On the fourth of July, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV received the Medal of Freedom of the United States of America, his native country. In his words of gratitude, he said verbatim: “the same freedom guarantees the right of every person to worship according to his own beliefs, of individuals and communities and associations to give public expression to their faith. Indeed, religious freedom gave rise to the American tradition of allowing interreligious dialogue and interreligious cooperation, promoting the common good, enriching debates on the great moral and ethical issues that shaped the nation and the course of its history”.
For the Vicar of Christ, these words have very little to do with the mandate of Jesus Christ in Mt 28, 19-20: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”. Our Lord gave this great mission to the Twelve after affirming that all power in heaven and on earth had been given to Him.
It is this mandate of Christ that has led the Church, throughout its two millennia of existence, to count on countless missionaries filled with zeal for the salvation of souls, which is found only in Christ, baptizing in the name of the Most Holy Trinity and teaching. Priests and religious, saints, canonized or not, who have contributed so valuably to the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
What has happened, then, for the words of the 266th successor of St. Peter to be opposed to the mandate of Our Lord Jesus Christ?
Romano Amerio sets it out with absolute clarity in his indispensable work Iota Unum, when dealing with the change in the concept of ecumenism, for the author the most significant change produced in the Catholic system after the Second Vatican Council.
The traditional doctrine of ecumenism is established – says Amerio – in the Instructio de motione oecumenica promulgated by the Holy Office on December 20, 1949, which takes up the teaching of Pius IX in the encyclical Mortalium animos, which establishes that 1) the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of Christ and does not need to perfect it through the work of other confessions; that union must not be pursued through a progressive assimilation of the various confessions of faith nor through an accommodation of Catholic dogma to another dogma; 3) that the only true unity of the churches can be achieved only by the return (per reditum) of the separated brethren to the true Church of God; and 4) that those separated who return to the Catholic Church lose nothing substantial of what belongs to their particular profession, but rather find it again identical in a complete and perfect dimension.
The doctrine is then clear, which supposes that the Church of Rome is the foundation and center of Christian unity, and that the separated must move toward the immovable center that is the Church of the service of Peter.
But at this fundamental point, the Second Vatican Council introduced a change, both through extrinsic signs and theoretical discourse. In the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio the Instructio of 1949 is never cited, nor is the word return (reditus). The word reversione has been replaced by conversione. The change implies that, for the new mentality, the Christian confessions (including the Catholic) must not turn to one another, but all together gravitate toward the total Christ situated outside them and toward which they must converge.
If this is the essence of ecumenism, the Catholic Church can no longer draw others to itself, but only join with the other confessions in converging toward a center that is outside it and all the others. It is claimed that all churches are equal and proselytism is condemned, advising the different confessions to preserve their identity.
If this was so for the union of the “different Christian confessions”, what was the position of the Second Vatican Council on the other religions? Amerio affirms that the change in the concept of the unity of Christians necessarily gives rise to a change in the concept of mission. “Non-Christian religions too – indicates Amerio – must enter into the religious unity of humanity; but, as with the “separated brethren”, this no longer occurs by their coming through conversion to Christianity, but by deepening their intrinsic values and thus rediscovering that deeper truth that underlies all religions. The Church’s renunciation since then of converting is commonplace, and the Church’s call is avoided as deplorable proselytism.
Romano Amerio’s book was published in 1985, but already during the celebration of the Second Vatican Council, Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre intervened on numerous occasions to try to correct the dangerous consequences linked to religious indifferentism that ambiguously drafted texts could have. In his seventh intervention, in the third session of the Council, in October 1964, regarding the declaration on religious freedom, he, who had been a missionary in Africa, warned that “another grave consequence will be the reduction of the capital role played by the missions and of zeal for evangelizing pagans and non-Catholics”. Regarding the schema On the Missionary Activity of the Church, Msgr. Lefebvre warned that it concealed the grave omission of not invoking at all the ecclesiastical documents, whether from Sacred Scripture or Tradition, “which show how, from the beginning and always, the Church was, is and will be essentially missionary”. He also pointed out that, in the schema, “the ideas of the equality of all religions can be perceived, underlying”.
