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Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Did the Pope Sign a Document that Advances One-World Religion?

Olivier Melnick
This morning I read a short analysis of the pope's signing A DOCUMENT ON HUMAN FRATERNITY FOR WORLD PEACE AND LIVING TOGETHER with Al Azhar Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. The author, a Messianic Jew whose maternal grandfather died at Auschwitz, Olivier Melnick works with Chosen People Ministries. Their mission is first to evangelize the Jews and then the gentiles. It's ironic isn't it, at a time when the Catholic Church discourages evangelization of the Jews (or anyone else) as "proselytism," that a man raised as a secular Jew devotes his life to bringing his brothers and sisters to know "Yeshua." [Read the article.]

We live in interesting and confusing times.

Melnick's article discusses the Fraternity document from the viewpoint of biblical prophecy. Now, I did a little research on the author and found that his conversion to Christianity was influenced by reading Hal Lindsey's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which is full of nonsense. (I read it years ago.) Lindsey, like Tim LaHay, wrote about apocalyptic events and the second coming of Jesus which depend, in his view, on the return of the Jews to Israel, declaring the Jewish state, rebuilding the temple, etc. Even today many Christian Zionists on the right seem eager for the final battle and look to Israel for the "proof" that it's about to begin. The neoconservative movement seems particularly eager to foment continued strife in the Middle East to bring on Armageddon. 

But back to the document. 

Melnick believes that the pope and the imam, by signing the document, are fulfilling Biblical prophecy about one-world religion. He specifically discusses the very controversial and much-discussed paragraph about God willing the "diversity of religions" which reads:
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. [I've included more than Melnick quoted.]
Does the imam really believe what he signed? Melnick says no:
al-Tayeb is on record for taking a position that is in direct opposition of the document he co-signed. He recently said, “Those learned in Islam [al-fuqaha] and the imams of the four schools of jurisprudence consider apostasy a crime and agree that the apostate must either renounce his apostasy or else be killed.” Additionally, in a 2013 interview on Egyptian TV, he said that Muslims “suffer from global Zionism and Judaism,” and “You shall find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” One would think that statements like that would disqualify him from even being considered as a signatory on the “Document on Human Fraternity and World Peace.”
I certainly can't disagree with that! Islam teaches that lying to infidels and apostates is morally justified. How can anyone sign an agreement with someone whose core beliefs include that only Muslims have a right to the truth?

Setting aside the controversy for a minute, the document is short and filled with wonderful insights and sentiments. Here's what it says about the family:
"It is clear in this context how the family as the fundamental nucleus of society and humanity is essential in bringing children into the world, raising them, educating them, and providing them with solid moral formation and domestic security. To attack the institution of the family, to regard it with contempt or to doubt its important role, is one of the most threatening evils of our era.
"We affirm also the importance of awakening religious awareness and the need to revive this awareness in the hearts of new generations through sound education and an adherence to moral values and upright religious teachings..... 
"The protection of the fundamental rights of children to grow up in a family environment, to receive nutrition, education and support, are duties of the family and society. Such duties must be guaranteed and protected so that they are not overlooked or denied to any child in any part of the world. All those practices that violate the dignity and rights of children must be denounced. It is equally important to be vigilant against the dangers that they are exposed to, particularly in the digital world, and to consider as a crime the trafficking of their innocence and all violations of their youth..."
Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix
The document also condemns abortion and terrorism and calls for defending the weak and vulnerable, the widows and orphans. All good. But does the Islamic world illustrate the charity discussed in the document? Hardly!

Reading the statement made me uneasy. If God really does "will" the diversity of faith, why did Jesus come and establish a Church? To be just one among many -- all "dialoguing" together? Can any Christian whose life is centered on Christ believe that he died to bring religious diversity to the world?

I sure can't!

And the end of the document sparked links to the French revolution's motto of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Our world is coming to resemble more and more the chaotic, violent, murderous Paris of 1789, and a false "dialogue" between Catholicism and Islam is unlikely to help change that.  When I finished reading the document my overriding question was, "Does this document advance the reign of Christ the King? Or is it part of the stealth advance the reign of the enemy?"

Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, have mercy on us.


