."

In November 1998, Cardinal Ratzinger held a private meeting with a leading Lutheran in order to save a later Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification just as it was about to be binned.(4) His having read all Luther's pre-Reformation (Catholic) works played well with the Lutherans and doubtless assisted his eleventh hour salvage operation.(5)

In March 2008, Vatican dialoguer-in-chief Cardinal Walter Kasper also proclaimed: "We have much to learn from Luther, beginning with the importance he attached to the word of God." Thus, he chose to ingratiate himself with Lutherans rather than burst their Luther-as-scripture-scholar balloon, so often floated to justify and elevate their founder in the eyes of ignorant posterity. This is to say that the Cardinal chose not to declare that we have nothing to learn from a man whose entire post-Catholic life was marked by the same mendacity that saw him falsify the Bible itself to suit his new religion. For while Luther did indeed translate the New Testament into German (eventually publishing the entire bible in 1534), he did so with his own erroneous flourishes. As the Cardinal knows well, it was not a faithful translation. For the record, the Catholic Encyclopaedia points out that

By attribution and suppression, mistranslation and wanton garbling, he made it the medium of attacking the old Church, and vindicating his individual doctrines. ... To Luther the vernacular Bible became a necessary adjunct, an indispensable necessity. His subversion of the spiritual order, abolition of ecclesiastical science, rejection of the sacraments, suppression of ceremonies, degradation of Christian art, demanded a substitute, and a more available one than the "undefiled Word of God", in association with "evangelical preaching" could hardly be found. In less than three months the first copy of the translated New Testament was ready for the press. Assisted by Melanchton, Spalatin, and others whose services he found of use, with the Greek version of Erasmus as a basis, with notes and comments charged with polemical animus and woodcuts of an offensively vulgar character supplied by Cranach, and sold for a trivial sum, it was issued at Wittenberg in September. ... While from the standpoint of the philologist it is worthy of the highest commendation, theologically it failed in the essential elements of a faithful translation.

Disastrous Detente
So much for the "importance he attached to the word of God." Truly, it is as if the spirit of Luther, who lied for a living, has gripped all these shepherds and scholars who dissemble to protect him, just as they overstate the Catholic contribution to any negatives he provoked. Yet as recently as 1949 the Holy Office exhorted bishops to "firmly insist that, in going over the history of the Reformation and the Reformers the defects of Catholics be not so exaggerated and the faults of the Reformers be so dissimulated, or that things which are rather accidental be not so emphasized, that what is most essential, namely the defection from the Catholic faith, be scarcely any longer seen or felt."

Led by the likes of Cardinal Kasper, Rome now encourages precisely the opposite approach. Eschewing the wise and balanced 1949 line they imply a 'moral equivalence' between Catholic and Protestant parties to Reformation disputes that ends up inflating Catholic sins and exculpating heresiarchs (apparently if not officially). Corrosive soft-pedalling is the widespread consequence. In June 2010, for instance, EWTN's Fr. Mitch Pacwa interviewed a convert-scholar who had been researching and writing on Calvin and Luther, in an attempt to put the record straight about their motives; that they were not trying to destroy the Catholic Church but merely to correct her errors at that time. For an hour they extolled their virtues; putting their incorrect doctrine down to poor decisions owing to bad influences. Never mind that these two unsavoury characters did seek the demolition of the Church and are unworthy of defence, as readily apparent from St Alphonsus Ligouri's research reprinted herein.

The devastating fallout from this new policy of ecumenical detente is all about us and exemplified in the simultaneous de-Catholicisation and Protestantisation of Latin America. Hitherto unimaginable, this Latino transformation is escalating even as ecumenical "declarations" and "accords" go interminably on.

Take the "code of conduct" regulating the missionary activity of Catholics, Protestants and Eastern schismatics. A model of false and farcical ecumenism, this "voluntary" accord was signed on 28 June 2011 in Geneva by representatives of the Vatican, the World Council of Churches (WCC) and World Evangelical Alliance (WEA). And yet the WCC, little more than a religious club renowned for its Marxist affiliations and sentiments, has no control over its members. Likewise the WEA, which claims to have authority over those who admit no authority above themselves, and to speak on behalf of those who admit no one to speak in their names!

