Roman Pontiff Comes Out As Universalist

And: NATO Leaders Stumble Towards Starting World War III

From ‘Frank The Hippie Pope’ cartoon

Hello on a Saturday. I wanted to share with you right away these links to my podcast interview with Andrew Sullivan: here’s the link to Andrew’s Substack page, and here’s a link to Apple podcasts. We talked about Trump at the front end, but I think the really good stuff is the enchantment business, which was the second half. Not sure how they edited it, though — it was nearly a two hour conversation, but I think they got it down to one. I’m grateful to my friend Andrew for having me on again. He and I have fought bitterly in the past over Christianity and homosexuality, but we always come back together as friends, in part, I think, because we are so much alike.

I write you on a Saturday also because two big events related to frequent themes of mine happened yesterday, and I wanted to talk about them. Also, I found out yesterday afternoon that I’m going to have a work event on Monday morning, stretching into the afternoon, so I won’t have time for a post then. Consider this your Monday dispatch, please.

So: Yesterday in Singapore, Pope Francis said that all religions lead to the same god. Watch:

Listen closely. Francis says we should not say that one god is “more important” than another. The Pope compares religions to different languages that all say the same thing, the clear implication of which is that all religions are equal. “Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian — they are different paths,” he says.

That’s not at all what Islam teaches. Though Catholicism teaches that Muslims and Catholics worship the same god, Islam does not teach that any other path to God is equivalent to Islam. I know nothing about Sikhism, but contra Francis, Hinduism is certainly not monotheistic, as Francis, displaying the intellectual sophistication of a bumper sticker, ought to know, being :::checks notes::: the Pope!

It is a very good thing to have ecumenical dialogue, and to work for peace among people of different religions. But you can and must do so without teaching heresy.

“If God is the god of all, then we are all sons and daughters of God,” Francis says.We are all children of our Father, the Creator, this is true, but otherwise, this is Christian heresy, straight up. It is certainly possible to see good in non-Christian religions, and in Christian traditions not one’s own. It is certainly possible to believe that non-Christians may be saved. God is merciful. I believe that should I make it to heaven, I will see some non-Christians there. But if I do, they will have arrived in heaven through the boundless mercy of God, and only through the saving work of Jesus Christ — the Savior they never recognized. We may hope that God will welcome righteous men and women of other faiths, and no faith at all, into paradise, but we must never assume or declare that He will.

If what Francis says is true, why evangelize? If what Francis says is true, why be Catholic? This is a very serious question. After Francis’s words shot around the Twittersphere, I heard from a Catholic friend who has been having a deep crisis of faith. Where he lives, Catholicism is spiritually desolate, he told me. For years he has been struggling to stay Catholic. He broke down and went to an Orthodox church recently — and felt a sense of peace that he hadn’t had in a long time.

Yesterday he wrote to tell me that Francis’s heretical statement today pushed him over the line. He no longer believes that his salvation depends on being in communion with the See of Rome. Therefore, he no longer believes that he should endure the spiritual desolation of practicing Catholicism in his part of the world. If even the pope has abandoned the idea that there is something special about Catholicism that makes it worth suffering to hold onto, then why should he?

This brought to my mind a story a laicized (conservative) Catholic priest told me back in 2002, when the Scandal first started. He had been ordained in the mid-1980s. He said that all the straight men in his ordination class took their vow of celibacy seriously; the gay men did not — and they lived in a major urban diocese that had a lot of closeted gay priests. The former priest, now married, told me that it was deeply discouraging to him and the other straight guys to see their gay brother priests engaging in routine promiscuity, even taunting them (the straight priests) to get over themselves, and find girlfriends. Their archbishop, though he knew all about it, didn’t lift a finger to stop it. The man told me that he and every other heterosexual member of his ordination class ended up seeking laicization. Living celibacy was hard enough, but to have to do it under those circumstances seemed impossible. They felt, the man said, that they couldn’t bear to sacrifice marriage and family to serve within an institution that laughed at orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

I hope you all know me well enough now to know that I absolutely do not approach this in a triumphalistic way. If my friend goes through with his conversion, I won’t feel like we Orthodox have a notch on our belt; I will just rejoice that he will now be living a life closer to Jesus than he has been. Besides, I mean it when I say that the future of the West depends on the health of the Catholic Church. The thing is, individuals are rightly more concerned about their own salvation, and the salvation of their children, than they are about an abstraction like “Western civilization.”

Listening to Francis, and then getting that communication from my friend, put me back in the early 2000s, when I went through my own ordeal that ended with me losing my ability to believe in the Catholic version of Christianity, and then move to Orthodoxy. I didn’t often have real joy as a Catholic, only because parishes typically were like spiritual battlefields, and the divisions between orthodox and heterodox within the Catholic Church were very powerful. I learned quickly that to be a faithful Catholic in 1990s and early 2000s America was to suffer more from the Church than for it.

