TRATCAST EXPRESS
A Vatican expert on interreligious dialogue, a certain Monsignor François Bousquet.
And you won't find his answer terribly surprising.
Quote,
The proclamation of Christ can only be done in a spirit of dialogue.
Coming with a loudspeaker and proclaiming your truth without taking into account your interlocutor seems to me contradictory and even counterproductive.
Yet one of the temptations today is to believe that we own the truth.
In my opinion, one should rather place oneself under the truth, being aware that it is always greater than one perceives it to be.
Unquote.
Now, see, these people are still living in the 1960s.
We don't possess the truth.
The truth possesses us.
You know, with that kind of twaddle, you'll never get it.
You can't convince a Muslim of anything.
Of course, the Catholic Church owns the truth, so to speak.
You know why?
Because Jesus Christ, her divine founder, gave it to her.
He entrusted the deposit of faith to his church.
In John 16, 13, our blessed Lord says,
But when he, the spirit of truth, is come, he will teach you all truth.
And in 1 Timothy 3.15, the church is called the pillar and ground of the truth.
It is because Catholics have the truth that we can and must proclaim it.
Not as though we owned it in the sense of being the makers of it or being lord over it,
but in the sense of being charged with guarding what God has revealed to us and given to us.
And in the sense of being sent to spread it so that as many people as possible will come in contact with it
and become disciples of Christ and members of his church.
You can't give what you don't have.
The church can teach people the truth because she has the truth.
This is not terribly difficult.
Now, look at what the Vatican II Church has done.
Look at what the Vatican II Church has done.
Look at what the Vatican II Church has done with that.
They've replaced true evangelization with useless dialogue
in which they constantly confirm others in their false religions.
Every time there is some kind of significant non-Christian occasion,
whether it be Vesak for Buddhists or Diwali for Hindus or Ramadan for Muslims,
the Vatican is right there wishing them joy, happiness, and abundant blessings
and even spiritual fruit.
And from the devout observance of their false religion, that is abominable.
It's abominable because it is an endorsement of the very religion
from which a Catholic must seek to draw the pagan, the Mohammedan, or the Jew.
There is no spiritual fruit to be had from observing the Hindu festival of lights
known as Diwali, for example.
Their lights are the false lights of the prince of darkness.
Now, that doesn't mean that you approach them by yelling at them
or being rude to them or anything.
That's understood.
But for heaven's sake, at least don't encourage them in the practice of idolatry.
And let me quote some more from this modernist Monsignor.
Quote,
First, seeking the conversion of Muslims has nothing to do in and of itself with the crusade.
Second, what's he mean Christ didn't proclaim himself?
Hello? Has he ever read the New Testament?
Of course Christ proclaimed himself.
You can find examples in Matthew 5.11, Luke 4.18, John 4.26, 6.35, 8.24, 13.19, 14.6.
The Gospels are filled with our Lord proclaiming himself.
And why wouldn't he? He's the Redeemer.
He told the Jews that he is the Messiah and that unless they accepted him, they would all perish.
He told them, I am the bread of life. I am the door. I am the vine.
What is wrong with these people?
Now, this Novus Ordo Monsignor does mention that a part of evangelization is proclamation,
which he says, quote,
consists in explicitly expressing the goodness,
the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, unquote.
Now, it's not clear to me how this fits in with this dialogue business
and this openness to the truth he says we must all have.
If he proclaims the good news as merely a subjective conviction that he has
and not as the objective truth,
or if he offers it merely as one option among many,
then that's not evangelization.
So, I don't know. Maybe that's what he means.
Let's look for a minute at the example of St. Francis.
Okay?
In a book on his life, it's related how the saint and his companions evangelized a Muslim sultan in Egypt.
And, spoiler alert, it wasn't by preaching a lowest common denominator message about human fraternity.
Quote,
The sultan Melodin asked him,
And for what purpose they came?
Francis answered with courageous firmness,
He immediately preached to him with great fervor
the dogma of one God in three persons and the Lord Jesus Christ,
the Savior of mankind.
Unquote.
That's from the book The Life of St. Francis of Assisi,
published in 1889, pages 197 through 198.
See, St. Francis wasn't rude to the sultan, right?
But he also didn't come to preach dialogue or human fraternity.
He had a supernatural message to proclaim, and that's what he did.
Would any of these values,
Vatican II inter-religious dialogue people do that nowadays?
Not in a million years.
Okay?
These people won't even keep Pachamama statues out of their own churches.