Demeaning both itself and our holy Faith by lending credibility to such sola scriptura absurdica, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, signed the agreement: Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World: Recommendations for Conduct. As reported in The Tablet of 2 July 2011, it includes the following points:

• Christians must forego a sense of boldness in proclaiming the Gospel;
• Imprudent and inappropriate means of preaching the Gospel must be avoided;
• Such methods cause tensions, violence and loss of human lives;
• A new way to proclaim the Christian faith is required;
• Whoever does not follow these orientations should be denounced;
• All forms of enticements, including financial incentives and rewards, should be denied them;
• Those who violate this code should be considered traitors.

Commenting on this development, Atila Sinke Guimarães has noted the foot-shooting faux diplomacy pursued by Rome:

There are two black sheep that were particularly targeted by this pact: the Protestant sects in Latin America and the Catholic Uniatesof Ukraine.

It is well known that, in the decades that followed the Council, Protestant sects have taken advantage of ecumenism in Latin America to spread their false teaching. Indeed, since Vatican II the new orientation regarding heresies is for Catholics to unload their weapons, open their bulwarks and stop fighting against Protestantism. Notwithstanding, the Protestants have intensified their attacks against the Catholic Church. The result is that a considerable slice of the population became Protestant.

For example, official State data presented the percentage of Catholics in Brazil in 1970 as 91.8%, with Protestants at only 5.2%. In 2000 Catholics fell to 73.9% and Protestants increased to 15.6%. Updated comparative data from the official 2010 census are not available yet, but considering that the population of Brazil just passed 190 million in 2010 and applying to Protestants the same percentage of 10 years ago (15.6%), we can estimate that their number is now around 30 million. This means that, thanks to this policy of Catholic ecumenism and Protestant aggressiveness, there are more Protestants today in Brazil than in Germany, which counts about 25 million of these [material] heretics.

Instead of counter-attacking the heresies in this traditionally anti-Protestant continent to contain such an enormous hemorrhage, the Conciliar Church seeks out agreements like the one recently made at Geneva."Needless to say," adds Guimarães, "these Protestants sects receive every possible encouragement and funds from abroad in their work of eroding Latin American Catholicism." Contrary to the useless Geneva accord, those funds are certainly used by way of "financial incentives" to lure poor locals out of their authoritative Catholic safehaven and into sola scriptura's subjective minefield. To use the diplomatic phrase beloved of global trade negotiators, this is not a "level playing field." It is, as Guimarães notes, typically "unfair and biased, favouring Protestant growth" while neutering any Catholic counter-attack.

Trashing Tradition
This is the suicidal state of play in the Year of Faith. Half a century ago it was perfectly portrayed by Father Edward Hanahoe who pointed out that the principal evil of the new ecumenism is its “perpetuating the state of separation, serving rather to keep people out of the Church than to bring them into it.”(6) In other words, it has turned Catholic tradition on its head.

From the very beginning, the Apostles, early Fathers, and Doctors like Saint Peter Chrysologus taught that Christ was "hungry for man's conversion and thirsty for his return" to Him (ergo to His Church). Similarly, Popes always sought "the only true union by the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ," while the Holy Office issued condemnations of the burgeoning ecumenical movement of last century and "the false pretext that more attention should be paid to the points on which we agree than to those on which we differ." (7)

National hierarchies followed suit. In his 1950 Lenten Pastoral, Cardinal Griffin for one confirmed that in England "reunion can only mean the resumption of that unity which was destroyed" by the Protestants, and so "A call for reunion means an invitation to all non-Catholics to join the one, true Church [and] submission to the authority of the Holy See."

