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| Vatican promotes climate agenda with Lenten ‘carbon fast’ |
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Posted by: Stone - 4 hours ago - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Vatican promotes climate agenda with Lenten ‘carbon fast’
Vatican officials promoted a 40-day 'carbon fast' during Lent while unveiling plans to utilize AI to monitor global parish eco-commitments.
Nov 5, 2026
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The Holy See celebrated the expansion of its global ecological platform by showcasing artificial intelligence surveillance tools and promoting an eco-substitute for Lenten penance, urging faithful to replace traditional mortification with a “carbon fast.”
On November 4, the Holy See Press Office hosted a press conference to mark the fifth anniversary of the Laudato Si’ Action Platform (LSAP), a digital framework launched by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Officials announced that over 6,200 Catholic institutions and 13,000 participants enrolled in the centralized system, unveiling a strategic plan for the next five years that integrates a planetary “Digital Atlas” tracking climate data, artificial intelligence algorithms to inspect and verify institutional compliance, and a global network of online “Digital Missionaries.”
“During Lent, we often ask ourselves a familiar question: What am I willing to give up? Perhaps a favorite food, a small comfort, or something that has become too important in our daily lives. Some years ago, in the Archdiocese of Bombay, we began asking another question alongside it: What if our fasting could also teach us to care more deeply for creation? We encouraged what we called a carbon fast. It invited people to examine ordinary choices: the electricity we consume, the water we use, the plastic we discard,” Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Allwyn D’Silva of the Archdiocese of Bombay, India, stated.
“A carbon fast lasts forty days. But the decisions our institutions make can shape people’s lives for decades. If our faith can change what we choose for forty days, why should it not change what our institutions choose for the next forty years?” he continued.
“Ten years are not many in the life of the Church, but they are enough to ask what happens when an Encyclical takes root,” Sr. Alessandra Smerilli, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said in reference to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’. “I think of the Mass for the Care of Creation, approved by Pope Leo XIV and inserted into the Roman Missal…. Living the vocation to be protectors of God’s handwork is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”
In Traditional Catholic theology, the season of Lent is a sacred time of bodily mortification, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving undertaken to crucify the passions of the flesh, atone for personal sins, and unite the believer with the redemptive Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Program Director Alonso de Llanes announced that the system will monitor participating Catholic institutions worldwide under the “Digital Atlas of Laudato Si’.” The apparatus utilizes an interactive surveillance map that cross-references participating parishes, schools, and monasteries with satellite data on regional carbon emissions, deforestation rates, and extreme weather.
“Let me explain what visitors can do,” Llanes said. “Open the Atlas and select a country or diocese. You can locate participating Catholic institutions and, where they have given permission, view their ecological plans and reflections.”
Llanes then confirmed that the Vatican is preparing AI mechanisms to verify whether Catholic institutions are carrying out their environmental plans, alongside an annual workshop examining AI algorithms: “Through the Atlas, we are bringing together three kinds of information in a single tool: where participating Catholic institutions are present, what their communities are doing, and what environmental data tells us about the places they inhabit.”
“We also want to improve how we evaluate progress,” de Llanes explained. “If an institution reports planting trees, can we learn whether those trees survived? If it adopts an ecological plan, can we understand whether that commitment has changed its decisions or operations? These questions require better data, follow-up, and appropriate verification.”
To enforce this agenda across the digital sphere, the Vatican also instituted a “Digital Missionaries Bootcamp” to deploy trained online activists.
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| Fr. Faber: Meditation on the Sacraments |
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Posted by: Stone - 4 hours ago - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
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There is something almost indiscriminate in the generosity of the Precious Blood. It appears not to regard the probabilities of its being used, or appreciated, or welcomed. It goes in floods through the seven mighty channels of the sacraments. It lies like a superincumbent ocean of sanctifying grace over the Church.
Truly, the sacraments are an invention of love, yet are thy not also as truly a necessity for our salvation? Would not the divine assurance of our salvation be a very heaven begun on earth? Yet the Sacraments are the nearest approach to such an assurance as the love of our Heavenly Father saw to be expedient for the multitude of His children.
Let us see now the means by which the Precious Blood spreads its empire. These means are the sacraments. It is difficult to describe the sacraments. If an angel were to bear us from this globe which we inhabit and carry us to some distant star, which God may have adorned as a dwelling-place for some other species of reasonable creatures, we should be struck with the novelty and peculiarity of the scenery around us. Some of its features might remind us of the scenery of earth, although with characteristic differences, while other features would be entirely new. This is very much the effect produced upon us when we come to learn the Catholic doctrine about the sacraments. It introduces us into a new world. It amounts to a revelation. The sacraments are a part of the new world introduced into creation by the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, and therefore are an essential part of creation as it was eternally preordained by God. Yet they are quite distinct from any other province in creation. The sacraments of the Old Law were but shadows of the sacraments of the Gospel. The sacraments of the New Law are created things which have been devised by our Blessed Lord Himself. The Eucharist was foreshadowed by the Paschal Lamb; the sacrament of Holy Orders by the consecration of priests and Penance by the legal purification of the tabernacle.
There was no shadow of Confirmation because it is the sacrament of the fullness of grace, and so can belong only to the Gospel dispensation. Neither was there any shadow of Extreme Unction because it is the immediate preparation for the entrance of the soul into glory and there was no entrance into glory for any human soul till Jesus had risen and ascended. Neither could Matrimony be a sacrament under the Old Law, because the Word had not yet wedded our human nature; and the sacramentality of Marriage consists in its being the figure of those transcendent nuptials of the Sacred Humanity.
What then shall we call these sacraments? They are not persons, yet they scarcely seem to be things. I mean that they seem to be more than things. We want another word for them, another name, and we cannot find one. They are powers, lives, shrines, marvels, centers of heavenly power, supernatural magnficences, engraftings of heaven upon earth, fountains of grace, mysterious efficacies, marriages of matter and spirit, beautiful complications of God and man. Each sacrament is a species by itself. Each has some specialty, which is at once its excellence and its mystery. The pre-eminence of Baptism consists in its remission of original sin and the pains due to it. The pre-eminence of Confirmation resides in the vastness of the succors of actual grace which it brings with it, as we see in the fortitude it conferred on the Apostles and which the Eucharist had not conferred. The sacrament of Penance can claim the privilege of the most necessary of all sacraments to those who have been baptized, and of the capability of reiterated remission of mortal sin, which Baptism cannot claim. Extreme Unction excels Penance in the great copiousness of its graces. The excellence of Orders consists in its placing men in the singularly sublime state of being domestic ministers of Christ. Matrimony has a glory of its own in its significance of the union of our Lord with His Church. The preeminence of the Eucharist resides, as St. Thomas says, in the very substance of the sacrament, seeing that it is as it were the sacrament of all the other sacraments, the center of them, the cause of them, the end of them, and the harmony of them. All are because of it and are subordinate to its amazing supremacy.
These sacraments were designed by our Lord Himself and were instituted by Him with varying degrees of details as to matter and form in various sacraments; and yet, saving their substances, He has given His Church very extensive power over them, because they are so intimately connected with its unity. We see the exercise of this power in the bread of the Eucharist, in the impediments of marriage, and in the varieties of Orders in the Latin and Greek Churches. The sacraments are institutions that illustrate at once the magnificence of God’s dominion over His creation, and also the capability of creatures to be elevated by Him to astonishing sublimities far beyond the merit and due of nature; and this elevability of creatures is one of the most glorious manifestations of the liberty of God.
The sacraments are not mere signs of grace, but causes of it. They cause grace in us physically by the omnipotence of God which exists in them as if it were their own proper virtue and energy. The sacraments cause grace physically, just as our Lord’s Blood, shed long ago, cleanses us from our sins physically, not morally only, and just as His Resurrection and Ascension cause our resurrection and ascension physically, by the energy and a force which God has appropriated to them. The sacraments also cause grace in us morally, by representing to the Father the merits of Christ’s Passion actually accomplished and so doing a sort of holy and irresistible violence to God, and thereby procuring for us more abundant, and at the same time, very special succors of grace…
But the sacraments not only confer a sanctifying grace and infuse habits of virtue, both physically and morally, they also confer a certain special sacramental grace which is peculiar and distinct in each sacrament. Moreover, it belongs to the grace of the sacraments that certain of them impress what is called a character or seal on the soul. The nature of this character is involved in mystery; but the most probable interpretation of it is that which describes it as a natural similitude of the soul of Jesus, likening our souls to His, and imparting hiddenly to our souls a resemblance of His, hidden in this life, but to be divulged with exceeding glory hereafter. This is a beautiful thought and fills us full of a peculiar love for the dear human soul of Jesus. Our clearest idea of the Sacraments is that which we gain form Hugh St. Victor and the elder theologians: they are the making visible of invisible grace…The sacraments are the actions of Christ. He instituted them as Man and thus they are the going-on of the thirty-three years upon earth…
The sacraments are the most striking memorials of the love of Jesus and a knowledge of them is most necessary to the right understanding of redemption…They are the inventions of God. No creature could have devised them. I do not believe that without revelation the most magnificent intelligence of angels could have imagined such a thing as a sacrament. It is a peculiar idea of God. It represents a combination of His most wonderful perfections… It conveys to us a distinctive notion of God. We already know God as the unbeginning God. We know Him as the God of nature and the God of grace. These are two different disclosures of Him to us. So the knowledge of Him as the God who devised the sacraments is another disclosure of Him. Moreover, God not only invented them but He invented them for the most magnificent of purposes. He invented them that by their means especially He might impart His Divine Nature to created natures, that He might justify sinners, that He might sanctify souls that he might unite to Himself the race whose nature He had condescended to single out and assume to Himself. If they are His own invention they must be works of unspeakable excellence; but if they were meant also for purposes so dear to Him, and of such an exalted character, who shall be able rightly to imagine the excellence of the sacraments?
The character which some of the sacraments confer also belongs to their grace. Amid the ardors of heaven and in the dazzling splendors of the Beatific Vision, the inexplicable characters of the sacraments, three in number, as if adumbrating the Three Divine Persons, shine forth as distinct beauties and brighten through all eternity. The character of Baptism is, as it were, the finger-mark of the Eternal Father on the soul. The character of Orders glistens like the unfailing unction of the priesthood of the Eternal Son. The character of Confirmation is the deep mark which the fires of the Holy Ghost burned in, the pressure of His tremendous fortitude which was laid upon us and yet we perished not, so tenderly and so gently did He touch us. In the wild fury of the tempestuous fires of hell the same characters glow terribly. They are indestructible even there, fiery shames, intolerable disgraces, distinct fountains of special agony forever and forever…
Now, look out upon the great laboring world, the world of human actions and endurances; it is not possible to measure the influence which is being exercised upon the world at this moment by the sacraments. They are penetrating the great mass of mankind like the network of veins and arteries in a living body. They are being the causes of millions of actions, and they are hindering the consequences of millions of other actions. They are weaving good and unweaving evil incessantly. The influence of a single reception of a sacrament may be handed down for generations; and the making of destinies of thousands may be in its hands., At this instant, by far the greatest amount of the earth’s intercourse with heaven is carried on directly, or indirectly though the sacraments. There is a vast wild world of sorrow upon earth. But over great regions of it the sacraments are distilling dews of heavenly peace….They are drying the widow’s tears, raising up unexpected benefactors for the orphan, nerving the pusillanimous, softening the desperate, rousing the torpid, crowning those who strive, and doing all things for those who die….
Moreover, a devotion to the sacraments is very needful for the times in which we live. The spirit of the age must necessarily affect both our theology and our asceticism. Under its constraints we shall be tempted to sacrifice the supernatural to the natural, the passive to the active, and the infused to the acquired. Theology will be allured to merge into metaphysics. Devotion will be considered a vocation, priests a caste, and theology a private professional training. Men will sneer at perfection in the world. Education will be bidden to throw off what it will be taught to consider the last relics of monastic trammels. Men will chafe at the condemnation of books and indeed at all acts of intellectual authority on the part of the Church. A discontent with the existing Church, or at least a want of cordial forward sympathy with it, will grow up. The sovereignty of the Church, the Pope’s temporal power, and the hallowed truths enshrined in canon law will provoke impatience as obstinate things which will not die although their hour of death has come. The mystical side of the Gospel will become more distasteful while it grows less intelligible. Heroism will have to rank lower than the ordinary attainments of conscientious piety. The privileges of the Church will be less esteemed and heresy less hated. The influence of the Incarnation will be far less recognized and acknowledged in the world. Such is the spirit which will try to waylay souls on their road to Calvary or Thabor. Such, by the blessing of God, will not be ours, if we foster in ourselves a deep, a tender, and an intelligent devotion to the
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| Fr. Michael Muller [1880]: How Catholics lose the Faith |
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Posted by: Stone - 4 hours ago - Forum: Articles by Catholic authors
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1. By going to schools forbidden by the Church;
2. by the neglect of their religious duties;
3. by the reading of bad books;
4. by worldliness and a wicked life;
5. by intercourse with scoffers at religion;
6. by mixed marriages;
7. by becoming members of secret societies;
8. by pride and subtle reasoning on the mysteries of religion.
