Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s liturgy provides us with the first verses of St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing that seems written for our day and the wave of apostasy afflicting the Church. St Paul had heard echoes of conflict among this cherished group of Corinthian Catholics to whom he had preached the Gospel. His answer to all their troubles is quite simply to insist on the centrality of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Bear with me as I read the text with you, a bit longer than the excerpt provided by the missal:
Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Sosthenes a brother, To the church of God that is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, in every place of theirs and ours. Grace to you, and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that is given you in Christ Jesus, That in all things you are made rich in him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; As the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, So that nothing is wanting to you in any grace, waiting for the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who also will confirm you unto the end without crime, in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful: by whom you are called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you; but that you be perfect in the same mind, and in the same judgment (1 Cor 1:1-10).
In ten verses, the apostle has named our blessed Lord Jesus Christ ten times, as if to say that when we as Catholics open our mouths to speak about religion, we cannot do so without referring all things to Christ. When we profess Him, we have already said everything there is to say about true religion. In all things you are made rich in Him, …so that nothing is wanting to you in any grace. If you are truly in Christ, you have all things, and you therefore have no need of going anywhere else. The reason is simple. I said it last week, and I repeat it here: All true religion is summarised in the person of Jesus Christ. To name Him with faith is to say everything true. To refuse to name Him or to put Him on a par with any others, is already a rejection of Him, an apostasy.
But this naming of Christ is much more than a simple exercise in pronouncing a name. When the same St Paul teaches in chapter 12 of this same epistle: No man can say “the Lord Jesus”, but by the Holy Ghost (1 Cor 12:3), he is giving us to understand that such an expression bears witness to the full acceptance of who Jesus really is, acknowledging Him as the true Son of God, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God, as we profess in the Nicene Creed. In similar vein, St John teaches in his first epistle: Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God: And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist (1 Jn 4:2-3).
The reason all this is so important is that there is a growing tendency in the Church to preach and write about anything and everything while carefully avoiding the mention of Jesus Christ and above all avoiding professing Him to be the one and only way to the Father. Or, when He is mentioned, it is to put His sacred and divine Person on a par with others, as if His were just one of the altars in the modern pantheon. It is one of the gravest sins against the Person of Christ to allow Him to be so treated, but we must add that it is inevitably a part of the delirious attempt at uniting religions by their lowest common denominator, for false religions cannot bear to hear it proclaimed that Jesus is only Lord or to be reminded of His sacrificial death on the cross by means of that sacred gesture which sets true Christians apart. A true Christian is one who is never ashamed of the cross and never afraid to make that sign in public, for it is the simplest and clearest profession of his faith. Many are happy to hear about Jesus, but only as a path among others to God, but when we profess the full truth, that He alone leads to God, then we rock the boat, and that is politically incorrect. A graver problem still is that when one, out of political correctness or out of fear, keeps silent about that most fundamental truth, one ends up transforming one’s beliefs to fit the political narrative. How did we get here?
Last week we started looking at the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of Pope St Pius X and we saw how the modernists seek to undermine all that is Catholic, going so far as to reduce Our Blessed Lord to the rank of an ordinary man. Today, let’s pursue our reflections and attempt to follow the holy pope in his explanation of how the modernists reach such a damnable end. The reading of this encyclical can be somewhat arduous, but immensely rewarding as we discover the roots of our present day crisis. Discovering the roots offers us a plan for reconquest. But for this we must have the courage to turn our minds to the system of thought which has effectively revolutionised the entire Church, making it into something completely different from what Christ made it to be, and ultimately annihilating it in the hearts of many.
St Pius told us last week that the modernist system includes all possible errors in itself. It is the synthesis of all heresies, the cesspool into which all errors flow. To explain this, we are introduced into the manner of thinking of the modernist, which is a big muddled mess, rife with confusion and ambiguity at every level, for the fundamental reason that the mind no longer works with the real, but lives in fairy land. The causes of this we also mentioned last week: the distancing of philosophers from the realism of Aristotle and St Thomas, and the shift towards idealism. No longer is the mind capable of discovering the real; all it can perceive are phenomena which refuse it entrance into the world of reality. To shorten this long itinerary of the mind from the light of the truth to the darkness of opaque phenomena, suffice it to say that it is ultimately the refusal of the real world in which we have been created; it is therefore the sin of the Serpent who, in the beginning, refused to acknowledge the reality of his subservience to God and wanted to pretend that he was God. This disease then infected Adam and Eve, to the point where they too tried to imagine in their minds a world other than the one they were created in. If only you eat the fruit, you will be like gods…..
This is why the disease of the mind called modern philosophy is the ultimate tool in the hands of Satan. Whereas, as long as people lived in the real world, it was possible for them to rise from the admiration of the creation around them and of which they are a part, to the contemplation of the Divinity (as St Paul speaks of to the Romans ch. 1), once their minds have been so infected that they no longer acknowledge the reality around them but build their own little worlds, made so much easier by modern technology, then the door is open to every imaginable escapade from the world God created, at the summit of which He placed His Son, incarnate of the Immaculate Virgin Mary.
That, in a nutshell, is the basis for the modernist ravings. It explains why they reject the rational basis of faith found in the traditional proofs for God’s existence and the divinity of Christ, and why they are forced to find in themselves the reason for their faith. For the modernist, faith does not come from above, for God is not knowable; it can therefore come only from within, whence what they call “vital immanence”, one of their favourite lunacies, by which they mean that faith is really about what and how we feel on the inside. If faith comes from the inside of each person, then of course there are going to be as many religions as there are persons, and so it becomes impossible to speak of an objective revelation that surpasses all human efforts at finding God. This is why, in the modern Church, even when a priest speaks the truth with clarity, most of the faithful don’t seem to care: for each person, religion and truth is what I feel, and our Sunday gatherings are only about coming together to feel good about each other. They of course would be incapable of expressing it the way I just did, but the fact of the matter is that for most of our contemporaries, faith is what I feel is right, it is what is dictated by my gut, and so it can change when I find something that makes me feel better.
The good news is that once we have discovered this fundamental error, the solution is simple, though very hard to achieve for persons whose minds have been distorted by the study of modern philosophy. For most people, a path of conversion will go through an effort to open their senses and perceive that they live in a world of which they are not the creator and of which they are a part. If this is done honestly, humbly, and perseveringly, it will ultimately lead to a conviction that this world could not have created itself, and that in turn will lead the person to humbly pray that the Creator will enlighten their heart. And anyone who seeks finds, to anyone who knocks, the door is opened.
So in the end, we see that modernism is really about pride, and conversion from it is really about humility. It is that humility which the paralytic in today’s Gospel had, but the Pharisees lacked. The paralytic and those who brought him to Jesus saw the wonders Jesus performed and made a humble act of faith in the God who had taken flesh to save them. The Pharisees saw them but remained wound up in the fairy land of their wild ravings about how God should be and what He should and should not do. They were idealists and modernists before the letter. In every age, the faith of the humble is rewarded; the obstinacy of the proud is condemned.
