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Cd. Newman: “But we must Hope, for one is obliged to Hope it, that the Pope will be Driven from Rome, and will not continue the Council"

“But we must hope, for one is obliged to hope it, that the Pope will be driven from Rome, and will not continue the Council, or that there will be another Pope. It is sad he should force us to such wishes.”           
(Newman’s Letter to Fr. Ambrose St. John, 22 August, 1870)

By James Larson

 http://rosarytotheinterior.com/newman-and-the-pope/

Our second article on John Henry Newman. It details the extraordinary malice which he displayed towards Pope Pius X, the Definition of Papal Infallibility, and the Syllabus of Errors (and the strangely desperate and clumsy subterfuges he used to try to undermine the latter). It also relates this malice to that which Pope Francis has displayed towards Traditional Catholics. The malice of both these men is rooted in the denial of the radiance and power of the Truths of Christ as contained in Catholic Doctrine.

The above words, written approximately one month after the promulgation of the Dogma of Papal Infallibility on July 18, 1870, succinctly summarize Newman’s attitude towards the Definition, and towards the Papacy of Pope Pius IX. This quote should astound us, and elicit an enquiry as to how such sentiments are possible from a man who has just been canonized, and who is being held up as a model of obedience to Church authority. It needs also to be stated that the reader should not conclude that Newman’s view expressed above merely reflects a momentary indiscretion. His letters during this period are replete with such sentiments. Two months after the above letter to Fr. Ambrose, and one month after the official suspension of Vatican Council I (dashing any of his expressed hopes that the Council Fathers could reverse themselves on the Definition), he wrote the following to Lady Simeon on Nov 18, 1870:

We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years. It is anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.” (Quotations from Newman’s letters are taken from Charles Stephen Dessain’s The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, v. XXVI).

The reader who wishes to somehow deny the significance of the above quotes is, of course, able to offer words from Newman’s writings which, in their general tenor and expression of belief, run directly contrary to such sentiments in regard to the Papacy. Thus, in his Discourse on University Education (1852), he writes:

“Deeply do I feel, ever will I protest, for I can appeal to the ample testimony of history to bear me out, that, in questions of right and wrong, there is nothing really strong in the whole world, nothing decisive and operative, but the voice of him, to whom have been committed the keys of the kingdom and the oversight of Christ’s flock. That voice is now, as ever it has been, a real authority, infallible when it teaches, prosperous when it commands, ever taking the lead wisely and distinctly in its own province, adding certainty to what is probable and persuasion to what is certain. Before he speaks, the most saintly may mistake; and after it has spoken, the most gifted must obey….” (Dessain, vol. XXVI, p. 167)

This duplicity of Newman in regard to the Papacy is, of course, paralleled by a corresponding duplicity in regard to the Dogmatic Definition of Papal Infallibility itself. It is the proclamation of the Dogma itself which is the act of cruelty of which Newman speaks, and it is for having promulgated this Dogma that Newman “hopes” for the death of the Pope Pius IX, or that he be driven from Rome. On the other hand, Newman claims to have personally believed in Papal Infallibility before the Vatican Council, and he also submitted to and embraced (after an agonizing struggle) the actual Definition after the Council.

This enigma of Newman’s duplicity in regard to both Dogma and the Papacy is usually lightly passed over as part of the complexity and depth of the man, and the profundity of his intellect. It is our belief that such is not the case. Rather, what might seem enigmatically complex, is simple contradiction; and what has been considered profound, is really the shallow fruit of his rejection of Thomistic philosophy, and especially of that branch of philosophy called epistemology – the science of how we know, and therefore also of that science which establishes the reliability and power of our knowledge.

