Source: https://www.bertha-dudde.org/en/proclamation/1514

1514 Infallibility.... Ecclesiastical commandments....

July 11, 1940: Book 24

You place too much significance on the infallibility of the head of your church, and yet you are hugely misguided. It was not God’s will that His church should be arbitrarily formed by people and in accordance with people’s will. Everything right and proper to maintain and spread His teaching was given by Jesus Christ Himself on earth to his disciples. He made the distribution of His teaching conditional on the individual’s will to accept it or not. His gave precise guidelines which applied to everyone who wanted to accept His teaching. These consist of the promises which were made on condition that people comply with the requirements of the Lord’s teachings.

He always respected the free will of the human being. The human being should make his decision voluntarily and without external pressure and thus fulfil God’s will. And to these people He promised eternal life.... Thus He only requires faith in Him and His Word when He says ‘I Am the way, the truth and the life.... I Am the means, the law and the fulfilment.... anyone who believes in Me will have eternal live....’ His love wants to give something unimaginably wonderful.... eternal life. And for this He only requires people’s faith and their will. However, it is not His will to burden humanity, who is already living in a constrained state on earth, with new sins.... The restraints of someone who truly believes in Jesus and His Word will be loosened, however, someone who does not believe is already punished enough by his constrained state because he has to remain in it for an eternity. Anyone who disregards the Ten Commandments given to people by God Himself, anyone who defies them, commits a sin, i.e. he disobeys God Who is love, because he disobeys the commandment of love. He does nothing to liberate himself from his state, instead he does everything to make it worse. Fulfilling these commandments is the only means of release, while infringing against them is the very opposite.

The dogma of infallibility, however, became a new lawgiver for people in as much as the God-given Ten Commandments were increased by several more, so that the new ecclesiastical commandments more or less were added to God’s commandments and failure to comply with these laws was considered to be as sinful as acting in opposition to the God-given commandments. And this error has an appalling effect. Because people now burden themselves with entirely irrelevant yet duty-bound actions which are quite unrelated to the commandment of love for God and their neighbour. And now they only focus their whole attention on keeping these ecclesiastical commandments and on releasing themselves from presumed sins.... Thus the sum total of their soul’s task consists of complying with commandments decreed by people or to do penance for the guilt of the alleged infringement. And the soul’s dreadful bondage, which can only be resolved by love, is ignored by them....

If these commandments had been necessary, truly, the Lord Himself would have given and preached the fulfilment of these to His disciples on earth first.... Thus people tried to improve Christ’s teaching arbitrarily and did not hesitate to give themselves divine approval for it. By deeming themselves to be enlightened by the Holy Spirit while still in a state far removed from it, they now decreed laws which could not be in accordance with God’s will. These laws considerably reduced people’s sense of responsibility for the God-given commandments due to the fact that the newly decreed commandments were now given the greatest attention, to an extent that humanity now observes them purely automatically and believes that it follows Christ’s teaching when it fulfils its imposed duty.

The truly enlightened human being is chosen by God to put a stop to this deplorable state of affairs, i.e. to reveal it. However, God can never have enlightened those who had decreed or approved such commandments. The infallibility of the head of the church is a distorted image of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Anyone inspired by the Holy Spirit will always have recognised the error of this set of laws but worldly-ecclesiastical power prevented them from correcting this momentous error. For these commandments did not come forth from the spirit of love.... Lawmakers had little interest in reducing the work for the struggling souls to achieve their final release. Rather, their motive for establishing these commandments was a craving for increased power and the will to lead people into a certain state of dependence, since at the same time the failure to observe the commandments was deemed to be a grave sin. True servants of God have always recognised this deplorable state and have wanted to confront it but the teaching of infallibility of the head of church is already too deep-rooted that it could be easily removed. And only someone looking for pure truth and asking God Himself for the truth and the spirit of inner enlightenment will be able to liberate himself from it....

Amen

Translated by Heidi Hanna