Catechism of the Crisis in the Church (Pt. 12)
Fr. Matthias Gaudron
(Question 47–continued from The Angelus, April 2008)
• Can it not be argued, however, that there are degrees of error, and that a religion that, while being false, recognizes the existence of one God and imposes on its adherents a certain moral code is better than doctrinaire atheism and absolute amorality?
There are degrees of error, but, paradoxically, it could be argued that a system that incorporates many truths is more dangerous than one containing fewer. A chair with just three legs is more dangerous than a two-legged chair no one would think of sitting on. A very good counterfeit bill is more dangerous than a less skillfully executed fake.
• Can you give an example?
It has been said quite justly that "Islam is the religion that, having known Christ, refused to acknowledge His divinity. If it is true that the worst form of falsehood is that which least contradicts the truth, then the falsehood that consists in saying all the good possible about Christ except that He is God is the most redoubtable."1 In fact, missionaries have always had much more trouble converting Muslims than Animists.
• What should we make of the argument that God is at work in the non-Christian religions because good can be found there, and good can only come from God?
This reasoning is a sophism that relies upon a failure to distinguish between the natural order and the supernatural order, for it is obvious that when we speak of the action of God in a religion, we understand an action that leads to salvation. God saves by supernatural grace, while the good referred to in the other religions (at least the non-Christian religions) is only a natural good. In these occurrences, God acts as the Creator who gives being to all things, and not as the Savior. The Second Vatican Council's desire to disregard the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders yields its worst fruits in the domain of ecumenism. People start thinking that any religion is able to procure the greatest gifts of the good Lord. This is an enormous deception.
• By stimulating man's religious sentiment, are not all these religions nonetheless doing good?
What is the good of urging someone down the wrong path? Far from leading to God and life eternal, the non-Christian religions turn people away.
• Does Hinduism turn people away from eternal salvation?
By preaching reincarnation, Hinduism removes the seriousness of our earthly existence. It is no longer the decisive test upon which our eternity depends, but rather a simple stage since the soul must be reincarnated–in a rat, a dog, or some other thing–as often as necessary to expiate its faults. For the same reason, Hinduism is devoid of mercy (even if today it tries to imitate the beneficent works of Christianity). It coldly passes by the poor and suffering, deeming that they justly bear the weight of their past sins.
• Does Buddhism turn people away from eternal salvation?
Buddhism is a religion without God. Man believes that he can save himself, and this salvation consists in entering nothingness, Nirvana. Buddhism does not look forward to an eternal life in union with God, but only at the end of suffering in the dissolution of existence itself.
• Does Islam turn people away from eternal salvation?
Islam rejects as blasphemy the Holy Trinity and, consequently, the divinity of Christ. It encourages cruelty (praising the murder of a Christian as a good work) and sensuality (encouraging polygamy and promising men a paradise of sensual delights). To give some examples, let us quote from a few passages of the Koran:
"...The Christians say, 'The Messiah is the Son of God.' That is the utterance of their mouths, conforming with the unbelievers before them. God assail them! How they are perverted!"2
"When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds; then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads."3
As for Paradise, besides the "wide-eyed houris as the likeness of hidden pearls" (Sura LVI, 22, etc.) there are also immortal youths to be found there.4
• What can be said definitively about these non-Christian religions?
The words of St. Peter must be repeated incessantly: "For there is no other name [than that of Jesus] under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).
• May one hope, in spite of everything, for the salvation of non-Christians?
The Church has always admitted that non-Christians can have implicit baptism of desire (if they are in a state of error without personal fault and accept the grace of God), but she has not been optimistic about the number of those saved in this way. Blessed Pope Pius IX denounced as an error this proposition: "Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ."5
48) Do the non-Christian religions honor the true God?
The non-Christian religions do not honor the true God. The true God, in effect, is the Triune God who was revealed in the Old Testament and especially in the New Testament by His Son Jesus Christ. "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father" (I Jn. 2:23). "No man cometh to the Father, but by Me" (Jn. 14:6).
• Might it not be said that the Jews and the Muslims have a correct but incomplete idea of God, and that consequently they honor the true God?
This was the case for the Jews of the Old Testament. To them, the Blessed Trinity had not yet been revealed. They did not believe this dogma explicitly, but neither did they reject it. Today, the Mohammedans and the Jews expressly deny the Holy Trinity revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. They pray to a God who would be but a solitary person. But such a God does not exist.
• Yet the Jews and the Muslims mean to honor the one God that exists, the One who created heaven and earth, the One who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; so doing, are they not addressing the true God?
