As we await the
Amazonian Synod we would do well to pay special heed to one of sacred Scripture’s and sacred Tradition’s insistent warnings — we
must be on our guard against individuals who seek to pass off their own words
as the word of God. The history of the ecclesia dei includes dark
periods when false prophets and heretics sought to deceive the faithful that
they spoke the word of God. However,
darkness does not have the final say — the history of the Church also
contains glorious moments when such deceptions were resisted, exposed and
defeated, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and
the darkness has not overcome it.’ (Jn 1:5.)
Old Testament
warnings against false prophets
The Lord God warned
Jeremiah about the egotistical deceptions of false prophets:
The prophets are prophesying lies in my name; I did not
send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you
a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.’ (Jer
14:14).
Such lying prophets
lead those who follow them to destruction, because God allows those who are
gulled to reap the consequences of colluding in such blasphemous impostures, ‘For I will pour out their wickedness upon them.’ (ibid,
14:16.) God permits those who follow false prophets to experience these
consequent evils both as divine punishment and as the unmitigated working out
of their sinful choices.
Blessed John Henry Cardinal
Newman explained that the deceptions of false prophets are so destructive
because they present the Gospel in selective half-truths:
And in one sense they speak the truth; but it is not the
whole truth; and we know, even from the common experience of life, that half
the truth is often the most gross and mischievous of falsehoods.’ (Parochial Sermons, Vol.1, sermon 24).
Half-truths are so
dangerous because they more easily seduce and beguile than blatant lies. The other reason why false prophets employ
half-truths is because, like the devil, they are ‘too
wise to set it in open opposition to the Word of God’. (ibid). Open opposition to God’s revealed Truth would immediately expose their deception,
therefore false prophets cunningly use confusion, evasions and ambiguity to
hide their intent. According to Newman,
the purpose of the false prophets’ scheming and manipulation is to create
a worldly, counterfeit religion that inclines:
…our minds in a wrong direction, and at
length to pull them down to the earth, which is the aim of our adversary, the devil.
It is his aim to break our strength; to force us down to the earth,—to bind us there. The world is his instrument for this
purpose… (ibid).
Rule One: a rule for discernment during the
Amazonian Synod follows from Newman’s insights — if
synod fathers’ speeches focus on the Earth, on
nature, and pull us away from Heaven, from grace and the supernatural, then
they are likely to be false prophets or in league with a false prophet.
It is therefore
concerning, that the focus of the Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazonian Synod
is almost exclusively on this Earth, with 48 references to the ‘world’, 43 references to ‘nature’, 17 references to ‘forests’ and only one reference to ‘Heaven’. It portrays the Amazon, not heaven,
as a source of hope, ‘the Amazon represents a pars pro
toto, a part for the whole, a paradigm, a hope for the world.’(IL, 37.) For the Instrumentum Laboris, it’s not Our Lord or His Holy Cross that are hope for the
world, but the Amazon and its indigenous people. There is mention of the blood
of the earth (IL 17), but no mention of the Precious Blood of Christ. Unaccountably,
there are no references to the greatest hope for mankind — God’s offer of sanctifying grace and holiness.
New Testament
warnings against false prophets
Our Lord Jesus
Christ further cautions us to be on our guard against the deceptions of false
prophets:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous
wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or
figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree
bears evil fruit. (Mt 7:15-17).
Our Lord warns that
there are some among us who are practicing deceit by pretending to be one of
us, while really intending our destruction and the destruction of the Church.
St. John Chrysostom characterises this type of deceit at work in the Church as
an ‘ambush and a conspiracy’ which
Our Lord charges us to watch out for with ‘exact care’. (St. John Chrysostom. Commentary on St. Matthew’s Gospel).
Those who have
tried — over the past sixty years — to
warn the Church of a conspiracy to distort and corrupt her doctrine and
discipline have been, more often than not, ridiculed and dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’. But such cavalier ridicule and
dismissal is contrary to Our Lord’s categorical instruction to ‘beware’ these false prophets who conspire
against the Church. In fact, Jesus’ warning about false prophets tells us
to expect such conspiracies against the Church and to look especially for them
among those who claim to speak in the name of God. Such conspiracy is one of
the hallmarks of Modernism among the clergy (Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 42), a recent example among the
cardinals being the self-styled ‘St Gallen Mafia’, involving Cardinal Martini, Cardinal Danneels and
Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, amongst others.
