A Catholic professor blasted Pope Francis, accusing the Pontiff of “destroying the foundations of faith and morals.”
Renowned philosophy professor and intimate friend of Pope John Paul II, Josef Seifert, published an open letter addressed to the cardinals of the Catholic Church, in which he called the bishops of the Church to resist Pope Francis’ his heterodox actions, like the signing of the Abu Dhabi document.
“Pope Francis – I say this with a bleeding heart – is not the ‘guarantor of the faith’, but is constantly increasingly destroying the foundations of faith and morals with this and many other statements and pronouncements,” Seifert wrote.
The Austrian professor specifically criticized the “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” often referred to as the Abu Dhabi document, which Francis signed together with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. The document states that “[t]he pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”
“Let us remember the Declaration on the Fraternity of All People signed by Pope Francis together with Grand Imam Ahmad Mohammad Al-Tayyeb,” Seifert said.
“Wouldn’t it be a heresy and a terrible confusion to claim that God – just as he willed the difference of the two sexes – i.e. with his positive will – also directly willed the difference of religions and thus all idolatry and heresies? Yes, isn’t the Abu Dhabi Declaration far worse than heresy, namely apostasy?”
“Shouldn’t all of you cardinals and bishops speak your firm ‘non possumus’ [we cannot] when Francis demands that this ‘document’ be the basis for the formation of priests in all seminaries and theological faculties?”
“True as it is in itself ‘that the pope is the pope and guarantor of the faith,’ this statement cannot be applied to a pope who signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration and spread it around the world, and who has said and done many other things contrary to the consistent teaching of the Church.”
“How should I answer a dear and deeply believing Lutheran friend, for whose conversion I have been praying for years, when he writes to me that with this Abu Dhabi Declaration the Catholic Church has left the soil of Christianity?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t all the cardinals have to write to the Pope as one man and ask him to withdraw this apostatic declaration?”
The philosophy professor also called out Francis’ promotion of same-sex “civil unions,” which directly contradicts Church teaching and his predecessors.
