Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XXV: Athanasius contra Magisterium.

ish­op Athana­sius Schnei­der is grous­ing to Fake Site News again about God will­ing the diver­si­ty of reli­gions. The Vat­i­can is betray­ing Jesus Christ! he says in the histri­on­ic style favored by Fake Site. If some­how you have been in a cocoon for a few months and have just emerged, here is what hap­pened: In Feb­ru­ary, Pope Fran­cis signed a joint state­ment with Mus­lim lead­ers at Abu Dhabi, and Faith­ful­Catholics™ had an imme­di­ate freak out over these words:

Free­dom is a right of every per­son: each indi­vid­ual enjoys the free­dom of belief, thought, expres­sion and action. The plu­ral­ism and the diver­si­ty of reli­gions, colour, sex, race and lan­guage are willed by God in His wis­dom, through which He cre­at­ed human beings. This divine wis­dom is the source from which the right to free­dom of belief and the free­dom to be dif­fer­ent derives. There­fore, the fact that peo­ple are forced to adhere to a cer­tain reli­gion or cul­ture must be reject­ed, as too the impo­si­tion of a cul­tur­al way of life that oth­ers do not accept.

The part in bold is the part that caused the freak-out. “Woah! woah!” Faith­ful­Catholics™ cried. “What do you mean God wills a diver­si­ty of reli­gions? There’s only one true reli­gion! God can’t will false reli­gions. He tells us there is one God, and him alone you shall serve (Luke 4:8)! He tells us no one comes to God except through Christ (John 14:6)! He tells us we shall have no oth­er gods (Exo­dus 20:3)! So how could God will oth­er­wise? There Bergoglio goes again, deny­ing the faith!”

Utter­ly ignored in the freak-out were the open­ing and clos­ing parts of the pas­sage, which pro­vide the con­text for the dis­cus­sion of God’s will. “Free­dom is a right of every per­son,” the Abu Dhabi state­ment says. God gave every­one free will. And there­fore “each indi­vid­ual enjoys … free­dom of belief.” From God come “the right to free­dom of belief and the free­dom to be dif­fer­ent.” And there­fore, no one may impose a par­tic­u­lar reli­gious faith upon anoth­er.

It is in that con­text that we must under­stand the part in the mid­dle about God will­ing a diver­si­ty of reli­gions. The diver­si­ty of reli­gions is a con­se­quence of human free will. Thus, while God did not ordain the diver­si­ty of reli­gions, they fol­low from his giv­ing us free will. God per­mits them, but does not direct­ly intend them.

Even Fr. Z under­stood this and was hav­ing none of the Faith­ful­Catholic™ freak-out. “God,” says Fr. Z, “did not will a diver­si­ty of reli­gions in the sense that all reli­gions are equal paths to God. False reli­gions are evil. God does not active­ly will evil.”

No. God did not active­ly will the Holo­caust, though he per­mit­ted it. He could have stopped it but did not. This is not an orig­i­nal obser­va­tion, dear read­er.

Fr. Z con­tin­ues:

When we speak of God’s will we make dis­tinc­tions. God has an “active or pos­i­tive will” and a “per­mis­sive will.” God’s “active will” con­cerns that which is good, true and beau­ti­ful. On the oth­er hand, God has a “per­mis­sive will” by which He allows that things will take place that are not in accord with the order He estab­lished.

Fr. Z has that exact­ly right. He finds the Abu Dhabi state­ment entire­ly ortho­dox and not con­fus­ing in any way. And indeed, back in March, Fake Site News trum­pet­ed it from the rooftops that Bish­op Schnei­der had received a “clar­i­fi­ca­tion” from Pope Fran­cis after pos­ing the ques­tion to him. “You can say,” the pope told the bish­op, “that the phrase in ques­tion on the diver­si­ty of reli­gions means the per­mis­sive will of God.” Case closed then, right?

Wrong. A mere two months lat­er, in May, Bish­op Schnei­der was still mum­bling about it to Fake Site and demand­ing that the pope “for­mal­ly cor­rect” the state­ment. Of course, if it was ortho­dox in the very way that Pope Fran­cis described, in what sense does he need to “cor­rect” it? I don’t see how that fol­lows; and thus I wrote Vol. XXII of this series.

AND SO ON AND SO ON

But now the Vat­i­can is imple­ment­ing the Abu Dhabi state­ment, and the Faith­ful­Catholic™ freak-out con­tin­ues apace, Athan­sius con­tra Mag­is­teri­um. “The spread of this doc­u­ment in its uncor­rect­ed form,” Fake Site writes, quot­ing ACM, “will ‘par­a­lyze the Church’s mis­sion ad gentes’ and ‘suf­fo­cate her burn­ing zeal to evan­ge­lize all men.’ ” (With heat­ed rhetoric like that to work with, some­one should come up with a Fake Site News sen­tence gen­er­a­tor.) ACM went on and said that if the pope does not cor­rect the “erro­neous affir­ma­tion on the diver­si­ty of reli­gions,” then “men in the Church not only betray Jesus Christ as the only Sav­ior of mankind and the neces­si­ty of His Church for eter­nal sal­va­tion, but also com­mit a great injus­tice and sin against love of neigh­bor.”

