It was accepted as a matter of course, even as early as 1955, that John Foster Dulles would appear at San Francisco’s Cow Palace for just such a celebration, all but wreathed about with Hindu and Buddhist symbols as a member of the World Brotherhood. Similarly, no one could have been surprised to see Sir James McCauley, a Buddhist, turn up on the Mediterranean island of Patmos in 1988 as an official delegate of the World Conference of Religion for Peace (WCRP), to help the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople celebrate two thousand years of Christianity.
What John Paul does find disturbing is the degree to which the higher-ranking clergy—cardinals and bishops—throughout his Church organization set an example of Mega-Religionist cooperation for priests and laity alike by joining celebrations that are intentionally neither Roman Catholic nor Christian.
The late John Cardinal Wright, for example, a Vatican figure of some importance, was one of the Founding Fathers of WCRP. Perhaps the Cardinal did not realize what he was getting into when he lent himself to the founding of that organization. Others, however, cannot claim ignorance as a fig leaf.
Surely Terence Cardinal Cooke, the late Archbishop of New York, understood the implications of his hosting a widely publicized meeting of TU in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. To the accompaniment of silver bells and ceremonial horns, and before a gathering of some 5,000 TU devotees—including Roman Catholic, Armenian, Protestant and Jewish clergy—the Cardinal welcomed the Dalai Lama to his side as the fourteenth reincarnation of Bodhisvatta Avalokitesvara, Manifestation of Buddha’s Compassion.
“We believers seek common ground,” the Cardinal told the TU glitterati as he took the Dalai Lama’s hand. “We make each other welcome in our houses of worship.”
“All the major world religions are the same,” the maroon-robed Dalai Lama corrected His Eminence, and received a standing ovation.
John Paul’s concern goes still further. It is one thing—a dangerous thing, perhaps—to lend your Roman Catholic house of worship for the atheist ceremonies of Tibetan Buddhism. But systematic and worldwide cooperation with Mega-Religion carries the matter to an entirely different level. And that is exactly the situation in the case of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace (PCJP).
Already known for its long cooperation with the policies of Antonio Gramsci, the PCJP, in each of its local branches throughout the four thousand dioceses of John Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, consistently endorses the main themes of Soviet Marxist policy—the evils of capitalism in Western democracies, the call for unilateral disarmament by the Western powers, the absolute need to establish a one-world economic system based on the distribution of the riches, goods and services of the capitalist world.
That close collaboration of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace with the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Union was institutionalized on the day the Commission cooperated with the World Council of Churches (WCC)—itself an instrument of Soviet policy since 1966—to establish a joint Committee on Society, Development and Peace (SODEPAX) in 1968.
SODEPAX fell into lockstep with the WCC on two capital points.
First, SODEPAX joined with the WCC in the condemnation of Pope John Paul’s claim to head the one, true Church of Christ. Rather, making liberal use of the local offices of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, SODEPAX promotes the WCC’s Mega-Religionist brief for the equivalence of all religions.
The second point on which SODEPAX fell into step with the WCC concerned the redefinition of “church,” to give it the broadest possible interpretation. True to Mega-Religionist principles, the WCC decided in 1970 that the word should no longer be confined to “church of the Christian faith,” or even to believers. Rather, it should encompass people of any faith, and of no faith at all. This, it was maintained, was the new and genuine ecumenism, the true culmination of the ecumenical movement. Accordingly, it became a matter of principle for the WCC and its lackey, SODEPAX, to enlarge their “interfaith” meetings and “ecumenical” activities to include such ideas as would promote their adopted anticapitalist and anti-Western themes of Soviet foreign policy.
It is here that one point of capital importance lies for John Paul concerning the new interfaith Mega-Religionist wave. Where Mikhail Gorbachev rejoices from his Marxist position in the geopolitical arena, Pope John Paul is aghast. For a long time now, the Pontiff and his advisers have known that the Pontifical Commission for Peace and Justice, though still nominally Roman Catholic, has been taken over by converts to Marxism. Necessarily, too, the Pope and his advisers have concluded that four of the main Mega-Religionist organizations—WCRP, WCF, UB and TU—are under the control of a master puppeteer whose home base is surely that red-gabled building in Moscow’s Red Square.
