In signing the Abu Dhabi Statement, PF dreadfully claimed that God willed the diversity of religions.
This is manifestly contrary to the teaching of the New Testament that God sent the Second Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity into the world as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Subsequently, there were attempts to justify these those words in the Statement. We have been told about a "Permissive Will of God".
It is true that God gave mankind such a freedom that Man and men can turn aside from the Will of His Creator, and have done so. It is also true that God 'can' ... 'is able to' ... draw good even out of the sinful choices of fallen Man. Of the Fall itself, the Latin Church dares to cry out "O felix Culpa".
So, in this sense, it would indeed be logical to say that God "willed" the Diversity of Religions. Just as, manifestly, he "willed" the Holocaust. In that he did not prevent it, he permitted it. Similarly, every other monstrous act of Murder and of Evil which Man has ever perpetrated against his fellow Man; every act of blasphemous defiance against our Maker; must, by PF's logic, have been "within the Permissive Will of God." God "wills", in PF's sense, the violent abuse of children. God "wills" the ravaging of the Rain Forests. God "wills" Capital Punishment. PF's God "wills" a thermo-nuclear catastrophe.
Whatever PF may have said subsequently, I find it hard to believe that, in the Abu Dhabi Statement, he really intended to bracket Islam among the sins I have just listed (and cf the list in Veritatis Splendor paragraph 80, and Gaudium et Spes 27).
Furthermore, if PF really does consider that the Holocaust et cetera are "God's will", why does he not make this clear rather more often? If the despoliation of the Amazon and the robbing of its indigenous peoples and Capital Punishment are "God's will", why doesn't PF say so openly and honestly?
I do not believe that it is either helpful or, indeed, humanly honest to use language in PF's sort of way. He listened to the Syncretist plaudits as he announced "God wills the diversity of religions", and then, in effect, he explained in private "I only meant that God doesn't actually send thunderbolts to stop it".
This is what most ordinary people would call slippery. Englishmen a century or two ago would have called it Jesuitical. Is it the sort of dodgy use of language people have in mind when they tell us that PF is 'Peronist'?
I believe PF on that occasion made, not for the first time, a very grave mistake, and that he led the Faithful Sheep astray. His voice was that of an allotrios.
Now PF is going to visit a largely Islamic country. He may, again, be gravely tempted by the Enemy to make further remarks which express (or are crafted to look as if they express) Syncretism rather than of the Truth which is in Christ.
The Abu Dhabi statement, thank God, was not made in an ecclesial or pontifical context. We can .... and should ... disown it and, indeed, roundly condemn it as being the well-intentioned error of a very foolish man. That Statement was no more the Words of Peter than the adulteries of Alexander VI were Acts of Peter.
I do not know if I dare to beg and entreat the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, that PF may proclaim in Iraq the Grace of the One Redeemer.
But if, at least, he gets himself back to Rome without having again surrendered his tongue to the Evil One, I shall say a Mass of Thanksgiving.
Otherwise, of Reparation.
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Dear Father. St Augustine teaches that God does chose evil men to rule over us:
Here is Saint Augustine, “City of God.”
Chapter 21.— That the Roman Dominion Was Granted by Him from Whom is All Power, and by Whose Providence All Things are Ruled.
