Nothing Should Ever Shake Our Faith

The Catholic Church is the one, true Church founded by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. She will last until the end of time. The jaws of Hell will never prevail against her. That does not mean, however, the Mystical Body of Christ on earth that is the Church Militant will not be buffeted now and then by various storms. Not at all. Each of us is a sinner. Each of us has given in to the wiles of the devil in many and varied ways over the course of our lifetimes. It was our sins that transcended time and caused Our Lord to suffer unspeakable horror during His Passion and Death, as is displayed so graphically and accurately by Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ. It is our sins that wound the Mystical Body of Christ today and that disfigure our own immortal souls, for the reparation of which we must be assiduous in our daily prayers and in our acts of penance and mortification, especially during this season of Lent. God permits us to sin, though, so that He can manifest His strength through our weakness, showing us that it is possible to overcome our sins by cooperating with the graces won for us on the wood of the Holy Cross. As a priest noted at a conference in 1997, God permits us to sin so that “we will forgive each other.” While we must detest our sins and seek never to commit them again, the fact that we have sinned is supposed to prompt us to dispense mercy and forgiveness to those who sin against us just as readily as Our Lord gives it to us through the words and gestures of an alter Christus acting in persona Christi in the Sacrament of Penance. The Catholic Church has been and will always be composed of sinners. It is one of the negative proofs of the divinity and of the indefectibility of the Church that none of our sins and no amount of scandals caused by bishops and priest can destroy her. No merely human institution could possibly survive for nearly two millennia despite the sins and bad examples of its members.

It is important to bear these facts in mind in light of the report on the crisis of the abuse of children and teenagers and young adults by sodomite priests released on Friday, February 28, 2004, by the independent commission chaired by Washington, D.C., attorney Robert Bennett. The commission’s findings indicate that over 4,000 priests have been accused of abusing in one form or another over 10,000 victims. An accusation is not the same thing as a proven charge. Nevertheless, even if the numbers are exaggerated slightly (and, if anything, they might not reflect the true depth of the crisis), the truth of the matter is that the Pope John Paul II and curial cardinals and the bishops in the United States and their chancery factotums have permitted a scandal of monstrous proportions to possibly undermine the weak faith of poorly catechized Catholics, most of whom are themselves victims of the much larger crisis in the Church: the systematic denial of articles contained in the Deposit of Faith and in the natural law. Indeed, it is the very infiltration of Modernism, enshrined as it is into the very ethos of the Novus Ordo Missae, into our chancery offices and seminaries and schools and religious education programs that is in no small way responsible for the magnitude of the sodomite priest abuse crisis. The abuse of bodies is the direct result in most instances of the abuse of souls. Spiritual abuse leads to bodily abuse.

That having been noted, however, we have to be strong in faith. Nothing should ever shake the faith of a believing Catholic. Nothing. And it is not to be a self-hating Catholic to point out that that it is the Pope, the bishops, many priests, diocesan attorneys, and insurance company officials who are responsible for this self-made crisis, which the truly anti-Catholic media is using with particular relish at the present moment. However, don’t blame the media for this crisis. No, the media are merely exploiting a situation caused largely by the systematic recruitment, retention, promotion and protection of sodomites into the priesthood and the hierarchy. The late President Richard Nixon put it this way in one of his four televised interviews with David Frost in 1977: “I gave my enemies the sword they stuck in me, and they twisted it with relish.” The facts of this crisis, which has been brewing for over twenty years, were well known to the Holy See and to the individual bishops and their chancery officials, as well as the heads of various religious congregations. As many of us have pointed out in the past few years since the secular media picked up and ran with this story, numerous private individuals beseeched chancery offices and the Holy See with sheaves of documentation about this crisis. Reports appeared in The Wanderer and the National Catholic Reporter as early as the mid to late 1980s about this crisis, which has caused several bishops and high ranking chancery officials to resign in disgrace. It is the Holy See and the bishops who are responsible for this crisis coming to full view in such a way as to possibly damage the faith of some Catholics.

The devil has used this scandal in so many nefarious ways. The National Catholic Reporter and organizations such as The Voice of the Faithful have used it to call for more “democracy” and “lay participation” in the Church. If anything, the democratic novelty of episcopal collegiality is one of the chief causes of the decay we have witnessed in the Church in the past forty-five years, so well documented in Ken Jones’s masterful Index of Leading Catholic Indicators. Others have made the preposterous claim that the Church’s discipline of priestly celibacy is the root cause of this scandal, ignoring that the proximate source of the problem of sodomite priests is sodomite priests. A homosexual “orientation” is disordered; all homosexual acts are objective evils, one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. No homosexual should ever be ordained to the priesthood. The minimizing of the sin of Sodom–and its very promotion in the name of “compassion,” “AIDS Awareness,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “sex education” in almost every precinct of Catholic education and pastoral ministry in the United States–is what has caused and fueled this crisis.