Newman, in his rejection of Thomism (and all the passages from the Gospel of St. John which speak of the power of the light of God’s Truth over all human souls of good will), rejected the radiance and power of the vertical dimensions of our faith, and instead insisted that a vital faith could only be produced through the illative sense of lived experience and imagination, rooted in sense experience. To therefore impose dogma from above upon vast numbers of human beings whose illative senses were not prepared to accept such dogma, was an act of tyranny. We see this same “missionary approach” now completely incarnated in the Papacy of Pope Francis who, while claiming to accept the entirety of the Catholic Faith, yet exercises a profound disdain for any attempt to convert others to the Catholic Faith, or to in any way emphasize such dogma and doctrine at the expense of a universal mercy and inclusiveness. The chickens of Newman’s epistemology have now, in other words, come home to completely “rest” in the Papacy of Francis. The canonization of John Henry Newman in the midst of the Amazonian Synod is therefore (in the same breath) also a symbolic canonization of the denial of the power of the Truth and Light of Christ and His Gospel over the human soul, which is the very essence of this Synod, and which has vomited forth the call to inculteration of pagan belief and practices at the expense of the Gospel-inspired demand for conversion.

This subject has been covered in depth in our previous article Does God Love Us: An Examination of the Epistemology of John Henry Newman, and we refer the reader to it for an in-depth understanding of what is really wrong with Newman’s approach to Catholic Faith, Dogma, and Papal Authority.
In this article, we intend to analyze the fruits of this duplicity. We have already explored Newman’s astounding words concerning the Definition of Papal Infallibility and his sentiments towards the Pope responsible for its promulgation. We would now like to turn to his equally disturbing treatment of Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.

The Syllabus

It is important to first place things in context.

The Syllabus of Errors of Blessed Pope Pius IX, sent to all the bishops of the world along with  the encyclical Quanta Cura (Dec 8, 1864), amounted to a declaration of war against the revolutionary world of the 19th Century – revolutions being waged in every sphere of human thought, life, and activity against Christ and His Church. The vast scope of the errors condemned is reflected in its division into 10 sections, each section representing a different area of human thought or activity. These are labeled as follows: 1)Pantheism, Naturalism, and Absolute Rationalism; 2) Moderate Rationalism; 3) Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism; 4) Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies, Bible Societies, and Liberal Clerical societies; 5) Errors concerning the Church and Her Rights 6) Errors About Civil Society, Considered Both in Itself and in Its Relation to the Church; 7) Errors Concerning Natural and Christian Ethics; 8) Errors Concerning Christian Marriage; 9) Errors Regarding the Civil Power of the Sovereign Pontiff; 10) Errors Having Reference to Modern Liberalism.

In considering the Syllabus in its larger context, it is also important to realize that the Pontificate of Pope Pius IX’s successor, Pope Leo XIII, was largely focused upon fleshing out these condemnations through an amazing array of profound social encyclicals covering all these areas of thought and activity. Further, Pope Pius X, Leo’s successor, brought this analysis and condemnation of modern errors to fruition in both his encyclical Pascendi, and in his own Syllabus Against the Errors of Modernism.

It is therefore impossible to overestimate the importance of Pius IX’s Syllabus for our understanding of the ideas, techniques, and activities of the forces of evil in the modern world, and also, therefore, for our being able to acquire those intellectual and moral weapons necessary for the Church’s defense and offense against these immensely destructive errors.

On the other hand, to undermine the authority and importance of the Syllabus in any way can only serve the purpose of aiding and abetting these same forces of evil. As we shall see, John Henry Newman used virtually every subterfuge conceivable to accomplish just such a task.
One of the things characteristic of the Modernist mind is that, to a large extent, such persons are able to leave the “bigger” mysteries of our faith alone. The doctrines of the Trinity, or of the Incarnation, for instance, do not demand “essentialization” with the same intensity as do many other magisterial teachings. These “major” doctrines usually play a very small role in that “illative sense” (experiential) which is “immediate” to man’s perception and experience,  and they therefore do not usually demand alteration in order for modern man to adapt to historical and cultural conditions, growth in secular and scientific knowledge, etc. Such doctrines are not confronted with the evolving ideas of human liberty, religious pluralism, political movements, new economic realities, and secularism. They do not, therefore, get “in the face” of the world.

