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.

“The Roman rite and the Eastern Orthodox disagree over some basics of the faith as well.”

Yes, but members of the Roman Rite do not claim to be Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox do not claim to be members of the Roman Rite. Protestants are Protestants. And those Protestants almost universally claim to be sola scriptura followers yet they sometimes disagree on very basic things. If you’re honest, you’ll admit that what usually happens on FR is that there will be one of two results: 1) Protestants will clash with one another, 2) if there is a Catholic involved the Protestants will claim the glaring difference between Protestants is actually not an important matter of the faith after all. How is that logically consistent?

“And both claim to be Catholicism in it’s original form with the other group being schismatic.”

Well, most Catholics and even many Eastern Orthodox will not say that the other is “schismatic” today. After all they are following their designated bishops. I understand what you’re saying, however, I don’t think your analogy works. Any logical person could see how Churches separated since 1054 - who had issues between them dating back centuries before that - could develop different views. But why is it so quick to happen among Protestants - especially when they claim to be sola scriptura people (in other words, they’re using the same source for final authority)?

A town I lived in some years ago had two Presbyterian churches. One of them was large and traditional and the other was a different denomination and liberal. The larger traditional one ended up in some sort of theological spat with in itself. A group broke off and they named their new church after the main issue of the theological spat (although they also still call themselves Presbyterians). All of this happened almost over night when you speak in terms of the long history of the Church. That’s the Protestant way. It’s not “Reformed and Still Reforming”, it’s “Fragmenting and Still Fragmenting”.

“So which one is right and why?”

I don’t believe for a single second that you believe either one is right or that either one could be right. The logical problem with that belief on your part is that Protestantism can’t possibly be right since Christ didn’t found it and a German monk did only 500 years ago.

“Your criticism of Prots disagreeing as making anything they believe invalid falls flat in light of Catholicism and its many flavors.”

No, my “criticism” of Protestants “disagreeing” stands and always will - precisely because their disagreeing shows the utter logical hopelessness of sola scriptura.

“For that matter, we can’t even get all the Catholics within the Roman rite to agree on whether Francis is a legitimate pope.”

He is a legitimate pope. You don’t have to get people to agree to it. He is one whether they agree or not. And I don’t even agree with Pope Francis on many of the things he says or does - but he is the legitimate pope. Truth cannot be merely subjective.

“And according to previous popes and Unum Sanctum, that’s pretty basic.”

It sure is. And that’s the point. But the vast majority of Catholics - and ALL of the Catholic hierarchy recognize the pope as legitimate. Case closed. But popes die. There will be a new one in a few years. A much more grave situation is when you can’t get Protestant denominations to agree on what happens in Baptism. 1) Baptism is a PERENNIAL thing. It’s been practiced for 2,000 years. No pope will hold the office for more than 30 or so years EVER. Popes come and go. Baptism stays. It matters much more what people think about Baptism then whether or not they like or dislike a particular pope! 2) If something happens in Baptism it has eternal significance. No particular pope’s popularity does. If something happens in Baptism it could effect or affect me forever and if I don’t receive it, it could affect or effect me forever. The popularity of a particular pope - or even the legitimacy of one - effects and affects me not in the least in terms of my eternal destiny. This was shown rather clearly in the Great Schism of the West 600 years ago. That’s the difference.

“No Vlad, I was making a joke.”

Yes, you were mocking a book of the Bible as a condiment. I know. I never said you were not making a joke about the Bible. I know you were. That’s the point.

“I understand you do not do humor.”

I do not mock the Bible. You do. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a sense of humor. I just don’t mock the Bible. You do.

“Others understood immediately.”

Other anti-Catholics shared in your mocking of the Bible. Yes, I understand. Why would they act any differently than you? Why would they not mock the Bible as you did? That’s exactly the kind of behavior I expect from your set.

“In the end, it was funnier because of your lack of humor and the shared experience with others. I can be thankful for that.”

Sure, you can be thankful that I did not participate in your mocking of the Bible while other anti-Catholics did. Yes, thankful. That’s what you’re thankful for - mocking the Bible.

“Sirach isn’t inspired Scripture.”

Actually, it is. Only Protestants - and not even all of them - believe otherwise.

“Consequently not part of the canon.”

No, it’s most definitely part of the canon - in East and West. Latter-day newcomers like Protestants don’t get to create new canons.

“Consequently, I will put it on foods that need a kick.”

Keep mocking God’s Word. Your reward will be your own.

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