Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
This Sunday’s Gospel presents Our Blessed Lord turning the tables on the Pharisees. Usually they are the ones putting Him to the test and getting burnt. This time He is on the offensive, and the battle is decisive. He asks a very simple question: the Christ, the Messiah, the one whom Israel has been expecting for centuries, whose son is who to be? For any Jew, the answer is obvious, and it comes without delay: David’s. Indeed the Messiah will be son of David as God Himself has prophesied through the prophet Nathan.
So far, so good. Then Our Lord asks a second question: If the Messiah is the son of David, how is it that David calls him “Lord” (in psalm 109)? How can the Messiah be both the son of David, and the Lord of David? A father is superior to his son, no? You will find families, especially in former times in which a son would call his father “Lord”, but there are none in which the father calls his son by that title. The evangelist tells us that they were stumped. They did not know the answer, even though it is a question that should have occurred to them often if they were attentive readers of the sacred text.
The Jews had long held psalm 109 to be one of the most explicit messianic psalms. It speaks of the mysterious origins of the Messiah, begotten before the daystar in the splendours of the saints, but it also refers to His passion (he will drink from the torrent in the way) and His resurrection (he will lift up his head). By referring then to this psalm, Our Blessed Lord does more than put the pharisees in a pickle. He makes it clear that the Messiah, while being true man, must also be something much more than man. He is trying to help them understand that the prophecy is being fulfilled right before them. If only they will open their eyes and see. But sadly most of them refuse and are lost.
This Gospel and its reference to the psalm, however, have a much broader significance. Its mysterious test is a confirmation for us of the central place of Christ in religion, in all religion. It is because Christ is both God and Man that He comprises in Himself the fulness of what binds man to God. This is why Christianity cannot be put on a par with other religions. It cannot even be compared to them. All other religions are attempts, from the perspective of the human intellect, at groping in the dark, striving to imagine something worthwhile about God, sometimes touching upon truths understood very vaguely, but often ending in the gravest of errors. Christianity alone is the true religion because it is God Eternal come in the reality of our flesh to teach us what He wants us to know about Himself and about our eternal destiny. The fact that God became man is one that can be discerned by any man making proper use of his intellectual faculties. Once that conclusion has been reached, – that Jesus is God – it is no longer permissible to go back, it is no longer possible to allow any space for any other attempt at finding God.
This is why the modern attempts at syncretism are not only condemned to failure. They are blasphemous. They are among the gravest affronts ever committed against the Godhead. They are a slap in His face, for they implicitly deny that He has come and taught us the truth, the one and only truth by which we must be saved.
I am the Way, says Our Lord. No one comes to the Father but through me. (Jn 14)
To say that everyone has his own way of going to God is to put man in the place of God. It is no longer God that reveals Himself and leads us to Him; it is man that decides who God is and how he will go to Him. From theocentrism we have come to anthropocentrism. God is no longer the focus, man is. How did we get here?
It all began with the Renaissance when, instead of focusing on what God had revealed to mankind, men began to put themselves forward as being capable of being godlike on their own terms. Instead of delving deeper into the revealed truth of divine adoption through Jesus Christ and the dignity of being elevated to supernatural life in Christ through the sacraments, men began to return to the lie that the serpent had whispered to Eve in the Garden: You can be your own god. At the same time, philosophically there took place a revolution whose consequences would not be apparent until later. The nominalist crisis denied the existence of the nature of created beings, leaving each individual being detached from the others and in a position to promote itself and its own way of thinking and acting autonomously from others.
Then Descartes came along and defined man as an incarnate angel who is pure thought, thus opening the path to idealism; man is no longer confronted with reality, he can make up his own reality in his head and pretend it is his truth. Then Kant appeared on the scene and decided that we can’t know anything about the essences of things, but only the phenomena that appear on the outside, thus making metaphysics impossible. Then we had the perfect recipe for the modern disease of the mind which, while refusing to be formed by reality, makes up its own little world. Conscience is no longer an exercise of the practical intellect striving to conform one’s life to God’s law; it is the individual person deciding for him/herself what she is capable of giving to God at any given moment and essentially making up his/her moral code as they go along.
This is why today even religious leaders no longer have any idea what they are talking about. Their minds are just as distorted, if not more, than the rest of humanity which is fed on the mental disease that is disseminated in nearly every university in the western world. But why would they care? For them, each individual forges their own identity and destiny. The same religious leader can say that everyone has their own way of going to God, and then the next day excommunicate someone who doesn’t agree with him, without even recognising that once you have decreed that every religion is good to go to God, you no longer have any leverage to promote your own. That is where we are, and roughly, how we got here. Our first predicament is a disease of the mind, a mind no longer capable of thinking straight, and therefore openly espousing the most glaring contradictions without even realising it.
That was a somewhat long introduction to some reflexions which we will consider in the coming weeks on the most important papal document of the last two centuries. I refer of course to the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of Pope St Pius X, whose feast day we recently celebrated. It is without doubt the most important, and equally the most neglected, or rather intentionally ignored, of major magisterial documents in modern times. Pascendi has the answers to all the confusion and error that permeates the Church and society today. If only it had been listened to and never forgotten, we would not be where we are today.
For this morning, we will limit ourselves to introducing the text. Published on the Nativity of Our Lady, 8 September 1907, the encyclical begins by pointing out that the evil in the Church stems principally from the fact that many clerics, “lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, put themselves forward as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man” (PDG, 2). These men, he goes on, are “the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church” (PDG, 3). Furthermore, these men attack the Church, not from without but from within, which makes the danger present “almost in the very veins and heart of the Church”. Their teachings strike, not the branches, but at the very root of the faith, so that they may diffuse poison through the whole tree. In this way, “there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt”. (PDG, 3).
That will be enough to whet our appetite. But it is already a lot, for as we saw in the Gospel, the error was already recognised and condemned by our blessed Lord when He forced the Pharisees to open their eyes, to read and to acknowledge that God had indeed prophesied the incarnation of His Son, the Son has abundantly proven His divine mission, and therefore all men have no other option, under pain of damnation, than to kneel down and adore Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God. Religion is not to be reinvented in every generation.
This is why in today’s epistle St Paul makes bold to proclaim: There is One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all (Eph 4:5-6). There are not several lords or several faiths or several baptisms, or several gods. There is only One, and it is in and through that One Lord and that one Church, the unique ark of salvation that all are called to salvation. All the rest is infected with that diabolical contagion which today’s collect refers to.
Let’s not forget that today is also the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. She wept at the foot of the cross with her divine Son. Today she weeps before the spectacle of a Church abandoned to wolves parading in shepherds’ clothing. May her tears for us touch the heart of God and obtain the restoration of the true faith in every heart, of true doctrine in every pulpit and the true Mass on every altar.