It is otherwise with the truths which are affirmed as contraries to the 80 propositions condemned by the Syllabus, Here, the “illative sense” of the dominant worldview, with which the ecumenist wishes to enter into dialogue and dialectical progress, is directly confronted and condemned. A person could hardly find himself in a position of being more of a sign of contradiction to the world and modern culture than by fully assenting to and embracing the Syllabus. And this is why the Syllabus is such a nemesis to the Liberal and Modernist mind. It lays bare precisely those principles and ideas which are on the cutting edge of the “vitality” of the modern world, and effectively burns them at the stake. It puts the ecumenist out of a job, It puts the non-Thomist out of a job, and it would have put Newman out of a job if the Catholics around him had taken it with the substantial seriousness which it deserved. Few did. Cardinal Manning was one of them. Newman eventually won the battle, and Manning lost. Interestingly, Cardinal Manning was at Pius IX’s bedside when he passed from this world, a death for which Newman had been hoping
Newman’s “definitive” response to the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX is to be found in Section 7 of the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), usually considered his last major work. It is with an analysis of this work that we will be concerned here.

First, Newman does everything possible to undermine the physical and moral connection of the Syllabus to the Pope. He says such things as

“viewed in itself, it is nothing more than a digest of certain Errors made by an anonymous writer.”

“There is not a word in it of the Pope’s own writing.”

”There would be nothing on the face of it, to show that the Pope had ever seen it, page by page, unless the ‘imprimatur’ implied in the Cardinal’s letter had been an evidence of this.”

“but the Syllabus makes no claim to be acknowledged as the word of the Pope.”
“the Syllabus cannot even be called an echo of the Apostolic Voice.”

Now, of course, none of the above statements are quoted in context. In point of fact, the context makes them appear even worse. This “context” is constituted by the fact that the Syllabus was long in preparation, and a project very close to the heart and mind of Blessed Pope Pius IX (and also Cardinal Pecci, the future Pope Leo XIII). Below is taken from the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia. We quote it in its entirety because it clearly “puts the lie” to Newman’s contention that the Syllabus was not the “Voice” of Pope Pius IX:

The first impulse towards the drawing up of the Syllabus of Pius IX came from the Provincial Council of Spoleto in 1849. Probably on the motion of the Cardinal Archbishop of Perugia, Pecci (later on Leo XIII), a petition was laid before Pius IX to bring together under the form of a Constitution the chief errors of the time and to condemn them. The preparation began in 1852. At first Pius IX entrusted it to Cardinal Fornari, but in 1854 the Commission which had prepared the Bull on the Immaculate Conception took matters in hand. It is not known how far the preparation had advanced when Gerbet, Bishop of Perpignan, issued, in July, 1860, a “Pastoral Instruction on various errors of the present” to his clergy. With Gerbet’s “Instruction” begins the second phase of the introductory history of the Syllabus. The “Instruction” had grouped the errors in eighty-five theses, and it pleased the pope so much, that he set it down as the groundwork upon which a fresh commission, under the presidency of Cardinal Caterini, was to labour. The result of their work was a specification, or cataloging, of sixty-one errors with the theological qualifications. In 1862 the whole was laid for examination before three hundred bishops who, on the occasion of the canonization of the Japanese Martyrs, had assembled in Rome. They appear to have approved the list of theses in its essentials. Unfortunately, a weekly paper of Turin, “Il Mediatore”, hostile to the Church, published the wording and qualifications of the theses, and thereby gave rise to a far-reaching agitation against the Church. The pope allowed the storm to subside; he withheld the promulgation of these theses, but kept to his plan in what was essential.

The third phase of the introductory history of the Syllabus begins with the appointment of a new commission by Pius IX; its most prominent member was the Barnabite (afterwards Cardinal) Bilio. The commission took the wording of the errors to be condemned from the official declarations of Pius IX and appended to each of the eighty theses a reference indicating its content, so as to determine the true meaning and the theological value of the subjects treated. With that the preparation for the Syllabus, having occupied twelve years, was brought to an end. Of the twenty-eight points which Cardinal Fornari had drawn up in 1852, twenty-two retained their place in the Syllabus; of the sixty-one theses which had been laid before the episcopate for examination in 1862, thirty were selected. 

