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| Prayers for Every Day of the Week in Aid of the Poor Souls in Purgatory |
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Posted by: Hildegard of Bingen - 01-17-2021, 03:20 PM - Forum: For the Souls in Purgatory
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PRAYERS FOR EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK IN AID
OF THE POOR SOULS IN PURGATORY
(100 days once a day, Leo XII, November 18, 1826)
For Sunday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee, by the Precious Blood which Thy Divine Son Jesus shed in the garden,
deliver the souls in purgatory, and especially that Soul amongst them all which is most destitute of spiritual aid;
and vouchsafe to bring it to Thyglory, there to praise and bless Thee forever. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Monday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee, by the Precious Blood which Thy divine Son Jesus shed in His cruel scourging, deliver
the Souls in Purgatory, and that Soul especially amongst them all which is nearest to its entrance into Thy glory; that so it
may forthwith begin to praise and bless Thee forever. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Tuesday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee, by the Precious Blood which Thy divine Son Jesus shed in His bitter crowning
with thorns, deliver the Souls in Purgatory, and in particular that one amongst them all which would be the last to
depart out of those pains, that it may not tarry so long a time before it comes to praise Thee in Thy glory and bless Thee forever. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Wednesday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee, by the Precious Blood which Thy divine Son Jesus shed in through the streetsof Jerusalem,
when He carried the Cross upon His sacred shoulders, deliver the Souls in Purgatory and especiallythat Soul which is richest
in merits before Thee that so, in that throne of glory which awaits it, it may magnify Thee and bless Thee forever. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Thursday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee, by the Precious Body and Blood of Thy Divine Son Jesus, which He gave with His own
hands upon the eve of His Passion to His beloved Apostels to be their meat and drink, and which He left to His whole Church
to be a perpetual sacrifice and the life-giving food of His own faithful people, deliver the Souls in Purgatory, and especially
that one which was most devoted to this mystery of infinite love, that it may with the same Thy Divine Son, and with Thy
Holy Ghost, ever praise Thee for Thy love therein in eternal glory. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Friday
O Lord God Almighty, I pray Thee by the Precious Blood which Thy Divine Son shed on this day upon the wood of the Cross,
especially from His most sacred hands and feet, deliver the Souls in Purgatory and in particular that Soul for which I am most
bound to pray; that no neglect of mine may hinder it from praising Thee in Thy glory and blessing Thee forever. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
For Saturday
O Lord God Almighty, I beseech Thee, by the Precious Blood which gushed forth from the side of Thy Divine Son Jesus
in the sight of, and to the extreme pain of His most Holy Mother, deliver the Souls in Purgatory, and especially that one
amongst them all which was the most devout to her; that it may soon attain unto Thy glory, there to praise Thee in her,
and her in Thee, world without end. Amen.
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the De Profundis
DE PROFUNDIS
Out of depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord; Lord hear my voice.
Let Thy ears be attentive the voice of my supplication.
If Thou, O Lord, will mark iniquities; Lord, who shall stand it?
For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness; and by reason of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord.
My soul hath relied on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning-watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.
Because with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him plentiful redemption.
And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
V. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord.
R. And let perpetual light shine upon them.
V. From the gate of hell.
R. Deliver their souls, O Lord.
V. May they rest in peace.
R. Amen.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
R. And let my cry come unto Thee.
V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with Thy Spirit.
Let us pray:
O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful, we beseech Thee to grant to the souls of Thy servants the
remission of their sins, so that by our prayers they may obtain pardon for which they long. O Lord, who livest and
reignest, world without end. Amen.
May they rest in peace. Amen.
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| Papal Biographer Calls for a ‘Reckoning’ Against Pro-Life Catholics |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 11:58 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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Papal Biographer Calls for a ‘Reckoning’ Against Pro-Life Catholics
Breitbart | 17 Jan 20210
British papal biographer Austen Ivereigh has called for a “reckoning” against pro-life U.S. Catholics, i
nsisting that they enabled the Jan. 6 Capitol violence by refusing to support pro-abortion politicians.
“US Catholic pro-life movement’s hour of shame,” Mr. Ivereigh asserts on Twitter Saturday, “not a single unborn life saved, while enabling a spate of executions.”
It would be interesting to know the source for Ivereigh’s claim that “not a single unborn life” was saved, given the removal of funding for both domestic and foreign abortion providers, the naming of three Constitutional judges whose lasting impact has yet to be seen, and the prevention of radical pro-abortion candidate Hillary Clinton from taking office.
Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden support repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which saves an estimated 60,000 poor and mostly nonwhite lives per year. That would be 240,000 lives right there, had Clinton been elected.
The “spate of executions” Ivereigh refers to are the federal executions of 13 violent felons convicted for rape, tortures, and multiple murders. As a point of reference, 13 unborn children are dismembered, scalded to death, or ripped from their mother’s wombs every 8 minutes of every day in America. Nearly one in five pregnancies in the United States ends in abortion.
Like other progressive Catholics, Ivereigh finds more cause for weeping in the deaths of 13 convicted criminals over four years than over the thousands of babies who die violently in abortion every day.
“Millions of dollars spent to help a president who led a mob assault on democracy,” Ivereigh concludes. “There must be a reckoning.”
![[Image: Austen-attacks-pro-life-Catholics.jpg]](https://media.breitbart.com/media/2021/01/Austen-attacks-pro-life-Catholics.jpg)
Never mind that President Trump did not “lead” a mob assault; more importantly, pro-life Catholics were manifestly appalled by the Capitol violence, which had nothing to do with their resistance to the pro-abortion, anti-religious freedom Democratic Party.
In their efforts to promote the Democratic Party, left-wing Catholics spent four years downplaying the evil of murdering unborn babies in the womb, one of the very few crimes considered so heinous as to incur automatic excommunication from their Church.
Recently, Joe Biden’s team of Catholic cheerleaders have tried to pin Capitol violence on Catholics who refused to throw their support behind the pro-abortion president-elect who openly flouts Catholic teaching on numerous issues.
Catholic Democrats, while relentlessly attacking pro-life Catholics for allying themselves to Trump over this most basic issue of justice, have done nothing to hold their side accountable, but have watched complacently as the Democratic Party has become more and more radicalized to the point where unlimited abortion rights funded by taxpayer dollars is now a fundamental plank in the party platform.
Prominent Jesuits have been particularly active in supporting the candidacy of President-Elect Biden, endeavoring to persuade Catholics of the viability of a Catholic politician who promotes Planned Parenthood, attacks the Little Sisters of the Poor, officiates at same-sex weddings, opposes school choice, embraces dangerous gender transitioning for young children, and promises to reinstate taxpayer-funded abortions at home and abroad.
For his part, Jesuit Father James Martin wrote this week that pro-life Catholic bishops and priests fueled the January 6 Capitol riots by characterizing the Democratic Party as the “party of death,” for which they need to repent.
