One-World Church Expected This Year
Acknowledgements to Catholic Family News.
One-World Church Expected This Year
CORNELIA R. FERREIRA
One of the long-standing goals of the Masonic New World Order seems finally within grasp: its one-world church, in the making for over 150 years, is about to become institutionalized as the United Religions Organizationthe UR. Collaborating on the details are Bishop William Swing of the Episcopal Diocese of California, the Communist Gorbachev Foundation/USA, and certain leaders of the Catholic Church, working through the interreligious organization known as the World Conference on Religion and Peace.
Plans for the formation of the UR were first revealed by Bishop Swing at the syncretic service held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter. Attending the service in San Francisco's Grace Episcopal Cathedral on June 25, 1995, were representatives of all religions as well as political and spiritual luminaries like Princess Margaret of Britain, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, then President Lech Walesa of Poland and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
One might ask why a religious service (of sortsit was permeated with consciousness-raising politics) was held to mark the founding of a political group. The answer is that interfaith religiosity is now a must for important social or cultural events, especially those involving world figures, as this gives credibility and form to the concept of a one-world religion and community. The separation of church and state does not apply to the Masonic Church and State. But there was another reason why religious groups and leaders were part of this particular celebration. Rev. Alan Jones, dean of the cathedral, said the service was "also a summons to the great religious traditions of the world to be in deeper conversation with each other ... as workers for peace, as guarantors of the sacredness of the earth...."
A Multi-Deity Service
According to the San Francisco Chronicle 1,"prayers, chants and incantations were offered to a dozen deities". But the tone... for the United Religions Organization was really set by a pantheistic ceremony in which children from around the world mingled water from over thirty so-called "sacred waters" in "a great bowl of unity", to the accompaniment of an international) children's choir singing a mournful dirge from the blasphemous Missa Gaia (the earth-worshipping concert originally commissioned by New York's Episcopal Cathedral, St. John the Divine). Mixed together was water from such sources as the. Ganges, Amazon, Red Sea, Jordan and Lourdes. Bishop Swing intoned, "As these sacred waters find confluence here, may the city that chartered the nations of the world bring together the religions of the world."
According to UR literature and articles on and by Bishop Swing, the UR will be launched with the writing of its charter in June, 1997. The institution should be in place by June, 2000, and fully operational by June, 2005. It will be located at the Presidio, the former military base in San Francisco.
Patterned after the UN, with a General Assembly, a Security Council and a Secretary-General, the UR is meant to be for religions what the UN is for nations. It will be a "permanent gathering center where the world's religions engage in daily prayer, dialogue, and action for the good of all life on this earth". The religions will also daily share with the public their sacred scriptures, music, prayers and wisdom. Rather than the Light of Christ, the UR will shine, declares Bishop Swing, "the light of the world's spiritual traditions [paganism and occultism included] into a world desperately in need of light". Parallelling the World Bank, the United Religions will have a "Value Bank" whose investments are aimed at solving issues of environment, population, poverty or disease.
The Presidio has been chosen as the headquarters for the one-world church as part of the Presidio "vision" of being "transformed from a military post into a national park unlike any other. It will pioneer a new role for a national park by creating a global center dedicated to addressing the world's most critical environmental, social and cultural challenges. The Presidio's new role symbolizes the swords into ploughshares concept." It is hoped that the UR headquarters will become "a magnificent and inspiring showcase for the world's religions".
According to the San Francisco Chronicle 2, Swing wants the Vatican Cityso to speakof the one-world religion to include a "Hall of Speaking, Hall of Listening, Hall of Action, Hall of Meeting" and "a world religions theme park to ... foster better understanding of other faiths." Who will finance all this? "Arab money, Jewish money, Christian ... and other foundations," says Swing. By January he already had $150,000 in "seed money" from unnamed private foundations.
When Richard Scheinin of the San Jose Mercury News 3 asked him how he could justify spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" on the UR complex, rather than distributing the money to the needy, he replied: "It costs a lot of money to have a united anything... But once [religions are] together, they will generate money to ... benefit the poor. And if the religions ... can keep peoples from murdering and raping and torturing each other, that's an awfully big dividend."
