Vatican City, Mar 1, 2018 / 05:57 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A new letter issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal office has reaffirmed that Christian salvation can only come through Christ and the Church, and highlighted modern expressions of Pelagian and Gnostic thought which contradict this belief.
Signed by Archbishop Luis Ladaria SJ, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the Feb. 22 feast of the Chair of St. Peter, the letter is addressed to the world’s bishops.
It clarifies how the ancient heresies of Pelagianism and Gnosticism are diffused in modern culture, and urges Christians to evangelize while engaging with those from other religions in a spirit of genuine dialogue.
The four-and-a-half page letter consists of six points, including an introduction and conclusion, outlining the errors of Pelagianism and Gnosticism in light of Christian doctrine, and reaffirming Christ as the only means of salvation, which is offered through the sacraments.
According to the letter’s introduction, the aim in writing it is to “demonstrate certain aspects of Christian salvation that can be difficult to understand today because of recent cultural changes,” incorporating Pope Francis’ reflections on the issue.
Modern expressions of Pelagianism and Gnosticism
The letter pointed to the difficulty many have in accepting the teachings of Christianity in today’s society, noting that on one hand, “individualism centered on the autonomous subject tends to see the human person as a being whose sole fulfillment depends only on his or her own strength.”
In this view, Christ is seen as “a model that inspires generous actions with his words and his gestures,” but is not recognized as the one who transforms the human condition by incorporating mankind into a new, reconciled life with the Father.
On the other hand, the letter noted that “a merely interior vision of salvation is becoming common, a vision which, marked by a strong personal conviction or feeling of being united to God, does not take into account the need to accept, heal and renew our relationships with others and with the created world.”
Pope Francis, the letter said, has often spoken of these two tendencies, identifying them with the ancient heresies of Pelagianism and Gnosticism.
Pelagianism gets its name from the monk Pelagius, who lived in the 400s and taught that the human will, as created by God, was enough to live a sinless life. Gnosticism, on the other hand, was a widely diffused belief in the 2nd century that the material world is the result of error on the part of God.
Since the beginning of his pontificate Francis has spoken out about the two heresies, and in 2015 during his pastoral visit to Florence, told participants in the Fifth Convention of the Italian Church that Pelagianism and Gnosticism are two of the greatest temptations that lead the Church away from humility and beatitude.
In the speech, he said Pelagianism “spurs the Church not to be humble, disinterested and blessed,” and does so “through the appearance of something good. Pelagianism leads us to trust in structures, in organizations, in planning that is perfect because it is abstract. Often it also leads us to assume a controlling, harsh and normative manner.”
Norms, he said, “give Pelagianism the security of feeling superior, of having a precise bearing,” while Gnosticism “leads to trusting in logical and clear reasoning, which nonetheless loses the tenderness of a brother’s flesh.”
The attraction of Gnosticism, he said, is “a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which are meant to console and enlighten, but which ultimately keep one imprisoned in his or her own thoughts and feeling.”
Likewise, in Cardinal Joseph Ratzingers’ 1986 spiritual exercises, the future Pope Benedict XVI also condemned the Palegian trend in modern society, calling it a “vice” and saying those who accept Palegianism “do not want forgiveness and in general they do not want any real gift from God either. They just want to be in order.”
“They don’t want hope they just want security,” he said, adding that “their aim is to gain the right to salvation through a strict practice of religious exercises, through prayers and action. What they lack is humility which is essential in order to love; the humility to receive gifts not just because we deserve it or because of how we act.”
In Thursday’s letter, Ladaria said a “new form” of Palegianism is spreading in today’s culture in which the individual, “understood to be radically autonomous, presumes to save oneself, without recognizing that, at the deepest level of being, he or she derives from God and from others.”
According to this thought, salvation “depends on the strength of the individual or on purely human structures, which are incapable of welcoming the newness of the Spirit of God,” the letter said.
However, a new form of Gnosticism is also widely diffused, promoting an understanding of salvation which is “merely interior, closed off in its own subjectivism.”
“In this model, salvation consists of improving oneself, of being intellectually capable of rising above the flesh of Jesus towards the mysteries of the unknown divinity,” the letter said. “It presumes to liberate the human person from the body and from the material universe” in which God is no longer found, “but only a reality deprived of meaning” and “easily manipulated by the interests of man.”
Comparing the two heresies is intended as a simple recognition of “general common features, without entering into judgments on the exact nature of the ancient error,” the letter said, emphasizing that there is a vast difference between modern, secularized society and the social context in which the heresies were born.
However, “both neo-Pelagian individualism and the neo-Gnostic disregard of the body deface the confession of faith in Christ, the one, universal Savior,” the letter said, and reaffirmed that “salvation consists in our union with Christ.”
