Category: Apologetics

Why Was Arius a Heretic?

Erick Thomas Ybarra writes:

Jimmy Akin’s argument here on the doctrine of Justification is right on the money, and it is why I wish the authors of the Open Letter did not write on this point. It is very clear Amoris dodges this accusation. . . .

My concern, however, with Akin’s article, and I would ask him to clarify for me, is that his argument on the “canonical crime of heresy” vis-a-vis the definition of dogma which requires both divine & catholic faith, would render the ancient presbyter Arius as free of the canonical crime of heresy.

The Council of Nicaea (325) gives us the Creed with “homoousian” (one substance), but only anathematizes those who hold to it, and does not specify anywhere in clear enough terms that the matter is “divinely revealed”.

Happy to oblige!

The reason that Arius counts as a heretic can be answered in more than one way.

 

By Historical Standards

The first way involves judging him by the standards of his own time. In this era, the term “heresy” did not have its modern, technical meaning.

Instead, as I discuss here, it was used in a broader sense that could refer to anything that conflicted with basic Christian doctrine or practice.

Consequently, it was not necessary at that time to show that a particular doctrine had been infallibly defined as divinely revealed to label someone a heretic.

Arius’s denial of the divinity of Christ unambiguously conflicted with basic Christian teaching, as solemnly confirmed by the First Council of Nicaea, and so he was labelled a heretic.

Thus, Arius has been known as a heretic down through history.

 

By Modern Standards

A second way of approaching the question is to apply the standards of our time, retrospectively, to the case of Arius. In other words: Would he be convictable as a heretic given the modern use of the term?

Today the term heresy, in simple language, refers to the obstinate, post-baptismal refusal to believe a dogma (for the technical definition, see CIC 751 with CIC 750).

Arius certainly was obstinate at the Council of Nicaea. He refused to submit to its teaching on the divinity of Christ and was consequently sent into exile. He also was baptized.

This leaves us with the question of whether the divinity of Christ is a dogma—that is, a truth that the Magisterium has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed.

There are several issues to be considered here:

  1. What the Council of Nicaea actually said
  2. What authority the Council was understood to have at the time
  3. What authority it is understood to have today

 

What Nicaea Said

Regarding the first question, the Council published what scholars refer to as the Creed of Nicaea. It was later supplemented at the First Council of Constantinople (381) to for the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (more popularly called the “Nicene” Creed).

The main difference between the two creeds is that the Creed of Nicaea did not end the same way. It didn’t have the passage declaring the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it ended this way:

[We believe . . .] in the Holy Spirit.

However, those who say: “There was a time when he [the Son] was not” and “Before he was born he was not” and that he was made from nothing or who say that the Son of God may be of a different hypostasis or essence, or may be created or subject to change and alteration, [such persons] the Catholic Church anathematizes (DH 126).

As Erick points out, the anathema at the end of the Creed does not mention the doctrine being divinely revealed.

However, another part of the Creed indicates that divine revelation is involved. The Creed begins:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of all things, visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten gener­ated from the Father, that is, from the being of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with [homoousion] the Father, through whom all things were made, those in heaven and those on earth . . . (DH 125).

The key part of this for our purposes is the verb that introduces and governs the entire sentence: “We believe” (Greek, pisteuomen, Latin, credimus).

This verb indicates that the truths articulated belong to the Faith (Greek, hê pistis, Latin, fides), and thus as belonging to divine revelation.

We thus have the text of Nicaea indicating that divine revelation is involved.

 

What Authority the Council Was Understood to Have at the Time

The First Council of Nicaea was initially confirmed by the authority of the Emperor Constantine. Bishop Karl Josef von Hefele notes:

Constantine the Great solemnly confirmed the Nicene Creed immediately after it had been drawn up by the Council, and he threatened such as would not subscribe it with exile. At the conclusion of the Synod he raised all the decrees of the assembly to the position of laws of the empire; declared them to be divinely inspired; and in several edicts still partially extant, he required that they should be most faithfully observed by all his subjects (A History of the Councils of the Church, I:42).

This is interesting from the point of view of history, but the question from a theological perspective is what the pope said about the Council. According to von Hefele:

The signatures of the Pope’s legates, Hosius, Vitus, and Vincentius, subscribed to the acts of the Council before the other bishops, must be regarded as a sanction from the See of Rome to the decrees of Nicaea. Five documents, dating from the fifth century, mention, besides, a solemn approval of the acts of the Council of Nicaea, given by Pope Sylvester and a Roman synod of 275 bishops. It is granted that these documents are not authentic, as we shall show in the history of the Council of Nicaea; but we nevertheless consider it very probable that the Council of Nicaea was recognized and approved by an especial act of Pope Sylvester, and not merely by the signature of his legates, for the following reasons:—

It is undeniable, as we shall presently see, that

α. The fourth ecumenical council looked upon the papal confirmation as absolutely necessary for ensuring the validity of the decrees of the Council; and there is no good ground for maintaining that this was a new principle, and one which was not known and recognized at the time of the Nicene Council.

β. Again, in 485, a synod, composed of above forty bishops from different parts of Italy, was quite unanimous in asserting, in opposition to the Greeks, that the three hundred and eighteen bishops of Nicaea had their decisions confirmed by the authority of the holy Roman Church (confirmationem rerum atque auctoritatem sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae detulerunt).

γ. Pope Julius I [r. 337-352] in the same way declared, a few years after the close of the Council of Nicaea, that ecclesiastical decrees (the decisions of synods) ought not to be published without the consent of the Bishop of Rome, and that this is a rule and a law of the Church.

δ. Dionysius the Less also maintained that the decisions of the Council of Nicaea were sent to Rome for approval; and it is not improbable that it was the general opinion upon this point which contributed to produce those spurious documents which we possess (ibid. I:44-45).

At this time, the theology of ecumenical councils and when they teach infallibly had not been worked out. That was a subject that would be clarified through later doctrinal development. However, Nicaea was held by its supporters to be divinely guided and supremely authoritative. (The Arians, naturally, disagreed.)

 

What Authority the Council Is Understood to Have Today

Now that the theology of ecumenical councils has undergone a high degree of doctrinal development, how is First Nicaea viewed from a contemporary perspective?

It is universally regarded as the first of the ecumenical councils. According to Church teaching:

The college of bishops exercises power over the universal Church in a solemn manner in an ecumenical council. But there never is an ecumenical council which is not confirmed or at least recognized as such by Peter’s successor (CCC 884).

Bishop von Hefele argues that First Nicaea was recognized as ecumenical by a special act of Pope Sylvester I (r. 314-335), during whose reign it occurred.

However, even if it turned out that Pope Sylvester did not recognize it by a special act, the council would still be ecumenical.

A special act of recognition by the pope is not required—only the recognition itself. Subsequent popes—including all of the recent ones—have unmistakably recognized this council as ecumenical, and so it is.

 

Prosecuting Arius for Heresy by Modern Standards

That brings us to the Creed of Nicaea’s infallibility. While the theology of magisterial infallibility also had not been developed at the time the Council met, it has now, and the Church holds that:

[When the bishops are] gathered together in an ecumenical council, they are teachers and judges of faith and morals for the universal Church, whose definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith (Lumen Gentium 25).

At Nicaea, the bishops were gathered in an ecumenical council, so that leaves us with the question of whether the Creed of Nicaea counted as a definition—that is, as a statement the bishops intended to be binding on all the faithful and to absolutely bring all legitimate discussion of a matter to an end.

Note that an ecumenical council—like a pope—does not have to use any set form of words to issue a definition. It does not have to say “anathema” or “we define.” It just has to indicate in one way or another that the matter is definitively settled.

In this case, it did. The bishops of the Council of Nicaea clearly intended to bring all legitimate discussion of the topic to an end, for all of the faithful, and to make this point they put their teaching in the form of a profession of faith for the faithful to say.

This profession of faith also has become universal in both East and West as an obligatory expression of Christian truth. One cannot be an orthodox Christian and deny it. (This means, among other things, that the ordinary and universal magisterium also has infallibly taught it, not just the extraordinary magisterium.)

That brings us to the final issue, which is whether the use of the verb “believe” (pisteuomen/credimus) indicates a matter of divine revelation.

It does. In the Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei, Ratzinger and Bertone note that the verb “believe” (Latin, credo) is used for “all those doctrines of divine and Catholic faith which the Church proposes as divinely and formally revealed and, as such, as irreformable” (n. 5).

By contrast, the verbs “accept and hold” (Latin, amplector ac retineo) are used for “all those teachings belonging to the dogmatic or moral area, which are necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith, even if they have not been proposed by the Magisterium of the Church as formally revealed” (n. 6).

Such a truth is thus a “sententia definitive tenenda” (Latin, “opinion to be definitively held”—as opposed to be believed with divine and Catholic faith).

Thus, from a modern perspective, the confession of faith offered in the Creed of Nicaea—or the modern Nicene Creed—consists of matters to be believed, not merely held, and thus as consisting of truths contained in divine revelation.

Consequently, Ratzinger and Bertone state that among truths of this kind “belong the articles of faith of the Creed, the various Christological dogmas and Marian dogmas” (n. 11).

By requiring Christians to profess belief in the divinity of Christ, Nicaea thus infallibly defined that this is a truth of divine revelation.

Therefore, even when we apply modern criteria, Arius was a heretic.

A Second Response to Peter Kwasniewski

Peter Kwasniewski, responding to my previous post, says:

Jimmy Akin wrote a reply to some stray comments of mine on Facebook, and I therefore owe him and my readers at least a brief response. (In the coming days, you can expect to see a more robust rejoinder or two made to all of our critics; it will be worth the wait.)

He then says:

There are two problems with Akin’s argument.

Let’s look at both of them.

 

Kwasniewski’s First Argument: The Possibility of Observing the Commandments

He writes:

1) The letter certainly contains charges that fulfill even Mr Akin’s definition of the requirements for the delict of heresy. Most obviously the first one:

“A justified person has not the strength with God’s grace to carry out the objective demands of the divine law, as though any of the commandments of God are impossible for the justified; or as meaning that God’s grace, when it produces justification in an individual, does not invariably and of its nature produce conversion from all serious sin, or is not sufficient for conversion from all serious sin.”

This rests on the dogmatic pronouncement of the Council of Trent, session 6, canon 18:

“If anyone says that the commandments of God are impossible to observe even for a man who is justified and established in grace, let him be anathema” (DH 1568).

The initial quotation (“A justified person has not the strength . . .”) is not a quotation of Pope Francis. It is a construction of the authors of the Open Letter, whose meaning they attribute to Pope Francis. They only later quote Pope Francis’s words in an attempt to justify their initial paraphrase, and they do not provide argumentation as to why we should take his words in the sense they attribute to him.

This is a flaw in the drafting of the Open Letter. It would be better if they had used Pope Francis’s own words and contrasted them directly with the quotation from Trent, providing exegesis as to why we must understand something Francis said as contradicting Trent. This they do not attempt.

They also fail to provide the needed analysis of Trent’s statement. The use of the penalty of anathema, in this case, indicates that Trent is making an infallible definition. However, as I document here, it does not indicate that Trent is saying this matter is divinely revealed and thus a dogma. More than a mere use of “anathema” is needed for that.

It is possible for the canon to be understood as asserting a truth known by reason or “founded upon” Scripture without being directly contained in divine revelation (see my previous documentation). I can think of arguments on both sides of the issue.

Whatever conclusion one might draw based on them, this canon will not sustain a successful charge of heresy against Pope Francis.

To see why, we need to do the work that the authors of the Open Letter failed to do—i.e., to conduct an exegesis of the relevant texts.

In the first place, we need to understand Trent. As is regularly underscored in textbooks on magisterial statements, the decrees of ecumenical councils must be understood in terms of the problems that they were addressing. The same is true of Scripture. Only after this step is completed can we relate what they have to say to problems raised in later ages.

So, what was Trent combatting in this canon? Basically, there were Protestant authors who were saying that it was altogether impossible for a justified man to observe God’s commandments. Some went as far as saying that every single thing a person did was mortal sin.

Trent’s concern is to reject this error and affirm that it is possible for “a man who is justified and established in grace” to observe God’s commandments.

Note the inclusion of the phrase “and established in grace.” This means that factors in addition to justification are needed for a man to observe God’s commandments. This is proved by canon 22, which reads:

If anyone says that without God’s special help a justified man can persevere in the justice he has received or that with it he cannot persevere, let him be anathema (DH 1572, emphasis added).

In other words, the just man requires God’s “special help” (Latin, speciali auxilio) to observe the commandments. This is what is meant in canon 18 when it refers to the just man being “established in grace.” Trent thus is not saying that justification alone provides this ability.