The promulgation according to the original plan, was to have taken place simultaneously with the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; in the event it was ten years later (8 December 1864) that Pius IX published the Encyclical “Quanta Cura”, and on the same day, by commission of the pope, the secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, sent, together with an official communication, to all the bishops the list of theses condemned by the Holy See. The title of the document was: “A Syllabus containing the most important errors of our time, which have been condemned by our Holy Father Pius IX in Allocutions, at Consistories, in Encyclicals, and other Apostolic Letters”.

This effort to deny the connection of the Syllabus to the mind and will of Pope Pius IX is part of the larger scheme to deny any dogmatic force to its condemnations.

Newman emphatically states:

“the Syllabus then has no dogmatic force.”

His efforts towards establishing this fallacy are threefold:

1) As already analyzed, he makes every effort, and uses every subtlety to separate it from the Pope.

2) He exercises similar subterfuge to separate the Syllabus from the encyclical Quanta Cura
(Condemning Current Errors). He writes:

“The Syllabus does not exist as far as the language of the Encyclical is concerned.”
This, of course, is pathetic. The Pope ordered Cardinal Antonelli to send Quanta Cura to all the bishops, accompanied by the Syllabus. Cardinal Antonelli’s letter of introduction read as follows
“Our Holy Father, Pius IX, Sovereign Pontiff, being profoundly anxious for the salvation of souls and of sound doctrine, has never ceased from the commencement of his pontificate to prescribe and condemn the chief errors and false doctrine of our most unhappy age, by his published Encyclicals, and Consistorial Allocutions and Apostolic Letters. But as it may happen that all the Pontifical acts do not reach each one of the ordinaries, the same Sovereign Pontiff has willed that a Syllabus of the same errors should be compiled, to be sent to all the Bishops of the Catholic world, in order that these Bishops may have before their eyes all the errors and pernicious doctrines which he has reprobated and condemned.

He has consequently charged me to take care that this Syllabus, having been printed, should be sent to your [Eminence] on this occasion….”

The Syllabus was obviously meant to augment the encyclical with greater detail by documenting individual errors. Both documents dealt with modern errors, and complimented one another. In Quanta Cura, the Pope, in speaking of past actions says, “We raised Our voice, and in many published Encyclical Letters and Allocutions delivered in Consistory, and other Apostolic Letters, we condemned the chief errors of this most unhappy age…we condemned the monstrous portents of opinion which prevail especially in this age, bringing with them the greatest loss of souls and detriment of civil society itself, which are grievously opposed also, not only to the Catholic Church and her salutary doctrine and venerable rights, but also to the eternal natural law engraven by God in all men’s hearts, and to right reason; and from which almost all other errors have their origin.” It is these “chief errors” spoken of by the Pope in Quanta Cura which are detailed and documented in the Syllabus. The two documents are clearly bound to one another.

3) Newman does everything he can to undermine the “universal application” of these condemnations. After flatly stating that “the Syllabus then has no dogmatic force,” he further writes:

“…[the Syllabus] is to be received from the Pope by an act of obedience, not of faith, that obedience being shown by having recourse to the original and authoritative documents.”
In other words, Newman here attempts to relieve all Catholics of all responsibility to obey any universality in the truths expressed in the propositions themselves. It is Newman’s position that the individual propositions have no universal verity, no dogmatic force, and that their meaning and applicability are to be reduced to the particular historical situations, etc. which surrounded their original statement in the individual Papal documents of Pius IX. Five times, in fact, he refers to the Syllabus as being merely an “index” to these previous documents, and he says, “But we can no more accept it as de fide, as a dogmatic document, than any other index or table of contents.” This is proved manifestly false by the very title of the document:”A Syllabus containing the most important errors of our time, which have been condemned by our Holy Father Pius IX in Allocutions, at Consistories, in Encyclicals, and other Apostolic Letters”.  The Syllabus is intended by the Pope to condemn “the most important errors of our time.” The “most important errors of our time” are not limited to a particular country, to an individual literary work, etc.