1. There are different causes which lead to apostasy from the faith to infidelity. The most successful means ever employed by Satan to bring about gradually a universal falling-away from Christ and His religion, is the introduction of the present system of public, or state-school, education. This I have sufficiently shown in my book, "Public School Education." In these schools no mention of God and religion is to be made. The best means to abolish religion is not to teach any. Children are to be brought up infidels. But there are some who assert that "there is no sectarian teaching in the public schools, and, consequently, a Catholic may send his children to them without exposing them to any danger." Now, even supposing there really was no sectarian teaching in the common schools, even then a Catholic parent cannot send his children to such a school without exposing them to the greatest danger. Those who approve of the public school, because nothing sectarian is taught there, act like a certain husbandman who wished to transplant a fine young tree to a certain part of his garden. On examining the new place, however, he found that the ground was filled with poisonous ingredients, which would greatly endanger the life of the tree. He therefore transplanted the tree to a sandy hill, where there were, indeed, no poisonous ingredients, but where there was also no nourishment for the tree. Now, will any one assert that the young tree was not in danger of perishing in this new place? And will any one assert that the faith and soul of a child are not in danger of being ruined in those godless common schools? Even if Protestantism is not taught there, infidelity is taught and practised there: and infidelity is even worse than Protestantism.
But is it really true that Protestantism is not taught in many of our public schools? This is unfortunately far from being the case. Napoleon I. introduced the public-school system into France, in order, as he honestly declared, "to possess the means of controlling political and moral opinions." Puritans and Freemasons, in this country, have clearly the same end in view in upholding the present system of public schools.
In the early days of New England, and even of several of the other American States, the Puritans always used the public schools as a powerful means of spreading their peculiar doctrines. When they were stripped of this power by the liberal founders of American independence, they still struggled for many years to accomplish, by indirect means, the injustice which they dared not maintain openly. We all remember how the poor Catholic boys and girls of the public schools were harassed by colporteurs and proselytizers, who carried baskets filled, not with bread for the poor hungry children, no, but with oily tracts, cunningly devised to weaken, or even destroy, the religious faith of those poor little ones. In some schools, even, Catholic children were urged and enticed to go to the sectarian Sunday schools; and pictures, cakes, and sweet meats were liberally promised, in order to induce them to go. Teachers were selected with special regard to their bitter hatred of the Catholic Church, and their zeal for "evangelical " propagandism. Some years ago, in New Orleans, when the school-board was composed of bigoted sectarians; many of them sectarian preachers, all the Catholic teachers, male and female, were turned out of the schools, merely because they were Catholics.
And even if Catholic children are not always expressly taught doctrines opposed to their religion, nevertheless the school-books which they use are, as I have said, frequently tainted with anti-Catholic prejudices and misrepresentations. Nothing can be more evident than the decidedly anti-Catholic spirit of English literature in all its departments. It has grown up, ever since England's apostasy, in an anti-Catholic soil, in an anti-Catholic atmosphere, and from an anti-Catholic stem. It is essentially anti-Catholic, and tends, wherever it comes in contact with Catholic feelings and principles, to sully, infect, and utterly corrupt them. Sound knowledge, a sound head, strong faith, and great grace, all these combined may, indeed, preserve one whom the necessity of his position may lead into un-Catholic schools; but no one will deny that this anti-Catholic literature must exercise a most baneful influence over all those who, without sufficient preparation from nature or grace, plunge into it, in the pursuit of amusement or knowledge. Protestant ideas will not make the Catholic turn Protestant, there is not much danger of that, but they will tend to make him an infidel; they will destroy his principles without putting others in their place; they will relax and deaden the whole spiritual man.
In these schools Catholic children are taught that the Catholic Church is the nursery of ignorance and vice; they are taught that all the knowledge, civilization, and virtue which the world now possesses, are the offspring of the so-called " Reformation." They learn nothing of the true history of Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Ireland, Austria, and the other Catholic countries of Europe; they learn nothing of the true history of Mexico, and the various Catholic countries of North and South America. They never hear of the vast libraries of Catholic learning, the rich endowments of Catholic education, all over the world, for ages; they never hear of the countless universities, colleges, academies, and free schools established by the Catholic Church, and by Catholic governments, throughout Christendom. Where is the common-school book whose author has manly honesty enough to acknowledge that even the famous universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded by Catholics, and plundered from their lawful possessors by an apostate government?
Moreover, Catholic children are often singled out by their school-companions, and sometimes even by their teachers, as objects of ridicule. Now, what is the result of all this training? The consequence is, that either the Catholic children become ashamed of their holy religion, and despise their parents, or, if they have the courage to hold out, their tender minds are subject to numberless petty annoyances: they must endure a species of martyrdom. This is no exaggeration: I have it from good authority. Practically speaking, the present common-school system is but a gigantic scheme for proselytism and infidelity.
Now, we intend that our children shall be taught to love and revere their holy Church. We wish to teach them that that Church has been, for over eighteen hundred years, the faithful guardian of that very Bible of which Protestants prate so loudly, and which they dishonor so much. We wish our children to learn that the Catholic Church has been, in all ages, the friend and supporter of true liberty; i. e., liberty united to order and justice. We wish them to know that the Catholic Church has ever been the jealous guardian of the sanctity of marriage; that she has always defended it against brutal lust and heathen divorce courts. We wish our children, in fine, to regard the Church as the only hope of society, the only salvation of their country, the only means of preserving intact all the blessings of freedom.
The public schools are not only seminaries of infidelity, they are, moreover, in many cases, hotbeds of immorality. In these schools every child is received, no matter how vicious or corrupt he or his parents may be. "One mangy sheep," as the homely proverb says, "infects the whole flock." So one corrupt child in a school is capable of corrupting and ruining all the others. And, in fact, where have our young people learned the shameful habit of self-abuse, and many other foul, unnatural crimes, that are bringing so many thousands to an early grave? Ask those unhappy victims, ask our physicians throughout the country, and they will tell you that, in almost every instance, it was from the evil companions with whom they associated in the common schools. Ah! you will see, only on the day of judgment, how many unnatural crimes have been taught and propagated, from generation to generation, in these very hotbeds of iniquity.
A certain friend of mine a man of great learning and experience wrote to me, one day, that he himself had been, in his youth, subjected to college-training; that, be it by nature or by grace, or both combined, he resisted and escaped. "But," he adds, "from my observation and experience, I would say it did require a miracle for Catholic youth to escape the damnable effects of a non-Catholic education." I have had opportunities, in this line, that many a priest has never had. I assert that a Catholic boy of tender years, and perhaps careless training, can be preserved from moral contamination, in public and mixed schools, by nothing less than a miracle. I will not chop logic with any one about it. It is a matter of fact. I therefore assert it as of ascertained result, that in most cases especially in those cases where there are enough of Catholics together to have a school of their own their frequenting a school without religion will land most of them in utter carelessness of their religion.
2. Many fall away from the faith because their parents neglected giving them any instruction in religion. There is a certain class of parents who have their children instructed in everything but their religion. There are other parents who allow their children to grow up in ignorance of everything except in the manner in which they may make some money. Now, when the time draws near for these children to make their first communion, their parents will take them to the priest to prepare them for this holy action in a week or two. Now, what can children learn in a couple of weeks? Certain it is that what they learn very seldom enters their hearts. Their hearts are not prepared for the Word of God; they are light-minded, and, in many cases, corrupted, and what they do learn is learned from constraint. No sooner are they free from constraint than they throw their religion overboard: they become the worst enemies of the Catholic Church. The young man who set fire to St. Augustine's Church, in Philadelphia, Pa., was a Catholic, and he gloried in being able to burn his name out of the baptismal record. By a just punishment of God, these neglected Catholic children will become our persecutors. Thus is verified in these children what God says through the Prophet Isaias: " Therefore is my people led away captive because they had not knowledge." (Isa. v, 13.)
There are others who do not wish to be instructed in their religious duties, in order that they may more easily dispense themselves from the obligation of complying with these duties. Now, it is this very class of men that easily give ear to the principles of infidelity, because these principles please their corrupt nature better than those of our holy religion. The class of these men is very numerous, and their number is on the increase every day. For, not having any religion themselves, nor wishing to have any, what wonder if their children follow their example? Such as the tree is, such also will be the fruit. A few weeks ago, a Catholic lady of New York asked a little child: "How many Gods are there, and who made you?" The child could not answer these questions. So the Catholic lady said to the child: "Say, 'There is but one God;' say, 'God made me.'" When the mother of the child heard this she flew into a passion, and said: "My child shall never learn such a thing: God has nothing to do with my child." Behold how infidel mothers bring up their children!
There are others who gradually fall away from the faith and become infidels, because they neglect a most essential Christian duty, that of prayer. "The impious," says David, "are corrupt, and they become abominable in their ways . . . They are all gone aside; they are unprofitable together: there is none that does good, no, not one . . . Destruction and unhappiness are in their ways." "Now, the cause of all this wickedness," continues David, "is because they have not called upon the Lord." God is the light of our understanding, the strength of our will, and the life of our heart. Now, the more we neglect to pray to God, the more we shall experience darkness in our understanding, weakness in our will, and deadly coldness in our heart. Our passions, the temptations of the devil, and the allurements of the world, will draw us headlong from one abyss of wickedness to another, until we fall into the deepest of all, into infidelity, and indifference to all religion.
3. There is another special cause of the loss of faith: it is the reading of bad books. Bad books are, 1. idle, useless books which do no good, but distract the mind from what is good. 2. Many novels and romances which do not appear to be so bad, but often are bad. 3. Books which treat professedly of bad subjects. 4. Bad newspapers, journals, miscellanies, sensational magazines, weeklies, illustrated papers, medical works. 5. Superstitious books, books of fate, etc. 6. Protestant and infidel books and tracts.
There are certain idle, useless books, which, though not bad in themselves, are pernicious, because they cause the reader to lose the time which he might and ought to spend in occupations more beneficial to his soul. He who has spent much time in reading such books, and then goes to prayer, to Mass, and to holy communion, instead of thinking of God and of making acts of love and confidence, will be constantly troubled with distractions; for the representations of all the vanities he has read will be constantly present to his mind.
The mill grinds the corn which it receives. If the wheat be bad, how can the mill turn out good flour? How is it possible to think often of God, and offer to him frequent acts of love, of oblation, of petition, and the like, if the mind is constantly filled with the trash read in idle, useless books? In a letter to his disciple Eustochium, St. Jerome stated for her instruction that, in his solitude at Bethlehem, he was attached to, and frequently read, the works of Cicero, and that he felt a certain disgust for pious books, because their style was not polished. Almighty God, foreseeing the harm of this profane reading, and that, without the aid of holy books, the saint would never reach that height of sanctity for which he was destined, administered a remedy, very harsh, no doubt, but well calculated to make him alive to his fault. He sent a grievous sickness on him, which soon brought the solitary to the brink of the grave. As he was lying at the point of death, God called him in spirit before his tribunal. The saint, being there, heard the Judge ask him who he was. He answered unhesitatingly: "I am a Christian; I hold no other faith than thine, my Lord, my Judge." "Thou liest," said the Judge; "thou art a Ciceronian, for, where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also." He then ordered him to be severely scourged. The servant of God shrieked with pain as he felt the blows, and begged for mercy, repeating with a loud voice, "Have mercy upon me, O Lord! have mercy upon me." Meanwhile, they who stood round the throne of that angry Judge, falling on their faces before him, began to plead in behalf of the culprit, implored mercy for him, and promised in his name that his fault should be corrected. Then St. Jerome, who, smarting with pain from the hard strokes he had received, would gladly have promised much greater things, began to promise and to swear, with all the ardor of his soul, that never again would he open profane or worldly works, but that he would read pious, edifying books. As he uttered these words he returned to his senses, to the amazement of the bystanders, who had believed him to be already dead.
St. Jerome concludes the narration of this sad history with these words: "Let no one fancy that it was an idle dream, like to those which come to deceive our minds in the dead of night. I call to witness the dread tribunal before which I lay prostrate, that it was no dream, but a true representation of a real occurrence; for, when I returned to myself, I found my eyes swimming with tears, and my shoulders livid and bruised with those cruel blows." He tells us, finally, that, after this warning, he devoted himself to the reading of pious books, with the same diligence and zeal that he had before bestowed upon the works of profane writers. It was thus that Almighty God induced him to that study of divine things which was so essential to his own progress in perfection, and destined to do so much good to the whole Christian world.
