05-08-2024, 07:07 AM
Here is even greater clarity of the distortion promoted by the Second Vatican Council:
Quote:Gaudium et Spes §11 expresses the relativist perspective that claims to seek to "purify" the world's values in order to link them to Christ:
Quote:The People of God believes that it is led by the Lord's Spirit, who fills the earth. Motivated by this faith, it labors to decipher authentic signs of God's presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age. For faith throws a new light on everything, manifests God's design for man's total vocation, and thus directs the mind to solutions which are fully human.
This Council, first of all, wishes to assess in this light those values which are most highly prized today, and to relate them to their divine source. For insofar as they stem from endowments conferred by God on man, these values are exceedingly good. Yet they are often wrenched from their rightful function by the taint in man's heart, and hence stand in need of purification.
What "values" are invoked here? It's easy to see they are indicated in GS §39. Here again, the Council wants us to believe that we shall find them "purified" in the Kingdom of God, and that they are "the dignity of man, fraternal unity, and liberty" which must serve "universal progress in human and Christian freedom" (Lumen Gentium §36).But it is necessary to comment:
1) These laicist values are said to be "exceedingly good." The purely lay ideal of progress, which includes the idea of humanity's "education" through "reason alone" and exalts worldly happiness and earthly well being, is totally anti-Christian and cannot be "exceedingly good." Nor can "human dignity," "universal brotherhood," and "liberty" be "exceedingly good" since they are the French Revolution's well-known triad. Therefore, under the banner of the "rights of man," they signal Deism's and Illuminism-Masonry's philosophy of rationalism, which inspired the famous Charter of Rights based on "Immortal Principles."
2) The same text that asserts that these values are "good," although "deflected from the rightful order," is the result of an equivocation and relativism that has spread widely among liberal Catholics as well as among their modernist and neo-modernist counterparts. It is well known that these values, as was said about the French Revolution, "apply Christianity's ideas which, however, await their application and are not recognized as such before that application" (Romano Amerio, Iota Unum). Actually, laicist-driven fraternity, equality and liberty are a distortion of their Catholic equivalents because they derive from a vision of the world based solely on man, seen as being exempt from the stain of original sin, and, so, superior, exalted, and proud. Consequently, these values are opposed in themselves to the equivalent Catholic ones, which they negate and attack in every way. This does not even include a discussion of the ideal of progress which, in concept and meaning, is alien to Catholicism. Actually:
>Christian freedom is interior and comes from faith in Christ (Jn. 8:31-32). It has nothing to do with freedom of the individual, who makes every choice in terms of absolute self-determination, in the absence of all law and constraint. This is the basis of contemporary democracy and the "rights of man." And it is precisely to this laicist liberty-value that the Council continually referred.
i. From the Christian point of view, brotherhood among all men is authentically felt because all men come from God the Father, Creator. It presupposes belief in the Blessed Trinity and is nourished by love of neighbor loved for the love of God, not for man's alleged "dignity." This means that we are connected, each of us to the other, because we are tainted by original sin and are all sinners.
ii. Therefore, Catholic brotherhood has nothing in common with the political type of brotherhood based on the ideology of egalitarianism, which spread through the world beginning with the American and French revolutions, and which is also the foundation of contemporary democracy. This is why it is legitimate to judge laicist equality as the reigning political value. Oppositely, Catholic equality has always been our equality as sinners before God, and of Christians before the promises of our Lord, thanks to which they are made potential "co-heirs" of the Kingdom (Eph. 3:6).
iii. In the Catholic meaning, equality, fraternity and liberty are, above all, religious values, founded on revealed Truth. The same values, such as the world defines and understands them are, above all, political, the fruits of the Deism and rationalism of the Enlightenment, and of a world willfully hostile to the Catholic Faith. Therefore, the Council's desire "to purify" these values appears to be stripped of all meaning. How should they be "purified?" In order to be in harmony with ageless teaching, the Council would have had to condemn them because of their opposition to their authentic Christian meaning. In reality, there was no "purification." As we have seen, there was only the bastardization of the Church's doctrine through its adapting these values of the world. And that was done as a result of adopting the false idea of man, his "dignity," his "vocation," all of these taken from a doctrinally erroneous idea of the Incarnation and Redemption. It was an idea of man that, rather than being "purified" of its laicist origin, introduced "humanism" born of revolutionary ideas into the Church's doctrine.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre