The Question of Judaism. Francis’ first official letter, written on the same day as his election, was addressed to the Chief Rabbi of Rome. This fact gives us something to think about. The very first letter of his pontificate, sent to the Jews? Would it be, at least, in order to call them to convert and recognize Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah and Savior? Not in the least. The Pope invokes in it the
“protection of the Almighty,” an accepted formula that dissimulates theological divergences, so that their relationship may progress “
in a spirit of renewed collaboration and in service of a world that may always be more in harmony with the Creator's will.”[1]
Two questions come to my mind. First: how can a person enter into mutual aid with his enemy, with the one who has only one goal in mind: your defeat, in this case, and this for nearly 2000 years, the ruin of Christianity , founded, according to them, by an imposter, by a false messiah, who constitutes the obstacle that stands in the way of the coming of the one for whom they wait, about which Our Lord warned them:
“I am come in the name of my Father, and you receive me not; if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive.” (John 5:43)
Saint Jerome comments:
“The Jews, after having despised the truth in person, will receive lies in receiving the Antichrist.[2]
” And Saint Ambrose:
“This shows that the Jews, who did not want to believe in Jesus Christ, will believe in the Antichrist.[3]
”Now that the political obstacle embodied by Christianity has been removed by the revolutionary surge, we are at the progressive suppression of the religious obstacle, that is, the Papacy, won over as it is by revolutionary ideas for more than a half-century. And this obstacle against the manifestation of the Man of Iniquity, this mysterious
katejon [the restrainer] of whom Saint Paul speaks (2 Thess. 2:7), who delays his coming, seems to me to be precisely the Papacy, light of nations and master of truth. It is only when this obstacle will have disappeared that
“the wicked one shall be revealed” (2 Thess. 2:8).
And let no one say that these are only fantasies from some feverish imagination: those who have actively worked toward the
aggiornamento of the Church, toward its adaptation to the modern world, which was the principal goal sought by Vatican II, its
“guiding principle,[4]
” do not hide it. So Cardinal Suenens, who was one of the figureheads of the last council and one of the four moderators named by Paul VI, did not mince words when he insisted,
“The Council, this is 1789 in the Church.[5]
”Father Yves Congar, named by John XXIII in 1960 a consultant on the preparatory theological commission, and later, in 1962, an “official expert” to the council, for which he was also a member of the theological commission, was without a doubt the most influential theologian of the council, along with Karl Rahner. The well-known Dominican affirmed, in speaking of episcopal collegiality, that at Vatican II,
“the Church had peacefully accomplished its October revolution,[6]
” and had recognized that the Conciliar declaration
Dignitatis humanae on religious liberty said “
something quite different from the ‘Syllabus’ of 1864, in fact just about the opposite,[7]
” and admitted that in this text on which he worked,
“it was a matter of showing that the theme of religious liberty had already appeared in Scripture. Yet, it is not there.[8]
”And according to Cardinal Ratzinger,
“the Council’s task was to assimilate the best values of two centuries of liberal culture. These are in fact values that, even though they originated outside the Church, can find their place – clarified and corrected – in her perspective, and that is what was done.[9]
” He did not hesitate to say regarding the subject of the pastoral constitution
Gaudium et spes on the Church’s relationship with the modern world, that we can consider the text as an
“anti-Syllabus, insofar as it represents an attempt at the official reconciliation of the Church with the world as it has become since 1789.[10]
”The second question that presents itself regarding the letter sent by Francis to the Chief Rabbi of Rome is the following: how is it conceivable that a religion that hates Christ can be in the
“in service of a world that may always be more in harmony with the Creator's will”? Such ineptitude speaks for itself.
Nevertheless, this is in perfect agreement with the modification of the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday that John XXIII hastened to carry out in March 1959, hardly four months after his election, by removing the words
“perfidis” and
“perfidiam” applied to the Jews; this prayer would be definitively removed in the new missal approved by Paul VI in April 1969 and promulgated in 1970. Here is the new prayer that appears:
“Let us pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.”Several remarks:
1. Not a word regarding their conversion to Christ.
2. The word “covenant” implies that the old one still prevails.
3. In order to progress in the love of someone, one must begin by loving him; yet how can one love the Father if he rejects the Son?
