Confusion Increasing, Audience Dwindling

On January 6, 2016, on the Feast of the Epiphany of our Lord, the Vatican broadcast a video in seven languages in which Pope Francis asks viewers to pray for interreligious dialogue, declaring that “Many think in different ways, feel things differently” and that “in this spectrum of religions, we have only one certitude for all: we are all children of God.” Now this video shows several representatives of different religions—some of them total strangers to Baptism, which alone can make us children of God—say one after the other: “I have confidence in Buddha,” “I believe in God,” “I believe in Jesus Christ,” or again, “I believe in God, Allah,” and then declaring, in front of the camera, “I believe in love.” Then four hands appear holding the Infant Jesus, a Buddha, a Jewish menorah (seven branched candlestick) and a Muslim tasbih (prayer beads).

In an interview granted to Famille chrétienne (Christian Family) on December 28, 2015, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, former Archbishop of Brussels (Belgium), returning from the recent Synod on the Family, deplored “the fact that ambiguity was cultivated on the most sensitive points,” and he revealed: “some bishops have told me that the texts had been deliberately composed in an ambiguous way, so as to make it possible to interpret them in different ways.”

For the 100th weekly audience of the pope, on August 26, 2015, the official statistics released by the Prefecture of the Papal Household show an inexorable erosion of the number of faithful: 1,548,500 were present at the thirty audiences of 2013; 1,199,000 present at the forty-three audiences of 2014; 400,100 present at the twenty-seven audiences of 2015. This means that the average number of persons present at each audience is as follows: 51,617 in 2013; 27,883 in 2014; and 14,818 in 2015. In other words, each year attendance of the faithful on Saint Peter’s Square diminished by half compared with the preceding year. And the Jubilee that commenced in early December has failed to apply the brakes to this constant decline.

This is why some Vaticanists are beginning to say and to write that the present doctrinal confusion does not just sow trouble in minds, it empties the auditorium. With an unsettling regularity.

Father Alain Lorans