No to the TLM Grab: Catholic Ecumenicism with Vatican II Church Devilry Has to End /with Update

Update Note:

News of the Vatican's 'extrajudicial penal trial' against Archbishop Viganò is hardly surprising, and just confirms what I've written in the essay below. 

Amici,

One usually thinks of Ecumenicism as a "dialogue" (whatever that overused word means outside of drama or narrative) between Christian denominations, but it actually primarily occurs, I think, within the Catholic Church, and there only between the Traditional Catholics and the "Novus Ordo" Vatican II Catholics. It is NOT a dialogue, however, but a tyranny, as we've all seen these past 60 years.

It is time – long past time, but now SO obvious – Traditional Catholics ended the ecumenicalism we've had with the Vatican II Church. Yes, to be Christian is to suffer for the Faith, but it is not Christian to suffer heretics lording it over us. The secular world already hates us; we have no need to let so-called Churchmen hate us and force us to suffer their wickedness. Souls are being lost, and it has to stop.

Abrogating the TLM?

Word is out that Bergoglio and his peeps will be cracking down on – as in eliminating or banning – the Traditional Latin Mass. This will probably consist, as Anthony Stine suggests, of Rome banning the TLM in diocesan parishes. (But it could be worse, he notes.) Rorate has the initial article here. Anthony Stine provides a thorough review of it here. Stine quotes Prof. Kwasniewski discounting the rumor, but Dr Stine explains how, with Bergoglio's Vatican being what it is, we can expect literally anything to manifest. I agree. Commentator Kennedy Hall, for his part, offers a very insightful understanding of this mess. Mr Hall points out that this has happened before. This is, after all, what they forced on us in the 1970s. A billion Catholics were worshiping in the TLM, Hall reminds us, including the pope, the cardinals, bishops, religious, and the laity, and even so the Modernists dropped the hammer on it.

In this, Mr Hall makes an excellent and indispensable point. Astutely, Hall points out that Pope John Paul II (God have mercy on that confused soul) only allowed the TLM because he and his Vatican team insisted hardly anyone except old folks wanted it, as though from some sentimental attachment. And the Polish pope insisted it would not be allowed at all if any Traditionalist thought that the Novus Order slop was somehow inferior to the TLM. For JP2, attraction to the TLM was a "problem", Hall notes, reading from a JP2 document, that needed to be "solved". 

This insight says it all. For the Modernist heretics, devotion to the Traditional Faith, the handed-down Faith ("I give you what I have been given", as St. Paul says twice in First Corinthians), is merely a psychological condition that needs "solved." Or we are just plain heretics. As one Modernist wrote (referenced below), we are "not in a relationship of fidelity" to Rome, but we are "at odds" with Rome. Of course we are, you fool, because you are "not in a relationship of fidelity" to the Faith as it has been handed down from the Apostles! Duh! 

To them, the New Mass is infinitely better; we see it as infinitely inferior. To insist the Novus Ordo is better is to fry our brains on the skillet of cognitive dissonance. I, myself, grew up with the new Mass and I testify about it thoroughly in these pages; I repudiate it. It's horizontal, not vertical, secular not sacred. If nothing else, it simply prays for a lot less – literally asking for less from God – and therefore naturally far fewer graces accrue from it. Of course far fewer graces accrue from it. We've copious proof of that over the last half century, have we not? I won't go back. 

Now, clearly, these are diametrically different viewpoints between the Modernists and Traditionalists. They can't both be correct. If the Modernists (technically "post-Modernists") running the Church since John 23 called Vatican II could disregard what that impotent and flaccid Council actually recommended for the liturgy; i.e. the calls for Latin to be retained in the Mass and Gregorian Chant be given pride of place, they could get away with anything they wanted to. And they did. This despite the Vatican II Council supposedly being a "Pastoral" Council, so its teaching consists of recommendations on pastoral outreach rather than dogmatic definitions, as Vatican I and most other councils promulgated. But the Modernists use it as a dogmatic sledgehammer to smash us actual Catholics all to bits. We live in the ruins.

Whatever Bergoglio, the Anti-Pope extraordinaire, and his lavender imps and cross-eyed hobgoblins are planning for the TLM, they obviously hate it. They hate actual "bead counters" and "breeders". They obviously do not understand the Traditional Liturgy. So, therefore, surely, now it is time to say enough, as in "Good-bye to you, get out of our house!". Yes, long past time. I could list all the devilry Bergoglio has imposed on Holy Church, but you-all know most of that already. Funding the drag tranny at the children's gathering was the slap in the face many needed to wake up. The Argentinian is just the icing on the Vatican II cake.

This is why I write that our ecumenicalism with the Vatican II tumble-down disaster has to end. Yes, our Catholic engagement with Modernism and the Modernist Church has to end. 

The Apostolic Faith

There exists the Catholic Faith, the Apostolic Tradition, the Deposit of Faith that has been handed down from the Apostles, and as St. Paul wrote of it, if he himself or an angel from Heaven dare teach another, let him be anathema. (Galatians 1:8-9) Then there exists a wide variety of Churches teaching versions of this Deposit of Faith, affirming this bit while discounting that bit, picking and choosing. Some are less heretical than others, certainly, such as the autocephalous or self-headed 14 Orthodox Churches. These are separate from Rome but they have valid sacraments and Apostolic Succession. Then there are the Oriental Orthodox. Many Eastern Rite Churches exist that are indeed in communion with Rome. (Though Bergoglio is putting absolutely everything under mortal strain by making "Rome" heretical.) Then there are the Protestant Churches, 20,000 or so – some say a lot more – who are not Apostolic-founded Churches, but denominations separating themselves in profound ways from Apostolic Christianity.

Failure to Stop the World Wars

Ecumenism was a big thing post World War II, as the various theologians and church leaders tried to deal with their being totally impotent to affect such a abrutal horror as either World War – or for that matter, the looming World War III. (That's something Bergoglio could be raising Cain about, but he is too busy coddling homosexuals.) During the Covid fraud, the Vatican II Church went belly up entirely. Though the pre-Conciliar Church was quite healthy generally speaking, these disaffected leaders during Vatican II and after pushed the idea to make the Church relevant again by refounding it as more modern, more "with it", more mundane and less "religious' or "spiritual". A key to this Modernist self-inflicted murder focused on Modernists trying to attract mainly the Protestant sects into rejoining the Catholic Church via negotiations – the idiot idea being to make Catholicism more like Protestantism so Catholicism would be less objectionable to Protestants. 