As noted before, the sin of sodomy has been minimized as a result of a loss of Faith in the Deposit of Faith on the part of many bishops and priests within the Church. A person who minimizes sodomy is either trying to find excuses for his own behavior and/or has lost his belief in the reality of the horror of sins, especially those of perverted vice, and has lost his belief in the fact that a soul who persists in an unrepentant state of mortal sin until his dying breath could send himself to Hell for all eternity. It is no accident that most Catholics in the United States have the same kinds of cultural and political views as do unbelievers. Most Catholics in the United States have been taught, both in the context of the Sacred Liturgy and in what passes for Catholic religious education, that there is no objective truth and that each individual must be guided by his own “conscience,” no matter if that conscience is badly formed and is thus at odds with the Deposit of Faith that Our Lord has entrusted to His Mystical Bride, Holy Mother Church.

The irony of all of this is that most of the bishops and priests who have actively promoted sodomites into the priesthood and have been most supportive of the sodomite agenda, both ecclesiastically and culturally, are the ones who have used the full force of their ecclesiastical power to discipline traditional Catholic priests and laity, to deny “permission” for the offering of the Traditional Latin Mass, to deny admission into the seminary or the ordination to the priesthood to men who are noted for their personal sanctity and doctrinal orthodoxy, to send ordained priests who are deemed to be “too rigid” off to psychologists and psychiatrists, to mandate all forms of filth under the guise of “sex education,” to mandate catechetical texts that undermine the historicity of the miracles of Our Lord and most of the articles of the Faith, and to use all manner of threats against Catholics who complain about liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo Missae. Oh, yes, the bishops know how to govern, all right. They have simply disciplined and threatened the wrong people while mandating programs and projects detrimental to the sanctification and salvation of souls. They have done all of this while letting the sodomite crisis within the priesthood fester and explode at a time when the Church’s voice is needed desperately to combat the inroads being made by sodomites and lesbians socially and politically.

The antidote to all of this is the same in our own day as it was in the day of Saint Francis of Assisi: prayer, penance, mortification. Saint Francis of Assisi lived in a time of terrible clerical corruption and scandals. He “reformed” the Church by stressing the need for the personal reformation of souls, which is why he chose to live a live of austere personal bodily penance and mortification and why he embraced the poverty of the Holy Family fully. Saint Francis of Assisi’s Eucharistic piety and deep devotion to the Mother of God made possible the flowering of the apogee of the Middle Ages, the Thirteenth Century. No less is possible in our own day today. The graces won for us by Our Lord by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood are no less powerful today than they were in the day of Saint Francis eight centuries ago.

The state of the Church Militant depends upon the state of individual souls who compose her. Each of us thus holds the key to the true reformation of the Church and the restoration of her living Tradition, beginning with the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. It will be by our own private, unseen time spent before Our Lord in His Real Presence and by our total consecration to Our Lady’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, fulfilling her Fatima requests to pray the Rosary and to keep the Five First Saturdays, that we will plant the seeds for a day when Popes will govern regally and monarchically, not collegially, and when sin will be recognized for what it is: the tool of the devil to lead us into Hell and to undermine the work of the Church as she holds high the Cross of the Divine Redeemer.

Never lose faith in the Catholic Church. She is the Mystical Bride of Christ. We must pray for the Pope and the bishops and the priests who have been involved in one way or another in causing or refusing to respond to this crisis. We must pray for them fervently as sons and daughters of the Church. Filial piety demands nothing less from us. And we must remind ourselves and others that there are scores upon scores of faithful priests and religious who have maintained the Faith for every priest and bishop implicated in the sodomite abuse crisis. The answer to this crisis is not to “reform” the Church along democratic lines. The answer is for the Church to return to Tradition. A return to Tradition is not a guarantee that the problems that have surfaced recently will not be present in the future. However, it is the necessary precondition for souls to be rightly ordered in order that they be more be disposed to cooperate with God's grace to avoid sin and to grow in sanctity. For it is in the Mass of Tradition that man is reminded of his sinfulness and his need to repent of his sins and to do penance for them. This return to Tradition depends principally, therefore, upon the state of our souls–and our willingness to suffer with Our Lady at the foot her Divine Son’s Holy Cross as His Mystical Body is racked and tortured from within just as His physical Body was by our sins on Good Friday.

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, pray for us.