The Church and Mercy

The Church is a visible manifestation of God's mission of mercy for his people.  As we heard in the Gospel today (Low Sunday), Christ established the Sacrament of Confession and entrusted its administration to His apostles so that his mission of mercy might be extended throughout the world.  The Church has ever followed that commission from our Blessed Lord, calling Her children to the Sacrament of Confession and offering them God's mercy.

On the other hand, it is not mercy to confirm people in their sinfulness and errors.  In fact, that is the opposite of mercy because it leads people away from the Sacrament of Confession by promising them some other route for the forgiveness of sins or even an easing of the conscience that erodes the concept of sin completely.

From this we can see that the Church's loving extension of mercy is not a concept that began sometime in the late 1960's, and it is not something that is being exercised to a greater extent by post-conciliar popes.  Arguably, the post-conciliar popes have acted against the Church's mission of mercy by leading souls into indifferentism and a Protestant understanding of salvation.

Charity (and, by extension, mercy) requires us to counsel the ignorant and to fraternally correct the erring.  I cannot imagine any greater example of charity and mercy than that offered by my friends during my recent troubles with the faith.  Thanks to their charity, I was led back into the True Faith, and through the Church's mercy, I went to Confession.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating God's mercy as He has so graciously bestowed this gift on the Church through Her Sacraments.  But, let us be wary of those who knowingly use words without their usual meaning or who make a point of breaking with the Church's past by setting up a dichotomous relationship between the Church of today and the Church of yesterday.  The Church is Christ's Mystical Body... Christ is God... God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Low Sunday

In reviving this blog, I noticed that three years ago I wrote a post about the many names for this Sunday.  Much has changed since that post, but thanks be to God, he has allowed me the grace to see another Low Sunday and to participate in the Holy Mass and receive His precious Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in Holy Communion.  Lord, let me not waste the graces you wish to give me on this day!

Driving home from Mass today, it occurred to how timeless is the message of today's readings.  St. John tells us, in his Epistle, that Christ has overcome the world.  That is something worth considering today.  It would appear, though, that the world has conquered hearts and minds.  But, St. John says that whoever is born of God has overcome the world through our faith.  "This is the victory."

Apparently, the apostles had that same feeling of defeat that we regularly experience.  As we read in the Gospel appointed for today, they were so afraid of the Jews, their persecutors, that they hid themselves in the upper room with the doors closed.

Notice what happens next, though.  Our Lord appears to them and gives them his peace.  And then, "They were glad when they saw the Lord."  Though we might be disturbed by our seeming lack of victory in the world, we are certainly glad when we see the Lord!  But, as our Lord says in St. John's Gospel today, "Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed."

When we are troubled and lack the faith that brings gladness and manifests the victory, we usually do not have an opportunity to lock ourselves away out of fear awaiting an appearance of our Lord.  But, how excellent is our Lord?  How much does he know that His presence makes us glad?

In today's Gospel, while in the upper room, he breathes on the apostles and tells them to go about the world forgiving sins -- he has given them this gift from his own authority.  He has sent his apostles to all the world to manifest His presence in the Sacrament of Confession.

When the victory appears impossible and our fear overtakes us, we must retreat, not to the upper room, but to the Confessional, where we can be assured that the Lord will appear, giving us His peace, and making us glad.  Then, we can once again partake in the victory that overcomes the world -- our faith.

For all the difficulties we experience today, the victory has already come to those who adhere to the Roman Catholic faith.  Christ has overcome the world, and we are part of His Mystical Body through our faith.

Doctrine and Our Response

Practically speaking, it is easy to forget that the Church's doctrine is nothing other than a description of an independently existing, objective reality exterior to our own thought processes.  But, in order to understand the importance of adhering to the Church's teaching and the way that doctrine has manifested itself in the Church's historical practice, we simply must bring this idea to mind regularly.  Considering the current assault on objectivity both inside and outside the Church, opportunities should be taken to make clear the relationship of doctrine to Truth as an exact correspondence.  Otherwise, in the minds of many, doctrine becomes nothing more than the window dressing to a nicely cultivated, logical system that might be pleasant to consider but without relevance due to a lack of correlation to our usual experiences in the world.  It should be clear from the preceding posts that the inversion of this thought process is largely to blame for most of the problems in the Church and the world today as there is no "doctrine" other than our own relative, individualistic experience.

