Rorate welcomes once again the crystal-clear and profound contribution of Vigilius, pen-name of a German theologian. The original text may be found here; the following translation has been approved by the author.
Pope Francis in the “Tunnel of Friendship”
Vigilius
Pope Francis was completely in his element during his trip to Southeast Asia. This is because he was once again able to engage eagerly in “interreligious dialogue”. If you read the Pope’s now published speeches, this dialogue enjoys an almost sacred status of grandeur, which is fed by impressive moral claims. This is because the essence of the intended dialogue is aimed at unity, fraternity, harmony and concord. Central to the Bergoglian concept of dialogue is the “detection of what connects us”, i.e., everything that brings us together by allowing us to discover what is, in truth, always already identical—as symbolized by the underground “tunnel of friendship” between the Istiqlal Mosque and the Cathedral of the Assumption in Jakarta.
However, the Bergoglian concept of dialogue is not yet sufficiently defined by the experience of commonality in common. Not only in explicitly interreligious contexts, but in all contexts in general, Francis understands the dia-logos more broadly as a circle-of-chairs-like encounter, in the sense of the non-judgmental juxtaposition of perspectives and feelings, of what is personally important to everyone. What this is may differ fundamentally among them, but the difference is irrelevant. For it is primarily a matter of “living together, of mingling and encounter, of embracing and supporting one another, of stepping into this flood tide which, while chaotic, can become a genuine experience of fraternity” (Evangelii Gaudium, 87).
However, there is a danger here of clouding the elation. Once the moral elevation of the mind generated by the papal doctrine of harmony has subsided a little and thought is allowed to stir again, the question might arise in one person or another, for example by recalling their own Greek lessons, as to whether “dialogue” does not classically have the connotation of speech and counter-speech? However, it is precisely this connotation that is erased in the Bergoglian concept of dialogue; the central moment of the Socratic dialogue is missing, which is determined by the intellectual dispute of thesis and antithesis, i.e., by rational argumentation, because only in this way can the knowledge of truth be conveyed. Truth in itself, however, is by no means the synthesis of the logically irreconcilable, nor does it necessarily lie in the middle. If it were, there would be no need to struggle for it. It lies where it lies, and it must be discovered.
Francis explicitly excludes the basic truth-theoretical definition of dialogue: “The tunnel was built in order to create a link between two different and distant places. This is what the tunnel does: it connects, creating a bond. Sometimes we think that a meeting between religions is a matter of seeking common ground between different religious doctrines and beliefs no matter the cost. Such an approach, however, may end up dividing us, because the doctrines and dogmas of each religious experience are different. What really brings us closer is creating a connection in the midst of diversity, cultivating bonds of friendship, care and reciprocity.”[1]
This is exactly what Francis repeated at his “interreligious meeting with young people” in Singapore: “One of the things that has impressed me most about the young people here is your capacity for interfaith dialogue. This is very important because if you start arguing, ‘My religion is more important than yours...,’ or ‘Mine is the true one, yours is not true...,’ where does this lead? Somebody answer. [A young person answers, “Destruction”.] That is correct. All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood?”[2]
I think we have understood the message. Perhaps we have understood it even better than the questioner.
I would therefore like to make two comments.
Firstly: Socrates and Plato are fundamentally concerned with our attaining knowledge of the truth because it is the real reality—being. Man’s spiritual nature orients him towards this true reality, it is the object of his deepest longing. The true is also the good; both dimensions can be seamlessly mapped onto each other. And because, according to Aristotle, no one can avoid wanting the good for themselves, i.e., their own happiness, man seeks the truth and strives for the dissolution of appearances. For he senses very clearly that those who live outside the truth, in the deceptive world of illusion, will never find happiness and therefore never find themselves. He understands that outside of the true there is only devastation in the inauthentic, in the void. The void also means the destruction of community. There can be no unity in untruth, because in untruth all of us do not find ourselves in the real reality, but only confirm each other in various illusionary perspectives. Outside of truth, there is only separation, which is still separation even when everyone in the circle of chairs seems to come together harmoniously and places their possible illusions next to each other without criticism.
