HomeCatholic Candle note: When you read the word “conciliar” in the following article, think “anti-Catholic” or “anti-Christ”.
The devil and evil men in the conciliar church know that they can control people’s thinking if they control how people speak. For example, “Christian” truly means one who follows Christ. But only Catholics truly follow Christ and so only Catholics are really Christian.
One who
truly follows Christ enters heaven. No one truly follows Christ unless he is a Catholic in the state of grace. It is a dogma of the Catholic Faith that there is
No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church! If a person is not Catholic, he is not a Christian and cannot save his soul.
The conciliar church abuses the word “Christian” by calling heretics and schismatics “Christian”, to promote the heresy that non-Catholics can go to heaven.
To promote Heresy, the Modernists adopted the phrase “the People of God”
Just as the conciliar church abuses “Christian” to corrupt people’s thoughts by corrupting speech, so also the conciliar church abuses “the People of God”. Although one can use this phrase in a Catholic way (viz., to refer only to Catholics), the modernists have hijacked this phrase to promote two conciliar errors: ecumenism and collegiality.
Whereas Catholics seldom called the Church “the People of God” before Vatican II, the conciliar church has been continually using this phrase since the 1960s.
The conciliar church claims this phrase, “the People of God” as its own.
Vatican II (and the conciliar church it caused), increased the use of “the People of God” so dramatically that the conciliar church claims this phrase as its own innovation. Pope John Paul II remarked that “the doctrine in which the Church is presented as the People of God” is a “
novelty of the Second Vatican Council”.
Sacrae Disciplinae Leges, 25 January 1983 (emphasis added).
Although the phrase is not completely new, nonetheless, because Vatican II widely popularized the phrase to promote heresy, a faithful and informed Catholic risks confusing and scandalizing others by using “the People of God”.
Vatican II’s use of this expression is traceable to the writings of a 20th-century Lutheran heretic.
Former Pope Benedict XVI (who served as a peritus, i.e., an expert, at Vatican II) traces the origin of Vatican II’s usage of the phrase “the People of God” to a Lutheran heretic, Ernst Käsemann. Here is how this former pope explains Käsemann’s influence upon Vatican II:
There is a third factor that favored the idea of [using the phrase] the “People of God”. In 1939, the Evangelical exegete, Ernst Käsemann, gave his monograph on the Letter to the Hebrews the title,
The Pilgrim People of God. In the framework of Council discussions, this title became right away a slogan because it made something become more clearly understood in the debates on the Constitution on the Church [
i.e., Lumen Gentium] ....
The conciliar usage of the expression “the People of God” promotes heretical ecumenism with non-Catholics.
The conciliar church falsely teaches that the Church of Christ encompasses more than just the Catholic Church, and that therefore one need not belong to the Catholic Church to save one’s soul. The conciliar church uses the phrase “the People of God” to spread this heresy (
viz., there is salvation outside the Catholic Church).
For a thorough explanation of this Vatican II heresy about a (so-called) “Church of Christ” which the conciliar church teaches is broader than the true Catholic Church, read the explanation in
Lumen Gentium Annotated, by the editors of
Quanta Cura Press, © 2013, p.47
et seq. This book is available for free at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B49oPuI54eEGbzRhdmQ3X0Z6RFE/view and sold at cost by
Amazon.com.Here is the way former Pope Benedict XVI explains how the phrase “the People of God” promotes Vatican II’s ecumenism with the heretics and schismatics:
[T]he Council introduced the concept of “the People of God” above all as an ecumenical bridge. It applies to another perspective as well: the rediscovery [sic!] of the Church after the First World War that initially was a phenomenon [sic!] common to both Catholics and Protestants. ...
[T]he phrase “People of God” ... expresses the
ecumenical dimension, that is, the variety of ways in which communion and ordering to the Church can and do exist, even beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.
The conciliar notion of the Church as “the People of God” allows the conciliar church to falsely posit different degrees of “communion” with the Church. Here is the way former Pope Benedict XVI explains how the phrase “the People of God” promotes the conciliar idea of degrees of “communion”:
If we use the image of a body to describe “belonging” we are limited only to the form of representation as “member”. Either one is, or one is not, a member; there are no other possibilities. One can then ask if the image of the body was too restrictive, since there manifestly existed in reality intermediate degrees of belonging.
The Constitution on the Church [
viz., Lumen Gentium] found it helpful for this purpose to use the concept of “the People of God”. It could describe the relationship of non-Catholic Christians [sic] to the Church as being “in communion” and that of non-Christians as being “ordered” to the Church where in both cases one relies on the idea of the People of God (
Lumen Gentium, nn. 15, 16).
The Ecclesiology of Vatican II, 15 September 2001 conference given by (former) Pope Benedict XVI before he became pope, found at:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfeccv2.htm (parenthetical citation is in the original; bracketed words added for clarity).
The conciliar usage of the expression “the People of God” promotes the heretical notion of a “horizontal”, non-hierarchical church.
This emphasis on “the People of God”, instead of the Mystical Body of Christ, de-emphasizes the hierarchical nature of the Church, since a body is hierarchical (with some parts more exalted and which control other parts) but “the people” is non-hierarchical. This de-emphasis of hierarchy panders to the Protestants, as well as to the “we are church” modernist Catholics.
When promoting the non-hierarchical expression, “the People of God”, former Pope Benedict XVI stated:
- “[S]omeone should ask what must I do to become Church and to grow like the Church”;
- “[E]ach one of us can and ought to say, ‘we are the Church’”; and
- “[W]e must be the Church. We are the Church”.
Promoting conciliar collegiality, former Pope Benedict XVI also warned that there is always a danger that the papal monarchy could have too much power. Here are his words:
The idea of reform became a decisive element of the concept of the People of God, while it would be difficult to develop the idea of reform within the framework of the Body of Christ. ... yet above and beyond all distinctions, all are pilgrims in the one community of the pilgrim People of God. ... It is certainly true that there are imbalances that need correcting. We should watch for and root out an excessive Roman centralization that is always a danger.
Whereas priestly and Episcopal orders, and the delegation of Divine authority distinguish the clergy from the laity, describing the Catholic Church as “the People of God” obscures these differences. For example, in
Lumen Gentium, §13, Vatican II lumps together the hierarchy and clergy along with laymen as “members of the People of God”.
Here is how former Pope Benedict XVI explained (with approval) how the phrase “the People of God” deemphasizes the hierarchical nature of the Church:
The expression does not lend itself easily to a description of the hierarchical structure of this community, especially if “People of God” is used in “contrast” to the ministers ....
Conclusion
One can correctly describe the Catholic Church as “the People of God”. However, Catholics seldom used this phrase. Beginning at Vatican II, the modernists hijacked this phrase, and the conciliar church has used it ever since to promote two heresies.