Those great corrupters of Christianity, the Jesuits

 

 Those great corrupters of Christianity, and indeed of natural religion, the Jesuits.

-- Joseph Addison 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Leo XIV continues Pope Francis' legacy of inclusion for LGBT after maintaining in 2012 that their behavior should not be promoted

 Pope Leo meets LGBTQ+ Catholic advocate and vows continuity with Pope Francis’ legacy of welcome

 ... The meeting, which lasted about half an hour, was officially announced by the Vatican in a sign that Leo wanted it made public. It came just days before LGBTQ+ Catholics participate in a Holy Year pilgrimage to the Vatican in another sign of welcome. ...

 

LOL Gerald O'Collins, Society of Jesus, 1971, speaking up for the Cosmic Christ without the slightest hint of self-awareness

 First, Jesus must not be turned into a contemporary. He is rightly viewed within the historical framework of the first century. To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless. Albert Schweitzer’s warnings against creating Jesus in accordance with one’s own character still stand. ...

We meet God in the cosmic Christ who encounters us now, as well as in the strangeness of a first-century Galilean whose preaching resulted in His crucifixion.

-- America: The Jesuit Review, March 6, 1971 and August 26, 2024 

Gerald O'Collins was a systematic theologian, not a philologist, who passed away August 22, 2024 after a long and distinguished Catholic academic career at Pontifical Gregorian University, 1973-2006.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of the cosmic Christ was the fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose offenses against Catholic doctrine were repeatedly warned against but never proscribed. Several Catholic intellectuals sought to rehabilitate his reputation after his death in 1955, not the least of whom was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

O'Collins was a child of this time.

The theological idea of the cosmic Christ certainly has its germ in the Pauline Colossian epistle and later in Irenaeus, but can hardly be said to be a Synoptic idea. O'Collins wanted these to have equal weight:

Both the Synoptic account of the preacher from Nazareth and Paul’s reflections on his Lord’s death and resurrection belong within the canon of scripture.

Yet it was Paul himself who eschewed the historical Jesus:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.

-- II Corinthians 5:16 

 

Christians don't care what the Bible says, they just pick and choose, or completely avoid mentioning what it says

Like this guy, a Jesuit Catholic priest, who fails to mention that the practice in Egypt was turbocharged by the Muslim conquest, and who should know better than to employ the is-is-ought fallacy:

This Easter, as some Christians get tattoos, this history might serve as a reminder of tattooing as a legitimate Christian practice, one that has been in use since the beginnings of the Common Era.

You must not slash your body for a dead person or incise a tattoo on yourself. I am the LORD. 

-- Leviticus 19:28

 

This priest could have thought about a single verse to make his point, but apparently knows not the Scriptures

 

Jesus Did Not Die to Appease an Angry God

Terrance Klein, America 

 

I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. 

 

-- Matthew 12:6f.

Catholic biblical scholar just coincidentally concludes that the history of hell pretty much confirms the Roman Catholic dogma of purgatory

 Candida Moss, here for the Jesuits, thinks that the biblical hell begins as a relatively late product of Greek influence from the time of Alexander the Great, and that in keeping with later Catholic reflection is a temporary place of punishment and purgation, not of eternal damnation.

Evidently Hitler does go to heaven, but he will be the very last one out of hell, on that you may rely.

Her essay does a better job of explaining how the later Catholic idea of purgatory reflects the actual awful material conditions of Roman penal and slave experience in late antiquity than it does of explaining the gospels' language. In the end the pope's hope that hell one day will be empty is "surely right", according to Moss.

In the middle of those Greek and Roman historical bookends, however, lies the New Testament language about hell. And it is just weird how Moss is so perfunctorily dismissive of that language. She hardly treats of it at all. For her it is simply "obscure" because it is usually parabolic or "evasively symbolic", a point of view which is oddly reminiscent of long-standing Protestant dismissiveness of "the hard sayings of Jesus". The Protestants find the hard sayings problematic in the main because they contradict the universal gospel to the Gentiles. In this case, a Catholic finds them problematic because they contradict the universalism implied by purgatory. For neither could it be possible that those sayings reflect an actual historical message, being so stern and radical as to be unthinkable. They must be an anomaly: "eschatology straight up, without the diluting effects of divine mercy and forgiveness."

