Father Thomas Massaro, S.J. and the Charter for Compassion: Breaking down dogma

Remember Father Thomas Massaro? The professor of moral theology at Boston College who appeared as a guest speaker at Father Bryan Hehir's Social Justice Conference last year?  In a previous post, I detailed how Fr. Massaro is a member of the Cambridge Peace Commission, an organization intimately linked with the GLBT agenda.

Fr. Massaro is now promoting the "Charter for Compassion," which is described as "..a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national difference" which is "supported by leading thinkers from many traditions."  In a review of Karen Armstrong's book entitled, "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life," which appeared in America Magazine [see here], Fr. Massaro writes, "..nothing could be more important than Armstrong's agenda to 'retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others.'  All people of good will and open minds will admire the Charter for Compassion and its promotion of more constructive patterns of social behavior."

The problem?  The Charter for Compassion is an assault on dogma.  It reads:


"The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.


It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community."

"New Church" Catholics who have embraced the tenets of Modernism and who desire to create a new humanitarian religion and a church made in their own image and likeness view the Church founded by Christ as "too dogmatic," "authoritarian," "rigid," "legalistic," "intolerant," "Medeival" and "triumphant."  Such modern-day Judases within the Mystical Body of Christ hurl these snide slogans against the Church because they have lost the faith and cannot steel themselves to admit it.  Their hatred of dogma is most significant.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen explains in his essay entitled "The sense of sin":  "It may be interesting to inquire at this point why the modern world has lost its sense of sin. It should be immediately evident that it is the obvious consequence of the loss of the value of man. Under traditional Christianity, a man was a theological creature, an adopted son of God and a member of the Mystical Body of Christ; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries man became a philosophical thing bound to God by some vague ties of creaturehood. But man today is only a biological phenomenon with no other destiny than that of the worm he crushes under his heel. Once one loses hold on the primary dogma that man has a moral end, and that his actions, thoughts, and words in this life are all registered in the Book of Life, and therefore will one day determine his eternal destiny, sin becomes meaningless. The modern mind has forgotten the dogma of man, and hence cannot avoid forgetting the morals of man, for one is the corrollary of the other. Deny that God is interested in the behavior of men and you immediately create a society in which man is uninterested in the behavior of his fellow man."

In his book Wrath of God: The Days of the Antichrist, Fr. Fanzaga explains that, "...he [Robert Hugh Benson] also warns of a great danger for the Church which has to do with the 'great seduction' - the 'great prostitute' the Book of the Apocalypse calls it - that is, humanitarian religion. Only the Church, reduced to a tiny flock will resist. The Church will be tempted to follow the path of humanitarianism which would reduce Christianity to a form of humanism in which Christ is regarded merely as a man - although the greatest man ever born...At the same time, Benson foresaw that the tiny flock - of Paul VI - would resist the reduction of Christianity to humanitarian religion and that it would be branded a public enemy of the people and of progress. It would be accused of being out of step with the times and of belonging to the Middle Ages. Thus, Benson has prophesied [in his book The Lord of the World] both the seduction and the persecution of those who would uphold the supernatural dimension of Christianity." (Fr. Livio Fanzaga, Wrath of God: The Days of the Antichrist, p. 128).