Monsignor Lefebvre, following the bimillennial tradition of the Church, set forth that divine law was the key to the question of religious freedom, “because it is the fundamental norm of religion itself and the criterion of goodness and dignity of all human activity”. Therefore, he considered that “with the new directives formulated on freedom of worship and conscience, the missionary spirit of the Church ran grave danger. In his twelfth intervention, dated October 2, 1965, again regarding the schema “The Missionary Activity of the Church”, which had been revised, he pointed out that there continued to exist in the document grave ambiguities and doctrinal novelties. To the missionary bishop it seemed that “very deficient is also the exposition of the end proposed for missionary activity. And this is also very grave, since from that exposition must be born vocations and in the light of those reasons all missionary activity will be ordered. The exposition presented (no. 7) of the motives of missionary activity, if it remains thus, will produce the withering of every vocation and apostolic zeal, not a new impulse. The true and essential reason is the salvation of souls by Jesus Christ our Savior, only in whose name man can be saved, because all men are sinners and while they remain in their sins they are deprived of the blood of Christ, which is found truly and integrally only in the Catholic Church. Here, we not only do not find at all the necessity of the Church, the necessity of faith and baptism, the necessity of preaching to fulfill the salvific mission of Christ, but instead there is talk of means that depend on the will of God and are foreign to the economy of salvation by the Church. The theology of this fundamental exposition of the schema is not traditional: justification by Christ through the Church seems to be only something better, but not indispensable, as if human nature were not vitiated by original sin and as if it could save itself by itself, alone, because something good still remains. Such a doctrine constitutes a new theology. Consequently, neither is the practice of the apostolate traditional, which in numbers 11 to 13 is founded on naturalistic and not supernatural principles. It was not at all in this way that Jesus Christ and the apostles acted: they preached not only ‘to well-disposed souls’, as is said in no. 13, but to all men, part of whom accepted the faith while another part refused it and withdrew (…) Why is it said: ‘The Church forbids that anyone be forced to embrace the faith or be led to it or be solicited by importunate artifices’? This phrase is injurious to missionaries and is very far from the zeal for the salvation of souls that we find in the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles”.
There are those who have tried to discredit Msgr. Lefebvre’s struggle in favor of the tradition of the Church by affirming that he signed the acts of the Council. The number and theme of his interventions during it, however, evidence that he already warned of the dangers that the ambiguities and errors of the texts contained for the future of the Church.
Romano Amerio totally agrees with Msgr. Lefebvre that the change introduced in the conciliar text leads to making the missions superfluous, in a novelty coherent with the whole system of the tendential disappearance of the specific transcendence of the Catholic religion. And we find that, if non-Christians are destined to unite with Christians not by a mutation that takes them outside themselves to the Christ of the Catholic Church, but by a deepening of their own belief, then it seems that Christ is found in the depths of their natural conscience; and one falls into the denial of the supernatural and the equalization of the natural with the supernatural proper to grace. The principle of salvation does not come caelitus, but funditus: it is immanent to human nature and shines in all men.
The head of the Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions, in two articles in the Osservatore Romano – points out Amerio -, reduces the missions to dialogue not to convert, but to deepen in the truth. In the OR of January 15, 1971, it reads that “the Church needs, in order to grow according to God’s design, the values contained in non-Christian religions”. Such an affirmation would imply that Christianity throbs in the bosom of non-Christian religions, and that it suffices to deepen in the natural Logos to find the supernatural Logos of the God-man and of grace.
From all that has been said, two very important questions arise that I would like to illustrate with respective examples: on the one hand, the consequence pointed out by Amerio that the novelties “lead to the confusion of religion with civilization”, giving rise to a sophism that exchanges religion and civilization and eliminates the transcendence of Christianity. The Barcelona missionary Lluís Mallart exemplifies this question well.
The story of Mallart has been explained by himself in his book “I Am a Son of the Evuzok”. Born in Barcelona in 1932, he evokes his years of youth with a total incomprehension of the Catholicism that permeated Spanish society and felt passionate about the exotic. He himself does not seem to understand how he ended up in the seminary and ordained a priest, and was soon sent as a missionary to Cameroon, where he arrived in 1961, at the age of 29. Mallart, in his writings, always identifies the Church with colonization, and feels violated at having to impose the beliefs of the Catholic Church on those of the natives, which he considers equally valid. He postponed as much as he could the construction of the mission in a clearing in the jungle separated from the local settlements to live “mixed” with them, so as not to feel the superiority of the colonizer. He himself narrates, among others, the episode of how the second wife of a bigamous marriage asked him to baptize her: “In those mission lands, the norms of Christian morality were ineffable. In a marriage like that, the husband, baptized, was excluded from sacramental life for having married a second woman. The first wife could receive the sacraments. The second, on the other hand, could not. But Christine, the second wife, was not Christian, although she bore a Christian name. When she asked me to baptize her, the good missionary I should have been ought to have told her that her situation did not permit it, that baptism required a “conversion” and that, if she really wanted to convert, she should leave her husband, go to her clan of origin and have her family return the dowry to the husband. The casuistry of moral theology was clear, clean, impeccable. Life, on the other hand, was much more complex. The elementary principles of the social organization of that people were opposed to the refinements of that casuistry that came from outside. I could have told her that she did not need to be baptized, that her “pagan” life was as dignified as that of any Christian… Those were ideas that at that time I expressed publicly. Faced with that request, I thought that my rhetoric would not be of much use. I listened to her and baptized her. Christine continued living with her husband”.