It is true that, in works like those of Cicero, we some times find useful sentiments; but the same St. Jerome wisely said, in a letter to another disciple: "What need have you of seeking for a little gold in the midst of so much dross, when you can read pious books, in which you shall find all gold without any dross?" (Epis. ad Furian.) As to novels, they are, in general, pictures, and usually very highly wrought pictures, of human passions. Passion is represented as working out its end successfully, and attaining its objects, even by the sacrifice of duty. These books, as a class, present false views of life; and as it is the error of the young to mistake these for realities, they become the dupes of their own ardent and enthusiastic imaginations, which, instead of trying to control, they actually nourish with the poisonous food of phantoms and chimeras.
When the thirst for novel-reading has become insatiable,--as with indulgence it is sure to do,--they come at last to live in an unreal fairy-land, amidst absurd heroes and heroines of their own creation, thus unfitting themselves for the discharge of the common duties of this every-day world, and for association with every-day mortals. The more strongly works of fiction appeal to the imagination, and the wider the field they afford for its exercise, the greater in general are their perilous attractions; and it is but too true that they cast, at last, a sort of spell over the mind, so completely fascinating the attention, that duty is forgotten and positive obligation laid aside to gratify the desire of unravelling, to its last intricacy, the finely-spun web of some airy creation of fancy. Fictitious feelings are excited, unreal sympathies aroused, unmeaning sensibilities evoked. The mind is weakened; it has lost that laudable thirst after truth which God has imprinted on it; filled with a baneful love of trifles, vanity, and folly, it has no taste for serious reading and profitable occupations; all relish for prayer, for the Word of God, for the reception of the sacraments, is lost; and, at last, conscience and commonsense give place to the dominion of unchecked imagination. Such reading, instead of forming the heart, depraves it. It poisons the morals and excites the passions; it changes all the good inclinations a person has received from nature and a virtuous education ; it chills, by little and little, pious desires, and in a short time banishes out of the soul all that was there of solidity and virtue. By such reading, young girls on a sudden lose a habit of reservedness and modesty, take an air of vanity and frivolity, and make show of no other ardor than for those things which the world esteems, and which God abominates. They espouse the maxims, spirit, conduct, and language of the passions, which are there under various disguises artfully instilled into their minds j and, what is most dangerous, they cloak all this irregularity with the appearances of civility and an easy, complying, gay humor and disposition.
St. Teresa, who fell into this dangerous snare of reading idle books, writes thus of herself: "This fault failed not to cool my good desires, and was the cause of my falling insensibly into other defects. I was so enchanted with the extreme pleasure I took herein, that I thought I could not be content if I had not some new romance in my hands. I began to imitate the mode, to take delight in being well dressed, to take great care of my hands, to make use of perfumes, and to affect all the vain trimmings which my condition admitted. Indeed, my intention was not bad, for I would not for the world, in the immoderate passion which I had to be decent, give any one an occasion of offending God; but I now acknowledge how far these things, which for several years appeared to me innocent, are effectually and really criminal."
Criminal and dangerous, therefore, is the disposition of those who fritter away their time in reading such books as fill the mind with a worldly spirit, with a love of vanity, pleasure, idleness, and trifling; which destroy and lay waste all the generous sentiments of virtue in the heart, and sow there the seeds of every vice. Who seeks nourishment from poisons! Our thoughts and reflections are to the mind what food is to the body; for, by them, the affections of the soul are nourished. The chameleon changes its color as it is affected by pain, anger, or pleasure, or by the color upon which it sits; and we see an insect borrow its lustre and hue from the plant or leaf upon which it feeds. In like manner, what our meditations and affections are, such will our souls become either holy and spiritual, or earthly and carnal.
In addition to their other dangers, many of these books unfortunately teem with maxims subversive of faith in the truths of religion. The current popular literature in our days is penetrated with the spirit of licentiousness, from the pretentious quarterly to the arrogant and flippant daily newspaper; and the weekly and monthly publications are mostly heathen or maudlin. They express and inculcate, on the one hand, stoical, cold, and polished pride of mere intellect, or, on the other, empty and wretched sentimentality. Some employ the skill of the engraver to caricature the institutions and offices of the Christian religion, and others, to exhibit the grossest forms of vice and the most distressing scenes of crime and suffering. The illustrated press has become to us what the amphitheatre was to the Romans, when men were slain, women were outraged, and Christians were given to the lions, to please a degenerate populace. "The slime of the serpent is over it all." It instils the deadly poison of irreligion and immorality through every pore of the reader. The fatal miasma floats in the whole literary atmosphere, is drawn in with every literary breath, corrupting the very life-blood of religion in the mind and soul. Thus it frequently happens that the habitual perusal of such books soon banishes faith from the soul, and in its stead introduces infidelity. He who often reads bad books will soon be filled with the spirit of the author who wrote them. The first author of pious books is the Spirit of God; but the author of bad books is the devil, who artfully conceals from certain persons the poison which such works contain. Written, as they generally are, in a most attractive, flowery style, the reader becomes enchanted, as it were, by their perusal, not suspecting the poison that lies hidden under that beautiful style, and which he drinks as he reads on.
But it is objected the book is not so bad. Of what do bad books treat? What religion do they teach? Many of them teach either deism, atheism, or pantheism. Others ridicule our holy religion and everything that is sacred. What morals do these books teach? The most lewd! Vice and crime are deified; monsters of humanity are held out as true heroes. Some of these books speak openly and shamelessly of the most obscene things, whilst others do so secretly, hiding their poison under a flowery style. They are only the more dangerous, because their poisonous contents enter the heart unawares.
A person was very sorry to see that a certain bad book was doing so much harm. He thought he would read it, that he might be better able to speak against it. With this object in view, he read the book. The end of it was that, instead of helping others, he ruined himself.
Some say: "I read bad books on account of the style. I wish to improve my own style. I wish to learn something of the world. "This is no sufficient reason for reading such books. The good style of a book does not make its poisonous contents harmless. A fine dress may cover a deformed body, but it cannot take away its deformity. Poisonous serpents and flowers may be very beautiful, but, for all that, they are not the less poisonous. To say that such books are read purely because of their style is not true, because those who allege this as an excuse, sometimes read novels which are written in a bad style. There are plenty of good books, written in excellent style, which are sadly neglected by these lovers of pure English.
To consult those books for a knowledge of the world is another common excuse for their perusal. Well, where shall we find an example of one who became a deeper thinker, a more eloquent speaker, a more expert business man, by reading novels and bad books? They only teach how to sin, as Satan taught Adam and Eve to eat of the forbidden tree, under the pretence of attaining real knowledge; and the result was, loss of innocence, peace, and paradise, and the punishment of the human race through all time.
Some profess to skip the bad portions and read only the good. But how are they to know which are the bad portions, unless they read them? The pretext is a false one. He only will leave the bad who hates it. But he who hates the bad things will not read the books at all, unless he be obliged to do so: and no one is obliged to read them, for there are plenty of good, profitable, and entertaining books which can be read without danger.
There is a class of readers who flatter themselves that bad books may hurt others, but not them; they make no impression on them. Happy and superior mortals! Are they gifted with hearts of stone, or of flesh and blood? Have they no passions? Why should these books hurt others and not them? Is it because they are more virtuous than others? Is it not true that the bad, obscene parts of the story remain more vividly and deeply impressed upon their minds than those which are more or less harmless? Did not the perusal of these books sometimes cause those imaginations and desires forbidden by Christian modesty? Did they not sometimes accuse themselves in confession of having read them? If not, they ought to have done so. Who would like to die with such a book in his hand?
Readers of bad books, who say such reading does not affect them, should examine themselves and see whether they are not blinded by their passions, or so far gone in crime that, like an addled egg, they cannot become more corrupt than they already are.
See that infamous young man, that corrupter of innocence! What is the first step often of a young reprobate who wishes to corrupt some poor, innocent girl? He first lends her a bad book. He believes that, if she reads that book, she is lost. A bad book, as he knows, is an agreeable corrupter; for it veils vice under a veil of flowers. It is a shameless corrupter. The most licentious would blush, would hesitate to speak the language that their eyes feed on. But a bad book does not blush, feels no shame, no hesitation. Itself unmoved and silent, it places before the heart and imagination the most shameful obscenities. A bad book is a corrupter to whom the reader listens without shame, because it can be read alone and taken up when one pleases!
Go to the hospitals and brothels: ask that young man who is dying of a shameful disease; ask that young woman who has lost her honor and her happiness; go to the dark grave of the suicide, ask them what was the first step in their downward career, and they will answer, the reading of bad books.
A certain young lady of the State of New York was sent to a convent school, where she received a brilliant education. She spoke seven languages. She wished to enter a convent, but was prevented by her parents. Her parents died, and after their death the young lady took to novel-reading. She soon wished to imitate what she had read: she wished to become a heroine. So she went upon the stage, and danced in the "Black Crook." At last she fell one day on Second Avenue, in New York, and broke her leg in six places. She was taken to a hospital, where a good lady gave her a prayer-book. But she flung it away, and asked for a novel. She would not listen to the priest encouraging her to make her confession and be reconciled to God. She died impenitent, with a novel in her hand.
Assuredly, if we are bound by every principle of our religion to avoid bad company, we are equally bound to avoid bad books; for, of all evil, corrupting company, the worst is a bad book. There can be no doubt that the most pernicious influences at work in the world at this moment come from bad books and bad newspapers. The yellow-covered literature, as it is called, is a pestilence compared with which the yellow fever, and cholera, and small-pox are as nothing: and yet there is no quarantine against it. Never take a book into your hands which you would not be seen reading. Avoid not only notoriously immoral books and papers, but avoid also all those miserable sensational magazines and novels and illustrated papers which are profusely scattered around on every side. The demand which exists for such garbage, speaks badly for the moral sense and intellectual training of those who read them. If you wish to keep your mind pure and your soul in the grace of God, you must make it a firm and steady principle of conduct never to touch them.
Would you be willing to pay a man for poisoning your food? And why should you be fool enough to pay the authors and publishers of bad books, pamphlets, and magazines, and the editors of irreligious newspapers for poisoning your soul with their impious principles and their shameful stories and pictures.
Go, then, and burn all bad books in your possession, even if they do not belong to you, even if they are costly. Two boys in New York bought a bad picture with their pocket-money, and burned it. A young man in Augusta, Ga., spent twenty dollars in buying up bad books and papers, to burn them all. A modern traveller tells us that, when he came to Evora, he there on Sunday morning conversed with, a girl in the kitchen of the inn. He examined some of her books which she showed him, and told her that one of them was written by an infidel, whose sole aim was to bring all religion into contempt. She made no reply to this, but, going into another room, returned with her apron full of dry sticks, all of which she piled upon the fire and produced a blaze. She then took that bad book and placed it upon the flaming pile; then, sitting down, she took her rosary out of her pocket, and told her beads until the book was entirely burned up. (Compitum, book ii, p. 239.) In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that, when St. Paul preached at Ephesus, many of the Jews and Gentiles were converted to the faith: "And many of them that believed, came confessing and declaring their deeds. And many of those who had followed curious arts, brought together their books and burnt them before all. And counting the price of them, they found the money to be fifty thousand pieces of silver." (Acts xix, 18, 19.)
A young nobleman, who was on a sea voyage, began to read an obscene book, in which he took much pleasure. A religious priest, on noticing it, said to him: "Are you disposed to make a present to our Blessed Lady? "The young man replied that he was. "Well," said the priest, "I wish that, for the love of the most holy Virgin, you would give up that book and throw it into the sea." "Here it is, father," answered the young man. "No," replied the priest, "you must yourself make this present to Mary." He did so at once. Mary was not slow in rewarding the nobleman for the great promptness with which he cast the bad book into the sea; for, no sooner had he returned to Genoa, his native place, than the Mother of God so inflamed his heart with divine love, that he entered a religious order. (Nadasi, Ann. Mar. S. J., 1605.)
4. Another cause that leads to the loss of faith is the corruption of the heart, the slavery of the passions. You will find men who deny the immortality of the soul, who deny the eternity of hell, who deny the infallibility of the Church. You will find men who deny the divine origin of confession. But why, my brethren, why? It is because these wholesome truths put a check to their passions. They cannot believe these truths and, at the same time, gratify their criminal desires.
An honest, virtuous man would never think of doubting or contradicting these sacred truths. In spite of its innate pride, the mind is the slave of the heart. If the heart soars to heaven on the wings of divine love, the mind, too, rises with it. But if the heart is buried in the mire of filthy passions, it soon exhales dark, fetid vapors, which obscure the intellect. The infidel's reason is the dupe of his heart.