The non-Christians are able to have a certain natural knowledge of God as the author of nature, and even as the author of certain revelations (to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, etc.) to which they adhere by a purely human faith. But this purely natural knowledge leaves them as strangers to God. Only supernatural faith enables its possessor to glimpse into the divine intimacy and enter into familiar relations with Him.
• But in the 11th century, did not Pope Gregory VII write to a Muslim king that Christians and Muslims have the same God?
Indeed, in a letter to King Anzir,6 Pope St. Gregory VII did write: "We and you, who, while in a different manner, believe and profess one God; who daily praise and venerate Him as the Creator and ruler of the world...."7
• What exactly does this passage mean?
This sentence of Pope St. Gregory VII means this: Christians and Muslims believe, profess, praise, and venerate the one God, but in the case of the Christians, this faith and love are supernatural virtues that make them adhere to God, whereas for the Muslims, it involves a virtue of natural religion that leaves them far from the true God.8 Thus it can be said in a certain sense that only the Christians possess or attain the true God, and that only they honor Him truly because they are in an intimate relation with Him.
• Does not a person who prays to God in virtue of a merely natural knowledge of Him accomplish a good action?
Such a prayer would be a good action in and of itself (though devoid of supernatural value), if it were not mingled with errors or superstitious rites that, far from honoring God, insult Him. The Muslim who, several times a day, affirms that God neither begets nor is begotten, blasphemes the God he pretends to honor. Ultimately he may be excused for this blasphemy because of his invincible ignorance, just as someone who engages in false worship, but, in fact, it is not an act of religion that is being performed, but of superstition (and even idolatry).
• Have these fundamental truths been challenged since Vatican II?
During the retreat that Cardinal Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, preached at the Vatican in 1976 for Pope Paul VI, he developed an absolutely modernist conception of faith and, subsequently, the thesis according to which all men, regardless of the religion to which they belong, pray to the true God.
• Can you quote these modernist statements of Cardinal Wojtyla?
Cardinal Wojtyla declared: "The itinerarium mentis in Deum emerges from the depths of created things and from a man's inmost being. The modern mentality as it makes its way finds its support in human experience, and in affirmation of the transcendence of the human person."9
• What makes these statements modernist?
These statements are modernist because faith is not understood as man's response to divine revelation, but as a search for God issuing from the depths of man's soul.10
• What did Cardinal Wojtyla say about prayer in the false religions?
A little further on, the Cardinal states:
"...This God is professed in his silence by the Trappist or the Camaldolite. It is to him that the desert Bedouin turns at his hour for prayer. And perhaps the Buddhist too, wrapt in contemplation as he purifies his thought, preparing the way to Nirvana. God in his absolute transcendence, God who transcends absolutely the whole of creation, all that is visible and comprehensible."11
• What can be said about these statements?
This way of thinking is completely foreign to Holy Scripture. The Old Testament is full of the wrath of God against the false religions; the Chosen People is often punished for worshipping false gods.
• Is the same vision of things to be found in the New Testament?
St. Paul writes in a trenchant phrase: "The things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God" (I Cor. 10:20).
• A non-Christian cannot honor the true God, then?
God is surely attentive to the good dispositions that Jews, Muslims, or pagans have when they set about to pray. It is even possible that, pushed by grace, some of them really honor God in their hearts, but that happens despite the false ideas their religion gives them. The false religion itself is not addressed to God, but to an illusion; of itself, it does not lead its adherents to God, but turns them away from Him.
1 Joseph Hours, "The Christian Conscience before Islam" [French], Itinéraires, 60, 121.
2 The Koran Interpreted, a translation by A. J. Arberry (version online at arthursclassicnovels.com), Sura IX, 30.
3 Ibid., Sura XLVII, 4.
4 Suras LXXVI, 19; LII, 24; LVI, 17. See J. Bertuel, L'Islam, ses véritables origines (Paris: NEL, n.d.), p. 187.
5 Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 17 (DS 2917).
6 This Berber prince (En Nacir Ibn Alennas) reigned over the former Roman province of Mauritania...from 1062–88. Gregory VII could consider him as being influenced by the Christianity of his ancestors, and perhaps even secretly Christian since the prince had sent presents to the Pope, had asked him to consecrate a bishop, and had released Christian prisoners, as he explained at the beginning of the letter. Pope Gregory VII's letter might have been written to sound out the king's thinking, which would explain his unusual turn of phrase (it is the only letter of this kind prior to Vatican II).
7 "...Nos et vos...qui unum Deum, licet diverso modo, credimur et confitemur, qui eum creatorem huius mundi quotidie laudamus et veneramur...."
8 Except for those that may have received baptism of desire, in which case they would no longer be acting as Muslims but as Christians.
9 Karol Wojtyla, Sign of Contradiction (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 15-16.
10 See Question 11, The Angelus, June 2007.
11 Ibid.
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