Julie

Quoting @59SouthLee: "Nostra Aetate was written by a gay Jew. It's only been downhill since then. Your last Pope said all religions are just different languages speaking to the same god." What a devastatingly accurate summary of the post-conciliar disaster. The man behind much of it was Gregory Baum (born Gerhard Albert Baum, 1923–2017). A man of Jewish descent who converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and rose to become one of the most influential periti at Vatican II. He drafted the first version of Nostra Aetate §4, the declaration that radically reframed the Church’s relationship with Judaism and non-Christian religions. In his later autobiography, Baum openly admitted he was homosexual and had his first same-sex experience while working on the Council documents in Rome. He left the priesthood, entered a relationship with an ex-nun, and became a vocal advocate for homosexual relationships, contraception, women’s ordination, and interfaith indifferentism. From the holy and unchanging perspective of Orthodoxy, the Church Fathers, and the Saints, this is not a footnote but a profound spiritual catastrophe. A man living in unrepented sin helped reshape Catholic teaching away from the patristic understanding of the Church as the true Israel, the fulfillment of the Old Covenant in Christ. Worse still, Baum’s work on Nostra Aetate opened the theological door for the infiltration of Christian Zionist ideas into Catholicism. By strongly affirming an “irrevocable” covenant with the Jewish people apart from explicit fulfillment in Christ, and by softening traditional supersessionist language, the document created space for a new philo-Semitism. This shift contributed to the Vatican’s eventual diplomatic recognition of the State of Israel and the rise of what some now call “Catholic Zionism,” positions that align more closely with Protestant dispensationalist support for modern Israel than with the consensus of the Church Fathers. This tragedy is compounded by the deeper error in Roman Catholic ecclesiology: the consolidation of doctrinal and disciplinary power into the person of the Pope alone. Unlike the ancient conciliar model preserved in Holy Orthodoxy, where bishops gather in Synod under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with the living voice of the Church including clergy and laity in harmony, the post-Vatican I papal system allows a single man’s decisions (or those of a small circle around him) to rapidly alter the course of the entire Church. When that man, or the experts influencing him, carries personal corruption or modernist ideas, the whole body suffers. Orthodoxy’s synodal structure, rooted in the practice of the Apostles and Fathers, provides safeguards through collective discernment that the papal model tragically lacks. How painfully naive (though meaning well), then, are so many of today’s “new Catholics,” voices like @RealCandaceO and @CarriePrejean1! They thunder against Christian Zionism, liberal ideologies, Epstein’s network of depravity, and moral decay, yet they have enthusiastically joined the very institution whose post-conciliar path, heavily influenced by figures like Baum, has helped mainstream the very errors they decry. They raise their voices loudly, as if the Catholic Church’s ecclesiology, centered on papal supremacy rather than the conciliar consensus of the East, suddenly values the opinion of the laity in matters of doctrine and morals. Yet when the fullness of the Church, Holy Orthodoxy, is humbly presented to them as the unadulterated apostolic faith, they fall mysteriously silent, ignoring its living authority rooted in the Saints and Fathers. This trajectory has normalized ecumenism without conversion, moral relativism regarding sexuality, and the dangerous notion that all religions are different paths to the same God, condemned by the Fathers and by every martyr who refused to compromise the uniqueness of Christ. Holy Orthodoxy alone has preserved the Faith once delivered to the saints without compromise. She calls us not to endless dialogue with error, but to repentance, fidelity to Apostolic Tradition, and the fearless proclamation that Jesus Christ is the only Savior of the world, yesterday, today, and unto the ages of ages. Let us guard our souls with fear of God and holy zeal! Cling to the unchanging Church of the Fathers and the Saints. Both Candace and Carrie are women of evident zeal and courage. May the Lord grant them, and all who seek the ancient Faith, to look East and discover the fullness of the true Church of the Apostles and the Saints, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church preserved without innovation.