Gratias tibi, Deus, gratias tibi,
vera et una Trinitas, una et summa Deitas,
sancta et una Unitas.

Ant. ad Magn.

The Holy Church celebrates today, with particular solemnity, one of the principal Mysteries of the Catholic Faith: the Most Holy Trinity, the One True God in Three Equal and Distinct Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Mystery – in the Greek sense of the term μυστήριον – is that which the human mind cannot know except through Divine Revelation. In welcoming this Revelation, man humbly accepts his own state as a creature in need of supernatural and freely given help, which goes beyond the rational knowledge of a single God who rewards the just and punishes the wicked. In fact, each person carries within himself that imprint of the Creator who shows him the moral principles of the natural Law; while knowledge of the divine Mysteries such as the Most Holy Trinity and the Incarnation is possible only thanks to Faith in what the authority of the revealing God proposes for us to believe through the Magisterium of the Church.

This vision implies two truths. First, that it is theoretically possible for man corrupted by original sin to be saved – where he is totally ignorant of the Gospel – even just by behaving rightly and following the light of right reason. Second, that only in the One True Church of Christ, the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, the sole custodian of Divine Revelation and depository of the means of sanctifying Grace, does sinful man, purified by Baptism, have the ordinary instruments that allow him in fact to be saved, by professing the Catholic Faith that Our Lord taught the Apostles and that the Holy Church infallibly proposes for us to believe.

I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me, says the Lord (Jn 14:6). If we believe that Jesus Christ is the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, who became incarnate for us men and for our salvation, who suffered and died for us, who rose again and who sits at the right hand of the Father; and if we conform our conduct of life to His holy Law and to what Our Lord has commanded us, we will be saved. And to believe this, we must also believe in the Holy Trinity, which He has made known to us and whose indelible imprint we bear as His creatures. It is in fact the Trinitarian dimension of our human nature that truly makes us in the image and likeness of God, of the One and Triune God. Our faculties refer to the divine attributes: to the memory of the Father, to the intellect of the Son, to the will of the Holy Spirit.

Whoever believes that the Mystery of the Holy Trinity is a matter for theologians and that the common man can ignore it commits an unforgivable error, first of all because it calls into question that wonderful pedagogy that the Lord wanted to adopt with us, making us participants not only in the knowledge of the Three Divine Persons, but also in Their Divine nature, at the moment in which with His Incarnation Our Lord assumed our human nature. A beautiful prayer of the Offertory, composed by Saint Leo the Great, says:

Deus, qui humanæ substantiæ dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilius reformasti, da, per hujus aquæ et vini mysterium, ejus divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nostræ fieri dignatus est particeps, Jesus Christus, Filius tuus, Dominus noster.

O God, who in a wonderful way created the noble nature of man and even more wonderfully reformed it, grant, through the mystery of this water and this wine, to be consorts of the divinity of Him who deigned to become a participant in our humanity, Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord.

If we do not profess our faith in the Holy Trinity, we cannot understand the reason that makes our Catholic Religion unique and truly divine, not only credible, but to be believed (credenda): the unheard-of miracle of the Incarnation of the Only Begotten Son of the Father, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, to redeem us and tear us away from the eternal death that we deserved through our own fault in Adam. And our life is always Trinitarian: we owe our creation to the Father, our redemption to the Son, our sanctification to the Holy Spirit.

This leads us to a theocentric vision – or rather, more properly Christocentric – of the divine κόσμος, of the order of all things, which find their beginning and end in Christ, according to the words of the Apostle: Instaurare omnia in Christo (Eph 1:10). Because it is by virtue of the hypostatic union that the Man-God, the new Adam, restores the order that Adam had violated. A divine order that is founded on God who is Truth and Charity, leading us also to believe and to love, veritatem facientes in caritate (Eph 4:15).

But who opposes, dear brethren, this orderly and most perfect vision, which reflects the perfections of the Most Holy Trinity, if not he who is a liar and a murderer from the beginning (Jn 8:44)? Satan is not capable of love, but only of hate; he creates nothing, he only knows how to destroy; and his hatred is not only directed at God, but also at us men, because the Eternal Word of the Father chose to become flesh, to become man. If therefore our salvation depends on believing in the Most Holy Trinity and in the Incarnation, it is obvious that Satan does everything to adulterate the purity of the Faith and thus try to nullify the work of the Redemption. Because whoever believes will be saved; and whoever does not believe will be condemned (Mk 16:16). The Devil’s envy for our supernatural destiny, which in his pride was denied to him, leads him to unleash himself precisely by making us believe that we can save ourselves without believing in the Holy Trinity and in the Incarnation.