Why hold on? Because it was true. And because one had become convinced that it was true, it also meant that one’s salvation depended on remaining in communion with the See of Peter. I had Christian friends in other churches who had a very different experience of church life than we Catholics did, but I didn’t envy them, because despite everything, Catholicism Is True. I really and truly believed that. We are also the only ones that have a valid Eucharist, except for the Orthodox churches, which Catholicism holds to have a true priesthood.

How many Sundays as a Catholic did I have to draw on strengths of the imagination that I didn’t know I had to remind myself that despite all appearances, despite the lazy or even heretical homily, and despite the lack of community in the parish, this was the true church, and therefore where I belong? Fine, so be it: Jesus called us to be disciples, not people who expect a life of ease. If this is the cross Our Lord asks us as Catholics to carry right now, so be it.

And all this was before the Scandal. When that hit, the fact that my Catholicism was primarily intellectual did me no good. You all know that story, so I won’t get into it here again. What my Catholic friend told me today was that he didn’t understand what I meant when I said I simply couldn’t continue anymore as a Catholic, because I had lost the will to believe … until now.

I told him that even the question of Should we be Orthodox? remained at the intellectual level, until the Sunday after another dreary Catholic mass that left us angry and disillusioned, my wife — who came into Catholicism from Evangelicalism because of me — came to me crying, saying that for the first time in her life, she feels like she’s losing Jesus. I knew something had to give.

It was when I realized that the Truth by which we are saved is not a relationship with syllogisms and propositions, but with the God-man, Jesus Christ, who is Truth made flesh. If I could not find him as a Catholic anymore, due to the Catholic Church’s brokenness right now, and due to my own brokenness, then I need to find another way. This was the path to spiritual death, I feared. As Catholics, Orthodoxy was the only path open to us that still had the Eucharist, as we believed it was (that is, the Real Presence, not just a symbol).

In Orthodoxy, I found what I thought I was going to get when I became Catholic. In time, I also regained my love for all the good that God did for me in Catholicism. Hardline Orthodox get mad at me for not wanting to whack Catholics and Protestants over the head with Orthodoxy, but that’s not my way. I was shattered and humbled by the loss of my Catholic faith. All I care to do is to tell you what I have found in Orthodoxy. If you’re a Protestant or a Catholic, and ask me about Orthodoxy, I’ll tell you what I know. But mostly, I am content to talk about Christ.

I say that because I’m not a triumphalist. There are problems too in Orthodoxy. No church is without them. It’s just that as an Orthodox Christian, I don’t have to fight those internal battles to remind myself at Sunday liturgy that this is all true, that this is the way. We might have a bishop or a patriarch who is corrupt, and that’s a terrible thing. We might have one who neglects his flock, which is also bad. But you will never, ever have one who gives a public address saying you can believe whatever you want, it’s all good, because we’re all going to God.

Maybe I should secretly be glad that Francis is carrying on like this, because it will end up sending more fed-up Catholics into Orthodoxy. But I’m not. I’m not glad at all. I want people to come to Orthodoxy, but not like this, not if the cause is a decadent and heretical pontiff. There are a billion Catholics in this world, and the Roman pontiff is a leader without peer. Even we Christians living in the de-Christianizing West who are not Catholic need a strong and good pope to bear moral witness, as many Protestants discovered under John Paul II. So often I was grateful as an Orthodox Christian for the things Benedict XVI said. Even if Orthodox bishops were saying them, they couldn’t hope for an audience as large as that or any Pope had, and has. I loved Benedict so much that I flew to Rome for his funeral, and wept true tears.

And now, there is a Roman pontiff who goes to a foreign land and teaches that you can be a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, or whatever you want, and God doesn’t care. It is deeply shocking. Catholics can point to these paragraphs of the Catechism, contra Francis:

843 The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved. Thus, the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as "a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that they may at length have life."³³²

844 In their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them:

Very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the Creator. Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair.³³³

845 To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood.³³⁴

"Outside the Church there is no salvation"

846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?³³⁵ Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.³³⁶

847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.³³⁷

848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."³³⁸

So Francis, yesterday, with his hippie universalism, teaches something flatly contradicted by the Catechism, which is authoritative, not to say Holy Scripture.

This isn’t Francis’s first rodeo. He has done stuff like this before, though I’m hard pressed to think of something so egregious, and so consequential. Why not just roll your eyes, and wait for this guy to go to his heavenly reward?

Because you can’t unsee and unhear what Francis has done, here or elsewhere in his papacy. This is not about “papal infallibility,” and ex cathedra pronouncements. The Catholic Church claims that when a pope teaches something in the “ex cathedra” mode, then he cannot err. But that has only been invoked once since its formal declaration in 1870: to define the dogma that the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven upon her death. This is something more mundane. In this old article from the JP2 papacy, Russell Shaw says:

In a Nov. 24 address to members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope John Paul expressed regret that many Catholics apparently think they are at liberty to dismiss doctrines they don't agree with unless it is formally stated that they are infallibly proposed.

