Answering queries from a Protestant friend

Amici,

You write about religious questions, so here's my responses.

First query was what is going on in the Catholic Church? Bergoglio seems a heretic, according to you, but also this Taylor Marshall guy. So, what gives. 

My friend, you write about religious questions, so here's my responses.

Thanks for the Taylor Marshall video about The Beast Bergi at that Candlemass address back in February of this year, where the layman stood up and contradicted Bergoglio. (And got himself escorted out for his efforts.) In his presentation, Marshall early on made a common sense observation, to wit, either Bergoglio is right in 2022 and Pius XII was wrong in 1943, or Pius was right in 1943 and Bergoglio is wrong in 2022. They can't both be right.

Indeed.

In general, one has to wonder just what Bergoglio thinks like, or what he knows, or whether he cares a whit about the Trad Catholics he is trashing out? One can ask the same question about Joe Biden, too. Or any of our governing elites in many countries. Ever listen to Neil Oliver? He discusses just this here. (Neil Oliver, When You Accept That Modern Western Government Considers Citizens Their Enemy, Then All the Outcomes Make Sense.) 

AnP: And this is true in the Churches, too.

This bizarre hated of the followers of the Modernists founders has long roots in the ecclesiastical field. "Modernist" Reformers of the 1960s on, I think, are necessarily damned. Plain and simple. They put their theories before actual people. That's evil. They did not care that the living Hell they were about to unleash would drive most Catholics from the Church. (The Church lost well over half its population of 1960.) Did they think the people would just "suffer through" and "grin and bear it"? Did they think people would just stay stuck in the pews when in the Church of their parents and grandparents sacrificed (back 2,000 years, ultimately), being decomposed into a lame imitation of modern mainstream Anglican or Luthernism.

These 1960s-1970s reformers lied and stole, breaking a number of basic commandments. Certainly, if nothing else, God had commanded them to feed His sheep, but they instead tried experiments on His flock. 

1. Yet by far the nastiest thing they did was use Traditional Catholics' deep-seated sense of duty to obey the Church as a tool they could use against such Trad Catholics. 
2. As they trashed all of Traditional Catholicism, incrementally, the one thing they kept was the traditional duty of obedience. "You have to obey us!" Yeah, right.
3. They essentially said, "You have to obey our orders to tear down the churches your grandparents sacrificed to build." In essence, "You have to obey our order to shoot yourselves." A great many did. But many did not.

This heightened the "cognitive dissonance" that has since remained far, far too strong in the Church.

Some cognitive dissonance examples:

• You're at Mass to begin with to worship God, but the priest faces you over (what's technically called) a Cranmer table. You all look at each other, like a customer and a clerk in a store.
  
• God is vertical, above us; He had to incarnate Himself to be among us, and in all its actions and prayers, the sacred liturgy promotes this – something obvious in the Traditional Latin Mass or the Eastern Liturgies. The veil between earth and heaven is pulled back and we're in the the Divine Presence.
• Yet in the "new" Mass (Novus Ordo), that is not clear at all. We do not face "East" toward God but inward, toward ourselves.
  
• Also, used to be the Incarnate God in the form of consecrated bread and wine was kept in the tabernacle on the altar, center, high, for all to see; but now He is shunted off to the side, or out in the hall. Massive cognitive dissonance. Textbook, really.
  
• The new Mass went to a three-year Biblical reading cycle so that Catholics would hear more of the Bible read at Mass, yet ironically, the new cycles leave out all the Hellfire and Damnation passages!
  
• Ironically too, the new form of the Novus Order in itself took out a HUGE portion of the daily Scripture readings that used to serve throughout the liturgy in every Mass! They took out the variable readings and much of the standing Sunday readings. (N.B. I'm always amazed at how much Holy Writ I can read in the various places it is used in every Sunday TLM Mass. So, therefore, how could they remotely claim to be promoting Bible verses when they intentionally vanished or watered down thousands of already in place Scripture verses?
• In general, nothing in the new Mass is vertical; all is horizontal. The simple message is "We're here to reaffirm ourselves and feel good about ourselves and to socialize by sharing a ceremonial meal together." They even modeled the new Offertory prayers (before the Consecration) on the old Jewish meal prayers!
  
• The sermons are certainly all as though written by some crappy psychology major in the "I'm ok, you're ok" school of psychology.
  
• On and on it goes, all pouring rivers of cognitive dissonance upon us as occurred in Noah's flood.
  

You write about Luther, Martin, doctor of theology

As for the Reformation of the 16th century, sometimes called "The Great Reformation", two things to note that most people raised Protestant don't know.