4. And how can one progress
“in faithfulness to his covenant” if he persists in refusing the Lamb of God who sealed a new covenant by immolating Himself on the Cross?
It must be noted that this new theology marks a deep split with that which prevailed in the Church from its origins until Vatican II and which was expressed in a luminous way by the former prayer for the conversion of the Jews henceforth removed from the Latin liturgy:
“Let us pray also for the faithless Jews (perfidis Judaeis): that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord . . . Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness (Judaicam perfidiam): hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.”The difference from the new prayer is striking, just as it is with the speech of John Paul II at the synagogue in Rome in April 1986, in which he praises
“legitimate religious plurality” and in which he affirms that efforts must be made to
“remove all forms of prejudice . . . to present the true face of Jews and Judaism.” “Prejudices” essentially expressed by the former Good Friday prayer for the Jews, which explains its disappearance from the new liturgy.
All the same, it is very unfortunate, for according to the famous adage from the 5th century attributed to Pope Saint Celestine I:
lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of prayer determines the law of belief, that is, by modifying the content of the prayer, the Faith content can be modified as well. What occurred in the 16th century with the liturgical innovations of Luther in Germany and Cranmer in England is there to prove it.
Alas, there is not only the letter sent the day of his election. Twelve days later, Francis did it again with a letter addressed to the same Chief Rabbi of the synagogue of Rome on the occasion of the Jewish Passover, sharing his
“warmest best wishes on the occasion of the Great Feast of Pesach.” As a Catholic, what can possibly be the nature of these “wishes” on the occasion of a feast on which Our Lord, the one, true Paschal Lamb immolated on the Cross to redeem our sins, is insulted? These “wishes” can only comfort the Jews in their spiritual blindness and serve to keep them far from their Messiah and Savior.
And Francis continued:
“May the Almighty, who freed His people from slavery in Egypt to guide them to the Promised Land, continue to deliver you from all evil and to accompany you with His blessing.” Yet, obviously God has not yet delivered them from all evil, since there is no greater evil than to be
“enemies of the Gospel” (Rom. 11:28) and to be a part of the
“Synagogue of Satan” (Apoc. 3:9). How is it conceivable that God may continue to
“accompany [them] with His blessing” while they obstinately continue to refuse The One who He sent?
I must clarify, to avoid any misunderstanding, that in no way am I attacking Jews as individuals; there are certainly some who are excellent people who profess their beliefs in good faith—it goes without saying. No, when speaking about the Jews, I intend to situate myself on the level of theological principles—it is there that implacable enmity is observed between the Church, which seeks to establish the Kingship of Our Lord in society, and Talmudic Judaism, which, having structured itself in opposition to Christ and his Church, logically tries to obstruct it. This is in full consistency with its theology which only sees Jesus of Nazareth as an impostor and a blasphemer, a false messiah standing in the way of the coming of the real one, for whom they await to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel and to rule over all nations from Jerusalem as the capital of his messianic reign.
But let us return to Francis’ letter. In which, he concludes by saying to the Jews:
“I ask you to pray for me, as I assure you of my prayers for you, confident that we can deepen ties of mutual esteem and friendship.” There, it must be noted, we reach new heights in the realm of absurdity: indeed, how can the prayer of those who, according to Saint John, are in Satan’s grip, be granted by God? And logically, if ever the Jews cared to pray for the Pope, they could only ask for his conversion to Judaism, the only true religion in their eyes, and consequently his apostasy from Christianity: Francis would be in the act of asking them to pray to God that he may come to reject Christ, like the Jews—no more, no less! My goodness, if this affair had not assumed such a degree of unbelievable gravity, it would be hilarious to the point of grotesqueness.
Another item is the ties of
“mutual friendship” that Francis mentions at the end of his message. Now, it so happens that a friend is an
alter ego, another self. Therefore, there can be no true friendship in the absence of similarities in thought, feelings and activities that make the communion of souls possible. Yet, the thoughts and actions of the Church and the Synagogue are, as already mentioned above, diametrically opposed. Their projects are incompatible; the opposition existing between them is radical, so much so that as long as the Jews have not accepted Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah and Savior, the enmity between Church and Synagogue will remain unsolvable for obvious theological reasons—just like that between light and darkness, God and Satan, the reign of Christ and that of the Antichrist.
