Protestantism, Modernism, Atheism

Crisis Magazine ^ | November 28, 2017 | Julia Meloni

[ebb tide]

“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.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

placemarker

[boatbums]

1 Corinth 1514 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Paul, the other Apostles and hundreds of believers who saw the risen Christ willingly died as martyrs than deny what they had seen with their own eyes. People will die for a lie (Islamic suicide bombers) but NO ONE would die for something they knew was a lie!

[boatbums]

Those of us not humor “challenged” understood the pun. ;o)

[vladimir998]

“There is a difference in what the Catholic Church uses as the Ten Commandments and what the protestant churches use. In the Catholic Church they are as follows:http://www.catholicbible101.com/thetencommandments.htm";

False. http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm What I posted (again) is a link to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It details the Ten Commandments as they appear in Exodus and Deuteronomy and in the Traditional Catechetical Formula. What is the Formula for? Ease of memorization. To say anything like you have is simply dishonest.

I should point out also - because the chances of you knowing this are almost zero because it would take some study and reading - that The Catechism of the Council of Trent which was written 400 years become the CCC says this in the section on the First Commandment: “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth: thou shalt not adore them nor serve them.”

And then:

“Some, supposing these words which come next in order to constitute a distinct precept, reduce the ninth and tenth Commandments to one. St. Augustine, on the contrary, considering the last two to be distinct Commandments, makes the words just quoted a part of the first Commandment. His division is much approved in the Church, and hence we willingly adopt it. Furthermore, a very good reason for this arrangement at once suggests itself. It was fitting that to the first Commandment should be added the rewards or punishments entailed by each one of the Commandments.”

And then it goes on to say:

“Let no one think that this Commandment entirely forbids the arts of painting, engraving or sculpture. The Scriptures inform us that God Himself commanded to be made images of Cherubim, and also the brazen serpent. The interpretation, therefore, at which we must arrive, is that images are prohibited only inasmuch as they are used as deities to receive adoration, and so to injure the true worship of God.

“As far as this Commandment is concerned, it is clear that there are two chief ways in which God’s majesty can be seriously outraged. The first way is by worshipping idols and images as God, or believing that they possess any divinity or virtue entitling them to our worship, by praying to, or reposing confidence in them, as the Gentiles did, who placed their hopes in idols, and whose idolatry the Scriptures frequently condemn. The other way is by attempting to form a representation of the Deity, as if He were visible to mortal eyes, or could be reproduced by colours or figures. Who, says Damascene, can represent God, invisible, as He is, incorporeal, uncircumscribed by limits, and incapable of being reproduced under any shape. This subject is treated more at large in the second Council of Nice. Rightly, then, did the Apostles say (of the Gentiles): They changed the glory of the incorruptible God into a likeness of birds, and of four­footed beasts, and of creeping things; for they worshipped all these things as God, seeing that they made the images of these things to represent Him. Hence the Israelites, when they exclaimed before the image of the calf: These are thy gods, Israel, that have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, are denounced as idolaters, because they changed their glory into the likeness of a calf that eateth grass.

“When, therefore, the Lord had forbidden the worship of strange gods, He also forbade the making of an image of the Deity from brass or other materials, in order thus utterly to do away with idolatry. It is this that Isaias declares when he asks: To whom then have you likened God, or what image will you make for hill? That this is the meaning of the prohibition contained in the Commandment is proved, not only from the writings of the holy Fathers, who, as may be seen in the seventh General Council, give to it this interpretation: but is also clearly declared in these words of Deuteronomy, by which Moses sought to withdraw the people from the worship of idols: You saw not, he says, any similitude in the day that the Lord spoke to you in Horeb, from the midst of the fire. These words this wisest of legislators spoke, lest through error of any sort, they should make an image of the Deity, and transfer to any thing created, the honour due to God.

“To represent the Persons of the Holy Trinity by certain forms under which they appeared in the Old and New Testaments no one should deem contrary to religion or the law of God. For who can be so ignorant as to believe that such forms are representations of the Deity? ­­ forms, as the pastor should teach, which only express some attribute or action ascribed to God. Thus when from the description of Daniel God is painted as the Ancient of days, seated on a throne, with the books opened before hint, the eternity of God is represented and also the infinite wisdom, by which He sees and judges all the thoughts and actions of men.’