With a proper understanding of the place of doctrine, let us take the example of the liturgy and our obligations to participate therein as the starting point for our practical response to the crisis in the Church today.

The purpose of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is to offer fitting worship to God the Father in the only way we know how -- by offering "unto [His] most excellent Majesty of [His] own gifts, bestowed upon us . . ." as the Canon of the Mass says.  We know from the very beginning of the Old Testament that our obligation to God in worship is to offer the very best from the fruits that He has so graciously bestowed upon us.

It is, furthermore, clear from the Canon of the Holy Mass that two sacrifices are being offered: firstly, the representation of the Sacrifice of Our Blessed Lord at Calvary; and secondly, our personal sacrifice of our very selves, sanctified by the unification of our personal sacrifices alongside that of Our Lord, whose Mystical Body is, in fact, the Church of which we are members.

Necessarily, then, in order for the Holy Mass to be a fitting sacrifice to God the Father, sacramental validity is very important.  Without a validly ordained priest saying the proper words over the proper matter, there is no Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Obviously, without sacramental validity, we are offering simply bread and wine, which is not the "most excellent gift."

In addition to sacramental validity, though, we must offer our own first fruits -- our most excellent worldly gifts, to use crude terms.  We should, in all instances and circumstances, seek to offer worship that is the best we can possibly muster.  And this is true both of ourselves individually and as a Church collectively.

So, is the Novus Ordo the best we can muster from our gifts?  I will assume for present purposes that there is no question about the sacramental validity of the Novus Ordo.  In fact, we are often told that we should attend the Novus Ordo even when it is suspect to fulfill our obligation to God in the First Commandment as expressed by the laws of the Church.  When bizarre things happen there or when we are scandalized by the banality of the event or when heretical hymns are sung, we are told that we should "offer it up."

Is this really the proper disposition for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?  Should we truly participate in less than perfect worship of God and "offer up" the suffering of that experience?

Because we have an obligation to God as individuals to offer him the best worship possible, when we fail to meet that obligation, we are committing a sin.  When we deliberately place ourselves in a near occasion of sin, we are committing a sin.  Knowing what we know, then, how can we participate in the Novus Ordo Mass.  The fact that it has sacramental validity should not console us -- far from it!  The fact that our Lord is truly and substantially present should cause us to be all the more horrified and scandalized if we are in attendance!

Far be it from me, Lord, to participate in imperfect worship of you!  Far be it from me, Lord, to abuse your Glorious Condescension by being complicit in any event that takes the focus from You!

The Church's doctrine is clearly presented in the Holy Mass celebrated according to the Missal of St. Pius V.  In the Church's historical worship, the activity of the Holy Sacrifice is clearly manifested for all to understand -- in other words, it is clear that a Holy Exchange of gifts is taking place.  Further, reality is brought before our eyes when we see the lowly place of our gifts in relation to the Majesty of God.  And the Majesty of God is revealed to us in the beauty of the words and actions, as well as in the connection that we have with the communion of saints by virtue of our participating in the same worship that nourished them.

The dilemma is often presented to so-called traditionalists about whether to participate in the Novus Ordo or to attend at all, usually to meet an obligation.  Let those of us who have been given the gift of grace to see this matter clearly reject such a question.  Instead, let us ask of those who attend the Novus Ordo how it is that they are meeting their obligations toward God by attendance at such a Rite.  After all, we have an obligation to offer to God our very best and not to abuse the Blessed Sacrament, which is our greatest treasure on Earth.

We know our obligations toward God, let us act accordingly.  May our actions correspond to reality and our worship correspond to our doctrine.

Mere Aesthetics and Liturgical Preference

In my previous post, I attempted to show that there are actual doctrinal errors flourishing amongst the hierarchy and laity in the Church today.  I want to be clear that the modern crisis is not one of aesthetics in Liturgy or liturgical preference. 

Many things have been written regarding the renewal of Catholic liturgical practice by way of introduction of the Tridentine Mass in diocesan churches and the use in the Novus Ordo of more "traditional" vestments and options, such as incense or the gradual introduction of ad orientem directionality.  

With the advent of the new liturgical renewal, the crisis in the Church is often presented as one of aesthetics and preference. Typically, one might read that "Traditionalists" are battling for their preference and should be content with a Novus Ordo Mass offered in accordance with the rubrics and possibly traditional elements. This is the "say the black, do the red" mentality. 