There is a man who was once a good Catholic, who used formerly to go regularly to Mass and to confession. Now he goes no longer to confession, now he is an infidel. But why? Has he, perhaps, become more enlightened? Has he received some new knowledge? No; the only new knowledge he has received, is the sad knowledge of sin. He believed as long as he was virtuous. He began to doubt only when he began to be immoral; he became an infidel only when he became a libertine. The history of his life is soon told. Wishing to gratify his passions without restraint and without remorse, he tried to rid himself of a religion which would have troubled him in the midst of his unlawful pleasures. Religion appeared to him like the hand on the wall, writing his doom in the very midst of his senseless revelry. Human respect, and the gratification of his passions, are the only causes that induced him to become an infidel.
5. To frequent the society of the wicked, of scoffers at religion, is, for many, another cause of losing the faith. A scoffer at religion is a man without principle, a man sunk in the grossest ignorance of what religion is. He blasphemes what he does not understand. He rails at the doctrines of the Church, without really knowing what these doctrines are. He sneers at the doctrines and practices of religion, because he cannot refute them. He speaks with the utmost gravity of the fine arts, the fashions, and even matters the most trivial, and he turns into ridicule the most sacred subjects. In the midst of his own circle of fops and silly women, he utters his shallow conceits with all the pompous assurance of a pedant.
There is a young man. He was brought up a Catholic. He went every day to a Catholic school until he made his first communion. He learned his catechism well. But his parents complain that he no longer says any morning or night prayers, that he goes no longer to confession, to holy communion, and to Mass on Sundays. Why not? It is because he frequents the society of wicked companions, who ridicule religion and scoff at everything sacred. "Evil communications corrupt good manners." In the company of such wicked young men he soon feels ashamed of his religion, becomes quite indifferent to it, gives up every practice of piety, and finally becomes an infidel, a scoffer at religion himself.
6. Experience has sufficiently shown that mixed marriages are also a cause why many have lost their faith. This is the reason why the Catholic Church has always opposed them. The Catholic party is generally exposed to the danger of losing the faith, or of becoming indifferent to it. The Catholic education of the children is also generally neglected, and often made impossible.
There is a congregation in one of the Middle States, which numbers about two hundred families. There are not fewer than fifty-seven mixed marriages in it. The number of converts is but six, and the number of those who gave up the Catholic religion is twenty-two. As to the children, there are at present found fifty-four who are being instructed in the rudiments of our religion, and it is hoped that they will adhere to the practice of her doctrines. But there are one hundred and thirty-seven who are receiving their religious training in some religious sect, or are left to grow up in utter ignorance. There are thirty-one more whose ultimate end is as yet doubtful. The number of perverted Catholics is nearly four to one in this congregation. There is no reason to believe that mixed marriages are less productive of evil in other congregations. We shall say more on this point in the explanation of the sacrament of matrimony.
7. The state of irreligion and infidelity into which millions of men who were Catholics are plunged at present, is the work of secret societies of Freemasonry. In the first volume of this work, Part I, I have clearly proved that the principal object of Freemasonry is to destroy all revealed religion, and to introduce heathenism in its place. To join any of the secret societies is to give up the Catholic religion; for the Catholic Church has excommunicated all those who have joined a secret society. Nevertheless there are thouands who join these satanic societies, and give up God and his holy religion for Satan and his work of impiety.
8. Pride, and subtle reasoning on the mysteries of faith, is another means which the devil uses to make people lose the faith. There are certain proud men who say that they cannot believe such an article or such a mystery of faith, because it is too obscure, too incomprehensible, and contrary to reason; they wish to believe no more of the truths of religion than they can understand. Hence they bring up ever so many objections to revealed truths, and thus exhibit a lamentable lack of reason. For, to be a man, it is necessary to have reason. Reason is the light of man. But reason tells us that it is necessary to believe what God has revealed, because God cannot reveal anything but truth, and that there is no sense in him who wishes to submit to his reason the very Author of his reason; and that to wish to understand what is above his intelligence, is to be without intelligence. There is a young man. He is a Catholic, who always believed what God teaches us through His Church. He frequently associates with one who, in a subtle manner, reasons on the mysteries of faith. He begins to listen to him with pleasure. The consequence is that he exposes himself to all kinds of temptations against faith. He begins himself to reason on its mysteries, then to doubt them, and at last to lose all faith in them. He dies an infidel.
Alas! how many are there who once were fervent children of the Catholic Church; they lived in the grace of God, in great happiness and peace, but, for the reason just given, are now leading the wicked lives of infidels! Their misfortune should be a warning for us all. Therefore, "Let him that thinketh himself to stand, take heed lest he fall." (1 Cor. x, 12.)
(Note: the condemnation of "bad books" also applies to other forms of media, including the internet, movies, television etc. as they are prevalent occasions of sin in society today.)
Act of Faith
O my God, I believe that Thou art one God in Three Divine Persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost; I believe that Thy Divine Son became man, and died for our sins, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all of the truths which Thy Holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, Who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
Indulgence of 3 years. Raccolta 36.
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| St. Vincent of Lerin: Distinguishing the Truth of the Faith from Falsehood |
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Posted by: Stone - 5 hours ago - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
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The Angelus - August 1985
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
Saint Vincent of Lerins
d. ca. 450
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St. Vincent was of Gallic nationality. Before he became a monk, he had perhaps been a soldier. He retired to the monastery of Lerins, where he wrote THE COMMONITORY under the pseudonym of Peregrinus. He refers to the Council of Ephesus as having taken place three years earlier, which dates his book at 434. Today he is famous chiefly for references to him made by Cardinal Newman, by Pope Saint Pius X, and in the proceedings of the First Vatican Council.
From The Commonitory:
A GENERAL RULE FOR DISTINGUISHING THE TRUTH OF THE CATHOLIC FAITH
FROM THE FALSEHOOD OF HERETICAL PRAVITY
I have often then inquired earnestly and attentively of very many men eminent for sanctity and learning, how and by what sure and so to speak universal rule I may be able to distinguish the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity; and I have always, and in almost every instance, received an answer to this effect:
Quote:That whether I or anyone else should wish to detect the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics as they rise, and to continue sound and complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our own belief in two ways; first, by the authority of the Divine Law, and then, by the Tradition of the Catholic Church.
But here someone perhaps will ask, Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church's interpretation? For this reason—because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of many interpretations as there are interpreters. For Novation expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another, Photinus, Apollinaris, Priscillian, another, Jovinian, Pelagius, Celestius, another, lastly, Nestorius another. Therefore, it is very necessary, on account of so great intricacies of such various error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and Apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.
Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense "Catholic," which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all things universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all . . .
What if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which . . . cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.
. . . What then will a Catholic Christian do, if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member? What, if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty . . .
This being the case, he is the true and genuine Catholic who loves the truth of God, who loves the Church, who loves the Body of Christ, who esteems divine religion, and the Catholic Faith above everything, above the authority, above the regard, above the genius, above the eloquence, above the philosophy, of every man whatsoever; who sets light by all of these, and continuing steadfast and established in the faith, resolves that he will believe that, and only that, which he is sure the Catholic Church has held universally and from ancient time . . . . For therefore it is that outside the most secure harbor of the Catholic Faith, they are tossed about, beaten, and almost killed, by divers tempestuous cogitations, in order that they may take in the sails of self-conceit, which they had with ill advice unfurled to the blasts of novelty, and may betake themselves to . . . the most secure harbor of their placid and good mother, and may begin by vomiting up those bitter and turbid floods of error which they had swallowed, that thenceforward they may be able to drink the streams of fresh and living water. Let them unlearn well what they had learnt not well, and let them receive so much of the entire doctrine of the Church as they can understand: what they cannot understand let them believe.
On Development in Religious Knowledge
But someone will say perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in Christ's Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For what being is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? Yet on condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the Faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration, that it be transformed into something else. The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning.
The growth of religion in the soul must be analogous to the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same. There is a wide difference between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same . . . . This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress, this is the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator had already framed beforehand in the infant . . . .
In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits . . . .
To give an example. In ancient times, our forefathers sowed the seeds of the wheat of faith in that field which is the Church. It would be quite unjust and improper if we, their descendants, gathered, instead of the genuine truth of wheat, the false tares of error. On the contrary, it is logically correct that the beginning and the end be in arrangement, that we reap from the planting of the wheat of doctrine the harvest of the wheat of dogma. In this way, none of the characteristics of the seed is changed, although something evolved in the course of time from those first seeds and has now expanded under careful cultivation. What may be added is merely appearance, beauty, and distinction, but the proper nature of each kind remains. May it never happen that the rose garden of the Catholic spirit be turned into a field of thistles and thorns. May it never happen that in this spiritual paradise poison ivy suddenly appear from growths of cinnamon and balsam. Whatever has been planted in the husbandry of God's Church by the faith of the fathers should, therefore, be cultivated and guarded by the zeal of their children; it should flourish and ripen; it should develop and become perfect. For it is right that those ancient dogmas of heavenly philosophy should in the course of time be thoroughly cared for, filed, and polished; but it is sinful to change them, sinful to behead them, or mutilate them. They may take on more evidence, clarity and distinctness, but it is absolutely necessary that they retain their plenitude, integrity and basic character.
If such a license of impious fraud be granted only once, what terrible danger—I am afraid even to speak of it—would result, with religion being destroyed and abolished. If one tenet of Catholic dogma were renounced, another, then another, and finally one after the other would be abandoned, first by custom, and then as though by right. When one segment after the other had been rejected, what else would the final result be, except that the whole would be likewise rejected? On the other hand, once there is a beginning of mixing the new with the old, foreign ideas become genuine, and profane elements with sacred, this habit will creep in everywhere, without check. At the end, nothing in the Church will be left untouched, unimpaired, unhurt and unstained. Where formerly, there was the sanctuary of chaste and uncorrupted truth, there will be a brothel of impious and filthy errors. May divine compassion divert such shocking impiety from the minds of its children; instead, may the impious crowd itself be left in its madness!
The Church of Christ, zealous and cautious guardian of the dogmas deposited with it, never changes any phase of them. It does not diminish them or add to them; it neither trims what seems necessary nor grafts things superfluous; it neither gives up its own nor usurps what does not belong to it. But it devotes all its diligence to one aim: to treat tradition faithfully and wisely; to nurse and polish what from old times may have remained unshaped and unfinished; to consolidate and to strengthen what already was clear and plain; and to guard what already was confirmed and defined. After all, what have the councils brought forth in their decrees but that what before was believed plainly and simply might from now on be believed more diligently; that what before was preached rather unconcernedly might be preached from now on more eagerly; that what before was practiced with less concern might from now on be cultivated with more care? This, I say, and nothing but this, has the Catholic Church aroused over the novelties of the heretics, again and again accomplished by the decrees of its councils, i.e., what it earlier received from our forefathers by tradition alone, it has handed down to posterity by authoritative decisions, condensing weighty matters in a few words, and particularly for the enlightenment of the mind, by presenting in new words the old interpretation of the Faith.
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| Protesting the Protestant Movement |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 11:33 AM - Forum: Resources Online
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Protesting the Protestant Movement
The Angelus – March 2005
Truth requires us to combat error. Justice demands that we do so by honest means. Charity would have us combat only the error itself, and not the human being who is its victim.¹ In what follows, the words Protestant and Catholic are used with their traditional meanings. Excluded from consideration are liberal Protestants and modernist Catholics, two groups of people who seem to believe nothing any more.
Protestantism can be summarized by paraphrasing Mark Twain:
Quote:"The trouble is not that Protestants are ignorant. Rather, the trouble is with all the things they know that ain't so..."
Protestantism is negative: it is defined in terms of Catholicism by emphasizing the rejection of various teachings of the Catholic Church. These rejections are justified by attempts to refute dogmas of the Catholic Church, but these refutations are never successful because they always contain factual errors.
In the United States, Roman Catholicism² by Loraine Boettner is considered a comprehensive collection of refutations of Catholic beliefs and practices. The book rejects Catholic beliefs and practices, but it does not succeed in refuting a single one of them. The book reveals that Protestants have little understanding of Catholicism, and thus little understanding of what exactly they are rejecting. So in the strictest sense it is true that "the trouble is with all the things they know that ain't so...." A few comments on Boettner's book:
Quote:• The book was written for Protestants, and a Catholic does not really know what they will make of it. But the Catholic reader very quickly discovers that the book does not present religious truth, but anti-Catholic propaganda, and so predictably there is almost nothing in it that is true. To Catholics, the Protestant picture of Catholicism may appear amusingly misinformed, deliberately misleading or downright mean-spirited.
