The Neo-Pastoral Work of Francis (3)

1. From September 22 to 24, 2024, the 38th International Meeting of Prayer for Peace was held, organized by the Sant’Egidio Community. Pope Francis addressed a message to the participants. And it was an opportunity for him to insist—for the third time—on the scandalous and false idea of the salvific value of all religions.

2. The Pope quotes from the Document signed (by himself, together with the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb) in Abu Dhabi, on February 4, 2019, on “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.” The main wish expressed in this text is that religions should not incite hatred.

Feelings of hatred are presented as deviations, for which the followers of any religion are responsible whenever they, “in the course of history, have taken advantage of religious sentiment in the hearts of men and women.” Should religion therefore be defined as the expression of a religious sentiment?

3. Further on, the Pope encourages the participants in this meeting “to allow ourselves to be guided by the divine inspiration present in every faith, in order to join in ‘imagining peace’ among all peoples.” Here we find the key idea already expressed by the Pope in his dialogue with young people in Singapore on September 13 [1], and in his video message to the ecumenical group meeting in Tirana, Albania, on September 17 [2].

This idea is that every religion is willed by God and leads to God. How could it be otherwise, given that every faith, every belief of every religion, is inhabited by “divine inspiration”?

4. And what exactly is “divine inspiration”? God's very first intervention with mankind is that of His Revelation. And Revelation is the supernatural action by which God teaches mankind the truths, supernatural (such as the mysteries of faith) and even natural (such as the existence of a Creator, author and end of all things, or the immortality of the human soul), knowledge of which is indispensable to salvation [3].

In concrete terms, divine inspiration takes the form of an infused science bestowed on the Prophets of the Old Testament, the Holy Humanity of Christ, and the Apostles of the New Testament, so that they can preach, instruct, and teach other men by showing them the intelligible object of their belief.

Faith is then defined as the adherence of the intellect to these truths, on the grounds of the authority of God, who reveals them. Divine inspiration, if there is such a thing, dwells only in the one and only true faith, the Catholic Faith—that is, the faith by which the intelligence submits itself to the true Revelation of the one true God, which is at the foundation of the Catholic religion to the exclusion of other religions.

5. How then can we maintain that divine inspiration is “present in every faith,” if not by fundamentally redefining the very ideas of faith and religion, and by giving a different meaning to the fundamental notion of Revelation? If divine inspiration inhabits all faiths, regardless of differences in beliefs and rites, faith is no longer adherence to a revealed truth.

It can only be man's experience—or awareness—of his need for the infinite and the transcendent. Revelation and faith are thus identified with “the awareness that man has acquired of his relation to God” [4]. And religion, based on this faith, will be true insofar as it is alive—that is to say, lived with sincerity, in the conviction of entering into a relationship with the Infinite or the Transcendent, the object of human aspiration and referred to as “God.”

Religion becomes the guarantee and means of human well-being. These new definitions endorse all religions as true, since the experience and awareness of the divine can be found in all “faiths” and all beliefs, the bases of all religions.

What right would we have to deny truth to the religious experiences of Muslims or Buddhists? Why should Catholics alone be given a monopoly on true experiences? How could we denounce a religion as false? It could only be because the experience of the need for the infinite may be false.

Yet this experience remains the same everywhere and at all times, beyond the various formulas that differentiate religious beliefs. In this sense, yes, all religions lead to God, because divine inspiration dwells in all faiths, given that faith and religion are the manifestation of the same need, the same divine “seed” that dwells in the heart of every human being [5].

6. At most, we could claim that the Catholic religion is truer because it is more alive. Such a claim remains inscribed in the texts of Vatican II. The Decree Unitatis redintegratio indeed affirms (in no. 3)—when speaking of Christian communities separated from the Catholic Church—that “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation,” but immediately clarifies that they “derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.”

For its part, the Declaration Nostra aetate, while affirming (in no. 2)—in reference to non-Christian religions—that “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions” and “regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings,” immediately specifies that it is insofar as these elements “reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”

And while She “exhorts her sons” (again in no.2) to “recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men,” She specifies that this must be done “with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life.”

7. Recent statements by Pope Francis no longer take the precaution of recalling these distinctions. The massive—and repeated—affirmation that divine inspiration dwells in all faiths and that all religions lead to God clearly takes on the meaning of indifferentism, pure and simple, unlike the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and John Paul II, who distilled a mixed indifferentism.

With Francis, we could truly say, modernism has thrown off the mask of neo-modernism. The old error condemned by St. Pius X appears for what it has always been, in the presupposition of vital immanence: revelation is identified with awareness, and religion is all the more true the more sincere and alive it is.

8. In a recent interview given to a journalist on September 26 [6], Bishop Athanasius Schneider says: “Such an affirmation of Pope Francis is clearly against the divine revelation, it contradicts directly the first Commandment of God which is ever valid – ‘You shall not have other gods beside me’ – this is so clear, and such a statement contradicts the entire Gospel.”

Wasn't this already stated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in his homily on the day of his episcopal consecrations at Écône, on June 30, 1988, to account for his conduct and justify the state of necessity? Even before Francis, John Paul II's lukewarm indifferentism at the Assisi ceremony contradicted the first article of the Creed [7].

And today, wouldn't the combined reactions of Bishop Schneider, Cardinal Burke [8], Bishop Strickland [9], and Archbishop Chaput [10] be enough, almost forty years later, to justify the “Operation Survival” of Tradition? Operation Survival, which should be seen by all for what it is: the guarantee of the Church's indefectibility.

[1] The Neo-Pastoral Work of Francis
[2] The Neo-Pastoral Work of Francis (2)
First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius (April 24, 1870); Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, De revelatione, t. I, p. 139.
[4] Proposition condemned no. 20 (DS 3420) in the Decree Lamentabili of July 3, 1907.
[5] St. Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi, September 8, 1907, Acta sanctæ Sedis, t. XL, (1907), p. 604-605.
[6] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishop-schneider-pope-francis-has-contradicted-the-entire-gospel/?utm_source=editions_menu&utm_campaign=fr&changed=358791848
[7] https://sspx.org/en/1988-episcopal-consecrations-sermon-30926
[8] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-burke-warns-of-practical-abandonment-of-salvation-in-christ-within-the-church-society/
[9] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishop-strickland-the-gospel-calls-us-to-give-of-ourselves-instead-of-always-receiving/;https://bishopstrickland.com/blog/post/open-your-eyes
[10] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archbishop-chaput-slams-popes-extraordinarily-flawed-comment-that-every-religion-is-a-path-to-god/