Just so.

Candida Moss stumbles over the Albert Schweitzer hard truth. The ameliorating of the hard sayings was the anomaly. The hard sayings did not arise from Lake Placid. Lectio difficilior potior, interpretatio item.

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.  

-- Matthew 7:14

For Moss the gospels are contradictory and run "hot and cold" on hell. The gospels give us only a "faint sense" of hell at best. After all there was a time when hell was not in the Bible, before the Greeks, and it shouldn't surprise us that the parables of Jesus really don't describe any "actual eternal punishment" dontcha know. It's a foreign idea, whose time came and went.

Oh dear.

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

-- Mark 9:43ff. 

Moss would like us to think, simply ignoring this passage, not only that there is no eternal fire according to Jesus, but that all such worm talk actually came from a later period, from the horrible fact of the parasites in human shit found everywhere and on everything in ancient prison cells, the literal analogues of an imaginary storied hell as in Dante, rather than from the actual message of Jesus about the eternal decay of death in the grave. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they do a dance upon your snout. This is . . . completely unconvincing.

That last point needs to be emphasized. The eternal decay of death in the grave flies in the face of Jesus' supposed belief in and preaching of resurrection of the body. The eternal grave which confronts us here is an offense to that.

But there it is. Eternal fire. Eternal worm. Straight up.

It takes a Jesuit lol

 The point of being a Christian isn’t to make more Christians.

Here.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

-- Matthew 28:19f.

The Jesuit headline that would never be: Abortion Ban in Indiana a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Choice Movement

 

Abortion Win in Kansas a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Life Movement

 

Indiana Is First State To Approve Near-Total Abortion Ban Post Roe

There is no such thing as "double belonging", unless you're a "former", or a Jesuit

 Knitter, a former Catholic priest and a major influence on many Catholics who subscribe to Buddhist ideology, insists the two faiths are not in conflict.

-- Buddhist/Catholic, Priests/Theologians Practice 'Double Belonging'  

Schutz, RNS

 

 

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.  

 

-- Matthew 6:24

Lent so phony a Jesuit is embarrassed by it

With that in mind, can we talk about our choices for Friday evening meals this Lent? Because over the years I feel like I’ve seen—and been a part of—quite a few Friday Lenten dinners that were every bit as fancy as any non-Lenten meal I have ever eaten. Kingfish ceviche tacos, coconut macadamia-crusted salmon steaks, Lobster Thermidor. Hey, it’s not meat!

I know of nothing in the literature about Lent that says food on Fridays shouldn’t taste good. Nobody wants that. But when our Lenten fasts start to resemble this recipe site’s announcement that “Fish on Good Friday doesn’t have to be a tired tradition. Indulge your guests (or treat yourself) to a fishy dish that’s equal parts impressive and delicious,” I think we might be headed in the wrong direction.

 

Jim McDermott, here.

At least six popes have been alleged to have had sexual relations with men, so why don't the Catholics just get it over with and call it Tradition?

Julius II

Paul II

Sixtus IV

Leo X

Julius III

Benedict IX

Cardinal Hollerich: Church teaching on gay sex is ‘false’ and can be changed

He was asked by a reporter: “How do you get around the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is sin?”

He replied: “I believe that this is false. ..."

Answer: Tight

Jesuit father James Martin, present at the temptation of Eve

Potty mouth: What President Trump and Rod Dreher have in common

The president's profanity is the subject of a recent article:

‘Using the Lord’s name in vain’: Evangelicals chafe at Trump’s blasphemy.

Rod Dreher has been on a tear with his own profanity this summer in his Twitter feed:

6/20: Somehow, the damn things fit!

6/22: Watch Tucker Carlson give John Bolton and others hell.

6/25: This guy is a first-class bullshitter.

6/25: Not a damn thing playing that an actual adult would want to see.

6/25: Stop tasing him! Goddamn!

6/27: Retweet: "the most batshit idea the Dems have come up with".

7/05: hell of a writer

7/08: hell of a writer

7/09: I had these for a starter. Savory walnut paste is pretty damn great.