“Angels, also, are represented under human form and with wings to give us to understand that they are actuated by benevolent feelings towards mankind, and are always prepared to execute the Lord’s commands; for they are all ministering spirits, sent to minister for them who shall receive the inheritance of salvation.

“What attributes of the Holy Ghost are represented under the forms of a dove, and of tongues of fire, in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, is a matter too well known to require lengthy explanation.”

In other words, it says what I said. in earlier posts.

“It is why Christianity rejects Roman Catholicism’s Tradition as it often contradicts Scripture and is based upon contradictory opinions of the ECFs.”

Christianity is Catholicism and Catholicism is Christianity. Thus, what you said is a logical and theological impossibility.

“I guess the two websites I posted aren’t to be trusted then by Roman Catholics??”

Not when you’re the one presenting from them certainly not. One site you posted from was www.catholicbible101.com and even you, yourself, admitted: “In fairness, the website does publish the entire passage from Exodus.”

Here it is and it shows both the Traditional Catechetical Formula and the full wording right from Exodus: http://www.catholicbible101.com/thetencommandments.htm So the website can be trusted but you can’t be.

You also cited http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm - and their electronic version of the CCC shows all three forms of the Ten Commandments - just as I linked to a while ago. So it can be trusted and you can’t be.

You also cited Beginningcatholic.com. Look closely at the name: BEGINNING Catholic. BEGINNING. Not surprisingly they give the simple to memorize Traditional Catechetical Formula. And at the end of the article they have this: “The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a detailed description of the Catholic Ten Commandments. Read it!” And the link is to...http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm

So the website can be trusted and you can’t be.

Same here: https://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/ten_commandments.htm

It can be trusted. You can’t be.

Even a reporter can get it right. You apparently can’t. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/apologetics/catholic-doctrines-and-practices/graven-images-altering-the-commandments

The “RadTrads” can get it right. And you apparently can’t. https://www.fisheaters.com/10commandments.html

Apologists get it right, but apparently you can’t: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2016/12/ten-commandments-changed-catholics-uphold-alleged-idolatry.html

A former Baptist gets it right, but you apparently can’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l9NQSV8CzM

And the beat goes on. No matter how much evidence is posted the chances you will come to believe the truth is just about zero.

[boatbums]

It is forbidden by Torah Law to write holy names for no reason. One who pronounces the Explicit Name will be uprooted from the world. HaShem literally means “The Name.” It is an acceptable way of referring to G-d without violating the prohibition of blasphemy.

Yet the Lord God spoke to Moses and told him what His name was:

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’


“This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation. (Exodus 3:13-15)

Was Moses and anyone else who called upon the name of the Lord "uprooted from the world"???

[aMorePerfectUnion]

.

[ealgeone]

>>“There is a difference in what the Catholic Church uses as the Ten Commandments and what the protestant churches use. In the Catholic Church they are as follows:http://www.catholicbible101.com/thetencommandments.htm";<<

False. http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/command.htm What I posted (again) is a link to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It details the Ten Commandments as they appear in Exodus and Deuteronomy and in the Traditional Catechetical Formula. What is the Formula for? Ease of memorization. To say anything like you have is simply dishonest.

You do realize that statement is from their website....they wrote it...Roman Catholics. I copied it word for word. I did not write that.

Let's see....Vlad's Rule of Internet Debate #6 applies...He will ignore his errors when pointed out to him and dismiss them...even when confronted with them.

I should point out also - because the chances of you knowing this are almost zero because it would take some study and reading - that The Catechism of the Council of Trent which was written 400 years become the CCC says this in the section on the First Commandment:

Wow...you jumped amoreperfectunion for an alleged spelling error (which was spelled correctly) and you make this blunder??

Vlad's Rules of Internet Debate #6 applies...again.

Vlad's Rules of Internet Debate #2 apply.

