PopeWatch: Ecumenism

No Orthodox Prayers on the Prayer Card?

My Orthodox friends on FB and elsewhere on social media are absolutely disgusted with Jorge the Heretic, and point out that he is the culmination of everything they have said about the “Roman Church.” May God Almighty depose and anathematize that man.

No Satanist prayers?

All of our Catholic saints martyred for refusing to offer a pinch of incense to the pagan Roman gods must feel so silly right now. If they’d only realized that worshipping an idol was just another path to the True God… /sarc

Never, ever, forget that the martyr’s crown and the letters St. are awarded solely by God.

Period.

Occupants of the Holy See and popular piety can make sound conclusions based on evidence, but whether any particular soul is in Heaven is the sole prerogative of God.

I will also trust the conclusions of holy men from holier generations over the sad remnants of Christendom present today. The martyrs of the Reformation, et al were theologically superior to ecumaniacs of today.

Viva Christopher Rey!

True ecumenism is possible for catholics. Anything other than true ecumenism is false ecumenism.

Jesus, Catholic Church Founder, said He was building one Church (only). Only His Church has the fullness of truth-no other. So how can His One Church do ecumenism?

Jesus’s Church has dogmas and doctrines that must be assented to and believed by every member of the church. In many attempts at one-big-happy-ecumenical church, these dogmas and doctrines are totally negotiable, ignored, irrelevant, or unimportant. For a faithful catholic, ecumenism is the effort, in charity and in faith, to bring nonbelievers to the Catholic Church; the Church that is, in the words of the Catechism, “ . . .the sole Church of Christ,” [Catechism of the Catholic Church, 811, 816]; the “ . . . one Church,” [Id., 814]; the “ . . one and only church of God,” [Id.].

When Jesus taught about the unity of His Church, it was not a unity which would result in the rejection or denial of His Church’s doctrines and dogmas, or the intentional nudge-nudge-wink-wink ignoring of dogmas, etc. that others find uncomfortable or that hurt their feelings.

Jesus’s Church, prior to the Second Vatican Council, defined “ecumenism” as an effort to convince those not in the Church to return to a unity that they themselves had rejected and from a disunity that they themselves had brought about.

Professor Alan Montefiore recognizes another type of ecumenism for those of different religions, even for those whose religions profess dogmas and beliefs that explicitly contradict each other. (Professor Alan Montefiore in “Ecumenical Movements and Truth”). For him, believers of different religions – to achieve an ecumenical goal – can accept that all believers are on an “equally valid path to religious fulfillment.” Religious truth, on this view, is relative, not absolute. This is based on an erroneous “equalization of truths.” Seeking unity at the expense of truth is false ecumenism.

In practical reality, “false ecumenism” requires that proponents of the various religions who want to engage in fruitful ecumenism resulting in one, almost certainly new, religion must jettison, or deny, one or some of their beliefs to create the new religion with a novel theology. This false ecumenism cannot be based on any agreement for the ecumenical partners to simply ignore dogmas and doctrines. Without doctrine-defeating, dogma-destroying ecumenical metanoia, no new religion can be achieved.

For Professor Montefiore, various beliefs of the ecumenical partners can, and often do, exhibit “mutual incompatibility.” Montefiore calls this the “problem of truth.” To achieve the new religion, there must be an approach beyond “mutual toleration,” because, in reality, principled “mutual respect” is not really possible.
It may be that a true believer of one religion can separate the believer of another religion from his or her beliefs (as some do in loving the sinner, hating the sin), but in real life, says Professor Montefiore, there can be a “tension” in trying to do this. This true believer who also wants an ecumenical solution to the disunity among religions must confront an inescapable conclusion. What there is about the other’s beliefs that is “genuinely incompatible” with the true beliefs “must be false.”

To achieve the ecumenical goal, the goal of false ecumenism, according to Professor Montefiore, this tension is to be resolved not by bringing the other believer to the true belief, but by compromising, rejecting, changing, or denying true beliefs:

“If, then, full and equal respect for one’s ecumenical partner implies a recognition that their own spirituality and their own “way to God” is as religiously valid as one’s own, one may have in all consistency to accept the prospect of having to revise certain of one’s own basic and Jong-standing beliefs. (The same will, of course, be true for one’s partners as well.) It is not likely to be easy for It is not likely to be easy for all those concerned to admit that their ecumenism harbors within it an acceptance of the principle that there may be more than one equally valid expression of the recognition of God, more than one equally acceptable form of His worship, more than one superficially incompatible but in fact equally valid diffraction of the one hidden Truth, but this, it does seem, must in the last resort be the inner sense of any really serious contemporary ecumenical movement.”
It is always the case – in science or in theology – that embracing a new framework, a new paradigm requires embracing new – i.e. different – truths and rejecting what was previously accepted as truth.

Here it is not a question of altering the deposit of faith, changing the meaning of dogmas, eliminating essential words from them, accommodating truth to the preferences of a particular age, or suppressing certain articles of the Creed under the false pretext that they are no longer understood today. The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth. In the Body of Christ, ‘[He who is] the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6), who could consider legitimate a reconciliation brought about at the expense of the truth?”(St. John Paul II, Encyclical Ut Unam Sint, On commitment to Ecumenism).

There is no authority in Catholic Church scripture, dogmas, doctrine or laws to refer to any group or entity as the single, one church of Jesus Christ other than the Catholic Church.

True ecumenism is the effort to help those who have, by their own actions, abandoned Jesus’s Church to return to it.

Guy, Texas

For full citations and biblical backup, see my article at the site Catholic Stand last April.
https://catholicstand.com/true-ecumenism-leads-to-the-one-true-holy-catholic-church/