Francis on Christmas: Salvation Comes through Love and Respect for Humanity?

Fatima Perspectives #1262

In his “Urbi et Orbi” Message for Christmas, Pope Francis proposes a conception of the Incarnation that reduces Christ to a mere passive facilitator of a humanistic brotherhood among men of whatever belief or persuasion, including those who reject His Gospel and His Church. The words Francis uttered leave no doubt of this:

What does that Child, born for us of the Virgin Mary, have to tell us? What is the universal message of Christmas? It is that God is a good Father and we are all brothers and sisters.

This truth is the basis of the Christian vision of humanity.

Without the fraternity that Jesus Christ has bestowed on us, our efforts for a more just world fall short, and even our best plans and projects risk being soulless and empty.

For this reason, my wish for a happy Christmas is a wish for fraternity.

Fraternity among individuals of every nation and culture.

Fraternity among people with different ideas, yet capable of respecting and listening to one another.

Fraternity among persons of different religions. Jesus came to reveal the face of God to all those who seek him.

The face of God has been revealed in a human face. It did not appear in an angel, but in one man, born in a specific time and place. By his incarnation, the Son of God tells us that salvation comes through love, acceptance, respect for this poor humanity of ours, which we all share in a great variety of races, languages, and cultures. Yet all of us are brothers and sisters in humanity!

Our differences, then, are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness. As when an artist is about to make a mosaic: it is better to have tiles of many colours available, rather than just a few!

To summarize this astonishing message: according to Francis Christ has “bestowed” fraternity on all men indifferently, regardless of their “different ideas” and “different religions,” and salvation comes not by converting to Him and accepting the truth of His Gospel and the authority of the Church He founded as the Ark of Salvation, but rather “through love, acceptance, respect for this poor humanity of ours.”

Note well: salvation, according to Francis, comes though love, acceptance and respect for humanity, not love, acceptance and respect for Christ and obedience to the Law of His Gospel.

Worse, according to Francis, the differences among men — which is to say their differences respecting the very truth revealed by the Word Incarnate — “are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness” and part of a marvelous “mosaic” made of “tiles of many colours…” This is nothing but an echo of the liberal mantra that “diversity is our strength.”  But there is no strength in a “diversity” of ideas about right and wrong or the duties owed to God.  There is only conflict and chaos and the risk of a loss of souls. 

As the Bible says in a verse Father Gruner frequently quoted apropos the civilizational and ecclesial crisis Our Lady of Fatima came to address: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.” (Hos 4:6)

Nowhere in Francis’ message to the Church and the world for Christmas is there any reference, even the most veiled, to the words of Christ Himself to the Church He founded: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.” (Matt 16:15) The divine commission has disappeared without a trace, and what we have now is precisely the humanistic counterfeit of the brotherhood of man promoted by the French Sillon movement and condemned by Pope Saint Pius X, as a false brotherhood “which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion… more universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men become brothers and comrades at last in the ‘Kingdom of God’.” 

The organizers of the Sillon movement boasted that “We do not work for the Church, we work for mankind” — as if working for mankind did not require precisely working for the Church as the means of both human flourishing in this world and eternal salvation in the next. Such thinking, St. Pius X warned, is but “a miserable affluent of the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions…”  A “church” in which the differences among men, meaning differences between truth and error, are celebrated as “a source of richness” rather than lamented and viewed as an evil to be overcome by the grace of God and the unity of one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism for the remission of sins.  And a Gospel which, to quote Pius X, presents not Christ the King, but “a diminished and distorted Christ” who merely presides over a pan-religious brotherhood in which truth no longer matters for salvation.

This, surely, is the situation the Mother of God had in view when She appeared to the three shepherd children at Fatima.

 

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