It should be noted that many Neo-Catholic newspapers, blogs, and websites reported the story with only this headline. Straining to find any semblance of orthodoxy coming from today’s Vatican, Neo-Catholic journalists were quick to publicize that Cardinal Koch said we have a mission to convert Muslims. The fact that they feel compelled to report this statement as if it were a new and earthshattering teaching is itself a condemnation of the Neo-Catholic view that nothing has changed in the Church. It’s as if the Neo-Catholics had humbly resigned themselves to believing the Church should no longer convert Muslims and were then surprised and happy to see that we can try to convert them again. This is the sad condition of people whose faith is based on the ever changing statements of Vatican bureaucracies rather than the Catholic religion. Unfortunately for the Neo-Catholics, Cardinal Koch’s statements did not end there:
But Cardinal Kurt Koch, the Vatican’s head of ecumenical relations, emphasised that Roman Catholic teaching rules out missionary activity aimed at Jewish people because they are regarded as God’s “chosen” people.
He said that, despite fundamental differences in beliefs between the two faiths, especially over the figure of Jesus, Christians should view Judaism as a “mother”…
Interesting. As we know, Catholicism teaches that the Catholic Church is our mother. Hence the phrase, “Holy Mother Church.” In addition, we know that Our Lady is our mother. Hence the phrase “Blessed Mother.” But never before have Catholics been told that they have another mother in Judaism! What is more interesting is that our new mother teaches us that our other two mothers do not exist. For Judaism teaches that Jesus Christ was not divine. Therefore, our new mother teaches that the Catholic Church is a false church and that Mary is neither the Mother of God nor of us. Thanks, mom! The story continues:
[Koch and Jewish leaders] discussed a landmark document published recently by Cardinal Koch’s Vatican department, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, setting out Catholic teaching on the Church’s relationship with Judaism.
It argues that although the Catholic Church teaches that people receive “salvation” through Jesus, Jews also have an ancient and “irrevocable” covenant with God.
Crucially, it makes clear that the Catholic Church no longer supports missionary work directed at Jewish people...
This is also a very interesting teaching coming from “Cardinal Koch’s Vatican Department.” It is also interesting to note that this “landmark document” openly admits it is not a magisterial document or doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church.Nevertheless, Cardinal Koch has already tried to assuage Neo-Catholic fears about this novel teaching in an address to an ecumenical conference in 2012. In this address we get to see Koch attempt to sell repackaged heresy as evolved orthodoxy through ambiguity and “mystery” to take advantage of reader gullibility:
According to the Christian faith understanding there can be only one path to salvation. However, on the other hand, it does not necessarily follow from this fundamental confession that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. Such a claim would find no support in the soteriological understanding of St Paul, who in the Letter to the Romans definitively negates the question he himself has posed, whether God has repudiated his own people: “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery. It is therefore no accident that Paul’s soteriological reflections in Romans 9–11 on the irrevocable redemption of Israel against the background of the Christ–mystery culminate in a mysterious doxology: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways” (Rom 11:33).
This is rich. First Koch completely butchers Catholic teaching on salvation, muddying it and making it contradict itself, and then poses his self-made contradiction as a great “mystery” so profound and so far above us that it can only be comprehended by God Himself! While reading Koch’s inanity, I started to wonder if the same author did not compose every post- conciliar document as they all seem to use the exact same phraseology: “however”, “on the other hand”, “does not necessarily follow”, “soteriological”, “mysterious”, “it is therefore no accident”, “Christ-mystery.” It’s as if Koch entered his heresy into a computer program that added enough Vatican II catch phrases, qualifiers, and invented words to ensure Neo-Catholics would not capable of recognizing it.
After reading the imaginative ramblings of Koch, I truly wonder whether the man has ever read the New Testament much less a catechism. For anyone who opens a bible can read for themselves the following passage in Acts:
5And it came to pass on the morrow, that their princes, and ancients, and scribes, were gathered together in Jerusalem;
6 And Annas the high priest, and Caiphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest.
7And setting them in the midst, they asked: By what power, or by what name, have you done this?
8Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said to them: Ye princes of the people, and ancients, hear:
9If we this day are examined concerning the good deed done to the infirm man, by what means he hath been made whole:
10Be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God hath raised from the dead, even by him this man standeth here before you whole.
11This is the stone which was rejected by you the builders, which is become the head of the corner.
12 Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.
