We live a double life.
Not at times but all the time. At least, this is true of those of us who are members of the Body of Christ, those who have been saved by God’s grace. We live a double life in a sense. On one hand, we are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb who was slain. But on the other hand, we still struggle against sin, the flesh and the devil. How can this be? There’s very much of a both-and situation going on here, a now and not yet. This time in the Church calendar can be a little strange for us as well. We have begun what is called “Passiontide.” This time begins on First Passion Sunday (today) and ends on Holy Saturday. Why do we do this? I want to offer an extended quote from the 1956 St. Andrew’s Missal in explanation, “During these last two weeks of Lent, leading up to Easter, the Church is at pains to make us relive with her the events which went before and surrounded our Savior’s death, and which, above all others, were decisive in effecting the salvation of the world. Passiontide, by its close connection with Eastertide even now sets before us our Redemption in the Blood of Jesus, but it is the remembrance of the sufferings of Christ and the humiliations of His Passion to which the Church now turns particular attention. Before applying to our souls the fruits of grace in the triumphant celebration of our Savior’s Resurrection, she desires to make us follow Christ step by step in the dire struggle which He underwent in order to redeem us. Thus the long retreat of Lent draws to a close, as we contemplate that unique contest, which could alone wrest man from sin and earn salvation for him. It is essential that we should be reminded of this and it is a source of great consolation for us. Our personal effort at self-correction and reparation is not thereby rendered useless, but it is only effective and of value in union with the Passion of Him who took on Himself the sins of the world and expiated them all. Through that mysterious solidarity, which exists between all members of the human family, Jesus, Son of God made man, takes the place of His guilty brethren. He takes our sins upon Him…”He was made sin for us,” says St. Paul, “so as to bear our sins in His Body on the tree.”” This, then, is Passiontide and today is First Passion Sunday. Our readings for today are going to reflect the dual nature of our reality as I introduced this reflection with. Epistle: Hebrews 9:11-15 Gospel: John 8:46-59 We are presented in our Epistle text today with a vision of our Lord Jesus that is at once profound, slightly disturbing by modern standards, and glorious. We are told that Christ is our High Priest. We are given the image of expiation and sacrifice. The writer says, “Neither by the blood of goats, or of calves, but by his own blood, entered once into the holies, having obtained eternal redemption.” To a Jewish person of the 1st century, this would have made perfect sense. In the sacrificial system under which they lived, put in place by God, expiation for sin only came through sacrifice. In fact, later in this chapter (Hebrews 9:22), the writer tells us that, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin, calling to mind Leviticus 5:11, Leviticus 17:11 and Ezekiel 43:18. The writer goes on to offer the perfect sacrifice of Christ for our meditation and great joy. If the blood of goats and oxen offer expiation, how much more, he asks us, does the perfect blood of the unspotted Lamb of God cleanse us?! And so, under the “Old Covenant” blood was shed for the remission of sin, now a new and better covenant has been fulfilled in our sight. By the shed blood of Jesus, a New Covenant has come forward that we who are covered in the blood of Christ may enjoy our eternal inheritance. Here we see His glory and prestige as our great High Priest, yet His great humility and sacrifice in giving up His own Body and Blood for the salvation of the world. By His blood, a new covenant ensues. By it, we are made free. And yet, we see in our gospel reading, the increasing hatred of the Jewish authorities toward Jesus. They even accuse Him of not only casting out demons with the help of the prince of demons but of being possessed of a demon Himself. What sacrilege and blasphemy! And then, in their minds, He commits the ultimate blasphemy. He calls Himself God. Look at verse 58 of our gospel reading, “Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am.” They take up stones to kill Him. Seems a bit harsh by our modern standards. But lest we took quickly consider our modern standards, remember that it was YHWH Himself who told Moses in the burning bush His most Holy Name: I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:14). Make no mistake. Jesus was very clearly calling Himself God, the eternal One, and therefore unequivocally referencing His divinity. The Jews understood this and tried to kill Him for blasphemy. Such a sharp contrast put before us in our readings today. This is the dichotomy set before us in Passiontide. On one hand, we see the fruit of grace in the celebration of Easter anticipated. On the other, we see the torment He endured on our behalf. This is happening today as well. Our world (at least some of it) will recognize Jesus as a wise man, a great teacher, perhaps even a holy man. But the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God who is indeed divine by whose death we are reconciled to God? No, that cannot be Truth to the world. For, if it is Truth, it demands something of us. The person of Jesus the Christ demands our faith and our obedience and for that, the world cannot stand Him. Our modernist world cannot stomach objective Truth, a Truth that exists outside our own selfish worldview of personal autonomy and what we believe is our own personal transcendence. Here is where our flesh conflicts with Christ. Here is where we don’t want to be. But here we must be. In the middle of this duality, this dichotomy. We have the glorious and great High Priest on the one hand and the bloody corpse of the God-man, Jesus, on the other. We cannot look away. We dare not. We must lean in, look closer, embrace our discomfort in fasting and penance so that we may join in His suffering. By it, we are purified and offer ourselves as a sacrifice to our Savior. In it, we join our Savior in His Passion and in His glory. Deo gratias!
