I got home yesterday from work and was too exhausted to put Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker up for gentle readers to ponder, so I am doing it this morning. Widburg's post is entitled In Chicago, another sign of the Catholic Church's decline. In this case, Chicago's Cardinal Cupich decided to attend a gathering of "faiths" in a mistaken attempt at ecumenicism. Note that ecumenicism is meant as between Christian denominations, not to include paganism, Islam and other belief systems.
Ms. Widburg is apparently Jewish. The God of Creation first revealed Himself to Abram, later called Abraham, the father of all Hebrews. And she is correct that before He revealed Himself, the entire world was pagan. They generally tried to appease their capricious "gods" by sacrifices, often human sacrifices including their children. Jonathon Cahn writes about these ancient "gods" in his book Return of the Gods, specifically Baal, Astarte (Ishtar) and Molech. The Catholic Church employs trained exorcists to cast out demons, so why a Catholic Cardinal would be associating himself with demons is cause for concern.
I’m not a Catholic, but I have an abiding respect for Catholicism’s role in bringing down the paganism that dominated Europe before the Church took over. At least one Catholic cardinal, though, seems to have forgotten that time. How else can we explain Cardinal Blase Cupich’s decision to participate in a Wiccan-organized conference to “enrich” his faith?
Before the Jews, the world was entirely pagan. People across the known world worshipped a panoply of gods tied to the visible and invisible phenomena of the earth. The gods didn’t provide an overarching morality. Instead, they were capricious beings that constantly needed to be placated, and they especially liked blood, whether animal or human. The stories of the Roman gods are a soap opera of vanity, matricide, patricide, incest, insanity, and random violence.
The Jews brought something new: a single, invisible God who had a powerful moral code that He demanded of His followers. The shorthand for this is “ethical monotheism.” Through Jesus, ethical monotheism spread beyond the Jews. Eventually, throughout Western Europe, it was the Catholic Church that took up this banner.
I genuinely admire practicing Jews, even though I think they are wrong. But one has hope that the Holy Spirit will guide them to Christ, who was of course a Jew. Widburg notes that in some cases, Christianity was advanced by the sword. Now there were some cases of discrimination against Jews in Europe that probably caused some to at least feign Christian beliefs in order to save their lives. Look at George Soros, who participated in the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. These were wrong-headed, period. If she is writing about the Crucades, these were actually self defense, and as I have maintained, are perfectly within the Christian and Jewish tradition.
It is as if the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is ashamed of Christ. But as Christ said in Luke 9:26 "For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels." The Church should stand up to the world and loudly proclaim the Gospel at every opportunity rather than bowing to it, or giving it any credibility by claiming "ecumenism." Unfortunately, the average faithful Catholic has no idea what the Catholic hierarchy is doing
If the Catholic Church doesn’t stand against paganism, one has to worry what basic principle it will abandon next.
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