A few days ago, I reported on a new ecumenical initiative that is going ahead with the apparent support of the Vatican and which relies on the conciliar mistruth (heresy) that the three monotheistic religions worship the same God. This is the idea that religions who reject the Trinity and specifically reject the Redeemer, Our Lord Jesus Christ, are on their “own path” to heaven. Is this a parallel path?
Parallel universe is more like it.
This week, in one of his many interviews, Australia’s Cardinal Pell gave his support to the same error. The interview was for the occasion of the Cardinal’s 80th birthday and touched on his time spent in prison for a crime he did not commit. The interviewer asked the Cardinal,
“In your diary, you say that you often listened to the prayers of Muslim detainees from your cell. What did it feel like to pray while listening to those prayers?”
To this, Cardinal Pell answered,
“For me there is only one God, we are monotheists. The theological conceptions of Christians and Muslims are obviously different, but we all pray in different ways to the same God. There is no God of Muslims, Christians or other religions, there is only one God.”
Cardinal Pell to Fabio Colagrande, of Vatican News, June 8, 2021
Forget for a moment that the good Cardinal should not merely give his opinion, and that he has a responsibility to state clearly the doctrine of the Church he represents. That is bad enough. But the comments themselves show a teaching that was entirely new at the time of the Second Vatican Council and which has come to be seen as Magisterial.
While of course it is true that there is only one God – Scripture tells us that all other gods are in fact, demons – the Cardinal is quite wrong in stating that the monotheistic religions worship the same God. He himself seemed to reject that idea in the past. For example, in 2006, the Cardinal pointed out that Catholics, Christians and Muslims do not universally believe that they worship the same God.
He said that “It is difficult to recognise the God of the New Testament in the God of the Koran, and two very different concepts of the human person have emerged from the Christian and Muslim understandings of God.”
Has the Cardinal come to change his position? It certainly would appear so. Has the Pope’s Abu-Dhabi project, that great triumph of Freemasonic indifferentism, influenced the Cardinal so much so he renounces the Church’s consistent teaching on this fundamental truth? I certainly hope this is not the case.
Please note that I do not in any way suggest that the good Cardinal is connected in any way with Freemasonry – other than that he has almost undoubtedly been the victim of its assaults over the years.
I will be most upset – perhaps litigiously so – if anyone accuses me of saying such a thing.
I draw attention to his comments only to show how prevalent religious indifferentism is today, even in conservative circles. This indifferentism has its roots in Freemasonry and has long been one of its goals.
Before the Council, this was the constant teaching of the Church, and the clergy warned of the dangers of religious indifferentism. Ideas like those put forward in the 19th Century by the Freemasonic occultist, Éliphas Lévi, who hoped for a Catholic Church that allowed Jews and Muslims to worship within Her without a renunciation of their own faith, were condemned. The errors were clearly exposed for all the faithful.
Similarly, academics like Hilaire Belloc warned of the heresy implicit in Islam, explaining the movement began as a corruption of Christianity from which Mohammed excised all that is supernatural from and then taught an erroneous, oversimplified doctrine.
Less than a hundred years later, this error was to find itself being promulgated by the Church Herself, in such documents as Lumen Gentium, which states that Muslims and Catholics worship the same God.
Hence a grave error has been sown in the fabric of the Church – a great contradiction that exhibits the hallmarks of a hermeneutic of discontinuity.
As Bishop Schneider remarked when speaking on this topic in his book, Christus Vincit, “We have to call all non-Christians to the one true path to God., which is the Catholic Church. The Apostles and the entire Church taught this for two thousand years. The Church could not err for two thousand years.” (p 97.)
Bishop Schneider is, however, not one to ignore or condemn individual members of other faiths. As he stated in Christus Vincit, he has good relations with Muslims in Kazakhstan and has, at times, joined in efforts with members of the Jewish faith. He is not xenophobic, but neither does he shy away from the truth that someone who rejects the Trinitarian God of Christians does not pray to that God, but to another of their own making.
A brief look at some of the Church Fathers will further illustrate the traditional Catholic view:
St Augustine: “This heresy affirms that all heretics are on the right path and that al teach the truth. This is so monstrous an absurdity that it seems to me to be incredible.”
Pope Pius VII: “By the fact that the indiscriminate freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed, truth is confused with error, and the Holy and Immaculate Spouse of Christ is placed on the same level as heretical sects…” – Post Tam Diuturnas
Pope Gregory XVI: “…. those who pretend that the way to [eternal] beatitude starts with any religion at all should be afraid and should seriously think over the fact that, according to the testimony of the Saviour Himself, they are against Christ, because they are not for Christ, and that they are miserably scattering because they are not gathering with Him…” – Mirari Vos
It is to be hoped that Cardinal Pell and other conservative, yet sadly quite Modernist, clergymen wake up to the errors that were promulgated by Vatican II and begin to teach the Faith in its entirely and totally in accordance with tradition. Perhaps then, these well-meaning but deluded men will pray with St Celestine:
Pray that the Faith may be granted to infidels, that idolators may be delivered from the errors of impiety, that the light of truth may be visible to Jews….
St Celestine, Council of Ephesus. 431
Ecclesiastical Freemasonry 