Pursuing the Ecumenical Mirage

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        On April 22, 2004, Zenit.org reported on the plans for yet another grand and utterly useless pan-religious gathering in Europe. On May 8, 2004 some 10,000 members of the various "Christian movements" which have arisen since the Second Vatican Catastrophe will gather in Stuttgart, Germany, to be joined by 100,000 "connected by satellite from more than 150 cities."

        The event, to be entitled "Together for Europe," will include representatives "of some 175 movements, communities and Christian groups, as well as 25 Catholic, 14 evangelical, eight Orthodox, and two Anglican bishops, and 30 parliamentarians from 10 countries."

        The program will include addresses "by founders and leaders of movements and communities, including Chiara Lubich of the Focolare Movement, Andrea Riccardi of the Community of Sant'Egidio, and Orthodox priest Heikki Huttunen." Also on hand will be none other than that fount of heresy, Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of "the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity," along with "Bishop" Johannes Friedrich of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Bavaria.

        In other words, the event will be a showcase for the same "leaders" who have spent the past forty years erasing from the memory of Catholics the constant teaching of the pre-conciliar popes on the necessity of the return of the dissidents to the one true Church as the only way to Christian unity and the restoration of Christian social order and morality.

        The aim of the conference, while far from clear, seems to have something to do with demonstrating a "unity" of Europe based on its "Christian roots." These "Christian roots," of course, are not to be confused with Roman Catholicism or with a Christendom built upon an organic relation between the Catholic Church and the state. The leaders of the post-Vatican II Church have abandoned the Church’s teaching on Catholic social order, which the pre-conciliar Popes, most notably Pius XI, termed the Social Kingship of Christ.

        Speaking on behalf of Chiara Lubich (the self-appointed lay woman whose "ecclesial movement" promotes the delusion of pan-religious "brotherhood", condemned by St. Pius X in Notre Charge Apostolique), one Gabriella Fallacara explained that "Stuttgart is a point of arrival but also a point of departure; it will be the first of other events, which perhaps will be carried forward by others."

        So, they are planning a whole series of pan-religious junkets. But to what end? As Fallacara explained: "The united Europe is a Europe of the market, a geographic Europe, which also hopes for a spiritual contribution. John Paul II said it in Madrid: 'I dream of the Europe of the spirit.’"

        A "spiritual contribution." A "Europe of the spirit." What is meant by these vague notions? Who knows? And what good are such notions without a legal code based upon the divine natural law and the positive law of Christ the King? Indeed, what is the point of these useless gatherings, which obviously have no intention of calling for the restoration of anything resembling the Social Kingship of Christ?

        As Hilaire Belloc famously observed, "Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe." Belloc, rooting himself in the teaching of the Magisterium before the great confusion got underway at Vatican II, called for nothing less than the restoration of a Catholic Europe as the only solution to the near-apocalyptic crisis of faith, morals and government which he foresaw even before World War II and the ascendancy of Soviet communism.

        As Pope Leo taught in Immortale Dei, "First and foremost, it is the duty of all Catholics worthy of the name… to endeavour to bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which We have described." But that is hardly what the Chiara Lubichs and the Walter Kaspers of the post-conciliar era have in mind. What they are promoting, rather, is the apostasy of Europe under the guise of vague references to religion and an ecumenical alliance of "believers." The ecumenists of the post-conciliar Church are, in fact, instruments of what St. Pius X called "the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Church which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions…" Our Lady of Fatima, Pray for Us.