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What is going to happen
this October 27, 2011? A simple friendly encounter among men and women of good
will? Desultory discourse on the divinity of Christ and of His Church? No—the
renewal by the reigning pope, Benedict XVI, of the unprecedented scandal
perpetrated by his predecessor, John Paul II, on October 27, 1986.
What will occur this
October 27, 2011? A call for conversion to the Catholic faith? The Pope’s
declarations clearly indicate what this day will be: the meeting of
representatives of all the false religions, called by the Pope personally to
join in a day of reflection where all are invited to pray for peace.1
Certainly, unlike the
first Assisi meeting, the prayer is to be silent, though intense. But to what
god will these representatives of all the false religions be praying in silence?
To what god will they be praying, if not their false gods, since the Pope has
invited them explicitly to live more deeply “their own religious faith”?2
To whom will the Muslims be turning, if not the god of Mohammed? To whom will
the animists address themselves, if not their idols? How is it conceivable that
a pope should call upon the representatives of false religions in their official
capacity to participate in a day of personal prayer? This act of the sovereign
pontiff constitutes ipso facto a dreadful blasphemy toward God as well as
an occasion of scandal for all on earth.
An Offense against God
Triune and Incarnate
How else should we
characterize this religious fair, which gravely offends against the First
Commandment: “The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou
serve.”3 How can anyone entertain the thought that God will be pleased with
the Jews who are faithful to their fathers, who crucified the Son of God and
deny the Triune God? How could He give ear to prayers addressed to Allah, whose
disciples relentlessly persecute Christians? How could He accept the suffrages
of all the heretics, schismatics, and apostates who have repudiated His Church,
which came from His Son’s open side? How could He be honored by the worship
offered to idols by all the animists, pantheists, and other idolaters? How could
He hear these prayers when His Son has clearly told us the contrary: “No man
comes to the Father but by me”?4
That souls in good faith
pray to God while still heretics or unbelievers is one thing; God will recognize
His own and will guide them to the one true Church. But to invite these men to
pray as representatives of the false religions, according to “their own
religious faith,” surely signals that they are being invited to pray
according to the spirit and in the manner of their false religions.
How can we fail to see in
this a supreme insult to God thrice holy? How can we fail to be profoundly
indignant at the sight of such a scandal? How can silence be anything but
complicity?
The Peace of Christ
Denatured
This exceedingly grave sin
equally offends the peace of Jesus Christ. The Pope is calling for prayer for
peace. But what is the nature of the peace the Pope seeks? Is it the cessation
of the conflicts that bloody the world? But are we really to believe that prayer
to false gods will merit for us, not chastisement, but the blessing of peace
among men? Has the primeval Flood been forgotten? Has remembrance been lost of
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose crime was less grave than that of
incredulity?5 Has the record of the gory destruction of Jerusalem, the wages of
the sins of His people, been stricken from the Gospels and from history?
Moreover, of what use
would it be to us to purchase temporal peace were we to lose our soul? “Be
not afraid of them who kill the body and after that have no more that they can
do….Fear ye him who, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell”.6
In another connection, how can we fail to see in this prayer for peace a
doubtlessly unconscious yet perfidious diversion, for ecumenical ends, of the
legitimate aspiration of humanity for civil peace? No, the peace brought by
Christ cannot be a worldly peace, the Masonic peace sealed with freedom of
conscience.
For in reality the peace
for which the current pontiff prays is not merely temporal peace; it is
especially religious freedom,7 the liberty of conscience so often condemned by
the popes.8 This is the prayer intention given by the Pope; this is the peace
the Pope prays for: temporal peace obtained by freedom of conscience.
Is this the peace of Jesus
Christ? of the One who died on the cross to affirm His divinity? The peace of
Christ is quite different, as far removed from this Masonic idea of peace as
charity is from fraternity. The peace of Christ is peace with God, fruit of the
redemption of souls by the Blood of His Son and men’s rejection of sin. As for
the civil peace communicated by Christ, it is nothing else than the fruit of
Christian civilization, molded by Catholic faith and charity.