Trent also is assuming the usual conditions needed for mortal sin are met. It is talking about people who are capable of performing human acts, and who thus have adequate consent and knowledge. It is not talking about people who are deprived of the needed consent or knowledge.

There is no guarantee here that God will ensure that the just always have the knowledge and freedom needed to avoid objectively grave sins. For example, there is no guarantee that a baptized child below the age of reason—who is justified by virtue of baptism—will always be able to avoid objectively grave sin. God does not guarantee, and Trent does not mean, that a baptized three-year old will always have the knowledge and freedom needed to resist the urge to run into oncoming traffic or eat something labelled “poison.”

Neither is there a guarantee that these will be the case for people at later stages of life. People can go senile. They can go insane. They can get brain damage. They can be incompletely or even erroneously catechized. There are all kind of things that can cause a just person to be deprived of the knowledge and freedom necessary to objectively observe the commandments.

None of those situations are covered by Trent’s definition, which is meant to deal with the situation of a just man who is established in grace, who possesses reason and is capable of performing human acts—i.e., who has sufficient freedom and knowledge.

So how does that relate to what Pope Francis said?

When the authors of the Open Letter attempt to document the error they attribute to him in the quotation above, they cite four texts (see Open Letter [A] 1, 9-11).

Three of these are quotations in which the Pope says things about Martin Luther and the Reformation. None of these even mention the issue at hand—whether it is impossible for a just man established in grace to observe the commandments. They are therefore inadequate to proving a charge of heresy on this point.

The remaining one is this:

Saint John Paul II proposed the so-called “law of gradualness” in the knowledge that the human being “knows, loves and accomplishes moral good by different stages of growth.” This is not a “gradualness of law” but rather a gradualness in the prudential exercise of free acts on the part of subjects who are not in a position to understand, appreciate, or fully carry out the objective demands of the law (Amoris Laetitia 295).

Here Pope Francis refers to John Paul II’s discussion of the law of gradualness in Familiaris Consortio 34. One can ask whether Pope Francis understands this principle in exactly the same way as John Paul II, but that’s not our question here. Our question is whether Pope Francis contradicts canon 18 of Trent’s Decree on Justification.

So, what can we say about that?

Unfortunately, the authors of the Open Letter have truncated Pope Francis’s remarks in a way that hides relevant context from the reader. To quote him more fully, he says:

This is not a “gradualness of law” but rather a gradualness in the prudential exercise of free acts on the part of subjects who are not in a position to understand, appreciate, or fully carry out the objective demands of the law. For the law is itself a gift of God which points out the way, a gift for everyone without exception; it can be followed with the help of grace, even though each human being “advances gradually with the progressive integration of the gifts of God and the demands of God’s definitive and absolute love in his or her entire personal and social life” (Amoris Laetitia 295, emphasis added).

The authors of the Open Letter omitted Pope Francis’s words stressing that God’s law is the same for everyone and that it can be kept with the help of grace! That’s precisely what Trent was saying!

This omission is so significant, given the error Pope Francis is being accused of, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was deliberately left out to deprive the Open Letter’s readers of information that would be damaging to the authors’ case.

Where Pope Francis goes beyond canon 18 is in calling attention to the fact that there are some situations, particularly at early stages of moral catechesis, where people “are not in a position to understand, appreciate, or fully carry out the objective demands of the law.”

But Trent didn’t deny that. It never said that the moment you’re justified you’re guaranteed divinely infused catechesis about the whole law of God. If that did happen, we wouldn’t need children to memorize the commandments or learn their meanings and applications as part of their catechism classes.

Trent assumed in canon 18 that we’re talking about a person who has the knowledge and freedom needed to place an authentically human act.

So, what if you get bad catechesis early in life and thus a late start on mature moral development?

In that case, you need to recognize the truth of God’s law, which “points out the way . . . for everyone without exception” and “can be followed with the help of grace,” even if this means that one “advances gradually with the progressive integration of the gifts of God and the demands of God’s definitive and absolute love in his or her entire personal and social life.”

That last quotation, which Amoris Laetitia gives, by the way, is also from John Paul II. It’s from Familiaris Consortio 9.

The Open Letter thus wholly fails to sustain a charge of heresy against Pope Francis on this point.

 

A Side Question from Louie Verrecchio

Although the authors of the Open Letter do not cite Amoris Laetitia 301 in relation to their first charge of heresy, Louie Verrecchio thinks it relevant. He quotes the passage as follows:

A subject may know full well the rule [divine law concerning the mortal sin of adultery], yet have great difficulty in understanding its inherent values, or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin. (AL 301)

Given the analysis of Trent that we have already offered, part of the solution to Louie’s query is clear: When section 301 refers to the possibility of someone having “great difficulty in understanding its [the law’s] inherent values,” there is no conflict with Trent. The Council did not define that people will never have incomplete or bad catechesis, resulting in a malformed conscience.

But what about the statement that it’s possible a person may “be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin”?

What might that mean?

This could have been expressed more clearly—e.g., with the addition of a relevant example—but it is possible to imagine situations that the pope would see as fitting this description.

For example: Suppose that a person has been raised culturally Catholic but given no catechesis at all. Let’s suppose that it’s a woman from one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. She marries a man, but he beats her, and she divorces him. She then marries another man, without an annulment, and they have several children. He then starts beating her, too. She thinks about leaving him also, but he makes it clear that if she does so, he will kill both her and the children. In fact, she realizes that she will be in danger if she even stops sleeping with him.

At this point, out of desperation, she turns to God and has a religious conversion. She begins attending religious education classes at her local parish and discovers that she’s been living out of conformity with God’s law all this time.

There is certainly a way through this situation that—however difficult it may be—does not involve her sinning.

But at her present stage of moral catechesis, she may believe that her moral duty to protect the children and provide for their welfare is such that she believes it would be a sin for her to stop sleeping with this monster. She may thus believe that she is in “a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.”

The situation I have proposed is extreme, but extreme situations help make points clear. That’s why they’re used in thought experiments.

Of course, however difficult it may be for her to discern, there is a way for her to deal with this situation without sin. God’s law never creates true double-bind situations.

But his permissive will allows situations to exist where it is very difficult to discern and follow the right path.

I take that to be what Amoris Laetitia means. Indeed, the context is one in which the document is discussing difficult situations that make it difficult to fully follow God—a process of discernment that “must remain ever open to new stages of growth and to new decisions which can enable the ideal to be more fully realized” (AL 304).

Given all of these factors, an orthodox reading of AL 301 is entirely possible. One cannot show from the text that Pope Francis is intending to teach that God’s law contradicts itself in such a way that there is literally no non-sinful option in some cases.

But if he’s not saying that, then he’s not saying that it’s impossible to keep the commandments.

AL 301 is thus not a suitable basis for sustaining a charge of heresy, even if canon 18 of the Decree on Justification is taken as establishing a dogma rather than just an infallible truth. You’d need something much more explicit and unambiguous to sustain a charge of heresy.

 

Kwasniewski’s Second Argument: Understanding Dogma

For his second argument, Kwasniewski writes:

2) Akin supposes that for a truth to be held of Divine and Catholic Faith, it must be expressly taught by the organs of the extraordinary magisterium as divinely revealed, but this is not so.

It’s not so, and Kwasniewski is misrepresenting me. The extraordinary magisterium does not have to be involved. The ordinary and universal magisterium can do it.

A truth should also be held with Divine and Catholic Faith if it is taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium as divinely revealed . . .

Correct. At this point, Kwasniewiski inserts a footnote, which reads:

He [Akin] verbally concedes this point but then restricts the definition of the ordinary and universal magisterium to a consensus of the episcopate so explicit that it would actually end up forming part of the extraordinary magisterium.

I do no such thing. The criteria for the ordinary and universal magisterium defining a point are as follows:

Although the individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held (Lumen Gentium 25).

Kwasniewski appears to confuse two issues: (1) the degree of consensus that exists among the bishops and (2) whether they are meeting in an ecumenical council. The latter is what is relevant to the bishops exercising the extraordinary magisterium; the former is not. There is no degree of consensus among the world’s bishops—however high it may be—that would turn an act of the ordinary and universal magisterium into an act of the extraordinary magisterium.

His assertion that I restrict the ordinary and universal magisterium “to a consensus of the episcopate so explicit that it would actually end up forming part of the extraordinary magisterium” appears to indicate that he does not know what these terms mean.

To resume:

. . . — and such truths are not (as Mr Akin falsely supposes) limited to those truths taught AS divinely revealed by the episcopate dispe[r]sed  throughout the world . . .

Once again, Kwasniewski misrepresents me. I do not suppose that the ordinary and universal magisterium is capable only of defining something as divinely revealed. It’s not. It can also define various non-revealed truths, and it can define revealed truths as true–without defining them as divinely revealed (as Ratzinger and Bertone indicate it did with papal infallibility prior to Vatican I, which raised that infallible teaching to the status of a dogma).

However, if it does so, then it does not have to be held by divine and Catholic faith, only Catholic faith.

If you’re going to sustain a charge of heresy based on the ordinary and universal magisterium, you must show that the ordinary and universal magisterium has defined a truth “proposed as divinely revealed either by the solemn magisterium of the Church or by its ordinary and universal magisterium” (CIC 750 §1; cf. 751)—i.e., a dogma.

I would note that, in the Open Letter, the signatories nowhere appeal to the ordinary and universal magisterium. The term does not appear anywhere in the document. If they are reconfiguring their case to appeal to the ordinary and universal magisterium (as I, frankly, expected they would once criticism of the document started), then I take this as a recognition of the weaknesses and inadequacies of the initial case they presented.

. . . but also include anything taught directly in the literal sense of scripture (because both the ordinary and universal magisterium and the extraordinary magisterium have taught the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture), the unanimous scriptural interpretations of the Fathers (from which a Catholic may not dissent, according to the definitions of Trent, Pius IV, and Vatican I), the unanimous consensus of the faithful concerning divine revelation (Lumen Gentium 12), and even the “universal and constant consent” of theologians concerning divinely revealed truth (Pius IX, Tuas libenter).

There are several problems here:

  1. Things taught in the literal sense of Scripture require divine faith—because they are divinely revealed. They do not require divine and Catholic faith if the Magisterium has not defined their sense. The fact that the Magisterium has defined the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture does not mean that it has defined what an individual passage of Scripture means in its literal sense. Therefore, divine and Catholic faith does not apply to such truths, only divine faith.
  2. Trent issued a disciplinary decree (not a doctrinal definition) that required Catholic authors not to hold positions “contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published.” It did not define that the Fathers (who included non-bishops) could infallibly define doctrines apart from the exercise of the Magisterium of their day. Pius IV required adherence to this principle, and Vatican I renewed the same decree, but neither defined that the Fathers—as a body—could infallibly define things. The Magisterium of their day—either extraordinary or ordinary and universal—could do so, but that’s a distinct and only partially overlapping body.
  3. The supernatural discernment of the faithful discussed in Lumen Gentium 12 is not exercised independently of the Magisterium. If you want to show that a matter has been infallibly defined, it has to be the Magisterium that does it, not the faithful conceived of separately.
  4. Kwasniewski flatly misreads Tuas Libenter. In it, Pius IX states that divine faith must be extended “to those matters transmitted as divinely revealed by the ordinary Magisterium of the whole Church dispersed throughout the world”—and which are therefore “for that reason, held by the universal and constant consensus of Catholic theologians as belonging to the faith” (DH 2879, emphasis added). In other words, Catholic theologians have always accepted what the ordinary and universal Magisterium has said belongs to the faith as belonging to it. He doesn’t say that orthodox theologians can themselves define that something belongs to divine revelation, apart from the Magisterium, or that the Magisterium always infallibly defines a sufficiently agreed-upon theological opinion. Kwasniewsky has the causal arrow pointing the wrong way.

Given the number of misrepresentations and misunderstandings we have documented—including of basic terms—it will be interesting to see the response that Kwasniewsky says is forthcoming from the signatories.

A Response to Peter Kwasniewski

Peter Kwasniewski—a philosopher and one of the signatories of the Open Letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy—has briefly responded on Facebook to my post On Charging a Pope with Heresy. He writes:

Jimmy Akin’s article at the NC Register, attempting to show why the Open Letter fails, will likely mislead many because of his know-it-all tone and seemingly watertight argument.

By his exceedingly narrow definition of dogma, Akin shifts the goal posts to such an extent that a vast number of actual condemnations for heresy in Church history would be excluded by it. Indeed, by his definition, the resurrection of Christ would not be a dogma, because it has never been solemnly defined as such; thus the denial of it would not constitute a heresy. Good news for modernist theologians!

On the other hand, even a kid brought up on the Baltimore Catechism would be able to say that someone who says that (e.g.) sinning is sometimes the best God asks of some people is a heretic.