In 1944, in his book Marxism and the National Colonial Question, Joseph Stalin wrote, “It is essential that the advanced countries should render aid—real and prolonged aid—to the backward countries in their cultural and economic development. Otherwise it will be impossible to bring about a peaceful coexistence of the various nations and peoples … within a single economic system, which is so essential for the final triumph of socialism.”
For John Paul, then, the threat of the Mega-Religionist movement is hardly in its quasi-theological self-justifications. It lies in the ease with which some of the most influential Mega-Religionist groups afford aid to Mikhail Gorbachev, persuading us all to dance to the classic tune written by Stalin “for the final triumph of socialism,” a tune, John Paul is convinced, that is still piped, in a new arrangement, by the Pope’s adversaries in Moscow.
There are now literally millions all over the world—millions of Roman Catholics and millions more Christians and non-Christians—who are persuaded that true human religion requires a commonly shared Mega-Religionist belief and practice that eliminates all the specific notes of their original faith and mitigates the rules of morality that once characterized their religious outlook. Moreover, there are as many millions who would never choose Marxism but who have been persuaded by the unlikely voices and examples of Mega-Religionist establishment figures that the prime cause—the very author and instigator—of all the world’s ills is capitalist democracy, especially as exemplified by its chief proponent, the United States.
At first, one might not think New Agers are brothers under the skin to Humanists and Mega-Religionists. The world map on display in the New Age situation room is not dotted with scores of separate groups, hundreds of acronyms. Instead, it is gloriously illuminated by the vision New Agers see advancing day by day among the nations. A vision of our near-future world that is guaranteed by the forces of human evolution. A vision expressed with a certain ethereal and even mystical tone, and in a vocabulary borrowed from every religion and culture, every political and ethical system.
Though they appear to be in the thrall of the utter marvel of their own vision of what is to come, Pope John Paul sees in the New Agers something more practical for our near-future world. He sees in them the ideological ground troops of the Piggyback Globalists. Unlike the Humanists or the Mega-Religionists, they have no geopolitical power groups and not much glitter to speak of. But their success is practical proof that they have an appeal for the common man in all of us that is undeniable. And if it ever came to a contest between the three categories of Piggyback Globalists—between the Humanists, the Mega-Religionists and the New Agers—New Age would win the prize for riding atop everyone else’s organizational systems, and co-opting the members of those organizations into the quest for the mystically material glory of the New Age.
Like the Mega-Religionists, the New Agers hearken to the teachings of a founding father. In 1931, Japan’s Meishu Sama claimed to have received a special revelation. Unlike Baha ’U’llah’s revelation, however, Sama’s came complete with detailed instructions, plans for the New Age of mankind.
A New Age of light was coming soon, said Sama. It would be introduced by catastrophes on land and sea—“negative vibrations,” he called them
—that would purify our present age, the Old Age of darkness.
Both the purification of the Old Age, claimed Sama, and the establishment of the New Age would be supervised by a “Maitreya,” or Messiah. Endowed with superhuman wisdom and fantastic psychic abilities, the Maitreya would bring to heel all powers of the universe and would establish the global village.
Lest Humanists or Mega-Religionists be alarmed that a nonmaterialist, transcendent heresy is afoot in New Age, let them be of good heart. According to Sama, the great Maitreya to come will be as much a part of the material human universe as, say, Moses or Buddha or Shiva or Baha ’U’llah or any of those great religious leaders of past ages. In fact, all those people—Moses and Shiva and all of that crowd—were Maitreyas too. And so was Christ, according to New Age doctrine. All were Maitreyas who came to teach us.
The whole point, in fact, is that the final and all-powerful Maitreya to come will correct the distortions mankind has wreaked upon the originally pure message of all those former Maitreyas.