First, the Church continually cycles through "reformations" historically, about every four or five generations, sometimes more, sometimes less. Before Luther and Calvin in the 16th century, there were Sts Dominic and Francis in the 12th century. That was a very successful "reformation" that swept through the entire 13th century and only began to wane after 1300, where, in the century of the 100 Years War, the Black Death, and the Mongol invasions, and peasant revolts, you begin to see dismal, dour thinkers (William of Occam and Marsilius of Padua to name two) who would eventually lead intellectually to Luther.

• They were called Nominalists, and they believed a lot like Muslim philosophers did, such as the amazing 11th-century genius al-Ghazali (Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġazzālīy) that God was capricious, alien, utterly "Other". (When you think of the dire times they lived it, this isn't so odd a development!)
• They believed God was unknowable, cruel, and damning. Modern-day "Modernists", on the other hand, believe "God" is just as remote, but not because He is Allah, but rather because he is evolving like everything else, and that ultimately we basically make Him up; it is this that would be Bergoglio's true belief if anyone could pry it out of him.)

But before the 11-12th century Reformation, there was a major reformation in the 10th century. The popes of that era (9th-early 10th centuries), made the Renaissance popes ALL look like saints! For example:

1. Popes John X and John XII (both 10th century) had many women and lived dissolute lifestyles, with John XII being known as a rapist, and even infamous for incest!
   
2. They called him "a Christian Caligula". And like that depraved emperor, John XII was knifed to death by an outraged husband in the midst of carnal relations with the husband's wife.
   
3. Or compare John XII with Pope Stephen VI, who, in 897, dug up his predecessor and put the corpse on trial! (Not surprisingly, the corpse lost his case!) This ended up being called the Cadaver Synod! Pope Stephen VI was later strangled to death.
   
4. As Wikipedia puts it, "Between 872 and 965, two dozen popes were appointed, and between 896 and 904 there was a new pope every year. Often, these brief papal reigns were the result of the political machinations of local Roman factions, about which few sources survive."
5. While all that was going on in Rome, in the provinces a great monastic reform was gathering steam – the Clunaic Reform – and it eventually swept into Rome.
   

So the reformation of the 10th century involved cleaning all this insanity up and establishing the College of Cardinals, who would henceforward elect a pope, rather than having him be a product of Italian Mafia-like machinations.

The Great Reformation

Now for the second point I mentioned earlier. You never hear of this stuff because The Great Reformation started in the 16th century, and the reformers of that one were not saints – Luther claimed a Christian "saint" was someone who ate hearty, pleasured the ladies with gusto, and who despite all that felt "saved"! I.e. Saved by faith alone. He boasted he could sin 100 – or was it 1000? – and doing what, exactly) times a day and it would not affect his salvation.

So those reformers harped on the Renaissance popes to justify their actions and ignored the long history of the Church. But those Renaissance popes were not depraved like the 10th century guys. None of them departed from orthodox Christian (Catholic) teachings. Personally lax, they still maintained the Deposit of Faith. They may have fought wars (like Julius II, "the warrior pope") or had long-standing mistresses and fathered children (Alexander VI had about seven kids by two different long-time mistresses, all of whom he openly acknowledged), but they didn't promote heretical teachings, as does Bergoglio today.

• Alexander VI, the second Borgia pope (family from Spain, originally) is probably the most notorious Renaissance pope. Like the other popes of that time, he was very learned and a patron of art and promoted Latin and learning in general. The historically significant writer Machiavelli dedicated his famous political essay "The Prince" to Alexander's son Cesare Borgia, himself a classic Renaissance ruler. The pope's daughter Lucrezia was famous for her blonde beauty and brilliant politics (being a governor of a city for some time) and for her many husbands, important princes. However, some modern scholars have argued that given Alexander's location at the time these were children born, they almost certainly weren't his actual kids. Before you judge him, also consider this. A visitor to Rome asked him if all the rumors about his affairs and political intrigues didn't upset him. And do you know what he said? He said, "Rome is a free city, and the citizens of Rome are free to speak their minds and say what they want." Pretty amazing, isn't it?
  

But Luther did not go the route St. Francis of Assisi went, or Saint Dominic Guzman, Luther had little (or no) patience and instead of getting local problems fixed, he kept pushing ever more extreme positions till he destroyed the Church and replaced it with his Lutheran Church creation, a state church controlled not by churchman (whether good ones or bad) but by secular princes. Mimicking him, Henry VIII did the same in England. John Calvin took over the Swiss town of Geneva and ran it like a Mideastern mullah! NO separation between Church and State.

Keep in mind, too, that the Reformers kept complaining of the Church selling indulgences (something that indeed, needed reformation) and taxing people, but the Medieval Church was the SOLE provider of welfare for the people, maintaining hospitals, old-folk homes (hospices), schools galore, including universities (something the Church created). The Church also provided work to thousands of craftsmen and masons, continually building or rebuilding ecclesiastical buildings. Millions of serfs lived safely on Church lands (treated better than secular rulers treated their own peasants), while non-serfs rented their farms from the Church.