• That was the origin of the Novus Ordo, the New Mass as Annibale (Hannibal) Bugnini – the toad who wrote the new Mass up – himself said. No wonder so many Catholics left the Church after the Church imposed it on them.
  
• But the basic idea on its face is asinine. 
• No Protestant can respect it, as it is so craven, and no true Catholic can tolerate it, as it most definitely isn't Catholic. 
  
• For hundreds of years now, Protestantism has defined itself in thousands of ways, but common to all its emendations stands its refusal to be Catholic. Ecumenism is as dumb as trying to "reunite" with the Jews by adopting kosher laws when Jews have spent the last 2,000 years being Jewish precisely by rejecting Christ, the point of Christianity. 
• Finally, trying to be "Protestant-lite", Catholics only succeeded in insulting Protestants by "getting into their lane". Of course they're insulted. They staked out their ground years ago and don't want us invading it. So imbecilic is all this that perhaps it is true this is all a plan of the Freemasons to bring down the Church.
  

Ecumenicism

Ecumenicalism is a falsity in and of itself. It's founded not on reason but emotion. ("Wouldn't it be nice if we could all agree?") It's not about faith but negotiation. Christianity is not – and never has been – about negotiations with other religions. Even within itself. From the beginning, Christians saw all other religions as at best false, at worst diabolical. And as one can see from St. Paul, they continually policed themselves. Christians could have saved their lives by burning a pinch of incense to the emperor; it would have been easy to "negotiate" that. Yet they would rather die. That's because they had FAITH in Christ and knew via God's grace that all else was a lie. And now we are reliving exactly this situation, with our pinch of incense now required abandoning the Traditional worship. 

This is essential to understand. While paganism is about ignorant superstition or tribal identity ("I swear by the gods my people swear by" Cú Chullainn used to boast) and Judaism is about inheritance and Islam is about submission (Al-Islam literally means The Submission), Christianity is about Faith in Christ, and Faith is more than belief: it is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It is supernatural, and definitely not up for negotiation.

Besides: Individuals convert. Institutions do not. Individual pagans can become Christian, as can Jews and Muslims (though the latter might be killed for doing so). Catholics can convert to other religions or become atheists. That's the Mysterium Fidei of God's gift of grace and the vagaries of human free will. None of that is arrived at by committees negotiating minutiae – or by elite bureaucrats imposing their diktats on the Faithful.

Ecumenism, if it is anything other than being "nice" to folk of other religions, is a negotiation: "Well, if we give up this teaching, will you join with us then?" Or "If we accept your teaching on this, will you join us then?" And that is exactly how John Paul II and Benedict saw easing off on TLM restrictions. A negotiation. Offering crumbs to dumb birds to keep them from flying the coop. But they imposed a time limit from the beginning, as Kennedy Hall asserts. Their patience with us has run out. Our Traditional time is over, this new Vatican ruling is saying. Pinch the incense or else. They fully intend to force the issue. We must refuse their entire gambit.

In short: WE CATHOLICS have had to give up so much of the Traditional Teaching of the Faith to the Modernists who took over the Church just in order to "stay Catholic" and not be called Schismatics or Sedevacantists. But it was never enough, was it? It never is with terrorists, and that's what the Vatican II Reformers were. Now, with Bergoglio bringing to birth this demonic "Synodal Church" of his, they're demanding even more! The Ape of the Church is come. And it is a baboon.

What Modernists Think

No. Just no. Of course Modernists think the Traditional Catholicism isn't true, or THE Faith is just a mental condition explained by psychology. Remember the fundamental idea of Modernism is that life evolves, our understanding of things evolves, and even God evolves. And they are the elite who see all and know all and we have to evolve as they tell us to. 

Of course they think they can manipulate us, push us around, consign us to some reservation in a school gym somewhere. Until they terminate us. Remember, to them, we have a psychological condition that needs "solved." Or we are just plain heretics. Anthony Stine in a followup podcast in which he reads from an interview with Andrea Grillo, the Vatican's "leader of liturgical progressivism": it is Grillo who asserts we are "not in a relationship of fidelity" to Rome, but we are "at odds" with Rome. Grillo also callously dismisses the Chartres Pilgrimage, saying,

"What are 18,000 people compared to the great multitude of the Catholic Church? Little more than a sect that experiences infidelity as salvation, as is often linked to moral and political positions, and very concerning customs. Tradition and Traditionalism cannot be equated."

That's exactly what they think of us. This is 180 degrees opposite of Tradition's understanding of the Faith, of devotion and the innate human desire to worship God as God has laid down.

We must break with these people. They are not Catholic. Bergoglio has defected from the Church, and this Professor Grillo, a VIP in Bergoglio's Vatican speaking though the Argentinian's mouth, is a truly blind guide. Grillo is a callous ideologue whose heartlessness is as plain as if he had horns and a forked tail. Fr James Mawdsley presents an excellent explanation of why Bergoglio cannot stop priests from saying the TLM starting at 12:06, "A word about obedience".

Millions have left the Church and the Holy Sacraments necessary for Salvation – to them the Sacraments are just juju, magic superstition for mental degenerates exactly like some Protestants have so long alleged. No wonder the Vatican II Church is so "Protestant"!

Raising Christ's Royal Standard

Suffering is a part of life, and sometimes we must suffer: accident, heartache, disease, tragedy. We Catholics can carry it too far, as did Luisa Piccarreta of the false Divine Will cult within the Church. (For details, see Fr Mawdsley.) The Blessed Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows is the all-time exemplar of true Christian suffering. She endured all that God sent her after her Fiat without the slightest demur, and is therefore the greatest created being, and our Mother and Intercessor. See what the demons testify to this.

In terms of the Faith, however, the world will always hate Christians because it hated Christ. We suffer when we must but it is sadomasochistic to suffer needlessly. We instinctively draw the line at a certain point. 

1. We couldn't let the Jews kill off Christianity in the first forty years of the Faith.
2. We couldn't let the Gnostics bury it alive in its infancy.
3. We couldn't let the pagan Roman state snuff it out, the Germanic barbarians or the later Mongols crush it.
4. We definitely could not let Islam – yet another Gnostic legalistic system – swamp it and tax it to death. 
5. We couldn't let the Cathar Gnostics kill it with their homosexual cult in the Middle Ages any more than we can let perverts destroy it now. 
6. And we couldn't let Protestants dissolve it into initial confusion, then empirical irrelevancy and finally the modern all-pervasive secularism.
7. We cannot let Bergoglio and Grillo and so many others destroy it from within, either, any more than we can allow the One World Government or Communism or Consumer Capitalism or Freemasonry to throttle it. The challenges from "the world, the flesh, and the devil" never end.
   