• The book is characterized by an intense hatred of the Catholic Church, which we shall discuss later.
• The book is full of blatantly dishonest arguments none of which will ever stand up in the court of reason (e.g., Roman Catholicism is just like communism; Catholics worship images, statues, and, of course, also Mary; American civil law is superior to Roman Catholic Canon Law; Catholics are poor, ignorant, idolatrous, superstitious people, etc. ad nauseam). It is written in the style of typical modern propaganda or "hate literature," i.e., it appeals to the emotions rather than to the intellect.
• When it comes to strictly religious issues, in many cases various straw men are knocked down, and caricatures of Catholic beliefs and practices are refuted. For example, it is correct to denounce idolatry, but it is completely bogus to accuse Roman Catholics of idolatry.
• Not surprisingly, Boettner fails to refute (i.e., to prove wrong) a single Catholic belief or practice. For example, he announces that Mary is the mother of Jesus but not the mother of God because God does not have a mother (p. 133). Anybody who says that does not understand the Trinity, does not understand the Incarnation, and is guilty of the heresy of Nestorius. The Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 settled this matter once and for all: Mary is the Mother of God, and this stands for all eternity.
St. Thomas Aquinas explains (Summa Theologica, III, Q. 35, Art. 4) that when a mother gives birth to a child we do not say that the mother is the mother of the "body of the child" but simply that she is the mother of the person of the child. The Blessed Virgin Mary gave a body to the person of Jesus Christ, but this person was the God-man, with both a human and a divine nature. Therefore, the Blessed Virgin, being the mother of the person of Christ, is justifiably called the Mother of God.
Boettner grudgingly admits that the Council of Ephesus did say that Mary is the Mother of God, but then takes it on himself to explain what "Mary is the Mother of God" really means, arriving at the conclusion that it should have never been said because it is "unscriptural." (This turning things upside down is typical Protestant "scholarship.") Finally, p. 135 concludes with the following nonsense: "The correct statement of the person of Christ in this regard is: As His human nature had no father, so His divine nature had no mother." Natures have no father and mother, only persons have a father and mother.
The book of Boettner, being a typical presentation of the stock Protestant arguments, suffers from the same basic problem the whole of Protestantism suffers from: it is inconsistent, which means that all its arguments are worthless. (In an inconsistent system when a proposition P is provable, then so is its negation). See below "Why believe the Bible?–Inerrancy."
Protestantism is not a single religion that could be examined and debated. It only has some "principles" which can be invoked with flexibility and can be used to generate the religion congenial to the Protestant. In these pages, as examples, we discuss two Protestant "principles," one Protestant doctrinal error, and the rejection of two Catholic doctrines, each in deliberately simple terms.
Sola Scriptura and Private Judgment
Sola Scriptura means that (supposedly) Divine Revelation is contained in Scripture alone. This is expressed in popular language by saying that Protestantism is "the religion of the Bible."
Reading the Bible Cannot Be a Requirement for Salvation
According to Protestants, a Christian is supposed to save his soul by acquiring a book called the Bible; read the Bible, make up his mind about what the Bible means (principle of private judgment), and now he is supposedly in possession of Divine Revelation.
Unfortunately, the Bible did not exist for the first 400 years of Christian history (the canonical books were selected by the Catholic Church only at the Council of Carthage in A.D. 397):
Quote:The whole revelation of Christianity was given by the Holy Spirit and preached also and believed among the nations of the world before the New Testament existed. The knowledge of God through the Incarnation, and the way of salvation through grace, was revealed partly by our Divine Lord, and fully by the Holy Ghost at His coming. The faith or science of God was infused into the Apostles by a divine illumination. It was in itself the New Testament, before a line of it was written....³
For the subsequent 1100 years the Bible was completely inaccessible to most ordinary mortals because there was no way to reproduce the Bible cheaply. Thus, apparently Our Lord Jesus Christ has completely failed to provide for His followers for 75% of Christian history. Since such charge of failure is untenable against God, these Protestant ideas must be wrong.
The Bible Is Not the Sole Source of Divine Revelation
It makes little sense to consider the Bible the only source of Divine Revelation in the light of the following consideration:
St. John put on Our Lord's lips about 8,000 words. Sts. Matthew, Mark and Luke about three times as many. To speak slowly and distinctly, all the words of Our Lord recorded in St. John would take less than an hour, the words given in the Synoptics about two and half. Now the Gospels give us to understand that during His Public Ministry Our Lord spoke practically, day by day, for many hours. If Our Lord spoke only one hour a day in public, His public speeches would occupy say one thousand hours, but Our Lord did not merely speak in public. He spoke continually in private to His disciples. His longest recorded speech in St. John (12-17) was spoken entirely in private to His disciples. Considering that apparently, Christ devoted all His time to speaking and teaching, somehow, His twelve Apostles must have heard him for thousands of hours, and what is contained in the Gospels is in consequence not one-thousandth part of what they heard Him say.⁴
Indeed, Tradition is another important source of our knowledge of Divine Revelation. For example, the Catholic is not impressed at all when Protestants question the existence of purgatory; the Catholic knows that not only the most ancient liturgies, but also the Roman catacombs were full of proofs of purgatory, because purgatory was always believed.
This also explains the fact that all the frenzy of Protestants fulminating against something "unscriptural" leaves the Catholic absolutely cold. He knows that everything does not have to be in Holy Scripture.
Why Believe the Bible!
Unfortunately, Protestants have no conceivable right to base any argument on the inspiration of the Bible, for the inspiration of the Bible was a doctrine which had been believed, before the Reformation, on the mere authority of the Church; it rested on exactly the same basis as the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The only reason for holding the Bible worthy of credence is because the Catholic Church has said so. St. Augustine stated this very clearly: "I would not believe the Gospel unless moved thereto by the authority of the Church."⁵
Protestantism repudiated Transubstantiation, and in doing so repudiated the authority of the Church; and then, without a shred of logic, calmly went on believing in the inspiration of the Bible as if nothing had happened! It is a most absurd and untenable position to be in, but most Protestants do not even realize this.
Of course, for liberal Protestants, literal inspiration led to literary inspiration, which then led to the total disintegration of the authority of the Bible. Only fundamentalists still hold on to the old inconsistent position.
The Protestant Bibles
Johann Gutenberg (1397–1468), inventor of the printing press, was a Catholic, and numerous (47) Catholic Bibles were printed in the vernacular (in many languages) between 1466 and 1520, but the Protestant propaganda is persistent that Luther somehow found the Bible and gave it to the people for the first time in their own language.⁶ Another one of the things they know that ain't so...
So what did the Protestants do with the Bible as it now became easily available? First, they have mutilated the Bible, the book for which they claim to have such high regard. They dropped typically six books from the Old Testament. For example, the second book of Machabees had to go because it proves the existence of purgatory beyond a shadow of doubt.
They left out parts of the books they kept (e.g., seven chapters of the Book of Esther, and most of the third chapter of Daniel), and they mistranslated key passages to suit their purposes. A theologically important example is from the prophecy of Malachias (Douay Version), which predicts a sacrifice that would be offered universally even among the Gentiles: "In every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation" (Mal. 1:11). The King James Version deliberately mistranslates it as: "And in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering" (Mal. 1:11). Of course, having refused all sacrifice to God, Protestants should now at least offer incense to Him (to be consistent with this Scripture passage), but they probably declare that practice "unscriptural" too.
As a result, even the very best of the Protestant Bible translations (such as the King James Version) are very faulty translations, full of errors.
But worst of all, they systematically misinterpreted the Bible. The Protestant revolution involved a great "explaining away" of many of the doctrines that the Catholic Church held for 1500 years. Without the divinely appointed interpreter, the Word of God preserved in Scripture is just a lifeless text, defenseless before the wildest interpretations. Propagating and respectfully accepting wild interpretations of Holy Scripture is an undeniable fact of Protestant life, which led to a proliferation of sects. The resulting doctrinal anarchy is in itself a complete condemnation of Protestantism: Protestants are inherently incapable of agreeing on what exactly Divine Revelation is supposed to be.
Although it is hard to find two Protestants who agree on all they believe (in the sense in which all Catholics agree on what their Faith is), it is still possible to comment on the range of beliefs Protestantism has generated. Opposition to the Catholic Church, the Catholic priesthood, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Catholic sacramental system are certainly common to them all.
Although the Catholic Church had always had to contend with heresies, Protestantism was a totally new class of heresies. Nobody had ever believed the kinds of things Protestants came to believe. Protestantism, with its individualism, complete refusal of authority and anti-sacramental nature is absolutely alien to Christianity as it existed for 1500 years.
Boettner is flagrantly lying when he writes: "Ever since New Testament times there have been people who accepted the basic principles now set forth in Protestantism."⁷ He cannot support this with any citation because it is not true. Anybody familiar with history knows that the "basic principles of Protestantism" did not exist until Luther scraped them together in a most haphazard fashion. And the irony of it all is that Luther ended up with his feelings hurt when his fellow "reformers," instead of admiring his principles, overruled him, and started producing their own "principles." Pandora's box was open.
And of course St. Paul has warned against such things: "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema" (Gal. 1:8).
Private Interpretation of the Bible
One of the "principles" of Protestantism is private judgment: "I deny the authority of the Catholic Church: every man must examine the credibility of every doctrine for himself." The result is a complete anarchy not only in belief but also in practice. Using this "principle," well-meaning Protestants, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Methodists find different things in their Bibles. A humorous result of private interpretation is the Shaker (now virtually extinct):
Quote:You are a presumptuous people. Do you not know that the Bible tells you that you must work out your salvation in fear and trembling, and you do not tremble at all. My brethren, if you want to go to heaven, shake, my brethren, shake!
All of which proves that the Bible is not easy to understand. The chief of the apostles said so:
Quote:As also our most dear brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, hath written to you: As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction. (II Pet. 3:15, 16)
Private judgment is implicit in all heresies, but Protestants were the first to state it explicitly as one of their "principles." St. Augustine commented on private interpretation:
Quote:If there is no branch of teaching, however humble and easy to learn, which does not require a master, what can be a greater sign of rashness and pride than to refuse to study the books of divine mysteries by the help of those who have interpreted them?⁸
When some Protestants say that it is not the whim of the individual, but the inspiration of the Holy Ghost that produces the Protestant interpretations of the Bible, their position gets even more awkward. Since the interpretations contradict each other (just take two well documented cases like Luther and Calvin), we must conclude that the Holy Spirit is contradicting himself. Since this assertion is blasphemous, private interpretation of the Bible must be a false concept. And it should be pointed out that what Protestants here claim for themselves (i.e., the Holy Spirit guides the reader of the Bible to the knowledge of the truth) is much more than the Catholic Church has ever claimed even for the Pope himself.
Although Protestants claim to derive their whole religion from the Bible, their "principle of private interpretation" cannot be found in the Bible. Protestant groups often try to counter the resulting doctrinal chaos and inherent fragmentation by instituting some kind of a "Confession of Faith." But these are not tolerated well: imposing any kind of norms is in contradiction with Protestantism, to which all fixed dogma, all immutable morality and any definitive rule is absolutely foreign.
It is easy to verify that the Catholic religion is clearly contained in the Bible, but the Protestant religion cannot be found in the Bible. If a Protestant honestly examines his own mutilated Protestant Bible, even there he can find the Catholic religion.
This has happened many times, and occasionally it was documented. Paul Whitcomb, who eventually converted to the Catholic religion, describes himself:
Quote:I was born of Protestant parents, was baptized a Protestant, was reared a Protestant, married a Protestant, and for a number of years held down a Protestant pulpit. If ever there was a "thoroughbred" Protestant, I was one.⁹
His conversion began with the painful realization that the Church, the Body of Christ is one, and he, as a Protestant, is not a member of it.
The Protestant misinterpretations of the Bible and the persistent errors of Luther and Calvin are propagated by means of a Protestant oral tradition whose existence only few Protestants are willing to admit.
The doctrinal error of the "reformers" easiest to explain is their erroneous concept of being justified. It also proves that Protestants–in violation of their principle of Sola Scriptura–also have an oral tradition: what Luther and Calvin (for example) said often decides what a Protestant is going to believe.
The Protestant Concept of "Justification"
The issue is what did St. Paul mean by the expression "to justify." (Catholics use "sanctifying grace" as a synonym for "justification." Justification is effected through the infusion of sanctifying grace into the soul.) Protestant exegetes from Luther and Calvin all the way to Barth maintain that it means nothing more than "to declare just," that it applies merely to extrinsic justice, which has nothing real to correspond with it in the person justified. God only declares the sinner to be justified, although he remains intrinsically unjust and sinful. On the negative side, justification is not a real eradication of sin, but merely a non-imputation or covering of the sin. On the positive side, it is not an inner renewal and sanctification but merely an external imputation of Christ's justice.
