On Friday, September 13th Pope Francis delivered a speech to the youthful students at Singapore’s Catholic Junior College, a group which included many non-Christians. In it he fired a shot that has been heard round the world. Putting aside his prepared script, His Holiness began speaking spontaneously, with words that now, more than ever, we can presume to have come straight from his heart. With soft, grandfatherly tones and intently earnest body language, he led his young audience gently and persuasively down a very different path from the straight and narrow one marked out by his predecessors in the chair of Peter.
Those previous popes had repeatedly censured and warned against religious relativism or indifferentism– the tendency to gloss over and deny the importance of the differences between Christ’s Gospel and other religions. After all, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me”. To the apostles he sends out as missionaries he says, “He who hears you, hears me; whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me” (Lk 10: 16). Again, “This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (Jn. 17: 3). Countless other New Testament texts could be cited to the same effect.
But a very different message was sent to those Singapore school students by none other than the earthly leader of Christ’s Church. Eliciting their smiles and applause, he led them down a wide and shining path whose smooth surface seemed to iron out all those troublesome, contentious differences between rival creeds. Comparing the world’s mutually contradictory religions to its different “languages” – none of which, of course, is ‘truer’ or morally better than any other – Francis affirmed bluntly, “Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio“. This was immediately rendered accurately by the translator at his side, who said loudly and clearly, “All religions are a pathway to arrive at God”. No hint of any nuance or qualification there.
Magisterial as well as biblical pronouncements against this kind of levelling of religious differences could also be cited in abundance; but two examples, one from two centuries ago and the other from Vatican Council II, will suffice here…
Read the rest: https://onepeterfive.com/francis-doubles-down-but-has-he-apostatized/
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