For our children's sake, we must preserve the Faith. We must fight. Therefore I repudiate Bergoglio, and have done so for some time. If that makes me a Sedevacantist, then at least I am not suffering from Cognitive Dissonance. What we need is a bishop, just one, to start the avalanche that has been building pressure and is about to burst. Bishop Strickland, for example, or Bishop Schneider to name another, who would formally declare by their Apostolic Authority that Bergoglio and Grillo and the rest have clearly defected from the Catholic Church, and that Catholics need to anathematize them.

We need to raise Our Lord's Royal Standard, the Sacred Heart, and not take it down until God triumphs.

        AnP

"The Church has buried every one of her undertakers." The Catholic Reconquista examined

Amici,

Funny, but I've said something like the title quote on the Church outlasting her critics – not so pithily – to a number of Protestant acquaintances over the decades. They've always scoffed; they don't understand the Incarnation, its necessity, and our participation in God's Incarnation as constituting salvation, our being a new creation in Christ (they're kinda Jewish or Muslim, actually), so they remain on the outside of the Traditional Apostolic Christian Faith. Unlike Jews and Muslims, Protestant acknowledge the Incarnation, sure, but they don't get the ramifications of what it means. And hence, they scoff at the necessity of the Church and its sacraments. "All you need is Jesus," they say, meaning talismanic belief divorced from corporal act. 

1. The truth is, however, that God Incarnate set up the incarnate and sacramental Church via His Incarnation and His orders to the Apostles about baptism of course, the Holy Eucharist, Confession (for this sacrament, see: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." St. John 20:21-23); the laying on of hands for Confirmation: Acts 8:14-17, 9:17, 19:6, and Hebrews 6:2; healing the sick via anointing with oil: Mark 6:13, James 5:14, etc.; all physical acts that transfigured via the Incarnation infuse grace, making us new creations in Christ.
2. We Catholics put up with the clergy in order to receive these sacraments, the visible signs of God's infusion of grace into our being – physical and spiritual – what the Greeks call Theosis. Any clergy that deny or restrict the sacraments are anathema. Remember that.
   
3. Vatican II fell upon us as the 16th century Reformation Come Again, a Reformation 2.0, trying to Protestantize, i.e. de-incarnationalize or hyper-spiritualize the Western Church, and while this dolorous 'church" seems to have made many conquests, it is failing, too. God is simply not with it. For always remember what Gamaliel said of Christianity. If it doesn't come from God, he told his fellow Jews, it will die out of its own accord, but if it does come from God, you cannot fight against it and will find yourselves opposing God; Acts 5:34-39. And indeed, the Church has "buried its undertakers" since Gamaliel's day. (Curious how Jews still don't listen to Gamaliel, isn't it?)
   

Now here again in this article linked below is a mainstream news report about the Traditional Church making a comeback. ‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways.

"Who laughs last, laughs best" goes the old saying. May it be true. As readers of this unworthy blog know, your correspondent remains an unreformed Catholic, and Latin Masser, a Pius X Catholic, and something of a Counter-Reformation Catholic (with a good dose of Celtic Church thrown in), so I read an article such as this one above with a cautious joy. (By the way, hat-tip to Frank Walkers at Canon212 for referencing a Fr. Zuhlsdorf article about this article on his blog.)

It's not a bad investigation, as these mainstream news reports go, though one has to be careful since the author sets up various 'straw-men arguments" as Anthony Stine points out here. Yet even so, it is especially valuable, I think, for its continuous expression of bewilderment so many Vatican II Catholics experience about the Reconquista, the Return to Orthodoxy. They just don't get it. Fr. Zuhlsdorf has some comments about it but what struck me was the obdurate stubbornness of Vatican II Catholics simply refusing to participate in the Catholic Reconquista. It's beyond them. In fact, it is obvious that they are become Protestants. One woman quoted excoriates this return to tradition, and says she has left the Church and won't raise her daughter as a Catholic. Well, Mrs Obdurate, you were obviously raising your kid as an Episcopalian anyway, so go literally join that Church, then. They are about dead, that Church, and need new members. (I write this with sarcasm.)

The article reports how younger priests are more orthodox (or "conservative" as modernists would have it), more Traditionalist. The author, who has the very Irish name of Tim Sullivan ("Timothy" was a name the Irish used when they switched to English, changing the old Celtic name Tadhg to "Tim"), writes:

The progressive priests who dominated the U.S. church in the years after Vatican II are now in their 70s and 80s. Many are retired. Some are dead. Younger priests, surveys show, are far more conservative.

I must hasten to write we should pray for those old farts, so full, alas, of a false Catholicism. And all this, of course, against the very strong Vatican II headwinds, exemplified by that blowhard Bergoglio (another one we should pray for, for his conversion before it is too late), who is also quoted:

And the pope clearly worries about America.
The U.S. church has “a very strong reactionary attitude,” he told a group of Jesuits last year. “Being backward-looking is useless.”

Thanks, Bergi, for being a shallow martinet worshiping at the altar of the mindless imp named "Progress". Your anti-American Perónista skirts are showing, BTW. You've canned Bishop Strickland and are making noises about cracking down on the American Church, haha, as if you were really a pope rather than an heretical imposter. Yet note that the above bit about "progress" was a constant and standard Vatican II refrain: "You can't go against progress!" 

• Yeah, and when you finally pass from this world, Bergi, you can join all your fellow Progressives progressing to wherever Progressives progress to. What was it King Caspian said? "Progress! I have seen it in an egg, We call it going bad in Narnia". (IIRC, from memory.)
  

I remember many years ago some enterprising American journalist sent a questionnaire around to Liberal/Leftist/Progressive U.S. Congressmen and Senators, trying to ascertain how much Progress they thought would be enough. They kept harping on change and progress; alright, well, the journalist asked, just when would they say, "OK, we've reached our goals and have enough progress?" 

• Of course, none of the idiots could answer. They hadn't a clue. 

The nebulous idea of Progress in itself had become the goal, like insisting on traveling without a destination except toward some vague Utopia. That's Vatican II in a nutshell. And that's why it is dying: it is going absolutely nowhere, and fast.

The orthodox Catholics reported on in the article, though, they want to go somewhere. They want to embrace the Incarnation, and the Most Holy Spirit is directing them right back onto the correct road to that. If one has to "go back" to find the right road, so be it. Only a fool, or a Vatican IIer, fast becoming a Synod Churcher (or maybe a Jew or Muslim or at least a One World Religioner), would keep on going into the gathering darkness.

The Reconquista cannot be stopped. The Holy Ghost clearly wills it.

