This is from my friend, the Orthodox researcher and poet Nicholas Candela. I hope SCwaterfowl can now understand my comment about the Pope.
My God be merciful to all of us!
Theophan.
16 April 2007
Patriarch Alexei of Moscow and All Russia,
letter to Pope Benedict XVI on the occasion of his
80th birthday
(http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=documents&div=108):
Your Holiness,
I cordially greet you on the occasion of your
80th birthday. On this solemn day of your jubilee, may I
express my special admiration of your life that has
wholly been dedicated to the ministry of the Church.
You were young when you were ordained and since then
you have led a praiseworthy life culminating in your
election to the high and eminent position of the
Primate of the Roman Catholic Church.
As a minister of the Church, you have long been a
famous theologian fully dedicated to the defending and
affirming of traditional Christian values. What makes
your position especially convincing is that you as
a theologian are not merely a theoretically thinking
scholar, but above all a sincere and deeply devoted
Christian who speaks of the abundance of his heart
(cf. Matthew 12.34).
I share many of the insights of your theological
works and I would like to underline the coinciding of
our Churches' views on most vital issues with which
the modern world challenges Christianity. I am
deeply persuaded that it should become a solid basis
for good relations and mutually beneficial cooperation
between the RussianOrthodox Church and the Roman
Catholic Church.
I wholeheartedly wish you good health, many years of
life, and God's help in your high ministry.
+Alexei, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia April 16,
2007
Since the Patriarch says he shares many of the
insights in the Pope's theological works, and since he
refers to him as a minister of the Church and a famous
theologian, we should examine some of the Pope's
teachings, so we may see just what the Patriarch is
so enthused about.
Father Joseph Ratzinger---now Pope Bendict XVI---
was a modernist "theologian" at Vatican II (1962-
1965). Even though he was a priest of the Roman
organization at the time, photos reveal him at the
sessions of Vatican II in his civvies, a suit and a
tie, paling around with the "hip" Jesuit Karl Rahner,
who was also dressed like a bank clerk. Let us examine
some of the teachings of this "famous theologian," who
the Patriarch claims is "fully dedicated to the
defending and affirming of traditional Christian
values."
A supporter of aggiornamento, the updating of
the Roman "church"---that is, ever accommodating its
teaching to this world that lies in evil---Ratzinger
is a man with a mission: like all Vatican II
devotees, he seeks to promote new accommodations
while posing as a strict "traditionalist." And yet he
always tips his hand (so his flock has no excuse).
For instance, he believes the Church was in error from
the days when she declared the Nicene-
Constantinopolitan Creed:
"Perhaps it will have to be admitted that the
tendency to such a false development which sees only
the dangers of responsibility and no longer the
freedom of love, is already apparent in the Creed..."
(INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY, 2004, p. 326).
He feels burdened by the witness of the true
Church:
"The question that really concerns us, the
question that really oppresses us is why it is
necessary for us in particular to practice the
Christian faith in its totality. Why, when there are
so many other ways that lead to Heaven and salvation,
it should be required of us to bear day after day the
whole burden of ecclesial dogma and of the ecclesial
ethos" (CO-WORKERS OF THE TRUTH, 1990, p. 217).
He doesn't know what to do with the barnacled
barque of his church, except to get it ship-shape in a
way that will not offend "modern man"---the Popes'
darlings. First thing overboard: the offensive idea
that there is such a thing as heresy:
"It is obvious that the old category of heresy is
no longer of any value" (THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN
BROTHEROOD, 1966, p.88). On the Papist priest Hans
Kung, who rejects the Divinity of Christ: "In
Christology and in Trinitarian theology, he has
further distanced himself from the faith of the
Church. I respect his path, which he takes in accord
with his conscience..." (SALT OF THE EARTH, 1996, p.
96).
A professor, he whittles the Holy Scriptures to
fit the rationalist expectations of his own mind:
He refers to the book of GENESIS as full of
"...pagan creation acounts..." (A NEW SONG FOR THE
LORD, 1995, p. 86). When he reads that God made man,
he interperts this to mean that "we can even read into
this representation something like evolution." (GOD
AND THE WORLD, 2000, p. 76). On page 165 of this same
work he wonders if the book of EXODOS is literally
true, that is, did God really write on stone tablets:
"Whether they really were stone tablets is another
question...How far we should take this story literally
is another question." He mockingly asserts of Holy
Scripture: "...You find this sentence in God's great
book, so it must simply be true in itself." (ibid.,
p. 153).
He wants modern men to admire him, to recognize
him as one of their own, so he portrays
himself as dismissive of "accretions" like infant
Baptism:
"The conflict over infant baptism shows the
extent to which we have lost sight of the true value
of faith...Whenever it is severed from the
catechumenate, baptism loses its raison
d'etre...Earlier ages had devised a teaching that
seems to me rather unenlightened. They said that
baptism endows us, by means of sanctifying grace, with
the capacity to gaze upon God...The solution (infant
baptism) is itself questionable" (PRINCIPLES OF
CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, 1982, pp. 43, 401).
He does not feel obliged to follow the Church's
traditional understanding of infant Baptism, because
he doesn't believe the Church as yet exists:
"...The unity of the church is still in the
process of formation...It will be totally achieved
only in the eschaton..." (CO-WORKERS OF THE TRUTH,
1990, p. 29).
This is why he finds "Saints" outside Her:
"...In every age there have been and still are
'pagan saints'"..." (TRUTH AND TOLERANCE, 2004, p.
207).