Like so much else, this unbroken unanimity of understanding and purpose went pear-shaped after Vatican II. In 2001, Cardinal Kasper, then head of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, typically opined that "today we no longer understand ecumenism in the sense of a return, by which the others would 'be converted' and return to being 'Catholics'. This was expressly abandoned at Vatican II." The 1993 Balamand Agreement with the schismatic Orthodox churches had already called the principle of conversion an "outdated ecclesiology."

Pius XI's encyclical Mortalium Animos (1928) puts that 180 degree about-turn in sulphurous perspective. Unencumbered by neo-Modernist baggage and false notions of charity and respect, Pius wrote with sublime Catholic conviction and clarity, dismantling all the ecumenical clichés that have since become de rigueur under his post-conciliar successors. He reminded one and all that "the Church of Christ not only exists today and always, but is also exactly the same as it was in the time of the Apostles, unless we were to say, which God forbid, either that Christ our Lord could not effect His purpose, or that He erred when He asserted that the gates of hell should never prevail against it." Pius then addressed the key question of the papacy: the divine authority called into question and corroded by the ecumenical movement:

7. And here it seems opportune to expound and to refute a certain false opinion, on which this whole question, as well as that complex movement by which non-Catholics seek to bring about the union of the Christian churches depends. For authors who favour this view are accustomed, times almost without number, to bring forward these words of Christ: "That they all may be one.... And there shall be one fold and one shepherd," with this signification however: that Christ Jesus merely expressed a desire and prayer, which still lacks its fulfillment. For they are of the opinion that the unity of faith and government, which is a note of the one true Church of Christ, has hardly up to the present time existed, and does not to-day exist. They consider that this unity may indeed be desired and that it may even be one day attained through the instrumentality of wills directed to a common end, but that meanwhile it can only be regarded as mere ideal. .... Controversies therefore, they say, and longstanding differences of opinion which keep asunder till the present day the members of the Christian family, must be entirely put aside, and from the remaining doctrines a common form of faith drawn up and proposed for belief, and in the profession of which all may not only know but feel that they are brothers. The manifold churches or communities, if united in some kind of universal federation, would then be in a position to oppose strongly and with success the progress of irreligion.

This, Venerable Brethren, is what is commonly said. There are some, indeed, who recognize and affirm that Protestantism, as they call it, has rejected, with a great lack of consideration, certain articles of faith and some external ceremonies, which are, in fact, pleasing and useful, and which the Roman Church still retains. They soon, however, go on to say that that Church also has erred, and corrupted the original religion by adding and proposing for belief certain doctrines which are not only alien to the Gospel, but even repugnant to it. Among the chief of these they number that which concerns the primacy of jurisdiction, which was granted to Peter and to his successors in the See of Rome. Among them there indeed are some, though few, who grant to the Roman Pontiff a primacy of honour or even a certain jurisdiction or power, but this, however, they consider not to arise from the divine law but from the consent of the faithful. Others again, even go so far as to wish the Pontiff Himself to preside over their motley, so to say, assemblies.

But, all the same, although many non-Catholics may be found who loudly preach fraternal communion in Christ Jesus, yet you will find none at all to whom it ever occurs to submit to and obey the Vicar of Jesus Christ either in His capacity as a teacher or as a governor. Meanwhile they affirm that they would willingly treat with the Church of Rome, but on equal terms, that is as equals with an equal: but even if they could so act, it does not seem open to doubt that any pact into which they might enter would not compel them to turn from those opinions which are still the reason why they err and stray from the one fold of Christ.

The pope immediately adds a stiff warning against complicity in false and compromising beliefs and endeavours:

8. This being so, it is clear that the Apostolic See cannot on any terms take part in their assemblies, nor is it anyway lawful for Catholics either to support or to work for such enterprises; for if they do so they will be giving countenance to a false Christianity, quite alien to the one Church of Christ. Shall We suffer, what would indeed be iniquitous, the truth, and a truth divinely revealed, to be made a subject for compromise? For here there is question of defending revealed truth.