An Odious Humiliation of
the Church
But if the Triune God and
the Sacred Humanity of Christ are gravely offended by this invitation to sin,
the immaculate Spouse of Christ, His one Catholic Church, is humiliated
publicly. Mocked is the teaching of the Apostles, Popes, Fathers of the Church,
the saints, the martyrs, and Catholic princes and heroes. Mocked is the teaching
of the Psalmist according to whom “all the gods of the gentiles are devils”;9
mocked, the formal order of St. John not to greet heretics;10 mocked, the
teaching of a Gregory XVI or a Pius IX,11 for whom freedom of conscience is a “delirium”;
mocked, the formal prohibition by Popes Leo XIII12 and Pius XI13 to organize or
participate in interreligious congresses; mocked, the martyrdom of a Polyeuctus
refusing to sacrifice to idols; mocked, the example of a St. Francis de Sales,
writing his Controversies to convert Protestant heretics; mocked, the
thousands of missionaries who gave up everything for the salvation of the souls
of infidels; mocked, the heroic deed of a Charles Martel, halting Islam at
Poitiers, or of a Godefroy de Bouillon, forcing his way by lance and sword into
Jerusalem; mocked, a St. Louis of France, who punished blasphemy.
How can a Catholic imbued
with the spirit of Assisi still subscribe to the dogma “Outside the Church no
salvation”? How can he see in the Catholic Church the one ark of salvation?
What’s more, this scandal comes from the highest sacred authority on earth, from
the Vicar of Jesus Christ himself, as if the gravity of such a gathering were
not enough. Does this not make of the Pope, presiding over this meeting, not the
head of the Catholic Church but the head of a “Church” of the United Nations,
the primus inter pares of a religion of all the religions, essentially
identical with the Masonic cult of the Great Architect of the Universe? Is this
not a satanic perversion of the mission of Peter? Whereas Christ solemnly
commanded Peter to “confirm his brethren in the faith” and to feed His
sheep, the successor of Peter is in fact going to confirm his brethren in
indifferentism and relativism.
An Immense Scandal
For, beyond the terrible
blasphemy, this personal decision of the Pope will engender an immense scandal
in the souls of both Catholics and non-Catholics. Before the image of a Pope
uniting the representatives of all the false religions, the reaction of the
majority of men will be to relativize truth and religion still more. What
individual, little acquainted with the Catholic religion, will not be tempted to
be reassured about the fate of non-Catholics when he sees the Pope inviting them
to pray for freedom of conscience? What non-Christian will see in the Catholic
religion the one true religion to the exclusion of all others when he learns
that the head of the Catholic Church has convoked a pantheon of religions? How
will he interpret the Pope’s exhortation not to yield to relativism if not by
thinking that it is a matter, not of holding to the truth, but of being sincere?
How could he not interpret
in a relativist sense14 the Pope’s explicit invitation to practice one’s own
religion as well as possible:
I shall go as a pilgrim
to the town of St. Francis, inviting my Christian brethren of various
denominations, the exponents of the world’s religious traditions to join this
Pilgrimage and ideally all men and women of good will… [in order] to solemnly
renew the commitment of believers of every religion to live their own
religious faith as a service to the cause of peace.15
In 1986, a journalist
published this telling conclusion:
The Pope is inventing
and presiding over a United Nations of Religions: those who believe in the
Eternal, those who believe in a thousand gods, those who believe in no
particular god. An amazing sight! John Paul II spectacularly admits the
relativity of the Christian faith, which is now but one among the others.16
How can it be imagined
that this judgment is not shared by many on the eve of October 27, 2011?
That is why it seems to us
singularly strange to excuse the Pope from such a sin on the grounds that Assisi
2011 is different from Assisi 1986. To the contrary, everything concurs to
convince us of the surprising continuity between the Assisi meeting in 1986 and
that of 2011:
The nature of the
gathering: an
invitation to the representatives of the false religions to get together to
reflect and to pray for peace.