Man’s search for salvation and Christ as Savior
The letter noted that each person, in their own way, seeks happiness and tries to obtain it through the means they have available.
Yet this desire is not always explicitly expressed, and is frequently “more secret and hidden than it may appear,” revealing itself only in situations of crisis, the letter said, noting that this desire can often be manifested as a desire for better health or economic well-being, and can be expressed as a need for interior peace and peace with others.
It also takes on the character of endurance and the desire to overcome pain, fighting off the “evil” of error, fragility, weakness, sickness and death.
Faced with these aspirations, faith, the letter said, teaches that in rejecting all attempts at “self-realization,” these desires “can be fulfilled completely only if God himself makes it possible, by drawing us toward Himself.”
“The total salvation of the person does not consist of the things that the human person can obtain by himself,” such as wealth, reputation or knowledge, the letter continued, noting that if redemption were judged solely according to the needs of mankind, “how could we avoid the suspicion of having simply created a Redeemer God in the image of our own need?”
The letter then emphasized that God has never stopped offering salvation to his people, and that this redemption has a concrete name and face in Jesus Christ.
Salvation, it said, doesn’t occur in just an interior manner, because Jesus was made flesh in order to communicate with mankind. And by becoming part of the human family, Jesus “has united himself in some fashion with every man and woman and has established a new kind of relationship with God, his Father, and with all humanity.”
Each person can be incorporated in this new relationship and participate in Jesus’ own life, the letter said, adding that Christ’s incarnation, “rather than limiting the salvific action,” allows him “to mediate the salvation of God for all of the sons and daughters of Adam.”
Given this understanding, when faced with the “individualist reductionism of Pelagian tendency, and the neo-Gnostic promise of a merely interior salvation,” Christians have to remember “the way in which Jesus is Savior.”
“He did not limit himself to showing us the way to encounter God, a path we can walk on our own by being obedient to his words and by imitating his example,” but instead opened the door to freedom and pointed to himself as the way.
This path, the letter said, “is not merely an interior journey at the margins of our relationships with others and with the created world,” but consists of a “new and living way” that Jesus inaugurated for mankind in his own flesh.
“Therefore, Christ is Savior in as much as he assumed the entirety of our humanity and lived a fully human life in communion with his Father and with others.”
Salvation is through the Church, the Body of Christ
The letter reaffirmed that the place where humanity receives the salvation of Jesus “is the Church,” beginning with baptism and continuing through the other sacraments.
“Both the individualistic and the merely interior visions of salvation contradict the sacramental economy through which God wants to save the human person,” the letter said.
Salvation cannot be achieved by one’s own individual efforts alone, as neo-Pelagian thought would argue, but is instead found “in the relationships that are born from the incarnate Son of God and that form the communion of the Church,” the letter said.
Likewise, it stressed that the grace of God leads us to concrete relationships that Christ himself formed, and of which the Church is an image.
Salvation, then, “does not consist in the self-realization of the isolated individual, nor in an interior fusion of the individual with the divine,” but rather means being incorporated “into a communion of persons that participates in the communion of the Trinity.”
While Gnosticism has a negative view of creation, seeing it as a limitation of man’s freedom and therefore implying that salvation means freeing oneself from the body and concrete human relationships, true salvation offered by Christ includes the sanctification of the body, the letter said.
With the sacraments, “Christians are able to live faithful to the flesh of Christ and, as a result, in fidelity to the kind of relationships that he gave us,” the letter said, explaining that under this rationale, care for those who are suffering is especially important, particularly through the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.
The letter closed urging Christians to advance in announcing the “joy and light of the Gospel,” while also establishing a “sincere and constructive dialogue” with those from other religions, believing that God can lead all men of goodwill toward salvation in Christ.
“Total salvation of the body and of the soul is the final destiny to which God calls all of humanity,” it said, and urged believers to look forward to the coming of Christ, who will “change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.”
[…]
I wonder if Bergoglio has ever read the Epistles of St. Paul, who advised that some people should indeed be excluded from the Church? Maybe he never heard of Jesus of Nazareth either, who also spoke of separating the sheep and the goats.
Pope Francis said: “I am well aware that speaking of a ‘Synod on Synodality’ may seem something abstruse, self-referential, excessively technical, and of little interest to the general public…”
Agreed. So why spends millions for 450+ to get autumn vacations in Rome?
Pope Francis says the Synods show must go on because marginalized Jesuit friends like Fr. James Martin are working with the Holy Spirit to help the Catholic Church grow by changing its teaching on sodomy, like it did for slavery and ecumenism. https://catholicherald.co.uk/leading-u-s-catholics-clash-over-schismatic-synod-agenda/
Um, this sounds like a serious case of stuckedness.
