Holy Father Recalls Dietrich Hildebrand's Warning About False Irenicism

Pope Benedict XVI delivers the Urbi et Orbi (to the city and to the world) Christmas Day message from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, on December 25, 2011. In his traditional Christmas Day message, Pope Benedict XVI urged the faithful to seek a "spiritual union" with the less fortunate around the world. UPI/Stefano Spaziani 


VATICAN CITY, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Pope Benedict XVI said Friday at the Vatican the world faces a crisis of faith and warned against indifference to doctrine in the name of religious unity. "Today we see a number of good results caused by ecumenical dialogue, but we must also recognize that the risk of a false Irenism and indifference, quite alien to the mind of Vatican II, demands our vigilance," the spiritual leader of the world's Roman Catholics said Friday at a meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Irenism was an ideology conceived by Dutch theologian Erasmus that sought to mediate differences between Protestants and Catholics, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

 Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/01/27/Pope-warns-Catholics-to-hold-to-doctrine/UPI-62381327700909/#ixzz1kihInKM8

Edit: A few may remember the words of Dietrich Hildebrand on False Irenicism.  It's clear that the Holy Father does.

"False irenicism is motivated by a misconceived charity at the service of a meaningless unity. It places unity above truth. Having severed the essential link between charity and defense of the truth, irenicism is more concerned with reaching a unity with all men than with leading them to Christ and His eternal truth. It ignores the fact that real unity can be reached only in truth. Our Lord’s prayer ‘that they may be one’ implies being one in Him and must not be separated from His words in John: ‘And other sheep I have that are not of this fold. Them also I must bring and they shall hear my voice. And there shall be one fold and one shepherd.’"

German Journalist: "The Church is Caught in a Modern Trap"

The Church gropes in the Modern Trap

Edit: Matussek has suggested that the church tax, which is levied in Germany and managed by the government, is going away. It's been suggested in certain other quarters that this last vestige of confessional Europe has been used as a medium for the auto-destruction of the Church in Germany. We've tried to keep our intrusions on Matussek's blunt and awesome observations to a minimum.

Matthias Matussek

After the Council the Church was placed increasingly in the hands of Liturgical dilettantes and fussy hobby-thinkers, who presented themselves as an Avantgarde organized against volksreligion and Tradition.

(kreuz.net) Pope Benedict XVI knows "that the form of the Una Sancta [One Holy} with its Dogmas and Traditions must be protected against the hobbyists."

Matthias Matussek wrote this in the recent edition of the bitterly anti-Church German boulevard magazine 'Spiegel' [basically, it's Germany's Time Magazine]

The magazine was founded after the Second World War by a former Nazi journalist and a Lieutenant of the Wehrmach.

Matussek's article appeared under the title: "Rock in the storm -- why Catholicism could not be Protestant."

The Pope has to be a Rock Now More than Ever


For Matussek the Pope has to be a successor of Peter now more than ever -- "the rock, on which the Church was once founded."

Because: "He is not only responsible for the 1.2 Billion Catholics, but also for the Tradition, which Chesterton once called >>the Democracy of the Dead<<. Tradition may not be betrayed on behalf of the tiny, German parish, which constitutes no more than two percent of the World Church.

Not a Reformer, but a Resistance Fighter

Benedict XVI, for Matussek, didn't come to Germany as a reformer, rather as a "great figure of contradiction".

"The Catastrophe, which has to do with us, is the memory loss of Catholics."

Matussek traced the problem to the time following the Second Vatican Council.

Then the Church was placed "increasingly in the hands of dilettante Liturgists and fussy hobby-thinkers, who presented themselves as an Avantgarde organized against volksreligion and Tradition.

Already in 1968 Pope Paul VI wept over the "weighty and complex disruption, which no one had expected after the Council." [Not entirely so, Msgr Bandas returned from the Council in abject despair and did his best to prepare for what he foresaw.]


Discussion instead of Holiness

Matussek brought the problem to a point: "The Church has been caught in the modern trap."

He defined the modern trap as: "Much head, little heart." [Which brings to mind Mozart's comment that, "Protestantism is all in the head"]

One has lost the feeling for Holiness and Grace: "In place of that, discussions take place."

Link to kreuz.net...

Photo: © Melanie Feuerbacher, Wikipedia, CC