On Michael Liccione’s page on Facebook, Kwasniewski states:

It’s [Kwasniewski’s previous response is] not an attack on his [Akin’s] person — I do not know him personally — but on his ridiculous definition of dogma and heresy. By his definition, many of the condemnations made by the Church Fathers would be rendered pointless. We can parse out canonical niceties until the cows come home, but if you need a doctorate to know what is and is not Catholicism — on rather basic issues like whether there is more than one religion on Earth that God positively wills, or whether cohabiting non-spouses can go up for Communion — then the whole project has failed, and we might as well hang up our hats and go to bed.

I would make several points in response.

I’m not going to engage Kwasniewski’s paraphrases of positions he attributes to Pope Francis. I agree that there have been any number of poorly phrased statements that need proper clarification. That is not the issue at hand: The charge of heresy is, and as I’ve shown, the signatories of the letter fail to prove their case.

I have not “shifted the goal posts” in any way. I explained the Church’s definition of the term heresy, and I have backed it up by quoting the relevant passages of its documents. That is why my piece offers a “seemingly watertight argument.” The actual goalpost shifting is by the signatories of the Open Letter, who have adopted a sloppy and overbroad understanding of heresy in order to make their case.

The Church’s definition of heresy does not exclude “a vast number of actual condemnations for heresy in Church history.” It embraces all of the magisterial condemnations for heresy where that term is used in its established sense.

By saying that “the resurrection of Christ would not be a dogma, because it has never been solemnly defined as such,” Kwasniewski neglects the fact that it was defined by the solemn Magisterium of the Church at the First Council of Nicaea (325) and the First Council of Constantinople (381), which is why it is part of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which the Church uses in its profession of faith. The entire Creed is thus a statement of dogma.

Ratzinger and Bertone, in their 1998 Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei, list “the articles of faith of the Creed” (n. 11) as truths “which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed” (n. 5)—i.e., as dogmas.

I would add that, even prior to I Nicaea, the Resurrection had been infallibly defined by the ordinary and universal Magisterium—a possibility that Kwasniewski also fails to discuss.

Kwasniewski’s statement that “even a kid brought up on the Baltimore Catechism would be able to say that someone who says that (e.g.) sinning is sometimes the best God asks of some people is a heretic” is a cute rhetorical flourish, but it does not correspond to the facts.

A “kid brought up on the Baltimore Catechism” could plausibly deduce that something is problematic about the statement in question, but the Baltimore Catechism does not identify this as a heresy, and it does not train children to be experts in diagnosing heresy.

By stating that the definitions I have offered for dogma and heresy are “ridiculous,” Kwasniewski reveals either (1) that he does not know how the Magisterium uses these terms or (2) that he considers the Magisterium’s use to be “ridiculous,” in which case his problem is with the Magisterium, not with me.

The use of these definitions in no way renders “many of the condemnations made by the Church Fathers” pointless. They retain their full force.

Kwasniewski complains about parsing out “canonical niceties,” but this is precisely the area that he and his co-signatories have ventured into by writing—in their words (in the Open Letter)—“to accuse Pope Francis of the canonical delict of heresy.”

You can’t accuse people of canonical delicts and then complain if you are being held to a canonical standard of proof. That is moving the goal post.

As I said before, it’s one thing to ask for clarifications, voice concerns, or express disagreement, but it’s another to start making charges of the canonical crime of heresy. When you do that, you’d better be able to prove your case, but Kwasniewski’s responses indicate that he can’t.

Some Clarifications Regarding the Open Letter

Recently I published a piece called On Charging the Pope with Heresy, which looks at the main problem with the recent Open Letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy—namely, that it fails to make its case.

So far, the most thorough engagement with the piece that I’ve seen is by Louie Verrecchio.

He thoughtfully and charitably asks if I could provide a few clarifications, and I’m happy to do so.

First, though, I’d like to add one of my own . . .

 

On the Matter of Credentials

At the beginning of my piece, I noted that none of the signatories of the Open Letter had doctorates in the relevant fields of canon law and sacred theology and that none appeared to be ecclesiologists or had published books on the Magisterium and how it exercises its infallibility.

A number of people, including Louie, took this as disparaging the signatories, but this was not my intent.

The National Catholic Register asked me to discuss the signatories’ credentials, and I agreed that this was needed because various press outlets were presenting them as highly respected scholars who would have expertise in this area.

In fact, only one of them is prominent as a theologian, and this isn’t his area of specialization.

I thus included the reference to help provide context for ordinary readers in understanding the degree of expertise the signatories have in this area, to keep them from overestimating the matter.

Also, because they aren’t experts in ecclesiology, it was my way of letting them off the hook, which is why I said that it made some of the flaws in the letter understandable.

Noting that someone is not an expert in a subject is a matter of fact that in no way disparages the person or diminishes their expertise in other areas or their other contributions.

Also, my critique of the letter’s contents did not involve their level of expertise. I did not argue that their charges should be dismissed because of lack of credentials. I never make that argument, for anyone, on any subject. That’s the ad hominem fallacy.

People’s arguments need to be met on the merits, and after providing this bit of context, that’s what I did: Look at the merits of the argument they made.

The need to consider the merits is something that I’m very aware of. As an autodidact, most of my own expertise in different subjects is through independent study, and this happens to be an area I’ve specialized in. I’ve even published a theological manual on the topic.

Thus, I would never argue that someone’s argument should be dismissed because they aren’t credentialed in an area.

However, enough people misunderstood my intention that I realize I could have done more to clarify the reason I brought up the subject.

It’s my fault for not doing so.

Now, let’s look at the clarifications Louie requested . . .

 

The Nature of Heresy

Louie’s discussion deals with the nature of heresy, so it will be helpful to note a few points up front.

The term heresy has had several meanings over the course of Church history.

Originally, the Greek word hairesis meant “sect,” “party,” “school,” “faction” or the views characterizing such a group—i.e., “opinion,” “dogma” (see A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., by Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich [BDAG]).

The adjective hairetikos thus meant “factious,” “division-making” (BDAG).

Thus, when Paul tells Titus,

As for a man who is factious [Gk., hairetikos], after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him (Tit. 3:10).

He means don’t waste your time on someone who persists in being divisive after you’ve warned him a couple of times.

In later centuries, the term heresy came to be applied—broadly—to any position that was in some way in conflict with Christian teaching and practice, but it didn’t have the technical meaning that it does today.

This has to be taken into account when reading older Christian documents, because we can’t impose on them a modern, technical meaning that the term had not yet acquired.

Today, the term heresy has a very technical meaning, which I document and explore in my original post. I go into even more detail in Teaching With Authority.

To put it concisely, today heresy is a canonical crime in which, after baptism, a person obstinately refuses to believe (i.e., doubts or denies) a dogma.

This is the sense of the term that is relevant if you want to charge a contemporary person—such as the pope—with heresy.

So, we need to know what dogma is.

 

The Nature of Dogma

Like the term heresy, the term dogma has had several meanings in the history of theology.

Originally, the Greek word dogma meant “ordinance,” “decision,” “command” (BDAG). That’s why Luke can say:

In those days a decree [Gk., dogma] went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled (Luke 2:1).

It also could refer to a tenet or statement of belief—i.e., “doctrine” or “dogma” in a loose, pre-modern sense (BDAG).

In later centuries, the term dogma came to refer to Christian teaching in general, without referring to a specific kind of teaching. This also has to be taken into account when reading older documents, when the term was still a synonym for doctrine (Latin, doctrina).

However, by the 18th century the term had come to refer to a subset of doctrines that must be believed “with divine and Catholic faith.”

This is, in essence, the set of beliefs that are contained in divine revelation (requiring divine faith) and that have been infallibly defined by the Magisterium as being part of divine revelation (requiring Catholic faith).

The upshot is that, today, the word dogma is used for those truths that the Magisterium has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed.

Heresy, then, is the obstinate, post-baptismal refusal to believe such a truth.

However, the Magisterium sometimes infallibly defines a truth without defining that it is divinely revealed. In that case, it is an infallible doctrine but not a dogma.

So, how can we tell which it is?

 

Infallible Doctrine or Dogma?

In my original piece, I wrote:

Note that just because something is infallible, that doesn’t make it a dogma. The Magisterium has to have infallibly said that it is divinely revealed for that to be the case.

Louie then says:

I would invite Mr. Akin to correct me if I have misread his position, but he seems to be treating the phrase “divinely revealed” almost, if not entirely, formulaically; as if a General Council that fails to explicitly state as much fails to teach dogmatically.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by “formulaically.” However, there is no set formula that the Magisterium must use, but it must in some way indicate not just that the matter is to be held definitively but that it is to be believed as a matter of theological faith, and thus is contained in divine revelation.

This is what I meant when I wrote:

But to create a dogma, the Magisterium needs to go further and, in some way [emphasis added], indicate that a truth is divinely revealed (e.g., by saying “is divinely revealed” in the case of a positive expression of dogma or by saying “is heretical” in the case of a doctrinal violation).

“Is divinely revealed” and “is heretical” are two possible ways of indicating this, but they are not the only ones. Saying things like “is a matter of faith” would also work, and there are other possibilities as well. As with papal infallibility, there is no set form of words that has to be used, but the concept has to be communicated in some way.

This gets us into how that happens in practice . . .

 

The Implications of “Anathema”

Louie writes:

My first thought upon reading his article up to this point is that when a council; e.g., the Council of Trent, employs the formula anathema sit, this alone is enough to inform the faithful that the truth in question is sufficiently based in revelation as to be considered divinely revealed; i.e., dogma.

I understand this impulse, and it’s a reasonable proposal when first considering the matter.

However, an examination of the historical record reveals that it isn’t the case.

As I discuss in Teaching With Authority (§§480-488), the term “anathema” literally referred to a special kind of excommunication, and it could be applied to non-doctrinal offenses.

For example, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) imposed anathema on Christians who sent ships to trade with certain countries “for a period of four years.”

That’s not a doctrinal matter at all; it’s a disciplinary infraction, as indicated by the sunset clause of four years. It’s not like Christian doctrine is going to change in four years, such that what’s intrinsically wrong now will cease to be when we hit the four-year date.

Some uses of the penalty of anathema thus do not establish doctrines. However, anathema was the strongest penalty that could be applied, and so when it is applied to a doctrinal matter, the Magisterium may be seen as invoking the supreme level of its teaching authority—i.e., infallibility.

That still leaves open the question of whether it’s defining that a doctrine is true or whether it’s defining that a doctrine is divinely revealed.

We can demonstrate that anathema is not always used to do the latter. This is clear when it’s used to define things that aren’t divinely revealed. For example, consider this canon from the Council of Trent:

If anyone says that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine remains together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and denies that wonderful and unique change of the whole substance of the bread into his body and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood while only the species of bread and wine remain, a change which the Catholic Church very fittingly calls transubstantiation, let him be anathema [emphasis added] (Decree on the Eucharist, can. 2; DH 1652).

This canon appears to make two definitions:

  1. In the Eucharist, the whole substance of bread and wine is changed to Christ’s body and blood so that the bread and wine do not remain.
  2. The Catholic Church very fittingly calls this change transubstantiation.

The second of these points is not a matter of divine revelation. The term transubstantiation was not coined until the 1000s, and so the term is not part of the deposit of faith that Christ gave to the apostles. The fittingness of the term for this miraculous change is thus what specialists refer to as a “dogmatic fact” rather than a dogma.

Thus, writing in 1896, Sylvester Hunter, S.J. stated:

In the same way [as other dogmatic facts had been defined], the Council of Trent (Sess. 13, can. 2; Denz. 764) defined that the word transubstantiation was most fit to apply to the change of the elements in the Eucharist (Sylvester Joseph Hunter, Outlines of Dogmatic Theology, 3rd ed., vol. 1 [New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1896], §221).

Therefore, from the mere use of the word anathema—even when it is applied to a doctrinal matter—we can’t infer that it’s establishing a dogma (something that belongs to divine revelation and thus the “primary object of infallibility”) rather than a dogmatic fact or another part of the “secondary object of infallibility.”

So how can we tell?

 

Clear and Less-Clear Indicators

If the Magisterium uses a phrase equivalent to “is divinely revealed” then it’s a slam-dunk that a dogma rather than just an infallible teaching is being established.

The same is true if a phrase equivalent to “is heretical” is used—provided we’re looking at a document written after the term heresy acquired its modern meaning.

If we’re looking at a document written when heresy could either mean what it does today or just mean opposed to Christian teaching and practice in a more general way, then the matter is less clear.

This can be a very tricky matter, and it has to be dealt with cautiously, on a case-by-case basis because, as we’ve said, there is no single phrase or set of phrases that has to be used.

