Can Different Words Be Applied to the One Eternal Truth?
Can all religions provide a path to Truth? Catholic faith and the heresy of Indifferentism.
Since I enjoy pondering spiritual topics and gazing at my navel, I recently participated in an informal discussion on different religions and the concept of eternal salvation. When we were done, I almost wished that we had been discussing fantasy football, because my head would have hurt less.
There are libraries full of books on this topic, and graveyards full of victims who had the wrong opinion at the wrong time.
For the purposes of this brief article, I want to focus on just one word: Indifferentism. There. I said it.
Did you know that the concept of “Indifferentism” (it’s a real thing) holds that all religions are legitimate paths to God? Sounds kind of peaceful and makes you want to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, right? Not so fast.
According to the Catholic faith, Indifferentism is a heretical concept.
That’s heretical as in heresy, as in a one-way ticket to being burned at the stake.
Just to make that concept clear, some notable executions for heresy included the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay (burned in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1314), St Joan of Arc (burned in 1431 at Rouen, France), and Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and John Hooper (burned in 1555 at Oxford, England), who were victims of English Queen Mary I “Bloody Mary”, who was determined to restore Catholicism to England through this barbaric practice.
Apparently, the Catholic Church stopped executing heretics for heresy in 1697, but the practice of killing people over religious differences is not limited to the Catholic Church, nor to the Middle Ages nor even limited to something that happens outside of America.
For example, during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, 19 women were hanged after being convicted of practicing witchcraft, and one elderly man, Giles Corey was pressed to death with heavy stones after he refused to enter a plea. (When asked by Sheriff George Corwin if he wanted to change his mind after two days of intense suffering, old Mr. Corey is reputed to have responded with “More weight!” Corwin complied.)
Or just google “religious killings” any day of the week, and you’ll find stories throughout the world of people killed because they believed something different than the folks who had the power to take that life.
But back to Indifferentism.
In 1832, Pope Gregory XVI issued his encyclical Mirari Vos, and declared “indifferentism” to be “another abundant source of the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present.”
“This shameful font of Indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone…. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin.” Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos.
(As a perspective check, this same encyclical goes off on a mind-bending defense of book-burning.)
And just in case you were wondering, Indifferentism is still considered heresy. I’m not sure what the penalty is for that nowadays, but it can’t be a good thing.
So, if you follow Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, or even Christianity without Catholicism, you are …well… screwed.
In discussing the concept as part of his ground-breaking encyclical in 1884, Pope Leo XIII warned of the dangers of considering all religions are alike:
This manner of reasoning is calculated to bring about the ruin of all forms of religion, and especially of the Catholic religion, which, as it is the only one that is true, cannot, without great injustice, be regarded as merely equal to other religions.” Humanum Genus, 1884.
Full Disclosure: I was raised as a Catholic, attended Catholic schools, and still attend weekly Mass. But this Indifferentism stuff bothers me.
By the way, I was always taught that the Pope was infallible, and you don’t dare question something said by a Pope! But I’ve since learned that perhaps Papal infallibility is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Thankfully, during the discussion I mentioned, one of the participants used a phrase that struck me. He said that all of the competing religious dogmas were “simply different words applied to the same Eternal Truth.”
To use the analogy of the blind men all feeling different parts of an elephant and trying to describe the same animal, is it possible that the world’s great religions — those current and many long-dead — all sensed the Truth but described it differently?
Could it be possible that no one religion nor any single concept gets it all right? Could the One Eternal Truth be so vast that it has evaded all human attempts to define or limit it, yet be so simple that we all sense it inside us?
That is where I am heading: that we are all humans struggling to apply different words to the same Truth.
And I’m not answering any emails from The Inquisition.
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