It is certainly good to have reference to the particular Allocution, Encyclical, etc. in order to obtain depth and accuracy of understanding of these propositions, but this “recourse” to these original contexts should in no way be used to undermine the universal application of these condemnations.
In order to perceive the depths or subterfuge involved here, let us look at Newman’s handling of one single condemned proposition
(#77)  “It is no longer expedient that the Catholic Religion should be established to the exclusion of all others.”

Here is Newman’s “reduction” of this particular proposition:

“When we turn to the Allocution, which is the ground of its being put into the Syllabus, what do we find there? First, that the Pope was speaking, not of States universally, but of one particular State, Spain, definitely Spain; secondly, that he was not noting the erroneous proposition directly, or categorically, but was protesting against the breach in many ways of the Concordat on the part of the Spanish government; further, that he was not referring to any work containing the said proposition, nor contemplating any proposition at all; nor, on the other hand, using any word of condemnation whatever, nor using any harsher terms of the Government in question than an expression of “his wonder and distress.” And again, taking the Pope’s remonstrance as it stands, is it any great cause of complaint to Englishmen, who so lately were severe in their legislation upon Unitarians, Catholics, unbelievers, and others, that the Pope merely does not think it expedient for every state from this time forth to tolerate every sort of religion on its territory, and to disestablish the Church at once? for this is all that he denies. As in the instance in the foregoing section, he does but deny a universal, which the “erroneous proposition” asserts without any explanation.”

Newman here clearly uses every means possible to minimize the meaning and extent of this proposition’s condemnation. According to Newman, the condemnation only has application to Spain. It only applies to breaches of the Concordant by that government. It is really not a condemnation at all, but only an expression of “wonder and distress.”  And it is reducible to the position “that the Pope merely does not think it expedient for every state from this time forth to tolerate every sort of religion on its territory, and to disestablish the Church at once”

To perceive the falsity involved in all of this subterfuge, one need only look to Quanta Cura for a true explication of this condemned proposition. Here, the Pope writes:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.”

In other words, Proposition 77 says just exactly what it appears to say; it condemns precisely what it appears to condemn, and this in its obvious and universal sense. And, it affirms its opposite – that it is expedient that the Catholic Religion should be established to the exclusion of all others.

The Syllabus really came to fruition in the social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. There, we can find the full development and universal applicability of the condemnation of Proposition 77. Interestingly enough, in Pope Leo’s Encyclical Immortale Dei (Christian Constitution of States), we find a passage which seems very applicable to Newman and his relationship to the Syllabus of Pius IX:

On the question of the separation of the Church and State the same pontiff [Leo is here speaking of Gregory XVI] writes as follows: ‘Nor can we hope for happier results, either for religion or for the civil government, from the wishes of those who desire that the Church be separated from the State, and the concord between the secular and ecclesiastical authority be dissolved. It is clear that these men, who yearn for a shameless liberty, live in dread of an agreement which has always been fraught with good, and advantageous alike to sacred and civil interest.’ To like effect, also, as occasion presented itself, did Pius IX brand publicly many false opinions which were gaining ground, and afterwards ordered them to be condensed in summary [the Syllabus] in order that in this sea of error Catholics might have a light which they might safely follow.”

It is this light which Newman dimmed with his obfuscations.

We have seen what great distaste Newman held for Pius IX. Recent Popes would, of course, have been much more to his liking. This is especially true of Pope Benedict XVI who, in his book Principles of Catholic Theology, went out of his way to destroy any relevance of Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus for our lives as Catholics in the modern world. This book contains an Epilogue titled On the Status of Church and Theology Today. Part B is titled Church and World: An Inquiry into the Reception of Vatican Council II. The text focuses primarily on the Vatican II document the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes), which the then Cardinal Ratzinger calls “a kind of summa of Christian anthropology.” The following is of immediate interest to our subject:

