When Strangers Come Knocking---Part 25

 

This is the next installment of my series to be published the first Monday of each month.

There are members of false sects, like Jehovah's Witnesses, that come knocking door-to-door hoping to convert you. Instead of ignoring them, it is we who should try and convert them. In 1 Peter 3:16, our first Pope writes, "But in thy hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks thee to give the reason for the hope that thou hast. But do this with gentleness and respect,..." Before the Great Apostasy, the Church would send missionaries to the ends of the Earth to make as many converts as possible. 

Those in false religions don't always come (literally) knocking at your door. It may be a Hindu at work who wants you to try yoga. It could be a "Christian Scientist" who lives next door and invites you to come to their reading room. Each month, I will present a false sect. Unlike the Vatican II sect, I do not see them as a "means of salvation" or possessing "elements of truth" that lead to salvation. That is heresy. They lead to damnation, and the adherents of the various sects must be converted so they may be saved.

In each month's post, I will present one false sect and give an overview of: 

• The sect's history
• Their theology
• Tips on how to share the True Faith with them

Anthroposophy

One of the most misunderstood, little known, and dangerous sects is that of Anthroposophy. If you've ever heard of Waldorf Schools, the occultist Rudolf Steiner, founder of  Anthroposophy, started the Waldorf education system. Before becoming an attorney, I was a New York City science teacher. I had heard of these private schools in my education courses both as an undergrad, and as a graduate student, but they were glossed over for the most part, just like Montessori Schools. (Dr. Maria Montessori, was an Italian physician who also developed a "child-centered" theory of education. She died in 1952). Although I was taught various educational theories, Waldorf education was presented as a place for rich parents to send their kids for a 1960s "hippie" type of learning experience.

Children at these schools learn at their own pace, and most don't read until they are about 9 years old. They generally have only two or three teachers from first through eighth grade, because the teachers stay with them for about three grades each (in education, this is known as "looping"). The price is hefty, tuition is about $18,000 per year (plus additional charges), and many executives from technology firms send their kids there, in spite of the fact Waldorf schools eschew technology for the most part. To educate a child from first grade through high school would cost approximately $235,000 when all is said and done. There are about 1,100 Waldorf schools in the world and approximately 160 are in the United States. Rudolf Steiner was an occultist, and the goal of his educational method is to train children to become clairvoyants who can make contact with the spirit world.  I know it sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone, but I haven't lost my mind. To read the rest of what I wrote about Waldorf Schools, please read my post: introiboadaltaredei2.blogspot.com/2018/06/an-education-in-evil.html. 

In this post, I will expose the truth about Anthroposophy, and the connection to the Vatican II sect.

Rudolf Steiner and the Founding of Anthroposophy

(I would like to credit The Development of Anthroposophy since Rudolf Steiner’s Death by T.H. Meyer, trans. by Matthew Barton [2014], Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life 1861-1907 by Rudolf Steiner, trans. by Rita Stebbing, [1999 updated edition], and information from the series of books, Foundations of Waldorf Education published by Anthroposophic Press, which was started by Steiner himself, in the formation of this post---Introibo). 

The truth about Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is much different from the sanitized version of his life I received in graduate school where it was taught he was a "child psychologist and scientist." Steiner considered Anthroposophy as a "spiritual science" which was “a path of knowledge aiming to guide the spiritual element in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.” He was born in Kraljevec, the son of an Austrian railroad engineer. He pursued his undergraduate education at the Vienna Institute of Technology, supplementing his scientific studies with wide reading in philosophy. 

Steiner earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Rostock in 1891, and was a Freemason. He became interested in the occult at age nine, when he claimed he saw the soul of his aunt appear to him and ask for help. Later, he found out she had just died in village far away when she allegedly appeared. Steiner then grew up to became a follower of the occult belief system of Theosophy. At some point, he joined the Masons. In 1899 Steiner experienced what he described as a life-transforming inner encounter with the "being of Christ." Being a Mason, he hated Christ, but thereafter, his relationship to Christianity remained entirely founded upon this personal experience, and he envisioned it as non-denominational and different from Catholicism, or any other sect which professed Christianity.  He split with other Theosophists circa 1912 after most accepted an Indian child named Krishnamurti as the new “World Teacher” and "reincarnation of Christ."  He ridiculed the idea that a "Hindu lad" (as Steiner called him) could be the new cosmic leader. He took with him the German speaking Theosophists to found his own occult religion which he called Anthroposophy. 1912 is considered the year of its founding.

Anthroposophy is directly cultivated by the 52,000 members of the General Anthroposophical Society, which has national branches in fifty countries. Far more people participate in “initiatives” rooted in Anthroposophy. These include the Waldorf network of schools, the biodynamic movement in agriculture, the form of  corybantic dancing ("spiritual movement") known as eurythmy, the Camphill network of intentional communities, the religious sect known as the Christian Community, and specifically anthroposophical forms of medicine, architecture, banking, speech, and care for disabled people. The reach of Anthroposophy is vast; more than most realize, and it is all based upon occult beliefs--especially contacting the dead and "spiritual entities." These occult-contacted spiritual entities are better known as demons.