An Préachán

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A Reflection on Modernism and Protestantism

Modernism is Protestant. One might say that as an ideology, it is Protestantism with the Catholic trappings removed. Catholicism is a revealed religion, descended from on high (like a few others claim to be, but most religions just sort of developed in certain ethnic peoples, over time).

And "revealed religion" is the very thing Modernism rejects. It came from German Protestants about the time Darwin was making waves, and Modernism is all about evolution. Evolution of a certain sort. There was the natural Development of Doctrine, which could be said to be a form of evolution -- but if it were, the Holy Ghost directed it slowly, steadily, over the centuries.
Protestantism wrenched that away and created the basis for "Evolution by Fiat", a intentional redirection of Doctrine based not on lived experience threaded through centuries and many, many individuals, but something directed by revolutionaries with "novel" doctrines. (The very idea of Sola Scriptura cries out for absolute novelty from every single reader of Holy Writ.) Once that began, then a new form of evolution started, actually a devolution, resulting in the basic Modernist beliefs, seen in Mainline Prot Churches and the Mainline Catholic National Language Churches, i.e. everything evolves, we evolve, morality evolves (as in our understanding of the death penalty), the Faith evolves (obviously "the spirit" of Vat 2 operates on that notion), the Church evolves structurally, and ultimately God Himself evolves.

The corporate managers running the Church today were weaned on this core bone marrow of Modernism and I suspect they really don't have a clue as to what a revealed religion really implies; certainly they don't grasp what Catholicism means. If ever I had that rock in my gut, as a friend put it, of wondering about whether the current bishops, etc., were actual Catholics, I guess I passed that (rather large) kidney stone some time ago.

An Préachán

Protestant - Muslim intellectual links, an interesting speculation

Amici,

One of the problems Catholics have traditionally had when arguing with Protestants is that they are not – to put it politely, very logically consistent. Many examples exist, but their answers to how the Canon of Scripture was worked out and their defense of Sola Scriptura both come to mine, not to mention the problems raised by their various interpretations of Sola Fide in every day life and in theological questions of great import. 

Often times, I don't think our Protestant friends really do bother with answering those questions. Or rather, should one, as a Protestant, be inclined to ponder them in the first place, then one might very well find oneself becoming a Catholic! So, whence comes this tendency to avoid rationality in regards to Faith? To begin this meditation, let me quote Protestantism's founder: in one of his debates, Luther, brought up short by logical argument, shouted, "Logic is the Devil's whore!"

I guess Protestantism has carried that "genetic trait" down the generations. Or to put it another way, the Medieval Nominalists who were the precursors of Protestantism weren't too big on logic, either. They rejected Aquinas as being too rational, and they in fact rejected human rationality – at least when it came to things religious. I suppose they either re-created or were influenced by the strain in Islamic thought that had produced the Al-Asherites, and today the Wahabi-Salafist school of Muslim theology. These rejected/reject the idea that human thought can know anything of God, and that all we can know of God is of revelation – in fact, they were/are quite extreme that even any science, chemistry, biology, etc., is blasphemous, because it plumbs the mind of God.

So, with that background in Islam, and the influence of certain Medieval Muslims in Christianity (there was a flowering of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages, partly because of Aristotle's works translated from Arabic), I would guess that some of the Al-Asherite/Salafist sort of thinking came in, as well, with tracts and excerpts of actual Muslim thinkers being translated, not just Aristotle. The parallels between certain aspects of Protestantism and Islam are just too strong for it to be coincidental, unless there's some sort of human trait (that obviously not all humans have) that produces it.

Thus we can speak of "Protestant Anti-Intellectualism" in the same way we can speak of Islamic anti-intellectualism. A great book on that latter subject is Robert R. Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind, How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis – well worth reading for itself, and the insights it gives into the recent murderous, savage behavior by a Saudi flight student at the U.S. Naval Air Station – and all such insanity, actually – but also for the insights it provides to Catholics trying to understand Protestant "thinking".

One of my favorite Luther quotes is, "Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." That is unadulterated, pure Al-Asherite Wahabi-Salafism. Couldn't be purer.

Anyway, some speculation, of course, but also a pondering, a meditation, but after all, we Catholics, with our long tradition, derived from the philosopher Justin Martyr and formalized by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, (died 524), famous author of The Consolation of Philosophy, who encapsulated the entire Western Christian intellectual program with his saying, "Insofar as you are able, conjoin Faith and Reason." That seems to be the antithesis of the Al-Asherites then, the Salafists today, and Protestantism from its inception. I for one know, from arguing with certain Baptists, that they are amazingly Salafist when it comes to religion, but not of course in any other field. Wahabi-Salafist Muslims extend that to all fields of human knowledge. 

An Préachán

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as Dewey, Cheatum, and How, Part II

A Catholic had been arguing with a Protestant on a blog and the former gave in to the latter enough to say that "Justification" comes first, and then "Sanctification", a classic Protestant notion.

I wrote:

If I may interject, an offer an observation. You wrote, "One is justified by faith, that is step one. Step two is sanctification."

No, it's not. 1 Corinthians 6:11 lays out the sequence: "And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." Notice how this is

the opposite of what Protestantism teaches. Protestantism teaches you are justified first by faith, then you are baptized as an outward sign of your inner justification, and then you work toward sanctification. But that's NOT what St. Paul wrote. He said you hare first baptized, then sanctified, and then justified! Almost the exact opposite of Protestant teaching.

Your correspondent reads like an excellent person, indeed, but like most Protestants, she doesn't "get it" about what Christianity is: Transformation in Christ. St. Paul, the Protestant go-to guy, is always saying something like "In Christ you are a new creation!" •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, but see also St Paul in Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12. And it's not just Peter and Paul! •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.)

St. John's "ye must be born again" fits perfectly into this. To be born again is a new, transformed, creation. "You are a teacher in Israel," Our Lord says to Nicodemus, "and you don't know this?" Israel was all about the Covenants, and our participation in the Covenants transform us just as it did the Jews – far more so, of course. God set up a system of salvation from the beginning, one told through the OT via the Covenants, participation in which transformed "God's people" then and MORE SO now, through Seventh, and Last New Covenant, the Holy Eucharist. The great St. Athanasius said it VERY plainly, indeed. "For the Son of God became man so

that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] And of course St. Thomas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

The traditional Catholic way of saying this was "infused grace", and opposed that the Protestant "imputed grace". We are truly changed in our nature – when the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity became Man, He elevated human nature so it could receive Him, and then through Baptism removes Original Sin's impediment to this, and then the Holy Eucharist fulfills it (with Confession restoring the infused grace if necessary). The Eastern Churches call it "Theosis". There's no more amazing, profound, uplifting, glorious story – yet alas, Protestants are still out in the weeds coming up with theological excuses about how such transformation is both not necessary and impossible.

