Pope Francis, the Jesuits, Chiliasm and “Liberation Theology”
Is may seem we have got to see the days St Seraphim Rose talked about so much. We are going to take the opportunity again to emphasize how important is for the Orthodox people to now load with all the information they can while it is still possible. We beg of you to please start reading the “Orthodox Survival Course” we made available on our site because it really explains everything that is happening today in the world today.
As you may know, one thing the Jesuits are known for is their “Liberation Theology” doctrine! You need to understand how this is exactly what we have been saying about the “justice system of the coming antichrist”. Seeking “justice” this world is exactly the Chilianism Father Seraphim so often exposed and spoke out against. The same chilianism that the Roman Catholics call “Liberation Theology” is in fact Marxism masquerading as “Christianity”.
An interesting question was brought up in a Reuters article which seems to raise a very good question: as Jesuits vow to obey the pope, and the pope himself being a Jesuit, does it mean he now has to obey (worship?) himself ! “Who will the pope obey now? How will this obedience work?”
We would like to quote from Fr Seraphim’s A Letter to Thomas Merton, from 1962, which we strongly encourage you to read in entirety:
Such a goal [total peace instead of war in this world], of course, is quite comprehensible to the modern mentality; modern political idealism, Marxist and “democratic” alike has long cherished it. But what of Christianity? – and I mean full uncompromising Christianity, not the humanist idealism that calls itself Christian. Is not Christianity supremely hostile to all forms of idealism, to all reduction of its quite “realistic” end and means to mere lofty ideas? Is the ideal of the “abolition of war” really different in kind from such other lofty aims as the “abolition” of disease, of suffering, of sin, of death? All of these ideals have enlisted the enthusiasm of some modern idealist or other, but it is quite clear to the Christian that they are secularizations and so perversions of genuine Christian hopes. They can be realized only in Christ, only in His Kingdom that is not of this world; when faith in Christ and hope in His Kingdom are wanting, when the attempt is made to realize Christian “ideals” in this world – then there is idolatry, the spirit of Antichrist. Disease, suffering, sin, and death are an unavoidable part of the world we know as a result of the Fall. They can only be eliminated by a radical transformation of human nature, a transformation possible only in Christ and fully only after death.
I do not, of course, deny that there is such a thing as a Christian “social action”; what I question is its nature. When I feed my hungry brother, this is a Christian act and a preaching of the Kingdom that needs no words; it is done for the personal reason that my brother—he who stands before me at this moment—is hungry, and it is a Christian act because my brother is, in some sense, Christ. But if I generalize from this case and embark on a political crusade to abolish the “evil of hunger,” that is something entirely different; though individuals who participate in such a crusade may act in a perfectly Christian way, the whole project—and precisely because it is a “project,” a thing of human planning—has become wrapped in a kind of cloak of “idealism.”
The hope that underlies this idealism is the hope that men can, after all, live together in peace and brotherhood in a just social order, and that this end can be realized through “non-violent” means that are not incompatible with that end. This goal seems like the virtual revelation of a “new world” to all those weary of the misery and chaos that have marked the end of the “old” world, that hollow “modern” world that seems now to have finally—or almost—played out its awful possibilities; and at the same time it seems like something quite attainable by moral means—something previous modern idealisms have not been.
You speak of “Christian action, the Christian who manifests the truth of the Gospel in social action, not only in prayer and penance, but also in his political commitments and in all his social responsibilities But why, if Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world? Is there really a Christian “social message” or is not that rather a result of the one Christian activity—working out one’s salvation with diligence?