“Can anyone doubt that the moral calculus proposed by some Christian leaders, including Catholic priests and bishops, framed in the language of pure good versus pure evil, contributed to the presence of so many rioters brandishing overtly Christian symbols as they carried out their violence?” Father Martin wrote in a Jan. 12 article for America magazine titled “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol.”
“The mistake for which Catholic leaders should be corrected, the mistake for which the church now needs to repent, is not simply casting this election in terms of good and evil,” Father Martin wrote, “it is pretending that real questions of good and evil could be simplified to the point where violent responses, even acts of domestic terrorism, become thinkable and then are carried out.”
Catholics might consider asking Father Martin what he would call the industrial-scale, intentional, violent killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent children if not “pure evil.” |
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| Cardinal Pie: Jesus Christ is King of the Nations |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 10:07 AM - Forum: Cardinal Pie
- Replies (1)
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Jesus Christ is King of the Nations!
[Translated from the French here via machine translation]
Jesus Christ is king; he is not one of the prophets, not one of the evangelists and apostles who does not assure him of his quality and his attributions of king. Jesus is still in the cradle, and already the Magi seek the King of the Jews Ubi is who is natu, rex Judoerum? Jesus is on the verge of death: Pilate asks him: So you are king: Ergo rex are you? You said it, Jesus answers. And this answer is made with such an accent of authority that Pilate, notwithstanding all the representations of the Jews, consecrates the kingship of Jesus by a public writing and a solemn poster .
Write, then, write, O Pilate, the words which God dictates to you, and of which you do not understand the mystery. Whatever one may say and represent, beware of changing what is already written in heaven. May your orders be irrevocable, because they are executing an immutable stop of the Almighty. That the kingship of Jesus Christ be promulgated in the Hebrew language, which is the language of the people of God, and in the Greek language, which is the language of the teachers and philosophers, and in the Roman language which is the language of the empire and the world, the language of the conquerors and politicians. Come now, O Jews, heirs of the promises; and you, O Greeks, inventors of the arts; and you, Romans, masters of the earth; come and read this admirable sign; bend your knee before your King.
Hear the last words that N.-S. address to His Apostles, before ascending to heaven: All power was given to me in heaven and on earth. Go and teach all nations. Notice, my brethren, Jesus Christ does not say all men, all individuals, all families, but all nations. It does not only say: Baptize the children, catechize the adults, marry the spouses, administer the sacraments, give the religious burial to the dead. No doubt, the mission that He confers on them understands all this, but it understands more than that, it has a public, social character because Jesus Christ is the king of peoples and nations. And as God sent the ancient prophets to the nations and to their chiefs to reproach them for their apostasies and their crimes, so Christ sends His apostles and priesthood to the peoples, to the empires, to the rulers and the legislators to teach all His doctrine and His law. Their duty, like that of St. Paul, is to bear the name of Jesus Christ before the nations and kings and sons of Israel.
Thus, Jesus Christ gives His Apostles the official mission to preach His social reign, even more, He wants this reign to be proclaimed by all the faithful. He will have him asked every day by every Christian in the Pater's prayer. Never has the divine founder of Christianity better revealed to the earth what a Christian should be than when he taught His disciples how to pray. In fact, prayer being like the religious breathing of the soul, it is in the elementary formula that Jesus Christ has given that we must seek the whole program and the whole spirit of Christianity. Let's listen to Teacher's current lesson. So you will pray, said Jesus. Sic ergo your orabitis. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
The Christian, therefore, is not as seems to believe it and as affirms every day and on all the tones a certain contemporary world, it is not therefore a being who isolates himself in himself, who is sequestrated in an oratory indistinctly closed to all the rumors of the age, and which, satisfied provided he saves his soul, takes no care of the business of this world. The Christian is the opposite of that. The Christian is a public and social man par excellence, his nickname indicates it: he is Catholic, which means universal. Jesus Christ, in tracing the Lord's prayer, ordered that none of his people could perform the first act of the religion which is the prayer, without being in contact, according to his degree of intelligence and according to his the expanse of the horizon open before him, with all that can advance or delay, favor or prevent the reign of God on earth.
And as assuredly the works of man must be coordinated with his prayer, he is not a Christian worthy of the name who does not actively employ himself to the extent of his forces, to procure this temporal reign of God and to reverse which hinders him.
-Mgr Pie - November 8, 1859 - Homily on the panegyric of St. Emilian
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| Top COVID-19 Statistics Mainstream News Isn't Reporting |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 10:05 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
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TOP 11 COVID-19 STATISTICS MAINSTREAM NEWS IS HIDING FROM YOU
All of this data is extracted from the CDC, WHO, Johns Hopkins, White House task force press conferences, and scientific studies.
All direct source links are cited below the list of statistics. A printable pdf version is available at the bottom of this page for those who wish to print and distribute these facts.
- 90% of Covid-positive individuals are asymptomatic. This is the most significant and meaningful statistic of all.
- Asymptomatic Covid-positive have a spread rate of only 0.7% – less than 1%. They are NOT super spreaders.
- Survival rate of ages 0-69 is 99.82%. Survival rate of age 70+ is 94.6% with high comorbidities and other causes of death.
- Dr. Deborah Birx and state health officials confirmed that all Covid-positive individuals who die from other causes are being counted as a Covid death, including, but not limited to: car accidents, gunshot wounds, 1-week to live in hospice, drowning, dementia, and alcohol poisoning. Most people did not die “FROM” or were “KILLED BY” Covid, they died “WITH IT.”
- Only 6% of death certificates show Covid-19 as the only cause of death, which includes “assumed cause.” On average, there are 2.9 comorbidities to documented Covid deaths. That number increases significantly in nursing homes.
- The CDC is grouping pneumonia, influenza, and covid deaths together as “PIC”, while discontinuing reporting on influenza hospitalizations because “the number is too low” despite being in the middle of the flu season.
- 38% of all Covid-related deaths have taken place in nursing homes & long term care facilities, accounting for over 129,000 of deaths reported, in which 43% of those deaths were attributed to influenza and pneumonia, and 31% were age 85+.
- The masks being mandated to wear, are scientifically proven to not work against viruses, according to studies, the WHO, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, in addition to 10 months of people wearing them, showing no better rate of cases than states and countries that have not worn them, plus 85% of people who tested positive were mask wearers. The CDC also reported: “no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks,” hence they do not work for Covid either.
- In the 2017-2018 Flu season, there were 810,000 hospitalizations, far surpassing Covid hospitalizations for the entire year. Over 61,000 people died. There were 195 pediatric deaths due to influenza, far greater than what has been reported for Covid-related pediatric deaths. No lockdowns, restrictions, social distancing, or masks were required.