“If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text (Gaudium et Spes) as a whole, we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of countersyllabus. Harnack, as we know, interpreted the Syllabus of Pius IX as nothing less than a declaration of war against his generation. This is correct insofar as the Syllabus established a line of demarcation against the determining forces of the nineteenth century: against the scientific and political world view of liberalism. In the struggle against modernism this twofold delimitation was ratified and strengthened. Since then many things have changed. The new ecclesiastical policy of Pius XI produced a certain openness toward a liberal understanding of the state. In a quiet but persistent struggle, exegesis and Church history adopted more and more the postulates of liberal science, and liberalism, too, was obliged to undergo many significant changes in the great political upheavals of the twentieth century. As a result, the one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X in response to the situation created by the new phase of history inaugurated by the French Revolution was, to a large extent, corrected via facti, especially in Central Europe, but there was still no basic statement of the relationship that should exist between the Church and the world that had come into existence after 1789. In fact, an attitude that was largely pre-Revolutionary continued to exist in countries with strong Catholic majorities. Hardly anyone today will deny that the Spanish and Italian Concordats strove to preserve too much of a view of the world that no longer corresponded to the facts. Hardly anyone today will deny that, in the field of education and with respect to the historico-critical method in modern science, anachronisms existed that corresponded closely to this adherence to an obsolete Church-state relationship…..

Let us be content to say here that the text serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.”

Cardinal Newman hoped for the death of Pope Pius IX, and the election of a successor more to his liking. The above words of Joseph Ratzinger were written in 1982.

Twenty years later, Cardinal Newman would have his Pope in the person of Benedict XVI. Some might protest that this had already been the case in respect to all the Popes since Vatican II. But none of these Popes carved this reversal in stone as did the above words of Joseph Ratzinger.

One might well wonder what Newman would have thought of Pope Francis, whose words and actions have now brought his own epistemology to their logical fruition. After all, Newman was a 19th century Englishman who certainly had a penchant for order in his life and in his Church, and who believed that doctrine and dogma, despite their inability to provide real vitality to our faith, did indeed serve a purpose in providing what he called a “stay” to our spiritual life and belief. In other words, it provided precisely that structure and order necessary for the non-chaotic evolution of the “illative sense”, which was for him the real source of vitality in our faith. And, of course, something similar may be said of the role of doctrine in the thought of Benedict XVI.

With the Papacy of Francis, this “stay” has largely been torn asunder, and we now have the chaos which was the inevitable result of Newman’s denying the radiance and power of Christ’s Truth (as expressed in Catholic doctrine) over the human mind and heart (please see our previous article on Newman). Also, as we have pointed out in other articles, the “make-a-mess” agendas of Pope Francis are the spiritual children of the theology of Pope Benedict XVI, his rejection of Thomistic metaphysics, and his consequent denial of the “substantiality” of our perception of both created realities and the Nature and Truths of God. All of this, in turn, can be seen as the evil fruits of those seeds which were planted in the epistemology pioneered and exemplified by John Henry Newman, and which were eventually bound to come to term in the chaos and madness within the Church as exemplified by the Amazonian Synod, and which is now our present chastisement.

We must also realize that the reversal of Catholic spirituality constituted by the denial of the vitality of the vertical dimension of our faith (as contained in defined dogma and doctrine), and its replacement by the illative sense (or the religious sense spoken of by Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi), necessarily demands that everything concerning both God and man becomes subject to evolution. After all, as claimed by Newman himself, every man “is his own centre” in regard to his own particular growth of the illative sense, and this demands that the concept of universal evolution, and a non-judgmental inclusiveness concerning this evolution, become the ruling principles of this new theology. Thus, Pope Pius X declared: “In this way they pass to their principal doctrine, namely, evolution. “To the laws of evolution everything is subject under penalty of death – dogma, Church, worship, The Books we revere as sacred, even faith itself.” It is therefore absolutely mandatory if we are to perceive the profound depths of the crisis that is now upon us that we understand that the real agenda behind the Papacy of Francis and the Amazonian synod is not just Paganism, or such things as married priests or women’s ordination, but the entire reversal of the Catholic Faith through Teilhardian Cosmic Evolutionary Theology.