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So as I said in the introductory post, we’re going to be taking a look at some of the pre-conciliar papal encylicals. I won’t be able to really cover these in the way that I would like. One could write tomes on these and probably should. I’ll do my best to keep it to around 2k words or so.
First up (in no real order) is Pascendi Dominici Gregis, promulgated on September 8, 1907 by Pope St. Pius X. Why did the sainted Pope write this? He was specifically refuting the doctrines of the Modernists. He tells us, in the opening paragraph why. It is worth quoting. “The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge so falsely called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there has never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Titus i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to the forgetfulness of Our office.” Right out of the gate, the Pope tells us the job of the Pope; feeding the flock of the Lord, guarding the deposit of the faith and rejecting profane novelties. The job of the Pope is this, not posing for photo opportunities or cozy up to the powers that be in the world. In fact, I would say that, if the Pope is popular in the eyes of the world, he’s probably not doing his job very well because the Church and the world should look very different from one another and probably will not get along well. So, if the Pope is getting along well with the world, that seems like a bit of a problem. The Pope goes on in the next paragraph to call out those who “belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking a firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church…” Does this sound like anyone we know or have known in the last, oh I don’t know, 50-60 years? The so-called reformers are, in the words of the Pope, enemies of the Church. On a practical note, priests should be saying pretty much the same thing today that priests have always been saying. I would dare say that, if a priest (or bishop or Pope) is saying things that do not align with what the Church has always said, you need to be careful about listening to that guy. When I was preaching full time (as a Protestant pastor), I would often say that I have nothing new to say. I’m going to keep repeating what has been said by pastors for the better part of 2000 years. Now, we can apply it in different ways to our modern life, but the Faith has not changed. Neither should how the priests tell us to live or how they interpret Holy Scripture. He goes on to tell us, in paragraph 3, that (basically) the goal of the enemy is to take down the Catholic Church. She is the bride of Christ. She is the visible body of Christ on earth, the Kingdom come. The world hates Her. The enemy will stop at nothing to destroy her…even infiltrating the clergy (this is my commentary). In paragraph 6, the Pope tells us about the root of the Modernist problem: agnosticism. The agnostic says it cannot be “reasonable” if it cannot be perceived by the human senses. How arrogant of us to assume that we are the arbiters of what is true, that we are the measuring stick. This very notion is a slap in the face of objective Truth. This is really at the heart of Modernism; that your personal experience of religion is what matters most. If something cannot be proven empirically (by evidence) then it must not exist. The problem with that is that feelings cannot be proven one way or the other, which then leads to all things being true if you experienced them in a certain way. That then obliterates objective Truth and makes all “truth” entirely subjective according to your own perspective, feelings and experiences. This inevitably leads to what’s next. He also addresses (paragraph 8) the folly of the Modernists, which is the notion that every religion, no matter what it is, must be “considered as both natural and supernatural.” In other words, all religions are equal. This is called ecumenism and it is evil and ultimately unloving. If indeed Christ formed a Church on earth (and He did) and intended that it be passed on (and He did), then it stands that there can be only One True Church. To say otherwise is to deny what Jesus came to do and is ultimately unloving of us. Ecumenism is the direct product of what was discussed in the last paragraph. If all you need is your experience and “your truth”, then ecumenism makes perfect sense. If, however, there is objective Truth, as the Catholic Church teaches, ecumenism cannot exist. In section/paragraph 13, Pope St Pius X gets to a very real and current problem. He talks about what he calls “religious sentiment” and says that it can possess an infinite variety of aspects. He goes on to say, “Consequently, the formulae too, which we call dogmas, must be subject to these vicissitudes, and are, therefore, liable to change. Thus the way is open to the intrinsic evolution of dogma…Dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed. This is strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and