- There has never been a sample specimen of SARS-CoV-2 isolated and purified, and the inventor of PCR and other scientists have always said that PCR should not be used for medical diagnostics – it will produce false/positives. Dr. Fauci confirmed that the cycle threshold on the tests is too high which creates false/positives.
- The vaccines have already shown terrible side effects, and they don’t know if it will cause infertility. Doctors all across the world have been warning about these vaccines that were rushed through in record time without long term clinical trials.
CLICK HERE to download, print, and distribute a single page version in PDF.
See also the following videos:
https://youtu.be/a_Vy6fgaBPE
https://youtu.be/IMAkFKprzRQ
https://www.coreysdigs.com/wp-content/up...Deaths.mp4
Source Links:
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| Peer Reviewed Study Shows COVID Lockdowns Have No Benefits Compared to Voluntary Measures |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:56 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
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Peer Reviewed Study Shows COVID Lockdowns Have No Benefits Compared to Voluntary Measures
Stanford researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
Summit News | 15 January, 2021
A new peer reviewed study by Stanford researchers has found that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits
to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.
The study compared countries that had imposed mandatory lockdowns, such as England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S., to those that had relied on the public to follow voluntary measures, such as Sweden and South Korea.
The researchers subtracted “the sum of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did not enact more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (mrNPIs) from the sum of NPI effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did.”
After analyzing the data, the researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
The authors added that they “do not question the role of all public health interventions,” but insisted that stay at home orders and business closures had no additional impacting on lowering the spread of the virus.
The study adds to the weight of evidence that clearly indicates lockdowns are totally pointless and only create further misery and death.
According to Professor Philip Thomas of Bristol University, the UK lockdown will end up costing 500,000 lives due to the health impact of the economic recession it will cause.
Untold numbers of people will also die from having their urgent treatments delayed as well as avoiding hospitals.
According to research published by Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University, around 1.4 million people globally will also die from untreated TB infections.
Last September, Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, warned that lockdown measures throughout the globe will end up killing more people than the coronavirus itself.
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| Cardinal Pie: The Sacred Heart of Jesus |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:41 AM - Forum: In Honor of Our Lord
- Replies (1)
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The Angelus: May 2004
THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS CHRIST
Five Minutes with Cardinal Pie
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...ipo=images]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.GBWVRhl6sDHrN2TGVcDOpwHaLN%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=8afca0305465d80fbafe263f7d2d313571ee7191848d981e4b1a9cf3414822b1&ipo=images)
Nothing is more founded on reason, nothing is more conformed to the doctrines of the Faith than the adoration of the Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The heart of Jesus is what there is most profound in creation. It is the noblest part of the holy human nature of the Word made Flesh. In our very physical nature, the heart is everything: when it functions in an irregular manner, life is in danger; when it ceases to beat, man immediately ceases to live. Likewise in the moral order: it is through the heart that we are something. It is the heart which gives to thoughts, to actions, to intentions, their value, good or bad. The good is what comes out of the good treasure of our heart (Lk. 6:45). What constitutes evil is the bad dispositions of the heart (Mt. 15:19). Also, while the eye of man takes hold and fixes on exterior appearances, God looks only at the heart (I Kgs. 16:7). In the language of all peoples..., the heart has always signified courage, virtue, and especially love. After the grave has snatched away a cherished being from us, we believe that we still hold him completely if we possess his heart. This part, separate from the rest of the body, seems to remain essential.
Now, having stated this, what adoration do we not owe to the Heart of Jesus? Physically, this heart has been the principal organ of a life all together divine and human. This heart has painstakingly given up, one after the other, all the drops of the redeeming Blood. It has exuded and exudes each day all the drops of the Eucharistic chalice. And if the material heart of Jesus is already worthy of honor, what is it if we consider this Heart as the seat of His love, as the principle of His inspirations? When I adore the Heart of Jesus, I adore this effusion of eternal charity which has prompted the Word of God to offer Himself as victim for our redemption. I adore this love which has confined a God for nine months in the womb of Mary, which has given birth to God as an infant in Bethlehem, which has nailed Him to the cross; this love which keeps Him night and day on our altars, this love which spreads torrents from heaven or from the tabernacle, and which is diffused into hearts. Magdalen covered the feet of Jesus with her kisses and her perfumes, but His Heart made these feet run in search of the wandering sheep in pursuit of the poor sinner's soul. The invalids and all those who were suffering invoked the all-mighty arm of Jesus, but this arm was acting only under the guidance and by the impulse of His Heart. The children of Judea loved to be touched by the divine hands of Jesus, but these tender hands were only the instruments of His Heart. One among them, already a young man, was one day the object of an inexpressible glance from Jesus, but this sweet and penetrating glance... was a lightening bolt flashing forth the fire of love from His heart (Mk. 10:21).
To you who hardly give allowance to the veneration of the Heart of Jesus, what then are you leaving of Him to me, since the Heart of Jesus is the whole of Jesus? If you forbid me to love and honor His Heart, then you forbid me to think of Jesus, to love and honor Jesus. Deprive Him of His Heart, He will no longer be Jesus to me. But, beware, your censures would not succeed in stopping me. I have in my favor the authority of the very institution of Jesus. On the eve of His death, after giving His love to those close to Him in this world, He made an admirable summary, a marvelous memorial of all His gifts. It seems that nothing more could be added to this supreme invention of His love. But behold that, on the very day of His death, having offered up His great cry and commended His spirit, Jesus...provided for the accomplishment of a last oracle. What do I see? The side of Jesus opened, and His Heart offered to the eyes of mankind to be the object of their adoration and of their love! "Observe," says St. Augustine, "[St. John] has been mindful of the language he was to use." The word has fallen from a reflective and vigilant pen. The holy writer was careful not to say that the point of the lance had struck, had wounded–this expression or any similar might not have rendered the truth–but that it opened the side of Jesus in order that the gateway of life might be in some way made manifest in this Divine Heart, the source of the redemption, from which have flowed all the mysteries, all the sacraments of the Church, without which we have no access to the life which is the true life.
There it is, the first basis and the first establishment of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus. And if–notwithstanding the evidence through the centuries of a school of fervent worshippers and passionate admirers of this glorious Heart–the worship of the Sacred Heart is only taking its more explicit form in these last ages by a doctrinal and liturgical development, I would say that we see there a providential progress, an expansion of love announced by the prophets. "There will be in the last days," Zacharias had said, "a fountain open to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem" (Zach. 13:1). This gushing source is the Heart of Jesus, offered more authentically to us and reviving in our souls new impulses of ardor and of piety.
Who could remain cold and indifferent to the Heart of Jesus? It would mean not having a heart ourselves. God forbid I not speak to you of the Heart of Jesus without speaking also of your own heart, and without placing these two hearts in the presence of each other.
