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.”

Gee, ya think?

But hope we must, because the alterative is disconcerting.

“That all religions have equal weight is an extraordinarily flawed idea for the Successor of Peter to appear to support,” Chaput says.

Extraordinarily flawed? Yes, because it echoes an idea that was condemned as a heresy long ago. Pope Gregory XVI, in his encyclical Mirari Vos (1832), for example, wrote that indifferentism is an “abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present.” This “perverse opinion,” he wrote, claims it is “possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained.”

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Humanum Genus (1884), affirmed his predecessor, writing, “The view that all religions are alike is calculated to bring about the ruin of all forms of religion, and especially of the Catholic religion, which, as it is the only one that is true, cannot, without great injustice, be regarded as merely equal to other religions” (no. 16).

In blurting out his slaphappy opinion of the supposedly wonderful and God-gifted diversity of religions in a slapdash manner, Francis did a great injustice to the Catholic religion. He shirked his duty to affirm the unique claim of the Catholic Church to be the very storehouse of truth itself, having received divine revelation from her founder — you know, the guy we consider the Savior of the World. Jesus did not say, “I am one of the ways, one of the truths. Anyone can come to the Father through any number of paths.” No, He was much more adamant — and demanding — than that. Our Lord said, rather decisively, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6).

In other words, there is only one God — on this Francis is absolutely correct — but there are not “many” paths to Him. There is only one singular path — or “way” — to the Father, and that is through His Son and the Church He founded on earth.

Are we really to believe that the deities other religious practitioners profess — Waheguru (Sikhs), Allah (Muslims), and Brahman (Hindus) — are the same as the triune God whom Catholics worship? Archbishop Chaput kiboshes that nonsense. “Simply put,” he explains, “not all religions seek the same God, and some religions are both wrong and potentially dangerous, materially and spiritually.”

Dangerous! Oh, but you won’t hear anything like that from this Pope.

The fundamental Christian belief, born from the very words of Christ, that no one comes to the Father except through the Son is — along with the Great Commission (cf. Mt. 28:19) — the basis for the evangelizing impulse that animated the Church from her humble beginnings under the whip of Roman persecution until the Second Vatican Council. An immense quantity of Christian blood — the very seed of the Church! — was spilled trying to bring the Gospel to all the nations of the earth. But, as Archbishop Chaput puts it, for Francis “to suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God? Such a sacrifice would be senseless.”

Indeed, Pope Francis gave the impression that the Church has wasted considerable time, money, and energy — not to mention lives — in her efforts over the past two millennia at evangelization and conversion. How are Catholics in, say, Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Yemen, Pakistan, and India — where they face the very real prospect of martyrdom at the hands of militant Muslims and Hindus for professing Christ today, at this very moment — supposed to receive the Holy Father’s words?

In places like Nigeria, where the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has been on the warpath against Christians for over a decade, they probably received it the same way they received Francis’s words after two jihadis in France slit the throat of Fr. Jacques Hamel while he was saying Mass in 2016 — as, shall we say, less than meager encouragement. At the time, the Holy Father attempted to draw an equivalence between Islam and Christianity, saying, “If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.”

Catholic violence? Well, surely it exists — but only in isolated incidents, not as part of a broader pattern. And Francis knows this. That’s why he qualified his statement, saying, “This one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law — and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics!… In pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists. We have them. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.”

What a weird thing to say. The “violence” of Catholics the Holy Father mentioned are crimes of passion. Fr. Hamel, on the other hand, was a victim of religiously motivated violence. C’mon, man, there’s a big difference! The Islamic State (ISIS) later claimed responsibility for the murder. Two ISIS “soldiers,” the group said, had answered “the call to target Crusader coalition states.” Crusader is jihadist code for Catholic.

The equivalence the Holy Father attempted to draw is a false equivalence, as there’s no organized Catholic group that’s committing acts of religiously motivated violence today. There’s no Catholic equivalent of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the like.

Talk about fruity!

Besides, these aren’t “small groups.” Each one commands a veritable army. ISIS and al-Qaeda are transnational organizations.

That episode was, at best, a bungled opportunity to define and condemn jihadist terrorism and, at worst, an expression of a different kind of indifferentism: indifference to religiously motivated Muslim violence, a plague on the world that random acts of Catholic violence in no way compare. (Ironically, Francis himself was the target of Indonesian jihadist terrorists affiliated with ISIS during his apostolic journey. Thankfully, their planned attacks were thwarted.)

In the present episode, before the youth of Singapore and Albania, Francis was given another golden teaching moment. But — again — he fumbled it away, this time in favor of a false irenicism. Surely, some might say, the Pope can be forgiven for trying to appear affable and avuncular before the inquiring youth of two religiously pluralistic societies, right?

Chaput provides an answer, though not the one Francis fans were hoping to hear. “The bishop of Rome is the spiritual and institutional head of the Catholic Church worldwide,” Chaput says — as if we need reminding (well, maybe one person does). “This means, among other things, that he has the duty to teach the faith clearly and preach it evangelically. Loose comments can only confuse. Yet, too often, confusion infects and undermines the good will of this pontificate.”

Loose comments? This pontificate is littered with them.

If only Francis’s expressions of indifference were limited to loose comments spoken extemporaneously. Then we would be able to pass them off as unreflective, in-the-moment prattling. If only! Unfortunately, Francis has also made “official” indifferentist statements. In signing the Abu Dhabi Declaration, titled “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” in 2019, for example, the Pope gave his assent to this proposition expressed therein: “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.”

Willed by God. Sound familiar? The Pope repeated this very thing to the youth of Albania. No, we can’t pretend that Francis is merely making nice; rather, he appears to be expressing — fairly consistently — a devoutly held belief of his in the guise of a can’t-we-all-get-along sentimentalism.

In this, Francis has broken with the magisterial teaching of the Church of which he is the spiritual and titular head. In addition to the condemnations of indifferentism by popes of old, Francis has contravened the teachings of two modern popes. St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio (1990), lamented the “widespread indifferentism” found among Christians that “is based on incorrect theological perspectives and is characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another’” (no. 36). A more recent teaching came in the form of a declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued when it was under the direction of Francis’s immediate predecessor, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. Dominus Iesus (2000) teaches that “it would be contrary to the faith to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her” (no. 21).

As for what God has willed regarding other religions, Dominus Iesus offers this corrective: “God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, the mentality of indifferentism‌” (no. 22; italics added).

In presenting himself as Pope Nice Guy, Francis failed to propose his own professed religion, Catholicism, as a viable option to religious seekers. He offered no compelling reason for them to take seriously the unique claim of Jesus Christ to be the only “way” to salvation. And that, Chaput points out, is the solemn duty of a pope — a duty this Pope has abdicated on more than one occasion.

As Archbishop Chaput concludes, “Christians hold that Jesus alone is the path to God. To suggest, imply, or allow others to infer otherwise is a failure to love because genuine love always wills the good of the other, and the good of all people is to know and love Jesus Christ, and through him the Father who created us.”

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