The Judge Who Does Not Judge?

Fatima Perspectives #1370

If you want to understand what the term “neo-Catholic” means, consider this article at the decidedly neo-Catholic website aleteia.org by one Fr. Francesco Cosentino.  Fr. Cosentino assures his readers that while “it’s true, God is a judge (among other things), and we find this statement in Holy Scripture,” He does not actually judge anyone.  He’s a judge only in that vague Modernist sense in which a thing can be and not be at the same time and under the same aspect.  So that the God Who is a judge is not a judge.

Let Father Cosentino explain in his own classic Modernist fashion, which involves leading the reader in a circle:

“Generally speaking, the main problem is that we apply to God our way of understanding and thinking about justice. For us, justice means above all that ‘if you make a mistake, you pay.’ Guilt is established in a courtroom by a judge who verifies in detail what faults were committed and who is responsible. This idea is too limited and incomplete with respect to God’s justice, because it’s limited to asking the guilty party to pay for the damage caused.”

So, God is a judge, but not like a judge in a courtroom who looks at facts, finds you guilty of some offense and then makes you pay.  Notice the caricature of divine judgment, which sets up the Modernist ruse:

“But, is God’s justice really like that?  The Bible shows us that God’s justice goes beyond that. As Pope Francis has often reminded us, God’s justice is mercy: He doesn’t want you to pay because you’re guilty — He wants to make you just, and free you from guilt, so that you don’t have to pay your debts! It’s a complete reversal of perspective, which is still too uncommon in our churches.”

Justice is mercy?  Nonsense, of course!  Justice is one thing and mercy is another.  A judgment can be merciful, but it is still a judgment, not mercy. This deliberate category confusion completely eliminates the revealed truth of the Last Judgment of which God in the flesh warns us in the 25th Chapter of Matthew:

“And when the Son of man shall come in his majesty, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit upon the seat of his majesty.

“And all nations shall be gathered together before him, and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats:

“And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left.

“Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world….

“Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but the just, into life everlasting.”

But, on and on Cosentino goes, lulling his readers into believing that they needn’t worry about their sins, because:

“God defeats the evil that besieges you, i.e. ‘does justice for you.’ We always have the idea that we must repair the error in God’s sight; in reality, when we fall into the web of evil, God is moved and suffers for us, and it is He Himself who intervenes on our behalf ‘doing justice,’ that is, freeing us from imprisonment and slavery. His justice isn’t the simple application of the law (‘if you make mistakes, you pay’); it’s the mercy with which He transforms us, making us new creatures.”

This, in thin disguise, is simply the heresy of Martin Luther, who designed a religion to accommodate his own sins, according to which the mere act of faith imputes the righteousness of Christ to men so that faith covers over all of men’s sins. In short, salvation by faith alone.

Cosentino reinforces his deception with another caricature: God is not “a severe and ruthless judge who is only interested in identifying our faults and punishing us if we’re guilty.” Whoever said that He was?  He is the just Judge, but a Judge nonetheless.  As we read in Chapter 5 of the Gospel of John:

“Wonder not at this; for the hour cometh, wherein all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God.

“And they that have done good things, shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.

“I cannot of myself do anything. As I hear, so I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not my own will, but the will of him that sent me.”

Cosentino, however, gives us precisely the neo-Catholic version of divine justice, a new version in which God never condemns anyone to eternal punishment because “justice is mercy.”  Blind guides like Cosentino would lead souls into the inescapable ditch they will encounter at the end of a wayfaring state in which they were led to believe, by Cosentino’s brand of cartoonish theology, that God would never punish them like some nasty judge in a courtroom.

 As Saint Catherine of Siena, a Doctor of the Church, recounts in her dialogues with Our Lord, He admonished her thus: “While you are alive you have a season of mercy, but once you are dead it is your season of justice.” But that is not what itching ears wish to hear at a time in which, as the Third Secret predicts, many of God’s own ministers will preside over the abandonment of the Faith.  Which explains, as Father Gruner never tired of demonstrating, why the leaders of “the Church of Vatican II” have tried to neutralize the Message of Fatima with its unacceptable vision of souls in hell — from which the Virgin Mary’s maternal intercession can save them.

 

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