Different teachings do have different degrees of authority, he said. But he added, "That does not authorize people to think that pronouncements and doctrinal decisions of the magisterium require irrevocable assent only when it presents them with a solemn judgment or definitive act."

So, look, Francis’s silly, shallow statement in Singapore blatantly contradicts Catholic teaching. Can’t Catholics just roll their eyes and move on? It’s not that simple. For time out of mind, Catholics have been able to count on the assurance that the Pope knows what he’s talking about theologically. Now they can’t. The post-Francis world means that ordinary Catholics, from here on out, cannot take what the pope says as accurate or true. They have to fact-check the pope against the Catechism. Who’s going to do that?

Here’s an example of why this matters. When Francis said early in his pontificate “Who am I to judge?” about homosexuality, I received an angry e-mail from a reader of my TAC blog who taught in a Catholic school in either Tennessee or Kentucky. He said he had been laboring for years to present authoritative Catholic teaching on sexual morality to his classes, who were strongly resistant to it, as they preferred to be catechized by pop culture. Now, he said, Francis has blown all of his work sky-high. He said at school, the kids were all telling him, almost tauntingly, that even the Pope says “Who am I to judge?” The kids interpret that as “everything goes.”

And now Francis has told the world explicitly that anything and everything goes in religion, because we’re all going to the same God. Catholics who know the catechism will know that the pope is wrong. ButAgain, if what this Successor of Peter says is true, then there’s no point in evangelizing. There’s not much point in suffering for your faith — not from mockers, not from persecutors, and not from the spiritually desolation in contemporary Catholicism, if that’s how it is where you live.

How do you tell that to the Christians in Nigeria who are being slaughtered en masse for their faith by radical Muslims? “Hey, the Pope says you might as well convert to Islam to save your lives. All paths lead to the same god anyway.” How would Francis break it to St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher, English Catholics martyred by Henry VIII? “Sorry Tommy and Johnny, you should have gone Anglican. It’s better to lose your Catholicism than your head, because all roads lead to the same place anyway.”

Catholics who know their faith well aren’t going to be fooled by Francis’s foolishness, but Catholics who know their faith well are in the minority. How does a father tell his liberal teenager who is struggling with the faith that the pope is wrong? I can hear the sarcastic comeback: “Oh, Dad, so you’re more Catholic than the pope, is that it?” You see the problem. It brings to mind something I told my wife angrily after yet another Sunday drive home from mass circa 2005, when I had to explain to our older son, who was just getting to be old enough to understand the homilies, that what Father preached that day is not what the Church teaches. I said to my wife, “I hate that I’m having to teach Matt to distrust priests before he even learns to trust them.” But Father Frootloop at Our Lady of Pizza Hut parish is not the Roman pontiff.

The plan now in Rome is to wait Francis out, I am told. Even his liberal allies there are weary of him, I hear. I doubt we will have any kind of posthumous condemnation of him by the cardinals, but I hope for the sake of the Catholic Church that one comes. If they let stand unchallenged the pope’s universalist claim, they will have effectively given away what they cannot afford to. But even a posthumous formal condemnation of Francis’s heretical teachings can’t really undo the full damage this man has done to his Church’s authority. As I indicated above, you can stand there and argue till your face turns blue that Francis’s heretical statement does not technically affect the Church’s authority, but in terms of practical effect, that is a legalistic abstraction. In the end, people will have seen that even a pope can teach heresy — and, if there is no “correction” of Francis coming from the Vatican’s doctrinal office, that the heretical pope can get away with it. Even people who understand that Francis did not change Church teaching here, only spoke a significant error, are still left with the inescapable fact that the pope is not protected from teaching heretical nonsense.

Stumbling Into World War III

I cannot for the life of me understand why the media back in the US are not paying more attention to Vladimir Putin’s statement this week that if the West grants Ukraine permission to use its Western-donated long range missiles for strikes deep into Russia, that Russia will consider itself in a state of war with NATO. Putin’s words:

If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct participation. And this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are fighting Russia…Therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not.

I subscribe to Top Secret Umbra, the Substack of former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler. Schindler’s remarks about this crisis might be paywalled, I dunno, but here’s a link to his full essay. Excerpts:

When a guy who hates the West and possesses several thousand nuclear weapons says NATO is choosing “war” it’s time to notice. Predictably, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rapidly pushed back, stating while headed to Washington that Russia “started” the conflict in Ukraine and can end it “straight away.” Last week, CIA boss Burns channeled the Western elite’s consensus view and explained that Putin is a “bully” whose nuclear saber-rattling should not be taken literally.

