Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 7:46am

PopeWatch: The Judas Option

Edward Pentin at National Catholic Register brings us some very interesting comments on the current pontificate by theologian Monsignor Nicola Bux:

Elaborating on this point, Msgr. Bux said the “radical paradigm shift” now in vogue means to “believe in an urgency” to bring justice to the world in terms of “eliminating poverty, or of fair trade, fraternity,” or mixing it with “extreme situations” such as “migrants, homosexuals, divorcees.” Yet often one does not hear the words “Jesus Christ,” he observed, and the Mass is “reduced to a television show with dance and applause.” And all this is happening, he said, “while in the world reference to God is absent” and the world itself “becomes more and more indifferent, an enemy of the Church, of religion, of the faith, of God.” 

He went on to refer to words of Eugenio Scalfari, who said after one of his interviews with the Pope, that Francis was pushing for a “change” in the “concept of religion and divinity” that would result in a “cultural change” that would be difficult to modify. “If that were to happen,” Msgr. Bux warned, “the consequences would be catastrophic.”  

Already, he said, the missionary drive is “diminished, a sign of a crisis of faith.” He then pointed out a stark contradiction in Francis’ words: on the one hand, in Evangelii Gaudium, he affirms that mission and proclamation of the Gospel are the “paradigm,” but on the other hand, and “in a Peronist way as they say in Buenos Aires,” he has said there is “no Catholic God” and that proselytism “is a solemn nonsense; not to convert but to serve, to walk together.” 

Msgr. Bux then drew further on St. John Paul II, in particular a quotation from his encyclical Veritatis Splendor: “The unity of the Church is damaged not only by Christians who reject or distort the truths of faith but also by those who disregard the moral obligations to which they are called by the Gospel.” 

Go here to read the rest.  There really is nothing new about what is happening currently in the Church.  It is a resurrection of the old Judas Option:

“Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.”

John 12: 5

The Judas Option always entails the Church taking her eyes off Christ and focusing on some political placebo popular in The World, and the promised wonders that will result therefrom.  This is always a snare and a delusion.  C.S. Lewis summed up this very old lie in the Screwtape Letters:

 

About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate.

Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster.

On the other hand, we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice.

The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner.

 

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Howard
Howard
Thursday, December 6, AD 2018 1:14pm

You should have continued on to the next verse, John 12:6. It is also relevant.

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