The motive:
the civic peace promoted by the United Nations. In 1986, John Paul II invited
all the religions “in this year 1986, designated by the U.N. as the Year of
Peace, to promote a special gathering to pray for peace in the city of Assisi.”17
During his message for peace of January 1, 2011, the date on which he announced
the gathering at Assisi on October 27, 2011, Benedict XVI signed these revealing
lines:
Without this fundamental
experience [of the great religions] it becomes difficult to guide societies
towards universal ethical principles and to establish at the national and
international level a legal order which fully recognizes and respects
fundamental rights and freedoms as these are set forth in the goals—sadly
still disregarded or contradicted—of the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights… All this is necessary and consistent with the respect for
the dignity and worth of the human person enshrined by the world’s peoples in
the 1945 Charter of the United Nations…18
As Bishop Fellay wrote to
John Paul II on the occasion of the second scandal of Assisi in 1999:
The humanist, earthly
and naturalist themes taken up at these meetings cause the Church to fall from
its entirely divine, eternal and supernatural mission to the level of the
Freemasonic ideals of world peace outside of the only Prince of Peace, Our
Lord Jesus Christ.19
The date:
Benedict XVI chose to
undertake this initiative twenty-five years to the day after the Assisi fest:
The year 2011 marks the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace convened in Assisi
in 1986 by Pope John Paul II… The memory of that experience gives reason to hope
for a future in which all believers will see themselves, and will actually be,
agents of justice and peace.20
Is this not a clear sign
of evident continuity? Is it not a way to make us relive the painful memory of
the scandals of a Buddha on the tabernacle in St. Peter’s Church, the chickens
sacrificed to the gods on St. Clare’s altar, the Vicar of Christ flanked by the
Dalai Lama and an Orthodox Patriarch under the heel of the KGB? Is it necessary
to commemorate the anniversary of an event if the goal is to distance oneself
from it? Why proclaim Ubi et Orbi that “the memory of that experience
gives reason to hope”? Only the betrayal of straight thinking can have given
rise to such a flight from reality.21
The recollection of his
predecessor, as
if he wanted to dissipate any misunderstanding and to remind one and all of his
fidelity to the spirit of the first Assisi meeting: “This year, 2011, is the
25th anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace which Venerable John Paul
II convoked in Assisi in 1986.”22
It is not only the
stalwart defenders of the Pope who use these same arguments to attempt to
justify the unjustifiable. Formerly Assisi was defended by making a subtle
distinction between “being together to pray” and “praying together.” Will they
now be saying that there will be no common prayer, but rather a day of prayer in
common? Instead of denying the concomittance of the silent prayers, shall we say
that everybody prays separately according to his own religion? As if these
specious distinctions were not manufactured for the needs of the cause. As if
these subtleties were immediately grasped by the majority of men, who will
retain only one thing: a gathering of all the religions for everyone to pray to
the divinity, abstracting from any Revelation.
Finally, and like most of
the gestures of the current Pope compared to his predecessor’s, the scandal of
Assisi 2011 will be substantially the same but less spectacular than Assisi
1986. That is why, to those who would accuse us once again of lacking in charity
because of the vehemence of these lines, we remind them of Christ’s words: “Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and thy whole soul, and all
thy strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Do we show an ardent love of
Christ when we fail to decry blasphemy or criticize those who are shocked by it?
Do we love our neighbor when we fail to warn him of the looming scandal? Is this
the love Christ requires of us? No, as St. Pius X recalled at a dark hour:
But Catholic doctrine
tells us that the primary duty of charity does not lie in the toleration of
false ideas, however sincere they may be, nor in the theoretical or practical
indifference towards the errors and vices in which we see our brethren
plunged, but in the zeal for their intellectual and moral improvement as well
as for their material well-being. Catholic doctrine further tells us that love
for our neighbor flows from our love for God, Who is Father to all, and goal
of the whole human family; and in Jesus Christ whose members we are, to the
point that in doing good to others we are doing good to Jesus Christ Himself.
Any other kind of love is sheer illusion, sterile and fleeting.23
So, then, what Church do
we belong to? To the Church of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who retorted to the
heretic Marcion, who had asked him if he recognized him, “Yes, I recognize
you as the devil’s elder son”?
Do we belong to the Church
of St. Martin, who broke the idols and felled the sacred trees of our
countryside?
Do we belong to the Church
of St Bernard, who preached the crusade to our forefathers?
Do we belong to the Church
of St. Pius V, who not only prayed the Rosary, but summoned the Christian
princes to make war against the Mohammedans?
Do we belong to the Church
of the saints and martyrs, or to the Church of the Pilates, the Cauchons, the
Lamennaises, the Teilhard de Chardins, ever ready to toady to the world and to
deliver Christ and His disciples to their detractors?
Will we judge Assisi with
the eyes of faith, of the popes and martyrs, or with the eyes of worldlings,
liberals, and modernists?
That is why we cannot keep
silent, and while the Pope prepares for one of the most serious acts of his
pontificate, we vigorously and publicly proclaim our indignation, hoping and
beseeching Heaven that this well-prepared calamity may not take place. Lastly,
how can we fail to think of these words of Archbishop. Lefebvre recalled by
Bishop Fellay in 1999 in his letter to the Pope:
Archbishop Lefebvre saw
in this disastrous event of Assisi one of the “signs of the times”
which permitted him to proceed legitimately with episcopal consecrations
without Your consent and to write to You that “the time for an open
collaboration has not yet come.”24 The time has come, however, to make
reparation for this scandal, to do penance while keeping in our heart the firm
hope that despite the progress of the Mystery of Iniquity, “the gates of
hell will not prevail against the Church.”
September 12, 2011, Feast
of the Holy Name of Mary, anniversary of the victory of the Catholic armies over
the Turks at Vienna, September 12, 1683.
Published with the
approbation of Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Priestly Society
of St. Pius X.
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