Also....Vlad's Rules of Internet Debate #1...always use ad hominem attacks

And lastly...Vlad's Rule of Internet Debate #15 applies...any spelling or grammatical errors renders the remainder of the post null and void.

[vladimir998]

” I did not write that.”

What you did just before this last post was say: “I guess the two websites I posted aren’t to be trusted then by Roman Catholics??”

And then I showed that the websites you linked to - all of them - showed exactly what the commandment text in question says in full in Exodus and in the Traditional Catechetical Formula or, as was true in one case, linked to the CCC which shows the full wording from Exodus and Deuteronomy as well as the Traditional Catechetical Formula.

Thus, all the websites you linked to could be trusted. And you can’t be.

So what did you do next? You wrote, “You do realize that statement is from their website....they wrote it...Roman Catholics. I copied it word for word. I did not write that.”

It doesn’t matter who wrote it. It is still false. There is no real difference between how Exodus 20 reads in a Catholic Bible (and in the CCC and in the Catechism of Trent) and how it reads in a Protestant Bible. The difference is not in the Ten Commandments. The difference only appears only in the Traditional Catechetical Formula which was a summary made for easy memorization.

I made no error whatsoever.

“Wow...you jumped amoreperfectunion for an alleged spelling error (which was spelled correctly) and you make this blunder??”

Sirach. That is the correct spelling.

Sriracha. That is the correct spelling.

“amoreperfectunion” - which is spelled correctly as aMorePerfectUnion by the way - used neither correct spelling.

You can’t seem to get anything right. With you it’s just one error after another.

[editor-surveyor]

.
The inherited lies have nothing to do with our Savior; they are the “creeds,” Sunday Sabbath, and the rest of the “mystery of Iniquity” that Paul bemoaned.
.

[ealgeone]

It doesn’t matter who wrote it. It is still false. There is no real difference between how Exodus 20 reads in a Catholic Bible (and in the CCC and in the Catechism of Trent) and how it reads in a Protestant Bible. The difference is not in the Ten Commandments. The difference only appears only in the Traditional Catechetical Formula which was a summary made for easy memorization.

Uh...yes, it does matter who wrote it. Your issue is with the owners of the website. Take it up with them.

You're compounding your growing list of errors on this thread.

You insinuated in your prior post that I had written the words that were from the website in question.

If that was not your intent then I apologize. However, with you it fits your style.

I never denied catholicbible101.com did not publish the entirety of the verses in Exodus. In fact I made it clear I was trying to be fair and not mis-represent what the website said....because some arrogant Roman Catholic would immediately post the rest and claim I was trying to misrepresent the website. Yet somehow you glossed over that admission.

That's what you do vlad(hey notice the spelling!)...you take things out of context in a futile attempt to show someone up. When you do you don't realize how petty you look doing so. Hence Vlad's Rules for Internet Debate #5...omit what others have posted or twist it in an attempt to show them wrong and #4.

Beginningcatholic.com does have the link to the Catechism...never said it didn't.

What those two sites do though is list what they are saying are the Ten Commandments. To the uninitiated they might read just those and stop there. That's the problem. What they have in their list of the 10 Commandments misrepresents the Ten Commandments in that it leaves out the one about not having idols nor serving or worshiping them.

That's the real issue that Rome wants to avoid due to the idols of Mary ya'll have and bow before and serve.

So again...the question remains...which you've yet to answer...Are they taught the full verses...or just the Formula?

“amoreperfectunion” - which is spelled correctly as aMorePerfectUnion by the way - used neither correct spelling.

I don't think he will be "triggered" by it like you are some things.

Some posters call me E1 in their posts. Big deal. I call you vlad. Big deal. It's not a misspelling.

Wow....Rule #4 dwell in the minors trying to make a point.

Regarding the spelling of the sauce in question.

AMPU (hey notice the spelling)>>: “I love the Siracha sauce Vlad! Good recommendation.”<<

You mean Sriracha sauce. You couldn’t even get that right. Par for the course.