The Magisterium needs to somehow teach that the doctrine is divinely revealed—otherwise, the modern definition of “dogma” is not met—but the matter can be difficult to discern in practice.

My sense is that, going forward, the Magisterium will be making it abundantly clear whether something is revealed, but in looking at older documents, before the present distinctions were made, the matter is more difficult to discern.

So, are there any case studies we can look to for guidance?

 

Two Helpful Examples

In 1998, Joseph Ratzinger and Tarcisio Bertone issued a Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei.

Because it did not carry papal approval, it does not itself qualify as a document of the Magisterium, but it represents the opinion of the top two doctrinal officials of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and thus it’s an extremely helpful guide.

In it, they offer two examples of matters that are (or were) infallible truths but not dogmas.

The first concerns the infallibility and primacy of the Roman pontiff. They write:

[T]he doctrine on the infallibility and primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff was already recognized as definitive in the period before the [First Vatican] council. History clearly shows, therefore, that what was accepted into the consciousness of the Church was considered a true doctrine from the beginning, and was subsequently held to be definitive; however, only in the final stage—the definition of Vatican I—was it also accepted as a divinely revealed truth.

Thus, prior to 1870 it was already an infallible teaching that the pope could exercise infallibility and that he held the primacy of jurisdiction over the Church. Then, in 1870, Vatican I elevated these truths to the status of dogmas.

The second matter concerns women’s ordination. They write:

A similar process can be observed in the more recent teaching regarding the doctrine that priestly ordination is reserved only to men. The Supreme Pontiff [John Paul II], while not wishing to proceed to a dogmatic definition, intended to reaffirm that this doctrine is to be held definitively, since, founded on the written Word of God, constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. As the prior example illustrates, this does not foreclose the possibility that, in the future, the consciousness of the Church might progress to the point where this teaching could be defined as a doctrine to be believed as divinely revealed.

Thus, they hold that John Paul II confirmed that the ordinary and universal Magisterium has already established that the reservation of priestly ordination to men is an infallible truth.

But, they indicate, it’s not yet a dogma.

This is fascinating, because they even say it’s a truth “founded on the written word of God, constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church.”

They thus draw a distinction between being “divinely revealed” and being “founded on” divine revelation. Presumably, this involves the distinction between something required by divine revelation but not contained within it (e.g., as a dogmatic fact) and something that is directly contained in divine revelation.

In view of these two examples, it seems to me that highly reputable theological minds today are being very careful about declaring something a dogma as opposed to an infallible teaching.

Consequently, in cases of doubt, the prudent course would be to assume that something is merely an infallible teaching.

The burden of proof would be on one to show why it is a dogma, especially in the absence of a clear indicator like “is divinely revealed” or “is heretical” (in the modern sense).

I hope this clarifies my understanding of the more theoretical matters that Louie asks about in his post. He also asks about a concrete issue raised in the Open Letter. However, this post is already long, so I will try to do another one on that subject.

I want to close by thanking Louie for his thoughtful and charitable interaction with my original post.

On Charging a Pope with Heresy

There are multiple problems with the recent Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church that charges Pope Francis with heresy, but here we will focus on the core problem: the letter fails to sustain the charge of heresy.

This fault is likely due to the lack of familiarity that the nineteen signatories have with the details of the concept.

A cursory review of the list of signatories indicates that none have doctorates in the relevant fields of canon law or sacred theology, though a few have licentiates (the equivalent of master’s degrees).

None seem to be specialists in ecclesiology—the branch of theology that deals most directly with the Magisterium of the Church—and none seem to have published a book on the Magisterium and how it engages its infallibility.

From this perspective, some of the flaws in the letter may be understandable, but from another perspective, they are not.

If you are going to charge anybody with heresy—but especially if you are going to charge a pope with it—you need to prove your case, and this letter doesn’t.

 

What Heresy Is

According to the Code of Canon Law, “heresy is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith” (CIC 751; cf. CCC 2089).

For heresy to occur, the following conditions must be met:

  1. The person committing it must be baptized
  2. Afterwards, he must refuse to believe (doubt or deny) a particular truth
  3. He must do so obstinately
  4. The truth in question must be one that is to be believed by “divine and Catholic faith”

 

What Divine and Catholic Faith Is

“Divine and Catholic faith” is a term of art that is explained in the previous canon:

A person must believe with divine and Catholic faith all those things contained in the word of God, written or handed on, that is, in the one deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, and at the same time proposed as divinely revealed either by the solemn magisterium of the Church or by its ordinary and universal magisterium (CIC 750 §1).

This requires some unpacking, but for a truth to require divine and Catholic faith, the following conditions must be met:

  1. It must be divinely revealed (i.e., be found in Scripture or Tradition)
  2. The Magisterium must have proposed it to be divinely revealed
  3. The Magisterium must have done so, either by (a) the solemn magisterium or (b) the ordinary and universal magisterium.

“The solemn magisterium” means an infallible definition issued either by a pope or an ecumenical council.

“The ordinary and universal magisterium” means an infallible exercise of teaching performed by the bishops in union with the pope, even though they are not gathered in an ecumenical council.

Consequently, a truth that requires divine and Catholic faith is a truth that, one way or another, the Magisterium has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed.

We have a name for such truths: dogmas.

 

What Dogma Is

A dogma is a special kind of Church teaching. Any time the Church authoritatively teaches something, it is a doctrine (Latin, doctrina = “teaching”).

Within the set of doctrines is a smaller set of teachings that have been infallibly defined by the Magisterium. These are infallible doctrines.

Within the set of infallible doctrines is a smaller set that consists of those infallible teachings that the Magisterium has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed. These are the dogmas.

Note that just because something is infallible, that doesn’t make it a dogma. The Magisterium has to have infallibly said that it is divinely revealed for that to be the case.

The distinctions between these categories, as well as examples of doctrines that belong to them, are discussed in a 1998 commentary by Joseph Ratzinger and Tarcisio Bertone.

They are also discussed, at length, in my book Teaching With Authority: How to Cut Through Doctrinal Confusion & Understand What the Church Really Says.

To give one example of how a doctrine can be infallible but not a dogma, Ratzinger and Bertone note that the Magisterium has infallibly defined that the priesthood can only be conferred on men, but it has not yet defined that this truth is divinely revealed.

Consequently, the reservation of the priesthood to men is an infallible doctrine but not a dogma—at least not yet.

 

Preliminary Consolidation

Putting the above together, the following conditions need to be met to sustain a charge of heresy:

  1. The person committing it must be baptized
  2. Afterwards, he must refuse to believe (doubt or deny) a particular truth
  3. He must do so obstinately
  4. The truth in question must be a dogma—that is, a truth the Magisterium has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed.

This is where the flaws in the Open Letter come in.

 

Failing to Demonstrate that Dogmas are Involved

The Open Letter lists seven propositions that the signatories take to be heresies, or denials of dogmas.

To support each claim, they cite various biblical passages and Church documents.

The biblical passages are neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate a dogma. They are not necessary because a dogma can be based in Tradition rather than Scripture.

They are not sufficient because, at most, they show that a truth is found in divine revelation. They do not show that the Magisterium has infallibly defined it to be divinely revealed.

This means that, to demonstrate a dogma, we need to focus on the Church documents.

Unfortunately, many of the documents they cite are simply not relevant to this endeavor. Many do not contain any infallible definitions, and nobody has ever claimed that they do.

Others do contain infallible definitions, but it is not clear that they give rise to dogmas. Remember: To be a dogma, the Magisterium must infallibly define that a truth is divinely revealed, not just that it is true.

In some cases, the documents use language indicating infallibility (e.g., the word “anathema,” though one has to be careful about this word, as it is sometimes used without making a definition, see Teaching With Authority §§480-488).

But to create a dogma, the Magisterium needs to go further and, in some way, indicate that a truth is divinely revealed (e.g., by saying “is divinely revealed” in the case of a positive expression of dogma or by saying “is heretical” in the case of a doctrinal violation).

The signatories of the Open Letter make no attempt to do the needed work. They either do not quote the language used by Church documents or they do not argue that the language they do quote shows that a truth has been infallibly defined as divinely revealed.

Instead, they cite passages as if the sheer number of them proves their case, which it doesn’t.

Indeed, it isn’t even clear that the passages they cite mandate the specific propositions they have in mind.

This is sloppy. It may sound impressive to someone not familiar with this area, but it is simply inadequate to the task they are attempting.

 

Failure to Demonstrate the Allegation

In addition to failing to demonstrate dogmas, the Open Letter also fails to demonstrate that Pope Francis obstinately doubts or denies dogmas.

One of the requirements for doing this is showing that his statements or actions cannot be understood in another sense.

If they can be understood consistently with dogma then the obligation of charity—and Pope Benedict’s “hermeneutic of continuity”—requires that they be taken this way.

Many of the Open Letter’s charges deal with the issue of divorce and civil remarriage, as discussed in the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, but as Cardinal Gerhard Muller has shown, the relevant statements in this document can be understood in harmony with Church teaching.

You can’t make a successful charge of heresy as long as this is the case.

Neither does the piling up of questionable staffing decisions—which the Open Letter does at length—prove the case. Staffing decisions are influenced by multiple factors, and you can’t cherry pick the data to support a claim of heresy, especially when the person in question is on record supporting Church teaching (e.g., regarding homosexuality).

 

Summing Up

The Open Letter has many other flaws, but its chief one is that it fails to make the case that the present pope is guilty of heresy. To do that, it would need to show the following:

  1. The Magisterium has infallibly defined some specific truth
  2. It has infallibly defined that this specific truth is divinely revealed, creating a dogma
  3. The pope has been baptized (that’s easy)
  4. The pope’s words or actions indicate that he refuses to believe the dogma
  5. His words or actions cannot be understood in a way consistent with the dogma
  6. He does so obstinately

If you can’t do those things, then don’t waste the public’s time.

In particular, don’t waste our time citing irrelevant documents that don’t prove your point, and don’t waste our time—as the signatories of the Open Letter do—with loopy charges regarding a pastoral staff that the pope has carried or a cross he has worn.

It’s one thing to ask for clarifications, voice concerns, or express disagreement, but making charges of heresy is another matter.

It’s gravely reckless and irresponsible to charge anyone with an ecclesiastical crime as serious as heresy if you can’t prove it, and it’s even worse to do so with regard to the pope, given the scandal, confusion, and risk of individual schism that it will create for the faithful.

“Three Days and Three Nights”?

In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says:

Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.

This has widely—and correctly—been understood as a reference to the period he spent in the tomb, between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

However, it raises a question about the timing of these events. Many people ask, if Jesus was crucified on Good Friday, how could he rise on Easter Sunday? That’s not “three days and three nights” later—at least by our reckoning.

To solve this dilemma, some propose that Jesus was actually crucified earlier—on a Wednesday. That way he could lie in the tomb all of Thursday, all of Friday, and all of Saturday, only to be raised early on Sunday.

Every year at this time—and periodically throughout the year—I get email from people telling me that I, and the vast majority of scholars (Catholic and Protestant alike), don’t know what we’re talking about when placing the Crucifixion on a Friday.

Some are positively insulting about it, presenting Matthew 12:40 as conclusive proof that we—apparently—have never thought about before.

But we have.

So, let’s talk about it and the other evidence we have from the New Testament about the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion.

 

Not a Matter of Faith

Let’s start by noting that, although the Church commemorates Jesus’ death on Good Friday, the traditional chronology of Holy Week is not a dogma of the Faith, and scholars can explore other options.

For example, in his Jesus of Nazareth series, Pope Benedict XVI discussed the view of the French scholar Annie Jaubert, who proposed that the Last Supper actually took place on Holy Tuesday rather than Holy Thursday.

That view is commonly shared by advocates of a Wednesday Crucifixion (though Jaubert still places the latter event on Good Friday).

After exploring the arguments proposed by Jaubert, he observes that the theory is “fascinating at first sight,” but that it “is rejected by the majority of exegetes” (2:111).

He then offers his own conclusion, stating:

So while I would not reject this theory outright, it cannot simply be accepted at face value, in view of the various problems that remain unresolved (Jesus of Nazareth 2:112).

For the pope to publish a book in which he says that he doesn’t “reject this theory outright,” even though he ultimately isn’t persuaded by it, is a clear indicator that alternative chronologies are possible.

But it’s a question of what the evidence supports. So what evidence is there?

 

The Day of the Resurrection

All of the Gospels indicate that Jesus’ tomb was found empty on Sunday morning.

  • Matthew says this happened “after the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning” (Matt. 28:1).
  • Mark says it was “when the sabbath was over” (Mark 16:1).
  • Luke says it was “at daybreak on the first day of the week” (Luke 24:1).
  • And John says it was “on the first day of the week” (John 20:1)

This gives us a solidly fixed day of the week, which is unmistakably Sunday—the day after the Jewish sabbath and the first day of the week on everyone’s reckoning.