For this reason, the dia-logos of Greek metaphysics is essentially geared towards our enlightening ourselves and each other about untruth. This already brought death to Socrates. He demands that the participants in the dialogue transcend themselves together towards the true and be prepared to leave their illusory worlds behind. This dialogue sees no a priori value at all in the community in common. After all, it could be that some or all of the dialogue partners agree precisely in what is untrue and, with the mutually respectful recognition of their untrue positions, entrench themselves in the void with added moral pomposity. That would then be nothing other than being lonely together. That is why the Greeks are concerned with a dialogue in which the dialogue partners respect each other precisely because they question and allow themselves to be questioned relentlessly through the epistemologically indispensable means of speech and counter-speech. They have this will because they want to enlighten themselves, which means nothing other than that they want to transcend themselves towards the truth, for the sake of their own happiness. In the Bergoglian understanding of dialogue there is no common self-transcendence, because, for sentimental considerations of harmony, there is no argumentation about the true doctrine and therefore everyone remains only with themselves and in their possible errors. In contrast, the Socratic concept of dialogue not only contains the possibility of genuine self-transcendence, because the dialogue partners are concerned with giving honor to the truth, but also the chance of achieving a true commonality in the literal sense, because such commonality is created by the truth itself.
Bergoglio’s insinuation that only destruction necessarily follows from the dispute over truth is simply untrue. Destruction happens only if the dialogue partners are not united from the outset in wanting to recognize the truth. The will to engage in an argumentative dispute that serves to recognize the truth is something quite different from the mere will to triumph over another. These two wills are opposed; the first is selfless, the second self-centered. Accordingly, the Pope should primarily call on his listeners, who belong to different religions, to that selflessness which is the necessary enabling condition for a productive dispute about the truth, which alone carries the chance that the dialogue partners will find their freedom from deception in the knowledge of the truth conveyed by the dispute and thus really come together.
Addressing Christians in particular, the Pope could then encourage them to bring to bear in interreligious dialogue all the arguments that make Christian doctrine reasonably plausible: Is abstract monotheism even conceivable? If God is to be alive, must He not engender differences within Himself? Is the doctrine of the Trinity not the prerequisite for defining God’s nature as love? Apart from Christ, is it even conceivable for man to gain an inner share in divine life without being destroyed in his creatureliness? Wasn’t it precisely through the Christian discourse of God that we discovered our own personhood and thus the specific ontological status and inalienable dignity of human individuality? The list of these questions could go on and on. Why should others be deprived of the argumentative accomplishments of this doctrine?
Conversely, Christians could learn from Islam the lasting significance of the “theologia negativa”. For the fact that God became man in no way means that He has lost His transcendence and unconditional majesty, His essential incomprehensibility and uncontrollability. The sacrilegious excesses of liberal theology and the breathtaking intrusiveness with which the deity is reified and subjected to human control in the realm of Christianity with reference to the brotherly God could do with an interreligious corrective. A genuine interreligious dialogue could therefore be extremely attractive. Unfortunately, it is exactly prevented by Jorge Bergoglio’s idea of dialogue.
Secondly: There is something decidedly infamous about the Bergoglian message of a dialogue that systematically excludes the dispute over truth. It is manipulative and self-aggrandizing. This message is so because it discredits a level that it actually occupies itself and, by discrediting it, simultaneously makes it unassailable—in two ways. It discredits the principle of “doctrine”, i.e., a theory that appears in a conceptual form. It is no longer supposed to be about argumentative rationality, but about sensibilities. But this discrediting itself stems from a doctrine. In fact, there is no such thing as freedom from theory; it is absolutely impossible for man. For his part, the apparently theory-free Francis is stuffed full of theory; all his statements, including those on interreligious dialogue, are the results of a certain theological position. This theory is miserable, but it is, at least rudimentarily, a theory. Insofar as this theory considers argumentative disputes to be not only irrelevant but destructive, it immunizes itself against the argumentative questioning of itself. The theorist arguing against this theory is insulted by this anti-theoretical theory as a theorizing theorist and knocked out of the game. In other words, the Bergoglian position shamelessly realizes a performative self-contradiction about which it notoriously refuses to be enlightened in the circle of this self-contradiction. One is stunned by this impertinence and is inclined to say with Aristotle: “There are people who no longer deserve arguments, but only rebuke.”
This peculiar self-immunization of the Bergoglian doctrine corresponds to the moral discrediting of its opponents. If one looks at the Bergoglian statements on dialogue with a keener eye, one sees that the moral nimbus of grandeur surrounding the anti-argumentative dialogue produces exactly this effect of moral delegitimization of its critics. Anyone who does not participate in Bergoglio’s dialogue and instead calls for Socratic dialogue must be an evil subject, i.e., a rationalist, solipsistic, hard-hearted, divisive, rigorist fundamentalist. He is downright sacrilegious. In any case, he is considered anti-Jesuanic. These darklings do not want a “tunnel of friendship”, they refuse to “experience brotherhood”. And indeed, there is no shortage of warnings in the Pope’s speeches about these relationship-disturbed “rigids”, who are also well known in the creative Bergoglian vocabulary as the “indietristi” (backwardists).
