Michael Davies

Ecumania

IN THE FIRST article in this series (Sept. 1986), it was explained that Our Lord wishes to save mankind by incorporating all men into one visible, hierarchically governed Church, which is His Mystical Body in the world, the unique Ark of Salvation. This does not exclude the possibility of salvation by extraordinary means for those who, through no fault of their own, are not incorporated into the visible Church. But the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ is explicit. His apostles were to go forth and preach the Gospel, the good news which He had entrusted to them, to all nations, and to baptize those who accepted it. Those who heard them heard Him and would be saved, but those who rejected them, rejected Him and would be condemned. Until the Second Vatican Council there had not been the least doubt among Catholics as to the unique and divinely constituted nature and mission of the Church. Baptized Christians who accepted the teaching of the Magisterium and were in communion with the Pope, were members of the Church founded by Christ, the rest of mankind was not. Those who are baptized in Protestant denominations are, in fact, baptized into the Catholic Church, for there is no other Church into which they can be baptized. They remain Catholics until they willingly embrace the tenets of the heretical sect to which their parents belong. In such cases their heresy is rarely culpable and involves no sin. It is what is known as material heresy. But, nonetheless, Protestants are deprived of important means of salvation. They are deprived of the grace of five of the seven sacraments instituted by Our Lord. They do not have the Gospel preached to them in all its fullness, but only in the distorted version adopted by their particular sect. Thus, a zealous Catholic will not only be eager to save the souls of non-Christians, but also Protestants. To give just one example, one needs only to glance through the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican sect to see how frequently and how gravely it departs from the Gospel truth.

It has become customary, as a matter of courtesy, to refer to the Anglican sect as a "church," but this is theologically misleading. Our Lord founded only one Church, and communion with the pope is a sine qua non of membership. Anglicans are not in communion with the pope and therefore they neither belong to the Catholic Church nor constitute a "church." The only legitimate sense in which the term "a church" can be used is when referring to the Catholics of a particular diocese. Each Catholic bishop presides over a Church. There is, however, no theological basis for speaking of an Australian Church, an American Church, or an English Church. There is the Catholic Church as a whole, and the individual dioceses which comprise it—nothing in between.

Under no circumstances whatsoever can any true Catholic speak of, let alone pray for, "Church unity." This term will not be found in any official Vatican document, and rightly so, for it is heretical. Church unity must evidently involve the coming together of more than one Church, but there is only one. A Catholic can only speak of and pray for the "unity of Christians."

A number of readers were probably puzzled by my statement that there was not the least doubt among Catholics as to the unique and divinely constituted nature and mission of the Church until the Second Vatican Council. They might claim that the Council did not modify the teaching of the Church in this matter, and that I have no right to suggest that it did. As a matter of fact, I did not state that the Council had modified the traditional teaching. What I meant to imply is that since the Council many Catholics no longer believe in this teaching, which is a fact. In Christian Unity Week this year, how many readers heard a Catholic priest, let alone a bishop, speak of Protestants returning to the unity of the one, true Church? The authentic Catholic position was expressed by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical, Mortalium Animos:

To all intents and purposes, since the Second Vatican Council, Catholic ecumenists (more accurately described as "ecumaniacs" by Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster) behave as if Catholics and Protestants are journeying together towards a yet unachieved unity. But unity is an essential characteristic of the Church founded by Jesus Christ. If it does not possess that unity it has ceased to exist. The unity of the Church remains unimpaired, no matter how many of its members abandon it for false religions. If in the last days the Church should be reduced to half a dozen faithful Catholics united around the Pope, it would still possess the unity imparted to it by its Divine Founder. Every Catholic has, of course, a duty to work and pray for the return of separated Christians to the Church, in the sense described by Pope Pius XI, but the Pope was describing a unilateral return to the one, true Church, and not a convergence.

The Ecumenical Heresy

It is indeed true that in the post-conciliar Church, yesterday's orthodoxy has become today's heresy, and yesterday's heresy has become today's orthodoxy. The majority of Catholic clerics today, bishops in particular, subscribe to what I would term the "Ecumenical Heresy," although they would term it the ecumenical orthodoxy. It would define itself in the following terms: "The Christian Church is now divided into a number of branches, each with its own traditions and insights into the Gospel message. The ecumenical movement is seeking to draw them together into the great united Church of the future. When this has been achieved, the lost unity of Christendom will be restored."

Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration should ponder the following statement which appeared in the bulletin of an American parish:

A parishioner who complained to the parish priest concerning this statement was told that he was crazy, and when he took the matter up with his bishop, was informed that the statement was fully in accord with the teaching of Vatican II.

In January 1984 a group of English Catholic bishops met with the leaders of a number of Protestant sects to discuss the nature of the Church. The Catholic bishops accepted that "other Christian bodies also belong to the Church of Christ"—a distinction being made between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. The January 21, 1984 Tablet quoted one jubilant Catholic bishop as follows: "What has been swept aside from the ecumenical scene is the idea that the Church of Christ is identical with the Roman Catholic Church. Instead we have a picture of Christ embracing all the Christian churches, though not in the same way. We cannot say that the Church of Christ is not verified in the other churches. Indeed, some marks of the Church are possessed by some of them more deeply than by the Catholic Church." I obtained the view of two highly competent theologians concerning this statement. They both informed me that it was heretical, and represented a view that had been condemned by the popes on numerous occasions.

The extent to which the ecumenical heresy is translated into practice was made clear in the January 30, 1983 issue of the Catholic Pictorial, the journal of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, which is presided over by one of England's most ecumaniacal prelates, Derek Worlock. This official Catholic journal reported with evident approval that a Catholic priest had presided over a "united service of communion" attended by Catholics and members of five Protestant sects. He used a form of service based on the Anglican Series 3 order, in which everyone present served his neighbor with bread and wine. In a BBC television religious program on October 20, 1985, a Protestant priestess boasted of the fact that a Catholic bishop had not only attended one of her Communion services, but had received Communion from her.

Australia is by no means lagging behind in promoting the Ecumenical Heresy. Indeed, after the scandalous joint service held in Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 29, 1985, Archbishop Little could be considered among the foremost prelates in the world in promoting indifferentism. It is interesting to note that during that service, the English Protestant leader, Dr. Robert Runcie, seemed to consider even Christian unity a thing of the past, and spoke of "the unity of humankind," and the search for the path to follow so that we can "become one world."

There is little need to go further into the extent to which the ecumenical heresy is now predominant among Catholics in most Western countries. The question that must be answered is whether there is a casual connection between this heresy and the Second Vatican Council. A distinction must be made here between the actual teaching of the Council and the Council as an event.

Teaching of the Council

The traditional and authentic teaching on the uniqueness and unity of the Church can be found spelled out very clearly in a number of Council documents. It would be difficult to find a more inspiring and evocative exposition of this teaching than that provided in Chapter I of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. It is replete with references to the Fathers of the Church, the teaching of the Popes, and that of previous Councils. A Catholic who could read this chapter without having his faith strengthened and deepened would be a very strange person indeed. This chapter is entitled "The Mystery of the Church," and towards its conclusion, contains the following passage:

It is very unfortunate that the word "subsists" was used in this passage. It has been used by ecumaniacs to suggest, as the English bishops did in January 1984, that other Christian bodies belong to the Church of Christ. When the term is taken within the context of the passage, such an interpretation is nonsensical. The passage speaks of the Church "constituted and organized as a society" and "governed by the successor of Peter," and being "the sole Church of Christ." How "the sole Church of Christ "organized as a society" and "governed by the successor of Peter" could be found existing outside the visible unity of that society is something the most rabid ecumaniac would find it hard to explain. But as is so often the case with Vatican II, those wishing to use the teaching of the Council to undermine the Church take a passage or even a word from its total context and use it in isolation. Unfortunately, there are only too many ambiguous passages which can be used precisely in this way, as Mgr. Kelly admits in his justly celebrated book, The Battle for the American Church. Some of these ambiguous passages are, as Mgr. Lefebvre rightly states, "time-bombs" inserted by the liberal experts (periti) who drafted the Council documents to be exploited after the conclusion of the Council. I have shown in my book, Pope John's Council, that the periti who drafted the documents were the men who obtained the power to interpret them after the Council. God forbid that this should happen, Cardinal Heenan warned, but happen it did. The use of the word "subsists" in Lumen Gentium must certainly be the most damaging ambiguity in any conciliar document, and it is particularly significant that in the original draft the same statement read: "The Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world is the Catholic Church." Valiant efforts have been made by orthodox theologians to prove that "is" and "subsists" are synonymous, but if this is the case, why was the change made?

