KIKO'S DEFORMED VISION PT 4: PRIDE DISGUISED

NOTE: This post is guaranteed to get some readers upset. It's not my intention to inflame passions, but rather to help us all understand the fruits that flow out of Kiko's Passion-less theology. Any issues or problems contained herein are my fault and should not be attributed to Jungle Watch.

I take no delight in writing this post at all, and in truth, I dread writing Part 5, which is well underway. Now to business:

By now, we all know that the NCW has built itself into a parallel church, but even more to the point, a competitor church with a competitor Christ. We have discussed not only the grievous heresies espoused by them, but also their guiding principle: that the Church is all about Man, and that the Incarnation has absolutely nothing to do with the reconciliation of God with Man. There is only community.

From there, it’s not a big stretch to convince those caught in Kiko’s web that they are special, that they have some secret, original teaching. This, combined with the equating of the NCW with the One True Church, means for a member to consider leaving them, or even disagreeing or questioning in any way, is abandonment of Christ.

So we finally arrive at the two most frightening facets of the NCW--their real spiritual fruits, and the support they receive from bishops. I say frightening because even while writing this, I literally got a shudder thinking about how demonic all of this is. I don’t say demonic for effect. I say it because that is in fact what it is, for it is the spirit of Antichrist at work (1 John 2:18-19).

In fact, it is the demonic that is at the heart of both Kiko's toxic fruit and his ecclesiastic support. Just hold onto that thought for a minute.

What’s worse is that all the debate, reason, and even mockery in the world won’t change a thing for those so consumed by this cult; they simply will not see what it’s doing to them, nor what the end result will be. As the Lord says, this kind of demon is only cast out by prayer and fasting.

This is not a post about judgment of our brethren in Christ. It’s a recognition of the great peril they are in, and if they will not listen, we must do everything in our power to deter others from throwing themselves into the mouth of the lion.

What happens when justice takes a backseat

THE DEATH OF JUSTICE

In the most general sense, and in a way the most sorrowful, the greatest damage caused to the individual believer in the NCW is the loss of virtue, in particular the virtue of justice.

So what? What makes this loss of justice so sad? Because even the simplest pagan or hardened atheist understands that justice is so absolutely necessary that human life and virtue are DOA without it. You don’t need special revelation to know that nor any special catechism or spiritual insight. But somehow the whole thing is lost on the NCW. They can't grasp that if a person (or anything else) lacks justice, then is lacks the other virtues as well.

Now classically speaking, we understand justice to be the giving to each person what is his due. Thus, when I hire a kid to bush-cut my grass, I pay him for his labor. Likewise, if I pay him for his labor, he owes it to me.

Although this is the technical definition of justice, Kiko interprets justice to be simply retaliation, retribution, or punishment. Justice therefore equals punishment. But this misses the bigger picture, as always. This is what happens when we abandon the Tradition and take it upon ourselves to self-define what is good, and it always ends up in moral chaos.

Justice is so much more. Justice in a fuller sense is the restoring of a thing from its deformity to its former beauty. In other words, it says that things are inherently good and beautiful, and not only does whatever deforms it need to be eliminated, but the thing itself must also be restored.

This goes to the heart of what Christ our God does. The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is about restoring Man to what he truly is: a creature of God created for communion with Him.  Our Lord restores our relationship to the Father. He restores human beings individually and as a whole, creation to what it truly is. He restores our relationships, and He restores order and beauty where it is been robbed by sin and evil.

So the restoration is all about God and His Divine love. Any human, horizontal restoration flows from that as an after-effect.

But in the work of “forgiveness” espoused by the NCW, there is only forgiveness as blanket acceptance of fate; that is the only requirement of love, for them. Because for Kiko justice is retribution and nothing more, it must be rejected since forgiveness is the only moral law. Because of this, justice as a virtue—especially justice as restoration--is suspended. It is bracketed out of any equation of the moral life. And such removal has devastating consequences.

First, it makes justice a vice, and therefore injustice a virtue. I know this sounds like an exaggeration, but the fact is that in the moral life, if one actually denies justice, then one is by definition unjust because what is unjust is promoted. Put another way, a bad man does bad deeds; but an evil man teaches other men to do bad deeds. Just so their injustice. An absolute acceptance of all things in the name of the spiritual life, or because of a fear of hypocrisy, or based on a resignation that we are all sinners so it’s all good, actually promotes injustice and therefore evil.

After all, we teach injustice not just by acts of commission, but by acts of omission.

Secondly, this suspension of justice in the name of forgiveness without recognizing the injury means that any injury suffered is essentially meaningless. God’s saving work of redemption for Man, who repeatedly sinned against Him, has no meaning since forgiveness is absolute, and no thought whatever should ever be given to the injury done (that’s precisely Kiko’s theology, by the way). It's a theology built on God's whole, "Nah, no worries, mate!" relationship to sin, death, and evil.  How much worse then is such violence done to the innocent: rape victims, battered children, prisoners, addicts, the sick, the dying, the sorrowful, and the despairing.