Your reason may have been misled, deceived, corrupted in many ways. You have been born and raised in an evil century. You have participated in a great many errors of your time. Moreover, the original fall has left a profound devastation in all of us; it has since gutted everything. However, in spite of the inclinations of corrupted nature, the allurements of the senses, and the prejudices of education, your heart has remained stronger than your mind. No matter what you do, below all these evil layers which have superimposed themselves one after another through acts of sin and lies, there remains at the core of your being a nucleus, a germ, a power for good that nothing has been able to destroy. In a word, there rests in your heart a faculty and a need to love: a faculty which can never completely translate itself into action, a need which can never find its hunger totally filled, as long as your love does not move towards its infinite end. I declare and promise that it is impossible for you to genuinely place the heart which beats in your breast in opposition to the Heart of Jesus without it immediately being carried toward His Heart by this movement of love which is the essential act of religion, and which, in itself, constitutes the accomplishment of all the divine law of the Old and New Testament: "Diliges: You will love." This is why the Lord makes His tender invitation: "My son, give me thy heart" (Prov. 23:26), as though He were saying: Willingly I set aside all others. You will easily acknowledge, My son, that my spirit is above thine. Therefore, do not enter into a useless discussion with Me. For Me, I will always easily overcome your mind, if you want to give Me your heart completely: "Præbe, fili mi, cor tuum mihi: My son, give Me thy heart."
When you have withdrawn from Jesus Christ, you have withdrawn from your own heart. The Psalmist declared it thus: "Cor meum dereliquit me: My heart has abandoned me." Fugitives from this better portion of yourselves, come back, come back to your heart (Is. 66:8). Lord Jesus, You are the center and the magnet of hearts. Man will never place himself again under the inspirations of his own heart, without being carried back immediately to You.
The Catholic Faith is truly the religion of hearts, and the veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ is the substantial summary of all Catholicism. The One who dwells in inaccessible light in heaven, wanting to draw nearer to us, to proportion Himself to us, to bring Himself to our level, at our ability, has taken our nature, our flesh. He made Himself man, and being man, He had a heart. And we also, although brought out of nothingness and formed from mud, we have received and carry in ourselves a heart. Here is the Creator and the creature, heaven and earth, Heart to heart. All religion is summed up in this Heart-to-heart confrontation of God and man. Let us pray with the Church the invitatory of one of the most ancient offices of the Sacred Heart: "Deus ergo nos apponentem Cor suum, venite adoremus: God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, His Son, disposing His Heart to us, let us come and adore Him."
- From Œuvres Sacerdotales du Cardinal Pie, Choix de Sermons et d'Instructions de 1839 a 1849 ["Homily for the Closing of a Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus," VI, 609-614].
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| Cardinal Pie: The Sacred Heart of Jesus |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:41 AM - Forum: Cardinal Pie
- No Replies
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The Angelus: May 2004
THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS CHRIST
Five Minutes with Cardinal Pie
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.explicit.bing.net%...%3DApi&f=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.explicit.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.qbSzcMJposPm0p4MHdo_zAAAAA%26pid%3DApi&f=1)
Nothing is more founded on reason, nothing is more conformed to the doctrines of the Faith than the adoration of the Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The heart of Jesus is what there is most profound in creation. It is the noblest part of the holy human nature of the Word made Flesh. In our very physical nature, the heart is everything: when it functions in an irregular manner, life is in danger; when it ceases to beat, man immediately ceases to live. Likewise in the moral order: it is through the heart that we are something. It is the heart which gives to thoughts, to actions, to intentions, their value, good or bad. The good is what comes out of the good treasure of our heart (Lk. 6:45). What constitutes evil is the bad dispositions of the heart (Mt. 15:19). Also, while the eye of man takes hold and fixes on exterior appearances, God looks only at the heart (I Kgs. 16:7). In the language of all peoples..., the heart has always signified courage, virtue, and especially love. After the grave has snatched away a cherished being from us, we believe that we still hold him completely if we possess his heart. This part, separate from the rest of the body, seems to remain essential.
Now, having stated this, what adoration do we not owe to the Heart of Jesus? Physically, this heart has been the principal organ of a life all together divine and human. This heart has painstakingly given up, one after the other, all the drops of the redeeming Blood. It has exuded and exudes each day all the drops of the Eucharistic chalice. And if the material heart of Jesus is already worthy of honor, what is it if we consider this Heart as the seat of His love, as the principle of His inspirations? When I adore the Heart of Jesus, I adore this effusion of eternal charity which has prompted the Word of God to offer Himself as victim for our redemption. I adore this love which has confined a God for nine months in the womb of Mary, which has given birth to God as an infant in Bethlehem, which has nailed Him to the cross; this love which keeps Him night and day on our altars, this love which spreads torrents from heaven or from the tabernacle, and which is diffused into hearts. Magdalen covered the feet of Jesus with her kisses and her perfumes, but His Heart made these feet run in search of the wandering sheep in pursuit of the poor sinner's soul. The invalids and all those who were suffering invoked the all-mighty arm of Jesus, but this arm was acting only under the guidance and by the impulse of His Heart. The children of Judea loved to be touched by the divine hands of Jesus, but these tender hands were only the instruments of His Heart. One among them, already a young man, was one day the object of an inexpressible glance from Jesus, but this sweet and penetrating glance... was a lightening bolt flashing forth the fire of love from His heart (Mk. 10:21).
To you who hardly give allowance to the veneration of the Heart of Jesus, what then are you leaving of Him to me, since the Heart of Jesus is the whole of Jesus? If you forbid me to love and honor His Heart, then you forbid me to think of Jesus, to love and honor Jesus. Deprive Him of His Heart, He will no longer be Jesus to me. But, beware, your censures would not succeed in stopping me. I have in my favor the authority of the very institution of Jesus. On the eve of His death, after giving His love to those close to Him in this world, He made an admirable summary, a marvelous memorial of all His gifts. It seems that nothing more could be added to this supreme invention of His love. But behold that, on the very day of His death, having offered up His great cry and commended His spirit, Jesus...provided for the accomplishment of a last oracle. What do I see? The side of Jesus opened, and His Heart offered to the eyes of mankind to be the object of their adoration and of their love! "Observe," says St. Augustine, "[St. John] has been mindful of the language he was to use." The word has fallen from a reflective and vigilant pen. The holy writer was careful not to say that the point of the lance had struck, had wounded–this expression or any similar might not have rendered the truth–but that it opened the side of Jesus in order that the gateway of life might be in some way made manifest in this Divine Heart, the source of the redemption, from which have flowed all the mysteries, all the sacraments of the Church, without which we have no access to the life which is the true life.
There it is, the first basis and the first establishment of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus. And if–notwithstanding the evidence through the centuries of a school of fervent worshippers and passionate admirers of this glorious Heart–the worship of the Sacred Heart is only taking its more explicit form in these last ages by a doctrinal and liturgical development, I would say that we see there a providential progress, an expansion of love announced by the prophets. "There will be in the last days," Zacharias had said, "a fountain open to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem" (Zach. 13:1). This gushing source is the Heart of Jesus, offered more authentically to us and reviving in our souls new impulses of ardor and of piety.