See how you are? AMPU (spelling!) throws you a nice comment and you act like the south end of a north bound mule...hence Vlad's Rule of Internet Debate #1...always use ad hominem attacks.

Yet you persist in your error.

Sirach. That is the correct spelling.

Sriracha. That is the correct spelling.

It can sometimes also be spelled Siracha...just as AMPU (spelling!) did. You can go look it up.

Vlad's Rules of Internet Debate #6…He will ignore his errors when pointed out to him and dismiss them...even when confronted with them.

[Mark17]

You might want to back off on that a bit. Mary is the Mother of Jesus. And if He has in fact allowed her to be a channel of Grace, exhorting and calling to repentance...

My opinion bro. God didn’t allow Mary, Or ANYONE, to channel ANYTHING. Acts 4:12. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. If God could have figured out a way to give us saving grace, without sacrificing His only begotten son, He would have done so.
We all sit here, behind our keyboards (or my IPhone) and we cannot even begin to comprehend what grace cost God. It was a horror of horrors, to sacrifice His son. Since God cannot simply do “anything” His justice has to be satisfied. He cannot violate the eternal principles He has laid down, so He can’t just DO anything. The only way His justice could be satisfied, was through the death of Jesus. There simply was no other way. He doesn’t channel graces any other way. Not now, not ever.
GW, if you want to think He does, you have that privilege. I just do not accept it.

[Mark17]

Great analogy bro, for the “God can do anything” crowd. He clearly can’t.

[Mark17]

I do agree with that statement, however.

[Mark17]

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

LOL. True BB. Fence sitting is not allowed. People are ether saved or lost. There is NO middle ground.
I recall telling my parents the same thing. They just said, we think we can go to Limbo.
Speaking of Limbo, on these threads, I never hear about it. Did the Catholic Church will it out of existence? If they did, what happened to my parents? 😩 I heard someone mention the limbo of the Elders, or something like that, but I had never heard that term before.

[Arthur McGowan]

Amazing they can put this together but not in the “2000 year” existence of their denomination have they bothered to put together a verse by verse exegetical position on the verses of the very book they claim to have given us.

You are contradicting yourself here. You constantly bash the Catholic Church for dictating to Catholics how they must interpret Scripture--allowing no freedom of thought or freedom of interpretation.

NOW you are admitting that the Catholic Church does NOT, and NEVER HAS, dictated to Catholics an official, binding interpretation of every verse of Scripture. In other words, Catholics are free to interpret practically all verses in Scripture according to their learning and intelligence.

So, you are now bashing the Catholic Church for NOT doing the thing you routinely bash the Church for doing.

To my knowledge, the only verse in the Gospels which the Church has DEFINED as having a certain meaning (i.e., it is the institution by Christ of the Sacrament of Penance), is in John, where Jesus tells the Apostles that he is giving them the power to forgive sins, and the power to JUDGE whether or not to forgive sins.

(No one has ever explained how Jesus expected the Apostles to make these judgments if people were not going to CONFESS their sins.)

[Arthur McGowan]

Wow. Fifty-three posts (so far) about an article in a Catholic magazine.

What makes you so obsessively malicious against a religion you don’t even believe in? Millions of Protestants get through life without neurotic obsessions about Catholicism.

[Elsie]

It is forbidden by Torah Law to write holy names for no reason.

And common logic; too.

---

Remember; GOD told Adam not to eat of the forbidden fruit.

When Eve talked to the serpent; she added 'not to touch it'. (She also seemed to know that it was in the 'middle' of the garden as well)

I've always wondered from where that originated; Adam or herself.

[Elsie]

But despite Mormonic faith, the Book of Abraham is dismissed as fake.

 

What?!

 

It just CANNOT be!!

 

Why; it's in EVERY Quad that gets printed!!!

--Mormon_Wannabe_Dude(I know the church is true...)

[Elsie]

Of course, the apostles did not have the New Testament.

True.

All of it anyway; for they were in the process of writing it.

---

When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.
Say to Archippus, “Take heed to the ministry which you have received in the Lord, that you may fulfill it.”.

Colossians 4:16-18 NASB

[Elsie]

Seems to work both ways...