The National Catholic Register portal publishes a commentary by Regis Martin extolling the 1994 bestseller Crossing the Threshold of Hope by the antipope John Paul II, presenting the work as a profound spiritual answer to worldly fear. Martin frames the book’s central exhortation — “Be not afraid” — as the definitive Christian response to existential anxiety, rooting it in a sentimentalized Christology that emphasizes divine “accompaniment” over divine judgment. The article culminates in a poetic invocation of Charles Péguy, suggesting God “hopes in us” and that salvation consists in a mutual walking-together across a threshold of hope. This panegyric to a manifest heretic exemplifies the conciliar sect’s substitution of therapeutic deism for the social reign of Christ the King, reducing the Gospel to a self-help manual for the anxious modern soul.
The Manufactured Bestseller as Instrument of Neo-Church Legitimacy
The article opens by celebrating the commercial success of Crossing the Threshold of Hope — “more than a million copies in 40 different languages” — as if market penetration were a mark of orthodoxy. This is the logic of the world, not the Church. The book originated as a scheduled interview with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, but when the journalist withdrew, the manuscript was published anyway under the antipope’s name, a calculated publishing event orchestrated by the Knopf publishing house to maximize global reach. The Register’s commentary treats this manufactured phenomenon as providential, ignoring that the very concept of a “pope” writing a mass-market interview book to explain the faith to a secular audience is a novelty unknown to Catholic tradition. True popes teach through encyclicals, bulls, and solemn magisterial acts — not through journalist-mediated dialogues crafted for bestseller lists. The article’s focus on sales figures and “publishing events” reveals the conciliar sect’s deep captivity to laicism and the cult of man condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
Linguistic Subversion: “Hope” Detached from Faith and Charity
Martin’s commentary employs a vocabulary steeped in modernist subjectivism. The word “hope” appears repeatedly, but stripped of its theological definition as a theological virtue infused by God, oriented toward eternal beatitude, and inseparable from faith and charity. Instead, “hope” becomes a psychological resource, a “crossing” we make “within the ambit of his own far greater hope,” as if the Divine Hope were merely a larger version of human optimism. The phrase “the still point of the turning world,” borrowed from T.S. Eliot, is deployed to locate salvation in a mystical experience of time and eternity meeting — a vague, aestheticized spirituality that replaces the objective reality of the Redemption accomplished on Calvary and made present in the Unbloody Sacrifice. The article speaks of “making contact with Christ” and “finding Jesus at the beginning, taking hold of our hand” — language of encounter and accompaniment that has become the hallmark of the conciliar sect’s anthropocentric theology. Nowhere does Martin mention the necessity of sanctifying grace, the sacraments, the state of grace, or the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10). The “filial fear” mentioned in passing is divorced from the servile fear of hell that the Council of Trent teaches is “good and useful” (Sess. VI, Ch. 6). This is the hermeneutic of continuity in action: using Catholic terminology to convey a Protestantized, subjectivist message.
Theological Bankruptcy: A False Christ for a False Church
The article’s Christology is explosively erroneous — though not in the sense John Paul II intended when he called the New Testament Christology “explosive.” Martin quotes the antipope: “Do not be afraid of God who became a man!” — a sentence that, in context, serves to domesticate the Incarnation, presenting Christ primarily as a comforting presence rather than as Rex tremendae majestatis, the Judge of the living and the dead. The Register’s commentary cites Revelation 1:18 (“keys of death and hell”) and 22:13 (“Alpha and Omega”), but only to support a message of reassurance, not of holy fear before the Majesty of God. The true Christ, as Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas, possesses a “threefold authority” — legislative, judicial, and executive — and “all power in heaven and on earth” (Mt 28:18). He reigns not only over individuals but over “families, societies, and states.” The article’s Christ is a private spiritual companion; the true Christ is King of Kings whose “reign encompasses all non-Christians” and before whom “rulers of states” must “publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” By silence on this social kingship, the article commits the gravest omission: it presents a Christ who makes no political demands, who does not condemn the secularism Pius XI calls “the plague that poisons human society,” and who does not require the public confession of His royal rights. This is the antichrist of liberalism: a Jesus who saves us from fear but not from sin, who accompanies but does not judge, who “hopes in us” but does not command us.
