The essential error in Syncretism is that it is a denial of the central principle of all the millennia of our Faith History: the truth that YHWH is our God and that he admits no other. How often do we clergy, as we say our Divine Office, use phrases like "DOMINUS deus noster"; our God is DOMINUS=YHWH.
From his call to Our Patriarch Abraham, through his Revelation to Our Teacher Moses, he alone is our God. To have anything to do with other legomenoi theoi or legomenoi kyrioi (I Cor 8:5: so-called gods or so-called lords) is to go a-whoring after idols. It merits the sternest punishment of our Covenant God.
But in the Greek and Roman World, there were so many gods and 'lords' on offer. And 'ladies'! And there was a particular fashion for the deities of the 'Mystery Cults' ... which tended to move over from the East ... Isis ... Mithras ... Osiris ... Sabazios ... so many of them (and, to the syncretist, all of them available because they are all essentially the same). So many 'names', onomata. To many in a mobile and unstable society, these Oriental deities seemed more interesting that the ancestral civic deities worshipped in the older temples up the hill. They had traction.
And they provided a real smorgasbord of Pick-n-mix!
I suspect that this is why, even in Jerusalem, the Apostle (Acts 4:12) felt he should emphasise that oude onoma estin heteron by which one can be saved. Every time we say the Gloria at Holy Mass, we make the same point: tu solus Dominus, tu solus altissimus ... (thoughtful worshippers must often have stifled a puzzlement here: surely, the Father and the Spirit also merit the titles 'Lord'; 'Most High'? But, in the theic economy of the ancient world, the text does not mean "only the Son, but not the Father, is Lord"; it means "only Jesus Christ, and not the kyria Isis or the kyrios Mithras, is Lord").
I know, because of his actions, that Pio Nono, who had the Isiac imagery scraped off the magnificent pillars in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Deipara Virgo trans Tiberim, was not a syncretist idolator. Deep in my heart, I work hard to feel confident that our Holy Father PF is also not a syncretist idolator.
But the Pachamama episodes ... what he allowed in his garden and what he did in S Peter's ... his Abu Dhabi document ... continue to put my confidence severely to the test.
Is this really the sort of peirasmos which a Roman Pontiff ought to put before souls for whom Christ died?
The sort of skandalon he ought to place before their feet?
Recently, Pope Francis openly ridiculed the young traditionalist seminarians for wearing 'stiff cassocks', part of his assault upon the traditionalist societies of pontifical right, whose numbers grow daily. In my Redemptorist parish church here in Liverpool is a side-chapel, called the tribune, its walls lined with photographs of young men in stiff cassocks. They were all slaughtered in the Spanish civil war. Any one of these stiff-cassocked martyrs is worth a hundred of those modern detractors of their spiritual descendants.
ReplyDeleteThank you Father. I remember walking the narrow lanes of Trastevere in a warm day in April. I must have circled Santa Maria in Trastevere at least three times, becoming more lost and disoriented by the maze around the church. Eventually we entered the piazza and found this beautiful place. A living parish church too, little children’s shoes and lost umbrellas propped against said ancient pillars. Local people, warm yellow light and real beauty.
ReplyDelete"Is this really the sort of peirasmos which a Roman Pontiff ought to put before souls for whom Christ died?
ReplyDeleteThe sort of skandalon he ought to place before their feet?"
Not only no, but HELL NO!
Pope Francis might not be a pagan, but, after the fashion of Oscar Wilde, he seems intent on making us think that he is.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I should like to answe your (rhetorical) questions, I dare not, lest the plain truth, that the Emperor is naked, be too much for you and your readers to bear. Declino ergo sententiam meam personalem de sedenti super sedem beati Petri aperte notam facere.
ReplyDeleteThe Pope is a humanist like his predecessor John Paul II, whose idolatry was the same as Francis'. When these Popes gave way to idols they told themselves, I'm sure, that they weren't giving way to the idols themselves, but rather to "the human spirit which is clambering towards the divine." So Pachamama itself may be an idol, but the human souls searching for God through Pachamama are not idols. But this Humanism / anthropocentric philosophy is itself a form of idolatry: the greatest idol of our age, the idol of Man. Just about everyone has been making way for this idol. It is the dominant cult in all the governments and universities, and most of the churches.
ReplyDeleteI've recently had to put up with living with a confere who not only does not deny Pachamama worship, but supports Pachamama worship, as 'inculturation'. I listened to the usual rant about how the Christian conquistadors destroyed the aboriginal pyramids, and forbid the worship of the native gods. This was all portrayed as an injustice to be rectified, by promoting the indigenous religion and rituals. This is typical and widespread. The Church cares more about culture than about 'Christ'. After picking up on these dynamics of Latin American-Vatican II inculturation, I simply cannot believe any naivite about the Pachamama incident and the Church with an Amazonian face. We are promoting paganism. We are promoting worship of false Gods. That's what we are doing now.
ReplyDeleteFor if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?
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ReplyDeleteThe simple---and self-evident---answer to your question, dear Father, is that Francis, in his pathological cruelty, does not care and may in fact be hard at work to scandalize those, like you and me, who are so obstinate and "stiff" as to love and want the Faith of Our Fathers. A felicitous phrase that brings to mind, once again, both Newman and his very different confrere Father Faber: how would these great converts evaluate Francis's destruction? Different takes or, at long last, a unanimous agreement grounded in their shared rock-solid love for the Church and Her Faith?
ReplyDeleteI don't think that most of the folks promoting syncretism have actually thought enough about it to understand what they're doing. Basically, they just don't think of pagan deities as real entities in any way, and therefore they think it's totally okay to dress up and title the Virgin Mary as Pachamama Barbie.
ReplyDeleteAnd neopagans tend to both take pleasure in getting leftie Christians to do this sort of thing, and in thinking, "Yeah, the Virgin Mary is just a cut-rate mother goddess! Except oppressive to women, unlike actual mother goddesses who just historically seemed to be oppressive to women!"
The other problem is that a lot of people seem to think that "It's okay to have a Christian holiday on the same day as a pagan holiday, if Christians want to do that to replace the pagan nonsense" is the same thing as "Christmas is a pagan holiday with Christian paint on it, and Midnight Mass is exactly the same as Saturnalia."
There are a lot of malicious things that people do, but there's also a lot of unthinking things that people do.