Martin Luther said we were NOT transformed and grace was not imputed. Rather, we were manure piles covered with God's grace-snow. C.S. Lewis, a Protestant, in his 10th Letter to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, has a gentle, polite, but absolute take-down of Luther's doctrine.

("Jack" Lewis obviously partnered with Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe for the most part, but he clearly kept an untrusting eye on 'em!)

An Préachán

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe (or Cheatum, Fleecem, and Scramm) Part I

I've been blogging some apologetics lately, and once again it is driven home to me how Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were the infamous law partners "Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe" (Do we cheat 'em, and how!) 

Once again, I've had to discuss why Catholics believe, are supposed to believe, in the Real Presence. The following is some bits of that. 

The idea, the dogma, of Our Lord being truly present in the consecrated bread and wine goes back to the beginning, as in St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-32. Notice how St. Paul says, "What I have received from the Lord is what I have passed on to you...", an oath of sorts, a "I solemnly swear I'm telling the truth". He says almost the same thing in chapter 15 at verse 3, "For what I received I passed along to you as of first importance," after which he witnesses to Our Lord's Passion, Resurrection, and the the Apostles meeting with the Resurrected Christ. It is a formal testimony to the reality of Christ rising from the dead. 

He even mentions five hundred of the brethren who saw Christ at one time. A Greek speaker with something of a classical education (as well as a Pharisaic one), I think St. Paul is mentioning these 500 (no where else referenced in the NT) because he would have known that in Athens, the greatest intellectual seat of the original Greek-speaking world (surpassed in the larger Mediterranean world by Alexandria, of course), a man on trial for his life faced a jury of 500. I think he's saying he has evidence that would pass an Athenian jury in that city's heyday. So therefore back in chapter 11, when he says he is passing on what he "received from the Lord" is an upping of the witness, a supreme capping of the oath. I think there can be no question that St. Paul means Christ is truly present, and that is what St. John in his chapter 6 is on about, for he would be writing after the Synoptic Gospels and he, John, did not include a Last Supper/Institution scene – instead, we went into a extended narrative about the reality of eating Christ's Body and Drinking His Blood. The Early Church Fathers after St. John clearly taught the Real Presence, but they used Platonic philosophy to explain to the pagans how such a thing could be. "Sign" and "signify" language – but they meant by that that the image contains a real essence of the higher reality (a basic tenant of Platonism).

They did not mean it in the more modern sense of only "symbolizes" the reality. (I've had Catholics, middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth types, tell me the Eucharist is "only symbolic"!)

By Aquinas' day, the up-and-coming theologians (like St. Thomas) used Aristotle, and thus developed the Transubstantiation definition. A wonderful lecture on this, and one very respectful to Protestants, is given here by Msgr. Frank Lane. I highly recommend it.

Assurance of Salvation?

Protestantism teaches – well, most denominations teach (20,000 of them, so it's difficult to say "all" of such a mass – Assurance of Salvation. It may be "stressful" for an individual not to have that, yes. But there it is. The "assurance of salvation" teaching wasn't a doctrine of the Historical Church (Catholic and Orthodox) but a Protestant invention. Luther never felt "a new creation in Christ" so he rewrote the "source code" of the Faith to include this doctrine via a (then) novel interpretation of Holy Scripture, that indeed we not not new creations but manure (sin) covered with snow (God's imputed grace).

Traditional Catholicism taught "infused grace" versus the Protestant "imputed grace". 

In any case, one thing we can be certain of, on Judgment Day, at our own Judgment, we'll each be able to quote Psalm 19, verse nine (its second half), as President Lincoln did during his second inaugural: "The judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether." That you can bank on.

No one given a ticket to Hell will cry that their judgment isn't just, that's its "unfair" or, horrors, "racist!" 

There's that, at least!

An P

Why are the Italian bishops set to attack the Traditional Mass?

 Someone wrote recently in a friend's email: "I don’t understand why the Bishops In Italy want to reduce opportunities to hear the traditional Latin Mass. Why are they opposed to it? ... I really don't get it."

The questioner is referring to this article at One Peter Five. I wrote the following in answer.

One could flippantly answer that the reason is they've "gone over to the dark side". Less flippantly, Francis has appointed his special cronies in key positions -- both in Italy and here, too -- to put a stop, once and for all, to the Traditional Mass (among other things). And it is Francis who is doing this, forcing this to happen. Make no mistake about that.

Why?

Where you see no downside to offering the Traditional Mass, they see a massive one: people actually in the presence of God and at the fount of Catholic spirituality as it has been since the days of St. Gregory the Great (and before back to the beginning). In comparison, the new Mass, the Novus Ordo of Paul VI, fails miserably. (After 60 years, I can say this most solemnly.) As the old saying has it, a camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the New Mass lacks the innate spiritual grace and power of the old, which, like the horse, evolved over a very long period of time, and under the influence of both saints, the pious, and 2,000 years worth of laity. The Novus Ordo just compares poorly, even when done at its best. After all, the old Mass was the Mass of the great saints, and the "nuclear" pile, the spiritual core at the center of everything Catholic -- as Catholicism existed in the centuries before the Vatican II Reformation.

And Bergoglio & Co. DO NOT want a return to "the Faith of Our Fathers". They all have too much emotionally and self-consciously invested in the Vat 2 Reformation. But rejecting that iconoclastic reformation is exactly what will be demanded by more and more people who discover the Traditional Mass. (My personal experience is that about half the people who experience a Missa cantata, or sung High Mass, reject it as weird, alien, incomprehensible, or a "museum piece" while the other half are dumbfounded with wonder, awe, and spiritual uplift. There seems to be no middle ground.)

Why is the Rite of St. Gregory the Great so powerful?

The Catholic/Orthodox idea is that no more important a thing (in this world) exists than Liturgy, as there's no more important a thing for a Christian than meeting and interacting with God, for Mass is how we come into the Presence of God before Judgment Day. It's how we prepare for eternity, by entering into and lingering in the Timelessness of the Eternal Presence. We partake of the Divine Nature in Mass, in many ways, especially prayer and simple wonder and contemplation, but primarily through reception of the Most Holy Eucharist.

The old Mass -- I refer to the High Mass forms -- organically developed over a millennium to express all that, and it does so most excellently.