Pantheism, Fox, and "Raves"
Swing is worried that religions "are the missing voice at the table of accountability in the world". He sees the UR as an "attempt to bring accountability to the religious forum".
"We're on the threshold of the first global civilization", he told Scheinin. "But there is no global access to [the] soul ... I think that as we become one global unit, we have to find out where religion is in regard to our global tribe."
What Swing seems to be saying is that pantheism, the heresy that everything in the universe is joined together with God in one unified force, is not yet a universally accepted idea. Pantheism is implied by terms such as interconnected, interdependent, global village, global tribe, world community, global civilization, family of nations, etc. A pantheistic world community must, by definition, have unity of religion (i.e., syncretism is pantheism). So Swing says, "the UR will be a symbol that people of faith share a profound belief that all of life is interconnected and that unity is worth striving for". His implied threat is that those who do not subscribe to the "profound belief" of pantheism will be held accountable by the world religious authoritythe URfor causing disunity and strife.
The bishop is friendly with ax-Dominican Matthew Fox, who is now an Episcopalian priest under him. In the fall of 1994, Grace Cathedral was the site of Fox's environmentally-oriented Planetary Mass, an adaptation of a "rave" Anglican Mass he had attended in England. The Dallas Morning News4 described the blasphemous service as a mixture of Christian ritual, occultism, earth worship, theosophy, creation spirituality and an "all-night 'rave' celebrating God and Mother Nature". One participant said it was "totally wild."
"Raves" are dance happenings or love-ins, featuring thunderous techno-music, lasers, strobes, thick smoke and, usually, psychedelic drugs. Presumably drugs were absent at Grace Cathedral, but the bishop himself participated in the dancing, and when quizzed about the service's "pop-culture approach", replied, "Let 'em rave, for God's sake."
Bishop Swing has employed the occult symbolism of earth, air, fire and water in his writings and in his cathedral. He has written that our age is "reversing" "the Noah story where water drowned people". "Now the world is drowning in people.... The water shortage will tell us when the flood has begun." An occult orientation and an anti-population stance, are, of course, standard requirements for any would-be citizen of the new world civilization.
Global Support Vs. "Fundamentalist Resistance"
Swing has support in high places. He has been consulting UN religious Non-Governmental Organizations as well as interfaith leaders and other celebrities about the UR. He says he has been given the "green light" from many people, including Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and the Islamic head of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. This spring he made what he called a "pilgrimage" to the world's religious leaders to gather support. His itinerary took him to King Hussein of Jordan, as well as Rome, Canterbury, Cairo, Jerusalem and other cities. He breathlessly reported an enthusiastic response from Mother Teresa (who later was warned about him and asked to withdraw her support).
After his "pilgrimage", Bishop Swing and his two main collaborators, the Gorbachev Foundation and the World Conference on Religion and Peace, hosted an Interfaith Summit in San Francisco in June. Its theme was "The World's Religions and the Emerging Global Civilization." Its goals were:
(1) "to examine the points of resistance" to the UR concept (emphasis added);
(2) to "create a process leading to a UR charter-writing conference in June 1997"; and
(3) to develop an agenda for presenting the UR vision to the world at Gorbachev's second State of the World Forum, October 2nd-6th.
One "point of resistance" examined was "fundamentalism." As reported by the San Jose Mercury News5, New Ager Robert Muller (a former UN Assistant Secretary-General who was groomed by U Thant to further the UN goal of uniting the world's religions) declared that fundamentalism's "inflexible belief systems" "play an incendiary role in global conflicts". "Peace will be impossible", he said, "without the taming of fundamentalism through a United Religions that professes faithfulness 'only to the global spirituality and to the health of this planet'."
While agreeing that fundamentalism is a "challenge to peace", Swing said fundamentalists are "not the enemy" and they will "bring great gifts to the family of the world". This disagreement between leaders of the religious tolerance school is more than ironic; it reflects the difficulty the UR faces in dealing with the New Age belief that fundamentalists and "creedal religions" cause divisions and wars. More importantly, as articulated by the very influential medium and futurist, Barbara Marx Hubbard, they are seen as holding back the progress of the New World Order and the evolution of the universe towards godhood, an evolution that can only take place under conditions of peace. Hubbard has actually threatened fundamentalistsorthodox Catholics includedwith extinction.