The autobiographical book is full of similar examples. It is interesting how, in the small church of the mission, Mallart, the priest, changed the glass vessels for hollow gourds to place flowers, water, etc., and how he found the glass ones again. He himself is surprised that the local people understood much better than he that what was most worthy and costly should be for the house of the Lord. It is not worth extending further, but it is interesting to read the book. He was a man of his time, of the convulsive 1960s of the 20th century. Mallart did not understand that he could lead those people to the eternal salvation of their souls by teaching them the true religion.
After some years wrapped in his own contradictions, Mallart was honest: he left Cameroon, was laicized, married and dedicated himself to anthropology. That said, it is curious how the natives never understood this change of role and their relationship was never the same when he returned on various later occasions to study this culture from a scientific perspective.
The second question pointed out by Amerio, which follows from the first, is that the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate replaces the traditional Catholic affirmation of the supernatural light that is Christ. Both the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate and Ad gentes are characterized by naturalism, evident even in the terminology, by the word “supernatural” never appearing. “The hidden problem in the new ecumenism and the new interreligious dialogue – affirms Amerio – is the ancient question of the salvation of unbelievers. The principal characteristic that is discovered in this system is the Pelagian tendency: for Pelagius, what saves is not grace, but the universal communication that God makes of Himself to minds through the light of the rationality of nature. Therefore the new interreligious dialogue destroys the missions, because if the nations possess in the bosom of their own religiosity the truth that saves, their announcement by Christianity becomes superfluous or vain.
In those circumstances, the missionary action of the Church can only be one of literacy, hydraulics, agronomy or health; that is, of civilization and not of religion. The idea of such a non-missionary mission has become the key to World Mission Day, which in 1974 distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets in which one could read: “What does (Mission Day) mean? To collaborate in eliminating from the world hatreds, wars, hunger, misery. To cooperate in the spiritual, human, social redemption of peoples in the light of the Christian message. What is asked? Nurseries, asylums, schools, hospitals, outpatient clinics, hospices. The missionaries await an act of generous solidarity”. There is in the entire appeal no shadow of the Catholic religion, but pure anthropocentric philanthropy.
I would like to illustrate this question with the case of the Capuchin bishop Alejandro Labaka, for whom Pope Leo began the process to raise him to the altars in May 2025, freshly landed in the Chair of Peter.
Labaka, who had been a missionary in China until the arrival of the communist government in 1955, and who suffered for not being able to preach the truth of Christ to the point that he had to leave the country, completely changed his missionary perspective when he was sent to Ecuador, in the midst of the 1960s. By then, he no longer thought of converting the indigenous to Christianity, but only of finding the seeds of the Word present in non-Christian religions.
The role of his community of missionaries appears as a very strange case of mediation between the oil companies that were entering Amazonian territory of very few Huaorani groups who had become very aggressive. The “missions” consisted of visits with gifts, of resembling them to the point of walking naked among them, trying to explain to them that the idea they had of a creator was the same God of the Catholics. His notes record situations of systematic nudity, sexualized coexistence with young people and a conception of inculturation based on liberation theology, which did not seek to modify local customs but to idealize them and integrate into them. The mediation exercised by Labaka’s Capuchin community was to protect the lands of the Huaorani from the advances of the oil companies. Something more proper to a non-Catholic NGO than to a Catholic mission, but which is totally understandable in the light of what Amerio affirmed.
The opening of a beatification process for Bishop Labaka by Pope Leo XIV means that the Holy See recognizes that Labaka lived his missionary vocation with heroic dedication until his martyrial death, and places him in the stage of “Venerable Servant of God”, a necessary previous step before being declared blessed and, in the future, a saint, if the conditions are fulfilled (…).
The advance of this beatification process would mean one more step in the erroneous drift that castrated the missionary spirit 60 years ago and the denaturalization of the concept of martyrdom. Labaka died as a consequence of the wounds from the spears directed at him by the most isolated Huaorani when he arrived by helicopter, and presented himself without clothes, together with a religious sister, to try to enter into dialogue with them. He did not die from hatred of the faith. He was not a martyr. The Huaorani killed him only because he was a foreigner who was entering their lands.
Note: The articles published as Tribuna express the opinion of their authors and do not necessarily represent the editorial line of Infovaticana, which offers this space as a forum for reflection and dialogue.