Fifth Sunday After Easter (2020)

Around the end of the fourth century the Church rightfully rejoiced.  Not only did nearly three centuries of persecution come to an end, but the emperor Theodosius officially proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire.  But still there lingered among the old grandees of the Roman aristocracy an affection for the pagan gods.  Symmachus, a Roman senator, insisted that the heroic sized statue of the goddess of victory, Victoria (known in the Greek pantheon of gods as Nike), be retained in the Roman Senate house.  To that insult to Christ, the great ancient poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius composed one his most famous poems, Contra Symmachus, a fiery invective against paganism and a paean to Christ the King.  It so roused the Roman senators that they declared the statue removed and broken in to pieces.  Such was the ardor of our ancient Catholic forbears.  Whilst the great persecutions might have made lesser men shy of confrontation, the power of the Holy Spirit only lionized them.

We today are having to endure great tests.  Immediately one thinks of this pandemic virus.  Though it tries men’s souls, it is not nearly as tortuous as the graver test God has sent us.  This test is the presence in the Church today of those who would attenuate Christ’s teaching, and replace it with a novel defense of sin.  Their voices multiply even at the highest reaches of the Church, and are leading countless souls to think now that they are free to enjoy the license to engage in disobedience to Christ, once thought sacrilege.  Just as some in the New Rome of St. Ambrose and Prudentius yearned to maintain the pagan gods and goddesses, so today there are those who crave a return to the old ways of sin.

Their voices are clothed in the deceptive dress of erudition and reasonable compromise.  They argue that it is time to raise the white flag of surrender, before a secular enemy who they declare has won the day.  With the oily language of compassion, they woo the masses into believing that the Church’s teaching of two millennia is simply unsuitable to a fresh understanding of man and his existential dilemmas.  Their rearguard are the once Catholic colleges and universities where students are scrupulously tutored in the new Religion of Man.   By the time these students graduate they are not only enemies of the true Faith, but enemies of their parents who might be still holding on to the revealed truth of Catholicism.  These sons and daughters are now strangers to the Catholic Church, and happy warriors in a pitched antinomian war.  Often some political leaders are accused of being divisive, when all that they are doing is exposing the enemy within, which these avant-garde Catholic voices have helped to create.  No, Covid 19 is not the enemy, those subverting the Catholic Church are.

They are armed with two principal weapons, both dangerous departures from Catholic doctrine.  First,  that man is simply too weak to carry the heavy demands of Christ. They embrace man’s sin as his natural condition For them, sanctification is a bridge too far. Calls to ‘save one’s soul’ are deemed to be embarrassing and fossilized. Divine demands must be relaxed and parsed in a way that gives precedence to ‘social concerns’ rather than, in one of their own theologian’s terms, ‘pelvic’ ones.  Any alert Catholic recognizes a familiar trajectory here.  Fifty years ago Friday abstinence was abolished, Sunday obligation transferred, communion fast abbreviated, amongst other similar capitulations, all to accommodate this new definition of Man Crippled.  They fail to understand that, yes, man is weak as a consequence of Original sin, but he rallies with strength precisely through the Church’s graces and ascetical rigor.   This new theological class are like men who see a house ablaze, telling the arriving firemen to withhold the water because it might hurt the flames.

The other error is closely related to the first.  It is a denial of the power of God’s graces.  Holy Church teaches that sanctifying grace possesses two movements.  First, gratia sanans, which heals the wounds left by sin, especially the despondency and lethargy settling upon a soul due to frequent or unattended sin.  The second movement,  gratia elevans, which places us upon the higher plains of Christ’s friendship.  Upon those divine uplands the soul is fed on the strength of the Precious Blood, and steeled by the fire of the Holy Spirit.  These two cornerstone teachings of Mother Church are simply drawn from the words of Our Savior Himself, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” (Jn 15:7), or St. Paul, “And he said unto me: My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.  Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” (2 Cor 12:9), and “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything if ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.” (2 Cor 3:5).    No admissions of defeat here, only dependence upon Christ for the victory.  Our Savior never meant for us to crawl on our knees content to be burdened by our sins, but to stand erect in the confidence of Christ’s grace.  This is freedom.  Or in the stirring words of the Apostle to the Gentiles, “Because the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21)

Old pagan goddesses are not our enemy today, but old heretical ideas.  Disguised as they are in the glitter of a no-fault Catholicism makes them ever more deadly.  Resisting them is our solemn charge from Christ.  Refusing to resist leaves Him disgraced, and our souls smothered.

Easter 2020