St. Augustine
identified the manipulator behind the scenes of such conspiracies as the devil,
the arch-deceiver, ‘Now the wolf is the devil, he lieth in
wait to deceive, and they that follow him’. (Sermons on New Testament
Lessons, LXXXVII). The devil has attacked the Church through false prophets
since the beginning, as St. Paul warned in his farewell to the Ephesians:
I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in
among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men
speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be
alert… (Acts 20: 29-31).
False prophets do
the devil’s work of destroying souls by leading
disciples into apostasy, by deceitfully drawing them away from the word of God.
Rule Two: following from this, another rule for
discernment during the Amazonian Synod is — if there are signs of a conspiracy
among some synod fathers, through scheming and manipulation, to lead the Church
away from the word of God then you know that they are doing the work of the
devil. The rigging
of synods
to advance heretical changes to doctrine has become a hallmark of recent times.
Evidence has emerged that heretical elements
within the German hierarchy are conspiring to use their ecclesial influence and
economic power to manipulate the Amazonian synod. Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck
of Essen, Head of the German Bishops conference’s
Latin America department, has expressed the hope that ‘the Amazon Synod will lead the Catholic Church to a “point of no return” and that, thereafter, “nothing will be the same as it was”’. The German bishops’ manipulation of the Amazonian synod to
promote their heretical agenda has been so brazen that some of the faithful on
social media refer to it as the ‘Germazonian synod’.
If we acquiesce to
their apostasy, either through commission or omission, we will justly receive
divine punishment. Sacred Scripture tells us that the consequences of betraying
God are inevitable destruction, corporately and individually. Be in no doubt,
God will allow us to suffer the full effects of the devil’s destructive plan for the Amazonian Synod if we co-operate
with it actively or passively.
What the devil’s first conspiracy tells us
Eve’s conversation with the devil is archetypal of all
subsequent false prophets and heretics who seek to pass off their own words as
the word of God. Eve’s addition of her own words to the
command of God is the first example of man’s catastrophic preference for his own
thoughts over the word of God. Almighty God commanded Adam and Eve:
“You may freely eat of every tree of
the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not
eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. (Gn 2:15-17).
In response to the
devil’s opening question, whose goal was to
tempt Eve into joining his conspiracy of disobedience against God, she replied:
We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God
said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the
tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you
shall die. (Gn 3:2-3).
God’s command did not include the injunction, ‘nor shall you touch it’, which was purely of Eve’s own invention, inserting her own thoughts into the word
of God. Adam was with Eve during her conversation with the devil (Gn 3:6)
but he did nothing to correct her interpolation, passively acquiescing to her
making herself the judge of God’s word. This is the undoing of Eve and
Adam, and the whole human race. Instead of replying to the devil only with the
word of God — as Jesus did during his temptation in
the desert — she took the first step towards
committing the sin of pride by thinking that she could improve on God’s command.
Jesus rendered the
devil’s attack impotent by relying solely on
the word of God, successfully blocking each temptation and forcing the devil to
move onto the next until he gave up. By failing to rely solely on the word of
God, Eve failed to block the devil’s temptation, giving him the opening
he sought to blasphemously contradict God, ‘You will not die’. (Gn 3:5.) Without the protection of God’s word by preferring her own thoughts, Eve descended into a
disastrous conspiracy with the devil that led her and Adam to disobey God’s commandment by eating the forbidden fruit.
Eve shows the
consequences of choosing human thinking over divine Truth — enslavement
to the devil with its consequent descent into sin, and the punishment of death.
Just like the serpent, the false prophets of Modernism promise to make us equal
to God, but instead sink those who follow them into apostasy and moral
depravity.
