Protestantism, Modernism, Atheism

“The reality of the apostasy of faith in our time rightly and profoundly frightens us,” said Cardinal Burke in honor of Fatima’s centenary.

In 1903, Pope St. Pius X declared himself “terrified” by humanity’s self-destructive apostasy from God: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 72:27). How much more “daunting,” said Cardinal Burke, is today’s “widespread apostasy.”

In 1910, St. Pius X condemned the movement for a “One-World Church” without dogmas, hierarchy, or “curb for the passions”—a church which, “under the pretext of freedom,” would impose “legalized cunning and force.” How much more, said Cardinal Burke, do today’s “movements for a single government of the world” and “certain movements with the Church herself” disregard sin and salvation?

In Pascendi, St. Pius X named the trajectory toward the “annihilation of all religion”: “The first step … was taken by Protestantism; the second … by [the heresy of] Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism.”

So let us, said Cardinal Burke, heed Fatima’s call for prayer, penance, and reparation. Let us be “agents” of the triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart.

A few weeks after that speech, the Vatican announced its shining tribute to the Protestant revolution: a golden stamp with Luther and Melanchthon at the foot of the cross, triumphantly supplanting the Blessed Virgin and St. John.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider has asked how the Vatican can call Luther a “witness to the gospel” when he “called the Mass … a blasphemy” and “the papacy an invention of Satan.” The signatories of the filial correction have expressed “wonderment and sorrow” at a statue of Luther in the Vatican—and documented the “affinity” between “Luther’s ideas on law, justification, and marriage” and Pope Francis’s statements.

At a 2016 joint “commemoration” of the Protestant revolution, Pope Francis expressed “joy” for its myriad “gifts.” He and pro-abortion Lutherans with female clergy jointly declared that “what unites us is greater than what divides us.” Together they “raise[d]” their “voices” against “violence.” They prayed for the conversion of those who exploit the earth. They declared the “goal” of receiving the Eucharist “at one table” to express their “full unity.”

In Martin Luther: An Ecumenical Perspective, Cardinal Kasper confirms that the excommunicated, apostate monk is now a “common church father,” a new St. Francis of Assisi. This prophet of the “new evangelization” was “forced” into calling the pope the Antichrist after his “call for repentance was not heard.” But Kasper finds ecumenical hope in Luther’s “statement that he would…kiss the feet of a pope who allows and acknowledges his gospel.”

Kasper says Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium, “without mentioning him by name,” makes Luther’s concerns “stand in the center.”

So it’s Luther’s “gospel of grace and mercy” behind, apparently, the high disdain for “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianis[ts]” plagued by a “soundness of doctrine” that’s “narcissistic and authoritarian” (EG 94).

So it’s Luther—the bizarre protagonist of “ecumenical unity”—behind the demand for a “conversion of the papacy” that gives “genuine doctrinal authority” to episcopal conferences (EG 32). Sandro Magister says the pope is already creating a “federation of national Churches endowed with extensive autonomy” through liturgical decentralization.

So it’s Luther behind the demand to “accept the unruly freedom of the word, which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our…ways of thinking” (EG 22). Kasper says Luther’s faith in the “self-implementation of the word of God” gave him a heroic “openness to the future.”

Ultimately, Kasper’s Luther—a prophet of “openness” to futurity, a “Catholic reformer” waiting for a sympathetic pope—emerges as a symbolic father for Modernism’s struggle to change the Church from within. Modernism falsely claims that God evolves with history—making truth utterly mutable. So Kasper the Modernist says dogmas can be “stupid” and Church structures can spring from “ideology” and denying the Eucharist to adulterers because of “one phrase” from Christ is “ideological,” too.

Kasper baldly calls the “changeless” God an “offense to man”:

One must deny him for man’s sake, because he claims for himself the dignity and honor that belong by right to man….

We must resist this God … also for God’s sake. He is not the true God at all, but rather a wretched idol. For a God … who is not himself history is a finite God. If we call such a being God, then for the sake of the Absolute we must become absolute atheists. Such a God springs from a rigid worldview; he is the guarantor of the status quo and the enemy of the new.

A shocking ultimatum from the man hailed as “the pope’s theologian”: either embrace a mutable God who’s not an “enemy of the new”—or profess “absolute,” unflinching, hardcore atheism.