PRIDE: THE MOST EVIL FRUIT OF ALL

St John of the Cross, the undisputed master theologian of mystical theology in the Western tradition, gave this warning to those who in their new-found fervor for God consider themselves holier than others:

“In these persons the devil often increases the fervour that they have and the desire to perform these and other works more frequently, so that their pride and presumption may grow greater. For the devil knows quite well that all these works and virtues which they perform are not only valueless to them, but even become vices in them. And such a degree of evil are some of these persons wont to reach that they would have none appear good save themselves; and thus, in deed and word, whenever the opportunity occurs, they condemn them and slander them, beholding the mote in their brother's eye and not considering the beam which is in their own; they strain at another's gnat and themselves swallow a camel.” (The Dark Night, I.2.2).

Now all of us are subject to pride, so again--what I say here is not judgment; it’s recognition of the very real sickness that infects those in the NCW, especially those at the 2^nd scrutiny and beyond.

Even at the surface level, many of us can recount numerous experiences of interactions with those in the NCW, and the stories are nearly unanimous that there is very clearly a sense of an “I’m a better Catholic than you” attitude. I’d love to tell you that’s all in my head, but I’ve been told repeatedly—even during a Holy Hour at the Cathedral—that I will only come to have a relationship with Jesus by joining the NCW. During that Holy Hour, I was told by a lady I know with a big smirk on her face that my “slavery” to “old liturgy” and “traditional practices” were basically superstition, and that I was trying to use it like magic to control God.

Even talking about it now leaves me shaking my head. How do you respond to such hubris? She didn’t bother to try to say it in charity; even a Jehovah’s Witness makes the effort to sound sincere. This woman, who is a friend of the family, said it in a mocking, contemptuous manner, and I was so struck by such blasphemy that I just closed my eyes and knelt until she left. At the risk of sounding judgmental, these cannot possibly be the fruits of the Holy Spirit. 

But there’s an even deeper level of pride here. We see in their version of the Faith the disdain for the offering of the Son to the Father for the reconciliation of Man to Himself. They reject it as unnecessary. Kiko himself says that the notion of sacrifice when speaking of God is “a scandal.” Like Luther, they so absolutely reject this that they revile any who says God loves us this much. Such is their denial of Christ. And such denial can only be born of pride whereby we presume that we don’t need any reconciliation with Him in the first place. It is only in "the community" that the Holy Spirit is actually at work, and only there that the fruits of the Spirit are born. 

This pride extends itself into day-to-day life in that they flat-out ignore their charism to participate fully in the parish life. Even I know that they are required to attend regular Masses at their church, yet they persist in sticking to their own pretense of a liturgy and do not participate on the larger level unless their parish is firmly under the control of a NCW priest or a supportive bishop--and even that notion of parish is a "community of communities" (their phrase, not mine). They have no interest in the larger church, and they admit as much. How can they—indeed, why should they—join with us when they consider us quasi-pagans? So much for “that they all may be one.”

What makes matters worse--and what makes them unable to hear any of this and give it any credence--is their interpretation of suffering for Christ and of persecution. It is indeed a blessing to suffer for Christ, and truly the calling to suffer for love of Him is a universal vocation--some of us are simply never given the opportunity to love to the full by their blood. Yet.

MAKING GOD THE AUTHOR OF EVIL

But that's not what I'm talking about. For the NCW, your family, your spouse, your neighbors--everyone--is there to be a cross for you. According to Kiko, God intentionally gives us a Judas, because such betrayal is His will in some way.

That's so demonically false that I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll just say this. The French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre ends his play "No Exit" with the famous quotation, "Hell is other people." The NCW flat-out adopts this very notion, and turns it into a virtue. "Love your neighbor despite the fact that your neighbor is greedy, lustful, proud, and not as holy as you. People are really only a cross for you." 

All of this flows partly from the confusion of “God send it because He will it” to “God permits it for your good.” Truly, He does allow evils, but these “evils” are “bad things” that happen to us that aren’t ontologically or morally evil. But the NCW herd insists that people in their moral breakdowns are there because God sends them and their sins to be a cross for you. You love them because they are a cross to bear. At this point, they have long ceased to be human beings created in the image of God. 

How exactly is that "love your neighbor as yourself?" Love of neighbor that is born from the love of Christ seeks the good of the other and does not keep score of such things. It elevates the other according to his dignity, even if he is those things. As Christians, we are called to love our neighbor because he is good, despite the fact that sometimes he does not do good. 

But the NCW does mean what we mean we talk about charity. For the NCW in their Lutheran contempt for humanity, they "love" their neighbor in spite of the fact that he's a piece of s*#t. Why? Cos we're all pieces of s*#t, and the only way to be happy is to accept your fate as a piece of s*#t that you are saddled with other pieces of s*#t.  Really? That's Divine love in action? Even in this supposed act of love, Kiko's devotee judges his neighbor and glories in the fact that only the NCW member could possibly love such an awful human being. 