7 comments:

  1. The weasel words are the right to "grow up in a family environment". How much that dilutes the words of donum vitae, which celebrate the right of a child to be conceived within the marital embrace. All else follows from that. Pray that Virginia's legislators vote that way today on sb1979.

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  2. Very insightful comment, rohrbachs. Thank you.

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  3. The one religion will be Islam. And not a blending of religions as in "one world religion". It will be Islam as it has been for 1400 years. Francis no longer believes in Christ as the Savior of mankind. Francis, the devil's fool...or tool actually... has never looked into the origin of Islam.

    The devil is delighting in this papacy as he uses Francis to further his (Lucifer's) goal - to convert the world to his religion of Islam...the religion he - Lucifer - founded in the Cave at Hira when he transformed himself into St Gabriel the Archangel to announce Islam to Muhammad.

    So I ask you - all you who might read this - 630 years after the Annunciation would God resend St Gabriel the Archangel to Muhammad to announce a new religion - Islam - to Muhammad because Christianity just was not working out as planned? Remember that 630 years after the death of Christ, Christianity was spreading like wildfire in the Middle East. All the lands which are now Islamic were then Christian. Satan had to do something to stop it. He established his own religion on earth to eradicate Christianity. Islam is a supremacist religion giving no quarter to Christianity or Judaism. It is a religion of manifested hatred, death and destruction - all attributes of Lucifer.

    Francis is a tool of Satan who uses him to further the destruction of the faith that God Himself founded for the salvation of mankind. Our salvation. You and me. All of us. God became incarnate so that we might live with him for eternity. But evil is so dense and thick in the world around us that we cannot see the forest for the trees.

    Never ever listen to those saying that Islam is a religion of peace. That is the devil's lie to pull you out of God's hands and into his own realm of hell on earth and for all eternity. After all, hell would not be complete unless you and I are there.

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  4. No way can islam be considered a cult of peace! And, yes, this present pope is a globalist and a destroyer of the Catholic faith.

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  5. It is important to keep separate any experience we may have with an individual and the religion/ ideology itself.

    We cannot say, "I once knew or worked with a nice Muslim and therefore it can't be all bad." The truth is individuals are only pawns.

    You may know a nice Muslim, or nice Democrat, or nice Freemason, or nice Scientologist, or nice feminist, but their "niceness" does not alter the evil they associate with.

    It is beneficial to the devil that the evil is masked by seemingly "nice" people. "Nice" people are in fact as useful to him as bad people. They do his work in any case.

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  6. In Islam, the difficulty is not the "The pluralism and the diversity of religions...are willed by God in His wisdom" for Allah being pure will, actively wills all religions; Islam because it is true and the others for the perdition of their followers and so that Muslims might engage in "the holy struggle". It is not dissimilar to how Calvinists understand double predestination. Rather, for the Muslim, the difficulty is the following "This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives" which is the right of individuals to persist in their religion. This should be very upsetting to the Muslim for the non-Muslim does not have a right to persist in their religion according to the Quran, but may be tolerated if they, amongst other things, "pay the tax".

    The joint outrage that both Catholics and Muslims should find in this document is the abandonment of the Missionary Mandates of their respective religions.

    Is the document pushing for a one world religion? No, not really. From the Catholic perspective, it is largely a denial of the unicity and universality of Christ and the Church (see the condemned theses in Dominus Iesus especially 19 and 22). That the document argues for a right to persist in one's religion indicates not a push for a universal religion, but more so that those cultic and cultural aspects of the various religions are not ultimately important -- only an underlying and overarching accompaniment and encounter of the other through shared experience of what is to be human is important.

    When it comes to documents like this one, though it speaks well about the importance of the family, pay attention to how they ignore or give short change to the spiritual works of mercy and rather over exaggerates the corporal works of mercy and views those works through a Marxist lens.

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  7. PF already placed Christianity in the back seat in his first Pope’s intentions video, back in 2013/14.
    Themed “interreligious dialogue," the video featured muslim prayer beads, a Jewish Menorah, and a Buddha, but no cross.
    Christianity is represented by a generic plastic baby doll.

    I seem to recall this is also when he started hiding his pectoral cross.

    https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/in-first-video-message-pope-francis-stresses-unity-we-are-all-children-of-god-39381

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