Kasper says the Church must be led by a “spirit” that “is not primarily the third divine person.” That ominous “spirit,” says Thomas Stark, is apparently some Hegelian agent of creation’s self-perfection. Pope Francis, against all the “sourpusses” (EG 85), describes our “final cause” as “the utopian future” (EG 222). Because God wants us to be “happy” in this world, it’s “no longer possible to claim that religion … exists only to prepare souls for heaven” (EG 182).

But Christ said, “In the world you shall have distress” (Jn. 16:33). The 1907 dystopian novel The Lord of the World hauntingly imagines the travails of history’s last days, when humanity has heeded Kasper’s call to “resist” God with absolute atheism if necessary. By this point, “Protestantism is dead,” for men “recognize at last that a supernatural religion involves an absolute authority.” Those with “any supernatural belief left” are Catholic—persecuted by a world professing “no God but man, no priest but the politician.”

More and more clergy apostatize. Man “has learned his own divinity.” Yet Fr. Percy Franklin still adores the Eucharistic Lord, still believes that “the reconciling of a soul to God” is greater than the reconciling of nations. He secretly hears a dying woman’s confession before the “real priests”—the euthanizers—come.

Her daughter-in-law, Mabel, scoffs that the new atheism has perfected Catholicism:

Do you not understand that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You said just now you wanted the forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that; we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only Crime.

And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are all human beings.

Mabel and the rapt multitudes ritually worship Man. God was a “hideous nightmare.” Their spirits swoon before a politician promising “the universal brotherhood of man.”

That “savior of the world” is the Antichrist. All must deny God or die.

For history, like the novel itself, ends not with rapturous utopia but with tribulation, apostasy, martyrdoms, and “God’s triumph over the revolt of evil [in] the form of the Last Judgment” (CCC 677). In the throes of his own tribulation, Fr. Franklin calls us to cling to the faith and those refuges of old:

The mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must throw all their weight.

Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. [35] For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in:

Matthew Chapter 25 Does the above sound like "by faith alone"? It looks more like it's about "faith and works", doesn't it?

That is a strawman of solafide, which does not teach than an inert faith is salvific, but only that which effects obedience by the Spirit. God purifies the heart by faith, and which faith is manifest in baptism and obedience, but the effect is not the cause of justification, as "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." (Romans 4:5)

Abraham was thus justified by faith (Gn. 15:6) before he went to offer up Issac, (Gn. 22) but which justified him as one having true faith, and in that sense works are necessary as fruit, "things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak," (Hebrews 6:9) though God sees the heart.

Those of a convicted broken (or pride) heart and contrite spirit needs only to believe on the Christ of the gospels to receive deliverance (Luke 8:50) and or forgiveness, (Jn. 3:26; 5:24; Acts 10:43) but since only effectual faith is salvific, promises of salvation are also made to those confess the Lord in word and in deed (Acts 2:38; Romans 10:9-10), who do the will of God by the Spirit (Hebrews 10:36; Romans 8:13,14) who obey, (Mark 16:16; Hebrews 5:9) for to do the latter (obedience) testifies to doing the former (effectual justifying faith in heart)

Likewise the Lord said in dealing with the palsied man, "Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?" (Mark 2:9) for to do the former was to do the latter.

But despite some extreme hyperbole to the contrary, and faults, in clear statements brave Luther himself rejected the idea that a faith which did not effect characteristic obedience was salvific, stating,

faith is a living and an essential thing, which makes a new creature of man, changes his spirit...
Faith cannot help doing good works constantly...
if faith be true, it will break forth and bear fruit...
where there is no faith there also can be no good works; and conversely, that there is no faith.. where there are no good works. Therefore faith and good works should be so closely joined together that the essence of the entire Christian life consists in both.
if obedience and God’s commandments do not dominate you, then the work is not right, but damnable, surely the devil’s own doings, although it were even so great a work as to raise the dead...
if you continue in pride and lewdness, in greed and anger, and yet talk much of faith, St. Paul will come and say, 1 Cor. 4:20, look here my dear Sir, "the kingdom of God is not in word but in power." It requires life and action, and is not brought about by mere talk.
Works are necessary for salvation, but they do not cause salvation...
faith casts itself on God, and breaks forth and becomes certain through its works...
faith must be exercised, worked and polished; be purified by fire...
it is impossible for him who believes in Christ, as a just Savior, not to love and to do good. If, however, he does not do good nor love, it is sure that faith is not present...
where the works are absent, there is also no Christ...
Christ is the priest, all men are spiritual lepers because of unbelief; but when we come to faith in him he touches us With his hand, gives and lays upon us his merit and we become clean and whole without any merit on our part whatever. We are therefore to show our gratitude to him and acknowledge that we have not become pious by our own works, but through his grace, then our course will be right before God...
For if your heart is in the state of faith that you know your God has revealed himself to you to be so good and merciful, without thy merit, and purely gratuitously, while you were still his enemy and a child of eternal wrath; if you believe this, you cannot refrain from showing yourself so to your neighbor; and do all out of love to God and for the welfare of your neighbor.

