A Canadian priest by the name of Fr. Paul Joseph Martin McDonald, who some readers may recognize for his “Ask Father” videos on the new Fatima Center’s website, recently took to Facebook to praise the so-called “Credo of the People of God” calling it:
An extremely important document of Saint Pope Paul VI. A profession of Faith by the Successor of Peter of “the immortal Tradition of the holy Church of God” and in particular, of truths that were and are disputed, doubted or even rejected since the time of the Council.
As I replied in comments that Fr. McDonald decided to delete rather than address, had such a text been published prior to 1958, the author would have been called before the Holy Office to answer (at the very least) for its vagaries, and short of a correction, he would have been censured.
Here, I will highlight just one example of the Credo’s grave deficiency.
Shortly after professing belief in “one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” and furthermore, “that this only God is absolutely one,” Montini offers a “however.”
We give thanks, however, to the divine goodness that very many believers can testify with us before men to the unity of God, even though they know not the mystery of the most holy Trinity.
Who exactly are these “very many believers,” and in what do they believe?
Montini is primarily referring, of course, to Muslims and self-identified Jews, who together with Christians are followers of what he (and his successors) fondly call “the three great monotheistic religions.”
Let’s be perfectly clear, it’s not so much that the Muslims and Jews of “our time” (in Latin, “nostra aetate”) know not the Trinity, but rather that they adamantly reject Our Lord Jesus Christ and the “one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
So, to what is the testimony of those who adhere to a false religion wherein the Triune God is mocked attributable?
According to Montini’s Credo, it would seem that it is attributable to nothing less than “the divine goodness.” (And you thought Bergoglio invented the idea that the false religions are willed by God out of whole cloth!)
Despite Montini’s claim to the contrary, the objective truth is that the adherents of these false religions do not testify with the Catholic faithful to the unity of God, they testify to a false god.
He who rejects Me rejects Him who sent me. (Luke 10:16)
The fact that a priest like Fr. McDonald has been deceived into imagining that Montini’s impure and deceptive Credo is a praiseworthy catechetical device illustrates very well why the Holy Office would never have tolerated such a text. It adds exactly nothing of value to the Faith such as it was taught with clarity prior to the Council, in fact, it adds only confusion and is guaranteed to mislead the naïve.
While I would expect Fr. McDonald to argue that the citation from the Credo above can be understood in an orthodox way (and I would disagree entirely), that alone would confirm my assertion that it would have been condemned by Rome prior to the conciliar revolution.
As Pope St. Pius X, the real Saint whose image appears in background of the photo of Fr. McDonald above, stated:
It may happen that a book harmless in one way, on account of different circumstances, be hurtful in another … We impose as a duty upon the Bishop to condemn it. (cf Pascendi, 51)
So, why did Montini deem it necessary to craft a new Credo in the first place? Would it not have sufficed to simply reaffirm that which the Church has always taught, in the same manner in which it had always taught it? Would not doing so have illustrated all the more clearly that the Faith had not changed?
The answer to these questions is simple, it did change, i.e., a new Credo was necessary because the faith of the Council is not the Faith of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Montini tacitly admitted as much in the intro to his Credo:
We shall accordingly make a profession of faith, pronounce a creed which, without being strictly speaking a dogmatic definition, repeats in substance, with some developments called for by the spiritual condition of our time…
Yes, that spiritual condition (better understood as a malady) led to such developments as the conciliar church’s esteem for false religions that steadfastly deny Jesus Christ, a concept utterly foreign to the mind of the one true Church but articulated at length in Nostra Aetate of Vatican II.
In conclusion, those who desire to teach the Catholic Faith in all its purity and integrity (as I believe Fr. McDonald truly does) must first come to realize that this will not be possible as long as they continue treating post-conciliar rubbish like Montini’s Credo as if it is treasure.
The “earthly cost” of speaking truth, identifying and condemning errors, adds up over time. Only with the support of likeminded persons can our efforts on this blog continue.