Conversion & Return vs.  Diversity & Absorption
To the curial likes of Kasper the Friendly Ecumenist this bracing solicitude for truth and souls is stale and stifling: the "outdated" voice of reactionary Catholicism. Never mind that such charitable candour — condemning the false allure of ecumenism and exhorting Protestants to abandon their errors and return to the barque of Peter — was a winning strategy! In response, converts clambered aboard the ark of salvation, where they joined Catholics united and energised by no-nonsense popes preaching this evangelically effective Union-as-Return. Yet in 2005, at an ecumenical meeting in Cologne, the Holy Father was again at pains to underline the about-face, declaring:

... unity does not mean what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to reject one’s own faith history. Absolutely not! It does not mean uniformity in all expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in discipline. Unity in multiplicity, and multiplicity in unity.... To this end, dialogue has its own contribution to make.

On the surface, this new papal "line" seems harmless enough. But it not only ruptures the "continuity" Benedict wishes to maintain with his pre-conciliar predecessors, it plants two spurious seeds in the minds of impressionable Catholics and non-Catholics alike. For it implies that Protestants have something to offer that the Church is lacking, and hints that the Church had previously failed to recognise and appreciate the good in non-Catholics. These insinuations are shot to pieces by the perfectly balanced 1949 Instruction from the Holy Office. The antithesis of post-conciliar cant — concise, clear and unwavering — it repeatedly emphasises "the only true union by the return of the dissidents to the one true Church of Christ," while insisting that

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.

Theoretically, perhaps, one might argue a diplomatic case for the Holy Father's well intentioned but fuzzy Union-as-Diversity. Practically, however, as witnessed by the rapid Latin American surrender, it does not inspire zealous defence and promotion of the one true Church because it does not transmit a sense of urgency. On the contrary, his "unity in multiplicity" sounds more like the exhortation of a Protestant vicar desperate to avoid offence; the sort of thing denounced by St Teresa of Avila:

Even preachers have the habit of so framing their sermons as to displease nobody. Their intentions are good and their activities splendid, but they do not persuade very many to amend their lives. Why? Is it that there are so few who are led by sermons to abstain from public sin? Do you know what I think? It is because preachers have too much worldly wisdom. They do not fling all restraint aside and burn with the great fire of God, as the Apostles did: and so their flames do not throw out much heat. I do not say that their fire could be as great as the Apostles, but I wish they had more than they have.

Far from instilling apostolic "fire" and "heat," the faithful no longer equate "evangelisation" and "dialogue" with conversion precisely because worldly-wise Rome itself so obviously fears offending non-Catholic sensibilities. So much so that it preaches an ecumenical version of "multiculturalism" (its utopian twin) that accommodates Luther while diluting/sidelining non-negotiables: like the absolute claims of the Church and the central place and role of Our Lady. With St Teresa, St Maximilian Kolbe, who saw ecumenism as "the enemy," viewed evangelisation in precisely the opposite way:

The mission St. Maximilian entrusted to his Knights of the Immaculata was that of converting the whole world to the Catholic Church. He said, "Only until all schismatics and Protestants profess the Catholic Creed with conviction, when all Jews voluntarily ask for Holy Baptism – only then will the Immaculata have reached its goals."

… "In other words," Saint Maximilian insisted, "there is no greater enemy of the Immaculata and her Knighthood than today’s ecumenism, which every Knight must not only fight against, but also neutralize through diametrically opposed action and ultimately destroy. We must realize the goal of the Militia Immaculata as quickly as possible: that is, to conquer the whole world, and every individual soul which exists today or will exist until the end of the world, for the Immaculata, and through her for the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus."(8)

In January 2011, the Vatican symbolically disavowed St. Maximilian's stirring Pauline militancy [Eph. 6:11-17]. Commemorating the 500th anniversary of Luther's visit to Rome by way of participation in "Luther's Garden" — a project started in Wittenberg and promoted worldwide as a symbol of the "global magnitude of the Reformation" and the "interconnectedness, interaction, and reconciliation between Christian churches" — Cardinal Koch helped a Lutheran delegation plant and bless an olive tree at the basilica of St. Paul: the great Jewish convert who became the instrument of the whole world's Catholic conversion!