Who could remain cold and indifferent to the Heart of Jesus? It would mean not having a heart ourselves. God forbid I not speak to you of the Heart of Jesus without speaking also of your own heart, and without placing these two hearts in the presence of each other.
Your reason may have been misled, deceived, corrupted in many ways. You have been born and raised in an evil century. You have participated in a great many errors of your time. Moreover, the original fall has left a profound devastation in all of us; it has since gutted everything. However, in spite of the inclinations of corrupted nature, the allurements of the senses, and the prejudices of education, your heart has remained stronger than your mind. No matter what you do, below all these evil layers which have superimposed themselves one after another through acts of sin and lies, there remains at the core of your being a nucleus, a germ, a power for good that nothing has been able to destroy. In a word, there rests in your heart a faculty and a need to love: a faculty which can never completely translate itself into action, a need which can never find its hunger totally filled, as long as your love does not move towards its infinite end. I declare and promise that it is impossible for you to genuinely place the heart which beats in your breast in opposition to the Heart of Jesus without it immediately being carried toward His Heart by this movement of love which is the essential act of religion, and which, in itself, constitutes the accomplishment of all the divine law of the Old and New Testament: "Diliges: You will love." This is why the Lord makes His tender invitation: "My son, give me thy heart" (Prov. 23:26), as though He were saying: Willingly I set aside all others. You will easily acknowledge, My son, that my spirit is above thine. Therefore, do not enter into a useless discussion with Me. For Me, I will always easily overcome your mind, if you want to give Me your heart completely: "Præbe, fili mi, cor tuum mihi: My son, give Me thy heart."
When you have withdrawn from Jesus Christ, you have withdrawn from your own heart. The Psalmist declared it thus: "Cor meum dereliquit me: My heart has abandoned me." Fugitives from this better portion of yourselves, come back, come back to your heart (Is. 66:8). Lord Jesus, You are the center and the magnet of hearts. Man will never place himself again under the inspirations of his own heart, without being carried back immediately to You.
The Catholic Faith is truly the religion of hearts, and the veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ is the substantial summary of all Catholicism. The One who dwells in inaccessible light in heaven, wanting to draw nearer to us, to proportion Himself to us, to bring Himself to our level, at our ability, has taken our nature, our flesh. He made Himself man, and being man, He had a heart. And we also, although brought out of nothingness and formed from mud, we have received and carry in ourselves a heart. Here is the Creator and the creature, heaven and earth, Heart to heart. All religion is summed up in this Heart-to-heart confrontation of God and man. Let us pray with the Church the invitatory of one of the most ancient offices of the Sacred Heart: "Deus ergo nos apponentem Cor suum, venite adoremus: God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, His Son, disposing His Heart to us, let us come and adore Him."
- From Œuvres Sacerdotales du Cardinal Pie, Choix de Sermons et d'Instructions de 1839 a 1849 ["Homily for the Closing of a Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus," VI, 609-614].
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| Cardinal Pie: Modern Debasements of the Idea of God |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:36 AM - Forum: Cardinal Pie
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The Angelus - September 2003
Modern Debasements of the Idea of God
by Louis-Edouard-Désiré Cardinal Pie
The first chapter of Vatican I's dogmatic constitution on the Catholic Faith is entitled: "Of God Creator of All Things": De Deo rerum omnium creatore. Here, Gentlemen, the Holy Church fulfills what, since Jerusalem and Nicaea, it has always placed at the head of its doctrinal work and of its solemn professions of faith. Credo in Deum, says the Apostles' Creed; Credo in unum Deum, says the Nicene Creed. But today, God having been travestied, disfigured, denied, our Council lays down in all its light the revealed doctrine by which God has declared Himself to us: Sancta catholica apostolica romana Ecclesia credit et confitetur unum esse Deum verum et vivam, and the remainder that we will soon explain.
Indeed, the duty and the need of the Church is to confess God before everything. This is its duty. Like Christ who has established and sent it, the Church is born and lives only to render witness to the truth, and especially to the truth from which all the other truths have their origin and their support. The Church is therefore the witness of God, His herald, His perceptible voice.
The Church is at the same time His requirement. Because the abundance of the heart causes words to spring forth, and because the Church has received the Spirit of God, it has in it a plenitude of light, of life, of divine charity which urges it and obliges it to tell God to the world. "It believes and it confesses," Credit et confitetur. Alas! This time, it is more than a homage rendered; it is a reparation made and it is at the same time a remedy presented to men against an ill so frightful that it would seem to have been impossible.
St. John gives the description in the Apocalypse of a woman dressed in red, seated on a red beast, and he says that she is "full of names of blasphemy": plenam nominibus blasphemice.1 This woman represents the city of the reprobates, that Scripture calls also "Babylon,"2 and elsewhere "the church of those who plot evil,"3 or "the Synagogue of Satan."4 Born with sin, this society will continue up to the final judgment; it is consequently contemporaneous with all the centuries. Nevertheless, where the course of time and the movement of men and of things has caused society to pass amid so many vicissitudes, it has, so to speak, its golden ages, where everything lends assistance to it, where its reign is freer and more extended, and where it seems to triumph over the city of God. Hoec est hora vestra et potestas tenebrarum:5"This is the hour of the wicked and the power of darkness."
Will we accuse him for not being an enlightened judge, nor an accurate historian, the one who will say that our century, assuredly great by so many great works that God has accomplished, and by so many remarkable graces which He has deigned to lavish on it, has been for this city of the evil, nevertheless, a singularly propitious and favorable era? Among the liberties claimed, recognized, instituted, carried to a condition of necessity in the order of facts, as well as to the position of principles and of axioms in the order of ideas and of laws, we have had on the first rank the liberty of blasphemy.
This liberty of blasphemy has been diversely named. Like Satan, who is its father, the world is naturally and inevitably a liar. If it were obliged to speak clearly and to call things by their true name, it would be struck with impotence and with death: the truth kills it, and light is deadly to it. Lies, darkness, equivocations are necessary for it to live: lies and equivocations in actions, lies and equivocations in speech. This godless liberty has therefore called itself liberty of conscience, religious liberty, liberty of thought, liberty of the press; but, in fact and truly in right, it was the liberty of blasphemy. It has been amply used and we do not know if, since the origin of the world, we have blasphemed more. There has been learned blasphemy and ignorant blasphemy, jeering blasphemy and serious blasphemy, polite blasphemy and cynical blasphemy, peaceful blasphemy and passionate blasphemy: plenam nominibus blasphemiæ.