Rule Three: from this follows another rule for
discernment during the Amazonian Synod — expect an openness to dialoguing with
the demonic among those synod fathers who do not rely solely on sacred
Scripture and sacred Tradition, but prefer human thinking and culture,
inserting their own thoughts into the word of God.
One of the most
shocking aspects of the Instrumentum Laboris is its positive references to
Amazonian shamanism and the worship of spirits, that are in reality demons. It
refers positively to ‘the beliefs and rites regarding the
actions of spirits, of the many-named divinity acting with and in the
territory, with and in relation to nature. This worldview is captured in the ‘mantra’ of
Francis: “everything is connected”’. (IL 25). And mentions with approval the indigenous
culture being ’in dialogue with the spirits’. (IL 75).
Reflecting on Eve’s disastrous response to the devil, St. John Chrysostom
indicates how we should respond to those false prophets who give voice to the
devil’s lies during the Synod:
“Be off, you are a cheat, you do not
know the force of the direction given us, nor the extent of the enjoyment we
have, nor the abundance of good things given us”…You
should [have] turned away from him utterly, and have had nothing to do with him
nor listened to anything said by him. (Homilies on Genesis.)
Recognise that the
Gospel is not human thinking
The Amazonian synod
is shaping up to be the most extreme phase in the catastrophic ‘aggiornamento’ project begun at Vatican II that has
seen the secular and profane ideas of the fallen world invade the Church.
Instead of giving primacy to God’s revelation, many post-conciliar
bishops and priests have given primacy to human experience, as if human
thinking is equal to — even at times superseding — God’s Truth.
Facing this crisis,
we will only stand on firm ground if we follow the apostolic understanding that
God’s revelation is not human thinking,
that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts (Is
55:8):
And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you
received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the
word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you
believers. (1Th 2:13).
What does it mean
to give primacy to God’s wisdom over human thinking? St.
Paul tells us that the Crucified Christ exposes the weakness and
limitations of human wisdom. It means recognising that the Cross of Christ and
his Paschal Mystery is the fundamental revelation of God, the axis on which the
world turns, and the indispensable hermeneutic that explains what it means to
be a human being. As Pope St John Paul II’s favourite Vatican II paragraph puts
it:
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word
does the mystery of man take on light…Through Christ and in Christ, the
riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful. Apart from His gospel, they
overwhelm us. Christ has risen, destroying death by His death. (Gaudium et
spes, 22).
Rule Four: a final rule for discernment — those
synod fathers who promote the human wisdom of the Amazon’s indigenous people as equivalent to divine wisdom are
really promoting their own anti-gospel, that is completely at variance with the
word of God. For example, the Instrumentum Laboris scandalously presents the
indigenous culture of the Amazon as another source of revelation apart from the
Gospel:
Furthermore, we can say that the Amazon – or
another indigenous or communal territory – is not only an ubi or a where
(a geographical space), but also a quid or a what, a place of meaning
for faith or the experience of God in history. Thus, territory is a theological
place where faith is lived, and also a particular source of God’s revelation: epiphanic places where
the reserve of life and wisdom for the planet is manifest, a life and wisdom
that speaks of God. (IL 19).
The danger that
false prophets pose to souls is that they deceive others to abandon God for the
worship of idols, which are really the worldly masks assumed by demons. The ‘eco-theology’ of the Amazonian synod gives every
indication of doing exactly this — erecting the Amazon rainforest as a
demonic idol at the heart of the Church. Just as the apostate King Ahab created
a grove for the devil worship of the Ugaritic mother-goddess Asherah (1 Kg 16:33),
the false prophets of the Amazonian synod are planning to create a pagan grove
for the worship of nature ‘spirits’.
The instrumentum laboris even refers to a earth mother goddess, ‘It is necessary to grasp what the Spirit of the Lord has
taught these peoples throughout the centuries: faith in the God Father-Mother
Creator; communion and harmony with the earth’.
(IL 121.) In response, we must pray for the prophetic charism of Elijah,
on fire with the word of God:
O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known
this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I
have done all these things at thy word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this
people may know that thou, O Lord, art God, and that thou hast turned their hearts
back. (I Kg 18:36-37).