Holy Obligation or Unholy Mess?
Again, as a purely diplomatic exercise a spot of ecumenical gardening is unremarkable. Conducted as an official nod of false respect to a heresiarch, however, as if his diabolic revolt could be reconciled with the person, teachings and experience of St. Paul, it signified far more: namely, a further blessing of the post-conciliar path that Benedict reaffirmed and prioritised at the outset of his pontificate. This dire policy is best summed up by the title under which L'Osservatore Romano published Cardinal Kasper's 2007 post-consistory speech to the assembled cardinals: "Ecumenism as a ‘Holy Obligation’" — a catchphrase worthy of a Master Mason!

We are caught in a Protestanising pincer movement. On one side, partisans of Luther are busy de-sacramentalising within.(9) On the other, interfaith relations are being quasi-sacramentalised.

As Rome adopts a 'more positive' view of Luther — now viewed as having anticipated aspects of 'reform' which pre-conciliar popes, unlike their enlightened successors, failed to appreciate and adopt — the Luther of Historical Fact is airbrushed to fulfil the Holy Obligation. Never mind that his diabolic revolution usurped the very authority being used to impose this near-sacred ecumenical duty. Or that this usurpation is central to understanding the fragmentation and collapse of the West into the anarchic "Kingdom of Whatever" depicted by Brad Gregory in his book: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.

John Agricola epitomised the non serviam anarchy Luther immediately unleashed. One of his fellow townsmen and for a time his disciple, Agricola "became afterwards the founder of a sect, called Antinomians, or Law Opposers," writes St Alphonsus, "for he rejected all authority of law, and taught that you may become a sensualist, a thief, a robber, but if you believe you will be saved." The authoritarian Luther himself was at odds with Agricola as he was with everybody else who disagreed with him; personifying, thereby, the self-serving and self-contradiction inherent in his theological novelties.

The Holy Obligation only serves to perpetuate this Unholy Mess. Half a millennium on, while Rome pursues futile "dialogues" with Protestant delegations that don't even speak for each other let alone the rest of 'Protestantdom', Luther's hapless heirs continue to rationalise sin in the name of Christ. "I read the Bible as seriously as fundamentalists do," explained Episcopalian Gary Hall, the dean of the Washington National Cathedral, informing the press of the decision to start "marrying" lesbians and sodomites in the Cathedral this year. "And my reading of the Bible leads me to want to do this because I think it's being faithful to the kind of community that Jesus would have us be."

Brother Martin himself might have stood open-mouthed before that sola scriptura pervertica. Then again, maybe not! In any event, he is no longer entirely to blame. Telling Episcopalians the truth about Luther may or may not open their eyes to the root cause of this absurd and blasphemous decision. But we'll never know because Rome, who once would have enlightened them, has opted for the false persona of Protestant mythology: the misunderstood "reformer" and theologian of substance.

Magisterial Antidote
If recent pontiffs had studied the ghastly historical facts recorded by St. Alphonsus in his Refutation of the Heresies, they might have kept the Barque of Peter on traditional course instead of careening into so much complicity, confusion and scandal.(10) Alas, bewitched by the Brave New Ecclesial World opened up by the Council, defying the sage warnings of their predecessors and Catholic history, they have immersed themselves and their flock in the Reformation Project: by way of an Ecumenical Project now dovetailing with their New Evangelisation Project.

