A friend of mine named Jim is currently reading G.K. Chesterton’s provocative book, The Everlasting Man. He sent me an email a couple of days ago with a wonderful paragraph excerpted from that work, stating that he was amazed at how what GKC is writing about here is the very thing afflicting the Church today.
Two things suggest to me how timely it is to read this paragraph written a century ago. The first is today’s entry in the The Roman Martyrology: the Syrian Martyr, Saint Peter Mavimenus, who I jokingly referred to on social media as, “the patron saint of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.” The second is Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmiero’s call for a permanent dialogue between the Church and Freemasonry. His Eminence allegedly called for this after participating in a secret meeting with members of the anti-Catholic secret society, noting that, “an evolution in mutual understanding” that has taken place between the Church and Freemasonry in the last half century.
The martyr did not believe that Christ and Belial have fellowship (cf. 2 Cor. 6:15), whereas the Cardinal seems to have a more nuanced position on the matter.
Here is GKC:
The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