It is good to know that in its criticism of the liberation theologian, Fr. Leonardo Boff, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has included an official condemnation of the heretical interpretation of "subsists" which has been discussed here, and accepted by the English bishops among others. The Congregation stated without ambiguity that the true Church exists only within the visible society of the Catholic Church (L'Osservatore Romano, French Edition, May 14, 1985). But such a correction twenty years after the Council ended will have little practical effect in correcting an error which has now spread throughout the Church, even at the parish level. There is thus a casual connection between a Council document and a grave theological error, even though the interpretation of the word "subsists" in an heretical sense does violence to the text of Lumen Gentium.

But the responsibility of the Council for the ecumenical heresy cannot be assessed simply by examining ambiguous passages within the documents. Note must also be taken of the spirit pervading those documents and what they do not say. While the true teaching concerning Catholic belief on most subjects can be found, not without effort in some cases, the Council had little to say on the subject of condemning errors or of urging those in error to return to the truth, as Pope Pius XI did in Mortalium Animos. Not even atheistic communism could receive a formal condemnation. The thrust of the documents is towards an end to confrontation and condemnation, and towards an era of tolerance and dialogue. This is particularly true of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. In his book Principles of Catholic Theology published in France in 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger admits that this Constitution uses key words with a lack of precision. He notes that in the preamble to this Constitution the Church is to see the world as its partner and to cooperate with it in building up the world. "It is not made clear whether the 'world' that is cooperating is the same as the 'world' that is in process of construction: no attempt is made to define what is meant by 'world' in either case" (p. 424). This comment confirms the complaint made by Mgr. Lefebvre in his book, A Bishop Speaks, that a lack of precise philosophical definition was "felt throughout the Council and, in my opinion, it was for this very reason that the Council became enmeshed in equivocation, in vague utterances, and in my opinion swayed by feelings rather than reason. And thus it was that the flood gates were opened to each and every interpretation."

The Council as an Event

The Archbishop's reference to feelings being more important than reason is crucial to an understanding of the responsibility of the Council for the ecumenical heresy. This is what I am referring to by the expression I used earlier, "the Council as an event." Where the everyday life of the Church is concerned, the Council as an event has had far more influence than the Council itself, i.e., the teaching contained in its sixteen official documents. For many of the experts and bishops, the Council turned into an ecumenical love-in with the Protestant Observers. Protestants soon became people with whom one dialogued and from whom one learned, rather than poor souls to be saved from the darkness of error. This ecumenical euphoria was taken back from Rome to their own countries. The concepts of condemnation and conversion have all but vanished from Catholic thinking in the English-speaking world.

There is no limit to the degree of self-deception and semantic acrobatics that ecumaniacal bishops and theologians will not indulge in when they grovel before their separated brethren. The ARCIC betrayal of Catholic teaching on the Priesthood, the Eucharist, and Authority, is the example par excellence here. Despite the scathing critique of these essays in ambiguity, compromise, moral cowardice and outright heresy made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the English bishops gave them their enthusiastic endorsement—only one bishop having the courage not to sign. This must certainly be considered the most appalling act of collective episcopal apostasy in the English-speaking world since, with the noble exception of St. John Fisher, the English hierarchy recognized Henry VIII as head of the Church. This endorsement was given on April 18, 1985, and thus the collective imprimatur of the English hierarchy to the following statement in the ARCIC final report:

If this is what the Catholic hierarchy in England believes, and in its response to the Final Report it nowhere repudiates this unambiguous expression of the ecumenical heresy, then it no longer has the right to the proud title of "Catholic." We cannot only infer that it does accept this expression of heresy by failing to repudiate it, but by the fact that this is precisely the heresy expressed publicly in the January 1984 meeting which has already been cited. Not only would it be unreasonable to expect English Catholics to obey bishops who have given public endorsement to manifest heresy, but it would also be unreasonable to expect them to take these pathetic prelates seriously. The only duty they owe to them is that demanded by charity—praying for their conversion.

Part VIII: The Liturgical Revolution

Part I: Et Incarnatus est - Sept. '86
Part II: Examination of the Traditional Position - Oct. '86
Part III: Obedience - Dec. '86
Part IV: Arianism - Jan. '87
Part V: Humanism and Its Consequences - Feb. '87
Part VI: The Committees Take Over - Mar. '87
Part VII: Ecumania - April '87
Part VIII: The Liturgical Revolution - May '87