Well, ‘scuzee Your Holiness, but those you have persecuted under TC, and The Dubia, and the FFI, and in and on, beg to differ…
Ironic that Pope Francis invokes Paul VI as the initiator of the Synod of Bishops. Bishops.
One thing he’s got right, that the S on S is of little interest to most Catholics, in spite of their supposedly having been encountered, dialogued with and listened to at every turn.
A number of things do not make sense to me.
1. Trying to make the works of mercy into a creed – they’re already part of our creed.
2. Building bridges like Greeks – when the Greeks came to Christ He moved swiftly to the Cross.
3. “Redefining structures and permanently eradicating sin possibilities through the poor” – preferential option for the poor never meant that and neither is that a true teaching of the faith.
4. Updating doctrine by minimizing it for sake of inclusivity and/or the universal service of the poor – is not the witness of the saints.
Pope Francis said of the Greeks in their approach to Jesus near the time of the Passion, that what the Lord indicated was “neither yes nor no”. I suspect that this “between memory and the future” -the between the yes and the no,- is what Pope Francis is trying to flesh out through the horizonless synod.
And I do not believe that it is what is meant by the incident in question.
The bridge building image is said to have come from James Martin. I do not know the point in time when it arose from him.
During 2014 I applied to a Jesuit University in the US midwest for an MA program in Literature and was eventually enrolled in mid-2015. In my application essays I had used the image of bridge building to indicate a mode of getting my thoughts from one place to another in tackling ideas between secular subjects that I ordinarily find very difficult. I had made some references to my faith mixed in with the essays.
If someone has felt “inspired” by what I wrote to interpret the image as some kind of “apostolic brilliance”, I would like to make it clear I never meant any such thing. Also, I do not grasp what such meaning would entail, even now.
(As it turned out I couldn’t make sense of the curriculum or the online portal or the degree director of the time; and I suspended my study.)
Surely these are strange discussions!
The Pope seems to say it is called for because the very survival of the Church is at stake? – and/or he seems to say it is called for because the very survival of the world is at stake?
‘ “This is a grace we all need in order to move forward. And it is something the Church today offers the world, a world so often so incapable of making decisions, even when our very survival is at stake,” he said.
“We are trying to learn a new way of living relationships, listening to one another to hear and follow the voice of the Spirit.”
To explain the significance of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis described the synod as “a journey that St. Paul VI began at the end of the [Vatican II] Council when he created the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops because he had realized that in the Western Church synodality had disappeared, whereas in the Eastern Church they have this dimension.”
“And this years-long journey — 60 years — is bearing great fruit,” he added. ‘
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/bishop-manuel-nin-synod-on-synodality-unlike-eastern-synods
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/03/17/on-the-paradox-of-abundance/
We read: “today’s dominant technocratic paradigm raises profound questions about the place of human beings and of human action in the world.” The same can be said about some entries on old-fashion flip charts at synodal focus groups.
“Forward, ever forward” said trail guide Jim Bridger to the “walking together” and ill-fated Donner Party, in the face of late autumn weather, as he wandered off elsewhere to fame and awards (lines in history books, and a mountain range in Montana!). And, as on the bridge of the Titanic when Joseph Ismay, White Star resident expert from the corporate boardroom, insisted to the captain–ever faster with an arrival deadline clearly in sight! The turning of the screw, so to speak.
Butt, yes, to engagement and invitation–and to actual “listening”… still waiting for the pope’s business-as-usual and cya advisors to flip. Never “backward!” Late autumn 2023! and 2024!
“Important to the Church”? What church? As for the synodal “dimension in the Eastern Church:” https://www.ncregister.com/blog/bishop-manuel-nin-synod-on-synodality-unlike-eastern-synods
Have the Catholics who prefer the traditional Latin mass been invited?
“Let the people eat cake.”
Peace Journalism is the need of the hour worldwide. The basic concept of Peace Journalism is to prevent violence and war.
War journalism is the need of the hour worldwide. The basic concept of war journalism is to expose the truth of violence and war.
To call sin love is to wage war on the truth that love is never sin. “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:16). God the Holy Spirit inspired St. John to write about Him Truth: “If you love Me, keep My commandments … He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me … If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.” (John 14:15-24)
And Gandhi said: “The way to peace is the way of truth. Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. The truth of a few will count; the untruth of millions will vanish even like chaff before whiff of wind.”
