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So what "manifest heresy" is to be found

Excerpts from Abbe de Nantes' The Book of Accusation against Pope Paul VI

II – HETERODOXY: THE CULT OF MAN

In the Discourses you gave to the Fourth Session of the Council, we see how your sympathy for man, and your desire to understand and meet him halfway, to respect, admire and love him – which were "apostolic" and "pastoral" to begin with – have developed into a veritable cult of man himself.

THE LOVE OF MAN

On 14th September 1965 you expressed the Church's love for man in very strange terms: "And what was the Church doing at that particular moment? the historian will be asking; and the reply will be: The Church was filled with love... The Council puts before the Church, before us in particular, a panoramic vision of the world: how can the Church, how can we ourselves, do other than behold this world and love it? (Cf. Mark 10.21) It will be one of the chief acts of the Session which is now beginning to take such a look at the world: once again, and above all else, love; love for the men of today, whoever and wherever they may be, love for all... The Council is a solemn act of love for mankind. May Christ come to our aid, in order that it may indeed be so."

What is new about this love? That it adores its object. It is a love which has no regard for the Truth of God, or His Law, or His Grace, but looks upon man, and upon the world, as worthy of admiration, service, and devotion, in their own right. As you quote, once again, Mark 10.21, I must protest at this repeated misapplication. Jesus did indeed love the rich young man, because the latter was one of the rare human beings who could claim that he had always observed the law of God. Does this apply to the world today? And because He loves him, Jesus proposes to him the greater perfection of the Evangelical Counsels. This pains the man, and he turns away, for he remains attached to the goods of this world. There is nothing here to justify the adulation which you make into a characteristic of the Conciliar Church.

This is the idolatrous love which led to Religious Liberty being proclaimed as a fundamental and absolute right of man. I say absolute, because the limitations which might be imposed upon it by the police seem to me not worthy of mention. The same love led to the promulgation of the notorious Pastoral Constitution on The Church in the World of Today, which you referred to as "the crowning achievement of the Council", entirely inspired by the cult of Man, "the apex of nature".

FAITH AND CONFIDENCE IN MAN

Such a love knows no constraint because it is no longer dependent on and controlled by the love of God, and soon turns into idealisation and idolatry of its object. This applies in your case as in any other, and leads you, in your blind and unbridled passion, to preach a faith and confidence in man which are little short the absurd. Thus, on 2nd December 1970, to the journalists in Sydney:

"For we have faith in Man. We believe in the good which lies deep within each heart, we know that underlying man's wonderful efforts are the motives of justice, truth, renewal, progress and brotherhood – even where they are accompanied by dissension or sometimes even, unfortunately, by violence. It is your task, not to flatter him but to help him become conscious of his true value and his true potential. It is up to you to plant in man the seeds of this ideal – not for the pursuit of selfish interests which ultimately only reduce him and sometimes degrade him – but an ideal by virtue of which he is able to attain the true stature of a creature made in the image of God, who desires him to aim higher and higher, to build together a city of brotherhood for which all yearn and to which all have the right... The Catholic Church, in particular since the impulse given her by the Conciliar Aggiornamento, goes out to meet this same man whom it is your ambition to serve."

Is it not written: "CURSED BE THE MAN THAT TRUSTETH IN MAN AND MAKETH FLESH HIS ARM AND WHOSE HEART DEPARTETH FROM THE LORD!" (Jer. 17.5)? And again, "FOR WITHOUT ME YOU CAN DO NOTHING." (John 15.5)? But you would encourage him to aim higher and higher, to outstrip himself... perhaps even to seek to be the equal of God?

THE CULT OF MAN WHO MAKES HIMSELF GOD

Yes, Most Holy Father, it was you who, on that historic day of 7th December 1965, addressing the entire assembled Council, gave a Discourse unlike any other in the annals of the Church and unlike any other that is ever to come, a Discourse which enthroned within the Church of Christ, the CULT OF MAN:

"The Conciliar Church has also, it is true, been much concerned with man, with man as he really is today, with living man, with man totally taken up with himself, with man who not only makes himself the centre of his own interests, but who dares to claim that he is the end and aim of all existence...

"Secular, profane, humanism has finally revealed itself in its terrible shape and has, in a certain sense, challenged the Council. The religion of God made man has come up against a religion – for there is such a one – of man who makes himself God.

"And what happened? An impact, a battle, an anathema? That might have taken place, but it did not. It was the old story of the Samaritan that formed the model for the Council's spirituality. It was filled only with an endless sympathy. Its attention was taken up with the discovery of human needs – which become greater as the son of the earth (sic) makes himself greater

… "Do you at least recognise this its merit, you modern humanists who have no place for the transcendence of the things supreme, and come to know our new humanism: we also, we more than anyone else, have the cult of man."