One must ask oneself why the Bergoglian position so stubbornly refuses the Socratic dia-logos and is not afraid to use even the most malicious means of discrediting its opponents. Foucault calls this “discourse-policing measures”. These measures are only resorted to by a position that is not yet completely sure of its power, that has not yet penetrated everything and therefore still has to become repressive, avoid the light of reason, and make argumentative discussion contemptible.
I think it’s pretty clear what the underlying critical center, the secret reference point, of the exuberant Bergoglian theory of dialogue is. That is the Christ. The dialogue is conceived precisely in such a way that He is no longer to be spoken about—and can no longer be spoken about. For the One Who says of Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6), eo ipso blows up the dialogue freed from any particular faith tradition, the aim of which is to meet in the tunnel below the dogmatic confessions and celebrate the “one God for all” there.
Why do all religious teachings and traditions have to be considered “cultural riches” yet they must be insignificant in substance? The Christ, with His singular self-claim in the history of religion, is only the most annoying case of the absolute truth claims of religious traditions that cannot be logically translated into one another. Why is it so important for Jorge Bergoglio that the various doctrines of salvation—hence also the Christ—are only “dialects”, in principle equal attempts to approach the “one God for all”? Where does this zeal for the demolition of religious dogmatics and the apotheosis of the subterranean One-World-Religion come from?
Logically, there can only be one answer to this: Because this perspective is no longer primarily concerned with religion as such at all, but with a motive that is different from religion, which is then declared to be the main motive of religion in general. And this guiding motive is the promotion of the “single global human family”[3], i.e., the universal natural fraternity that religions have to serve. Jorge Bergoglio’s guiding concept of religion is strictly functionalist. The entire Bergoglian pontificate has placed itself—up to and including its complicity with globalist high finance and the World Economic Forum—in the exclusive service of the natural human family and the protection of “Mother Earth”. Religions can only provide this eco-humanitarian service smoothly if they relativize their respective dogmatics and are satisfied with the abstract “God for all”, who no longer claims anything for himself and can therefore be defined as a function of eco-humanitarianism. This self-relativization is the aim of the highly morally charged dialogue propaganda that seeks to suggest to religions that the central religious imperative is to dedicate themselves primarily to the cultivation of natural universal brotherhood.
However, Bergoglio has direct access only to the Catholic Church. He makes ample use of this access, as the Pope wants the Church to become the eco-humanitarian beacon for all religions. Since the beginning of his pontificate, Francis has devoted himself intensively to reshaping the Church into such an integrative function for the “brotherhood of all people”, a reshaping that, at its most important point, must make the Johannine Christ unrecognizable, because the Christ simply cannot be functionalized for purposes that lie outside Himself. The Christ is only concerned that all people believe in His holy name, worship Him, and thus find their eternal salvation. But how can this Christology be left behind? A pope can only do this indirectly. Christ is to be rendered unrecognizable by the tactic of sidelining Him as a secondary religious tradition. He is given the status of a nice cultural ornament.
However, getting rid of Christ in this way is a tough project. There is a lot of resistance; the traditional residues are persistent. It still does not make sense to everyone that the Christ should be nothing other than a mere formation of tradition or the Jesus of boundless mercy, who welcomes “all, all, all” without any preconditions and whose message should consist solely in speaking of the natural brotherhood of all and of a God who accepts everything and everyone kindly—except for the rigids. So there are still, in the Church, the last echoes of this disturbing belief in the divine person of Christ. Until these traces of memory are completely paralyzed, there is still much to do. No elephant decays in a day. That is why Pope Francis is trying with great energy to instrumentalize the religious youth of the world in particular for his actual ideology through his interreligious dialogue project; this is why he promotes in the Church post-Christian bishops; and this is why he strives to structurally implement anti-argumentative chair-circles called synods, and, moreover, to set the course for Pope Francis II.
What must we do? We must precisely identify the Bergoglian ideology; analyze the manipulation machinery of this pontificate; see through its power politics, rhetorical self-protection strategies, and discourse-policing machinations. And then we must unabashedly oppose the papal ban on reason and speech, and speak with precision, and ever more loudly, about the very one who must not be spoken of: Jesus Christ, the one and only true Logos of God.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2024/september/documents/20240905-indonesia-incontro-interreligioso.html
[2] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2024/september/documents/20240913-singapore-giovani.html
[3] https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2024-09/ing-036/fostering-religious-harmony-for-the-sake-of-humanity.html