If St. Peter, our first pope, had stood up and said these words at one of Koch’s ecumenical conferences Koch would have most likely thrown him out (as the Pharisees did), ordered him to keep silent, and condemned his statement to the press as not indicative of the Vatican’s position on Jewish-Catholic ecumenical relations. For in Koch’s view, how can any of the apostles’ preaching of conversion to their own people, often ending in their own martyrdom, ever have been justified? Did not St. Peter know that, “the Jews are participants in God’s salvation,” that this is “theologically unquestionable,” and “how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery?” Silly Peter! If the apostles just had Cardinal Koch around to set them straight as to what Christ’s Church would be teaching 2,000 years later, they could have saved themselves a lot of work not to mention their own lives.
Koch (unfortunately) continues:
“I don’t think that we have the same relationship with Islam that we have with Judaism.
“It is very clear that we can speak about three Abrahamic religions but we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition is not the same.
“In this sense we have only with Jewish people this unique relationship that we have not with Islam.”
Wait a second. Didn’t Vatican II teach us at that Christians, Muslims, and Jews all worship the same God? Ah, yes, says Koch, but not the same Abraham! I can’t help laughing at the hypocrisy. At the time of Vatican II, when the Conciliar Church wanted to reach out to Islam, it proclaimed that we both worship the same God. But now, when radical Muslims are murdering Christians and Cardinal Koch wants to seek favour with the Jewish leaders, he says, “same God but different Abraham!” You can’t make this up!
Koch’s explanation is priceless. He says, “we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition is not the same.” Well, no kidding! Neither is the view of God in any of these three religions the same as only the true religion teaches that God had a Son and His name was Jesus Christ! This absurd theological maneuver by Koch is proof positive that current Vatican modernists are simply making up theology as they go along to suit whatever worldly purpose they desire. Next week, for instance, if Koch meets with Muslim leaders, he will no doubt manufacture some special theological relationship we have with Islam that we do not have with Judaism. Meanwhile our Neo-Catholic enablers will lap up his every word as they attempt to synthesize and integrate Koch’s scattershot self-serving theology into the Frankenstein’s monster of post-Conciliar thought.
Finally Koch ends with this egregious whopper:
Asked whether this meant Catholics must seek to convert Muslims to Christianity, he said: “We have a mission to convert all non-Christian religions’ people [except] Judaism.
Of all of the post-conciliar statements I’ve been unfortunate enough to read in my life, this one may be the most insidiously evil and lacking in charity. I’m not saying that Koch, neatly tucked away in his modernist fantasy land where all men are most likely saved, intends evil by this statement. That is for God to judge. What I am saying is if we apply this statement in the context of true Catholic teaching on salvation, it is monstrous.
The Catholic Church teaches that the only certain way to be saved is to be baptized into Christ’s Church whereby original sin is washed away, to hold and profess the Catholic Faith, and to die in the state of sanctifying grace. While the Church allows the possibility that those who, through no fault of their own, do not know that joining Christ’s visible Church is necessary for salvation might be saved, we do not know for a fact whether this even happens. This is why Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors that, “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”
The Conciliar Church has now made this theoretical possibility in to the rule! Now it is assumed that because God is merciful, becoming Catholic is no longer strictly necessary for salvation. Sure Cardinal Koch may not mind us attempting to convert some radical Muslims to Catholicism. Not so much to save their souls of course, but rather because it might make them more peaceful. As Koch himself says:
“We must above all convert these Muslims that use violence from the abuse of religion because the sister of all religion is freedom and peace and not violence and when a religion uses violence to convert other this is an abuse of religion.”
However, lest anyone think this new inverse view of salvation is merely the view of Koch, one need only look at the interview Benedict XVI gave in October 2015 on justification by faith, which was recently revealed in a book by Fr. Daniel Libanori, SJ. When the interview came out in March, Neo-Catholics once again published and emphasized the parts that offered morsels of orthodoxy to the starving masses. Yet they completely failed to note or emphasize Benedict’s truly horrifying views on salvation and conversion efforts. After mentioning the teaching of St. Ignatius the interviewer, Fr. Jacques Servais, SJ, stated:
…It is in this spirit that St. Francis Xavier lived his pastoral work, convinced he had to try to save from the terrible fate of eternal damnation as many “infidels” as possible. The teaching, formalized in the Council of Trent, in the passage with regard to the judgment of the good and the evil, later radicalized by the Jansenists, was taken up in a much more restrained way in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cfr. § 5 633, 1037). Can it be said that on this point, in recent decades, there has been a kind of “development of dogma” that the Catechism should definitely take into account?
