Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Judas and Hell




The Vortex

(Church Militant) Monday, we showed the voice of Scripture on Judas being in Hell; yesterday we showed constant witness of the Fathers of the Church.

Today: the witness of the saints in approved private revelation, and specifically, the Church-approved revelations of God the Father to St. Catherine of Siena.

In her famous Dialogue, St. Catherine reveals the following that was told to her by God the Father:
So the despair of Judas displeased Me more and was a greater insult to My Son than his betrayal had been. Therefore, such as these are reproved for this false judgment of considering their sin to be greater than My mercy, and for this they are punished with the demons and tortured eternally with them.
Notice again the sin of Judas betraying Our Blessed Lord is not the one for which he is damned, but the despair of God’s mercy. But whatever the sin, he is damned.

From Scriptures, from Doctors and Fathers of the Church, from Church-approved private revelations of the saints — nowhere in 2000 years is there a voice in the Church declaring that Judas was saved.
And if you include Church-approved private revelations as credible sources, then there is actually a three-fold revelation of Judas being damned from each of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity: God the Father to St. Catherine; God the Son as related by the Gospel writers; and the Holy Spirit as revealed to St. Peter and recounted through inspiration in the Acts of the Apostles. Add to this the deep reflection and meditations by Popes, Doctors, and Fathers, and it is simply UN-Catholic to try and hold that Judas was saved.

And as to the objection that the Church does not teach that Judas is damned as part of official teaching — that’s a pointless objection. There are many things the Church holds that are not part of declared dogmatic teaching. Something doesn’t have to be officially declared to be true; it’s just that whatever is declared definitively is true.

Moreover, we should never look to the Church to declare anything definitively that does not bear directly on our salvation. The declaring of someone as being damned does not bear on your or my salvation.

And switching gears here to the question of private revelation, it can never contradict official Church teaching. This is one of the ways that so many fraudulent apparitions are discovered. Our Lady, or whoever the supposed vision is of, says some oddball thing, or in other cases simply never seems to say anything related to Church teaching. It’s one of the biggest reasons for totally dismissing the supposed revelations of Our Lady of Medjugorje.

Having allegedly appeared every day now for over 30 years — including many multiple appearances in the same day to some of the various seers — this means if that apparition is true, that Our Lady has appeared more than 12,000 times, day after day, with no end in sight.

In all those appearances (more than 12,000) she has never, ever —  not once — breathed a word about the worldwide slaughter of over one billion children in the womb. She has never said a word about the evil of sodomy and its quickly growing acceptance by even many Catholics. She has never breathed a word about the increase in sin, homosexuality in the clergy and so forth.

But according to the visionaries, she has said things like the differences in world religions don’t matter to God.

That is a fake apparition, regardless of how many people who have gone their have felt about it. Feelings do not make something true. The truth makes something true. The supposed visions at Medjugorje are the perfect apparition for a Church drowning in feel-good emotions. They appeal to Catholics on an emotional level, not an intellectual level, that is to say, an authentically spiritual level.

This is a fake private revelation, especially when you consider that nothing has really been revealed.

But in cases like real apparitions and private revelations such as that of God the Father to St. Catherine of Siena, not only is nothing revealed contrary to Church teaching or tradition — it all agrees with and supports already-existing tradition and teaching.

When it comes to the question of Judas, there can be no private revelation revealing he is saved because such a private revelation would stand in contradiction to close to 2000 years of well-grounded (including Scripture) belief that he is damned.

Even the early fourth-century saint of the East Ephraim said, "Judas was the treasurer of his poison [referring to Satan]; And although Satan’s form is hidden, in Judas he is totally visible. Though Satan’s history is a long one, it is summed up in the Iscariot."

The Holy Spirit inspired the prophets a thousand years before Our Lord to speak of this; Our Blessed Lord Himself spoke of this; the first Pope spoke of it; later Popes spoke of it; the Early Fathers spoke of it; later Doctors of the Church spoke of it; the saints down through the ages spoke it; private revelation spoke of it.

And of it there can be no doubt: Judas is damned.

But the effort to “say it isn’t so” still continues, with feeble attempts to deny it. One in particular has created much much confusion in people’s minds in understanding some fundamental truths of the Faith. It is the subject of tomorrow’s Vortex, and it is the attempt to say Judas had to betray Jesus in order for us to be redeemed. Not a word of truth to that.

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