26th Sunday after Pentecost – 6th after Epiphany transferred
In today’s holy Gospel we are again given a comparison with nature that explains something fundamental about our faith. Our Lord refers to the tiny mustard seed which becomes a large bush, and to the invisible leaven which causes the dough to rise. Familiar, everyday happenings that we have all observed. Life grows slowly, without our realising it. The small efforts we put into things ultimately produce their abundant fruit, even though at the start they seemed insignificant.
Our Blessed Lord uses these analogies to explain to us the way the faith grows in the world, the way the Church develops in history and the way the Christian soul grows in virtue. Regarding the latter, today’s epistle gives us a beautiful concrete example. St Paul recalls to the Thessalonians the way the seed of faith was sown among them and the way they received it. The word was preached to them, but far from being the word of a man only, it was truly the word of God, and that word is a word of power, power that was all the more evident in that the reception thereof was amidst many tribulations.
This point is one we would do well to reflect upon. Let’s recall the analogy of the mustard seed. Any seed that is planted in the ground must face numerous obstacles to its development. There are other seeds and already existing plants that rival with it to take its water, sun and soil sustenance. There are also winds that sometimes blow strong and give the impression they will uproot the tender plant. But all this is necessary so that the plant will dig deeper roots into the soil, finding greater strength in the depth, more water and sustenance in the deep earth. By persevering in spiritual and ascetical formation, the faithful at Thessalonica became not only Christians, but they even became a model for others of the faith they had received, to such an extent that their reputation of living the faith to the full was known by all. Such an example of persevering acceptance of the faith and growth therein is one which gives us courage in our spiritual life, for we meet with many obstacles, but we know at the same time that our perseverance may be what leads many others to Christ.
It is also the occasion to reflect upon the meaning of this passage as regards the Church and the way she develops in history. We have considered in recent weeks the Modernist approach to this question, which is essentially that the initial religious experiences of the founder of a religion lead others to share similar experiences, leading to still other experiences which evolve with time as do people. In this way there can be no definitive dogma, but rather dogma must evolve with the development of humanity. For the Modernist, there is nothing to prevent the apple seed sown at the beginning from becoming a cherry tree, or the acorn from becoming a beech tree. Consequently, the Church could very well teach at one period of history that Christ is the only way to salvation and in another that He is just one among many, or in one period that certain behaviours are forbidden and at another that it is for each person’s conscience to decide what is good and bad.
But such an approach is not reconcilable with the Gospel as a whole nor with today’s parable. It is the same seed that is sown which began as a seed but grew to become a tree of the same species. Applied to the Church, the same doctrine sown at the beginning can and must progress, certainly, but only in the comprehension of the same teaching, not another. This was long ago explained in-depth by one of the great fathers of the Church, St Vincent of Lerins, and was developed in an admirable way by St John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the final work he wrote and left unfinished before entering the Church of Rome. Newman explores how the Church of Rome has such an elaborate doctrinal teaching and liturgical ceremonial that is not found as such in the Gospel, but is its natural development, always the same teaching, deepened over time. The Catholic Church with its intricate dogma and elaborate liturgy is the same entity as the initial twelve apostles around Our Lord. It is the majestic oak tree that has grown out of the acorn.
In a letter written in the 1970’s when so many Catholics were losing their bearings, J.R.R. Tolkien writes the following about the way the Protestants at the Reformation wanted to go back to primitive Christianity, temptation that many Catholics fell into in the post-conciliar period:
“The Protestant search backwards for simplicity and directness – which of course though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because primitive Christianity is now, and in spite of all research, will ever remain largely unknown; because primitiveness is no guarantee of value, and is, and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. … [T]he Church was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant) which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the mustard seed and the full grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth, the tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. Very good: but in husbandry, the authorities, the keepers of the tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!). But they will certainly do harm if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unaffected by evils.”
We have here a masterly summary of why the modern Church has disconnected itself from the Church of all times. Those who have led this distancing were either fooled into thinking they could dig up the past and make it flourish again, without realising that the past is actually already present at a highly developed degree in the very thing they were part of, or they were convinced that the present tree is no good and so we need just to chop it down and start all over. In the first case, they were the foolish husbandmen Tolkien refers to who think they can pull everything apart and make it better. In the second, they were simply heretics, or worse, infiltrators, knowingly subjecting the Church to a process of self-destruction. In either case, we are not dealing with Catholics as all, but with men who had long before abandoned the apostolic faith.
This is the reason for which Pope Pius XII had warned about the false notion of antiquarianism, which he wrote about in the encyclical Mediator Dei, pointing out that such ideas had already been condemned with the Council of Pistoia. Among other things he writes this: “it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive form of a table; were he to want black excluded as a colour for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer’s body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings…” In passing, let’s note how strange it is that those who promoted the Mass facing the people instead of facing the Lord did not realise that in so doing they were rendering the priest guilty of the injunction pronounced by the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah: “they have turned their backs to me and not their faces” (Jer 32:33).
Pius XII adds: “Perverse designs and ventures of this sort tend to paralyse and weaken that process of sanctification by which the sacred liturgy directs the sons of adoption to their Heavenly Father of their souls’ salvation”. In other words, the sacred liturgy grew like a majestic tree throughout the centuries, and such development was accomplished under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Ill-guided pastors came in with axes and chainsaws and thought they could fix it. And behold all they did was paralyse and weaken the work of the Holy Spirit in souls. The words of the psalmist were relived in our day: As with axes in a wood of trees, they have cut down at once the gates, with axe and hatchet they have brought it down. They have set fire to thy sanctuary: they have defiled the dwelling place of Thy name on the earth (Ps 73:5-7).
There is good news, however, and that good news is that the roots of the tree, the true Tree planted by Christ Our Lord, remain forever, and all those who want to grow from the sap of those roots need only make their way back to the trunk, that is, to the religion of our fathers in all its purity, undefiled by the Modernist poison. More and more souls are doing so today. The tide is turning as the husbandmen at the top reveal their true intentions to grow an entirely new tree, one of their own making and not of the Lord’s. So let us pray fervently and with hope in the words of the same psalm: Arise, O God, judge Thy own cause: remember Thy reproaches with which the foolish man hath reproached Thee all the day… Let not the humble be turned away with confusion: the poor and needy shall praise Thy name (Ps 73:21-23).