Perhaps, or perhaps not. I think we may find out rather soon.

More:

Moscow has been signaling for months that it views Storm Shadow strikes inside Russia as a game-changing event, indeed a “red line” for the Kremlin. Russia’s argument is that the missiles aren’t just supplied by NATO to Ukraine, rather the West is providing Kyiv with the logistical and real-time intelligence support required to target Russians with them. While the pilot launching the Storm Shadow is Ukrainian, almost everyone else in that deadly missile’s kill-chain comes from NATO. Just as Kyiv has a point here, so does Moscow.

Russia recently announced that it is lowering the threshold for the employment of nuclear weapons in response to “the escalation course of our Western adversaries” in Ukraine. Since CIA Director William Burns last weekend let drop that Russia was much closer to unleashing tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in 2022 than was publicly stated at the time, we should assess that Moscow has kept them on the table. In truth, we know they have, and a few months ago leaked documents from the Russian defense ministry revealed that the Kremlin’s threshold for employing tactical nuclear weapons – which fundamentally are viewed by Moscow as just a bigger boom than conventional fires – is far lower than previously believed.

I was interviewed yesterday by a reporter for Politico, who seemed really put out that I don’t stand with brave Ukraine in continuing its war with Russia. I explained that I do in fact side with Ukraine, in agreeing that it has the right to repel Russian invaders. But I don’t believe, I told her, that it is the West’s moral obligation to risk war with a nuclear superpower to help Ukraine fight. Here’s Schindler on that point:

Simply put, how much does a country care about another country (including who’s occupying or running it)? Despite nonstop assertions from NATO superfans, who have made an avocation of killing Putin with their mouth, the fate of Ukraine does not, in fact, have vast global implications. I state this as an unabashed supporter of Ukraine in its fight for survival and freedom. However, the geostrategic reality is obvious to anyone who examines global reactions in diplomacy and trade to the Ukraine war: most countries just don’t think this ugly war matters that much to them.

Maybe they’re morally obtuse, maybe they’re just dumb. I am certain that stern moral preaching from wealthy Western elites, perhaps some catchy Davos lectures, won’t convince them to side against Moscow here. In truth, most of NATO doesn’t think the Ukraine war is an existential issue either. Poland and Estonia certainly do, as they should given their long history of nasty occupation by Moscow which ended a mere three decades ago. Warsaw and Tallinn, almost alone in NATO, are making serious military preparations to defend their countries against Russian aggression, and they are right to do so. That virtually nobody else in the Atlantic Alliance is equally worried about Putin and his wrath speaks more loudly than ten million NAFO Fella tweets. Since the Russian military is incapable of pushing Ukrainian troops out of Kursk region, I don’t expect them to be marching on Berlin, or even Warsaw, anytime soon.

Stated plainly, there is no universe where NATO – excepting outliers like Poland and Estonia, who aren’t calling the shots in the Alliance – cares more about who’s running Ukraine than Russia does. Looking at a map clarifies most strategic dilemmas, yet misunderstanding the value of the object is precisely how we got the Ukraine war. As this newsletter explained before Putin restarted his aggression against his neighbor, it was criminally irresponsible for NATO, led by the United States, to pretend that it wanted to admit Ukraine to the Alliance, when it plainly had no plans to do so. That empty promise, an immoral diplomatic charade, only enraged the Kremlin while doing nothing to improve Ukraine’s security. Careless talk costs lives, per the venerable OPSEC mantra.

It's time to move Western discussions about the Ukraine war back into earth orbit, before we stumble right into World War Three due to another needless strategic miscalculation.

The American strategic geniuses who brought us the Iraq War and the Afghan War are now at work, drunk on ideology, leading the US, and indeed the entire West, into what would be an incomparably more destructive war. When people like Viktor Orban and J.D. Vance point this out, they immediately face denunciation as stooges of Putin — in the same way thinkers on the Right who warned about the foolishness of the coming Iraq War found themselves condemned as “unpatriotic conservatives” back in 2003.

It’s happening again (e.g., the Very Serious Defense Writer Tom Ricks compares defense expert Elbridge Colby, who expresses grave concern about this mounting crisis, to Neville Chamberlain). But this time, the enemy has nukes, and its leader has stated unambiguously that the West granting the Ukrainians permission to use a certain weapon is an act of war. The Guardian reports today that Joe Biden says he doesn’t think letting Ukraine use Storm Shadow missiles would amount to NATO declaring war on Russia. Erm, the point is that Putin says it would. He gets a vote.

And:

I told the Politico reporter that one big reason I’m voting for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is to try to stop the Washington forever-war machine. How bizarre that today, the Republican presidential candidates are the peace ticket. But then, if, in 2004, someone had told you that in 20 years, Dick Cheney would endorse the Democratic presidential candidate, and the Dems would welcome it, nobody would have believed it for a hot second. Yet here we are.

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