Corrupter, you are putting Christ to death

INNOVATOR, YOU ARE BETRAYING CHRIST !

INSTEAD of being with Christ, like Him and in Him, worshipping God, revealing the Father, giving the Holy Ghost and distributing His Grace, instead of being God’s servant calling all men to fear their Sovereign Judge and to desire, love and serve His greatest Glory in view of Life everlasting, You, who are the Vicar of Jesus Christ, are following Man and so betraying Christ. What a novelty in the Church is this faith in man ! this cult of man ! this service of man ! this struggle, this combat on behalf of man ! It wholly usurps the place of faith in God, the worship and service of God, and the struggle to bear witness to Him even unto martyrdom !

Even as early as October 16, 1978, you revealed your strange ideas thus: “ I present myself to you to confess our common faith, our hope and our confidence in the Mother of Christ and of the Church, and also to begin our new path along the road of history and of the Church, with the help of God and the help of men. ” What is this resemblance between the secular, apostate and indifferent world of today and the supernatural Christian world ? Between the way of profane history and the Church ? What resemblance is there between God’s help and... men’s ?

On October 22, the day of your enthronement, what veneration and love you showed for man ! “ Again, I address myself to all men and to each individual man (and with what veneration the apostle of Jesus Christ was to pronounce this word: ‘ man ’ !). Pray for me and help me, so that I may serve you. ” In his epistles, the Apostle Paul refers to “ man ” forty-six times, but never with such misplaced fervour, as though robbed from Christ Himself, to whom be honour, praise and glory for ever !

These exaggerated feelings for man will become more and more exalted until the peak is reached in your speech delivered to UNESCO on June 2, 1980. I shall quote only a brief passage from this speech here, but how revealing it is of your faith and of your cult !

“ Man must be regarded in his entirety and in every final conclusion as a particular and autonomous value, bearing within himself the transcendence of the person. Man must be valued for himself alone and not for any other motive. Furthermore, we must love man simply because he is man, and we must demand love for man by reason of the particular dignity that is his. These claims made on behalf of man are integral to Christ’s message, whatever critical minds may have had to say on the subject or whatever various trends opposed to religion in general and Christianity in particular may have succeeded in doing. ”

Such obvious blasphemies could be transcribed into the following prayer of adoration: “ Oh Man, Oh Woman, I love you with my whole heart, with my whole soul and with my whole mind, because you are great in your dignity as man or woman, great in your value and your transcendence. And I love you as I love myself for my own dignity and worth. ” Is it thus that you claim to be establishing, with the Gospel as guarantee, a reign of man founded on Man himself, independently of God ? What treason !

Whatever you may say, the one excludes the other. Your defence is that “ Christianity is anthropocentric precisely because it is theocentric. And it is theocentric by virtue of its particular anthropocentrism. ” (Allocution, November 29, 1978.) But that is just a painful play on words. You might as well say that Poland has two capitals, Warsaw and Cracow, and that from now on they are only one. Can you see that in concrete ? No. Our Lord Jesus Christ said: “ No man can serve two masters: either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cleave to one and despise the other. ” (Mt. 6.24).

Still, one can and one must love one’s brothers and serve one’s neighbour for the love and service of God. But faith in and worship of God exclude any other kind of faith or adoration of a being that could be contrary to Him or not proceed from Him alone, as do the Blessed and Immaculate Virgin Mary and all the Church’s saints. So the answer to you must be the same as that which I quoted to Paul VI, the words of Jesus to the Tempter during the Holy Forty Days and Nights: “ Begone Satan ! For it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore and Him only shalt thou serve. ” (Mt. 4.10).

Following the publication of your first encyclical Redemptor hominis, the editor of Le Monde, whose impartiality is well known, wrote: “ Conservative and Polish though he may be, the Pope seems to be sensitive to the times in which he is living. He is trying to keep hold of both ends of the rope, but not always successfully. His encyclical is somewhat ambiguous, as was Paul VI’s first encyclical in 1964. It is not so much a question of skilful handling as of wanting to have it both ways: allegiance to God and allegiance to Man at the same time. It is something more easily achieved in theology manuals than in reality... ” (L’optimisme du Pape, March 7, 1979).

Might this be an intellectual construction, intended to attract atheists, unbelievers and the indifferent to the Church, and might this be a way of showing that the Church is open to their problems, even though the eloquence is a little exaggerated ? If that were so, it would be the lesser of two evils, but its total failure should be sufficient to call a halt to such an apologetic. What more could it be ? A passion, an obsession with man’s grandeur, for love of man and his success ? If it is, this humanism will occupy more and more of your heart and mind, and will take up more of your time and activity ! And it will be all the more serious in that you have ascended to the highest degree of the Church’s hierarchy. From that height, all that is given to man will be taken from God, and all that is kept for God will appear to have been refused to God’s rival, man.

This double vision, this discord, this dualism, this bi-polarity of faith, hope and charity will have fatal consequences if it is more than purely rhetorical or sophistical. If it is made public and becomes effective, it will take on the characteristics of what the prophets of Israel called in plain language the ultimate “ adultery ” and even “ prostitution ”, and will have the same dramatic consequences. In the first place, there will be the destruction of the legitimate home, the dispersion of the people, and the abandoning of the children of the first union. In the second place, it will be impossible to raise the criminal union of the adulterer to the level of an honourable, stable and sacred union.

CORRUPTER, YOU ARE PUTTING CHRIST’S CHURCH TO DEATH

This is why your spiritual adultery, your “ sacred prostitution ”, and the betrayal of Christ it involves, obliges me to pursue this accusation by addressing you with this second brutal exclamation: Corrupter ! You are putting Christ’s Church to death ! In so far as you have yielded to the Devil’s temptation and received, in accordance with the terms of the contract, all the kingdoms of this world – an illusory kingship and a deadly sense of exhilaration – your faith, trust and hope in man, your love and service of him – in him, with him and for him ! – have pervaded your being like a cancer and have been transformed – do you not think ? – into a faith, trust, love and cult of You Yourself, making you the centre of the world, as you already were of the Church and, as you believed, of her religion ? Are not You Yourself the MAN most often in the public eye, the one most elevated and visibly closest to divinisation ? There can be nothing more corrupting and nothing more illusory than such pride and egoism at the summit of the Church – the Church that has to be the guide and the model for all nations ! Your thinking, teaching and example, your intense and constant encouragement of the cult of man and of the cult of self – an encouragement to love man as one loves oneself, and to have a faith in him that is no more than presumptuousness and self-satisfaction – these act like so many acids insidiously corroding and eating away all order, both human and divine, dissolving the whole “ theandric ” mystery of a world transformed by grace. In a general and indefinite way, everything is coming undone and is falling to pieces. If things continue thus – and even now we are in a state of material, moral and spiritual ruin – it will be the end of religion, the end of the Church, and the end of Christian civilisation. The point will be reached when that sorrowful eventuality implicitly foretold by Christ will come to pass: “ … But the Son of Man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, any faith on earth ? ” (Lk 18.8)

“ And will God not revenge His elect who cry to Him day and night, even though He delays on their behalf ? I say to you that He will revenge them speedily. ” (Lk 18.7) But first it is necessary that they pray ! Alas, the first thing to be stifled through your obsession with man is the virtue of religion.