Cursillo
CURSILLO
The Cursillo (cur-see-yo) movement originated in Spain in 1947. The official name, Cursillos in Christianity means “a short course in Christian living.”
Founder Bishop Juan Hervas states, “The cursillo movement is aimed at Christian renewal and to bringing to the Church a group of Christians dedicated to living the life of Grace and working with all their strength to bring others to live it.”
The movement encourages evangelical-sounding words (born again, salvation experience, receiving Christ) without the biblical basis for salvation, the completed work of Jesus Christ on Calvary. Those who attend cursillos (cursillistas) are encouraged to live their “Christian” lives within the sacramental framework of Romanism; they are usually fervently involved in the sacraments.
Terminologies Roman Catholics learn in cursillos confuse their evangelical friends, who don’t realize these terms have a different meaning for Roman Catholics. In some cursillos, evangelical are recruited to share this experience with their “Catholic brothers”, and some are now being conducted almost solely for Protestants as an ecumenical ploy.
The lay involvement promoted in Cursillos has greatly strengthened the Church.
This movement is creating a “climate of tolerance” which supposes that religious people can meet together in “love and unity,” regardless of totally different beliefs regarding Christ’s finished redemption.
The national Cursillo movement has began a pilot program of evangelization of non-Catholics called Arise. It is directed to the unchurched and to members of other churches. The Arise program used a threeday weekend of prayer, community experience and presentations by a team of two priests and 14 laymen to examine the Catholic Church’s history and doctrine.
After a Cursillo, cursillistas get together for a bi-weekly Ultreya, where they talk about their spirtitual lives.
Address of the Cursillo movement: 6401 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, CA 94608. CHRISTIAN COMMENT THE CURSILLO MOVEMENT by ALEX DUNLAP
The Cursillo movement is one of the newest of Rome’s successful plans to fool sleepy Protestants and others. The R.C. Church has replaced the mailed fist approach to non-Catholics with the Trojan horse of infiltration by guile, intrigue and deception. The Cursillo Movement is an example. A pamphlet from the Louisville, Kentucky office says, ‘although it is Catholic in origin and setting, now Protestants and Catholics can have an encounter with Christ together.’ This retreat revival weekend is called a Cursillo. So today’s priests are being trained to use expressions like born again, salvation experience, salvation history, encounter with Christ, baptism of the Holy Spirit, salvation from a non-divine existence, receiving Christ, charismatic experience, kerygma, etc. They are attending evangelistic crusades, learning the hymns, the messages, the terminology. They are going forward at invitations, being interviewed in the inquiry rooms by counselors and personal, workers, filling out cards indicating the church of their choice as R.C.. Priests and nuns are being trained to attend Full Gospel meetings and to copy the actions and motions of others. Priests are joining local councils of churches, YMCAs, speaking in pentecostal, Methodist, Baptist and other so-called Protestant churches. One priest, Cursillo Director in Louisville, told me the Baptist minister welcomed him as a brother in Christ because, he said, we both believe in Jesus. This priest boasted to me that he was conducting a revival in a Methodist Church. Fundamentalists, beware! Modernists are not the only ones being fooled. The FGBMI, for instance, has published a booklet, ROMAN CATHOLICS AND THE BAPTISM OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. It contains testimonies of priests, nuns and laity telling how they received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and now they attend Mass more regularly, are more devoted RCs and say, ‘We appreciate the liturgy more fully.’ The RC Church is doing away with the old catechism books. It is not denying the contents contained in them, it’s just phasing them out for its new program of the Trojan Horse. Now they have modern castechisms. You can read about it in the 40-page booklet by this name published by Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. They now admit that the old catechism classes were drab, dull and repititious.
Modern catechists are to teach the liturgy as the saving actions of Christ made present to God’s people today. Christ’s purpose was ‘that they might accomplish the work of salvation which they have proclaimed by means of sacrifice and sacraments around which the entire liturgical life revolves.’ And again they say that Christ is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, especially under the Eucharistic Species.
Expressions appealing to Protestants such as salvation centered appear often. On the one hand they are trying to acommodate themselves to Protestants, even fundamentalists, by speaking of salvation as a gift of God not to be merited. On the other hand, under all the camoflauge there is still the Roman pope, the blasphemous Mass, the idolatrous devotion to Mary, salvation by sacraments, the new birth by water baptism and the same old purgatory – all denying the efficacy of the blood atonement of Jesus Christ.
Yes, it is the same old Romish attack on the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ hidden inside the Trojan Horse of Protestant expressions and activities. In modern catechisms we read that all of creation is evolutionary and the dynamism of God’s creativity points to man as the crown of creation. Hence salvation is the final step in this creative process, and is the divinizing of creation in the person of man.
And some Christians, even pastors, are snowed by such verbiage and effervescence. We need to read and study passages in the Word of God that warn of crafty teachers, deceitful workers, and Satan and his ministers coming as angels of light. (Luke 20:23; Eph 4:214; II Cor 11:13; Mt 24:4,5,24; Acts 5:3; Rom 16:18; Eph 5:6; II Cor 11:26; II Peter 2:1; Luke 21:8; I Cor 6:9; II Tim 3:13; Rev 18:23; II John 7.
Then warn truly converted persons against being fooled by Rome’s espionage agents. Instead, in the love and power of the Holy Spirit pierce their disguise with the word of God, the sword of the Spirit. Bring them under conviction of sin. Expose their counterfeit Christ (II Cor 11:14). Show then how to be truly converted according to the Christ of the Bible, the Christ Who saves fully and completelty from, sin and hell by faith alone in His substitutionary blood sacrifice. Then lead them out of Roman idolatry into a Christ-centered, Bible teaching, missionary-minded, evangelical, evangelistic, fundamental, separated, Protestant, New Testament Christian church. Turn the tables on the devil.”