It could certainly be imagined that John Henry Newman, if he was suddenly transported in time to the reign of Pope Francis, would have been horrified and disgusted by the ultimate fruits of his labors. We might well question, however, if he would ever admit to any responsibility.

 Revealingly, in the case of Pope Benedict XVI, we have seen no real sign of either horror, or admission of responsibility. Once the radiance and power of the light of Christ’s Truth is denied, then the darkness which descends upon the interior of man destroys any real capacity for true self-knowledge and repentance of errors. Such a man is to be “compared to a man beholding himself in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was”. (James 1: 23-24).

This complete reversal and inversion of the Catholic Faith may well be considered the ultimate “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit”, which Our Lord declared to be the one sin for which there is no forgiveness (Mt. 12: 31), and which constitutes that “operation of error” which increases towards the end of time, and eventually ushers in the reign of Antichrist. The Holy Spirit is the Sanctifier, and therefore the Giver of all Light and Grace within the human soul. He descends from Above – from Christ Who is the Word of Truth defined in God’s Revelation. The ultimate Sin against the Holy Ghost is therefore constituted by that alteration in the minds and hearts of men by which they choose to believe that He comes from below through the evolutionary ascent of man.

We must realize, however, that this “operation of error” (Thess. 2: 10) is not just something that has engulfed intellectuals and those wielding power and authority within the Church. Nor is it something which is the fruit only of reductive evolutionary science. It is also embedded in the ascent of man to prosperity and acquisition in regard to all the things of this world, thereby living in profound contradiction in his daily life to that spirit of poverty and simplicity which is the life of the Beatitudes, the denial of which inevitably lead him to that interior darkness and preoccupation with the things of this world which can no longer find the time or motivation to look up. It is, in other words, a “seduction of iniquity” (Ibid.) which has increased at an accelerating pace over the centuries, and poisoned us all.

There is a “place” which has been prepared for all of us in these times of accelerating deceits and errors which now threaten to ascend and obtain dominion within our own  hearts and minds – a refuge where we may be firmly rooted in the certain faith that “Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration” (James 1: 17) It is the Immaculate Heart, and Spiritual Womb, of Our Blessed Mother, in whom all such perfect gifts dwell. She is the refuge wherein awaits all the fullness of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit for our own purification and preservation from all these evils. This is why we have chosen the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord on February 2nd as the perfect time for the Rosary to the Interior: For the Purification of the Church. It is the premier Feast of the Light of Christ’s Truth (commonly called Candlemas) bathing and purifying the Temple of Our Lord’s Church, a purification which can only be accomplished through the individual purification of each one of us through the mission entrusted by God to His Mother: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.” (Luke 2:35).

We therefore ask everyone to read our Original Proposal, and to beseech their parish priests and bishops to implement this event on the Feast of the Purification and Presentation on February 2, 2020. This year it falls on Sunday – Our Lord’s day, and the perfect day for surrendering to that interior state of mind and heart which completely acknowledges that He, and He alone, is the source of every perfect Gift “in Whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration”.

Please spread the word about the Rosary!

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.

Comments

lynn said…
Thanks for this. For many years I was a Newman devotee. The pontificate of Francis has brought about for me a re evaluation of many assumed beliefs. Since Newman has been called the Father of Vatican ll, I decided I needed to take a second look at the man who was once described by a catholic traditionalist as "The most dangerous man in England." The reexamination begin to reveal disturbing evasions and duplicities in Newman. Perhaps the most disturbing one was discovering a letter he wrote to a perplexed anti Darwinist who had written to Newman concerning the vast implications of this novel theory for the christian religion (and indeed it has become perhaps the principle weapon of the modernist). Newman essentially told the letter writer to cool his heels....nothing to get overly concerned about....if God made us out of the slime and from monkeys the faith could adjust. I knew that I had been overlooking some crucial if rather hidden aspects of Newman's christian faith from then on.
Michael Dowd said…
We could consider Cd. Newman another of "Pope" Francis false saints among which are Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. All of these "saints" support, in one way or another, the catastrophe of Vatican II which a bottom the replacing worship of God with the worship of Man.

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