Since no human eye witnessed the Resurrection itself, one could propose that Jesus actually rose some time Saturday (or any point after the burial), but this was not the understanding of the early Christians.

They universally understood Sunday as the day of the Resurrection, which is why they began gathering every first day of the week (1 Cor. 16:2) and why this day came to be known as “the Lord’s day” (Rev. 1:10; cf. Ignatius of Antioch, Magnesians 9:1).

We thus begin with the premise that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday, at least as it was reckoned at the time (remembering that Jews began the day at sundown, so for them Sunday began on what we would call Saturday night).

 

“The Sabbath”

You’ll note that Matthew and Mark both say that Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty after “the sabbath.”

In ordinary Jewish speech, “the sabbath” was overwhelmingly used to refer to the day of the week known to us as Saturday.

There are a few exceptions to this, where certain other holy days could be referred to as sabbaths:

  • The day of atonement (Lev. 16:31, 23:32)
  • The feast of trumpets (Lev. 23:24)
  • The first and eighth days of the feast of booths (Lev. 23:39)

However, these usages were rare, and the fact that Matthew says this sabbath preceded “the first day of the week,” which Luke and John confirm, indicates that it is the weekly sabbath we are talking about, which is what we’d expect from the unmodified use of “the sabbath.”

What else do we know about this particular sabbath?

Luke records that as soon as Jesus was buried, the women “returned and prepared spices and perfumed oils. Then they rested on the sabbath according to the commandment” (Luke 24:56).

If we back up a few verses, Luke records that the burial was done in haste, for “it was the day of preparation, and the sabbath was about to begin” (Luke 24:54).

Bear in mind that this is the same weekly sabbath that the Gospels report as the day before the Resurrection, so the chronology Luke gives is:

  • “the day of preparation”: Jesus buried
  • “the sabbath”: the women rest
  • “the first day of the week”: the women find Jesus’ tomb empty

 

“The Day of Preparation”

Modern people aren’t typically familiar with the phrase “the day of preparation,” but it was a way of referring to the day before the sabbath.

It was called that because devout Jews had to make preparations to rest on the sabbath. For example, they needed to prepare all the food that they would eat on Saturday. Thus, Moses declared:

“This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay by to be kept till the morning’” (Exod. 16:23).

Friday thus became known as the day of preparation. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes:

“The idea of preparation is expressed by the Greek name paraskeuê, given by Josephus (Ant. 16:6:2) to that day (compare Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; Matt. 27:62; John 19:42). In Yer. Pesaḥim 4:1 the day is called ‘Yoma da-’Arubta’ (Day of Preparation)” (s.v. Calendar).

What Luke is saying thus is that Jesus was crucified on Friday, the women rested on Saturday, and they found his tomb empty on Sunday.

The same is indicated by the other Gospels. Speaking of the same day that the women rested, Matthew records:

The next day [after Jesus was buried], the one following the day of preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember that this impostor while still alive said, ‘After three days I will be raised up.’ Give orders, then, that the grave be secured until the third day” (Matt. 27:62-64).

Matthew thus indicates that Jesus was buried on the day of preparation (Friday), and the next day—Saturday—the priests requested a guard be posted until the third day (Sunday).

Mark says that Jesus was buried, “the day of preparation, the day before the sabbath” (Mark 15:42). This is particularly significant because he then says the women found the tomb empty “when the sabbath was over” (Mark 16:1). Mark’s chronology thus has Jesus being buried on a Friday and raised on a Sunday, with the weekly sabbath intervening.

Finally, John says that Jesus was crucified “the day of preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14, LEB)—that is, the Friday in Passover week.

He then says that the Jewish leaders asked for the legs of the crucified to be broken “since it was the day of preparation, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross on the sabbath (for that sabbath was a high day)” (John 19:31)—and a sabbath falling in Passover did have extra solemnity.

Finally, John indicates that Jesus was buried hurriedly, in a nearby tomb: “So because of the Jewish day of preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there” (John 19:42).

He thus indicates that Jesus was crucified and buried on the day of preparation (Friday), which preceded the sabbath (Saturday), and he was discovered alive again “on the first day of the week” (John 20:1).”

All four Gospels thus point to the same Friday-Saturday-Sunday chronology, with each saying specifically that Jesus was crucified on the day of preparation (cf. Matt. 27:62, Mark 15:42, Luke 23:54, John 19:14, 31, 42).

 

“On the Third Day”
You’ll note that in Matthew the Jewish authorities asked that the tomb be secured until “the third day” (Matt. 27:64).

This is the standard way that Jesus referred to the time he would rise. There are at least eight cases in the Gospels indicating that he rose on “the third day” (Matt. 16:21, 17:23, 20:19, Luke 9:22, 18:33, 24:7, 24:31, 46).

Mark also records three instances of him saying he will rise “after three days” (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34), and John has him saying it will happen “in three days” (John 2:20).

However, the standard way of referring to the timing of the event was “on the third day”—a usage also found outside the Gospels (Acts 10:40, 1 Cor. 15:4).

To understand which day was the third, one must understand a couple things about how biblical authors counted:

  • The first unit of time after something happens begins immediately after the event. We still use this convention today. It’s why a president’s “first” year in office is the one that begins immediately upon his inauguration. His first year isn’t complete until he reaches his twelve-month anniversary.
  • Where the ancients differed from us is that they would often count parts for wholes. For example, they would often consider an emperor’s first year to be the time from when he took office to the beginning of the next calendar year. His “second” year would begin with New Year’s Day, meaning that his “first” year wasn’t twelve months long. Yet though it was only part of a twelve-month period, it was counted as a year.

The same thing applied to other units of time, such as months, weeks, days, and hours, and this has implications for the Crucifixion:

  • Jesus died at around 3 p.m. (cf. Luke 23:44-46), which means the first day of his death was the remainder of the day of preparation, between 3 p.m. and sunset.
  • The second day then began at sunset and lasted through the entire sabbath (i.e., it was Friday night and Saturday daytime).
  • The third day then began at sundown on the sabbath and lasted until sunset on the first day of the week (i.e., it was Saturday night and Sunday daytime).

This is why, on the road to Emmaus, the disciples can tell Jesus that “it is now the third day” since the Crucifixion (Luke 24:21).

We thus have abundant evidence pointing to the Friday-Saturday-Sunday chronology, with Jesus being raised “on the third day.”

 

“Three Days and Three Nights”?

How, then, do we explain the single verse in which Jesus says he will be in the belly of the earth for “three days and three nights”?

If we took that literally to mean three full days—no more and no less—then it would mean Jesus would be dead for exactly seventy-two hours, which would place the Resurrection at 3 p.m.—something nobody proposes.

We must therefore recognize that this expression is not to be taken fully literally. It involves a figurative expression.

To understand that expression, we can’t impose our own culture’s ideas. We need to look at how ancient Jewish authors used language, and here scholars are clear.

As conservative Protestant Bible scholar R. T. France notes: “Three days and three nights was a Jewish idiom to a period covering only two nights” (Matthew, 213).

Similarly, D. A. Carson, another conservative Protestant Bible scholar, explains: “In rabbinical thought a day and a night make an onah, and a part of an onah is as the whole. . . . Thus according to Jewish tradition, ‘three days and three nights’ need mean no more than ‘three days’ or the combination of any part of three separate days” (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, 8:296).

“Three days and three nights” is just an especially demonstrative way of saying “three days.” It doesn’t literally mean seventy-two hours.

And because of the ancients’ tendency to count parts for wholes—that is, to round numbers up—the three days of Jesus’ death were the final part of Friday, all of Saturday, and the first part of Sunday.

Of course, the phrase “three days and three nights”—with no further context—could mean seventy-two hours, but we have context for Matthew’s use of this phrase.

Ultimately, one cannot use a single verse that can be understood in more than one way to overturn all other the evidence we have from the New Testament—and from later in the Gospel of Matthew itself.

Scholars thus are on safe ground when they maintain the historic position that Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

The Resurrection of Jesus – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

The Resurrection of Jesus

Easter is a holy day for billions of people where we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus. But is belief in the resurrection just a matter of faith or is there evidence for it? Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli examine the theories for what happened that first Easter.

Direct Link to the Episode.

Links for this episode:

Mysterious Headlines

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Secret No More

After reading the secret, the Holy Father realized the connection between the assassination attempt and Fatima. He has since consistently attributed his survival of the gunshot wound to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima. 

For years I have had a special devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. Of all the recent Marian apparitions, Fatima has spoken to me the most. Like millions of others, I had often wondered about the contents of the “third secret of Fatima,” which is more properly termed the third part of the secret of Fatima.

When the Holy See released the text of the 83-year-old third secret June 26, it was as part of a booklet prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith titled The Message of Fatima (MF). I wasn’t the only one surprised at its contents. It did not contain prophecies of the end of the world, of a great apostasy, or many of the other things it had been rumored to contain. However, I was not disappointed. (Relieved would be a better word.) And it gave me a new appreciation of the Church’s struggle with Communism and of the current pontiff by showing me the view from heaven.

What Happened at Fatima, Portugal

Lucia dos Santos—the only Fatima seer alive today—is in many ways the “core” visionary of Fatima. She says she experienced supernatural visitations as early as 1915, two years before the famous appearances of the Virgin Mary. In 1917, she and two of her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were working as shepherds tending their families’ flocks. On May 13, 1917, the three children saw an apparition of Our Lady. She told them, among other things, that she would return once a month for six months.

At Our Lady’s third appearance, on July 13, Lucia was shown the secret of Fatima. She reportedly turned pale and cried out with fear, calling Our Lady by name. There was a thunderclap, and the vision ended.

The children again saw the Virgin on September 13. In the sixth and final appearance, on October 13, a dramatic outward sign was given to those gathered to witness the event. After the clouds of a rainstorm parted, numerous witnesses—some as far as 40 miles away—reported seeing the sun dance, spin, and send out colored rays of light.

Meanwhile, as World War I raged across Europe, an epidemic of Spanish flu swept the globe. It erupted in America and was spread by soldiers being sent to distant lands. This epidemic killed an estimated 20,000,000 people. Among them were Franciso and Jacinta, who contracted the illness in 1918 and died in 1919 and 1920, respectively. Lucia entered the convent.

On June 13, 1929, at the convent chapel in Tuy, Spain, Lucia had another mystical experience in which she saw the Trinity and the Blessed Virgin. Mary told her, “The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father in union with all the bishops of the world to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means” (S. Zimdars-Schwartz, Encountering Mary, 197).

On October 13, 1930, the bishop of Leiria (now Leiria-Fatima) proclaimed the apparitions at Fatima authentic and worthy of assent.

The Secret Is Written Down

Between 1935 and 1941, on the orders of her superiors, Sr. Lucia wrote four memoirs of the Fatima events. In the third of these, she recorded the first two parts of the secret, explaining that there was a third part she was not yet permitted by heaven to reveal. In the Fourth Memoir, she added a sentence to the end of the second part of the secret: “In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc.” This sentence has been the basis for much speculation that the third part of the secret concerned a great apostasy. Sr. Lucia also noted that in writing the secret in the Fourth Memoir, “With the exception of that part of the Secret which I am not permitted to reveal at present, I shall say everything. I shall not knowingly omit anything, though I suppose I may forget just a few small details of minor importance.”

Upon the publication of the Third and Fourth Memoirs, the world became aware of the secret of Fatima and its three parts, including Our Lady’s request that Russia be consecrated (entrusted) to her Immaculate Heart by the pope and the bishops of the world. On October 31, 1942, Pius XII consecrated not only Russia but the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. What was missing, though, was the involvement of the world’s bishops.

In 1943, the bishop of Leiria ordered Sr. Lucia to put the third secret of Fatima in writing. She did not feel at liberty to do so until 1944. It was then placed a wax-sealed envelope on which Sr. Lucia wrote that it should not be opened until 1960.

The “Third Secret” and the Popes

The secret remained with the bishop of Leiria until 1957, when it was requested (along with photocopies of Sr. Lucia’s other writings) by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. According to Cardinal Bertone the secret was read by both Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI (see MF, “Introduction”). “John Paul II, for his part, asked for the envelope containing the third part of the ‘secret’ following the assassination attempt on 13 May 1981” (ibid.). He read it sometime between July 18 and August 11.

It is significant that John Paul II did not read the secret until after the assassination attempt was made on his life. He notes in Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), “And thus we come to May 13, 1981, when I was wounded by gunshots fired in St. Peter’s Square. At first, I did not pay attention to the fact that the assassination attempt had occurred on the exact anniversary of the day Mary appeared to the three children at Fatima in Portugal and spoke to them the words that now, at the end of this century, seem to be close to their fulfillment” (221).

