Archbishop Viganò: Homily on Easter Sunday - March 31, 2024

[Stone]

Msgr. Carlo Maria Viganò
ADHUC TECUM SUM
Homily on Easter Sunday
Taken from here.

Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum.
I have Risen, and I am still with you. Psalm 138

Hæc dies, quam fecit dominus. This is the Day the Lord Has Made. These are the words that the Divine Liturgy will repeat throughout the Octave of Easter, to celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, triumphant over death. However, allow me to take a step back, to Holy Saturday, that is, to the moment in which the Body of the Savior lies lifeless in the Sepulcher and His Soul descends into Hell to free from Limbo those who died under the Ancient Law waiting for the Promised Messiah.

A week ago, the Lord was acclaimed as King of Israel and entered triumphantly into Jerusalem. A few days later, as soon as the Jewish Passover was celebrated, the Temple guards arrested Him and with a show trial convinced the Imperial Roman authority to put Him to death for having proclaimed Himself God. We accompanied the Lord to the praetorium; we witnessed the flight of the Disciples, the inaction of the Apostles, the denial of Peter. We saw Him scourged and crowned with thorns. We saw Him exposed to insults and spitting from the crowd, incited by the Sanhedrin. We followed Him along the road that leads to Calvary. We contemplated His crucifixion, listened to His words on the Cross, heard the cry with which He died. We saw the sky darken, the earth tremble, the veil of the Temple torn. We mourned His Death and His Deposition from the Cross along with the Pious Women and Saint John. Finally, we observed the Stone closing His tomb and the garrison of temple guards ensuring that no one would approach to steal His body and claim that He had risen from the dead. Everything was already written, prophesied, and announced ahead of time.

The words of the Prophets were not enough, despite the fact that they announced both the Most Sorrowful Passion of the Savior as well as His glorious Resurrection. It seemed that it was all over, that everything was in vain: all the hopes of three years of public ministry, miracles, and healings seemed to dissolve in the face of the harsh reality of a terrible and infamous death, which definitively ended the life of the son of a carpenter from Galilee.

This is what we have before us in this crucial phase of the history of humanity: a world that for centuries has built a civilization – or rather Civilization itself – on the words of Christ, recognizing Him as King just as the people of Jerusalem did, and yet in the span of just a few generations now denies Him, tortures Him, kills Him with the most infamous of tortures, and wants to bury Him forever. And if we have not yet reached the end of this passio Ecclesiæ – that is, the completion of the Passion of Christ in his members, the Mystical Body – we know that this is in any case what will soon take place, because the servant is not superior to the master. The contemporary world has witnessed the maneuvers of the Sanhedrin, which in three centuries has accomplished against the Holy Church, what it once did in three days against its Founder; in that Sanhedrin we have been able to include not only kings and princes, but also priests and scribes, for whom the Redemption threatened a usurpation that would hurt a people deceived by their own leaders. In fact, he [Pilate] knew well that they had handed Him [Jesus] over to him out of envy (Mt 27:18).

We are watching all this in disbelief it can happen again, this time involving the entire ecclesial body and not just its divine Head. Some with the fear of seeing the failure of their political subversive program, others dismayed and unable to understand how the words of the Lord can come true, when everything leaves one fearing the worst. Some reveal themselves by the way they consider the Lord as an opportunity to gain personal advantage and are therefore ready to betray Him. Others continue to believe, apparently against all reason.

We see today’s high priests bowing to temporal power, prostrating themselves before the idols of globalism and Mother Earth – an infernal simulacrum of the New World Order – out of that same fear of having a usurped power taken away from them, of being discovered in their lies, in their deceptions. Betrayals, fornications, perversions, murders, and corruption expose an entire unworthy and treacherous political and religious class. And what the scandals bring to light is still nothing compared to what we will soon come to know: the horror of a submerged world, in which those who should exercise the authority of Christ the King in the civil sphere and of Christ the High Priest in the religious one are in reality worshippers and servants of the Enemy, no more and no less than the priests shown by the Lord to the prophet Ezekiel (Ez 8), hidden in the deepest recesses of the Temple and intent on worshipping Baal.

God’s wrath is unleashed upon them through the punitive action of their enemies: yesterday it was Nebuchadnezzar or Antiochus Epiphanes, Diocletian or Julian the Apostate; today it is the hordes of invading Islam, Black Lives Matter, the followers of LGBTQ ideology, the tyrants of the New World Order, and the WHO. And just as the precursors of the Antichrist believed they could defeat Christ and died, so the servants of the Antichrist and the Antichrist himself will also die, exterminated by the right hand of God.

How much blood has been shed! How many innocent lives have been cut short, how many souls lost forever, how many Saints torn from Heaven! But how many silent martyrs there are, how many unknown conversions, how much heroism exists in so many nameless people. And among them we cannot fail to include the Doctors of the Church – that is, those Bishops who have remained faithful to the teaching of the Lord – and the teachers of the people, that is, those champions of Catholic Truth against the Antichrist. Yes, dear friends and brothers, because there will also be these: And the doctors of the people will enlighten many people, and they shall fall by the sword, and by fire, and by captivity, and by spoil for many days (Dan 11:33). The Holy Spirit gives this title of doctor – which is a just reward for ingenuity combined with work – equally, and with infinite justice, to poor commoners who have been transformed into apostles by the greatness of their Faith. Intrepid apostles of Christian truths: they will make them resonate in offices, in shops, in the streets, in the countryside, on the internet. The Antichrist too will hate them, considering them as one of the greatest obstacles to the establishment of his tyrannical kingdom, and will persecute them ferociously; because just when he believes he has the pulpits and parliaments under control, it will also be thanks to them if the flame of Faith does not go out and if the fire of Charity lights up many hearts that were lukewarm until then. Let us look around us: the mounting fury of so many heinous crimes and so many lies is waking up many souls, shaking them from their torpor to make them heroic souls ready to fight for the Lord. And the more ferocious and ruthless the battle becomes in the final stages, the more determined and courageous will be the testimony of unknown and humble people.

During this great Good Friday of all humanity, which is now drawing to a close and is a prelude to the victory of the Resurrection, the obscene cries and vile cruelties of the crowd terrify us and make us think that everything is lost, especially in contemplating how many cries of “Hosanna” have turned into cries of “Crucify Him.” But everything is not lost, dear brothers and sisters! On the contrary: if we have reached Good Friday, we know that the silence of Holy Saturday is imminent, which will soon be pierced by the sound, no longer of festive bells, but of the trumpets of Judgment, the Triumphal Return of the glorious Lord.

To whom does the Risen Savior first reveal Himself? Not to Herod, nor to Caiaphas, nor to Pilate, to whom he too could have given a good lesson by appearing dazzling in his snow-white robe. He does not show himself to the Apostles, who have fled and are still hiding in the Cenacle. He does not show himself to Peter, who still bitterly mourns his denial. Instead, He shows himself to Magdalene, who initially believes he is a gardener: to a woman whom the mentality of the world at that time would have considered insignificant, but who, along with Most Holy Mary and the Pious Women, had accompanied the Lord to Calvary, and who was now concerned with washing and embalming the Sacred Body. May this thoughtfulness of the Redeemer towards Magdalene therefore be a promise for the Glorious Day of His return, when other nameless Catholics, who remained faithful in the hour of the Passion, will deserve to see, rising in the East, the Sun of Justice who will never set. And so may it be.


+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

March 31, 2024
Dominica Paschatis, in Resurrectione Domini