The Gorbachev Foundation, one of Bishop Swing's partners, was set up several months before the demise of the USSR as the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is located at the Presidio. Gorbachev is still a professed Communist. Communism, a Masonic tool, has long been involved in forming the one-world religion. In fact, Communism, which is a form of pantheism has been promoted as the basis for a one-world religion and world unity. Communists have been attending international interfaith conferences for years, even whilst they were the "enemy".
Gorbachev's Global Brain Trust
The Gorbachev Foundation convened the first State of the World Forum in San Francisco in September, 1995. Its goal was to begin a five-year process of articulating the "fundamental priorities, values and actions necessary to guide humanity as it develops the first global civilization". Gorbachev proposed a "global brain trust"an elite leadershipto provide guidance.
Brain trust contenders present at the Forum included James Baker, then Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, Vaclav Havel, George Schultz, Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Robert Muller, Matthew Fox, Carl Sagan, Shirley MacLaine and former Humanist of the Year, Ted Turner of CNN, who gave an address. Pagans and witches rounded out the attendees.
The Interim6 reported that the Forum's main theme was population control. As Gorbachev revealed, "... we shall have to address the problem of controlling the world's population." This theme was woven through the topics of global governance, global security and so on, but "nowhere was the theme more evident", said The Interim, "than in the discussions around religion". In the main, Christianity was blamed for the "population dilemma".
The conference summary noted: "there was a very strong agreement [amongst participants] that religious institutions have to take primary responsibility for the population explosion. We must speak far more clearly about sexuality, about contraception, about abortion, ... because the ecological crisis ... is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."
Kungly "Values"
The second State of the World Forum this month, at which the UR is to be unveiled for the world, intends to pursue the development of a humanistic global ethic, a set of "basic values" shared by the world's religions, which would allow increased cooperation between them. Chief designer of the global ethic is Hans Kung, the discredited Catholic theologian, who says consensus will decide the contents of the global ethic. Kung has tried unsuccessfully for several years to get this consensus.
In 1991, he told the UN that "religions must ... work with world outlooks that are not religious but that propose views on the deep meaning of life and ethics for living." The global ethic "must center on both man and the universe so that humanistic and religious precepts are included". In 1993, Kung presented his global ethic to the syncretic Parliament of the World's Religions conference in Chicago (hosted by the Catholic Archdiocese). The document said that spiritual renewal "can come about if people embrace the 'ethics underlying the world's religions, whether or not they believe in any of the religions concerned" (all emphases added). Kung's global ethic has nothing to do with Christianity. It takes the platforms of justice and peace, women's rights, environmentalism, and tolerance of vice and sin and turns them into humanistic commandments that replace the Ten Commandments.
Ethics (also called "universal values") are "in" today because, as opposed to the absoluteness of the Decalogue, they are changeable rules. As Robert Muller explains, "Each generation must decide what is right and wrong. We need a science [not a religion] to define what is good and bad. We need ethics in time: What is right today may not be right tomorrow." Revealing the totalitarianism of the New Age, Muller "recommends that each nation establish commissions on ethics to control every aspect of ethics".
Global ethicists are actually following Helena Blavatsky, founder of the New Age Movement. Blavatsky said she wished to revive Secondand ThirdCentury theosophy, which aimed "to reconcile all religions, sects and nations under a common system of ethics" and "to induce [religions] to lay aside their ... strifes, remembering only that they [all possessed] the same truth" or "ancient wisdom".
The World Conference on Religion and Peace
Bishop Swing's other main partner is the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP). It is through this organization that the Catholic Church has become closely involved in founding the United Religions. The WCRP, with strong Catholic representation, was launched in 1970. It had been conceived in 1960 by four American religious leaders, including John Cardinal Wright. The Catholic Archbishop of New Delhi, Angelo Fernandes, was its first international president. The WCRP's 1979 conference featured an interfaith service in St. Patrick's Cathedral. in New York, presided over by Cardinal Cooke.