Last September 13, during his trip to Singapore, Jorge Bergoglio had stated that all religions are a path to reach God. They are – I make a comparison – like different languages, different idioms, to get there. But God is God for everyone. And since God is God for everyone, we are all children of God. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’. Is this true? There is only one God, and we, our religions are languages, paths to reach God. Some are Sikh, some are Muslim, some are Hindu, some are Christian, but they are different paths. Understood?

These blasphemous words horrify us because of their intrinsic satanic matrix. They subvert objective reality, relativizing it and adapting it to how it is perceived by the individual. The Modernists of the nineteenth century attributed the multiplicity of doctrines to the “need for the sacred” in man, and this immanent need was translated first into ecumenism towards non-Catholics, then expanded to false religions and idolatrous superstitions, and finally merged into pantheism, into the cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin, into the Pachamama. Christian Revelation, for the Modernists, does not consist in the action of the Living and True God who makes Himself known and reveals Himself in His Mysteries to man, His creature, but rather in the projection of an immanent “religious feeling,” into a chimera created by man – an idol, literally – and therefore dependent on his culture, the environment in which he was born, external conditioning, and society. In the Catholic vision, man as a creature bows to the Divine Majesty of the Creator who manifests and reveals Himself; in the modernist delirium, God is a creature of man, who by reason of his “infinite dignity” is free to choose which gods to annex to his own pantheon. And what is this, if not the application of Hegelian idealism in the theological field, according to which reality is the product of reason or spirit? It is on this philosophical basis that the entire heretical edifice of the ecumenism of Vatican II is founded, summarized by the syncretistic vision of the House of the Abrahamic Family in Abu Dhabi.

Such an anthropocentric and immanentist vision of religion is obviously in open contradiction with the Catholic Creed, which is instead based on the revelatory action of the Holy Trinity through the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit. Our holy Religion is not the fruit of wild speculations, nor the projection of a “need for the sacred” to which man gives a partial and incomplete response, “some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.” It is instead the set of doctrines and precepts that Jesus Christ – True God and True Man – taught the Apostles and commanded them to transmit intact to all men, so that they can be saved from the eternal damnation they deserved by sinning in Adam.

Modern society, pervaded by relativism, is the victim of a great, diabolical deception. It does not believe that there is any objective truth, but that each person can create his own virtual reality which is both true and false at the same time. Whether God is Triune or not, whether the Second Person of the Holy Trinity became Incarnate or not, is therefore not important, because for the Neomodernists the purpose of religion is not to know, adore, love and serve God and deserve eternal bliss, but rather to have a common and as generic as possible concept of the divine that serves the cause of universal brotherhood, without any otherworldly perspective. This is precisely what the Revolution does: it changes the end into the means and the means into the end – that is, it lowers the living God to an idol among many, or erects an idol in place of the Living God. That is, denying the Truth in order to affirm every error; not recognizing the One and Triune God in order to be able to recognize all idols. And this is an intrinsically diabolical work.

Pope Leo has chosen for his motto the phrase In illo uno unum, which is taken from this passage of Saint Augustine’s Exposition of Psalm 127:

You, then, are many and yet one; we, being many, are yet one. How can we, being many, be one? Because we cling to Him of whom we are members; and if our Head is in heaven, then also our members will follow.

Psalm 127 begins with these words: Beati omnes qui timent Dominum, qui ambulant in viis ejus. Blessed are those who fear the Lord, who walk in His ways. It is in relation to these words of the Psalmist that we must read and understand the commentary of the Holy Bishop of Hippo. Not in persevering on the path of that false irenic ecumenism that silences the Truth in order to please the spirit of the world, but in returning to the unique, ontological principle of the transcendent and indefectible reality of the One and Triune God, keeping ourselves closely united to Him of whom we are members, the God-Man, the Word made flesh, without Whom it is impossible to come to the Father. May this not be a mere wish, but the confident hope of finally seeing all things recapitulated in Christ, glory given to the Holy Trinity, honor to the Holy Church and the Papacy, and salvation to the souls whom the Divine Shepherd has entrusted to His Vicar on earth. And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

15 June MMXXVDominica I post Pentecosten, in festo Ss.mæ Trinitatis