7/09: Retweet: Perfect response: "I am so sick of this shit".

7/11: There's just too damn much weather in Louisiana.

7/23: You damn right that Gina Schock was the sexiest Go-Go!

7/24: And these Jesuit dipshits have the gall to publish this.

8/04: This is true: none of us has a damn clue how we're supposed to respond.

8/07: What the hell?

8/10: Every damn US Senator should co-sign.

I think the evangelicals would call this habit speech a sign of being unredeemed.

Others might chalk it up to being unintelligent, or intellectually lazy. Trump is the former, Dreher the latter.

Jesuits, like the pope, specialize in tampering with the word of God

No one who says goodbye to all that he owns can feed or clothe anybody, let alone himself. No one who leaves all and follows has a home into which to welcome anyone. Helping others means calling them into poverty, not out of it. The disciples were forbidden to enter into the way of the Gentiles, for he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.

The Jesuits are free to believe as they wish, but they are not followers of Jesus.

The communist wing of the Catholic church in America un-endorses Brett Kavanaugh

And now a word from a lying Jesuit dog, who obviously isn't one of Jesus' little lambs

"Don't waste what is holy on people who are dogs. Don't throw your pearls to pigs! They will trample the pearls, then turn and attack you." -- Matthew 7:6

Then Jesus said to the [Canaanite] woman, "I was sent only to help God's lost sheep—the people of Israel." But she came and worshiped him, pleading again, "Lord, help me!" Jesus responded, "It isn't right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs." -- Matthew 15:24ff.

Jesus told her, "First I should feed the children—my own family, the Jews. It isn't right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs." -- Mark 7:27

Watch out for those dogs, those people who do evil, those mutilators who say you must be circumcised to be saved. -- Philippians 3:2

It would be better if they had never known the way to righteousness than to know it and then reject the command they were given to live a holy life. They prove the truth of this proverb: "A dog returns to its vomit." And another says, "A washed pig returns to the mud." -- 2 Peter 2:21f.

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" -- John 1:29

But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: -- John 10:26f.

Outside the city are the dogs—the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idol worshipers, and all who love to live a lie. -- Revelation 22:15

Anthropocentric twaddle on hell from the Jesuit priest Thomas Reese of the Religion News Service

 

 

 

God did not create hell; we did. On the other hand, some theologians think that hell is empty because once we meet God, we will choose him.

Here.

The unspoken corollary is that we also created heaven.

Which is fine if you're an atheist, who typically maintains that religion is not the stuff of revelation but is a human creation. But such talk is hardly compatible with the teaching and perspective of Jesus, who was anything but sanguine about human nature, or its fate.

"For many are called, but few are chosen."

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."

It's no surprise that the many would disagree with this. The offense of the gospel is not the cross, it's the exclusiveness of the club. St. Paul tried to ameliorate this by opening the club to the Gentiles, and the universalists among us carry it a step further, opening the club to the denizens of hell, but at which point nothing Jesus has to say matters much anymore.

And yet they claim to be his worshipers, or at least his followers.

They are neither.

A Jesuit imagines that he would have been exempt from Jesus' call to discipleship because he has a child to support

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in "Are Christians really supposed to be communists? A response to David Bentley Hart" in America: The Jesuit Review, here:

Jesus, we are told, did not just speak in parables, he spoke in hyperbole. Quite right: Nobody thinks that Jesus actually wants you to pluck your eye out if it drives you to lust. (Wouldn’t you be just as able to lust after a beautiful person with just one eye?) What is wrong is to stop once we have said this.

Professor Hart is wrong and the church is right. There are vocations, and some Christians are called to total poverty; others are called to live in the world, and therefore to engage in market transactions, to earn wages and to accumulate savings to provide economic security for their families. No church father, catechism, encyclical or council has ever preached the opposite. What is wrong is to stop once we have said this, as his critics would have us.

