By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Sep 16, 2024
A new height in pontifical fuzziness was reached by Pope Francis on, of all dates, Friday the 13th (see our news story All faiths lead to God, Pope tells youth in Singapore). It is a great sorrow to many Catholics that we must endure such a pontificate. Just stop and think about the numbers of bishops and priests who have to walk constantly on that tightrope of truth which requires them to faithfully teach the Catholic Faith without undermining confidence in the Church’s very constitution, by which the successor of St. Peter is the monarchical administrator of the Church while being the guarantor of Catholic teaching under only very carefully-defined conditions.
About all we can do is to attempt to clear things up one point at a time, and this time the question before us is whether all “faiths” really do lead to God, or lead equally well to God. As it turns out both postulates are utterly rejected right from the first in Scripture, under both the Old and the New Covenants. Therefore, it ought not to be terribly difficult to make the distinctions necessary to understand the issue.
Scripture vs. natural religion
The history of the Jews under the Old Covenant is one long Providential path in which God acts decisively to separate His People from the surrounding nations, all of which worship false gods. This is so obvious that I presume I need not spend much time on it. The Jews are warned again and again to keep themselves separate from all the other nations, including the avoidance of any intermarriage, because the other nations all worship “strange gods”—that is, non-existent gods or idols. They are rather obviously being manipulated by the Devil, but the point repeatedly made by the Lord God is precisely and simply this: All faiths are not salutary because all religions do not lead to God.
Indeed, many religions lead directly to the Devil, some lead to a substitution of nature for God, and all the rest of them, apart from Judaism and Christianity—the only two that even claim to have been publicly revealed by God Himself—lose themselves in constant distortions. These distortions reflect either the limitations of a purely natural theology or the errors of those who claim a particular knowledge of God through some sort of personal revelation, for which there is absolutely no supernatural evidence. Indeed, it is the burden of much of Scripture to testify to actual Divine evidence—the evidence of miracles and prophecy—which completely distinguish Judaism and Christianity from any other religion the world has ever seen.
We often confuse the natural recognition of the existence of God (which all of us can possess as part of the natural law) with “faith” or “religion”. Our natural awareness that God must necessarily exist is not “faith” but a rational conclusion which can be explored philosophically. It is a wonderful help in that it should stimulate a desire to know God personally, but our spiritual aspirations do not constitute a religion until they are clothed in specific doctrines and practices of worship and behavior. Our word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, which means an obligation or a bond, a noun derived from the verb religare (“to bind”). It is no surprise, then, that all kinds of binding to all kinds of obligations tend to emerge in religious systems, and these depend on who is formulating the rules, and whether the inspiration for the religion in question is purely natural, actively diabolical, or in fact demonstrably Divine.
Consider the source and the institution
While a natural form of religion may lead someone to recognize a Divine Revelation when it occurs—indeed, presumably this is exactly how God intended nature and supernature to harmonize—we have thousands of years of experience beginning even before the Fall to confirm that something has gone seriously wrong. We ought to be aware of how easy it is for people to rationalize their own selfish desires into either made-up religions or the denial of God altogether. The history of the world alone should be enough to teach us that it has generally been easier for people to make formal or informal religions out of their own selfish desires than to discipline their minds and wills in the service of Divine perfection.
It is a lesson of history, in fact, that the normal condition of mankind is to be dramatically wrong about God and about what God has or has not revealed to us concerning Who He is and how He wants us to live and worship. If we traverse the religions of the world we can enumerate the following types and examples:
- Those which, like Buddhism and Confucianism, are mostly human philosophies;
- Those that derive from tribal traditions which may be either purely natural or diabolically inspired—now morphing into contemporary popular commitments to witchcraft, or direct and deliberate devil worship (e.g., the St. Death of the drug cartels);
- Those which, like Hinduism, are strange combinations of human philosophies with rather obviously diabolical mythologies;
- Judaism, which remains in a class by itself, being uniquely predicated on God’s self-revelation but ceasing to accept that on-going Revelation with the coming of Jesus Christ;
- Odd religious amalgamations, like Islam and Mormonism, which are combinations of other religions, and which claim (without any evidence) a specific revelation all their own;
- Those sects which, like all the Protestant forms, began with an appreciation for a miraculously-attested Divine Revelation but rejected the revealed authority principle that was intended to guarantee it against human tampering;
- Those such as the Orthodox churches which originally participated in the fullness of Catholicism and indeed still preserve its sacramental character, but which were led primarily by politics to abandon key aspects of the Church’s Divine constitution—chiefly, again, the Petrine principle of authority;
- And finally Catholicism, which is not only based on a miraculously-attested Divine Revelation but possesses the God-given principle of authority necessary to protect that Revelation from spiraling into a fallacious nothingness through misdirected human interpretations—an absolutely essential feature which no other religion in the world even claims.
