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 derivation from Genesis 2:16 is correct. But it is not the only one:

Five of the Noahide Commandments are explicitly found in different verses in the Book of Genesis, and one is found in Leviticus. The remaining one (and in fact all them) can be inferred from a single verse in Genesis.

1. Do Not Worship a False Deity
Genesis 2:16 states: “And L-rd G-d commanded to the man, saying…” This Divine command to Adam implies that only the One True G-d, the Creator of the spiritual and physical realms, should be obeyed and honored as the Deity, and the greatest honor is to serve and worship Him. Thus, one should serve and worship only the One True G-d, and not any idol.

2. Do Not Commit Blasphemy
Leviticus 24:10-17 relates the incident of a Jew who violated the injunction of Exodus 22:27 and blasphemed in anger. Moreover, it states in Leviticus 24:15, “ish ish” (any man) who curses his G-d shall bear his sin.” Why the double expression of “ish ish” (literally: “a man, a man”)? To include all mankind, Jews and Gentiles. This demonstrates that blasphemy thus is prohibited to Gentiles even as it is for Jews.

3. Do Not Commit Murder or Injury
The edict against murder, and the punishment for this transgression, is stated in Genesis 9:5-6: “…of man for his brother, I [G-d] will demand the soul of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, among man, his blood shall be shed; for in the image of G-d He made man.”

4. Do Not Have Forbidden Sexual Relations
Five of the six types of relations that are forbidden by G-d to Gentiles are covered in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” This verse explicitly forbids relations with one’s mother, with a woman who has ever been his father’s domestic partner or certified wife, with a woman who is currently a domestic partner or certified wife of another man, with another male, or with an animal. A Gentile is also forbidden to have relations with his maternal sister, which is learned from Gen. 20:13: “Moreover, she is indeed my sister, my father’s daughter, though not my mother’s daughter; and she became my wife.” (Note that Abraham said this to appease Abimelech. It was actually only figuratively true in his case, since Sarah was the daughter of Abraham’s brother. So they had the same paternal grandfather, who people often referred to as “father.”)
It also was universally accepted that father-daughter relations would be included, as evidenced by the disgrace of Lot after he had relations with his two daughters, following G-d’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:29-36, and Rashi’s explanation of Gen. 20:1). Relations of a female with a female are likewise an abomination to G-d which is included as one of the subjects of the verse Lev. 18:3, which speaks against the immoral practices of the ancient Egyptians and Canaanites, and which Lev.18:30 refers to as “abominable traditions.” About these, the Midrash (Sifra) specifies: “A man would marry a man, a woman would marry a woman, and a woman would be married to two men.”

5. Do Not Commit Theft
The prohibition of theft is contained within the permission which G-d granted to Adam and Hava (Eve) in Genesis 2:16 to eat from the trees of the garden. This implies that if the permission had not been granted, they would have been forbidden to do so, because the property did not belong to them. This applied specifically to the fruit of the Tree of “Knowledge of Good and Evil” which was forbidden for them to take, under penalty of death (Genesis 2:17). This Noahide commandment was cited explicitly by Abraham in Genesis 21:25.

6. Don’t Eat Meat that was Taken from a Live Animal
Adam and Hava (Eve) were not given permission to kill animals for food, and this remained in effect until after the Flood. G-d permitted the eating of meat for the first time to Noah and his family after they left the Ark, which is why G-d at that time added the seventh commandment, which prohibits the eating of meat that was severed from a living animal (even if it was stunned and insensitive). This commandment given to Noah is recorded in Genesis 9:4: “But meat, with its soul [which is in] its blood you shall not eat.”

7. Establish Laws and Courts of Justice
G-d commanded Noah regarding the trial and punishment of a murderer, as it says in Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, among man, his blood shall be shed…” This refers to a Noahide commandment to judge and penalize a murderer.This is explained as follows by the Talmudic Sages: “Whoever sheds the blood of man” (referring to the murderer), “among man” (i.e., he is to be prosecuted in a court by a man who is qualified to testify as a witness), “his blood shall be shed” (if convicted, he is liable to capital punishment by the court). The Noahide Code specifies that Gentile societies are obligated to abide by justice through establishing a system of righteous courts of law.

https://asknoah.org/7-commandments/locate-sources

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