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.

>>“Your post illustrates why I came up with the Rules.”<,

Your post illustrates that you will not address any of the points made. You really can’t. You didn’t read post #430 did you? You really didn’t know that aMorePerfectUnion was mocking a book of the Bible by calling it “Siracha sauce”, right?

I've dealt with the primary issue which is why the RCC when they are teaching new Catholics the Ten Commandments, or discussing the Ten Commandments, deletes the prohibition on idols and serving them or bowing before them in their Traditional Catechetical Formula.

I think if Roman Catholics really read and understood all of Exodus 20 they would see their idolatry involving Mary, their pledges of devoting all of themselves to her without reservation, bowing before the idols of her, etc, violates the Commandment to Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, mind and body.

It also violates this from Exodus:

4“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. 5“You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. Exodus 20:4-6 NASB

Roman Catholics both worship and serve Mary by their actions. They may not admit it but Christians recognize the Roman Catholic actions as being against Scripture.

Consecration to Mary

Greatest Commandment from the Bible

My Queen and my Mother,

I give myself entirely to you;

and to show my devotion to you, I consecrate to you this day my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart,

my whole being without reserve. Wherefore, good Mother, as I am your own, keep me, guard me, as your property and possession. Amen.

37And He said to him,

“ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART,

AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL,

AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’

38“This is the great and foremost commandment.

Matthew 22:37-28 NASB

The Greatest Commandment leaves no room for what Roman Catholicism teaches regarding "devotion" to Mary.

Further, the NT is clear it is God Who keeps us and that is Who we are to make our appeal to and place our trust in.

31What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? 33Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; 34who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. 35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36Just as it is written, “FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.” 37But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:31-39 NASB

Paul makes no allowance for Mary in this.

The rest of the debate is meaningless as that is the primary issue at hand.

If however, as you will undoubtedly claim you do not worship Mary, will you:

throw away your "statues" of Mary?

cease to kneel before any statue of Mary and pray to the image it represents?

cease praying to Mary and direct your prayers to God alone as noted in the New Testament?

Unless the Roman Catholic is willing to answer in the affirmative the only conclusion that may be drawn is they wish to continue in their worship of Mary in defiance of what is revealed in Scripture.

That said, there is no verse that is a blank check, that can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Do you know of the logical fallacy "law of the excluded middle" ?

This hinges on the definition of Sola Scriptura as far as I can tell.

If you take it to mean, "All doctrines {intrinsically} necessary to achieve Salvation are set forth in Scripture" I don't off the top of my head have major quibbles with that.

If you take it to mean, "All practices or actions which help towards Salvation, or to maintain and nurture one's faith in Christ, must have been ALREADY PRACTICED in Scripture, or they're a bunch of hooey" then I disagree.

As far as I can tell from reading the thread, the idea of Sola Scriptura seems to be to act as a safeguard against certain errors or license, or idolatry: but the problem in practice, is that there seems to be a large share of Sola proponents, who automatically assume that any practice not in scripture, automatically gets mapped onto a list of probable sins or errors, and condemned.

An example might be statues of the Saints: many of them were created as an exhortation to holiness, and an example to follow, in a time and place where most people were illiterate, and so art was a useful way to reach the lowest common denominator: thereby extending the Good News beyond the upper crusts and the lettered.

Another way to consider it, you know, might be the same way people cheer on Tom Brady: but with fandom applied to righteousness rather than throwing a pigskin. And the encouragement of those who gave their lives to God (in service as well as martyrdom) sounds to me like a vastly superior society than one given to selling beer and cheap women.

May I suggest that, for practices, one looks to see whether they point to Christ, to glorify Him, even if indirectly ("Be followers of me, even as I am of Christ" as Paul wrote); or if they feed worldliness, or contention within Christianity.

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