This shows how your heteropraxy is slipping into a heterodoxy which I must refer to not so much as heresy as apostasy. And all through your apostolic generosity! Against all the wise counsels and infallible teaching of your Predecessors, you play the Good Samaritan, nodding good-naturedly to every man his brother… And in your unfettered love you make friends with the Goliath of the Modern World, kneeling before the Enemy of God who only feels hatred and defiance for you. Instead of fighting, like David, against the Adversary, you express yourself full of love for him, you flatter him, and end up in his exclusive service! Your charity towards the Enemy of God turns into adoration and service, to the extent even of rivalling him in his error and blasphemy.

For you have allied yourself with Man-who-makes-himself-god! You vie with the pride-intoxicated atheistic humanists of our day in the cult of man. Just read again this HYMN TO THE GLORY OF MAN which you intoned on the occasion of one of the voyages to the Moon and which is a blasphemous parody of the HYMN TO CHRIST THE KING OF THE AGES (Angelus, 7 February 1971):

"Honour to Man!

"Honour to his thought; honour to his scientific knowledge;

"Honour to his technical skill; honour to his work;

"Honour to human endurance;

"Honour to that combination of scientific activity and organisation by which man, unlike the other animals, can invest his spirit and his manual dexterity with instruments of conquest;

"HONOUR TO MAN, KING OF THE EARTH, AND TODAY PRINCE OF THE HEAVENS!

"Honour to our living being, in which is reflected the image of God and which, in its triumph over matter, obeys the biblical command: increase and rule."

It was on a similar occasion that you said:

"Man is both giant and divine, in his origin and his destiny. Honour, therefore, to man, honour to his dignity, to his spirit, to his life." (13 July 1969)

Compare this Discourse with that of St Pius X in his first Encyclical which served also as the blueprint of his pontificate:

"He who considers these things is entitled to fear that such a perversion of minds might represent the beginning of those evils foretold for the end of time, forming as it were, their stepping stone on to the earth, and that the Son of Perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, might already be coming amongst us. For religion is being attacked with the greatest boldness and vigour, the dogmas of the Faith are being battered, and no effort is spared to tear asunder man's link with the divine. Moreover – and this is what the same Apostle tells us is typical of Antichrist – man in his unspeakable temerity is usurping the place of the Creator, and placing himself above all that bears the name of God. Powerless to extinguish within himself entirely the concept of God, he yet shakes off the yoke of His majesty and dedicates to himself a temple in the form of the visible world, where he receives the homage of his own kind...

"That is why all our efforts must be directed towards bringing mankind back under the rule of Christ. To achieve the result of Our hopes, it is vital to spare no efforts in uprooting entirely this monstrous iniquity peculiar to the times we live in, which leads man to set himself up in place of God." (E Supremi Apostolatus, 4 October 1903)

The teaching and sentiments expressed here are totally different – are they not? – in their inspiration and indeed in their SPIRIT. St Pius X, for whom you have little affection and whom you avoid quoting, even when such quotation would be imperative upon you, St Pius X preaches Christ in accordance with the fullness of the Catholic Faith and Law. He resists the temptation by Satan and bravely takes up the battle against him... And you, Most Holy Father? Your liberalism has moved from the pastoral sphere into the doctrinal, and from the practical level to the theoretical. Was this done deliberately? It was already evidence of greatest temerity to override the condemnations of your Predecessors in order to adopt this liberal policy, even for the best of apostolic intentions. But taken in its entire context, it seems rather that, having first yielded to the second of the three temptations – that of tempting God through foolhardiness – you have let yourself fall into the third, which consists in abandoning God in order to serve Satan, so that you finish up by adoring man who puts himself into the place of God – and this is a mark of Antichrist.

Your way of expressing yourself had grown bolder by 12th August 1970: "Religion must be renewed. All who are still today concerned about religion are convinced of this, regardless of whether or not they are members of a religion as it finds expression in a particular faith, a definite observance, a defined community. The question at issue is what meaning we are to give to the term 'renewal'." Such a statement leads one to think that you must have lost the Catholic Faith – any Christian Faith, indeed your very sense of religion. For you speak of "religion" as though it were a purely human phenomenon, endowed with a certain power of emotion, of moral energy, which can be put to good use in the service of mankind and its worldly advance. For you are certainly among those "who are still today concerned about religion", but who no longer have any very clear idea why, or what it really means.