He instructs his flock---who belong to the Church
that has not yet come into existence---in the
new "mysteries" of this imaginary church. For
instance, he rejects the true Church's teaching on
Judgment Day: the resurrection of the body and its
reunion with the soul:
"It now becomes clear that the real heart of
faith in the (general) resurrection does not consist
at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to
which we have reduced it in our thinking...The
Biblical pronouncements about the resurrection, their
essential content, are not the conception of a
restoration of bodies to souls after a long
interval...Paul teaches not the resurrection of
physical bodies, but the resurrection of persons..."
(INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY, pp. 349, 353, 357-358).
Essntially Protestant in the way he places
himself above the Church, above Her tradition, above Her
phronema, he cannot tell us enough how much he loves
Protestantism:
"...Taize (the Protesant ecumenical community,
founded by Protestant Brother Roger) has been, without
a doubt, the leading example of an ecumenical
inspiration...Similar communities of faith and shared
living should be formed elsewhere..." (PRINCIPLES OF
CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, p. 304). There is a photo of him
giving "holy communion" to Protestant Brother Roger.
After Brother Roger's murder, Pope Benedict assured
his flock that "Brother Roger, founder of a non
Catholic sect...has arrived at Eternal joy." (August
16, 2005). On World Youth Day, August 19, 2005, he
said: "Brother Roger...is now visiting us and speaking
to us from on high." He even grants to the
Protestants what Saint John of Kronstadt denied them:
"Even a theology along the lines of the concept of
(Apostolic) Succession...should in no way deny the
saving presence of the Lord in the Evangelicals'
Lord's Supper" (PILGRIM FELLOWSHIP OF FAITH, 2002,p.
248).
Essentially one of the Sadducees---for they too
rejected the resurrection of the body---he feels at
home with Judaism:
"I have ever more come to the realization that
Judaism and the Christian Faith described in the New
Testament are two ways of appropriating Israel's
Scriptures, two ways that in the end are both
determined by the position one assumes with regard to
the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The scripture we
today call (the) Old Testament is in itself open to
both ways" (MILESTONES, 1998). "It is of course
possible to read the Old Testament so that it is not
directed toward Christ: it does not point
unequivocally to Christ. And if Jews cannot see the
promises as being fulfilled in him (sic: he never
capitalizes the pronouns referring to the Lord), this
is not just ill-will on their part, but genuinely
because of the obscurity of the texts...There are
perfectly good reasons, then, for denying that the Old
Testament refers to Christ, and for saying, 'No, that
is not what he (sic) said'" (GOD AND THE WORLD, p.
209). In 2001, the Pontifical Biblical Commission
published THE JEWISH PEOPLE AND THE SACRED SCRIPTURES
IN THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE. This book states that "Jewish
Messianic expectation is not in vain" (II, A5)---as if
the Lord and His Apostles and the Holy Fathers had not
taught that unbelieving Jews await ANTICHRIST. The
Pontifical Commission continues: "To read the Bible as
Judaism does, necessarily involves an implicit
acceptance of all (Judaism's) presuppositions, which
exclude faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of
God...Christians can and ought to admit that the
Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one." Guess
who wrote the approving preface to this piece of
Judaizing filth? Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Why not?
In 2000 he'd written in GOD AND THE WORLD: "...(The
Jews') NO to Christ brings the Israelites into
conflict with the subsequent acts of God, but at the
same time we know that they are assured of the
faithfulness of God. They are not excluded from
salvation..." (pp. 150-151). On August 19, 2005,
Benedict XVI participated in a Jewsh "worship" service
at a synagogue in Koln, Germany. I've seen the video.
He applauded the cantor's operatic---because
triumphalistic---performance of Jewish prayers: the
Jewish audience regarded the Pope's presence and
participation as as sign that Christ Himself blessed
them to contune pretending they should be following
the Law of Moses...as if Christ had not come. The Pope
prayed with Jews the Kaddish. On January 16, 2006 he
wrote to the Chief Rabbi of Rome: "Distinguished Chief
Rabbi, you were recently entrusted with the spiritual
guidance of Rome's Jewish community...I offer you my
heartfelt good wishes for your mission..." His
MISSION?Anyone even vaguely familiar with the
teachings of the rabbis would recoil in horror that a
man who claims to represent Christ wishes the mission
to de-Christify the world, the Scriptures,and the
Church, as a mission worthy of "good wishes." Notice
how his phatic language is the same as the
Patriarch's: it has no inner Christian content. Alexei
spoke similarly contentless words to the rabbis of New
York. Sounds "nice"... because it is the voice of the
devil.
Bold son of the Ecumenist Revolution, the Pope
loves Islam, too. He's written a book, JOHN PAUL II
MY BELOVED, and the whole world's seen the photo of
that poor man kissing the Koran which denies
the Divinity and the Crucifixion of Christ.
"This year is the 40th anniversay of the
Conciliar declaration NOSTRA AETATTE (Vatican II),
which has ushered in a new season of dialogue and
spiritual solidarity between Jews and Christians, as
well as esteem for the other great relgious
traditions. Islam occupies a special place among them.
Its followers worship the same God (as Jews and
Christians) and willingly refer to the Patriarch
Abraham" (cathechesis, August 24, 2005). "The
believer---and all of us, as Christians and Muslims
are believers---knows that despite his weakness he can
count on the spirtual power of prayer...You guide
Muslim believers and train them in the formation of
the younger generation" (Address to reprensentatives
of Islam, August 20,2005).
These are some of Pope Benedict's teachings. The
only reason Patriarch Alexei II could say he shares
these "insights" is because he is just as benighted as
the Pontiff. Soon he will be commemorated in every
ROCOR church.
Don't say no one warned you.