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Pope Francis’ recent comments during an interreligious meeting with young people at Catholic Junior College in Singapore regarding the smorgasbord of different “paths to reach God” – “[s]ome Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian” – encapsulate the poisonous ideology that has permeated the Catholic Church over the past several decades. It has seeped into the pulpits, seminaries, and classrooms, corrupting the Church Militant. Whether as converts or cradle Catholics, many of us were infused, at some point, with this pernicious, any-road-up-the-mountain toxin.
It is certainly not the first time Francis has espoused religious indifferentism. Buried within his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Francis stated that, while for Christians the wellspring of human dignity and fraternity is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, “others drink from other sources.” It was a scandalous and deceptive comment. That it was written by the successor of St. Peter, the rock upon whom Christ built His Church, and who consented to be crucified upside down for love of the Savior, was distressing. Until last week, Fratelli Tutti was, in my mind, Francis’ worst moment as Pope. His observations amounted to so much more than a deviation from Church teaching. Together with his recent address in Singapore, they represent a direct attack on the divinity of Christ and His dominion over all Creation.
It’s no accident that, according to a 2021 Pew Research study, Catholics are twice as likely as Protestants in general, and over three times as likely as Evangelical Christians, to say that people who do not believe in God can still go to heaven. Only 16 percent of Catholics – compared with 38 percent of Protestants and 50 percent of Evangelicals – believe that their religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life in heaven. Whichever way you dice it, a Catholic who accepts the heterodox view that salvation is possible without Christ, has, somewhere along the road, been deluded into believing that, at the end of the day, the whole Jesus thing is a nice story, but just isn’t essential. Such blasphemy isn’t the unfortunate result of decades of poor catechism; it’s the intended result of three generations of miscatechism.
Francis has effectively confirmed that it’s intentional. In fact, he has been uncharacteristically lucid and consistent on this point. In February 2019, the Pope signed a document on human fraternity along with Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, which claimed that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions … are willed by God in his wisdom.” Later that year, Francis suggested during a general audience that Catholics have no need to fear the existence of other religions as these “always look toward heaven and God,” and that what God wants is “fraternity among us.” In 2022, he participated in an interreligious congress in Kazakhstan, whose 35-point declaration, adopted by the majority of the delegates, called religious pluralism an expression “of the wisdom of God’s will in creation.”
Yet religious indifferentism has absolutely no foundation in Catholic teaching. The prophets and patriarchs shunned it. Immediately before his death, Joshua admonished the Israelites to choose that day whether to serve the Lord God of Israel, or the pagan gods of their ancestors. “As for me and my house,” Joshua declared, “we will serve the Lord.” Elijah famously battled it out with the false prophets of Ba’al, and Mathathias, father of Judeus Maccabeus, stood firm as wicked King Antiochus ordered the Jews to depart from God’s Law.
The Word Incarnate condemned it. In John Chapter 14, Our Lord specifically said that “no man cometh to the Father but by Him [sic].” In Chapter 6, He declared that the work of God is “to believe in Him whom He hath sent.” In Matthew 28, Jesus told his apostles that “all power is given to me in heaven and in earth” and instructed them to “teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” In Mark 16, He commanded them to “go… into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature,” insisting that “he that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.”
And the Church Fathers rejected it. St. Irenaeus, in his 3rd century work Against the Heresies, described it this way:
[The apostles] have all declared to us that there is one God, Creator of Heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets; and one Christ the Son of God. If anyone do not agree to these truths, he despises, the companions of the Lord; nay, he despises Christ Himself the Lord; yea he despises the Father also, and stands self-condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation, as is the case with all heretics.[1]
Two centuries later, St. Augustine wrote that “God the Son of God, who is himself the Truth, took manhood without abandoning his Godhead, and thus established and founded this faith, so that man might have a path to man’s God through the man who was God.” He went on:
For there is hope to attain a journey’s end when there is a path which stretches between the traveler and his goal. But if there is no path, or if a man does not know which way to go, there is little use in knowing the destination. As it is, there is one road, and one only, well secured against all possibility of going astray; and this road is provided by one who is himself both God and man. As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way.[2]
These are the truths that the holy Catholic Church teaches; we believe them because God has revealed them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The fraternal, one-world-religion, all-faiths-look-to-heaven falsehood that Francis is recklessly promoting is not simply inconsistent with that Truth; it is diametrically opposed to it.
The false creed of universal brotherhood is at root a nuanced variation of its long line of heretical predecessors. Two millennia of Church history have been punctuated by the regular emergence of heretical movements, manifesting like “mushrooms growing out of the ground,” as St. Irenaeus described the myriad gnostic sects that plagued the early Church during his time. Regardless of their different branding, all heresies have one thing in common: they undermine the kingship of Christ by rejecting the perennial teaching that Jesus has two natures: human and divine.
Thus, according to the heresy of Docetism, for example, Christ was indeed divine, but only had the appearance of being a man. Ebionites, on the other hand, accepted that Jesus Christ, fully human, was indeed the Messiah, but refused to acknowledge that He was God. In the 4th and 5th centuries, Nestorianism denied the Incarnation by rejecting the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the one divine person of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Meanwhile Pelagianism subtly undermined Jesus’ divinity by dismissing His role as Redeemer and suggesting that the individual can attain salvation through his own will, and not necessarily by the grace of God. For the 12th century Albigensian sect, Christ was not truly a man, Mary was therefore not really the Mother of God, the crucifixion, death, and resurrection were illusions, and hence the concept of the Cross was null and void.
In the same way, religious indifferentism mocks the Man-God by positing that an individual may, through professing other faiths and preaching other “gospels”, effectively bypass the Savior on the Road to Salvation. Jesus Christ ceases to be Creator, Judge, and Redeemer, and becomes an optional rest-stop along the way: a nice repose if you need to grab a coffee and stretch your legs, but by no means an essential part of the journey.
There is no graver heresy than this. For it is through God’s Word that we were created, by God’s perfect Law alone that we are judged, and through His body alone, in which He is manifested for our salvation, offered to death on behalf of all, that God has made a path to Heaven. As St. Athanasius so eloquently explained, God effected the salvation of the world through the self-same Word, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who made it in the beginning. Or as St. Peter put it, “there is no other name under Heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.”
Yes, we are all sons of God, because we have all been created by God, who by an especial grace bestowed upon the race of men an impress of His own image. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches in Article IX that “the Church is not confined to any one country or class of men, but embraces within the amplitude of her love all mankind.” However, St. Irenaeus emphasized that “with respect to obedience and doctrine we are not all the sons of God: those only are so who believe in Him and do His will.” Those who do not believe, and do not obey His will, says Irenaeus, are “sons of the devil, because they do the works of the devil.”
The Vatican’s perverse revolt against Christ’s kingship underpins every doctrinal and liturgical abuse that Catholics are being subjected to with greater vigor and insolence than ever, as Archbishop Fulton Sheen so perspicaciously foretold. No, all religions are not alternative paths to God. They aren’t “like different languages that express the divine.” They aren’t one wellspring among many, or one road up the mountain, or one way to skin a cat, or any other ridiculous analogy.
There is but one Way. And it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and nailed to the Cross, trolling the enemies of Christ for all ages, immortalized with profound irony in the inscription above Our Lord’s head, as He hung, despised, and the most abject of men, led according to His own will as a sheep to the slaughter: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum.
[1] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 1.
[2] St. Augustine, City of God, Book XI, Chapter 3.