This is sometimes illustrated by saying that according to Luther a justified soul is like a pile a dung covered by snow. So then heaven would eventually be populated with, and God would for all eternity be surrounded by, piles of dung. This concept is truly repulsive and absurd.
The correct meaning is "to make just," or "to declare officially just someone who is so in reality." The correct, Catholic understanding is that justification sanctifies the soul, bestows supernatural beauty on the soul, makes the just man a friend of God, makes the just man a child of God and gives him a claim to the inheritance of heaven, and makes him a temple of the Holy Ghost. The justified man has been remade by God; he is truly a "new creation."
This explains why not only there are no saints in Protestantism, but there cannot possibly be any. The saint is a person converted and newly created in the grace of God, and Protestantism refuses even to consider the existence of such a thing.
The rejection of the Catholic Church and that of the Catholic sacramental system are closely connected.
Rejecting the Church
What did Our Lord leave behind him at his Ascension? Merely an example, and fleeting memories? (At that moment no words had yet been written down.) His primary legacy to the world was a society which he originated; a society which consisted in the first instance of his own immediate followers, and which has become known as the Catholic Church. The Divine Redeemer, who brought us the final revelation of God, would see to it that His purposes were not frustrated by the infidelity of His legatees. He gave His Church a monarchical organization, with the Apostle St. Peter as the first head.
The Church is the most sore subject for the Protestant, the truth he most bitterly rejects, denies or tries to evade, and therefore it is the pivotal issue in trying to comprehend Protestantism.
Since it was necessary that the divine mission of Jesus Christ should be perpetuated to the end of time, Jesus Christ took to Himself disciples, trained them Himself, and made them partakers of His own authority. And when He had invoked upon them from heaven the Spirit of Truth, He bade them to go through the whole world and faithfully preach to all nations what He had taught and what He had commanded, so that by profession of His doctrine, and the observance of His laws, the human race might attain holiness on earth and never-ending happiness in heaven. In this wise, and on this principle, the Church was begotten.¹⁰
The unspeakable tragedy of the Protestant revolt was the wholesale rejection of the Church Jesus Christ had founded. It deprived Protestants of the Truth, and deprived them of the means to save their souls. Pope Pius IX correctly described Protestantism in all its forms as a "revolt against God," it being an attempt to substitute human for divine authority.
The true Church of Christ is both natural and supernatural; it is both external and spiritual.
Quote:If we consider the chief end of this Church and the proximate and efficient causes of salvation, it is undoubtedly spiritual; but in regard to those who constitute it, and to the things which lead to these spiritual gifts, it is external and necessarily visible.¹¹
The Church being both natural and supernatural simultaneously is a reflection of her Divine Founder, who is True God and True Man at the same time. It is an error to imagine that the Church is only natural or that the Church is only supernatural. In the words of Pope Leo XIII:
Quote:It is assuredly as impossible that the Church of Christ can be the one or the other as that man should be a body alone or a soul alone. The connection and union of both elements is as absolutely necessary to the true Church as the intimate union of the soul and body to the human nature.¹²
The human body without a soul is merely a corpse, and the human soul separated from the body is not a living human being either. Separating the body and soul of a human being is equivalent to killing it. And that is what the Protestants tried to do with the Church.
According to Protestant beliefs, there is really no vital need of a Church. For Catholics, the Church is a vital fact; for Protestants it is an intellectual figment. Unfortunately, the Bible is too full of references to the Church for the Protestants to make it completely disappear. So the wholesale rejection of the Catholic Church by Protestants was accomplished by declaring the Church either
1) only natural, visible and external (a merely human organization, convenient for organizing the energies of individuals) or;
2) only supernatural, invisible, intangible, merely "pneumatological" (i.e., united by a bond that eludes the senses).
Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), nobody is at liberty to "redefine" the Church of Christ. The Church has been perfectly clearly defined by Jesus Christ Himself, and His definition cannot possibly be changed.
The Church is certainly mysterious: the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ (Rom. 12:4-5), the Church is the Bride of Christ (Eph. 5:25-27), and the Church is a continuation or an extension of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ continuing to dwell among us.¹³
The words of Jesus Christ in Holy Scripture announce a certain identity of Himself–and not merely His presence–with those who corporately represent Him: "I am the Vine, you the branches" (Jn. 15:5), or "As the Father sent Me, I also send you" (Jn. 20:21), or "He that heareth you, heareth Me: he that despiseth you despiseth Me" (Lk. 10:16).
Even after the Ascension Jesus Christ most clearly identified Himself with His Church in His encounter with Saul. "For I am the least of the apostles who am not worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God" (I Cor. 15:9). But in persecuting the Church, Saul was persecuting Jesus Christ Himself: "Who art thou, Lord? And he: I am Jesus whom thou persecutest" (Acts 9:5).
The Church is Jesus Christ still living with us, she is Jesus Christ still at work in the world. As Jesus Christ lived His natural life on earth 2,000 years ago in a body drawn from the Blessed Virgin Mary, so now He lives His Mystical Life today in a body drawn from the human race in general, and this body is called the Catholic Church. In the words of St. Gregory the Great:
Quote:"Christ with His whole Church, in heaven and on earth, is one single person. And as there is only one soul vivifying the different members of a human body, so the Holy Ghost vivifies and enlightens the Church."
Indeed, the Church is mysterious, there is nothing like it in the whole world. No community in the merely natural order can be called a person. For example, no nation is a person, no nation has a divine mission, nor any promise of lasting always and being constantly assisted by God. Only the Catholic Church has these properties, given to her by her divine founder. It is this personality of the Church that we affirm in the Nicene Creed: "I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church...." "Apostolic" means that the personnel of the Church can be traced back all the way to the twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ, i.e., that the Church existed at all times without interruption.
Quote:And I say to thee: That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: And whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven. (Mt. 16:18-19)
Our Lord means that His Church, built on Peter, will never be destroyed. To "give the keys" of a storeroom, a house, or a city, to someone meant to give him delegated control of all that is in it. "To bind and loose" means to forbid and permit in a wide sense: Peter is to be the visible "master of the house," Our Lord of course being the invisible foundation and controller by whom all power held by a visible representative is delegated.
Quote:All power is given to me in heaven and earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Mt. 28:20)
In this tremendous declaration Our Lord sends the apostles, with delegated power 1) to teach and 2) to baptize all nations–no more only Israel–in the name of the Trinity. The last sentence implies the indefectibility of the Church, i.e., the Church will never fail. This clearly contradicts the Protestant myth that the Catholic Church has somehow "failed," the Church has become corrupted, has fallen into error, and Protestantism had to step in to take her place. If this myth were true, then Our Lord would be a liar. But that cannot be: "And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever" (Jn. 14:16).
That the Church is not a merely human organization but is truly Christ continued, is not an obscure dogma for Catholics but a self-evident fact. The Catholic knows that Christ really and truly lives and acts in His Church: the grace of every sacrament comes from Christ, the Catholic makes his confession to and receives absolution from Christ, and in the Holy Eucharist he receives Jesus Christ Himself.
The Rejection of the Catholic Sacramental System
"I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life" (Jn. 14:6) means that Our Lord is Lawgiver, Teacher and High Priest. Correspondingly, the Church governs, teaches, and dispenses the fruits of the Redemption through the sacraments. Protestants reject all that, but most of them especially vehemently reject the Catholic sacraments. Some Protestant groups claim to recognize a few (typically two) sacraments, but these claims are completely misleading. When a Protestant says "sacrament," what he means is not a sacrament at all. A Protestant "sacrament" is not a channel of divine grace, rather it is a means of stirring up faith.
There are strong similarities between the most dramatic examples of opposition in the Gospels against our Lord's teachings and the most violent rejections of Catholic teachings by Protestants:
"How can a man be born when he is old?" (Jn. 3:4)–a challenge against Baptism;
"Who can forgive sins save God only?" (Mk. 2:7)–a challenge against Christ forgiving sins;¹⁴
"How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" (Jn. 6:53)–a challenge against the Eucharist, and finally
"Before Abraham was made, I am. They took up stones to cast at Him" (Jn. 8:58)–a challenge to the divinity of Christ.
As Christ was rejected then, the Catholic Church is rejected by Protestants now, some of the most violent rejections being leveled against the Catholic sacraments (including Baptism, Confession and the Eucharist) and against asserting the divine prerogatives of the Catholic Church.
Even Protestants tend to admit that God had to become man to redeem us. Our Divine Lord redeemed us in a most unspiritual way, through His bodily sufferings and His death. God could have done it differently but that is how He did it. And the Incarnation did not end with the Ascension. The Eternal Son of God assumed a human nature never to lay it down. Our Lord Jesus Christ will remain a man forever. And thus the religion He founded is also incarnational. The principle implicit in the Incarnation is that matter is not bad, nor is it to be despised, but can be made use of by God in the work of our sanctification.
G. K. Chesterton offers the following explanation:
Quote:The sacramental system is based on the idea that certain material acts are mystical acts; are events in the spiritual world. This mystical materialism does divide us from all those forms of idealism that hold all good to be inward and invisible and matter to be unworthy to express it.¹⁵
Since the Incarnation, no one can possibly criticize a religion because it is not wholly "spiritual." We, humans, are not wholly spiritual, and Christ is not wholly spiritual. Therefore, the religion that He gave us is not wholly spiritual either; it does not disdain material elements but includes them.
Just as the Incarnation was believed from day one, but began to be understood only later, the situation was similar with the sacraments. All the sacraments were used from day one, but an understanding of them was only gained gradually. Jesus Christ Himself instituted all seven of the sacraments, and they are not haphazard but form an orderly series, a central idea giving coherence and unity to their number and nature.
The Seven Sacraments of the Church are a Record, or Scripture of God anterior to the written Gospels of the Evangelists....The Church, its sacraments, and its worship were spread throughout the world before as yet the books of the New Testament were written.¹⁶
All seven sacraments give sanctifying grace. God does the work, He gives the grace, but the minister and the recipient have to cooperate. Lack of proper cooperation prevents reception of grace. So it is not God who is tied by the sacraments, but we. God is merely fulfilling His promise to give grace.
When G. K. Chesterton was asked by horrified fellow Anglicans why he chose to become a Catholic, his answer was: "To get rid of my sins."¹⁷ He wanted certainty that he was forgiven, and the Catholic Church, and she alone, can give such a certainty. All the sacraments provide such certainty: if the minister and recipient do their (easily verifiable) part, God gives sanctifying grace according to His promise.
Of course, God in His omnipotence and freedom can communicate grace in a purely spiritual manner also, but about that, being the exceptional case, we know very little. The Sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for the salvation of mankind, exactly because Christ gave them to the Church to be used as the ordinary channels of divine grace. God is the one who determines the way He is pleased to bestow His graces.
One of the sacraments, the Holy Eucharist, is special, because in it we not only receive sanctifying grace (a participation in the divine life) but in it we receive Christ Himself. In the account of the Last Supper we read:
Quote:And taking bread, he gave thanks, and brake; and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me. In like manner the chalice also, after he had supped, saying: This is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you. (Lk. 22:19-20)
The men to whom He was speaking were not modern psychologists and symbolists but men of antiquity who thought simply and in a corporeal way. When Jesus said to them, "This is my Body" and, "This is my Blood...," then it is that and does not merely signify it. So they knew that here He was giving them Himself, in the mystery of an inconceivable sacrifice. This too is contained in the new Community which was here established. It is the central point, the Holy of Holies. Here again we are told what the Church is-the living Christ who imparts Himself to His own throughout the ages.¹⁸
The Catholic Church is the heir to the rights of Jesus Christ. She is the faithful guardian of the spiritual treasures of Jesus Christ. She is the infallible teacher of the doctrines of Jesus Christ. She wields the authority of Jesus Christ. She lives by the life and spirit of Jesus Christ. She enjoys the guidance, protection and help of Jesus Christ. She speaks, orders, commands, concedes, prohibits, defines, looses and binds, in the name of Jesus Christ. But when the Catholic Church claims her uniqueness, that she is Christ continued, that she is the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, then Protestants are ready to take up stones to cast at her.
Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, a convert from Anglicanism, described England in 1911:
Quote:It is a very delicate and significant compliment to the Catholic Church that religious people are bound to hate her more than anything else in the wide world. Religious people may differ among themselves on every other imaginable point, but they are at any rate agreed on this, that the Church is the enemy and must be annihilated. Now surely this is a remarkable phenomenon–that one religion should have such a monopoly of being hated by religious persons. Anglicans do not hate Wesleyanism; Wesleyans do not hate Congregationalism; Congregationalists do not hate Christian Science. They disapprove, and they disagree, but their emotion is not vivid enough to be called hatred. But they hate Catholicism. There is no question about that.
The Inquisition or the massacre of St. Bartholomew are alleged as reasons for this hatred when it makes its appearance; but it is not really these things. It is Catholicism itself.
It is what is called "intolerance"–that is, the claim of the Church to be the Truth–that is at the bottom of the trouble. And so we see religious persons rending their garments in horror at this blasphemous arrogance; and we see Jesus in His Church, bound, spat upon and condemned, standing at the bar.¹⁹
In the United States, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack Chick, Alberto Rivera, Tony Alamo, and men of that ilk not only personify but also fuel the hatred of the Catholic Church.
Bishop Fulton Sheen in his preface to Radio Replies tried to minimize the extent of this hatred:
Quote:There are not over a hundred of people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church–which is, of course, quite a different thing.²⁰
Whether all the slander is motivated by malice or ignorance is a moot point. But Jesus Christ clearly predicted this hatred. It started with Caiphas, was given a strong boost by the vulgarities of Luther, and will only end at the Last Judgment:
Quote:If the world hate you, know ye that it hath hated me before you...because you are not of the world but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for my name's sake: because they know not him that sent me. (Jn. 15:18-21)
Being Separated from the Catholic Church
To the Protestant, the Christian religion consists in the union of the individual with Christ–of individual with individual–the Church having nothing to do with the whole thing. The Divine Person lived on earth 2,000 years ago, performed actions, spoke words, finished His work and went back whence He came; and true religion consists in the adherence of the human to the Divine Person, with no priest, prelate, church or sacrament involved, since none are thought necessary. (This individualism in religion is repudiated by few Protestants only, most notably the Anglicans.)
The Protestant, not understanding that the Catholic Church is Christ, thinks in terms of intermediaries. Even if the Church is considered an intermediary, it does not have to be an obstacle, preventing access to Christ. On the contrary, it is an aid, greatly helping us to have access to Christ (as in the Holy Eucharist) or to the benefits we hope to obtain from Christ (divine grace in all the sacraments).
But not only is the Church very beneficial to our salvation, she is absolutely necessary to it. The claim of the Church that she alone can lead men to salvation, what men call her "intolerance," is not a mere trick, a human invention to get ahead in a crowd of equal rivals. The Catholic Church has no equals. She is absolutely unique. She is the Bride of Christ, she is the Mystical Body of Christ, she is Christ continued. That is why the Fathers of the Church like to compare the Catholic Church with the ark in which Noe and his family were saved, while all those who were outside the ark perished.
To be saved, we must do the will of God: "Not every one that saith to me Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Mt. 7:21). The will of God the Father is that men hear and believe his Son, Jesus Christ: "This is my most beloved Son. Hear ye Him" (Mk. 9:6). Now Jesus Christ said to His apostles and lawful successors: "He that heareth you, heareth Me: he that despiseth you despiseth Me" (Lk. 10:16).
From these words it is clear that it is not possible to be united with Jesus Christ while despising His Church. Yet Protestants despise the Catholic Church, they turn their back most contemptuously on the Catholic Church, they slander her at every turn, and follow their own will in all religious matters. It is a delusion and a tragic mistake for anyone to count on gaining his salvation outside the Catholic Church. Holy Scripture, the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church all warn against it.
Jesus Christ:
Quote:If he will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican. (Mt. 18:17)
St. Cyprian:
Quote:Whoever has been separated from the Church is yoked with an adulteress, is separated from the promises made to the Church. Nor shall he who leaves Christ's Church arrive at Christ's rewards. He is a stranger, he is sacrilegious, he is an enemy. Who has not the Church for mother can no longer have God for father. (On the Unity of the Catholic Church, 6)
St. Isidore of Seville:
Quote:Therefore heresy is so called from the Greek word meaning "choice," by which each chooses according to his own will what he pleases to teach or believe. But we are not permitted to believe whatever we choose, nor to choose whatever someone else has believed. We have the apostles of God as authorities, who did not themselves of their own will choose what they would believe, but faithfully transmitted to the nations the teaching received from Christ. (Etymologies, 8, 7)
St. Augustine:
Quote:• In the Catholic Church there are both good and bad. But they who are separated from her, as long as they remain in their opinion against her, cannot be good; ...the separation itself makes them bad, the Lord saying: "He who is not with me is against me; and he who gatherest not with me, scattereth." (Ep. ccviii, n. 6, col. 1177)
• No one, indeed, attains to salvation and eternal life except he who has Christ as his head. But no one can have Christ as head, except he who is in His body, which is the Church. (Ep. ad Cath. contra Donat. xix, 49)
• The Christian ought to fear nothing so much as to be separated from the body of Christ. For if he is separated from the body of Christ, he is not a member of Christ; if not a member of Christ, he is not quickened by his Spirit. (Tract, xxvii, in Joan., n. 6, col. 1992, tom., iii)
• Outside the Catholic Church one can have anything except salvation. One can have honor. One can have the sacraments. The "Alleluia" can be sung. The response "Amen" can be given. One can hold to the Gospel, and can have and preach the faith in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But one can never find salvation except in the Catholic Church. (Sermo ad Caesariensis ecclesia plebem, 6. MPL., XLIII 695)
These quotes have the full authority of the Catholic Church, and therefore the full authority of Jesus Christ behind them. By contrast, it is both comical and tragical, when, aping the Catholic Church, Protestants make statements in a similar fashion, usually assigning all Catholics to hell on their own authority.
The meaning of the statement "There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church" is not that all Protestants necessarily lose their souls. The meaning, admitting no qualifications, is that the Catholic Church is the only religious body in the world through which salvation can be procured. Membership in any other religious body will not contribute to any man's welfare in eternity. So if a Protestant eventually manages to gain his salvation, it will be not because he was a Protestant, but despite it.
Finally, some words of G. K. Chesterton, one of the greatest converts to Catholicism in the 20th century, describing what is it like having arrived home:
Quote:It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug toward it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair. The man has exactly the same sense of having committed or compromised himself; of having been in a sense entrapped, even if he is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is not so much glad as simply terrified. It may be that this real psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and is responsible for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a mere trap. But that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. It is not the Pope who has set the trap, or the priests who have baited it. The whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth. The whole point is that the man himself has made his way toward the trap of truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. All steps, except the last step, he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage, only alarms him because it is so very true.²¹...After nearly 2,000 years, Catholics have come to regard Catholicism as one thing, all the parts of which are in one sense equally assailed and in another sense equally unassailable. Now it is unfortunately impossible for a Roman Catholic to state the principle without its sounding provocative and, what is much worse, superior; but unless he does state it, he does not state Roman Catholicism. Having stated it, however, in its dogmatic and defiant form, as it is his duty to do, he may afterwards suggest something of why the system seems, to those inside it, to be not so much a system as a home, or even a holiday.²²
Dr. Gyula Mago was born in 1938 in Hungary and raised a Catholic. He lived under Communist rule for 20 years. Dr. Mago obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, in 1970, and was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970–99). He presently lives in retirement in Durham, North Carolina, and assists at the Latin Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Footnotes
1. A. G. Sertillanges, Spirituality (McMullen Books, 1954), p. 180.
2. Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1962).
3. Ralph Woods, The Catholic Companion to the Bible (Lippincott, 1955), p. 199.
4. J. P. Arendzen, The Gospels: Fact, Myth or Legend? (Sands, 1923), pp. 64–65.
5. Contra Epis. Munich., Fund., n. 6.
6. Woods, The Catholic Companion to the Bible, p. 76.
7. Boettner, Roman Catholicism, p. 11.
8. Woods, The Catholic Companion to the Bible, p. 95.
9. Paul Whitcomb, The Bible Made a Catholic Out of Me (Gregorian Press, 1956).
10. Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum (On the Unity of the Church), June 20, 1896, §5.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., §8.
13. Tihamer Toth, The Catholic Church: A Course of Sermons (Herder, 1943), pp. 36–39.
14. Not surprisingly, Boettner uses it to attack Confession in the Catholic Church (p. 202).
15. G. K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (Burns & Oates, 1926), p. 122.
16. Woods, The Catholic Companion to the Bible, p. 200.
17. G. K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K.C. (Sheed & Ward, 1936), p. 341.
18. Romano Guardini, The Church of the Lord (Henry Regnery, 1966), p. 24.
19. Robert Hugh Benson, Christ in the Church (Sheed & Ward, 1911), pp. 145–150.
20. Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies (TAN Books, 1938).
21. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, pp. 53–54.
22. Ibid., pp. 117–118.
[Emphasis – The Catacombs]
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| Statue of Jesus vandalized outside UK church, man in custody |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 09:54 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Statue of Jesus vandalized outside UK church, man in custody
The parish priest called the attack on the Catholic statue and war memorial an act of ‘true persecution.’
Nov 3, 2026
BEWSEY, Warrington (LifeSiteNews) – An unidentified man is in custody in connection with a Halloween attack on a war memorial at a Catholic church that decapitated a statue of Jesus Christ.
The BBC reports that the war memorial at St. Alban’s Church, which depicts Christ on the cross above a monument bearing the names of church members who died in World Wars I and II, was beheaded and defaced on Friday with what parish priest Canon Christopher Cunningham described as “offensive language against the Catholic Church.”
The graffiti has since been scrubbed off, but photos and footage reveal a scrawled message that some social media users have interpreted as Arabic, while other reports have quoted the message as “no cross s–t.” Other unspecified incidents had been reported in the area around the same time, as well.
Cunningham called the deed an act of “true persecution” but called on the faithful to “stick together.”
Police released a blurry CCTV image of a nondescript figure believed to have been in the area at the time, and on Tuesday the Warrington Guardian reported that a 42-year-old male has been detained under the Mental Health Act. Neither his identity nor his motives have yet been confirmed.
“We understand the concern this incident has caused within the community, and I hope that now we have identified the suspect through an extensive and fast-moving investigation, parishioners and residents will be somewhat reassured,” said Warrington LPU Chief Inspector Joseph McNally.
In the meantime, a fundraiser has begun on the platform Just Giving that aims to raise £5,000 to restore the memorial.
“To see a place of such historical and emotional significance damaged is deeply upsetting, not just for those connected to the church, but for the entire community. We cannot undo what has happened, but together we can put things right,” wrote organizer Stephen Burke.
“Let’s show that acts of vandalism will never outweigh the kindness, generosity and community spirit of local people,” he added. “They gave their tomorrow for our today. The least we can do is protect their memory.”
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| Latin prayer for November from St. Gertrude |
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Posted by: Stone - Yesterday, 09:52 AM - Forum: For the Souls in Purgatory
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Latin prayer for November from St. Gertrude
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Santa Giustina (Padua) – Ecstasy of St. Gertrude by Pietro Liberi SOURCE
paxorbis.org | November 1, 2026
This month’s Latin prayer is one by St. Gertrude – the wonderful saint who promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart, as well as to the Holy Souls. Some sources claim that reciting this prayer releases 1000 souls from Purgatory; regardless of the numbers helped, it remains a powerful prayer for the souls of the dead.
Scripture tells us “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.” [2 Macc. 12:46]
The Church takes this requirement so seriously that She dedicates the entire month of November to offering and encouraging prayers for the Holy Souls in Purgatory.
Here is one story taken from her writings:
Quote:ON one occasion, while Mass was celebrating for a poor woman who had died lately, St. Gertrude recited five Pater nosters in honor of our Lord’s Five Wounds for the repose of her soul; and, moved by divine inspiration, she offered all her good works for the increase of the beatitude of this person. When she had made this offering, she immediately beheld the soul in heaven, in the place destined for her; and the throne prepared for her was elevated as far above the place where she had been, as the highest throne of the seraphim is above that of the lowest angel.
The Saint then asked our Lord how this soul had been worthy to obtain such advantage from her prayers, and He replied: “She has merited this grace in three ways: first, because she always had a sincere will and perfect desire of serving Me in religion, if it had been possible; secondly, because she especially loved all religious and all good people; thirdly, because she was always ready to honour Me by performing any service she could for them.” He added: “By the sublime rank to which she is elevated, you may judge how agreeable these practices are to Me.”
ON Rogation Wednesday, at the elevation of the Host, she besought our Lord for the souls of the faithful in purgatory, that He would free them from their pains by virtue of His admirable Ascension; and she beheld our Lord descending into purgatory with a golden rod in His Hand, which had as many hooks as there had been prayers for their souls, by which He appeared to draw them into a place of repose. She understood by this, that whenever anyone prays generally, from a motive of charity, for the souls in purgatory, the greater part of those who, during their lives, have exercised themselves in works of charity, are released.
St. Gertrude Prayer in English
Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the holy souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal Church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen.