Christ is the Truth of God. To prevent violence, we must tell the truth of Christ. And Christ said in His Sacred Scripture and Tradition that concubinage and sodomy are sinful and never loving in practice. A Synod, or anyone, that says sin loves like Christ is lying and leading us to spiritual and physical violence, like war.
Don’t be deceived, Francis. Some of us are listening and watching you very closely. More than you think.
The synod will be an embarrassment and disaster for the Church.c
We do get this: “That word of the Gospel that is so important: everyone. Everyone, everyone: there are no first-, second- or third-class Catholics, no. All together. Everyone. It is the Lord’s invitation.”
But, beyond the invitation, what is the distinction between the universal and sacramental Catholic Church as historically established by the incarnate Jesus Christ, and the Islam’s inclusive and doctrinally minimalist family of the ummah, in which full membership requires only a mere declaration of intention to belong, from which follows “not only a sense [feeling?] of belonging, but a knowledge of being accepted as well” (Farooq Hassan, “The Concept of State and Law in Islam,” 1981)?
Rising above all considerations of the efficacy of a more inclusive Church, one that suggests that we least provide the opportunity for conversion and salvation to all, inclusive of those in irregular union or practice, the ‘garment of faith’ the sole requirement to receive the sacraments, particularly the Holy Eucharist – is the given perception that reception of the Body and Blood of Christ is a uniquely redemptive sacrament consistent with reparation for sins. As is the sacrament of penance.
While this holds true for sins that are commonly reparable, venial sins, it isn’t for those that are intrinsically evil. These sins require acknowledgment to the Church by confession to a priest, followed by legitimate absolution. This regulation has persisted since Trent, the Church forbidding commonly held private practices of absolution.
The Holy Eucharist is a remedy, a strengthening of our faith, and will [the rational appetite or desire] to refrain from serious sin. To increasingly transform our life style to that of Christ. Exclusion, as opposed to inclusion, is a necessary feature in Christ’s revelation of the Father’s will, that we are willing to convert, to cross the barrier of our own making by adopting a way of life contrary to the revelation of Christ the Way.
LET US PRAY FOR POPE FRANCIS THAT AFTER ALL THE SYNODS OF SYNODALITY HAVE THEIR SAY HE WILL HAVE THE COURAGE TO UPHOLD THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS CHRIST AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AS POPE ST. PAUL VI DID.
Noreen, your comment reminds me of a line from a film. John Cleese in “Clockwise” says “It’s not the despair, but rather the hope that’s killing me.” The hope that after 10 years of destroying the legacy of ppJPII and ppBXVI, the hope that after 10 years of Bergoglioism’s Cancel Catholicism Programme, he might suddenly turn around and say “ha, I was only joking. I don’t really want to destroy the last remains of the Catholic Church for her enemies,” seems to me worse than handling the despair and acknowledging the Catholic Church is eclipsed by full blown Apostasy.
Noreen’s heartfelt prayer made me think of Jane Austen’s Persuasion on this great Sunday of Simon Peter’s confession of faith:
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”
If Pope Francis allows the type of weaponised ambiguity to dominate the Synod as Paul VI did during VII then we will see the church head further into confusion.
I remember at the local diocesan synod level discussion and I brought up the Latin Mass effect and I was met with shifting seats, puzzled looks and a sharp intervention that the alphabet soup mafia and need for women to be in charge of the liturgy were far more important!! Well then let them proceed and we know that it will be a complete train wreck!
“The measure is full, and the time has come to choose which side we are on. Either with Bergoglio and Spadaro, with the Synod on Synodality, with a human and counterfeit church enslaved to the New World Order, or with God, His Church, and His Saints. And on closer inspection it is already unheard of to hypothesize that Catholics – I am not speaking of priests or prelates – can consider it possible to have a choice.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano
https://twitter.com/CarloMVigano/status/1695760255815147927
“Surely one of the most concerning aspects of this paradigm, with its negative impact upon both human and natural ecology alike, is its subtle seduction of the human spirit, lulling people — and especially the young — into misusing their freedom,” the pope said.
If “this paradigm” is the Synod and if “human and natural ecology” is the traditional dogmatic teaching and practice of Catholicism, then Francis has spoken truly of the disorientation diabolically lodged in the sulci of his and his psycho-fanatical synodalists.
Francis has misunderstood faithful Catholics for far too long. We care that demons have been given access to Christ’s seed under Francis’ watch. We care that Francis has allowed distorted truth to stand for Christ’s Word. We care that Christ’s Body has been in recent years repeatedly dishonored. We care that souls are lost because Francis has failed to learn, to respect, or to transmit the Faith handed to him. Francis does not care.
But Christ cares, and He is our salvation. Francis is an open door to a dark and horrid place from which there is no escape.