And now, of course, they're claiming that God wants there to be many different religions because diversity.
Now, of course, there can be legitimate disagreements over how best to approach Muslims in order to evangelize them fruitfully.
And that will probably vary from case to case, right?
Depending on all kinds of circumstances.
We're not saying there's a one-size-fits-all or that you should come with a, you know,
a big sledgehammer and just kind of lay down the law and this is how it is and you're going to hell.
That's not what we're saying, okay?
Of course, you have to be sensitive to the different circumstances.
But the point is that at the end of the day, there can only be one goal.
And that goal is the soul's conversion to Catholicism.
Not human fraternity.
Not unity and diversity.
Not soup kitchens unlimited.
Now, the conversion of Muslims and any non-Catholic to Catholicism is obviously not the goal of all these Vatican II sect ecumenical and inter-religious shenanigans.
Sure, I mean, they'll probably accept.
Conversions, you know, because liberty of conscience.
But these people don't believe that conversions are necessary.
Necessary for salvation.
And they sure don't make conversions the goal of their activities.
In other news, the twice-ordained layman, Reverend John Hunwick, loves to unleash all kinds of daring theological theses
on his blog, Father Hunwick's Mutual.
One of his more recent entries, dated April 22nd, proposes the idea that if your local Novus Ordo bishop accepts Francis as pope,
then it is safe for you to regard him as pope, too.
Now, of course, Hunwick would never want you to draw the logical inference that if, therefore, your local bishop accepts Francis' teachings,
then you should, too.
Or, if your local bishop accepts the clown mass, then so should you.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
See, that's not how it works in Hunwick land.
The argument he makes is ad hoc, you see.
It is specifically created for only this one particular issue.
So please don't apply its logic to anything else.
You're supposed to use it only to feel comfortable about accepting Francis' claim to the papacy as valid.
You're not supposed to use it to draw any conclusions that would follow from Francis.
This is possession of the papacy.
To find out what you're supposed to do with regard to what Francis teaches in his magisterium,
you're supposed to read Hunwick's blog, or Mr. John Zoolstor's, etc.
You get the idea.
Now, Hunwick tries to draw this principle of accepting Francis as pope if your bishop accepts him.
He tries to extract that from the historical case of the Great Western Schism,
where, so he,
which of the two or three papal claimants you were in communion with
depended not on you or on your bishop, but on your monarch.
Another daring idea he, of course, provides absolutely no evidence for.
But no matter what the facts are with regard to that, the historical facts,
it was always a given that whomever you accepted as pope,
whoever you were in communion with,
that is the man whose teachings and laws you followed.
Hunwick, on the other hand, wants a pope without the papacy.
And for that, there is no historical precedent,
at least not within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy.
And lastly, on May 10th, the popular Recognize and Resist blog,
Rorate Caeli, published the eighth installment in an ongoing series by Don Pietro Leone,
critiquing the errors,
of the Second Vatican Council,
a council which the author believes came from a true pope, by the way.
Towards the end of the post, he writes,
Now let's think about this for a minute.
Immutability means unchangeableness.
Leone maintains that Vatican II,
which he acknowledges to be a council promulgator,
denies the unchangeability of the Church's doctrine
by changing the Church's doctrine.
Does he not see a problem with that claim?
See, one way to know with certitude that Paul VI wasn't a true pope
is that he ratified Vatican II,
which changed Church doctrine in a substantial way,
which is impossible.
The only way you can explain that fact is that Vatican II is a true pope.
The only way you can explain that phenomenon
is to hold that Paul VI was not in fact the Roman pontiff.
Otherwise, you'd have to hold that Church teaching can change,
which you're not allowed to hold.
Now, somehow the semi-trads think that the way to uphold
the unchangeableness of Church teaching
is by maintaining that when this teaching does change,
somehow it doesn't count.
But that's not what the immutability of Catholic doctrine means.
It means that it cannot change, not that everyone has an obligation to resist it when it does.
Now, what makes otherwise quite learned and reasonable people such as Don Pietro Leone,
who is an academic, embrace such bizarre and harebrained positions?
Quite simply, it's the noble desire to reject modernism combined with the not-so-noble desire
to avoid Sedevacantism at all costs.
In my opinion, that's the reason why they adopt such weird ideas and are oblivious to any problems with them.
So, let me end here with a piece of advice to Rarate Chaley.
If you're going to criticize modernists for believing that church doctrine can change,
you may not want to do it in an article that argues that church doctrine changed.
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