The new Mass is a committee-concocted horizontal group therapy session, or a group pep rally, a sort of parade ground drill: a crowded, relentless one-thing-after-another performance led by a relentless conductor with whom we never break eye contact. (That's an amazingly important difference between the two rites.)* And it is all done to affirm our selves. Affirm our self-awareness and self-consciousness. Reinforce our identity. It's about us. Ultimately, it's all about "Belief", rather than "Dwelling With". The Traditional Mass and the Eastern Liturgies are a Dwelling With: a listening, praying, wandering in the antechambers of Heaven's timelessness.

The very first thing I noticed when I started attending the Eastern Liturgies, and then the Traditional Latin Mass, was how "roomy" they were compared to the Novus Ordo, how uncrowded, peaceful, and filled with time for silence and eternal, internal space -- especially prayer space. Prayer comes naturally in the old liturgies, and at our own speed. One's spirit can simply wander in a sacred citadel. But most of all, it is about lingering in the very Presence of the Lord of Hosts. Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) are all about the Presence of God, His presence on Earth and our presence to and in Him.

In comparison, the modern Mass is like a brass band marching in some sort of "pride" parade.

These devotees of Bergoglio, however, want none of the Old Faith. Please understand. This is crucial. To the extent they have any faith in Christ, it is Protestant faith, meaning in worship that the worship service is about one expressing one's belief rather than dwelling in the Presence. The Novus Ordo is about us, and it reaffirms us. This is why so many observers insist that Vatican II and its fallout was a Protestantization of Catholicism. It was that on various levels, especially both on the ecumenical level and the liturgical one, the latter enacted to make the former all the easier. (And Papa Bergoglio has demonstrated, many times in many comments, sermons, observations and off-the-cuff remarks, that he has a Lutheran understanding of how salvation works, not a Catholic one. He's thus the "perfect Progressive" of "Manifest Modernist.")

However. this Vat 2 ecumenical goal was a "chasing after wind." Protestants, as a collective, aren't interested in Catholicism. Individuals do convert, obviously, from both directions, but no Protestant Church has any interest in "Communion" with Catholicism. (And Catholicism has always rejected the core Protestant ideas.) In 500 years, not a single Protestant denomination ever "evolved" back toward Catholicism. Not even a little.

The reason: Catholicism and Orthodoxy are the Churches of the Real Presence and Protestantism is the Church of the Real Absence. And I mean that literally: in their various founding documents, the Protestant Churches insist Our Lord is really NOT present in the Holy Eucharist. And that's why they all insisted miracles came to an end at the conclusion of the New Testament, for the Holy Eucharist is a miracle and they wanted none of it. (Pentecostalism came into existence primarily driven by a thirst to experience some sort of miracle, actually, and thus it runs counter to the foundational ideas of classical Protestantism.)

So, therefore, everything about the Rite of St. Gregory the Great -- by its very nature -- invalidates everything Vatican II types believe -- or perhaps one should say, everything they don't believe.

They can thus hardly be expected to tolerate it!

Pope Francis intentionally, as an act of pure spite, destroyed the thriving Traditionalist order of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. According to Benedict's Summorum Pontificum, the FFI had every right to embrace the Traditional Mass. Bergoglio showed his colors then as he has now by smacking down the U.S. bishops in their attempt to do something about the sex abuse crisis. Read this article, or one of the many others on this latest Bergoglian outrage. The pope is making himself odious. Something like old-time gangster films, they're holed up in a hideout surrounded by police, and they're in effect shouting, "Come in a get us, Coppers!" Because of the pope's actions, the American Church will be helpless when the prosecutors come to liquidate its assets.

In Francis, the Modernist / Progressive faction has total control of the Church, and they won't let it go. They intend to keep it and drive the rest of us out.

But they'll only lose it, and drive everyone else out.

That's a fuller, non-flippant answer to your question.

We are in dire, very dire times.

An Préachán

* Note I write "two rites" when it is a strict rule in the Modernist Church that all the Latin rites are really only one rite. That's nonsense. The Novus Ordo is more different from a High Mass than any two separate Eastern Liturgies are from each other. A High Mass has more in common with any Eastern Liturgy than it does with the Novus Ordo. It is true that the Novus Ordo is a bowdlerized version of the Low Mass, which itself is a "short form" or Reader's Digest Condensed version of the High Mass, developed for specific monastic purposes in the High Middle Ages, but it had ended up being almost the only form of the Mass pre-Vatican II Catholics experienced. A 1950's Catholic parish had two or three Sunday Masses, all Low. But the Eastern Liturgy Churches only have the one Sunday Liturgy. It was the heavy use of the Low Mass that gave fuel to the liturgical iconoclasts' fire when they rampaged "in the spirit of Vatican II".

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part II Original Sin

Now, a bit about Original Sin on this Holy Feast Day, a Feast Day Pius XI instituted as a counter to the Protestants' Reformation Sunday. Protestants believed historically in Original Sin, and many still do, but definitely not in the way Catholicism does.

Original Sin: G.K. Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Church doctrine one could prove by merely opening the daily newspaper. This recent horror in Pittsburgh is an example of opening the daily paper (or accessing the Web) and seeing Original Sin.


Jews famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) don't believe in Original Sin. Classical Protestantism embraced it, but not in the Catholic way. Protestantism insisted that Original Sin meant people were worthless rags, utter failures, or "Totally Depraved" as Jean Calvin taught it in the famous Reformed Church acronym of "T.U.L.I.P". Thus, we're all miserable rats, fiends, selfish and savage. (And all too often, many people seem to want to be precisely so horrible as all that! Hell is their choice, and God always gives you what you want.) But through an act of faith, i.e., personal and then public acceptance of Jesus as Lord, God would then "cover" their sins -- and sinful nature -- with the snow of His Son's Righteousness. We would be made "right with God" even though sinners. Luther called this Justified but a Sinner. "Simul Justus et Peccator." This is defined as "imputed righteousness." Luther said we were thus like manure piles covered with snow. (I grew up on a dairy farm and this is quite a clever metaphor.)


Most traditional Protestants still believe this, though the more Modernist or Progressive ones don't (they don't believe in sin very much at all, unless being non-Politically Correct is a sin to them). In any event, such fallen wretches can not possible make good subjects for Christ as King of the Here and Now, so Protestants teach His kingship comes at the end of the ages. 