These things being so, we do not attribute the power of giving kingdoms and empires to any save to the true God, who gives happiness in the kingdom of heaven to the pious alone, but gives kingly power on earth both to the pious and the impious, as it may please Him, whose good pleasure is always just. For though we have said something about the principles which guide His administration, in so far as it has seemed good to Him to explain it, nevertheless it is too much for us, and far surpasses our strength, to discuss the hidden things of men’s hearts, and by a clear examination to determine the merits of various kingdoms. He, therefore, who is the one true God, who never leaves the human race without just judgment and help, gave a kingdom to the Romans when He would, and as great as He would, as He did also to the Assyrians, and even the Persians, by whom, as their own books testify, only two gods are worshipped, the one good and the other evil — to say nothing concerning the Hebrew people, of whom I have already spoken as much as seemed necessary, who, as long as they were a kingdom, worshipped none save the true God. The same, therefore, who gave to the Persians harvests, though they did not worship the goddess Segetia, who gave the other blessings of the earth, though they did not worship the many gods which the Romans supposed to preside, each one over some particular thing, or even many of them over each several thing — He, I say, gave the Persians dominion, though they worshipped none of those gods to whom the Romans believed themselves indebted for the empire. And the same is true in respect of men as well as nations. He who gave power to Marius gave it also to Caius Cæsar; He who gave it to Augustus gave it also to Nero; He also who gave it to the most benignant emperors, the Vespasians, father and son, gave it also to the cruel Domitian; and, finally, to avoid the necessity of going over them all, He who gave it to the Christian Constantine gave it also to the apostate Julian, whose gifted mind was deceived by a sacrilegious and detestable curiosity, stimulated by the love of power. And it was because he was addicted through curiosity to vain oracles, that, confident of victory, he burned the ships which were laden with the provisions necessary for his army, and therefore, engaging with hot zeal in rashly audacious enterprises, he was soon slain, as the just consequence of his recklessness, and left his army unprovisioned in an enemy’s country, and in such a predicament that it never could have escaped, save by altering the boundaries of the Roman empire, in violation of that omen of the god Terminus of which I spoke in the preceding book; for the god Terminus yielded to necessity, though he had not yielded to Jupiter. Manifestly these things are ruled and governed by the one God according as He pleases; and if His motives are hid, are they therefore unjust?
Job 34: For when he granteth peace, who is there that can condemn? When he hideth his countenance, who is there that can behold him, whether it regard nations, or all men? [30] Who maketh a man that is a hypocrite to reign for the sins of the people?
I fear, dear Father, that you will soon after Francis's trip be offering a Mass of reparation---as is called for on almost a daily basis under his pontificate. The old Jesuits---the ones detested and maligned by English heretics---had a soul-defining difference from most present-day Jesuits: they had the Catholic Faith. Their use of mental reservation and evasive language was not the tactics or games of swindlers and equivocators; no, it was the language and tactics of defenders of the Faith and of their own personal safety---ethically justified under duress and in the light of justice. What we witness, on a regular basis, with Pope Francis and his modern Jesuits is a well-crafted plan of religious indifferentism calculated to dilute the True Faith. The plan was long ago, with Vatican II, set in motion by the much-touted Ecumenism that was to bring a the unity that Christ prayed for among His followers---a unity that has always existed since the birth of the Church among orthodox believers. But, oh, to disbelieve the ecumenical program suddenly---and against defined magisterial teaching---became the new "heresy," as the late convert Father Richard Neuhaus once described it. The real Faithful have been bamboozled, and the ecumenical project (first with separated Christians and progressively with others until we reach worshippers of Pachamama) only moves along to its necessary and logical conclusion: apostasy.
Oh, come on. Pope Francis isn't even close to the worst of the popes. There's at least five or six popes ahead of him.
And he's not an apostate, because he doesn't even realize what he's doing and that it's wrong. He thinks theology is handwavium.
He's ignorant and talks too much, but all his actual sins are along the line of power-hungriness and love of control.
"Is it the sort of dodgy use of language people have in mind when they tell us that PF is 'Peronist'?"
Yes, it is.
Signed:
An Argentine
I ask this as an honest question Father: In all of recorded history, since the Fall, has there ever not been a diversity of religions? Does the Will of God rule history or does it not? If both of these things are true how can a person not say that "God wills a diversity of religions." He never said 'equality' he said 'diversity.'
Dear Eric
I answered your question at some length in my post. That is what it was all about!!!
So, in reply, I will ask you: In what sense does the Will of God rule history?
Are you willing to agree that God willed the Holocaust and the violent rape of children?
If not, why not?
(Hint: read my original post.)
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