(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis’ recent comments that “every religion is a way to arrive at God” undermines martyrdom and causes confusion, according to Archbishop Charles Chaput.
Pope Francis made the comments last week during an “inter-religious dialogue” in Singapore.
“Every religion is a way to arrive at God. There are different languages to arrive at God, but God is God for all. And how is God, God for all? We are all sons and daughters of God. But my god is more important than your god, is that true?” Pope Francis said.
“There is only one God and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, they are different paths,” the Pope said.
The idea Catholics simply walk a different “path” “drains martyrdom of its meaning,” Chaput wrote in a Tuesday column for First Things.
“To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God,” he asked rhetorically.
“Such a sacrifice would be senseless. But the witness of the martyrs is as important today as ever,” he wrote. “We live in an age when the dominant religion is increasingly the worship of the self.”
“We need the martyrs – and each of us as a confessor of Jesus Christ – to remind an unbelieving world that the path to a genuinely rich life is to give oneself fully to another, to the other,” he wrote.
READ: Pope Francis: ‘Every religion is a way to arrive at God’
The emeritus archbishop of Philadelphia began his article by suggesting that the Pope may have intended something else by his words than what they plainly express.
“Since his comments were extemporaneous, they naturally lacked the precision that a prepared text would normally possess, and so hopefully what he said is not quite what he meant,” the prelate wrote.
Pope Francis, however, has a history of making similar statements that suggest different religions can lead to God and salvation. “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings,” a 2019 statement, signed with a Grand Imam in Egypt, stated in 2019.
This document, referred to as the “Abu Dhabi” statement, was repeated in a similar form just days before the Pope’s trip to Singapore while visiting Indonesia, as reported by LifeSiteNews.
“That all religions have equal weight is an extraordinarily flawed idea for the Successor of Peter to appear to support,” Chaput wrote.
“Simply put: Not all religions seek the same God, and some religions are both wrong and potentially dangerous, materially and spiritually,” the former archbishop of Denver wrote.
“Loose comments can only confuse,” Chaput wrote, adding, “Yet, too often, confusion infects and undermines the good will of this pontificate.”
The idea that different religions can lead to salvation has been condemned as a heresy multiple times throughout Church history.
Pope Pius IX, writing in Qui Pluribus, stated in 1846:
Also perverse is the shocking theory that it makes no difference to which religion one belongs, a theory which is greatly at variance even with reason. By means of this theory, those crafty men remove all distinction between virtue and vice, truth and error, honorable and vile action. They pretend that men can gain eternal salvation by the practice of any religion, as if there could ever be any sharing between justice and iniquity, any collaboration between light and darkness, or any agreement between Christ and Belial.
Reaffirmed this teaching in 1863, Pius IX wrote in Quanto Conficiamur Moerore:
Eternal salvation cannot be obtained by those who oppose the authority and statements of the same Church and are stubbornly separated from the unity of the Church and also from the successor of Peter.