Shakespeare has King Henry V say in Henry V, Act 4, scene 1,

Not to-day, O Lord,

O, not to-day, think not upon the fault

My father made in compassing the crown!

I Richard's body have interred anew;

And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears

Than from it issued forced drops of blood:

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,

Who twice a-day their wither'd hands hold up

Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built

Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests

Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do;

Though all that I can do is nothing worth,

Since that my penitence comes after all,

Imploring pardon.

It was thus the Medieval World was built, the great cathedrals, the endless churchs, the beautiful art, schools endowed, hospitals established, the poor maintained, all indulgences pleading for the penitent giver. 

Luther's doctrine of grace destoryed it all. 

After the Reformation, the secular state took over all this and usually sold it off to rich laymen, who either ejected the free-born tenants or cracked down the serfs who couldn't leave. "Clearances" began, as in England, where the poor farmers and tradesmen where thrown off their estates.  Occasionally, the new state bureaucracies tried to provide schooling and so on, but it was nothing like it had been. Charles I of England tried to push hard for government charity and got beheaded for his troubles. And no new churches were built for a 100 years or more, either, though about half or so of Europe's artistic heritage (most of it ecclesiastical) was destroyed by Protestant mobs acting in a true Islamic spirit.

We saw the same occur after Vatican II, BTW, only with Catholic bureaucrats doing the destroying. It is called "iconoclasm": the intentional destruction of Church-related art. As part of all iconoclasm, churches are simply robbed, not just of their art, but their gold and silver, their lands, their incomes (reduced to state-provided handouts), and so on. Beautiful windows were removed. The Trappists ruling the Kentucky monastery Thomas Merton attended took out the church's windows and stored them away. 

The Reformation-era Catholic churches were truly smashed. What makes me especially angry is the destruction of the old monastic libraries. God only knows what was lost. A good example is the Beowulf Old English epic. It was found in only one manuscript written about the year 1000 (the poem itself could be 200 years older). It came to the attention of the literary world about 1650, when it was found in a private library. No one has ANY idea of where it came from. Apparently the family that had it had no clue. It's a complete mystery. But you can imagine that some Medieval Monastic library had it, and that it was looted. How many more Beowulf's were lost? We know the libraries were scattered when the secular owners who bought them from Henry VIII took them over. They didn't want old books; they wanted the land and the buildings. (Or just the lands; roofs were taken off the churches and they were left to deteriorate.) 

Of course, the big issue in the 16th century Reformation was theology; specifically, just how one is "saved"? How did that work? By "grace" or by "faith" and faith in conjunction (or not at all) with "works".

Luther came up with a novel way of understanding how Faith works, or even what it is. He had a new idea of what grace was, and of course he damned all "works" root and branch. In short, Martin Luther simply rewrote the source code of the Christian Faith. When in public debate, Johann Eck got him to say he, Luther, would trust his own judgement of Scripture over a Church Council, every jaw in the room had to drop open. One guy, a youngish academic with no parochial experience, and with a narrow Nominalist university education in a corner of Germany, claimed to know more than a parliament of Churchman, many of whom were far older and more learned, than he? Many of whom would be from wide-spread countries, too.

But that is Martin Luther in a nutshell. ("Tell them Doctor Martin Luther would have it so!" he would write later.) And when at the imperial Diet in Worms in 1521, the emperor, Kaiser Karl, Charles V himself, the most powerful ruler in all Europe, asked Luther in astonishment, "What of all our ancestors who believed in the old Faith, as it was for centuries?" Luther literally answered, "Who cares!" (Well, literally, he said, "What is that to us?" but the drift was plain as a smack in the face.)

Such was Luther.

Since he was one who started the Reformation (Jan Huss and John Wycliffe tried to do so a generation or so earlier, but the secular princes did not think to use them against the Church, as they would do with Luther), historians have painted him the best they could. But he really was neither wise nor faithful. At one point, he approved of a German prince's committing bigamy! (That got out – of course it did – and has tarnished Luther's reputation ever since.)

The Core Christian Teaching

The core Christian idea is that God incarnated Himself into the human race so that those humans who accepted Him could in turn be incarnated into God. God takes over a person via Grace, a transforming spiritual substance, changing his fundamental nature, and creating a New Creation in Christ.

This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:
•    John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation) And of course the whole "You must be born again" colloquy in John 3.

•    2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

In Romans 8, St. Paul talks about receiving the spirit of sonship so that you can call God Himself "Abba", a Hebrew word meaning 'father' but specifically 'my particular father'. Obviously, to be able to do that, one is a new creation indeed.

Or obviously in the Gospel of John, chapter 1:

12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

Once you know what to look for, this truly becoming a new creation in Christ, "children of God not of natural descent...but born of God" is everywhere in the New Testament.