It ought to be obvious that for all religious claims we must consider the source, and in doing so we may find that the source is not God. Moreover, we must consider the institutional character of the religion itself to see if it bears anything of Divine origin within it, including any protection against its dissolution into a mere collection of human ideas and interpretations. Even for those which claim a Revelation, while they may lead sincere followers to some understanding of and relationship with God, they may also proclaim an ever-increasing series of distortions of what God has revealed. This is so true that, even within the Catholic Church herself, we must thoroughly understand the nature and limits of her Divine protection against error.
Going astray
The generic concept of “faith” (that is, personal belief in a particular set of religious ideas about God) does not necessarily lead to God, and it never has. The supernatural virtue of Faith does so, but it is not at all the topic under discussion. Someone’s “personal faith” may rather lead a person into so many errors that he cannot easily disentangle himself from them in order to really begin to know God, and to respond in love. Obviously, anything in any religion which is naturally true or has been borrowed from Divine Revelation has the potential to be what Pope Francis claimed in Singapore for all faiths, namely one of the “paths to reach God”. But of such truths many religions contain few or none, and most others cover these truths with so much dross as to render them seriously defective for the purpose of knowing, loving and serving our Creator.
In other words, most “faiths” require something between rejection and serious correction in order to lead to God. The best that many of these faiths might do is to serve as disappointments, prompting an adherent to look elsewhere. But the worst would be either to enmesh the believer in falsehood or to cause him to give up entirely.
This, of course, does not mean that those who adhere to false religions are to be mocked or even to be written off as lost. What it means, in fact, is that we are called always to preach the Gospel, to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ. Insofar as we may recognize a selfless sincerity and evidence of truth in any religion, of course, we recognize the source in our Divine Creator, but there is a tremendous danger in religious indifferentism. To take Pope Francis at his word—that all faiths are simply “different languages in order to arrive at God”—is to fall into a grave error, for some religions actually obscure God or lead away from God. Moreover, all those religions not grounded in the fullness of Divine Revelation are distorted to the point of making it far more difficult to achieve that blessed union which God desires for each one of us.
No other option
Now I grant the force of one rhetorical question Pope Francis raised in the same address to young people in Singapore, “If you start to fight—‘My religion is more important than yours; mine is true and yours isn’t’—then where will that lead us?” Manifestly, if we are just bragging or just denouncing, we are not serving the Gospel. Rather, it is always necessary to take the path of love and service, and an important part of that love and service must arise from our understanding, as St. Paul exhorted, that God “desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” Here is the full passage:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men… that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was borne at the proper time. [1 Tim 2:1-6]
Not all religions are ordered to God. Not all religions ordered to God take advantage of what God has revealed. And not all religions tied to Revelation understand it or commit themselves to all of it.
Therefore, let me recall once again St. Paul’s defense of his own conduct in his first letter to the Corinthians. He stated most emphatically that he did not impose himself on anyone, but that he always tried to be gracious and conciliatory: “To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings” (1 Cor 9:22).
St. Paul’s purpose must be our own. This is not denigration, it is not rivalry, it is not seeking a position of superiority, nor is it picking a fight. Rather, this is love. It is the very highest from of Divine love—the very form of love for which the God-man Jesus Christ was crucified.
But there is something else it is not as well: It is not optional for Catholics.
Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.
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