The UR reflects WCRP goals, such as a world parliament of religions upholding "the common good of all people"which is precisely what the UR will be, for besides dispensing spirituality, it will also be a debating and resolution-making body a parliament"for global good". Also, the WCRP is planning an International Centre for Religion and Conflict Resolution (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), whilst the UR envisions training peacemaker teams of spiritual leaders, retired politicians and conflict-resolution specialists for world trouble spots (witness the many retired politicians at the first State of the World Forum).
The WCRP promotes planetary rather than national citizenship, i.e., it promotes world government. Archbishop Fernandes, like Robert Muller and other notables, is a "primary endorser" of the New World Order organization, Planetary. Citizens, which is now openly occult.
The WCRP is a UN Non-Governmental Organization, headquartered at the United Nations in New York, with chapters in several countries. It works closely with the UN, UNICEF and UNESCO. Dr. John Humphrey, a past president of the Canadian chapter, wrote the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The WCRP promoted its agenda at the UN's Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing Conferences and held an interfaith service at Copenhagen.
Catholic Involvement
The importance of the World Conference on Religion and Peace was recently underscored when the Vatican hosted the first session of its sixth General Assembly in November, 1994. The conference theme was "Healing the World: Religions for Peace". This was the first time an official interfaith conference had been convened at the Holy See. In his opening address, the Pope told the 900 representatives of the world's religions assembled in the Synod Hall that "religious leaders must clearly show that they are pledged to the promotion of peace" and religions must "engage in a dialogue of mutual understanding and peace on the basis of the values they share". He ended by remarking, "The Vatican is open to you. I hope you all return soon."
Besides the many non-Christian speakers, the conference featured Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the founders of liberation theology; the President of the Rockefeller Foundation (which provided financing); Hans Kung, a WCRP international president, discredited by the Pope as a Catholic theologian, but called to present his global ethic (the Assembly sub-theme was "Isolation and Indifference: Searching for a Global Ethic"); and Cardinal Martini of Milan, who is friendly towards Masonry, who wants another Vatican Council to reconsider women's ordination, priestly celibacy and contraception, and who is promoting himself as the next Pope. Also speaking were Roger Cardinal Etchegaray, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and Francis Cardinal Arinze, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Cardinal Etchegaray, aided by the WCRP, was the chief organizer of the first Assisi interreligious prayer meeting in 1986. Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria is a World Advisor to the syncretic World Thanksgiving Square in Dallas, Texas, with whom he has a long-standing association. The high-profile Cardinal, who issued joyful greetings to Buddhists for their feast of Vesakh on June 1st, is also considered a front-runner in the race to succeed Pope John Paul II.
The WCRP conference featured prayers and meditation rituals from different religions both at the Vatican and at the secondary conference site, Riva del Garda. The Pope listened to Koranic verses and Jewish, Shinto, Buddhist and Hindu invocations for peace, said Inside the Vatican7. The February, 1995, WCRP newsletter reported that the conference's final declaration acknowledged the new world community taking shape, affirmed "the sacredness of the earth and our unity with it", and asserted that "sharing of sacred texts, respectful observance of other religious traditions and participation in common meditation can facilitate mutual enrichment and inspiration...." These are the exact sentiments of the UR, which the WCRP is helping to found.
Peace Without the Prince of Peace
The bait of the syncretic movement is peace. A world tired of warfaremuch of it deliberately fomentedwill eagerly follow anyone who promises peace. It does not look like the UN will produce peace by the New Age target date of 2000 A.D. So the torch has been passed to religions. With Communism (which Our Lady of Fatima accused of provoking wars) conveniently "dead" it is easy to engender supposedly religious wars, blame religions in general for conflicts past and present, then tell them they have a responsibility to work for religious unity and peace. This, anyhow, is the propaganda. The hidden agenda, however, made clear by the statements of syncretists themselves, is to unite people under one religion so that they will peacefully accept the one-world government. Unstated is their hope that Catholicism, the real target of all this activity, would finally be destroyed peacefully, by indifferentism.