He Sees Dead People

What made Steiner so influential? The answer is given by Tore Ahlback in a research article entitled, Rudolf Steiner as a Religious Authority:

Steiner’s alleged ability to see into the hidden was the attribute that primarily separated him from other people. Steiner ‘lived in a vision and he could talk with prophets and saints about their experiences as an equal’ (Steffen 1925c: 114; Rittelmeyer 1925: 38, 41). This visionary ability is given as the explanation to his knowledge of things religious. Steiner could see into the invisible world. He ‘dared construct a theory of knowledge on the angelic realm’. But there was nothing of Swedenborg here, nothing medial. It was a ‘seeing with a clear intellect, but with higher organs’. (Rittelmeyer 1925: 40.) It was important for the Anthroposophists that Steiner should not be perceived as a medium, or a spiritist. 

Steiner’s clairvoyant ability also explains why his doctrines include ideas found elsewhere, for example, in Gnosticism and NeoPlatonism. He has not borrowed the ideas from others, but they originate in the same source as the contents of Gnosticism or Neo-Platonism. Steiner took his ideas from the Akasha Chronicles, a universal memory which contains all that has happened since the beginning of the world. He could read the Akasha Chronicles and he conveyed more information from these chronicles than any other living person. (Rittelmeyer1925: 37–40.) Steiner is also said to have had the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, which were present even when he lectured (Rittelmeyer 1925: 40).  (page 4; Emphasis mine).

How does someone "communicate with the dead," and yet not be a spiritist or medium? Steiner's followers deceived others by making him somehow exempt from that charge, and a "special" leader, so as not to put off Catholics (and others) who knew such was wrong. Anthroposophists also lie that Steiner was a scientist and child psychologist. He held no doctorate or advanced degree in any scientific discipline nor did he have such in the field of child psychology. 

Steiner taught that human beings evolve upward as they gain "knowledge of higher worlds" — that is, knowledge of the "spiritual worlds above the ordinary plane of existence." To gain this knowledge firsthand, people must develop clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is the alleged supernatural ability to perceive events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact. Preparation for clairvoyance involves such things as heightened imagination and dream consciousness. Therefore, the ultimate goal of Anthroposophy is to evolve via "knowledge of higher worlds" by making contact with the dead and other spirit entities. Steiner had some very strange doctrines  which included:

• Everything evolves, and there has been "reverse evolution" wherein people became certain animals

• There are several "bodies:" a physical body composed of the same material elements as minerals, plants, and animals; an etheric or “life” body that is common to plants, animals, and humans; an astral or “soul” body similar to that possessed by animals; and an integrating “I” that is uniquely human

• Our evolutionary process began not on planet Earth but on a much earlier planet with some spiritual correspondences to Saturn. This planet was reincarnated in phases corresponding to the Sun and the Moon, making our Earth the fourth in what will be an ongoing series of incarnations

• People have twelve senses but only learn to use five

• Goblins exist and Buddha now lives on Mars

If anyone thinks Steiner should have been committed to a mental institution, I couldn't disagree. His whacky beliefs are a hodgepodge of Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, and astrology. A syncretism of pure poison.  This poison would go on to help usher in the Vatican II sect.

Anthroposophy and Vatican II

There were three people influenced by Steiner's Anthroposophy that would play a key role in bringing about the Great Apostasy. Each would be a big player at Vatican II:

1) Angelo Roncalli (aka "Pope" "St." John XXIII)

Roncalli was censured for teaching the occult theories of Steiner:

Then in 1924, after the death of his beloved bishop [Bp. Tedeschi], he [Roncalli] was called back to Rome and given a minor post in the Association for the Propagation of the Faith. At this time he also became a part time Professor of Patristics at the Lateran University, only to be relieved of his post within months "on suspicion of Modernism" and for "teaching the theories of Rudolf Steiner." (See The Destruction of the Christian Tradition, World Wisdom Press, 2006, pg. 134 & Footnote 17, pg. 154).

2) Karol Wojtyla (aka "Pope" "St." John Paul II)

Karol Wojtyla was a close friend of one Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, the director of the Rhapsodic Theatre, which he co-founded with him. Kotlarczyk was an Anthroposophist who admired and believed the doctrines of Steiner. His plays were productions of Rudolf Steiner’s mystery dramas. Kotlarczyk wrote a book, The Art of the Living Word: Diction, Expression, Magic, published by the Papal Gregorian University in 1975. Kotlarczyk listed the sources of his ideas in the book, which included Madame Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and Rudolph Steiner. In 1919, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office condemned Theosophy and forbade Catholics to read anything they published. 

Steiner's Anthroposophy comes primarily from Theosophical thought, and one can only imagine how much Modernism, Masonry, and occultism had pervaded the former Catholic Vatican by 1975 that they would permit this garbage to be published. The preface was written by---Karol "Cardinal" Wojtyla. He had this to say in the first paragraph:

Writing these words that precede Dr. Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk's three-part work, I wish to repay a debt of gratitude to the author. I first knew Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk in our native town of Wadowice in the late twenties and early thirties. I got to know him as the pioneer of an original theater, in the noblest sense of the word; as an exponent of the true Polish and Christian (!) traditions of that art, traditions passed on to us by all our literature, and especially by the great romantic and neo-romantic literature.