Contra this, the Orthodoxies (Catholicism, etc.) teach that Original Sin means we're not "plugged in" to God as we were when first made. We can thus go either way in life, in terms of being good people or bad, although usually we go the downward way. However, we're all far, far, far from worthless, and some can achieve profoundly all on their own (think of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle, etc., or the local "good atheist" who does great charity work and so on). However, no matter how good (or of course, bad) an individual may be, he or she cannot be "saved", made right with God; or to put it another way, a less Protestant way: our current, fallen, nature is such that as to prevent us from ever "seeing God" in the Beatific Vision.


Our natures, our very essence, thus must be remade, and this is what the Incarnation is all about. Eastern Orthodoxies -- whether in Communion with Rome, as many of the small ones are -- or not, all stress the Incarnation aspect of Salvation. They dwell on the mystery of the Incarnate God, ruling all history and creation as He is now, today, and as revealed in the Book of Revelation. Catholicism on the other hand, because of St. Augustine, tends to contemplate Christ as Crucified, hanging on the Cross, beaten, bloody, redeeming our sins through His sacrifice. These are two sides of the same Salvation coin, of course.


That is why when you walk into a traditional Catholics church, you're sure to see a large Crucifix. But when you walk into an Eastern liturgy church, you see Christ as Pantokrator, Ruler of All, on high (usually on its central dome).


Now, both Catholicism and the Orthodoxies are "orthodox" in that they teach the full Gospel, i.e., that the Incarnation and the Crucifixion go together. The difference is one of stress. But Catholicism's stress on the Crucifixion resulted in Protestantism, which is all about "Jesus died for my sins!" Protestantism focuses on the Cross to the point they can't really appreciate the Incarnation. The Incarnation is about the change in OUR natures ultimately. Protestants deny, however, as Luther went to great pains to deny, that there is any "change of nature." We're manure piles under beautiful robes. C.S. Lewis, in his 10th Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, refutes (very politely) this central Protestant teaching.


The question is: why the Incarnation? Why did God have to become Man? What is all that about, anyway? And the answer is that by the Incarnation, God elevated our natures so that we could then participate in the Divine Nature. That is what Salvation ultimately is. "We are new creations in Christ Jesus," as St. Paul says at least once in most of his letters, one way or another, "the old nature is gone; the new is here!" And this is the idea of Jesus' comments on to Nicodemus in St John about being "born again", i.e., literally receiving a new nature, born of the water and the Spirit, which is the Catholic / Orthodox understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism, and we receive the spirit of sonship (as St. Paul put it in Romans).


To rephrase it and bring in the help of angelic friends, angels by their inherent nature shared God's nature as pure spirit, and once they chose for or against God, they were locked in -- or locked out -- of God's presence for all eternity. This is simple to understand: if you are in Eternity and you make a choice, that choice is -- surprise, surprise -- eternal. One doesn't celebrate one's millionth year in Heaven or lament one's millionth year in Hell. There are no years in Eternity. Only what Boethius called the "Bound Now". (Thus anyone trying to make the argument that a good God would not consign someone to Hell forever is ridiculous -- there's no "forever" in Heaven or Hell, only the Boundless Present.


Humans are made in the image and likeness of God, as well, not in that the Lord of Hosts looked like Adam or had a physical nature in any way, but that we have minds that can comprehend, sort, catalog, figure out, project, extrapolate, and in general, be rational. These minds are eternal, mirroring God and the angelic minds. We're thus both the highest animals and lowest (sorta) angels, in the mind/soul sense. Original Sin locked us out of full participation in God, but the Incarnation opened the door for us that way, and opened it in a new and higher level entirely, so that now, incredibly, the Lord of Hosts Himself (Christians believe) is not pure spirit any more, but the Second Person is both God and Man, two natures, one Person. And we can share in that through the Sacrament, changed in our own very natures.


So, thus, Original Sin only means that an individual, no matter how good, can not be with God as God intended until that person participates in God's long-running plan of Salvation. We're not totally depraved, though many seem to want to go that way. But we're not sinless either, in the sense we don't have the supernatural help and cleansing all the Sacraments give, especially Baptism, which removes the Original Sin issue.


One final note: The Easterners don't believe unbaptized babies go to Limbo, and certainly not Hell. The Westerners (again because of St. Augustine to some large extent) believe unbaptized children can at best go to Limbo (or the Celtic Otherworld or Native Americans' Happy Hunting Grounds, or the Elysian Fields, however you wish to see it). St. Thomas Aquinas argued for the latter against those who taught the Hell destination idea. St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542 to 1621, was about the last important theologian who taught they went to Hell, if I recall correctly. The question today is generally held in abeyance, or to coin a phrase, Limbo. I've had children who didn't make it to birth and should I be blessed with Heaven, and they're in Limbo, I'm going to go be with them. We are made for the Beatific Vision, but as their father, I'm responsible for them. There are no angel families or clans, but there are with us. And God works through us for the general Salvation, to the extreme and astounding extent He became one of us Himself. 

Certainly the Lord of All Creation, the King of All, and a Father Himself, would understand, and fix it up to fulfill His glory and our destiny.

An Préachám

Christ the King: A Catholic Essay on Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, and How Salvation Works, Part I

Here's a take on Original Sin and Christianity/Judaism that many of you are probably not familiar with. But today, on the Traditional and proper Feast of Christ the King, it is good to recall just how He is Lord of History and our True King -- not only of Heaven, but our Earth, our present, miserable, confused, and lost (even in so many persons in the Church itself, even Christ's Vicar!) as it seems to be. 

God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.

So:

The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).

To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.


What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)


What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.


Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.


Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.


Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.

 N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.

An Préachán

Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and Catholicism Part III

Islam, Protestantism, and Homosexuality are Heresies.

Part III

Homosexuality a heresy?

That may seem odd, as Protestantism is certainly a heresy (maybe not to them), but Islam is a separate religion (definitely to Muslims) and Homosexuality is something different again – and whatever it might be, a heresy it would not be it.

But it is. Read this from Rod Dreher's column of July 25, 2018, here. A pull quote from "James", who was a child abuse victim of the evil yes, evil, Theodore McCarrick: "They believe that they are more important than the religion itself,” James says. “They believe that man is better than God. That’s not possible. McCarrick believed that he was my direct contact with God. He told me that hundreds and hundreds of times: God will only listen to you when you are with me.”

Clearly, the evil McCarrick had left the True Faith years ago, decades ago (and maybe never had it), and had been living a lie, a lost soul in a made-up religion (if he were not a total atheist). 

So, if Corporate Homosexuality isn't a heresy in itself, it certainly fosters unbelief and lies and, yes, heresy in others.

