Why the “Perennialist School” — like Pope Francis’s “all religions are paths to God” — is incompatible with Christianity
In recent days, the internet has been ablaze with commentary on the pope’s off-the-cuff remarks in Singapore, which were initially “cleaned up” by the Vatican press operation, then restored to reflect what he actually said, and which, no matter how you slice it, are not, in any possible universe, words that a Catholic believer could speak:
One of the things that has impressed me most about the young people here is your capacity for interfaith dialogue. This is very important because if you start arguing, “My religion is more important than yours…,” or “Mine is the true one, yours is not true….,” where does this lead? Somebody answer. [A young person answers, “Destruction”.] That is correct. All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. “But my God is more important than yours!”. Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood? Yet, interfaith dialogue among young people takes courage.
The mental gymnastics displayed this time by the popesplainers — Lofton, Likoudis, et al. — have been positively olympic in scope. For those who are interested, such figures as Erick Ybarra, Fr. Peter Totleben, and Larry Chapp have been critiquing the attempts on Facebook. To me, it’s a no-brainer that the pope meant what he said in exactly the same way in which the dissident theologians of the 1990s and 2000s — often Jesuits and often disciplined by Ratzinger at the CDF — meant it when they, in their turn, used the same kind of language. It’s not as if this is the first time Francis has asserted something panreligious, indifferentist, or syncretistic. I’ll come back to this point below.
For now, I’d like to focus on a specific set of issues that will disclose the error of the pope’s entire approach.
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