That’s just wild. There is no “erro­neous affir­ma­tion.” The pope spec­i­fied four months ago that God wills a diver­si­ty of reli­gions from the stand­point of his per­mis­sive will, and this is not arguable. From the stand­point of God’s per­mis­sive will, what­ev­er hap­pens is God’s will. Unless there is no diver­si­ty of reli­gions at all, the state­ment is not “erro­neous.” But I don’t hear ACM or Fake Site say­ing, “What diver­si­ty of reli­gions? We’re all Catholic!” If he has said this and I’ve over­looked it, please do let me know.

And would­n’t you know? Bish­op Schnei­der actu­al­ly points out at the wery begin­ning of his inter­view with Fake Site that Pope Fran­cis had clar­i­fied all this anoth­er time at a Wednes­day audi­ence. Did you know that? That was on April 3—one month after Schnei­der had cried “The pope has clar­i­fied!” and one month before he said, “The pope needs to issue a cor­rec­tion, you know.” Amaz­ing. Here is what the pope said in his Wednes­day audi­ence:

Why are there many reli­gions? Along with the Mus­lims, we are the descen­dants of the same Father, Abra­ham: why does God allow many reli­gions? God want­ed to allow this: [Scholas­tic] the­olo­gians used to refer to God’s vol­un­tas per­mis­si­va [i.e., per­mis­sive will].

So twice now the pope has clar­i­fied, and the clar­i­fi­ca­tion says the very thing Fr. Z knew from the begin­ning to be whol­ly clear and ortho­dox. But is that enough for ACM? Of course it’s not.

“The pope unfor­tu­nate­ly,” he says, “did not make any ref­er­ence to the objec­tive­ly erro­neous phrase from the Abu Dhabi doc­u­ment.”

But it’s not erro­neous! You can’t simul­ta­ne­ous­ly hear the pope say “I meant God’s per­mis­sive will” but still insist that the doc­u­ment refers to God’s per­fect will, unless you want to claim that the pope is a liar. Is that your claim, Your Excel­len­cy, because if it is, you prob­a­bly need to just come right out and say it: “Pope Fran­cis is a LIAR!! Then you need to say on what grounds you know this.

“The afore­men­tioned remarks of Pope Fran­cis,” ACM goes on, “are a small step towards a clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the erro­neous phrase.”

There he goes again. He seems to want to have it both ways. If the pope mere­ly needs to “clar­i­fy” the text, he’s done so at least twice. But then you can’t speak of it as “erro­neous.” You can’t say on the one hand that the pope must “clar­i­fy,” and then once he does change the ground of argu­ment and demand that the stan­dard is now “cor­rec­tion” since you’ve decid­ed it’s in error and you’re claim­ing for your­self the author­i­ty to make demands of the pope.

The pope in his gen­er­al audi­ence, says ACM, “does not refer direct­ly to the doc­u­ment.”

That’s disin­ge­nous. The pope express­ly framed his intro­duc­tion of the Scholas­tic con­cept “vol­un­tas per­mis­si­va” around the ques­tion “Why does God allow many reli­gions?” So clear­ly that’s a ref­er­ence to the Abu Dhabi text and the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing it. Also, this time Pope Fran­cis says “allow” rather than “will” to fur­ther clar­i­fy what the text means.

But, says ACM, “the aver­age Catholic and almost all non-Catholics nei­ther know nor under­stand the mean­ing of the the­o­log­i­cal­ly tech­ni­cal expres­sion ‘per­mis­sive will of God.’ ”

Maybe. But you can’t then decide that, if many peo­ple don’t know what “per­mis­sive will” means, there­fore the text must mean “per­fect will.” That’s not intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est. And has it ever occurred to you to actu­al­ly explain it? It does­n’t take long; Fr. Z did so in a para­graph. Do you lack the pow­er of clear speech? You speak so elo­quent­ly about the need to evan­ge­lize, and now you treat the idea as though it’s a lost cause, no one’s gonna under­stand, they’re all igno­ra­mus­es out there.

And so on and so on ACM goes: “One can­not jus­ti­fy the the­o­ry that the diver­si­ty of reli­gions is pos­i­tive­ly willed by God by adduc­ing the truth of the deposit of faith regard­ing free will as a gift of God the Cre­ator.”

Sigh. So may I point out again that Pope Fran­cis is not say­ing that “the diver­si­ty of reli­gions is pos­i­tive­ly willed by God”? Bish­op Schnei­der refus­es to be hon­est with both the orig­i­nal text and the lat­er remarks of Pope Fran­cis. “God has grant­ed man free will,” ACM says, “pre­cise­ly so that he may wor­ship God alone.” That’s exact­ly right, but the con­se­quence of free will is that peo­ple some­times won’t do that, or that peo­ple will have dif­fer­ent notions of what reli­gion wor­ships God right­ly. And God allows this and does not stop it. Nor does the fact that God gives us free will to choose him imply that one can be forced to choose him or one par­tic­u­lar set of ideas about him. That’s not free will at all. But to observe these things does not mean that the pope thinks God pos­i­tive­ly wills a diver­si­ty of reli­gions. That’s not in the text and it’s not in the pope’s clar­i­fi­ca­tions. But because he has free will too, Bish­op Schnei­der obsti­nate­ly choos­es to describe the Abu Dhabi text the way he wants to describe it.

That’s why I say that these demands for “clar­i­fi­ca­tion” by the Holy Father are a ruse. Because when the pope actu­al­ly does come out and clar­i­fy, his crit­ics refuse to accept the clar­i­fi­ca­tion, raise the bar, and demand “cor­rec­tion” and treat the orig­i­nal words as though they unques­tion­ably con­tained the same heresy that the pope just specif­i­cal­ly denied.

Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome: And so on and so on.