Here’s the rub: The fact that I can know that God does not want me to give up all worldly goods because I support a child is precisely why I cannot rest easy. The fact that my vocation is perfectly acceptable to God is why Jesus’ thunderous words still apply to me. Jesus’ dramatic, hyperbolic words are a reminder that even while maintaining my vocation as a petit bourgeois, I can always be more radical in how I love and how I give to my fellow man. “Fearful it is to fall in the hands of the living God,” Kierkegaard reminds us in the same passage I quoted above. And how reassuring it would be for petit bourgeois Christians like myself to tell ourselves that the way Jesus preaches is for the others, for those who go into the desert.

To put it simply: poverty sine glosa is not the only way for the Christian. But that reminder should always be followed up by the always urgent reminder that we could still do with a lot less glosa and a lot more poverty.

As usual, this confused mess arises precisely because it is divorced from the all important context of the history of early Christian apocalyptic. Divorce Jesus' message from that and all that remains is one form of compromise with the world or another. Anything can then be made of it, and has. The error arises when the existence of early Christian poverty and communism is not seen simply as evidence of this original apocalyptic context, but instead as a prescription. The same error takes Paul's compromises as an entrepreneur for a blessing of capitalism. "Is" does not mean "ought".

It will not do, as Gobry does, to say "virtually all church fathers missed" the early Christian call to poverty and communism. The great value of Hart's essay is to show the fathers' knowledge of it, and to link it to the evidence for it in Scripture. Gobry simply ignores all this.

The imminent end of the world as imagined by Jesus and even Paul has little to offer in the way of life instruction for an interminable future, whether spiritually conceived, for example as the hermetism of the Desert Fathers or the monasticism still thriving on the eve of the Reformation, or materially, as the base conceptions of mercantilism, capitalism, fascism, socialism or communism now and again embraced by Christian thinkers.  Everything Jesus taught is repentance from this life in the face of the impending judgment. There was nothing hyperbolic about this, nor about the requirements necessary for navigating to the new reality of the arriving kingdom of God. The disciples understood this clearly, as did every hearer of Jesus' message, which is why it was at once so compelling to a few and so revolting to the many:

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions. ... And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. -- Mark 10:21f., 29f. 

Evidently Mr. Gobry can't imagine any of The Twelve were deadbeat dads.

Paul himself, the first theologian to compromise the teaching of Jesus and get away with it, didn't even recommend his own capitalist industriousness in the service of the gospel, not to mention class struggle nor freedom from slavery nor any other social value, because he himself retained the apocalyptic outlook where everything is impermanent. Paul's was a halfway house of vocationalism where everyone was to remain in the state in which they were called because of the impending end of the world, whether slave, free, married, unmarried, etc.:

Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. Was any one at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was any one at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision. For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God. Every one should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. So, brethren, in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God. Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away. -- 1 Cor.7:17ff. 

This so-called hyperbolism of apocalyptic was anything but. It only waned because history ensued and destroyed its very credibility, including Paul's halfway house of the already/not yet. Faced with its basis in the false predictions of the end, the Christians had to adapt their story to reality or die. What had become no longer conceivable they replaced with something less susceptible of contradiction, something at once more durable because it was by definition social but ironically also actually hyperbolic, something which made sense of the failures and transformed them into victory, the doctrine and practice of the Real Presence:

"Take, eat; this is my body. ... Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." 

This actual hyperbole became the center of the holy catholic faith, and remains so to this day for over a billion of the world's Christians. Perhaps that's why Christians such as Gobry read hyperbolism into everything which competes with it, especially when it comes from Catholicism's enemies the Orthodox and the Protestants: "Hart, a tireless basher of Protestant theology (not one of his least virtues), has produced a crypto-Protestant theology out of his exegesis".

They know their own error only too well. 

 

Pope Francis: In communism he found the same aspect of the social he found in the doctrine of the Church

To paraphrase Oswald Spengler, there is no contradiction between Roman Catholic social doctrine and Bolshevism.

Pope Che, quoted here:

“She often read Communist Party texts to me and gave them to me to read. So I also got to know that very materialistic conception. I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death,” he has said. Learning about communism, he said, “through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church.” As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he took pride in helping her hide the family’s Marxist literature from the authorities who were investigating her. According to the author James Carroll, Bergoglio smuggled her communist books, including Marx’s Das Kapital, into a “Jesuit library.”