Solemnity of the Holy Rosary
Tomorrow, 7 October, is the feast of the Most Holy Rosary. Today on the first Sunday of the month of October, we celebrate what we call the external solemnity of the feast so as to allow the faithful to more easily take part in this significant celebration. Incidentally, tomorrow has been declared a special day of prayer and penance for peace, especially in the Middle East. We will certainly unite ourselves with Christians around the world in praying the Holy Rosary especially for this crucial intention.
As we pray for peace, we are reminded that on the first Christmas night, the angels sang: Peace on earth to men of good will (Lk 2:14). We may also recall that just before going to suffer His Passion, Our Lord said: Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you (Jn 14:27), and that the first words He says to the apostles after His resurrection are: Peace be with you (Jn 20:19). St Paul, for his part, tells us that Christ is our peace, who hath made both one, breaking down the middle wall of partition… He preached peace to you that were afar off, and peace to them that were nigh (Eph 2:14-17). In every Mass, we pray for this peace to reign in our minds and hearts and in the world.
At a time like this when the spectre of generalised warfare is far from being unfounded, when belligerent parties are all too ready to insist upon their rights and to brag of their military might, and are all too reluctant to consider the rights of others and to sit down to seriously negotiate peace, it is good to reflect a bit upon the notion of peace and why it is so elusive.
The first thing to keep in mind is that peace is the tranquility of order. Things are at peace when they are each in their place, when each person fulfils their role and respects that of others. But before there can be peace among nations, there must be peace within each nation. It is not conceivable that a nation divided within itself could avoid conflicts with other nations, for if there is no peace at home, there can be no peace abroad. But there can be no peace within each nation if families are not at peace, nor can there be peace in families if each person is not at peace within themselves and with God. This is why the first step towards world peace is for each person to achieve that peace in their heart, that is to say, to be at peace with God. The first step towards making that happen is to listen to the voice of conscience, to repent of one’s sins, and to ask forgiveness of them from the only One who can forgive, namely Jesus Christ, Our Lord. And this brings us to the most important component of peace, which is Christ Himself.
It makes sense, sadly, that Jews and Muslims would fight each other. They are missing the key element, the capstone, the One who unites all in Himself, namely Jesus the only Saviour of all mankind. It is very enlightening to read the way the great popes of the early 20th century spoke of peace to belligerent nations at the beginning of the First and Second World Wars. Unlike today when Church leaders are more likely to base their discourse on some sort of vague and unidentified universal brotherhood that we would like to see unite us – fratelli tutti –, these holy Popes (I refer in particular to Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI and Pius XII), who truly had the faith, did not hesitate to admonish all nations that the only way to obtain and to maintain peace is through Jesus Christ. The prophet Micah had announced this most clearly, referring to the Messiah: This man shall be our peace (Micah 5:5). In other words, there is no other person, and still less is there an idea, that can unite us in peace than the God-given Saviour who teaches us by word and example how to have and to keep peace.
If one were to object that even among Christian nations there have been deadly wars, I answer that this only proves such nations were not fully Christian. We all need to beat our breast and admit that it is because we have not collectively lived up to the demands of our faith that we remain prone to conflicts, disputes and wars. Conversion of heart and docility to God’s revelation is of the essence.
And so we do not hesitate to say to Jews and Muslims: the One you need is Jesus Christ; if you persist in refusing Him, do not be surprised if there is no peace in the land that He came to save. To Russians and Ukrainians, we say: only Jesus Christ can teach you to respect each other’s rights and make a lasting peace; to Americans and Europeans and all those who promote the so-called “values” of the west, we say: before you can preach peace to others, you need to stop making war on unborn babies; you need to cease mutilating your children and twisting their minds to suit your self-centred agenda. Then, and only then, you might be able to mediate peace between others.
To Church leaders also, we say: you cannot speak for peace if you do not promote the true religion or if you reduce it to one religion among others. The brokenness of human nature is such that, without the remedies brought by our blessed Saviour through the sacraments and teachings of the Church, it is not possible to keep God’s law, and therefore it is not possible to have peace. This is why St Pius X emphatically taught that there can be no moral civilisation without the true religion. To think that one can build a human fraternity on any other basis than Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church is to live in an illusion, one that is all the more deadly in that it deprives souls from the incentive they need to work for true peace, instead of its counterfeit.
And that brings us back to the encyclical Pascendi. These past days, I was wondering if my words of the past few weeks had met with understanding. Perhaps, I thought, it’s all a bit too abstruse, or perhaps some think that it is a bit outdated. It so happened then that I chanced upon some interesting information from the Synod on Synodality presently underway in the Vatican. I was hardly surprised to read it, but as I did so, it became clear that here was the answer to my question. It so happens that one of the study groups established by Pope Francis to develop a synodal way of discerning Catholic Church teaching on so-called controversial issues, including sexual morality and life issues, has proposed what it calls a “new paradigm”. According to this new paradigm it would not be a matter of applying pre-packaged objective truth to the different subjective situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law, but rather of achieving a vital, fruitful and reciprocal tension between doctrine and practice. We must move beyond proclaiming and applying abstract doctrinal principles so as to “be open to the ever-new promptings of the Spirit.” But not to worry, because we would be in complete “contextual fidelity” to the word of God. What that means is that we would finally adopt the situation ethics condemned by the Church and, while acknowledging them in principle, we would minimise in practice the concept of moral absolutes and established Church teaching. In other words, this “new paradigm of contextual fidelity” would allow us to have our list of 10 Commandments but then each person would adapt them to his own life situation as best he can, and better, would be able to invent our own list of sins, as the Synod did this past week. Isn’t it charming that now when we go to confession we can accuse ourselves of failing to be synodal, or of hurting plants, or of – God forbid! – using doctrine to hurl stones at others (and with that we have sent to hell every single Catholic priest and missionary in the history of the Church, not to mention St John the Baptist and Our Lord Himself who never failed to admonish the Pharisees for their failure to open their eyes to the obvious truth in front of them!).
Now, if you have followed what I have been repeating over and over again, this is Modernism in its most pure form. What’s important is not Church teaching; what’s important is my life, and if in my life right now I feel that it’s ok to have an abortion or to be in a same-sex relationship, or to stop preaching Church doctrine, or pretend that all religions are equal, then God will be alright with that because He wants me to be “happy”. And so there you have it, my dear friends. I do hope that it is now clear why I am so insistent: Modernism is not a thing of the past – it rules the day.
But do not lose hope. One day, much sooner than you think, there will be another synod that will make real acts of repentance for the travesty of Catholicism that we have to suffer at the moment. The Church is built on the truth, and the truth does not change. When men fail to align their lives with it, they are the ones who will disappear and be forgotten. Tomorrow they will be gone. The truth remains forever. The task at hand for each of us is to follow Our Lord, to know our catechism, to receive the sacraments, and to pray unceasingly.
In this battle, the Rosary is one of our most powerful weapons. It is a veritable spiritual machine gun which allows us to neutralise all the power of the enemy. Let us take it up once again with renewed fervour and zeal. As Pope St Pius X taught us: “The Rosary is the perfect summary of the Gospel; it gives peace to those who recite it. Love the Rosary, and recite it daily”.