After reading the secret, the Holy Father realized the connection between the assassination attempt and Fatima. He has since consistently attributed his survival of the gunshot wound to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima. “It was a mother’s hand that guided the bullet’s path,” he said, “and in his throes the Pope halted at the threshold of death” (Meditation from the Policlinico Gemelli to the Italian Bishops, May 13, 1994).

As had Pius XII, John Paul II decided to consecrate not only Russia but also the entire world to her Immaculate Heart. After he read the third part of the secret in July, he decided to journey to Fatima on May 13, 1982, and there performed the Act of Entrustment.

This act, however, did not appear to satisfy the requested consecration, and so, “on 25 March 1984 in Saint Peter’s Square, while recalling the fiat uttered by Mary at the Annunciation, the Holy Father, in spiritual union with the bishops of the world, who had been ‘convoked’ beforehand, entrusted all men and women and all peoples to the Immaculate Heart of Mary” (Bertone, MF).

“Sister Lucia personally confirmed that this solemn and universal act of consecration corresponded to what Our Lady wished (‘Yes it has been done just as Our Lady asked, on 25 March 1984’: Letter of 8 November 1989). Hence any further discussion or request is without basis” (Bertone, MF).

The Fall of Communism

After it became public that there was a secret of Fatima and that it mentioned Russia, many pondered Fatima in the light of Russian Communism.

Nineteen seventeen was a year of turmoil for Russia. Besides fighting in World War I, the country experienced two civil wars known as the February Revolution and the October Revolution. The former led to the creation of a provisional government that proved unstable. On October 24–25, less than two weeks after the final appearance of Our Lady of Fatima, the second revolution resulted in the creation of the Soviet government.

In the ensuing years, Russia expanded its sphere of influence, exporting Communist ideology and revolution to other lands and martyring Christians wherever it spread. Once Pope John Paul II’s 1984 consecration took place, first the Soviet bloc and then the USSR itself crumbled from a variety of social, political, and economic factors.

As the Pope himself noted, “And what are we to say of the three children from Fatima who suddenly, on the eve of the outbreak of the October Revolution, heard: ‘Russia will convert’ and ‘In the end, my [Immaculate] Heart will triumph’ . . . ? They could not have invented those predictions. They did not know enough about history or geography, much less the social movements and ideological developments. And nevertheless it happened just as they had said” (CTH, 131; emphasis in original).

Though he did not reveal the third part of the secret until this year, six years earlier John Paul II hinted at its contents. Immediately after he meditated on the fall of Communism in connection with Fatima, he went on to write:

“Perhaps this is also why the Pope was called from a ‘faraway country,’ perhaps this is why it was necessary for the assassination attempt to be made in t. Peter’s Square precisely on May 13,1981, the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima – so that all could become more transparent and comprehensible, so that the voice of god which speaks in human history through the ‘signs of the times’ could be more easily heard and understood” (CHT, 131-132).

By the year 2000, the Holy Father felt able to reveal the final part of Fatima’s secret, since “the events to which the third part of the ‘secret’ of Fatima refers now seem part of the past” (Sodano, MF, “Announcement”). The pontiff selected the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta on May 13, 2000 in Portugal as the occasion to announce this fact.

Interpreting the Secret

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the CDF, points out that the key to the apparition of Fatima is its call to repentance and conversion (MF, “Theological Commentary”). All three parts of the secret serve to motivate the individual to repentance, and they do so in a dramatic way.

The first part of the secret—the vision of hell—is the most important, for it reveals to individuals the tragic consequences of failure to repent and what awaits them in the invisible world if they are not converted.

In the second part, Mary says, “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” Speaking of devotion to the Immaculate Heart as a means of salvation is not part of our cultural vocabulary and is easily misunderstood. Some anti-Catholics have even taken it as a false gospel replacing the gospel of Christ. It is no such thing, as Cardinal Ratzinger explains:

“According to Matthew 5:8, the ‘immaculate heart’ is a heart which, with God’s grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore ‘sees God.’ To be ‘devoted’ to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means therefore to embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiat —‘your will be done’—the defining center of one’s whole life. It might be objected that we should not place a human being between ourselves and Christ. But then we remember that Paul did not hesitate to say to his communities: ‘imitate me’ (1 Cor. 4:16; Phil. 3:17; 1 Thess. 1:6; 2 Thess. 3:7, 9)” (op. cit.).

After explaining the vision of hell, Mary spoke of a war that “will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI.” This latter war, of course, was World War II, which Sr. Lucia reckoned as having been occasioned by the annexation of Austria by Germany during the reign of Pius XI (J. de Marchi, Temoignages sur les apparitions de Fatima, 346).

Sr. Lucia understood the night of the “unknown light” mentioned by Our Lady to be January 25, 1938, when Europe was witness to a spectacular nighttime display of light in the sky. In her third memoir she wrote, “Your Excellency is not unaware that, a few years ago, God manifested that sign, which astronomers chose to call an aurora borealis. . . . God made use of this to make me understand that his justice was about to strike the guilty nations.”

Much has been made of the statement “Russia will be converted.” Many people have assumed this meant the Russian people as a whole would become Catholic. But the language of the text does not require this: The Portuguese word converterá doesn’t necessarily mean converted to the Catholic faith. It can mean simply that Russia will stop its warlike behavior, and thus “there will be peace.” This interpretation seems to be the one understood by John Paul II in a passage cited above from Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

The Third Part

In reading the third part of the secret, it is important to understand that its imagery is similar to that of many prophecies in the Bible in four key ways.

First, its depiction of events is non-literal. When it describes the pope’s ascent to the foot of a cross, it can be seen as symbolic of the continual struggle of the pope to follow Christ.

Second, it compresses events that occur over many years and in many places into a single image. The third secret of Fatima is essentially an icon of the twentieth-century conflict between the Church and Communist Russia. And, like any icon, the elements that it shows us must be meditated upon in a kind of timeless fashion.

Third, the third secret is written according to the language of appearances. It describes things as they appeared in the vision, not necessarily as they are in reality. We see this mode of speech (called “phenomenological language”) in the Bible, for example, when Scripture speaks of the sun rising and setting. The sun appears to move around the earth, though in reality it is the motion of the earth around the sun that causes this phenomenon.

Fourth, scriptural prophecies often can be changed by the response of human free will. For instance, when Jonah preached destruction to Nineveh and it repented, God spared it. Similarly, in Scripture, God declares, “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I intended to do to it” (Jer. 18:7–8).

In one crucial respect, the secret of Fatima is unlike any of the biblical prophecies: It is not divinely inspired. While it is the product of God’s grace, God does not guarantee the exact wording or even every element of the text the way he does with the statements of Scripture.

In a letter to John Paul II date May 12, 1982, Sr. Lucia wrote: “The third part of the secret refers to Our Lady’s words [in the second part]: ‘If not, [Russia] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated’ (13-VII-1917)” (MF, Introduction).

In interpreting the third part of the secret, the angel with the flaming sword clearly represents the judgment that would fall on the world were it not for the intercession of Mary (and, of course, the intercession of others, though here it is Mary with whom we are concerned). For many years it was rumored that the third part of the secret involved the possibility of a nuclear war. If there is anything in the text that suggests this, it is the flames of the sword, which Sr. Lucia noted “looked as though they would set the world on fire.”

In Scripture, fire tends to be an image of judgment or conflict in general. In his commentary on the angel’s flaming sword, however, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to allude to nuclear war: “Today the prospect that the world might be reduced to ashes by a sea of fire no longer seems pure fantasy: Man himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword” (ibid.). In the 1984 consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the second of Pope John Paul II’s specific petitions was, “From incalculable self-destruction, from every kind of war, deliver us” (Sodano, MF, “Introduction”).

The angel then signifies the means by which the judgment is averted: “Pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’”

The seers then saw in the unapproachable light of God a reflection of someone who, Lucia says, ‘we had the impression . . . was the holy father.’”

With the pope were others climbing a mountain to a rough-hewn cross. Mountains are traditional places where man meets with God, the difficult process of ascending the mountain suggesting the perseverance required to follow God. The ruggedness of the cross depicted in the vision evokes the harshness of the sufferings of Christ and those who share in his sufferings.

The journey of the pope and those with him through the half-ruined city suggests that the Church must pass through the destruction that accompanies war, and it evokes the suffering of the pontiff in witnessing this destruction but being unable to stop it. This reflects the experience of many twentieth-century popes.

Then comes the part of the vision reflecting the attempted assassination on Pope John Paul II. It shows that he, like numerous other members of the Church, must face the possibility of martyrdom in the conflict between the Church and Russian Communism. (There are, in fact, significant indications that the would-be papal assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, was on a mission sponsored by the Russian secret police, the KGB.)

There are two.aspects of this part of the secret that will be seized upon by those who wish to challenge the Holy See’s interpretation. First, the killers are described as a group of soldiers using guns and arrows, not as a lone gunman who is not a soldier.

The response to this objection is simple. The third part of the secret simply describes one group of people killing another group. The soldiers in the vision represent all those who have been used by Communists to martyr or attempt to martyr Catholics, and those being killed represent all Catholics who suffer in this way at the hands of Communists. The vision thus indicates that the Holy Father will himself be a victim of this violence, though without indicating the particular means by which it will be brought to bear upon him.

Critics of the Holy See’s interpretation will also point to the fact that Pope John Paul II did not die. To this there are a couple of responses:

(1) If in the vision Lucia saw the pope being shot and falling over, she might well have thought that he had been killed even though in reality he would only be gravely wounded.

(2) The intercession of Mary may have changed what would have happened. “That here ‘a mother’s hand’ had deflected the fateful bullet only shows once more that there is no immutable destiny, that faith and prayer are forces which can influence history and that in the end prayer is more powerful than bullets and faith more powerful than armies” (Ratzinger, MF, op. cit.).

In the final image of the two angels, an aspersorium can refer to a stoup, basin, or vessel used to hold holy water, or it can refer to the.aspergill used to sprinkle holy water. Either way, the angels using the blood of the martyrs to sprinkle the souls going to God gives us a powerful symbol of salvation, of the honor shows to the martyrs by God, and of the significance of their blood. Cardinal Ratzinger points out: “Therefore, the vision of the third part of the ‘secret,’so distressing at first, concludes with an image of hope: No suffering is in vain, and it is a suffering Church, a Church of martyrs, which becomes a sign-post for man in his search for God” (op. cit.).

Apologetic Fallout

Having looked at the entire secret of Fatima, it remains for us to assess a few questions and apologetic issues that remain in the wake of the release of its final part:

1) Has the Vatican revealed the whole of the secret?
Yes. Any accusation to the contrary is simply not credible. John Paul II clearly believes that the third secret of Fatima is crucial to understanding his own pontificate. He is specially invested in the third secret, and, if he says that he has released the full text of the document, then he has. No one with an accurate appraisal of the moral character of John Paul II could think otherwise.

2) Why does the end of the second part of the secret not flow seamlessly into the third?
Because the third part was written more than three years after the first two. Though the three parts describe a single event, they were not composed as a single narrative. For whatever reason, when Sr. Lucia wrote down the third part of the secret she chose not to write it in a way that fit seamlessly with her previous narrative.

3) Wouldn’t it have been of use for people to have known the secret much sooner? 
Sr. Lucia herself explained: “It may be . . . that some people think that I should have made known all this some time ago, because they consider that it would have been twice as valuable years beforehand. This would have been the case, if God had willed to present me to the world as a prophetess. But I believe that God had no such intention, when he made known these things to me. If that had been the case, I think that, in 1917, when He ordered me to keep silence . . . He would, on the contrary, have ordered me to speak” (Third Memoir, 115).

This highlights the error of those who have insisted that the Virgin Mary demanded that the third part of the secret be read to the world by 1960 at the latest. When queried about this, Sr. Lucia replied: “It was not Our Lady. I fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood but that only later would it be understood” (Bertone, MF, “Conversation”).

4) To what does the triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart refer?
Cardinal Ratzinger explains, “The Heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world ” (op. cit.).

5) Are other interpretations of the “third secret” possible?
Since the Holy See has not infallibly defined the subject, other interpretations are possible. This does not mean that other interpretations are rational—at least if they depart from the main lines of the interpretation given by the Holy See.

The reason has to do with the nature of private revelation. Since it is principally for the benefit of the individuals directly involved, they are the most likely to interpret it properly. In this case, both Sr. Lucia and the Holy Father are in agreement that the interpretation offered in The Message of Fatima is the correct one. Those of us who are not principals have little reason to question the judgment of those for whom the revelation was given.

Bottom line: If they’re satisfied, we should be.