as clearly flows from their principles.” Does that sound like almost all our Church leaders over the last fifty or so years or what? We keep hearing about a more modern faith, that the Church needs to “get with the times” or some other such drivvle and nonsense. That’s called Modernism. And it is false and against the teachings of the Church. Dogma, by its very definition, cannot change. To say or even hint otherwise should be anathema. See, the Modernist says that how you feel about something is what is true. To the Modernist, how you feel about something is what matters. It is entirely subjective and there is no fixed truth, no objective standard. Sound familiar? If this is true, then, as the Modernists proclaim, all religions are true. But no, says the sainted Pope. He says (via Pius IX), “In matters of religion it is the duty of philosophy not to command but to serve, but not to prescribe what is to be believed but to embrace what is to be believed with reasonable obedience, not to scrutinise the depths of the mysteries of God but to venerate them devoutly and humbly.” This, then, is Catholic doctrine. The submission of our will to what Christ has given us through the Church. It is not our place to prescribe what is to be believed but to embrace what is to be believed with obedience, devotion and humility. The Pope also speaks of the relationship between Church and State. The outplaying of the Modernist is that the Church comes completely under the dominion of the State. He says, “If the Modernists have not yet reached this point, they do ask the Church in the meanwhile to be good enough to follow spontaneously where they lead her and adapt herself to the civil forms in vogue.” I think we can all see this in the middle of this so-called Covid-19 pandemic. The Church has bowed to the State. She has not stood up but rather cowered in fear like the rest of the world. Hmmm, from whence did that come? A final thing I want to engage with in this encyclical is universal worship and Tradition. One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, that came from Vatican II was the ripping up and throwing away of centuries-old worship in the Church. Since the 3rd century, the Church had worshipped in one way (with very few exceptions) and in one language. This gives a true universality to the worship of the Church. You would never have had to wonder or guess what the Mass was going to be like from one church to another, from one country to another or one age to another. The Church’s worship was, indeed, universal. There was a universal language, Latin. The reason for the use of Latin, even today, is quite simple. First and foremost, it is the language of the Church. Second, because it is a “dead” language, it is not subject to the whims of culture. In other words, the Latin words the priest says in the Mass don’t change their meaning based on the epoch of history. Allow me an example. In 16th century England, you could say that you went to a party and had a “gay time.” That meant it was fun and merry. That word, “gay”, has a very different meaning today. However, the Latin language as used by the Church has not changed the meanings of the words. In point of fact, the meanings cannot change. It is necessary for the Church to use unchanging language in the face of an ever-changing world. Pope St. Pius X also deals with this when he says, in the eyes of the Modernist, “The chief stimulus of evolution in the domain of worship consists in the need of adapting itself to the uses and customs of peoples, as well as the need of availing itself of the value which certain acts have acquired by long usage.” Thus, the death of universal worship in the Church. If the Church must conform to the customs of the people, and not the other way around, there can be no universal Church. That becomes abundantly clear when we see the effects of the liturgical tinkering and innovations that came post Vatican II. Worship is now vastly different from one parish to another. My brethren, this should not be so. That is a direct result of Modernism. How do we combat this spirit and effect of Modernism? The Pope answers: Tradition. “The conserving force in the Church is tradition, and tradition represented by religious authority, and this both by right and in fact, for by right it is the very nature of authority to protect tradition, and, in fact, for authority, raised as it is above the contingencies of life, feels hardly, or not at all, the spurs of progress.” Tradition protects. Tradition feels no need for so-called “progress.” Tradition cannot progress in the Modernist sense, precisely because it is objective Truth. There is much more that could be gleaned from the timeless words of the sainted Pope. I will close with one final word from the Pope. The doctrine of the Faith is not ours to change. It is ours to guard and pass on, “The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted.” Deo gratias! |
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