St. Gertrude Prayer in Latin
Offero, Pater Aeterne, Sanguinem Pretiosissimum Filii Divini Tui Tibi, Iesu, in unitate cum Missis quibus dicuntur in toto mundo hodie, pro animabus sanctis omnibus in Purgatorio, pro peccatoribus quibus undique sunt, pro peccatoribus in Ecclesia universa, pro illis in domo ipsa mea et intra familiam meam. Amen.
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| The Spirituality of Time and the Use of Traditional Catholic Calendars |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-03-2026, 11:39 AM - Forum: Resources Online
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The Spirituality of Time and the Use of Traditional Catholic Calendars
Fatima.org | January 16, 2026
Introduction
In his meditations for the Christmas Season, St. Alphonsus writes: “Time is a treasure of inestimable value because in every moment of time we can gain an increase of grace and eternal glory. Time is a treasure which can only be found in this life: it is not to be found in the next, in hell or in Heaven. If the Blessed in Heaven could grieve, they would do so for having lost so much time; and in hell the lost souls are tormented with the thought that there is now no more time for them. “According to St. Bernadine of Siena, a moment of time is of as much value as God; because in each moment a man can, by acts of contrition or of love, acquire the grace of God and eternal glory.” This excerpt is taken from Meditations and Readings for Every Day of Christmas by St. Alphonsus Liguori (The Fatima Center, 2023), p. 66.
A Catholic Understanding of Time
We should never forget that time itself is a creation of God. It is hard for us to define exactly what time is.1 We can never return to the past nor can we move into the future. We can only live in the moment that is “now” and yet by the time you have read this sentence that moment is gone, and we exist in a different, unique, and irrepeatable “now.” In the final analysis, perhaps all we can do is be conscious of our existence in time. Our only way of “grasping” time is by measuring it, which we do through the movement of the celestial bodies. God also created these bodies and has likewise decreed their proper place and motion. To sanctify time is to sanctify life itself. God, Who created all things “in measure, and number, and weight” (Wis. 11:21), also ordained time as the arena of man’s salvation. The Church, as the Mystical Body of Christ, extends the sanctification wrought by the Incarnation into every hour and season through her liturgical life. The traditional Catholic calendar – rich with feasts, octaves, vigils, fasts, and commemorations – is more than a schedule of devotions. It is a spiritual architecture that orders our days according to the mysteries of Christ and His saints. In contrast, the modern world treats time as a commodity to be managed, filled, and spent. But in the traditional Catholic view, time is not money; it is grace.
Time as a Sacred Reality
From the very beginning, God sanctified time. “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen. 2:3). In this act, the Creator set apart one day for Himself, establishing the rhythm of worship and rest. After the Fall, man’s labor became toilsome, yet even then, God continued to mark His dealings with humanity through sacred times and seasons – the Sabbath, the Passover, the Jubilee. With the coming of Christ, time itself was redeemed. The eternal Word entered history at a particular hour: “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent His Son” (Gal. 4:4). As St. Augustine explained: “The Lord did not change times by abolishing them, but by filling them” (Sermon 219). Thus, the Church inherited not only the truths of the Gospel but a new sanctification of time: the liturgical year, wherein the mysteries of Christ’s life unfold from Advent through Easter to Pentecost and beyond.
The Traditional Calendar and the Sanctification of Life
Before the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, the Church’s calendar presented a profound interplay of fasts, feasts, vigils, and octaves – a structure that formed the rhythm of Catholic civilization. The year was not secular time punctuated by holy days; it was sacred time intersecting with earthly realities. Each feast carried both theological meaning and practical grace. Advent prepared the soul for Christ’s coming; Lent purified the heart for Easter; Pentecost spurred missionary zeal. The ‘triduum’ of All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls proclaimed the mystery of the communion of saints by bringing into sharp relief the Church Militant, Church Triumphant, and Church Suffering, respectively. Every season has great Marian feasts keeping Our Lady at the forefront of our minds. These feasts conveyed the chief dogmas and honors of Our Lady – which in turn always defend the truths of Christ and man. The feasts of saints filled the year with models of virtue and heavenly intercession. The octaves extended great mysteries across eight days of joy or contemplation. Fr. Pius Parsch summarized this spiritual pedagogy: “The liturgical year is Christ Himself, ever living in His Church. Each day the Church places before us a mystery of Christ’s life, that we may live by it and thus transform our whole being into Him” (The Church’s Year of Grace, vol. 1).
The Hours of the Day: A School of Prayer
Just as the liturgical year sanctifies the seasons, the Church sanctifies each day through the Divine Office – the liturgical hours of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. In the traditional rhythm of monastic and clerical life, these hours mark the passage of time with psalmody and prayer. Dom Prosper Guéranger, in The Liturgical Year, wrote: “The Hours are the echoes of that divine hymn which the Son of God sang upon earth when He glorified His Father in all the moments of His human life.” By uniting with the Church’s prayer, the faithful learn to perceive every hour as a meeting place with God. Even for the laity, the spirit of the Divine Office can be lived by praying the Angelus at morning, noon, and evening; saying Compline before bed; or meditating on a psalm corresponding to the hour. Time thus becomes not a sequence of empty intervals but a succession of sanctified moments.
The Domestic Church and the Liturgical Year
Traditional Catholic families once shaped their homes and routines according to the Church’s feasts and fasts. Ember Days reminded them of gratitude for creation; rogation processions sanctified the land; and saints’ days were occasions for celebration and virtue. In a home faithful to the liturgical year, children learn the faith not merely from books but through living memory: lighting the Advent wreath, fasting on Fridays, blessing homes at Epiphany, crowning statues of Our Lady in May, spreading the Rosary in October, and praying for the dead in November. Pope Pius XII praised this harmony of home and Church: “The family, sanctified by the sacraments and animated by the spirit of the liturgy, becomes the first school of Christian life and the first altar of God” (Mediator Dei, no. 78).
Modern Disruption and the Loss of Sacred Time
The twentieth century’s liturgical and social revolutions have obscured the Catholic sense of time. The suppression of octaves, the reduction of fasting, and the calendar’s simplification, while presented as reforms, stripped the faithful of spiritual milestones that once shaped Catholic life. The result has been a flattening of the sacred year into an indistinct sequence. The rich cycle of preparation, feasting, and recollection gave way to a rhythm indistinguishable from the secular calendar. Sundays have lost their primacy, and Feast Days once celebrated as Holy Days of Obligation are ignored or transferred for convenience. Pope Pius XI foresaw this danger when he warned that modern man, “forgetful of the divine majesty, makes an idol of time and labor” (Divini Cultus, 1928).
Recovering the Sanctification of Time
To recover Catholic time is to recover Catholic life. This begins with rediscovering the traditional calendar and observing it within the family and parish. Even in the absence of full liturgical observance, the faithful can sanctify time by:
- Praying the Angelus morning, noon, and evening.
- Observing the traditional fast and abstinence days, especially Ember Days and Fridays.
- Praying the Mass Propers of the day, meditating upon the Roman Martyrology, or reading the life of the saint honored each given day.
- Praying the Stations of the Cross, especially in Lent, but also on any Friday during the year.
- Making First Fridays and First Saturdays in honor of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts.
- Celebrating Feast Days with appropriate joy, meals, or hymns, and especially devotions. There are countless examples; here are just a few:
- Blessing of candles at Candlemass, Feast of the Purification.
- Blessing of throats on St. Blase’s Feast Day.
- Praying monthly litanies.
- Participating in Eucharistic processions on the Feasts of Corpus Christi and Christ the King.
- Organizing a public Rosary on October 7.
- Giving of small presents on the Feast of St. Nicholas.
In this way, Catholics begin to re-enter the sacred rhythm of time – a rhythm that forms souls in patience, gratitude, and dependence on grace.
Time and Eternity
The ultimate goal of sanctifying time is to prepare for eternity. Every day and season is a rehearsal for that eternal Sabbath which has no evening. As Dom Marmion taught: “By sanctifying our time, we make our life a continual preparation for that eternal day when time shall be no more”(Christ the Life of the Soul). See also “Blessed Columba Marmion on Living a Daily Catholic Life.” The faithful soul learns to see hours, days, and years as opportunities for showing our love of God. The ticking clock becomes not an enemy but a teacher – a reminder that every moment draws us closer to the vision of God.
Conclusion
The traditional Catholic calendar is not nostalgia; it is theology lived through time. It transforms the days of labor and the hours of rest into occasions of grace. It reminds us that history is not random but ordered by Providence and redeemed by the Cross. To sanctify time is to acknowledge God as Lord of all moments. As the psalmist prayed, “My lots [times] are in Thy hands” (Psalm 30:16). Let us then recover the ancients’ reverence for time – beginning with our homes and hearts – so that every hour may echo with the rhythm of Heaven.
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| Leo XIV-led Vatican sends Diwali message to Hindus |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-03-2026, 11:09 AM - Forum: Pope Leo XIV
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Leo XIV-led Vatican sends Diwali message to Hindus
The Vatican extended its ‘warmest prayerful and festive wishes’ to Hindus on Diwali
while suggesting the ‘spirit of Assisi’ could help Christians and Hindus ‘forge pathways of peace’ together.
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Giant golden statue of Hindu god Lord Murugan
Paul Maguire/Shutterstock
Nov 2, 2026
(LifeSiteNews [adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — The Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue (DID) under Pope Leo XIV on Friday published a special message to Hindus ahead of their Diwali holiday next week, stressing the Vatican’s commitment to peace “in the spirit of Assisi.”
In its October 30 message, published the day before Allhallowtide and signed by Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad and Monsignor Indunil Janakaratne Kodithuwakku Kankanamalage – prefect and secretary of the DID, respectively – the dicastery offered its “warmest prayerful and festive wishes” to Hindus who will celebrate the Diwali “festival of lights.” The dicastery also emphasized its commitment to fraternity and interreligious peace “in the spirit of Assisi.”
“The Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue extends its warmest prayerful and festive wishes to you as you celebrate Deepavali on 8 November this year. May God, the fount of all that is good, bless you, your families, loved ones and communities with abundant joy, peace and prosperity!” the message stated.
The dicastery highlighted how just over 40 years ago the first Assisi “World Day of Prayer for Peace” took place, calling it “a historic encounter, in which people of various religions came together to pray, convinced that religions and interreligious solidarity can help address global crises and promote peace.” They added that Pope John Paul II called this the “spirit of Assisi.”
“In the face of the many challenges facing humanity today, especially those arising from wars, conflicts, and the use of religion for political ends, the commemoration of the 1986 Assisi gathering offers us the opportunity to reflect with you on how Hindus and Christians can forge pathways of peace together, drawing inspiration from the spirit of Assisi,” the dicastery wrote.
“One such pathway is to come together to pray with a shared spiritual commitment to peace, each according to his or her own religious tradition, while respecting that of the other. Indeed, genuine prayer overcomes differences and disarms hearts, minds and lives, transforming us into men and women of compassion and peace,” it added.
Contrary to the tone of the dicastery’s message, the Catholic Church teaches that it is the one true Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the one true God. Sacred Scripture also states that the “gods” worshipped by members of false religions are “devils.”
Furthermore, the DID’s message implies that true peace can be achieved through interreligious dialogue, whereas the perennial teaching of the Church is that true peace is achieved through Christ alone.
The message came within a week of the Vatican’s international ecumenical meeting commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first interfaith “World Day of Prayer for Peace” in Assisi.
During that meeting, the female Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, scandalously processed and offered prayers alongside Catholic Cardinals Kurt Koch, president of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and Matteo Zuppi, ecclesiastical assistant to the Community of Sant’Egidio. In another scandal, the meeting also included a Jewish rabbi who told Vatican News that “God can be found outside the Catholic Church.”
Perhaps worst of all, in a video address to the meeting, Pope Leo also avoided speaking about the need to evangelize the world and instead focused on a supposed need for dialogue, seemingly among equals.
“The world needs dialogue,” Leo said. “The path of Assisi calls religious leaders to foster a climate of dialogue amongst the faithful and within society, so that the language of arrogance may give way to the language of peace, negotiation and understanding. This will help to “gradually (lead) humanity away from the cycle of violence.”
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| Requiem Mass in New Jersey - November 4, 2026 |
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Posted by: Stone - 11-02-2026, 01:43 PM - Forum: November 2026
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Holy Sacrifice of the Mass - Requiem Mass for Richard Schwarz
[Grandfather to one of the Seminarians]
Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Time: Confessions - 9:00 AM
Holy Mass - 10:00 AM
Location: Falco, Caruso, Leonard Funeral Home
6600 W. Browning Rd
Pennsauken, NJ 08109
Contact: 315-391-7575
sorrowfulheartofmaryoratory@gmail.com
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