Getting Fatima Right

In 1915, as World War I raged in Europe, a Portuguese girl saw something strange in the sky.

The girl—Lucia dos Santos—was seven years old and lived near the town of Fatima. One day, as she was tending her family’s sheep along with three other girls, they began to say the rosary and saw a strange sight.

In the second of four memoirs she would write, Lucia recalled: “We saw a figure poised in the air above the trees; it looked like a statue made of snow, rendered almost transparent by the rays of the sun.” She also wrote, “It looked like a person wrapped up in a sheet.”

They did not know what to make of the sight, and it vanished when they finished praying. The same thing happened on two more occasions.

The angel of peace

In the spring of 1916, Lucia and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Martos (then 7 and 6) began seeing an angel.

It appeared as “a young man, about fourteen or fifteen years old, whiter than snow, transparent as crystal when the sun shines through it, and of great beauty.”

The angel identified itself as “the angel of peace” and as the guardian angel of Portugal. Lucia understood it to be the same figure she had seen in the sky.

The angel appeared to the children on three occasions, taught them prayers, and during the last appearance showed them a host and chalice that hung miraculously in the air. It then gave them Holy Communion.

‘I am from heaven’

On May 13, 1917, the three were again tending their sheep when they perceived what they thought was a flash of lightning. As they hurried home, there was another flash, and they beheld a beautiful woman in a hemlock tree that grew in a field known as the Cova da Iria.

“We beheld a Lady all dressed in white. She was more brilliant than the sun and radiated a light more clear and intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water, when the rays of the burning sun shine through it” (Fourth Memoir).

When asked where she was from, the Lady replied, “I am from heaven.” She requested that the children return to the spot once a month for six months.

She also informed the children that they would go to heaven, and she asked if they were wiling to offer themselves to God and bear the sufferings he would send them, in reparation for sin and the conversion of sinners. They replied they would.

She also told them: “Pray the rosary every day, in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.”

“Jesus wishes to make use of you”

When the Lady reappeared the next month, Lucia asked her to take the three children to heaven, and she replied, “I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon. But you are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved. He wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.”

This prediction was fulfilled. In 1918, toward the end of the war, a global flu pandemic took the lives of millions. Among them were Francisco, who died in 1919, and Jacinta, who died in 1920. Lucia would not die until 2005 at the age of 97.

A secret revealed

At the July apparition, the Lady promised that, in October, she would identify herself and perform a miracle so that all might see and believe.

She also gave the children a secret, which included a vision of hell that caused Lucia to cry out. Afterward, the Lady said:

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.

“To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world. In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved; etc. . . . Do not tell this to anybody.”

Arrested

The children were prevented from returning to the site on August 13 because the local mayor—an opponent of the apparitions—had the young visionaries arrested. Despite threatening them, he was unable to get them either to admit that they were lying or to reveal the secret.

Pilgrims who had gathered at the site of the apparitions reported strange phenomena. Some said they saw a blue and white cloud descend and then ascend again, some reported lightning, and some reported seeing our Lady.

‘A chapel that is to be built’

Since the children had not been able to come to the site of the apparitions on August 13, the Lady appeared to them a few days later.

When asked what should be done with money that pilgrims were leaving at the apparition site, she indicated that two processional litters should be made for the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, adding, “What is left over will help toward the construction of a chapel that is to be built here.”

On September 13, large crowds of pilgrims greeted the children and urged them to present their petitions to the Lady.

As the children and the crowd prayed the rosary, she appeared, this time promising, “In October our Lord will come, as well as Our Lady of Dolors and Our Lady of Carmel. Saint Joseph will appear with the Child Jesus to bless the world.”

The miracle of the sun

On October 13, the Lady said, “I am the Lady of the Rosary. Continue always to pray the rosary every day. The war is going to end, and the soldiers will soon return to their homes.”

According to Lucia, the Lady opened her hands, “made them reflect on the sun, and as she ascended, the reflection of her own light continued to be projected on the sun itself.”

Lucia then called for people to look at the sun, and an event called “the miracle of the sun” occurred. Although not everyone claimed to see the phenomenon, numerous individuals reported that the sun appeared to change colors, spin, and “dance” in the sky.

In the wake of this event, the children reported visions of St. Joseph, the Child Jesus, and our Lady in various guises, including Our Lady of Dolors and Our Lady of Carmel, as had been promised.

First Saturdays devotion

In the July 1917 apparition, the Lady had indicated that she would request a devotion involving the First Saturdays of the months.

This request was made on December 10, 1925, when Lucia was a novice among the Dorothean Sisters. On that day, Sr. Lucia experienced an apparition of the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus, in which Mary said:

“All those who during five months, on the first Saturday, go to confession, receive Holy Communion, say a rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes, meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the rosary for the intention of making reparation to me, I promise to assist them at the hour of death, with all the graces necessary for the salvation of their souls” (Documents on Fatima & the Memoirs of Sister Lucia, 279-280).

On January 15, 1926, she experienced an apparition of the Child Jesus, asking if she had spread this devotion, which has come to be known as the First Saturdays devotion.

Consecration requested, apparitions approved

The July 1917 apparition also indicated a request would be made for the consecration of Russia, and this was done on June 13, 1929. On that night, Sr. Lucia experience a vision of the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary, in which Mary said:

“The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the bishops of the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means” (Documents on Fatima & the Memoirs of Sister Lucia, 393-394).

On October 13, 1930, the bishop of Leiria, Portugal—in whose territory Fatima lies—granted formal approval for the 1917 apparitions, declaring “as worthy of credence the visions of the children in the Cova da Iria, parish of Fatima, of this diocese, on the thirteenth day of each month from May to October 1917” (Documents on Fatima & the Memoirs of Sister Lucia, 290).

“An unknown light”

In the July 1917 apparition, the Lady stated that the war (World War I) would end but that a worse one could break out in the reign of Pius XI, who would not be elected until 1922. The sign presaging this event was to be “a night illumined by an unknown light.”

On the night of January 25-26, 1938, an extraordinary display of the aurora borealis was widely visible in Europe. In her Third Memoir, Sr. Lucia interpreted this as the sign indicating the new war was close.

World War II broke out the following year.

The third part of the secret

Between 1935 and 1941, Sr. Lucia wrote a series of four memoirs concerning the 1917 apparitions and her cousins.

In the Third Memoir, she revealed the first two parts of the secret they had been given on July 13, 1917: the vision of hell and the material concerning Russia and the pope, along with the forthcoming requests for the First Saturdays devotion and the consecration of Russia.

However, she did not reveal the third part at that time. On January 3, 1944, at the request of her bishop, Sr. Lucia did record it, placing the text in a sealed envelope, which in 1957 was transferred to the Holy See.

Before giving the sealed envelope containing the third part of the “secret” to the then bishop of Leiria-Fatima, Sr. Lucia wrote on the outside envelope that it could be opened only after 1960, either by the patriarch of Lisbon or the bishop of Leiria. Archbishop Bertone therefore asked: “Why only after 1960? Was it our Lady who fixed that date?” Sr. Lucia replied: “It was not our Lady. I fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood, but that only later would it be understood” (The Message of Fatima; all subsequent quotations are taken from this document).

When 1960 came, the Holy See chose not to reveal the third part of the secret.

Assassination attempt

On May 13, 1981—the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition—a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca shot John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. The pope almost died from the wound, but surgeons were able to save his life.

Though Agca has repeatedly changed his story, it is widely thought he was acting on behalf of Communist forces wishing to neutralize the Polish pope, who went on to play a key role in the downfall of Soviet Communism.

On July 18, 1981, John Paul II read the third part of the secret for the first time and learned what it contained.

The consecration performed

As early as 1942, Pius XII consecrated the entire world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and in 1952 he specifically consecrated Russia.

Following the assassination, while he was still recuperating, John Paul II had a special act of entrustment performed on June 7, 1981, and it was repeated in Fatima on May 13, 1982.

However, there was a question of whether these fulfilled the request made by the Virgin Mary, as she had asked that the pope perform the consecration “in union with all the bishops of the world.”

Consequently, “in order to respond more fully to the requests of ‘our Lady’ . . . on 25 March 1984 in St. Peter’s Square, while recalling the fiat uttered by Mary at the Annunciation, the Holy Father, in spiritual union with the bishops of the world, who had been ‘convoked’ beforehand, entrusted all men and women and all peoples to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Subsequently, in a letter dated November 8, 1989, Sr. Lucia confirmed that the consecration had been done, writing, “Yes, it has been done just as our Lady asked, on 25 March 1984.”

The fall of communism

The Cold War, which began in the wake of World War II, was a tense period. It saw various conflicts; national borders were redrawn (“various nations will be annihilated”), and the world itself was threatened by the prospect of nuclear war.

In 1989, the Soviet bloc collapsed, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved, with the Communist Party losing power in Russia.

Beatification and disclosure

In 2000, John Paul II beatified Francisco and Jacinta. He also decided that the time had come to release the third part of the secret, and the Holy See issued The Message of Fatima, which contained it along with supporting documents.

The third part of the secret turned out to be a vision of destruction in which an assassination attempt was made on the pope. Others also were martyred.

Interpreting the secret

The first part of the secret was a vision of hell, the ultimate consequence of human sin, and the second and third parts contained references to how human sin would play out in the course of the twentieth century.

The Lady referred to the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II.

According to Sr. Lucia, “The third part of the secret refers to our Lady’s words: ‘If not, [Russia] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.’”

The third part of the secret therefore seems to refer in a special way to the Cold War and the persecution of the Church by atheistic Communism.

“The vision of Fatima concerns above all the war waged by atheistic systems against the Church and Christians, and it describes the immense suffering endured by the witnesses of the faith in the last century of the second millennium. It is an interminable Way of the Cross led by the popes of the twentieth century.”

The assassination attempt on John Paul II on the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition, along with his act of consecration and his role in the fall of Soviet Communism, seems to indicate that he, in a special way, was tied to the fulfillment of the prophecy.

John Paul II regarded the fact he survived the assassination attempt as a special grace. “Sr. Lucia was in full agreement with the pope’s claim that ‘it was a mother’s hand that guided the bullet’s path and in his throes the pope halted at the threshold of death.’”

The significance of Fatima

The Church teaches that private revelations like Fatima do not have the same status as the public revelation God has given us in Scripture and Tradition.

The latter requires the assent of faith, but private revelations—even when approved—do not. The “ecclesiastical approval of a private revelation has three elements: the message contains nothing contrary to faith or morals; it is lawful to make it public; and the faithful are authorized to accept it with prudence.”

The purpose of private revelation is to help people live the Faith in particular circumstances, such as the conflicts that affected the Church in the twentieth century. However, even when these circumstances are past, apparitions can have an enduring value going forward.

In The Message of Fatima, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) wrote:

Insofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of the “secret”: the exhortation to prayer as the path of “salvation for souls” and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion (ibid.).

What Was Hitler’s Religion?

Adolf Hitler was one of the most evil figures of the 20th century. His ideology of war and racism led to millions of deaths.

What was it that drove him to adopt the abominable policies he did? Did his views on religion play any role in this?

There’s a startling lack of information on this subject in the public sphere—and much of what you hear is wrong.

So let’s set the record straight.

 

Ideologues Have Ideas

I’ve looked into the question of Hitler’s religion for decades. I remember being in bookstores back in the 1990s, leafing through the indices of biographies of Hitler, searching for information on the subject.

Yet the biographies I checked said little, and it was hard to find concrete information. They discussed his persecution of Jews and—to a lesser extent—Christians, but they didn’t devote much space to what he, personally, believed.

It was as if Hitler either didn’t have religious views or they weren’t important.

That never struck me as plausible, because of the kind of figure Hitler was.

It isn’t just that he was an authoritarian dictator. I can imagine someone who has no particular views on questions like God and the afterlife ending up in political power and then doing cruel things to maintain it. Such a person would simply be an opportunist.

He might have a personality disorder that leads him to do extreme things to maintain his hold on power, but that wouldn’t mean he had strong views on religious questions.

Yet Hitler wasn’t simply an opportunist. He was an ideologue.

His rabid anti-Semitism was an illustration of that. So was his Aryan master race ideology, his plan to build a “Thousand-Year Reich” for Germany, and his belief in an overarching destiny for his movement.

Ideologues are obsessed with ideas, and that means they inevitably have views on the Big Questions. Is there a God or not? What does he want? Is there an afterlife? What’s our ultimate destiny?

Ideologues don’t have to be favorable to traditional religions. Since the nineteenth century, Communist ideologues have fiercely opposed belief in God and the afterlife.

However, that just replaced traditional religions with a new one: atheism. Further, instead of seeing a divine plan behind history, they saw the laws of the material universe providing an inescapable triumph of Communism over other systems.

