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.

You make a complete case, given your premises; that is, of Sola Scriptura.

That's refreshing, considering the source!

That is one of several biggie differences between the Catholics and the Protties. Part of this difference is that the Catholics all along insisted on hewing to the teachings and history of the Church; the Protestants, as far as I can tell, jumped ship so hard over indulgences, that they decided it was less risky to throw out ALL traditions and reports of visions or visitations, and much of the accrued practices and devotional artwork, in addition to the formalism and (for a time) administrative overhead.

No: instead the reason they reacted against indulgences was due to the regard of Scripture as supreme. Thus why should not they ascertain the validity of what is preached by that source, as noble truth-loving Bereans did? And seeing as Catholic distinctives are not manifest in the only wholly inspired substantive record of what the NT church believed, then the only inconsistency is that they kept some of the Catholic errors, including the use of the sword of men to deal with theological errors.

Now if you want to equate Cath oral tradition with that of apostolic preaching, then you need to do what they could do, which is to speak as wholly inspired of God and provide new public revelation thereby, neither which even Rome presumes pope do.

If you want to argue that oral transmission can be the word of God, then the question becomes on what basis do we know this. We know something like it was Jannes and Jambres who withstood Moses (2 Timothy 3:8) but its inclusion in Scripture, but how do we know what Scripture consists of, and means, andalso that something not recorded therein is the word of God?

And even if want to argue that an assuredly (if conditionally) infallible magisterium is essential for determination and assurance of Truth. And that being the historical instruments and stewards of Divine revelation (oral and written) means that Rome is that assuredly infallible magisterium. Thus whatever she officially teaches is the word of God, then do so, so we might see where this leads.

But at least you seem to be doing what i have advised Caths to do, which is give up trying to make a case for PTCBIH based on Scripture, since it has become an argument against them, and admit (implicitly or not) it comes from to tradition

However, considering that we are not dealing with something like an event like the Assumption (which actually lacks evidence from early tradition) or some marginal issue, but a most basic common spiritual practice, to argue for PTCBIH by believers, esp. the NT church, despite the utter absence of any prayer in Scripture among over 200 addressed to anyone else in Heaven but the Lord, actually impugns that source. If it will not even attest to this then it opens up the door for many other aberrations

No, just a long-bedraggled thread. Whence, btw, the doctrine that those in Heaven cannot even hear anything down on Earth?

Hear prayer or know what is going on? Only God is shown or described as able to hear from Heaven all prayer, while from what i recall the only 2-way communication btwn created beings from their respective realms required both to somehow be in the same location together.

That they cannot know of anything down on Earth cannot be denied with certainty, nor taught as certain. The only inferences we have of the elect in glory (and there is only one place for them after death: Lk. 23:43 [cf. 2Cor. 12:4; Rv. 2:7]; Phil 1:23; 2Cor. 5:8 [“we”]; Heb, 12:22,23; 1Cor. 15:51ff; 1Thess. 4:17) knowing anything down on Earth is "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us." (Hebrews 12:1) This is the best text, though the witnesses can refers to testimonies to faith, and with being surrounded by them not being to literal (a heap as well as an altar were said to be witnesses in Genesis 31:44 and Joshua 22:27)

Then we have Moses and Elijah discussing the Lord's impended death, but which was prophesied. And rather than hearing or seeing what is going on, they could have been briefed by the Lord, and or by believers who just arrived in glory.

Then we have the martyred souls under the altar in Heaven asking the Lord how long before their blood would be avenged, which infers they know hoe events are unfolding but which they could know by martyred souls who just arrived in glory.

However, even if they had information (maybe watching the 700 club!), this is not the same thing as able to innumerable hear mental prayer . And even if they did, and even interceded, this simply does not mean believers are to prayer to them. The Holy Spirit of God only and often directs believers to look to and prayer to God/Christ, to whom they have direct access in the holy of holies by the sinless shed blood of the Lord Jesus.

" the prayers if a righteous man availeth much" (see also Ezekiel 14:14 "...even if these three stood before Me...")

Both of which are in the context of those on earth.

I'm too tired to delve into this as deep as it seems to require.

0) First, as to the Bereans: this was in Pauline times, and "the Scriptures" meant in his case, the Hebrew Scriptures, there are other verses about how he proved from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. This was closer to apologetics, and is not exactly the same thing as justifying a practice or not, depending on whether it is practiced or was recorded in Scripture (see below). But I'll just throw out a couple of tidbits which seem to be useful in, as it were, parsing reports of "apparitions" (*) defined by my for the purposes of this discussion, as, dreams or visions purporting to be an angel, a Saint, or Mary.

You are right, there are aberrations: but in all fairness, there have *always* been aberrations, going all the way back to Aaron and the Golden Calf. And I'm not going to take the cheap shot of going after any number of Protestant aberrations...explicitly because there are Biblical admonitions (commands, really) to seek how to spur one another on to love and good works, that the servant of the Lord must not strive, and that one should welcome one whose faith is weak, but not for disputation (the cool part about that verse, is that the more someone thinks "but I'm *RIGHT* drat it all" the more they are constrained to be patient; and, it applies to Catholics, and Protties, and Orthodox, too...

1) The Catholics seem to take a rather skeptical view *officially*, often saying, if the believer finds private edification, OK, but we do not officially recognize nor compel acceptance.

This is the "see below." The usefulness of Scripture is that it gives benchmarks for testing to see whether things are genuinely of God, and protecting against aberrations.

2) "The testimony of Jesus Christ is the spirit of prophecy" -- the visions (unless explicitly personal e.g. "rise, Peter, kill and eat" or "come to Macedonia and help us") should glorify God and point (even if indirectly through a saint) to Jesus (well, and / or the Father: the Spirit seems to direct our attention to Them, not Himself).

3) "Believe not every spirit etc. / every Spirit which confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" -- this is from 1 John and holds true.

Finally, on a more personal note, and applying the tests above to a standard Catholic practice:

4) I was quite surprised, upon first reading the Rosary some time after converting to Catholicism, to discover that a) the meat of the Rosary was in fact *meditation* (thinking on, pondering) on episodes in the life of Jesus and/or the Apostles (including Mary)

b) one of these was explicitly the Baptism in the Holy Spirit

c) the Prayer after the Rosary, which reads, "O GOD, whose only begotten Son, by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech Thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ Our Lord." Even when I tried, I couldn't find any thing objectionable in it.

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