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.

I never mentioned "Kolbob" (whatever in the galaxy that is), and my quote does not contain the words what God "could do". Stop putting words in my mouth. That's dishonest.

No, it merely follows your argument, which was that since God showed grace in renting the veil in the temple then it allows for the possibility of God providing other channels for His Grace=PTCBIH. In short, since God could do it, then it supports Catholicism saying He did it.

Likewise, since God's grace abounds, and will seat overcomers in His throne, (Rv. 3:21) and He has all power in Heaven, then believers could inhabit other planets, one of which could be called Kolob, thus supporting Mormonic literature which teaches of it being "nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets..." (Abraham 3:1-9)

Mormons could argue there is nothing that would forbid this in Scripture, and while the whole thing is absurd, it illustrates what extrapolation out of your single principle (God has and can give more grace) might do. Other Catholic also extrapolate PTCBIH us being blessed with all spiritual blessings in heaven. (Eph. 1:3) Read into that what you need, despite the evidence (or lack thereof) to the contrary, or stop Catholics from putting words in Scripture's mouth. That's dishonest.

The problem is that you are accepting Sola Scriptura not only as axiomatic, but exclusive.

Oh I see: so after vainly appealing to Scripture yourself by being met with the incongruent utter absence of even one example of this most basic common practice, you must attack the premise that substantiation from Scripture is requires, and instead must do what I basically told you to do, just admit this is received by tradition from your fathers.

Yet my argument need not rest on SS, but on what is manifestly reasonable. For even it you do not hold to SS, yet seeing how much attention that the Holy Spirit of God gives to prayer, and even instruction on who to address, and how basic and common PTCBIH is for Catholics, which they imagine the NT church was, and how many beings were available to pray to, and occasions of need wherein it would be expected, and how much the NT relies upon Scriptural substantiation, then the utter absence among over 200 prayers of it is highly incongruous, and it is hardly reasonable to dismiss this with, "well, not everything is written down."

That is, apparently you think that "if it's necessary for salvation, it's in Scripture" implies that ONLY those things explicitly in Scripture have any validity;

That is not what i said or inferred, but argued for a manifest example in the light of this basic common practice for which there are multitudinous examples but none of PTCBIH. If someone wanted to argue that born again believers in the Bible could also communicate telepathically ("all spiritual blessings...) they would have the same problem is multitudes of examples of oral or written communication, but none of telepathy (outside of a rare vision from God). And this is not a matter of whether or not there will be pets in Heaven.

And thus i also argued at length from principle, of what we would expect from Hebrews in particular, and how instead it is Christ whom the believer is directed to as intercessor, and by whom the believer has immediate direct access with boldness into the holy of holies by Him. In addition, unlike a doctrine like the Trinity which is supported by clear statements as well as what is implied and demanded in the face of otherwise contradictions, there is no need for belief in PTCBIH, besides the lack of explicit or actual implied references to PTCBIH.

it then *appears* (from what you write) that you think 1) if someone denies Sola Scriptura, they must be open to any and all outside-of-Scripture ideas

No, but your argument based on God giving more grace does not help. Yet the reality is that writing is God's chosen most-reliable means of preservation. ( Exodus 17:14; 34:1,27; Deuteronomy 10:4; 17:18; 27:3; 31:24; Joshua 1:8; 2 Chronicles 34:15,18-19; Psalm 19:7-11; 119; John 20:31; Acts 17:11; Revelation 1:1; 20:12, 15; Matthew 4:5-7; 22:29; Luke 24:44,45; Acts 17:11)

And as abundantly evidenced , as written, Scripture became the transcendent supreme standard for obedience and testing and establishing truth claims as the wholly Divinely inspired and assured, Word of God. Thus the veracity of oral preaching subject to testing by Scripture, and not vice versa. It was not because oral tradition preserved the Word of God that brought about a national revival, but because of the wholly inspired-of-God written word:

2 Chronicles 34:30-31) And thus even the veracity of apostolic preaching was subject to examination by Scripture as supreme, unlike Rome presumes.

2) They believe all these things are "supposed" to be given equal weight with Scripture.

No, I argued to the contrary, that a most basic common practice for which there is abundant examples would expect to have at least one of the kind of basic common practice Catholics engage in. This is not like arguing if a form of cannibalism can ever be allowed.

I find it singularly difficult to decry anything about this image, or the accompanying explanation, as heretical, or leading people away from salvation.

Saying something is expressly the words of Christ as a public revelation need not be heretical in what is says in order to be wrong, while the kind of promises given to ongoing veneration of a painting is contrary to what Scripture says and shows, in which victory is not by looking at what is seen, though illustrations van be helpful, but by faith in what is not seen. (2 Corinthians 4:6,18; Heb. 12:2) ) Moreover, this private but public revelation" is not that of a officially sanctioned pervasive Catholic practice. .

Let’s examine your errors one at a time.

“It’s got nothing to do with numbers.”

Clearly it does have something to do with numbers since: 1) the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 (and again in Deuteronomy 5:4-20) are NOT enumerated, but elsewhere we are told there are TEN and we know that not all of them begin with “Thou shall not” so that doesn’t help us in the enumeration of them as ten distinct laws. It does not bode well that your first sentence is your first error.

“Catholics love them so graven images.”

And Lutherans too? I mean since they use the same numbering as Catholics that would have to be the case wouldn’t it? Or, more likely, you’re simply wrong. After all the Eastern Orthodox WHO VENERATE IMAGES ALL THE TIME have the same numbering you do and not the same one Catholics have. That pretty much shoots you’re obviously biased reasoning all to hell now doesn’t it? Thus, we see that the only thing that could have led to your second sentence is an error in reasoning on your part.

“So it was either give up the graven images or drop the commandment. They dropped commandment.”

But they didn’t. It’s right there in the Catechism of the Catholic Church right after paragraph 2051. Here, I’ll include a link to it and this will demonstrably prove you wrong - which was inevitable of course: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm

“As for the Information Age, it works in my favor, not yours, since anyone with eyes can see:”

Well, no one with the ability to reason will see it that way since all you’re doing is cutting and pasting from an anti-Catholic webpage that posts the same falsehoods you do:

“The Roman Catholic revision is obvious: The Vatican eliminates the second commandment against idolatry, and subdivides the tenth commandment against covetousness in order to keep the number of commandments at ten.”

Here’s the anti-Catholic webpage you refused to link to. Perhaps you wanted to hide something? http://www.teachingtheword.org/apps/articles/web/articleid/64839/columnid/5444/default.asp

Now, let’s look at the errors of what you cut and pasted without attribution:

Except it’s ALL right here in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm So, why would they lie when it is so obvious that it is a lie? And remember, it was St. Augustine, NOT THE VATICAN, that first numbered them as we have them now. So why does your anti-Catholic webpage say it was the “Vatican”???

It’s the Information Age. You can try to hide sources, but they can be found.

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