But what was bending and was progressively degenerating under the weight of these blasphemies was the true idea of God. We have made gods to our fancy; there has come into being gods of all sorts. We have the God who reigns and does not govern: God splendid and worthy of every respect, but without care for the world, and that the world can better honor only by considering itself too small to merit His attention and, all the more, His intervention. We have had the God-idea: absolute ideal, escaping by its very nature every definition, fleeing so much the more as we seek to comprehend it, and vanishing entirely as soon as we claim to have understood it. We have had the God-Being: the being who is, but who does not exist, who does not live, the God who does not think, nor want, nor judge, nor operate, seeing that these words signify a determination, and by that even a limit, a decrease, a contradiction, a negation of absolute being. There has been the God-progress, the God-aspiration; the God who is a boundless evolution, who tries His strength unceasingly to exist, who seeks to expand and to contain Himself, who tends by every means to His plentitude, to His perfection, to His happiness, to His last end, and who never arrives there because being by essence the infinite aspiration and the eternal progress, His life is moving without ever stopping and always aiming at an always impossible end: that reduces it exactly to the state of the damned. Neighbor and parent of the former, there has been the God-world, the God-cosmic: soul of the world, secret force, fatal, universal, vivifying everything, and if mingled with everything, it is distinct from nothing, and the world is its essential and unique expression. What should I say? There has been the God-nothingness, the God-evil, the God- hostile, jealous, tyrannical, oppressor: I stop.
You see it, Gentlemen, this is a pantheon of blasphemy: plenam nominibus blasphemiæ. But each of these blasphemous names has been given to God by our contemporaries, by our fellow-citizens, and that, more than one time, from the height of the chairs of public teaching. Each of these absurd and detestable ideas has taken the place of the rational and Catholic idea of God, and that even in baptized souls who even believed that they had not formally renounced their baptism.
After that, is it necessary to wonder at the degree of weakness, misery, and shame to which this society, ignorant and contemptuous of God has descended? The sage had said it well: "But all men are vain, in whom there is not the knowledge of God." Vani autem sunt omnes homines in quibus non subest scientia Dei.6 Do you hear? Vani omnes: whatever they may be and whatever advantages they glory in, these are no longer truly men, but shadows and phantoms of men, men who are no longer kept upright. They are inconsistent, fleeing, imperceptible men who, themselves, no longer know what to grasp nor to retain: a generation devoted to unhappiness, and which is reduced to look for its saviors among the dead, as if the dead could offer a hope of salvation: Infelices autem sunt, et inter mortuos spes illorum est.7 But if these people are taken away captive, if they are torn limb from limb, if they are delivered to the mercy of all their enemies from the outside and from the inside, the cause of it is that they have lost the key of all science and of all wisdom and the principle of all force by losing the knowledge of God: Propterea captivus ductus est populus meus, eo quod non habuerit scientiam this is why its leaders perish from starvation, and its multitudes, made thirsty for order and for peace, waste away in trouble and disorder: et nobiles ejus interierunt fame, et multitudo ejus siti exaruit.8 On account of that, the monster of revolutions, this anticipated hell, has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any bounds, and their strong ones and their high and glorious ones have descended into this abyss with the common people: Propterea dilatavit infernus animam suam, et aperuit os suum absque ullo termino: et descenderunt fortes ejus, et populus ejus, et sublimes gloriosique ejus, ad eum.9 Just chastisement by the outraged Divinity. Because He is no longer the unknown God10 of the pagans; He is the ignored God, and ignored by those whom He has instructed Himself, and whom He has honored with His divine adoption: Filios enutrivi et exaltavi; ipsi autem spreverunt me.11
It was therefore necessary,12 for the honor of God and for the salvation of souls, and for the deliverance of societies, it was necessary from the very first to affirm the true God, the only God, the living God, all powerful Creator, eternal, incomprehensible although perfectly knowable and truly known, infinite in His intelligence, infinite in His Will, infinite in His perfections, which are total perfection; a substance being one, sole, absolutely simple, and consequently spiritual, and by that immutable, truly and essentially distinct from the world. It was necessary to affirm of God that He has of Himself and in Himself the plentitude of His happiness: so much so that His happiness, no more than any of His perfections, is not susceptible to any increase; and that He lives, that He exists in a complete independence, at heights which go inexpressibly beyond everything that can, outside of Him, be or be conceived.
It was also necessary to affirm the truth of the perfect liberty, the absolute gratuitousness of the creative act. Without any doubt, this act and the entire universe that He produces manifest the divinity as every work manifests its author. Creation makes God known by the power that He displays, and by the astonishing beauty with which it has pleased Him to adorn it. Creation makes Him even be loved because of the innumerable goods with which He has deigned to bestow on it, and especially by the revelation that creation brings to us of this radical goodness which has inclined Him to create beings out of nothingness. In spite of that, strictly speaking, God does not have any personal interest here, He could not have any benefit, and His nature renders Him incapable of it. Why is it that this contingent glory, for which everything is made and everything had to be made, is not at all necessary to Him, is by itself of no usefulness to Him, is of no advantage? It is for us that He furnishes it, because, this glory consisting completely in that God may be known and loved and the creature being able to be perfect and happy only by this knowledge, it follows that our happiness derives from this exterior glory of God, and appears so much to determine our happiness that it finally becomes identified with it.
This is what a text of St. Hilary, often alleged by theologians to support the doctrine that we have just established, expresses marvelously: "God, [said the great Doctor], wants to be loved by us: not that God derives for Himself any fruit from our love; but this love much rather will profit us, we who will love Him": Amari se a nobis exigit: non utique amoris in se nostri fructum aliquem sui causa percipiens, sed amore ipso nobis potius, qui eum amabimus, profuturo. "The pouring out of the divine goodness, like the radiance of the sun, like the heat of fire, like the fragrance of a plant, is not useful to the one from whom it comes, but to the one who uses it": Bonitatis autem usus, ut splendor solis, ut lumen ignis, ut odor sued, non præbenti proficit, sed utenti.13
Finally, God having been affirmed and the world affirmed as a creature of God, it was necessary to establish their relationship and first the essential relationship on which are founded all the others. It has to be said, in short, that after creation, God and the world do not remain strangers from each other; that the dignity of God as well as His goodness, meaning His nature, obliges Him to incessantly watch and supremely govern the creatures upon whom He has spontaneously conferred existence; that He has His purpose, His plan, His laws, His powers, His resources, His works, and that, as there is nothing nor anyone which escapes His knowledge, there is nothing nor anyone who can be even, for an instant, outside of His reach, outside of His laws, outside of His Will.
1. Apoc. 17:3, 4.
2. Apoc. 17:5.
3. Ps. 25:5.
4. Apoc. 2:9; 3:9.
5. Lk. 22:53.
6. Wis. 13:1.
7. Wis. 13:10.
8. Is. 5:13.
9. Is. 5:14.
10. Acts, 17:23.
11. Is. 1:2.
12. Everything that follows is a paraphrase from the Vatican Constitution Dei Filius. We publish it here as the affirmation of the Catholic truth opposite the errors that Monsignor Pie has just denounced.