Hence the call to all the different religions to fraternise, to work together in the temporal task which has become a new reason for their existence: because this is common to all of them, dogmatic quarrels are a thing of the past, "the wars of religion are over for good". (15th February 1965) "Fanaticism" and "proselytism" also are dead, for we are no longer concerned about winning souls for the "supreme things" (Discourse of 7th December 1965), but only with putting them into the service of humanity. The different gods are to be forcibly reconciled by their priests who have decided all to work together in the interests of human success. For that is what Ecumenism means.

This confusion of the different religions, all considered as multiple and convergent expressions of the same "spiritual values" offered to "men of good will" for the "salvation" of all and every man upon earth, appears over and over again in the course of your journey to the Far East. You include even Buddhism among the religions. Was it not the main purpose of your journey to ripen "the fruits of a closer understanding between the communities of different origin and different denomination in this part of the world, as an encouragement of solidarity for progress, justice and peace." (Address given at Teheran on 26th November 1970)

"With no distinction of caste, OF FAITH, of colour, or of language", was what you said at Ceylon (4th December 1970). And because in your eyes Love is enough to banish all distinctions, you carried this appeal, addressed indiscriminately to all the spiritual forces, to the length of including even Communist China, because towards that too, you feel nothing but Love.

I will remind you of only a single one of the discourses in which you speak about the coexistence and collaboration of the religions, and I will ask you only one question concerning it: as the Judge of the Faith, can you tell us whether the speaker is still a Catholic, or whether he has denied Christ and placed himself outside the Church. Here is the text; it relates to the conflict in the Middle East and your hopes of peace:

"And We have a hope which may appear Utopian because it does not rest on any concrete basis, and may even itself represent a point of discord, but which We consider to be founded upon an argument that is solid and practical: the conflict involves three different ethnico-religious groups, all of which recognise a one and true God: the Hebrew people, the Islamic people and between them, and scattered throughout the entire world, the Christian people. These three expressions of an identical monotheism speak with the most authentic and ancient, and even the boldest and most confident, the most convinced voices. Can we not hope, therefore, that the name of the same God, instead of engendering irreconcilable opposition, may lead, rather, to mutual respect, understanding and peaceful coexistence? Should the reference to the same God, the same Father WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSIONS, not lead us rather one day to discover what is so evident, yet so difficult, that we are all sons of the same Father and that, therefore, we are all brothers?" (Address given at the Angelus on 9th August 1970)

Well, here is the reply: "Strange indeed, and both sad and terrifying, are the audacity and rashness of spirit of men who call themselves Catholic and dream of founding society anew in such conditions and of establishing upon earth, independently of the Catholic Church, 'the reign of justice and of love', with the help of all who come, of whatever religion or none at all, with or without beliefs, provided only that they are prepared to forget that which divides them – their religious and philosophical beliefs, and to concentrate on what unites them – a generous idealism and certain moral forces 'of whatever origin'. It is frightening... The result of such promiscuity of labour, the beneficiary of such cosmopolitan social action can only be a democracy which is neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish: a religion more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men thus finally become brothers and comrades in 'the reign of God'. 'To work no longer for the Church, but for mankind'... this is organised Apostasy." (St Pius X, Letter on the Sillon)

The reply was given by St Pius X. Whose word speaks louder in our souls – yours – or his? Which of the two is the apostate?....

You announced this new Credo on 7th December 1965, in the presence of the bishops of the whole world. How far these were inattentive, or your accomplices, or fascinated by you, I do not know. But Holy Mother Church cannot, can never subscribe to such a philosophy. That day marked the point of no return along the road that leads away from the Church of Christ in order to proceed towards that other Church which is truly yours – the Antichurch or Synagogue of Satan, where man makes himself God. But in the meantime, through men's indifference or cowardice, you are still on the Throne of Peter, in the capacity of Supreme Judge of the Church. The capital charge we bring against you concerns your liberalism and your cult of man, which we maintain are blasphemous, heretical, schismatic and finally apostate. The decision is for you to make, for you are still the Vicar of Jesus Christ upon earth. Pass judgement upon yourself and, if I have lied, cut me off from the Church. But you know that I am not lying. If I have told the truth, then cut yourself off from this Sacred Body which you have betrayed!....

The time has came to take the final step, and put all this to the test of divine power. And so I bring before your own Jurisdiction a process against yourself, accusing you of heresy, schism and scandal, and challenging you – if this New Religion does indeed come from Christ – to proclaim this solemnly in His Name, for it is one which all the Popes before you had branded as the offspring of Lucifer.