Pope Emeritus Benedict responded as follows:
There is no doubt that on this point we are faced with a profound evolution of dogma. While the fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages could still be of the opinion that, essentially, the whole human race had become Catholic and that paganism existed now only on the margins, the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the modern era radically changed perspectives. In the second half of the last century it has been fully affirmed the understanding that God cannot let go to perdition all the unbaptized and that even a purely natural happiness for them does not represent a real answer to the question of human existence. If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost – and this explains their missionary commitment – in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council that conviction was finally abandoned…
And there you have it. Pope Emeritus Benedict, just like Koch, then goes on to contemplate for three more paragraphs how a contradiction in doctrine (which he himself just created by inventing novel teaching), can be understood. He first offers absurd attempts to reconcile these opposites proposed by heterodox theologians Karl Rahner and Henri de Lubac, but even he admits they do not resolve the contradiction. If we recall, Cardinal Koch attributed our inability to understand his self-created doctrinal contradiction to a mystery of God! What is Benedict’s answer? He ends by saying:
“It is clear that we need to further reflect on the whole question.”
Wow! I think we’ve done enough “reflecting” on the theoretically impossible over the last 50 years, thank you very much. Instead, what is clear to me is that if I truly believed the views of Benedict and Koch on salvation, I would no longer bother being a Cardinal or Pope Emeritus. I would immediately turn in my clerical garments to the authorities, put on some secular clothes, book a trip to the Bahamas, and have cocktails on the beach. At least then I could at least attempt to squeeze some worldly pleasure out of the rest of my earthly life after realizing I devoted it to a fabricated religion of my own making. But that is just me. For I do not believe any Catholic Saint or missionary worth his salt would ever have ventured out into foreign and hostile lands facing starvation, persecution, torture, disease, hardship and death to spread and pass on the faith and religion these men describe in their interviews. The only sane Catholic response to such a puerile, barren, invented and pathetic religion would be the response of Flannery O’Connor when told the Eucharist was a symbol:
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it. That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.
What is even more tragic than the clearly erroneous view on salvation Koch holds are the real-life spiritual consequences of it. For what Koch is truly saying is that you and I should intentionally deprive Christ’s own people and the people of the apostles of the ONLY sure way we know of to attain eternal salvation! This would be worse than if all of mankind was infected with a deadly disease and only the Catholic Church had the cure, meanwhile Cardinal Koch forbids us to even attempt to give the cure to any of those who practice Judaism. This would be diabolical. For to share the Faith is an act of love! It is an act of tremendous charity! How dare these Churchmen try to turn into something shameful. To not try to convert souls to Christ when He has given you His very life is what is shameful. We try to convert souls to Christ because we love them with a supernatural love that goes beyond even human love much less human respect.
Thus all Catholics have the duty and obligation to oppose this discriminatory, contradictory, and non-magisterial command of Cardinal Koch forbidding us, in direct contradiction the Great Commission, to convert a certain class of souls and instead redouble our efforts to bring them to Jesus Christ. As Alice Von Hildebrand recalled:
Let me relate an incident that caused my husband grief. It was 1946, just after the war. My husband was teaching at Fordham, and there appeared in one of his classes a Jewish student who had been a naval officer during the war. He would eventually tell my husband about a particularly stunning sunset in the Pacific and how it had led him to the quest for the truth about God. He first went to Columbia to study philosophy, and he knew that this was not what he was looking for. A friend suggested he try philosophy at Fordham and mentioned the name Dietrich von Hildebrand. After just one class with my husband, he knew he had found what he was looking for. One day after class my husband and this student went for a walk. He told my husband during this time that he was surprised at the fact that several professors, after discovering he was Jewish, assured him that they would not try to convert him to Catholicism. My husband, stunned, stopped, turned to him and said, “They said what?!” He repeated the story and my husband told him, “I would walk to the ends of the earth to make you a Catholic.”To make a long story short, the young man became a Catholic, was ordained a Carthusian priest, and went on to enter the only Charter House in the United States (in Vermont)!
The Gospel According to St. Matthew Chapter 28, verses 16-20
16 And the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them.
17 And seeing him they adored: but some doubted.
18 And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth.
19 Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