For two thousand years, the Church has taught the "infusion" of grace via baptism and the sacraments. Luther and Calvin, etc., taught that God merely "imputed" or "assigned" the grace of His Son to those who professed Faith in Christ. But the Historical Church, East and West, and Further East and Deep South (Egypt and Ethiopia) taught St. Paul's and St. John's New Creation in Christ as the way of salvation. The Greeks have always called it Theosis.

But Martin Luther never felt a "new creation in Christ". He always felt like old sinful Martin Luther. Nothing he did helped, no prayer, no confession, no penance. When he said Mass, he admitted he felt terrified. He hated God for not making him feel a new creation. He hated himself for being so messed up. His confessor, Johann von Staupitz said to him, "Martin, God is not angry with you, you are angry with God." All-in-all, Martin Luther is not really the kind of guy one wants to base Faith in Christ on.

Romans 3:28: "The verse that launched the Reformation"

Finally, one more bit of detail Biblical reading and we're done. Reading Roman 3, specifically verse 28: "For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law," Luther took this "works of the law" set phrase to mean doing any good thing, whatsoever. None of it helps or is necessary for salvation. Therefore, one did not have to do good things to be saved. Indeed, one could "sin a 1000 times a day" and it not affect one's salvation. (Isn't that an example of cognitive dissonance in itself, though?)

The phrase "works of the law" had been debated before, however, by no one less than St. Augustine back in the Fifth Century, who argued it meant all moral law (10 Commandments or whatever). St. Jerome, his contemporary but who had wider experience and who had lived and studied with Jews at one point in his long career, said no, "works of the law" meant Jewish temple ceremony, eating kosher, being circumcised, and so on. As the phrase only appeared in St. Paul, there was no way to get a handle on it until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which, dealing with ceremonial law, uses the exact phrase! This is 4QMMT, (Miqsat Ma'asei ha-Torah: Some of the Works of the Law). It was a letter written by the Essenes (a very strict Jewish sect) to the Pharisees, in order to correct the Pharisees in some of their teaching. In the title and in the letter, "works of the law" definitely means ceremonial law. So, St. Jerome was right and Augustine wrong! And of course, therefore Martin Luther was wrong. Flat out.

We also know he was wrong because of how he read New Testament authors who quoted from Old Testament writings. Luther interpreted the Romans 3:28 in light of his reading of the earlier part of Romans 3, where a succession of verses lament, "(10) There is no one righteous, not even one; (11) there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. (12) All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (This is only a partial quote.)

Luther took these to mean no ONE PERSON in the all world was worthy, all fallen and failed. No one had sufficient grace from God! But each of these verses are from the Psalms (with one from Isaiah) and when a New Testament writer quotes an Old Testament verse, one is expected to recall the entire psalm or chapter it is in. A startling example is Our Lord on the Cross, reciting the first line from Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The idea is He recited the entire psalm, or a goodly portion of it (it is long). St. John expects his readers to know this detail. Sts Matthew and Mark do not have to explain it. That's how they wrote in those days. Everything is important. (And anyway, no chapter numbers or verse numbers existed until much later.)

And thus it is that the first lines above from St. Paul's chapter 3 lament originated from Psalm 14, the one that starts, "The fool says in his heart, there is no God." But if you read the whole psalm (it isn't long), you get to this startling verse:

"(4) Do all these evildoers know nothing? They devour my people as though eating bread; they never call on the Lord. (5) But there they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company of the righteous."

Whoa! If everyone is fallen and no good, who are these "company of the righteous"? Who are "my people"? Well, they're the good guys who keep the Faith! Not everyone everywhere is no good, then. That was in no way what old St. Paul meant. God has His righteous! (Actually, note that He always does. Remember First Kings, 19:18? "I have kept 7,000 in Israel who have not bent the knee to Ba'al".) And if you take the time and trouble to look up each psalm verse St. Paul quotes, and read the psalms they come from (and Isaiah), you'll find the SAME thing. Luther read chapter 3 COMPLETELY wrong and Protestantism was founded on a profound misunderstanding.

Now, I could go on, and will, upon request, but this is pretty long. For right now, then, Luther (and Calvin, who had in many ways a VERY different take on the Faith than Luther did, but isn't nearly as colorful or dramatic a character) were quite wrong in their Biblical exegesis.

Their sola scriptura doctrine soon split the Church into major pieces, and after the American Constitution of 1787, thousands of denominations have appeared and metastasized across the world. (The U.S. Constitution was the first to regulate religion to limbo, a personal eccentricity. The Iroquois told Ben Franklin – I read somewhere long ago – that the Founders were crazy to do this, but of course who listened to Indians?)

Hopes this helps set things in perspective.

An Préachán