13. Hilary, Enarrat, on Ps. II, n. 15..
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press by Mr. & Mrs. William Platz from "Synodal Instruction on the 1st Vatican Constitution" (July 17, 1871. VII, 204-210), Pages choisies du Cardnal Pie (Paris: Librairie H. Oudin, 1916), pp. 103-110. The couple responded to an invitation in The Angelus for translators to make the work of Cardinal Pie, a mentor for Pope Pius X and Archbishop Lefebvre, available in English, for most of it is only known in French.
Louis-Edouard-Desire Cardinal Pie [say: "pea"] (1815-1880), renowned Bishop of Poitiers, France, was a major-league player in the fight against the anti-Catholic movement of the 19th century.
"...He is best known for his opposition to modern errors, and his championship of the rights of the Church. Regarding as futile the compromises accepted by other Catholic leaders, he fought alike all philosophical theories and political arrangements that did not come up to the full traditional Christian standard...." His distinguished service to the Church was recognized by Leo XIII, who made him cardinal in 1879. (From the Catholic Encyclopedia, vol.XII, 1913 ed., p. 76.)
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| Big Tech Coalition Is Developing a Digital COVID Vaccination Passport |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:27 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Secular]
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Big Tech Coalition Is Developing a Digital COVID Vaccination Passport
Breitbart | January 15, 2021
A coalition of tech and health organizations including Oracle, Microsoft, and the Mayo Clinic, is reportedly working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport that would allow businesses, airlines, and governments to check if individuals have received the vaccine.
The Hill reports that a coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a new digital COVID-19 vaccination passport that could be checked by businesses, airlines, and countries to confirm if an individual has received the vaccine. The coalition includes tech giants such as Microsoft and Oracle, along with the Mayo Clinic.
On Thursday, the Vaccination Credential Initiative announced that it is developing technology to confirm vaccinations in case governments mandate that people provide proof that they have received a vaccination in order to travel.
The coalition hopes that the tech will allow people to “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.” The group is using work from the Commons Project’s international digital document that verifies a person has tested negative for COVID-19.
Currently, the Commons Project’s system, which was created in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, is being utilized by three major airline alliances. The coalition is reportedly currently in discussions with several governments to create a program requiring either negative tests or proof of vaccination to enter the country, according to Commons Project chief executive Paul Meyer.
Meyer stated in a release: “The goal of the Vaccination Credential Initiative is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can use tools like CommonPass to safely return to travel, work, school, and life, while protecting their data privacy.”
Mike Sicilia, the executive vice president of Oracle’s Global Business Units, commented that the passport “needs to be as easy as online banking,” and added: “We are committed to working collectively with the technology and medical communities, as well as global governments, to ensure people will have secure access to this information where and when they need it.”
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| Nine Catholic bishops with COVID-19 die in a single week |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:20 AM - Forum: Pandemic 2020 [Spiritual]
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Nine Catholic bishops with COVID-19 die in a single week
Rome Newsroom, Jan 15, 2021 / 02:00 pm MT (CNA).- In the past week, nine Catholic bishops have died worldwide after testing positive for COVID-19.
Between Jan. 8 and Jan. 15, bishops across three continents died as a result of the coronavirus. The deceased bishops ranged in age from 53 years old to 91. Five of the bishops died in Europe, where a new strain of COVID-19 has led many countries to implement further restrictions.
Four bishops died on the same day, Jan. 13: Archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow, who was 70 years old; Bishop Moses Hamungole of Monze, Zambia, who died at the age of 53; 87-year-old Bishop Mario Cecchini of Fano, Italy; and Cardinal Eusébio Oscar Scheid, the 88-year-old retired archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Tartaglia tested positive for COVID-19 after Christmas and was self-isolating, but Glasgow archdiocese stressed that the cause of his death was currently unclear.
Bells tolled across the Colombian diocese of Santa Marta on Jan. 12 to honor Bishop Luis Adriano Piedrahita Sandoval, 74, who died on Jan. 11 of complications from COVID-19. Bishop Cástor Oswaldo Azuaje of Trujillo, 69, became the first bishop from Venezuela to die after contracting the virus on Jan. 8.
Bishop Florentin Crihalmeanu, the 61-year-old bishop of the Greek-Catholic Eparchy of Cluj-Gherla in Romania, died on Jan. 12. He was remembered by his eparchy as “a diligent, meek, and humble soul.”
Polish Bishop Adam Dyczkowski, emeritus of Zielona Góra-Gorzów diocese, died on Jan. 10 at the age of 88 and Italian Archbishop Oscar Rizzato died at the age of 91 on Jan. 11. Rizzato had served as papal almsgiver under both St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Pope Francis expressed his condolences following the death of Cardinal Scheid in a telegram on Jan. 14.
“I offer fervent prayers to welcome him into eternal happiness and console him with hope in the resurrection and to all those who mourn the loss of their beloved pastor,” the pope wrote.
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| Cardinal Pie: To Faint-Hearted Catholics |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:18 AM - Forum: Cardinal Pie
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Cardinal Pie:
“Let us fight, hoping against hope itself, which is what I wish to tell faint-hearted Christians, slaves to popularity, worshippers of success and shaken by the least advance of evil. Given how they feel, please God they will be spared the agonies of the world’s final trial. Is that trial close or is it still far off? Nobody knows, and I will not dare to make a guess. But one thing is certain, namely that the closer we come to the end of the world, the more and more it is wicked and deceitful men who will gain the upper hand. The Faith will hardly be found on earth, meaning that it will almost have disappeared from earthly institutions. Believers themselves will hardly dare to profess their belief in public, or in society.
“The splitting, separating and divorcing of States from God which was for St Paul a sign foretelling the end, will advance day by day. The Church, while remaining always a visible society, will be reduced more and more to dimensions of the individual and the home. When She started out she said She was being shut in, and She called for more room to breathe, but as She approaches her end on earth, so She will have to fight a rearguard action every inch of the way, being surrounded and hemmed in on all sides. The more widely She spread out in previous ages, the greater the effort will now be made to cut her down to size. Finally the Church will undergo what looks like a veritable defeat, and the Beast will be given to make war on the Saints and to overwhelm them. The insolence of evil will be at its peak.”
“In such an extremity, in such a desperate state of affairs, where evil has taken over a world soon to be consumed in flames, what are all the true Christians to do, all good men, all Saints, all men with any faith and courage? Grappling with a situation more clearly impossible than ever, with a redoubled energy by their ardent prayer, by their active works and by their fearless struggles they will say, O God, O Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name on earth as it is in Heaven, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. On earth as it is in Heaven! And they will still be murmuring these words while the very earth is giving way beneath their feet.