And that's the whole point: heresy ALWAYS puts forth evil fruit. As we see all the time, this is seen most readily—outside of their constant sacrileges in the liturgy—in the false teaching they put forth. I know all sorts of things are posted on the NCW blog, so I checked a few days ago and saw that Diana is talking about how traditional Catholics are afraid to evangelize and only want to cling to their comfortable Catholicism. When someone mentioned the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, this spokesman for Fr Pius and the whole NCW on Guam had this to say:

"All acts of mercy," she says, are nothing more than what "the atheists are capable of performing." Evangelization is far more important, and despite her near perfect ignorance of evangelization, she boasts of the superiority of the NCW.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister. When our Blessed Lord says that we will be judged by the standard of “when you do it for the least of these, you do it for Me,” she says that’s just childishness because even atheists can do that [click here to read Matt 25:31-46 to refresh yourself on the Lord's teaching on the Gospel standard].

So great is the pride that they directly contradict the Lord Jesus Christ in the works that He expects of us.

In their hubris, they don't get that we don't condemn that they evangelize, but rather what they evangelize. They don't get that we don't condemn that they celebrate the Liturgy, but rather how they celebrate the Liturgy--and in both cases, it's way way outside of the Tradition.

One last one: I say we are at war, but it's against the powers of darkness, and it is spiritual warfare in the arena of souls “in” the Church who hate us and our love for the Lord. The hatred and panic of some of these poor soul is so blinding that a few seem to have lost all reason, as this poor soul apparently has:

This is a grossly extreme example, and there are fringe types and trolls on every blog. But they make my point for me. As usual. 

Please understand: I do not post screenshots for shock value, and definitely not so we can go to her blog and trash her—she absolutely LOVES getting double-digit comments, and most of her comments are from our readers and supporters. That's yet another reason to not comment on her blog. 

No, I show you these so you can see, in context and out, just what we are up against. These are not simply men and women we fight against. This is quite literally the work of the evil one. To re-iterate what St John of the Cross declares, all that conversion and all those healed marriages and all the other good that may come from the NCW initial catechesis becomes vice for them, and if they persist in such pride, then all their work is in vain. In truth—just like with us and everyone else—their works will stand as accusers against them.

And this pride is not just collective; it’s infecting to the individual believer. It’s the individual who thanks the NCW for saving his marriage--and who then is contemptuous of those not in the NCW or don't support the NCW--that make all his progress in the Christian life just so much straw.

Then there’s the problem of the ubiquity of pride. We all struggle with this egregious vice, and so when anyone reads this post, it’s so easy to jump to the conclusion of “Glaucon’s so prideful. Look at his hypocrisy. But it's not hypocrisy, my friends. I make no claim to being holier or more reverent or more devout or more prayerful or more joyful in the Lord than anyone else. I do, however, see those who DO claim to be all of these things lording it over the rest of us with a sneering arrogance, and I see that pride for what it is: the profoundest threat to charity. I see it for what it is, I recognize it, because I have personal knowledge of it, and I know that humility is the only cure (though my own humility is so flimsy that I will say no more on it except to say I need A LOT more work).

And the key to understanding this whole post is this: the spirit of antichrist (in the general sense) hates Christ Crucified and what that really means. That evil doesn't mind love your neighbor, it's doesn't mind community, it doesn't mind all manner of spirituality. It DOES mind Christ Crucified.  Christ Crucified--the Cross AND the Corpus--contradicts everything because it's about the sacrifice of God Himself for Man. It's only in Christ Crucified where God Himself demonstrated His perfect humility where we may become humble ourselves in a modelling of ourselves on our Eucharistic Lord and all He has done for us.

As long as the NCW proclaims a Passion-less Lord (except as a pit-stop on the way to Resurrection), I don't see how we have anything in common with them. There is no common faith with those who deny Christ our God; all that's in common after such a denial is is "there once was a fella named Jesus who came from Nazareth". If they break faith with Christ Crucified, then they are already well outside the Body of Christ. And to my eyes, this is the case, and all the more so the further one goes into this "way."

And the same applies to so many bishops. More on that in Part 5.

So no, I do not judge nor condemn. I only write with the full knowledge that our family members and friends have de facto left the Church and are in a mutant form of schism--all under the direction of the archbishop, who in in turn controlled by his spiritual director. What a terrible time for Guam. How really very sad. Even after we win because of the valiant efforts and courage of those who lead in this fight, the damage to the Church is still done. Rather like after an exorcism, the evil spirit is cast out, but the delivered person still requires real time to heal and reflect.

So then let our work with the NCW be a mirror for us all! Let the evils that we see are the true fruits of Kiko  Arguello’s theology and practice be a warning to us all not to fall into such traps. Let not pride be mingled with our struggle for Christ. If the NCW seeks to corner the market; then let them have it. They will be the ones to reap the dividends later, in this life and (God forbid!) in the life to come.

It is my sincere hope that clarity will be granted one day to them, but from where I’m sitting, such a grace isn’t humanly possible. Pray to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for them. Do penance for them. There is no other way to cast out this kind of demon that so darkens the intellect that the blind are leading the blind outside of the safety of the Tradition, and both head speedily toward the pit.

Coming soon is the 5th and final part, regarding how the bishops and Curial types have promoted this infection for their own gain.