With these types of wishes, we enter straight into the realm of utopia, of humanist sentimentality, the denial of reality and, especially, the misappropriation of language and distortion of concepts. We are in the middle of the illusion, in the middle of mind manipulation and lies—lies, whose father we know very well.
His Eminence Jorge Mario Bergoglio, when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Cardinal Primate of Argentina, already had the rather curious habit of regularly going to synagogues to participate in interreligious ceremonies, of which the most recent goes back no further than December 12, 2012, just three months before his papal election, on the occasion of
Hanukkah, the festival of lights, in which a candle is lit each night in a nine-branched candelabra for eight consecutive days, a liturgy whose meaning is, from a spiritual point of view, the representation of the expansion of the Jewish faith.
Cardinal Bergoglio actively participated in the ceremony of the fifth day by lighting the corresponding candle. This had never happened before in the history of the Church, and it is something extremely troubling. But what, in truth, is even more worrisome, is that these types of truly scandalous gestures pass completely unnoticed, hardly attracting attention from the vast majority of Catholics, dazed and dozing, imbued to a great extent with the revolutionary thinking that undermines the Faith and weakens the
sensus fidei of believers, penetrated to the marrow by pluralist, humanist, ecumenical, democratic and human-rights ideology that their pastors have adapted for all purposes for more than a half-century, an ideology completely foreign to the deposit of Revelation that has become the
leitmotif of the official speech of Catholic hierarchy since Vatican II.
To conclude this part, here is a small extract of what Francis said to the Jews in another Buenos Aires synagogue,
Bnei Tikvah Slijot, in September 2007, during his participation in the ceremony of
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year:
“Today, in this synagogue, we are made newly aware of the fact that we are a people on a journey (???)
and we place ourselves in God’s presence. We make a stop in our journey to look at Him and to let ourselves be looked upon by Him.”We cannot but ask: what does he mean by using the pronoun
“us” here? And what does he want to indicate by using the word
“God”? In any case, this word, used in this precise context, cannot in any way refer to God the Father, otherwise the Jews would not reject the Son. Indeed, Our Lord said to them:
“If God were your father, verily you would love me. For I proceeded and came from God… You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of your father you will do… He that is of God, heareth the words of God. Therefore, you hear them not, because you are not of God.” (John 8:42-47)
The most astonishing thing, during his long speech given in this synagogue in the Argentinean capital, he who was then “only” His Eminence Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Cardinal Primate of Argentina, did not deign to pronounce even one time the Holy Name of Jesus.
Sources: 1.
The strange papacy of Pope Francis. - 2.
THREE YEARS WITH FRANCIS - The Bergoglian deceit - 3.
FOUR YEARS WITH FRANCIS: enough is enough! - 4.
"2013-2022: Nine Years With Francis"[1] Pope Francis to the Rabbi of Rome, 13 March 2014,
news.va/…pope-francis-to-rabbi-of-rome-i-hope-to-contribute[2] St. Jerome, Epist. 151, ad Algasiam, question II.
[3] St. Ambrose,
Enarratio on Psalms XLIII[4] Paul VI,
Ecclesiam suam, 1964, no. 52.
[5] As quoted by Abp. Lefebvre in the “Author’s Introduction” to
They Have Uncrowned Him, Angelus Press, Kansas City, MO, 1988, p. xvi.
[6]
Vatican II.
Le concile au jour le jour, deuxième session, Cerf, 1963, p. 115.
[7] Father Yves Congar,
The Crisis in the Church and Archbishop Lefebvre, (
La Crise dans l’Église et Mgr. Lefebvre), Cerf, 1976, p.51
[8] Eric Vatré,
La droit du Père, Guy Trédaniel, Ed., 1995, p. 118.
[9] Interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
Jesus Magazine, Nov. 1984, p. 72, and
The Ratzinger Report, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, Ignatius Press, 1985, p. 36.
[10] Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal,
Les principes de la théologie catholique, [
Principles of Catholic Theology], Téqui, 1987, p.427.