The Péguy Distortion: God’s “Hope” in Man as Pelagian Inversion
The commentary’s climax cites Charles Péguy’s poem portraying God as hoping “that the least of the sinners… would at least work a little for his own salvation.” This is a Pelagian inversion of the Gospel. God does not “hope” in man as if He were uncertain of the outcome; God ordains and predestines. The Council of Trent anathematizes anyone who says “man can be justified before God by his own works… without the grace of God through Jesus Christ” (Sess. VI, Can. 1). Péguy’s poetic license becomes, in Martin’s hands, a theological principle: “Will it be said that we tiny ones… will it be we who do not place our hope in him?” The initiative is subtly shifted to the sinner’s response. This is the cult of man condemned by the Syllabus of Errors (Prop. 58: “No other forces are to be recognized except those which reside in matter… and the gratification of pleasure”) and by St. Pius X in Pascendi: the Modernist makes religion “a certain religious movement, applied or applicable to different times and places” (Lamentabili, Prop. 59). The article’s “hope” is not the virtus theologica but a humanistic optimism baptized in Christian language.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Conciliar Sect’s Spiritual Opium
This commentary is not an isolated error but a symptom of the systemic apostasy inaugurated at Vatican II. The conciliar sect, occupying the Vatican since 1958, has replaced the Catholic religion — the only true religion (Syllabus, Prop. 21) — with a natural religion of “dialogue,” “accompaniment,” and “hope” severed from dogma. John Paul II, the article’s hero, was the architect of this transformation: he kissed the Koran, prayed with pagans at Assisi, taught religious liberty as a human right (contradicting Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII), and canonized the very Modernists condemned by St. Pius X. His book Crossing the Threshold of Hope contains explicit heresies: on the salvation of non-Christians without explicit faith, on the validity of non-Catholic religions as “paths to God,” on the dignity of the human person as the foundation of morality. The Register’s commentary, by celebrating this book as a spiritual masterpiece, participates in the great apostasy foretold by St. Paul (2 Thess 2:3). It offers the faithful a counterfeit consolation — “Be not afraid” — while the true Church, the Ecclesia militans, warns: “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28). The article’s silence on sin, judgment, hell, the necessity of the Church for salvation (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus), the Social Kingship of Christ, and the duty of Catholics to combat error — this silence is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.
The Sedevacantist Imperative: No True Pope, No True Magisterium, No True Hope Apart from Tradition
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the analysis is clear: John Paul II was a manifest heretic who, by the very fact of his public heresies, lost the papacy ipso facto (St. Robert Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice; Canon 188.4, 1917 Code; Cum ex Apostolatus Officio). The “pope” who wrote Crossing the Threshold of Hope was a private doctor, a wolf in shepherd’s clothing. The National Catholic Register is an organ of the conciliar sect, the Church of the New Advent, the paramasonic structure that has usurped the visible patrimony of the Church. Its commentators, like Regis Martin, are pseudo-theologians teaching in a pseudo-university (Franciscan University of Steubenville), forming pseudo-priests for a pseudo-church. The only “threshold” Catholics must cross is the one guarded by the unchanging Magisterium of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII — the threshold of Tradition, where the Kingship of Christ is proclaimed over every nation, every law, every heart. “Be not afraid” — but fear the Lord, who “will come to judge the living and the dead,” and whose Kingdom “shall have no end” (Dan 7:14; Quas Primas). The Register’s article is not a commentary; it is a confession of apostasy.
Source:
‘Be Not Afraid’: John Paul II’s Message to a Fearful World (ncregister.com)
Date: 22.10.2026