...

Rome, 6 November 1974

Karol Cardinal Wojtyla

Metropolitan of Krakow (Emphasis mine).

3) Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905-1988)

Von Balthasar was a Modernist who supported and wrote in favor of the heretics at Vatican II. He preached universalism, which "conservative" Vatican II sect members deny (even as the sect itself preaches universalism). Von Balthasar was praised by both "Pope" John Paul II and "Pope" Benedict XVI. JPII actually named him a "cardinal" in 1988, but he died just two days before his promotion would have taken effect. He cannot rightly be called a theologian as his 1928 doctorate was in German Literature and Philosophy. 

Von Balthasar wrote a laudatory preface to a book by Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973), an admitted member of Anthroposophy and self-described "hermetic magician" (whatever that appellation means). Tomberg later converted to the Eastern Schismatics, and became Catholic in 1946. One problem: Tomberg's conversion was insincere. He wrote the aforementioned book entitled, Meditations on the Tarot, in 1960. The name alone should sound warning bells that it's occult--which it is for the promotion of reincarnation. Published posthumously in 1967 (in French), and in 1984 (in English), Von Balthasar wrote the Foreword to the French edition, which was then published as the Afterword in the English edition. The Foreword/Afterword begins:

 Having been asked to write an introduction to this book, which for most readers enters into unknown terrain, and yet is so richly rewarding to read, I must first of all acknowledge my lack of competence concerning the subject matter. I am not in a position to follow up and approve of each line of thought developed by the author, and still less to submit everything to a critical examination. However, such an abundance of noteworthy material is offered here, that one may not pass it by with indifference. (Emphasis mine). 

Immediately, one has to ask why an educated cleric would write a glowing Foreword to a work (a) that contains an occult title, (b) in which he claims no competence, (c) and has glaring occult and heretical teachings (like reincarnation) which requires no special "competence " to detect. We must conclude Von Balthasar was either culpably ignorant or purposively deceptive in helping get notoriety to a book on the occult.  Von Balthasar is a "hero" to "Bishop" Robert Barron, who never ceases to ensnare people in the Vatican II sect through his Word On Fire media campaign. Ironically, he undermines the very raison d'etre of his stated mission in promoting Von Balthasar. Like his spiritual mentor, Barron believes there are "objective grounds" to hope that all humanity will be saved and Hell will only be for Satan and his demons. 

Proselytizing Those In Anthroposophy

It is important to remember what we are dealing with; namely people who wittingly or unwittingly make contact with demons. As I've written many times before, mediums are condemned by both the Bible and Church teaching. "Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD; because of these same detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you." (See Deuteronomy 18:10-12; Emphasis mine.) According to theologian Jone, "Spiritism claims to be able to communicate with the spirit world and endeavors to establish such commerce with it. Although spiritism is for the most part fraud, still the intention alone to enter into communication with spirits is gravely sinful. Therefore, it is mortally sinful to conduct a spiritistic seance or to act as a medium." (See Moral Theology, pg. 100; Emphasis mine). 

Those who are convinced of Anthroposophy's message are to be prayed for and have Masses offered for them. They are under demonic influence and it will take God's intervention more than argumentation to get them away from the sect. However, there are many people who are genuinely ignorant of Anthroposophy. I spoke to a married couple who sent their daughter to a Waldorf School. When I gave them the background information, and copies of the books, they were horrified--"We've been lied to by that school!" They thanked me over and over for enlightening them. The very next week they pulled their daughter out and placed her in a charter school. 

The best weapon against both the unwary (and the convinced if you choose) is to expose the crazy occult teachings. Any rational person who sees doctrines about goblins and "reverse evolution" must stop and think when you (a) show them proof that this is taught (if they don't already know it) and then (b) ask, "What proof does Steiner give for these ideas?" "Why do the Waldorf Schools lie to parents about Steiner's educational philosophy?" "If lying is wrong, can an institution that supports and encourages lying be good?" 

Conclusion

Anthroposophy seeks to brainwash children and adults alike into making contact with the "spirits." They then want them to go out into the world and influence all institutions with the doctrines of demons. Roncalli, Wojtyla, and Von Balthasar were all influenced by Anthroposophy and helped to create the Vatican II sect, thereby driving the One True Church "underground," so to speak, as a remnant. There is also quite an impressive list of those educated by Waldorf occultism who are now in many influential positions.  A small sample of notables include:

• Actresses Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock
• Former CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault
• American film director Austin Chick
• Renowned Biochemist Thomas Sudhof 
• Former Member of Finnish Parliament (and first admitted sodomite elected) Oras Tynkkynen
• Norwegian author and journalist Karin Beate "Linn" Ullmann

Satan is using Anthroposophy to win converts to his cause and place them in all walks of life. If only we Traditionalists, the remaining members of Christ's One True Church, were as solicitous for converts. Then we might see this rotten world get a little better.