Point 27. Against Protestant Illuminism

1. Because he knows that he is – and wishes to be – the disciple of Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the Phalangist abominates private judgement and its supposed divine guarantee, individual illuminism, characteristic of the so-called reformed religion, which calls itself Christian, but is in fact merely Lutheran, Calvinist or Zwinglian, being but the reflection of the spirit of its founders. Nothing can “ sadden the Holy Spirit ” more than this claim of the individual to receive his own lights, commandments and inspiration outside of any submission to the hierarchical Church and without consideration for the apostolic traditions. By acting in this way, he makes the Holy Spirit the principle of division, rupture, and erosion, the agent of indefinite and insurmountable differences and contradictions!

Private judgement is not a particular heresy but the principle and fallacious justification for every possible heresy, because it replaces the teaching of divine revelation by the Church with an individual faith, which is then transfigured into supernatural intuition and personal illumination, reducing faith to the common level of human opinion and caprice.

2. The idea resulting therefrom, of an invisible spiritual Church, a Church exclusively made up of the pure and the elect, is equally perverse. It is the contradiction and ruin of the visible, hierarchical, historical Church founded by Jesus Christ. It idealistically transfigures the Church into some sublime reality, totally sacred and spiritual, free and charismatic, a perpetual marvel, the work of the Holy Spirit alone, but in reality it debases it to the level of purely human associations and collectivities, which survive only through self-interest, sectarian rivalry, the constraint of a jealous and despotic power, or simply through the soulless inertia of social habit or religious officialdom.

Every form of Protestantism, Pentecostalism and illuminism, is absolutely rejected by the Phalangist as the “ sin against the Holy Spirit ” from which there is no return, for it is a major aberration from the faith. And that is why the Phalange distrusts any “ charismatic ” upsurge in the Church.

3. The Phalangist combats Protestantism and denounces it as the principal corruptive agent of the Christian religion and as the destroyer of the Church and all civilised human community, since it hands Christians over to the modern Leviathans, to empires founded on the pride of thought, the power of money and the passions of the flesh.