It thus seemed inevitable that Hitler would have some kind of views on religious subjects—views that would have inspired his ideology of war, racism, and destiny.

The question was: What were they?

 

A Practical Question

I was interested in the subject for its own sake—just to understand a seemingly inexplicable historical evil—but it was also a partly practical question for me.

The reason is that it’s a fact of history that Hitler—like ninety percent of everyone born in Austria at the time—was baptized a Catholic.

This made it easy for anti-Catholics to portray Hitler as a loyal son of the Church who simply took the anti-Semitism found in European Christian circles to its murderous and logical extreme.

In 1963, German playwright Rolf Hoccuth published a play called The Deputy in which he portrayed Pius XII—the pontiff during World War II—as having failed to take action against or condemn the Holocaust.

In 1999, British journalist John Cornwell published the book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, in which he argued that the wartime pontiff was anti-Semitic and silent in the face of the murder of six million European Jews.

Both works were roundly criticized by historians who looked into the subject, but they helped fuel the fires of those who wished to portray the Catholic Church as having a cozy relationship with Nazism.

In reality, the Church vigorously opposed it. Even before the war, Eugenio Pacelli—the future Pius XII—contributed to the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (German, “With Burning Concern”), which condemned Nazi ideology.

To underscore the Church’s forceful rejection of it, this encyclical was written in German instead of the usual Latin and then smuggled into Germany to be read from the pulpit of every Catholic church on Palm Sunday.

It condemned the Nazi’s “so-called myth of race and blood,” as well as numerous actions of the German state, and after it was released, “Hitler was beside himself with rage. Twelve presses were seized, and hundreds of people sent either to prison or the camps” (Anton Gill, An Honourable Defeat; A History of the German Resistance to Hitler).

During the war, Pius XII oversaw clandestine Catholic efforts to save Jewish people from being shipped to the concentration camps, and in his book Three Popes and the Jews, Orthodox Rabbi Pinchas Lapide estimated that “the final number of Jewish lives in whose rescue the Catholic Church had been the instrument is thus at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability, it is much closer to . . . 860,000.”

Pius XII’s opposition to Hitler was so well known that he wrote a letter of resignation in the event that he was captured by the Nazis, so that a new pope could be elected in a neutral country, away from Nazi control (Andrea Tornielli, Francis: Pope of a New World).

Upon his death, Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, stated: “When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.”

Despite the opposition of the Church to Nazi ideology, the question of Hitler’s religion had a practical aspect for me from an apologetic perspective.

It was one thing to show that Hitler had turned his back on Catholic teaching, but it would be better to be able to identify exactly what he came to believe.

 

False Starts and Better Information

I thought I had a promising lead when I found the 1989 book The Nazis and the Occult by American journalist Dusty Sklar.

In it, she linked Nazi ideology to various occult and neo-pagan ideas that were floating around Austria at the time, and for a while I relied upon this book.

However, I came to realize that while Sklar was correct that such ideas were present in the ethos of the time, the book was unscholarly, and these ideas could not simply be attributed to Hitler.

I also came across unreliable documentaries that similarly sought to portray Nazism as a fundamentally occult/neopagan movement.

Fortunately, in recent years much more information about Hitler’s religious beliefs have become available—as well as more easily findable due to the Internet—and today there are several quality treatments of the subject.

One is American historian Richard Weikart’s 2016 book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich.

It is a balanced, carefully argued work that interacts with the views of different scholars and documents Hitler’s beliefs using his own writings and speeches, as well as memoirs of him by his associates.

The quotations in the sections that follow can be found in it unless otherwise noted.

 

Was Hitler an Occultist or a Pagan?

Those who link Hitler to occultism or neopaganism can point to the fact that there were prominent occult societies in Vienna, Austria, where Hitler lived in early adulthood.

Further, some of his associates were involved in these activities. Individuals such as Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi educational leader, both favored the reintroduction of German paganism, involving the worship of deities such as Wotan (Odin) and Thor.

However, this did not mean Hitler subscribed to these views. Weikart notes, “At the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1938, Hitler confronted head-on the neopaganism in his own party. Some Germans were becoming unsettled at Rosenberg’s and Himmler’s attempts to resurrect ancient Germanic gods, rites, and shrines. Hitler reassured his followers that this did not represent the official party position, nor did it correspond with his own perspective.”

Not only did Hitler distance himself from such views in public, he also mocked them in private. According to Nazi architect Albert Speer, he derided Himmler’s religious efforts, saying, “What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may someday be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave.”

Weikart also notes, “Hitler’s military adjutant likewise recalled that Hitler disapproved of Himmler’s plans to reintroduce the cult of Wotan and Thor. In October 1941, Hitler ranted again about the foolishness of trying to resurrect the cult of Wotan.”

 

Was Hitler an Atheist?

Hitler’s godless behavior made it easy for some to portray him as an atheist. The millions of deaths he was responsible for represent a slaughter comparable only to those of the atheistic, Communist dictators of the twentieth century—such as Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot—and it is easy to see Hitler as one who feared neither God nor man.

Some of Hitler’s contemporaries even described him in atheistic terms. One was the early Nazi Party official Otto Strasser. Another was Hitler’s friend Ernst Hanfstaengl, who said, “He was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him” (Hitler: The Memoir of the Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Fuhrer).

But Strasser and Hanfstaengl both turned on Hitler, and their descriptions of him as an atheist may have been attempts to damage his reputation or distance themselves from him. Hanfstaengl, in particular, only said that he was an atheist “to all intents and purposes,” suggesting that he was just very irreligious, not a committed disbeliever in God.

Hitler was not an atheist according to his public statements. Thus in 1937 he remarked that the German national anthem “constitutes a pledge to the Almighty, to his will and to his work: for man has not created this Volk [i.e., the German people], but God, that God who stands above us all.”

However, many politicians engage in insincere God-talk just to curry favor with their constituents, and there is no doubt that Hitler was a prolific liar who refrained from fully disclosing his religious beliefs to the German people, lest he lose support among believers.

We thus must ask whether Hitler actually believed in a deity or whether he just mouthed what he thought people wanted to hear.

Weikart writes: “Was this just a pose for public consumption? Not likely. Hitler not only appealed to Providence as his guide in many public speeches and in both his books, but he also did the same in his private monologues. His closest colleagues also testified that he believed Providence had anointed him for a special task.”

 

Was Hitler a Christian?

If Hitler professed a belief in God even in private, we need to ask what kind of deity he believed in. Was it the Christian God?

In his speeches and writings, he attempted to give the impression that it was. However, his antagonism toward historic Christianity was so strong that he publicly reinterpreted it.

Early in his career, he said he supported what he called “positive Christianity,” according to which Jesus was a great Aryan who fought against Jewish materialism.

He then used this image of Jesus-as-fighter to inspire his followers to likewise fight. In 1923, he gave a speech in which he said, “We must bring Christianity to the fore again, but the fighting Christianity (Kampfchristentum)” which did not involve “mute acceptance and suffering, but rather a doctrine of struggle” against injustice, saying “now is the time to fight with fist and sword.”

Hitler’s understanding of Christ was bizarre. According to him, Jesus was not a Jew. Weikart notes, “in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic.”

Although Hitler was prepared to see Jesus as having been martyred because of his opposition to Jewish practices, he did not believe in the Resurrection. According to Hitler’s confidant Otto Wagener, Hitler stated that “Christ’s body was removed from the tomb, to keep it from being an object of veneration and a tangible relic of the great new founder of a religion.”

As the years progressed, Hitler deemphasized “positive Christianity” and in private he admitted this was a pose.

As early as 1931, Weikart notes, “Goebbels recorded that Hitler wished to withdraw from the Catholic Church but was waiting for the right moment. Hitler’s wish seemed to excite Goebbels, even though he admitted it would cause a scandal. But Goebbels relished the thought that he, Hitler, and other Nazi leaders would someday leave the churches en masse.”

Hitler also envisioned the overall demise of Christianity. In 1937, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that “The Fuhrer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

One reason it would take time was that Hitler felt he needed to keep the German people united in order to fight the war. However, afterward things would be different. In 1941 he told his district lieutenants, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction.”

His rejection of Christianity did not mean embracing atheism, however. As Hitler privately told Nazi newspaper editor Hans Ziegler, “You must know, I am a heathen. I understand that to mean: a non-Christian. Of course, I have an inward relationship to a cosmic Almighty, to a Godhead.”

 

What Was Hitler?

If Hitler wasn’t an occultist, a neopagan, an atheist, or a Christian, what was he?

The answer is that, religiously as in other matters, he was an eclectic who didn’t follow an established school of thought. Instead, he borrowed different ideas that were floating around in the culture of his day.

If we had to describe his religious views in a single phrase, we could say that he was a pseudo-scientific evolutionary pantheist.

Each of these elements requires some unpacking.

 

Pantheism

Pantheism is the view that God and the world are identical. It emphasizes the immanence of God in nature at the expense of his transcendence.

It began to gain traction in Europe in the 1600s as a result of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and, later, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.

Pantheism lacks a personal God separate from creation. Instead, the world itself is understood as a spiritual entity.

This is why Hitler could still affirm a belief in “a cosmic Almighty,” despite his rejection of the Judeo-Christian God.

Hitler was powerfully impressed with nature—as illustrated both by his racial theories and by nature imagery in Nazi propaganda—and so he tended to conflate God with nature.

Thus in 1941 he spoke of “the helplessness of humanity in the face of the eternal law of nature. It is not harmful, if we only come to the knowledge that the entire salvation of humanity lies in trying to comprehend the divine Providence and not believing that he can rebel against that law.”

As Weikart points out, “In this passage, Hitler equated ‘divine Providence’ with natural laws that are also eternal.”

Hitler did not believe that the world was created. Instead, it was eternal, and rather than being able to appeal to a loving Creator who can intervene in human history, Hitler believed people must simply submit to the iron laws of nature.

 

Evolution

This leads to the next element of Hitler’s religion: It was heavily focused on evolution. This is the reason for his racial policies.

Hitler believed that, through the process of evolution, nature had produced a hierarchy of races, with Nordic Germans at the top and groups like Jews and Africans much further down.

Since evolution involves survival of the fittest, Hitler believed that conflict between these races was natural and desirable, that the weaker should be subjugated or eliminated so that the superior might prosper.

It also is why he opposed race mixing, because it would mean weakening the superior strains of humanity by introducing genetically inferior material into their lines.

And it is why he favored euthanasia, which he saw as helping to weed out the genetically defective and the weak from the gene pool.

All of these things, according to Hitler, facilitated the process of evolution and thus corresponded to the “will” of nature.

This also explains Hitler’s antipathy toward Christianity, with its emphasis on the equality of all peoples and its efforts to help the weak.

 

Pseudo-Science

Although some of Hitler’s ideas were shared by the Social Darwinists and eugenicists of his era, they remain fundamentally unscientific.

Conceived of as a purely natural process (as opposed to the tool of an intelligent Creator), evolution would not produce a hierarchy of organisms or, within humanity, of races.

Hitler—like many others—misunderstood the concept of survival of the fittest. This does not mean the survival of the strongest or the most aggressive.

Instead, it means the survival of those life forms that are most “fit” or adapted to their environment. Thus, fish have been evolutionarily fitted for life underwater, while humans have been evolutionarily fitted for life on land.

As environments change over time, what counts as “fit” changes. This is why the dinosaurs died out and mammals began to fill the ecological niches they left behind.

It’s also why, during the Cold War, many feared that humans might no longer be fit for the environment that would result from a nuclear war, but cockroaches might be.

If evolution were a purely natural process, as Hitler believed, then there would be no permanent, overall standard of fitness—only adaptation to changing environments.

Hitler had a simplistic understanding of evolution and did not take into account things like the development of altruistic behaviors or how a species’ overall survival might be promoted by it helping its physically weaker members and the contributions they could make.

The pseudo-scientific nature of his understanding can be seen by considering his policy against race mixing. Why should this apply only on the level of races? Why not apply it to individual bloodlines within races?

On Hitler’s logic, one could argue that a superior family should never breed with lesser families lest it taint its genes, but we know what the result of that would be: inbreeding and everything that follows from it.

Not only are highly genetically similar populations prone to birth defects, they also are more vulnerable to diseases, because if a germ comes along that works against a given set of genes, and everyone has those genes, the population can be fatally damaged.

Consequently, breeding outside of one’s group often promotes greater population resilience, and individuals who result from such unions often display greater strengths—a phenomenon known in biology as hybrid vigor.

It is tragic that Hitler’s pseudo-scientific ideas led him to embrace a pseudo-religion that resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent people through genocide and war. His example stands as a witness to the evil that can result from blinding oneself to the true God and his message of love and compassion for all