References by God's grace.

The people with Cornelius knew about Jesus but that doesn’t mean they yet believed in Him. While Peter preaches to them, they become convinced and the Holy Spirit descends on them. This is a second Pentecost and in one way is even greater than the first for it shows that the Gentiles are invited by Christ as well. And then they are baptized. And? At other times, people have faith and are baptized for some time and only later receive a greater gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:16-17). And?

You are correct that Cornelius was not yet saved before Peter preached to them and they believed. And what they believe was

To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins. (Acts 10:43)

That was it, and indeed they did believe, with God giving "them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us; And put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. (Acts 15:8-9)

The same gift promised to those in Acts 2:38 if they would repent and believe in the LJC was essentially promised to those in Acts 10:43 (not by works..by the "washing of regeneration": Titus 3:5)

However, there is no contradiction, and need to attribute a unique condition of heart to Cornelius and company if we understand both as a call to faith, this being what purifies the heart. Since real faith effects confession, and if one confesses the Lord Jesus from the heart then it means one believes, then the promises is made "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. (Acts 2:38)

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. (Romans 10:9-11)

It is only such faith that will confess the Lord Jesus, which baptism formally does, that is salvific, But since it is actually the faith behind the work that justifies, that appropriates the purifying their hearts, the "washing of regeneration," then the promise can be made, "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins." (Acts 10:43) And which was realized.

Such souls are washed, sanctified, and "justified justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." (1 Corinthians 6:11) And thus ojn Christ's account such are accepted in the Beloved and made to sit together with Him in Heaven, (Eph. 1:6; 2:6) which will be realized when they die in overcoming, saving faith, (Rv. 3:21) or at His return. (1Ths. 4:17)

However, it cannot be the confession that merits justification, since it is faith which is counted for righteousness, (Rm. 4:5) nor that the change that regeneration effects makes them good enough to be with God, unless simply being forgiven is enough and thus maintaining a sinless state, versus perfection of character also being required, which even Paul confessed he lacked, and strove to be in this life as much as a resurrected believer will be, which event he looked forward to as being what would finally deal with his "vile body," (Phil 3:8-21) though to be presently absent from the body was to be present with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:8; Phil 1:21-22)

As for Acts 8:16-17, I in the absence of more persuasion, I also hold to be reasonable what you conclude, that "At other times [though to be precise, this was the only time recorded], people have faith and are baptized for some time and only later receive a greater gift of the Holy Spirit .

Some posit that the apostles were required to lay hands on such, but the Ethiopian eunuch was baptized by deacon Phillip and went on his way joyfully without any.

Paul for his part believed enough to obey God/Christ (which he though he was doing before) but awaited further revelation before he was filled with the Spirit, which was provided thru "a certain disciple at Damascus," (Acts 9:10) "one Ananias, a devout man according to the law," who confirms Christ as being "that Just One" whom he was to serve, and instructs "be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord," (Acts 22:10-16) thus confessing the Lord.

Yet based on the two but supplementary accounts, before he was baptized Ananias "entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized. (Acts 9:17-18)

It is certain that God cannot be put in a box, but it is evident that baptism and conversion were normatively one event in Scripture, since faith in the heart and confession with the lips - and legs via baptism - go hands in hand, and one cannot claim to believe while not obeying.

Yet again, it is faith which appropriates justification with the purifying of the heart, faith being counted as righteousness, even before it is expressed in baptism, which countless examples of conversions with profound changes in heart and life via regeneration testify to, as with Cornelius and company, though the time of expression be the time when one effectually believes. That is my conclusion without any constraints over where the evidences leads to.

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