When it comes to materialism, therefore, New Age will give Humanism a run for its money. And it will beat Mega-Religionists hands down. For, where Mega-Religionist groups are willing to accommodate certain malleable aspects of this or that transcendental religion for the sake of peace, comfort and consolation, New Age doctrine is rock-hard on two core principles that permit no such compromise.
The first point is that there is no reality beyond this world. No cheating, and no pretending. Everything—presumably including Sama’s revelation—is exclusively human. Even the coining Maitreya and his attendant spirits, of which he has many, belong to this human universe. The words of poet Edwin Markham enshrine this basic New Age principle succinctly:
We men of Earth have here the stuff
of Paradise—we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The Temple of the Unfulfilled—
No other Ivory for the Doors—
No other Marble for the Floors—
No other Cedar for the Beam
And dome of man’s Immortal dream.
The second principle is harder to put into poetry; but it is even more important than the first for the New Age outlook. Man, according to that principle, is an animal evolving on an upward curve of increasing, all-inclusive perfectings that will result, very soon now, in millennial conditions for all mankind.
The nature of those conditions was set out by one prominent Roman Catholic New Ager, Father Matthew Fox, who was quoting witch Starhawk—a faculty member of Fox’s Oakland Institute—much as athletes endorse cereals. The New Age, Fox quoted witch Starhawk approvingly, will be one in which “no one is ruled or ruler, where no promise of Heaven offers us false compensation for our present pain, but where we tend together the earth’s living, fruitful flesh.”
One area in which New Agers do not seem to stand as tall as Humanists or Mega-Religionists is highlighted by the fact that the map in the New Age situation room pinpoints only a handful of places New Agers can call their own. They do mark a single site as the New Age center of the world: Findhorn Bay in the north Scotch county of Moray, where the Findhorn River empties into the Moray Firth. Their community at Findhorn was to New Agers what the Vatican is to Roman Catholics. In its heyday, Findhorn already exhibited extraordinary fruits, plants and trees; its frequenters had extraordinary experiences. Findhorn was a “footprint” of the Maitreya to come.
But beyond that, the places of the world claimed by New Agers are so few that they can be quickly listed: the cliffs of Big Sur in California; the Victoria Falls, between Zambia and Zimbabwe; the gardens of Kyoto, Japan; the shrines of fabled Mandalay in Burma; the Hellfire Club in the Dublin mountains of Ireland; the standing slabs of Stonehenge, England.
That’s a far cry from the sixty or so Humanist groups around the world; and it doesn’t measure as much at all beside those hundreds of acronyms such as TU and SUN and WCRP and the rest that cover the Mega-Religionists’ map. But if one were tempted on that account to dismiss the New Age ability to catch on in the world because of a lack of organization, or because they are too unsophisticated in outlook and setup to convert anyone but nonurban peoples—country bumpkins who have never heard of HM-II or seen the likes of John Foster Dulles—there are plenty of people to tell you that nothing could be more inaccurate.
David Fetcher, for example, a recognized expert on modern cults, points out that New Age indoctrination is taking place at all levels of religion, spirituality and culture. And John Randolph Price, one of the acknowledged world leaders of the New Age movement, claims that “there are more than half a billion New Age advocates on the planet at this time, working among various religious groups.”
Given the subindustry of New Age publications thriving around the world, it is not surprising that even the most conservative estimates place the number of New Agers in the hundreds of millions, and find them sprouting like mushrooms not only in Western populations, but among the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians and the Africans.
Further, where the Humanists and Mega-Religionists tend to appeal to the middle and upper-middle classes, New Agers seem to have something for everyone. Millions of individuals engage in self-training techniques at dawn and dusk each day. Individuals who run the gamut from laborers to laboratory geniuses, and from youths to senior citizens, all perform the same meditations. A housewife in Lincoln, Nebraska, a truckdriver in Scotland, a government official in Bonn, West Germany, a teenage freshman at Beijing University, a sheep farmer in Queensland, Australia, a chamberlain at the Royal Court of Bangkok, Thailand, a banker in Zurich, Switzerland—all nourish the same wild hopes for “the new world of man that is just around the corner, for the global village of the New Age.”