Spineless and self-defeating, this grand design is hollowing out the One True Faith, all the while diminishing the sole hope of the suicidal West: Magisterial Authority. For until that unifying Catholic voice is stripped of all ecumenical equivocation and raised anew with supreme Apostolic conviction, the Lutheranisation of Church and State will continue on in ruinous tandem: as the incoherence, dissolution and statism engendered by Luther's privatisation of faith and morals deepens and worsens, aided and abetted by Roman Protestants of the Ecumenical Antichurch.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) The Catholic Encyclopaedia [CE] recounts that "While Germany was drenched in blood, its people paralyzed with horror [after the repression of the peasants whose revolt he had inspired] ..., Luther then in his forty-second year was spending his honeymoon with Catherine von Bora, then twenty-six (married 13 June, 1525), a Bernardine nun who had abandoned her convent. He was regaling his friends with ... circumstantial details of his connubial bliss, irreproducible in English." After the failure of the Peasants War, he and his offsider Melancthon "now proclaim, for the first time the hitherto unknown doctrine of the unlimited power of the ruler over the subject; demand unquestioning submission to authority; preach and formally teach the spirit of servility and despotism." So much for sex and power. As for money and the good life, "the Augustinian monastery, which was given to him after his marriage by the elector, became his homestead" (where he fathered six children). When the papal legate, Vergerius, visited Luther in Wittenberg on 7 November 1535, he found "the jauntily groomed reformer 'in holiday attire, in a vest of dark calmet, sleeves with gaudy atlas cuffs . . . coat of serge lined with fox pelts ... several rings on his fingers, a massive gold chain about his neck' .... The presence of the man who would reform the ancient Church decked out in so foppish a manner, made an impression on the mind of the legate, that can readily be conjectured."

(2) "What harm would there be, if a man to accomplish better things and for the sake of the Christian Church, does tell a good thumping lie" he famously pleaded in 1540 before the Hessian counsellors assembled at Eisenach. - CE.

(3) After his invectives poured oil on the flames of revolt: "Luther then 'dipped his pen in blood' (Lang, 180) and 'calls upon the princes to slaughter the offending peasants like mad dogs, to stab, strangle and slay as best one can, and holds out as a reward the promise of heaven.' ... His advice was literally followed. ... More than 1000 monasteries and castles were levelled to the ground, hundreds of villages were laid in ashes, the harvests of the nation were destroyed, and 100,000 killed. ... that history with hardly a dissenting voice fastens the origin of this war on Luther, fully shows where its source and responsibility lay." - CE.

(4) "We had a very important meeting in my brother's house, in Germany," the Cardinal publicly stated in 1999, "as it seemed that the consensus on the Doctrine of Justification had failed. In this way, in the course of a debate that lasted a whole day, we found the formulas that have clarified the points that still present difficulties...."

(5) This should not fill us with great ecumenical confidence. Firstly, it was not the Catholic Luther studied by the Cardinal but the apostate Luther who established his new religion: his violent polemical writings revealing precious few glimpses of the sound theology and reverence for tradition from his old training (and even then only when it suited his deviant designs). Secondly, just as the Cardinal studied pre-apostate Luther, so James Larson has studied the pre-papal Ratzinger, only to find his many works imbued with dubious Lutheran notions, as regularly documented chapter and verse in Christian Order. Thirdly, the dissident, dying, comprehensively Lutheranised CINO Church in Germany embodies the perils of neo-Modernist ecumenical "dialogue."

(6) One Fold: Essays and Documents to Commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the Chair of Unity Octave, 1908-1958, edited by Edward F. Hanahoe, S.A., S.T.D., and Titus F. Cranny, S.A., S.T.D., M.A. [Graymoor: Chair of Unity Apostolate, 1959] Quoted by John Vennari in "Ecumenical Chapel at St. Paul Outside the Walls," Catholic Family News, 23/1/08.

(7) Cf. Satis cognitum (1897); Mortalium animos (1928); Mystici Corporis Christi (1943); On the "Ecumenical Movement," An Instruction of the Holy Office, 20 Dec. 1949.

(8) Cited in "Ecumenical Chapel at St. Paul Outside the Walls," Vennari, op. cit.

(9) Cf. "Lutheranising the Church: The Anti-Sacramental Agenda," CO, Dec. 2012.

(10) According to his close friend Jean Guitton, for instance, the express "ecumenical intention" of Paul VI was "to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass."

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