To avoid being drawn into syncretism, Catholics have to recognize and reject the three wrong premises on which the New Age concept of peace is based.
The first premise is that advanced by the meaningless Christmas-card greeting: "Peace on earth, Goodwill to men.". What the angels actually sang was, "Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will" (Luke 2:14). In other words, peace can only be engendered by men of good will, i.e., just men. Even atheists are dimly aware that peace is based on justice, though they have no idea of what true justice is.
The just man is one who observes all the commandments. That is what Scripture means when it calls St. Joseph a "just man". Sin consists of breaking the commandments. The greatest sinand the highest injusticeis to break the First Commandment by refusing to give God the honor, glory and:: worship due to Him and by worshipping false gods instead. So it is impossible for unjust men who repudiate God to engender peace.
The second wrong premise on which the syncretist movement is based is that religions are responsible for wars and strife. This common New Age accusation targets Catholicism, but such an. accusation against the Church was condemned by Pius IX in his: Syllabus of Errors8. War is a product of sin and resultant injustice. It is also a divine punishment for sin, as confirmed by Our Lady of Fatima.
The third wrong premise of syncretism is that uniting religions will bring peace. Only the Catholic religion, true Christianity, can bring peace, as only the true Catholic is closest to the perfect justice which generates peace. So diluting or down-playing: Catholicism can never bring peace. Moreover, the one-world, religion will be the pantheistic, occult religion of Satan, a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). It will result in a blood bath, a common fruit of paganism, as history attests.
Cardinal Ratzinger's Warning
In any case, the mission of the Church is not to bring peace to the world, but to obtain the eternal salvation of all men by, teaching the Gospel and baptizing them into the Faith. In 1988, reported 30 Days9, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that Catholic' participation in an interfaith council for peace is, "due to the very essence of the Church, impossible". He said the Church would not join a meeting which would bring together the world religions on the theme of peace because the Church "is not in a position to obtain peace by force.... She should not transform herself into a sort of political peace movement, in which the achievement of everlasting world peace would become her reason for existing." He said that Church leaders have "received no mandate for this" from Jesus.
Further, "the effort to establish a world-wide reign of peace by means of a world union of religions", he noted, "has a disturbing similarity to the third temptation of Jesus: '... All the kingdoms of the earth I will give unto you if you, prostrating yourself, will worship me.' (Matt. 4:9) For in this conception world peace becomes itself the summum bonum, ... for the attainment of which all other religious doctrines and acts are mere means. But a God who would become the instrument of supposed higher ends is no longer God; He has in reality consigned His true 'being God' to the superior thing, whose establishment He must serve."
He warned that "a peace established in this way would by its very nature be transformed into a totalitarianism of the sole authorized way of thinking or would threaten to be turned upside down into a world civil war" (a blood bath).
The Cardinal reminded us that the Antichrist "will present himself as a messenger of 'peace and security"' (a reference to I Thess. 5:3) and will be "precisely the one who terms himself the establisher of world peace". This, of course, is how the New Agers' "Christ", expected to manifest himself to the world soon is described.
It seems that the United Religions Organization could be the church of the Antichrist. Its imminent establishment is according to plan: New Age leader Alice Bailey, whose teachings and instructions are meticulously followed, said in 1919 that the "Church Universal", a union of occultism, Masonry and Christianity, "will appear towards the close of this century".
Meanwhile, Heaven's Peace Plan, outlined by the Queen of Peace at Fatima, lies largely ignored.
FOOTNOTES:
1. San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1995.
2. San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1996.
3. San Jose Mercury News, March 2, 1996.
4. Dallas Morning News, May 13, 1995.
5. San Jose Mercury News, June 29, 1996.
6. The Interim, April 1996.
7. Inside the Vatican, December, 1994.
8. Syllabus of Errors, Prop. 40.
9. 30 Days, February 1989.
This article was taken from the March 1997 issue of "Christian Order". Published by Fr. Paul Crane, S.J. from 53, Penerley Road, Catford, London SE6 2LH. The annual subscription to "Christian Order" is $20.00.
This item 166 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org