Indiff’rent Strokes

One critic called it “a master class in religious indifferentism,” a “rupture in tone, content and authority from the Magisterium of the Church.” Another offered a one-word invective: “bizarre.” One of the cranks among us called it “neo-Modernist poison.”

What is it? It’s episode 7 of season 12 of The Francis Follies!

It begins with Pope Francis’s address to an interreligious assembly of Singaporean youth at a Catholic college during his apostolic journey to Asia and Oceania this September. “There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God,” he told them. “Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”

Francis followed that up with a video message to an interreligious conference of youth in Albania a few days later. “The diversity of our cultural and religious identities is a gift from God,” he said to them.

All religions are paths to God. And they are gifts from God. Nobody would flinch if such sentiments issued from the mouth of William Swing, the notorious Episcopal bishop who founded the syncretistic United Religions Initiative in the 1990s. But coming as they did from the very Vicar of Christ on earth, they caused double takes and whiplash.

Laymen and clerics alike were startled by the Pope’s wild words. Wild? Yes, because they suggest that all religions are equal or relative, and no matter which religion a person professes, he can be saved. This is what is known as indifferentism.

Charles J. Chaput, archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, was provoked into responding. He penned a scathing critique in the otherwise stolid pages of First Things. Francis, he writes, “has the habit, by now well established, of saying things that leave listeners confused and hoping he meant something other than what he actually said.”