The “Irenistic” mentality of compromise with error is typical of a psychological utopian disposition that hopes for an era without contrasts or controversies.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira demonstrates, in Unperceived Transhipment, that on the religious level, the Irenistic dialogue promotes interconfessionalism, weakens all religions and projects them into a condition of absolute confusion.
“Two forms of ecumenism should be pointed out. One type seeks — in order to lead souls to the one flock of the one Shepherd — to reduce as much as possible the number of arguments pure and simple and polemics in favour of argument-dialogue and other forms of interlocution. This ecumenism is amply based on numerous pontifical documents, especially those of John XXIII and Paul VI. But another type of ecumenism goes further and seeks to extirpate any and all militant character from the relations of the Catholic Religion with others. This extreme ecumenism is evidently founded upon relativism or religious syncretism, whose condemnation is found in two documents of St Pius X, the encyclical Pascendi against Modernism, and the Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique against the Sillon.”97
Accordingly, all religions are accepted as “relative” truths and ordered among themselves according to a Hegelian dialectic schema. This second type of ecumenism drives souls towards a single and universal religion: the artificial and false “religion of Man”.
“We observe that extreme ecumenism produces tragic confusion among Catholics as well as the separated brethren, be they schismatics, heretics or otherwise. This confusion is certainly one of the most tragic of our confusion filled age. Indeed, today there is no greater danger in the religious field than relativism. It threatens all religions, and any true Catholic or separated brother who seriously professes his own religion should fight it. This can only be done by the effort each one makes to maintain the natural and proper meaning of his belief against the relativistic interpretations that deform and undermine it. The ally of the true Catholic in this fight would be the Jew or the Mohammedan who allows not the slightest doubt about what unites or separates us. It is this kind of attitude that keeps relativism out of the fields it attempts to enter. Further, it is only once this attitude is adopted that interlocution in its various modes, including argument pure and simple and polemics, can help to unite souls. ‘Good accounts makes good friends,’ says the proverb. Likewise, only clarity in thinking and expressing what one thinks really leads to unity. Exaggerated ecumenism, which tends to make everyone hide or underestimate his real discrepancies with others, leads to a regime of maquillage, which can only favour relativism, the most powerful common enemy of all religions.”98
Notes:
97. Ibid, p. 28.
98. Ibid, p. 29. “When one day the history — so dark and confused! — of the religious crisis, of the serious socio-economic reflections igniting the Catholic world will be written — the Brazilian thinker would write ten years later on the occasion of the visit of John Paul II to the Lutheran temple in Rome — the fatal action of ecumenism will be brought to light. Psychologists will be disconcerted by its great capacity for expansion. In effect, the ecumenical myth exerts a peculiar capacity to blind those who allow themselves to be bewitched by it. (…) Do they not see the danger lying in ambush at the end of this path, that is the formation, at world level, of a sinister supermarket of religions, philosophies and systems of all orders, in which truth and error will appear divided, mixed and haphazardly placed? The only thing absent from the world will be — if it be possible to arrive to this point — the complete truth: that is the Roman, Catholic, Apostolic Faith, without stain or alteration”, P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Lutero: no e poi no!”, Lepanto, no. 22, January 1984.