James White, Carlos Martini and Ecumenism

I mentioned in my essay about “Why James White is wrong,” that the late Roman Catholic Cardinal Carlo Martini, was one of the drivers of the current United Bible Society’s Greek New Testament. This Greek New Testament is used widely to translate modern Bible versions such as the English Standard Version (ESV), New International Version (NIV), Good News Bible, and many others.  James White was a good friend and supporter of Cardinal Martini, who in turn supported James White’s writings on Catholic websites. The saying “birds of a feather flock together” comes to mind.  The question is, who was this Cardinal Martini really, and how could he have influenced James White’s thinking?

Journalist Julia Meloni of CrisisMagazine.com wrote this about Martini on February 28, 2019 (with some editing by me). Not only does it enlighten what Martini believed and preached, and how it could have influenced James White, it also shows up the dangers of the ecumenical movement: where the Catholic and Protestant churches (together with other religions), consistently move closer to each other.

Before his death in 2012, Cardinal Carlo Martini eerily called himself an “ante-pope,” a “precursor and preparer for the Holy Father.”

Martini was the leading antagonist to Popes John Paul II and Benedict—a Jesuit famous for groaning that the Church was “200 years behind.” In Night Conversations with Cardinal Martini, he cringed about the Church speaking “too much” about the sixth commandment and sin. He also said legal abortion was, ultimately, “positive.”

For Martini saw himself as a dreamer who kept us “open to the surprises of the Holy Spirit.”  Hadn’t the prophet Joel said that your sons and daughters would prophesy and your old men would dream dreams? The old cardinal dreamed of young “prophets” who’d criticize the Church and a “strong middle generation” who’d effect “changes.”

Martini said that in “preparation” for the 2005 papal election, he and others discussed the “new answers” that the next pope would “have to give” on sexuality and Communion for adulterers. For Martini was the leader of the St. Gallen “mafia,” the anti-Ratzinger group that wanted a “much more modern” Church under Cardinal Bergoglio.

According to Austen Ivereigh’s The Great Reformer, Cardinal Bergoglio quoted Martini frequently and was introduced by him to the Gallen group after the two Jesuits reconnected in 2001.

In a fiery last interview published immediately after his death, the ante-pope Martini burned with disdain at conservatism in the Catholic church. James White himself said that one cannot criticize Catholic belief since itself has evolved and is evolving all the time.

The Church was “tired,” its rites were “pompous,” and he who had dreamed of a “young church” now stared at countless ashes, said Martini. How he wanted the embers beneath the ashes to burn! Where were the men who burned for the spreading of the “spirit”? Where were the men who would preach “discernment” and carry the Eucharist to those in “complex family situations”?

“Are we afraid? Fear instead of courage?” he cried.

Pope Francis soon praised Martini as “prophetic”—a “father for the whole church”—and hailed his agenda of “focusing” on synods. In 1999, Martini “had a dream” of hurtling the Church into “permanent” synodality—that is, permanent revolution. The decentralized, “synodal” Church would foment changes on marriage, sexuality, penitential practice, priestly celibacy, women in the Church, ecumenism, and the like.

So at the rigged Synod on the Family, Cardinal Baldisseri—who, according to The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?, was overheard explaining how he’d manipulate that synod—calls this year’s synod on young people a “continuation of the subject of the family.” He says the youths bemoaning Church “prohibitions” via web surveys and Facebook will marvellously prophesy what Christ wants to “cut out.”

“As in the days of Samuel and Jeremiah, young people know how to discern the signs of our times, indicated by the Spirit,” the synod’s preparatory document intones. That text, as Matthew McCusker shows, is pervaded with Modernism, which heretically claims that doctrines come from “experience” and thus must “evolve.” Is this what James White believes? That translating Bibles comes from experience and thus must evolve?

Modernists hold that “truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.”

At a pre-synodal planning seminar with Cardinal Baldisseri, one young prophet invoked her sage “experience” to lament how “closed” the Church is to those with “radical” views on issues like transgenderism. In other remarks published by the Vatican, she extolled a fourteen-year-old who “need[ed] to create her own religion to find one that is welcoming.” Another young prophet announced: “The pope asked us to ‘make chaos,’ that’s precisely what we’re doing.”

Indeed, Pope Francis had urged the young—specifically “agnostics,” those “estranged” from the Church, and “atheists”—to “criticize” the Church in fulfilment of Joel 3:1-2. “‘The old will dream dreams, and the young will prophesy,’ namely, with prophecies they will take concrete things forward,” he explained.

So what the Pope was effectively saying was that young people, who are our adults of tomorrow, will create their own “truth” through their experiences and subjective voices that will be heard, mainly through social media. They will no longer need a God since they will become their own god. This he called prophecy, a fulfilment of Joel 3!

Pope Francis was quoting Martini once again, for the ante-pope had dreamed all this, too. Grandiosely invoking Joel in Night Conversations, Martini presaged that the “things we are waiting for” would gust in “via the uninhibited qualities of young people.” The Church “can’t teach young people anything.” It “can only help them to listen to their inner master.” Being taught by the young is a new “pastoral principle.”  Of course as one study the roots of the New Age Movement it becomes clear that to New Agers, “The Christ” and “the inner master” is the same thing, i.e. effectively worshipping self. And didn’t 2 Tim 3:2 predict that in the last days “men shall be lovers of their own selves…”?

They were Martini’s “glowing coals”—“working to save the world” with their leftist politics, forging new “beginnings” with their “less inhibited approach to sexuality.”

And then the nexus with Ecumenism: Carlos Martini called Martin Luther a “great reformer” and said “you cannot make God Catholic”. Remember this comes from a  “revolutionary” Jesuit Catholic Cardinal- One who seeked a meeting of minds between Catholics and Protestants. This is why next year’s Amazon Catholic synod will crusade for married priests and women deacons; why the Germans are letting some Protestants receive the Eucharist and why a respected Vaticanist says an “ecumenical mass” is being readied; why Pope St. Pius X cried of the Modernists: “What is there left in the Church which is not to be reformed according to their principles?”

Carlos Martini, James White’s friend and admirer, preached a “utopia,” where everyone ends up “transparent and accepted by everyone else.”  The time is coming, and coming soon, where these revolutionary prophets will cry, with Martini, that “the times are long gone when the Church could talk you into having a guilty conscience.” Then the sons and daughters, the young people on FaceBook and the rest of social media,  will prophesy that there is no Hell, no sin, no judge, and no judgment and so evil is good and good is evil. And this, will bring the Catholic and Protestant revolutionists in sync with the New Age Movement, ready to receive a false Christ who shall, as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. (2 Thes 2:4).