Buying into this narrative is detrimental to the fight against the modern errors because it would require us to wage war on the Modernists' turf. They seem content, as I mentioned in the previous post, with a Church that is one option among many. It stands to reason, then, that they are equally content with the Tridentine Mass being one option among many. 

We cannot succumb to that thinking. We must move beyond aesthetics and preference so that we can refocus on the fact that practice is subject to doctrine. We must be prepared to make a firm decision to adhere to the doctrines of the Faith as manifested in the perennial and venerable practices of our Faith. When we consider the Novus Ordo as a legitimate option, we can be assured we have lost the correct focus and have surrendered to the modern, pluralistic mentality. 

Identifying the Issues

There is no real dispute that there is an immense crisis in the Catholic Church today. This crisis has been described accurately as another Passion besetting the Mystical Body of Christ. There is, I suppose, some dispute as to the nature and extent of today's crisis and whether it is different in magnitude or type from previous crises. 

I propose that today's crisis is the most serious crisis ever to have happened in the history of the Church and that this is due to the nature of the crisis itself. 

In former times, various heresies besieged the Catholic Church, sometimes gathering to their errors vast multitudes of unwitting laity and complicit bishops and priests. We are all familiar with the dark times of the Arian heresy, and we live with the aftermath of the Protestant Revolt everyday. Still, today's crisis is nothing more than an outright Modernist upheaval attacking the Church's members at every level of the hierarchy and capturing uncatechized laity in its skewed thinking without their even being aware that they have been infected. 

In a certain sense, this crisis has been presented as merely one affecting liturgical practice resulting in bizarre pseudo-Protestant rituals performed in the hollowed-out shells of formerly Catholic buildings. Assuredly, this is a hallmark of the crisis, but in a way, the focus on the liturgical revolution as the problem instead of a symptom of many larger problems has served to minimize the actual extent of the crisis wrought by the near wholesale acceptance of the Modernist heresy as the de facto intellectual framework operative in the Church for the past 50 years. 

It is the erroneous thought process of Modernism that has so successfully subjected doctrine to practice in a complete inversion of the Church's perennial methodology. Remember that Modernism itself is a way of thinking that immanates from the individual, who creates his own reality and truth, while sometimes retaining the same vocabulary as former generations. One cannot believe a Modernist because words have no objective meaning to him. And words aren't the only thing lacking objectivity as the Modernist conception of God Himself is a construction of the individual's making. Hence, Modernist liturgical practice focuses on the individual and his "experience" and feelings. So, you can see the necessity for Modernists to invert the traditional roles of doctrine and practice--to them, there is no doctrine in the way Catholics would understand the word. There is only practice, from which the individual produces whatever conceptions he might create. 

This is a concrete problem that was presumed to be codified by the recent "pastoral council" of unhappy memory. And it continues to be problematic as members of the hierarchy hope to subject Our Lord's clear teaching on marriage to modern sensibilities by, once again, elevating practice above doctrine. 

What is one to do when one recognizes, with the assistance of grace and the God-given intellect, that Modernist heretics have won the temporal victory in our times? The crisis is, after all, a crisis of Faith for everyone involved. The heretics (yes, even in the hierarchy) have lost the faith and departed from it in ways that affect us by promoting anger and dismay, among other reactions. Many priests are indoctrinated in erroneous thinking in the seminary. And those priests have arisen from the ranks of a laity that has largely lost the faith or who see our Holy Catholic Church as merely another option among many that are presented to our completely pluralistic society as equal and equivalent. Finally, the crisis of faith makes those who wish to remain faithful to the Faith of our Fathers question their standing--it calls them schismatic, traditionalist, Pelagian, Jansenist, nostalgic, and backward.

With this global view of the crisis, we can justifiably ask what are our options? What should we do? What can we do?

A New Series of Posts

(St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church in Roswell, Georgia, on Holy Thursday 2015)

Throughout the last three years, I have struggled mightily with the Faith. Ultimately, through my own fault, I lost the grace of perseverance and formally departed from the Roman Catholic Church, entering into the schismatic so-called Orthodox Church. 

The mercy of God, however is greater than my intellect, thankfully. I have now been reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church and am attempting to rest in the beautiful Truth of our Holy Faith. 

In a series of articles, I hope to shed light on my departure from the Roman Church, the reasons for my return, and the lessons I learned from my time as a formal schismatic. In so doing, I hope the light of truth will shine brightly to illumine those in need of assistance in persevering during the current, unprecedented crisis in the Church.