Yet, in actuality, all three are Christian heresies, and they're heresies about the Incarnation. Most Protestants would say, and probably now most Catholics, following as they do since Vatican II the Protestant lead, that Christ's death on the Cross is the main point of Christianity: "Jesus died for your sins!" But the real point – the essential idea – of Christianity is the Incarnation: that God became a human being in the first place. (The Crucifixion is a part of that, rather than the Incarnation being a part of the Crucifixion.) Therein lies a tale, alright. God became a human being to alter and uplift our nature, to change us into New Creations 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)

·   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.

·   Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26

The Greeks call this theosis. Here are two great saints on it, one Eastern and one Western:

·   St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

·   St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

Protestantism formally disagrees with the Historical Church's* teaching on all this, the why of the necessity of the Incarnation, and Islam denies the Incarnation took place at all (because there are is only one "Person" in God, Allah, and "Allah's hand is not chained", i.e., He is required to do nothing, including save us. Whether we end up in Hell or the Garden of Allah is immaterial to Him, and he makes no promises, no covenants, because that would "chain His hand." (The most ardent Mujahideen Jihadi, no matter how many infidels he murders, has no guaranteed promised of anything in the Afterlife; certainly no virgins, all because Allah's hand is not chained; i.e. Allah makes no covenants. Sura 5.64)

Meanwhile, Homosexuality is a heresy in part because it denies Divine Revelation. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is, just as is Jesus in the New Testament, extremely concerned with our moral behavior. We simply MUST be moral, and give it our absolute best try -- there's no middle ground. "Be perfect," Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48) 

This ability to be righteous, to be "perfect" is denied by Protestants, from Luther on. They insist we are saved judicially, by Divine Fiat, but that our nature is not changed: Simul Justus et Peccator, as Luther phrased it: Simultaneously (both) justified and a sinner. We go to Heaven, as Luther put it, as manure piles covered with snow. Our nature is fallen, and putrid, but if we make an act of faith, God will declare us saved by virtue of His Son's sacrifice, and allow us into Heaven – even though spiritually, we're a stinking, rotten putrescence. We're declared righteous, but we're NOT righteous, no "new creation" in Christ.

All Catholics and all Protestants need to understand this cyclopean gulf between to two versions of Christianity.

Thus Luther famously wrote his assistant Philipp Melanchthon that he, Luther, could sin many times a day and it not affect his salvation and that Melanchthon should sin greatly, engage in big sins, for "Christ did not die for small sins."

But as Deuteronomy, in the Offer of Life or Death, puts it: 

11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14) 

This implies the Holy Spirit enables one to keep the Law, the very breath, the Word, in one's mouth.

To prove this, the "Righteous" are found throughout Holy Writ. For example, from Luke 1:5-6

⁵ In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. ⁶ Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. 

How did they manage that? No one is supposed to be righteous. Did not St. Paul say in Romans 3, and did not Luther start the Reformation on this, that no one is worthy? Not one? 

In Romans 3, St Paul had written, beginning with verse 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 begins St. Paul's quoting of six citations from the Old Testament, all of them from Psalms (except one from Isaiah: Romans 3:15-17 is from Is 59:7-8) The sequence opens with verses from Psalm 14 (Romans 3:19-12), then lines from Psalms 5, 140, 10 and 36. Let's look at Psalm 14 in its entirety. 
Psalm 14

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;

    there is no one who does good.

2 The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind

    to see if there are any who are wise,

    who seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;

    there is no one who does good,

    no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers

    who eat up my people as they eat bread,

    and do not call upon the Lord?

5 There they shall be in great terror,

    for God is with the company of the righteous.

6 You would confound the plans of the poor,

    but the Lord is their refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

    When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,

    Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

Psalm 14 goes along with clear denunciations of just about everyone, then suddenly, at verse 4, it begins to change. "My people" are mentioned, and then in 5, "God is with the company of the righteous."

Wait! Who the heck are these Righteous? No one is supposed to be righteous, right?

No, Luther got it wrong. All the Psalms quoted mention the Righteous, and compare/contrasts them with the wicked. (The Isaiah passages in that chapter don't have that, but the righteous are mentioned in nearby chapters.)

In other words, St Paul could not in any way have meant NO ONE, period, is righteous. When he quoted an OT verse, there were no chapter numbers or verses, and his audience was to immediately think of the section quoted, what the section overall was about. Psalm 14 is not long and was well-known, so clearly every Roman Christian reading Romans 3 – all of them trained in turn by Jewish Christians – would have understood what Paul was about. Luther, writing 1500 years later, was clueless.

So the Reformation was started by a German professor who didn't really understand his source material. Pretty pathetic, really.

But you see the importance of this related to Homosexuality, a thing Divine Revelation has always condemned, something directly contrary to God's intentions and also something that necessarily brings doom on those involved in it, as Romans 1 famously details. Today, wherein most male homosexuals have quite numerous intimate partners and are involved in drug and alcohol abuse – a doleful state homosexuals blame not on themselves, but on the large society not accepting them – and wherein most "Gay Marriages" are contracted without the partners intending to be monogamous. 

Men (most men, through a great part of their lives) have a tendency to be profligate, if possible. (Hence one aspect of the importance of Jesus' admonition about looking with lust.) Women, traditionally, wholly reject that because they need steady, permanent males to help protect them and their (and his) children. A tremendous amount of traditional Christian culture involves trying to encourage men to be Men, to fulfill their masculine duties to their females and children. 

Unless its adherents adopt, Homosexuality by its nature cannot give them any of this. It is one of the reasons Homosexuality tends to be unstable in relationships, and often violent. (Lesbians may have long-term relationships, for which they are famous, but they are hyper-intense connections and often violent.) And of course if they do adopt, they automatically deprive the child they adopted of the right to have a father and a mother. 

Therefore, Homosexual Inc, Corporate Homosexuality, denies traditional Christian doctrine, for as St. Paul wrote in First Corinthians 6:9-20

9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

Glorify God in Body and Spirit

12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,”[e] and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.” 17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple[f] of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

That is about as far from the lifestyles of most Homosexuals today as one can get, and still be talking about the same species.

An Préachán
Notes
* By "Historical Church" I mean the Orthodoxies: the Western Orthodox, i.e., Catholicism, whether the "Latin Rite" or its many Eastern Liturgy Churches who recognize the Pope; the Eastern Orthodox "in-communion-with-each-other" Churches who barely speak to each other – and can't anyway even if they wanted to because they're all hopelessly divided by their various national languages; and the Oriental Orthodox, which consist of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Copts and Ethiopes. ("Oriental" means Eastern, of course, but these are the original "Eastern" Churches, as what we in the West call "Eastern Orthodox" are breakaways from the Universal ("Catholic") Church. All of these Churches have Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacramental System.