No religion is immune from the zeal of the enthusiasts, converts and disciples of the New Age movement. New Age simply borrows all the words, melts them down like so many gold chalices and crosses, and pours them into the mold of their New Age globalism.
Networked throughout the Roman Catholic Church and all the mainline Protestant churches in the United States, for example, are teams of former Christian believers—bishops, priests and laity—who are subtly and gradually transforming the meaning of Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Marriage, Confession of sins, Priesthood and Anointing. Sacraments all, they become instead celebrations of “Earth festivals,” cultivating man’s relationship not with a loving God but with his own earthbound destiny in the global village to come.
In this particular misery, religion has company in all the main sectors of modern life, at least in terms of vulnerability to New Age zeal. No serious doubt can be maintained about the large and growing numbers of New Age adherents among those who want to succeed—to find the good life and promote it for others—in medicine, psychiatry, finance, politics, science, academia, the media and national and international business. More than a few large corporations, national and multinational, have even joined the crowd in an official and organized way. Intent on improving management skills and boosting motivation for success, they provide quasi-obligatory seminars based on the various techniques developed and perfected by New Age theorists for “self-realization” and “creative growth toward integration.”
Generally speaking, New Age also rides especially well on the shambles left in the wake of the anti-God accomplishments of the Humanists and the religion-leveling accomplishments of the Mega-Religionists. Perhaps the firm if tatterdemalion teachings of New Age concerning “spirits” and “devas” give some measure of comfort to the former believers of the major Christian denominations.
The function of these “spirits” and “devas” is to aid men and women to enter the New Age. Chief among them all is Lucifer, the one whom all Christian denominations unjustly pillory and excoriate. “Lucifer,” writes David Spangler, a former codirector of the Findhorn New Age Center, “… is the angel of man’s inner light…. Lucifer, like Christ, stands at the door of man’s consciousness and knocks…. If man say, �
�Come in,’ Lucifer becomes … the being who carries … the light of wisdom…. Lucifer is literally the angel of experience…. He is an agent of God’s love … and we move into a new age … each of us in some way is brought to that point which I term the Luciferic initiation. …. We must say, ‘Thank you, Beloved, for all these experiences…. They have brought me to you.’ … At some point each of us faces the presence of Lucifer…. Lucifer comes to give us the final gift of wholeness. If we accept it, then he is free and we are free. That is the Luciferic initiation. It is one that many people now, and in the days ahead, will be facing, for it is an initiation into the New Age.”
Whether because or in spite of its belief in Lucifer and the lesser “devas” and “spirits,” such New Age spirituality has demonstrated its attraction not only for former Christians, bur for men and women of all religious groups, and of no religion. It appears to be a perfect fit even for those atheists who are so really and truly godless that they see the need to deny the existence of God as equivalent to the need to deny the existence of the Three-Headed Cat of the Himalayas, or the Hairy Man of Norwood.
For such individuals, the appeal of the New Age effort lies in the fact that it is directed, above all, at enabling each person to manipulate his own experience for maximum personal benefit. Its aim is to allow the individual to project into reality the fulfillment of his desires. As cult expert David Fetcher concludes, in plainer, un-co-opted language, the aim for everyone is “to act like God, because you are God.”
New Agers may be lampooned with greater ease than their Humanist and Mega-Religionist brothers. But the fact is that, where Humanists and Mega-Religionists tend to influence religious and other organizations on their own ground, New Age tends to suck them out like a vacuum. It has made the greatest strides in drawing believers and non-believers onto entirely new ground, convincing them that in its doctrine and revelation, New Age is the highest manifestation yet achieved on the evolutionary road to perfect enlightenment, an enlightenment, as they confidently expect, that will shortly engulf men and women the world over, persuading us all to enter the global village of the New Age.
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