“And just as once upon a time, following upon an appalling military disaster the whole Roman Senate and State officials of all ranks could be seen going out to meet the defeated consul and to congratulate him on not having despaired of the Roman Republic; so likewise the senate of Heaven, all the Choirs of angels, all ranks of the Blessed will come out to meet the generous athletes of the Faith who will have fought to the bitter end, hoping against hope itself.
“And then that impossible ideal that the elect of all ages had obstinately pursued will become a reality. In his Second and final Coming the Son will hand over the Kingdom of this world to God his Father, the power of evil will have been cast out for ever into the depths of the abyss; whatever has refused to be assimilated and incorporated into God through Jesus Christ by faith, love and observance of the law will be flung into the sewer of everlasting filth. And God will live and reign for ever and ever, not only in the oneness of his nature and in the society of the three divine Persons, but also in the fullness of the Mystical Body of his Incarnate Son and in the fulfilment of the Communion of Saints!”
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| Cardinal Pie: Doctrinal Intolerance |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 09:11 AM - Forum: Cardinal Pie
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The Angelus - June 2002
Doctrinal Intolerance
by Louis-Edouard-Désiré Cardinal Pie
A sermon of the great Cardinal Pie, appearing here for the first time in English, which he preached twice at the Cathedral of Chartres in 1841 and 1847.
Unus Dominus, una fides, unam baptisma–There is only one Lord, only one Faith, only one baptism (Eph. 4:5).
A sage has said that the actions of man are the children of his thought, and we have established ourselves that all good things as well as all bad things in a society are the fruit of the good or bad maxims that it professes. Truth in the mind and virtue in the heart are things that correspond nearly inseparably; when the mind is delivered to the demonic lie, the heart, if by chance the obsession has not seized it first, is close to delivering itself to demonic vice. Intellect and Will are two sisters between which seduction is contagious; if you see that the first has given itself up to error, throw a veil on the honor of the second.
This is because it is so, my brethren, it is because there is no harm, no wrong in the intellectual order which would not have fatal consequences in the moral order and as well as in the material order, that we apply ourselves to fight the evil in its principle, to stop it at its source, that is to say, in the ideas. A thousand prejudices are spread amongst us: Sophism, astonished to hear its own voice attacked, invokes prescription; paradox flatters itself to have acquired citizenship and the freedom of the city. Christians themselves, living amidst this impure atmosphere, do not avoid all its contagion; they too easily accept many of the errors. Tired of resisting on the essential points, often for the sake of peace and quiet, they give way on other points which seem to them less important, and they do not always perceive, and sometimes they do not want to perceive how far they could be led by their imprudent weakness. Among this confusion of ideas and false opinions, it is up to us priests of the incorruptible truth to intervene and to protest with action and with our voice; fortunate we are if the rigid inflexibility of our teaching can stop the flood of error, dethrone erroneous principles which are reigning superbly in minds, correct deadly axioms which already assume authority with the sanction of time, finally enlighten and purify a society which threatens to sink, in growing old, into a chaos of darkness and of disorders where it would no longer be possible to distinguish the nature, and even less the remedy, of its ills.
Our century cries: Tolerance! Tolerance! It is acknowledged that a priest must be tolerant, that religion must be tolerant. My brethren, in all things nothing equals frankness; and I am here to tell you frankly that there only exists in the world one society which possesses the truth, and that this society necessarily has to be intolerant. But, before broaching the subject, for us to better understand, let's make distinction between things, let's agree on the meaning of the words, and let's not confuse anything.
Tolerance can be either civil or theological; the first does not fall within our province, I permit myself only a word in this respect. If the law wants to say that it permits all religions because in its eyes they are all equally good, or furthermore because public power is incompetent to come to a decision on this matter, the law is irreligious and atheistic. It no longer professes civil tolerance such as we are going to define it, but dogmatic tolerance, and, by a criminal neutrality it justifies in individuals the most absolute religious indifference. On the contrary, if recognizing that only one religion is good, it supports and permits only the peaceful exercise of the others, the law, in this, as it has been observed before me, can be wise and necessary according to the circumstances. If there are times when it is necessary to say with the famous high constable: One faith, one law; there are other times when it is necessary to say as Fenelon said to the son of James II: Grant civil tolerance to everyone, not by approving everything as indifferent, but by suffering with patience what God suffers."
But I abandon this rough field of difficulties, and adhering to the properly religious and theological question, I will set forth these two principles:
1) The religion which comes from heaven is truth, and it is intolerant toward doctrines;
2) The religion which comes from heaven is charity, and it is full of tolerance toward people....
It is of the essence of every truth not to tolerate the contradictory principle. The affirmation of one thing excludes the negation of this very same thing, as light excludes darkness. Where nothing is certain, where nothing is defined, the sentiments can be divided, opinions can vary. I understand and I ask liberty in doubtful things. But since the truth appears with positive traits which characterize it, for that very reason that it is truth, it is positive, it is necessary, and consequently, it is one and intolerant. To condemn truth to tolerance is to force it to suicide. Affirmation kills itself if it doubts of itself; and it doubts of itself if it leaves indifferently the negation to pose itself beside it. For truth, intolerance is the care for preservation, it is the legitimate exercise of the right of property. When one possesses, it is necessary to defend, under pain of being soon entirely despoiled.
Therefore, by the very necessity of things, intolerance is everywhere, because everywhere there is good and evil, true and false, order and disorder. Everywhere the true does not endure the false, the good excludes the bad, order combats disorder. What is more intolerant, for instance, than this proposition: 2 and 2 are 4? If you come to me to say that 2 and 2 are 3, or that 2 and 2 are 5, I reply to you that 2 and 2 are 4. And if you said to me that you do not contest my manner of counting, but that you maintain yours, and that you request me to be as indulgent toward you as you are toward me; while I remain convinced that I am right and that you are wrong, if absolutely necessary I might remain silent, because after all it concerns me little enough that there may be on earth a man for whom 2 and 2 are 3 or 5.
On a certain number of questions, where the truth would be less absolute, where the consequences would be less grave, I could, up to a certain point, compromise with you. I will be conciliatory, if you speak to me of literature, of politics, of art, of agreeable sciences, because in all these things there is not a unique and determined type. There, beauty and the true are more or less conventions....But if it concerns religious truth taught or revealed by God Himself; if it is a matter of your eternal future and of the salvation of your soul, then there is no more compromise possible. You will find me immovable, and I must be. It is the condition of every truth to be intolerant; but religious truth being the most absolute and the most important of all the truths, is consequently also the most intolerant and the most exclusive.
My brethren, nothing is as exclusive as unity. But listen to the word of Saint Paul: "One Lord, one faith, one baptism." There is in Heaven only one Lord. This God, of which unity is the great attribute, has given to the earth only one creed, one doctrine, one faith. And this faith, this creed, He has confided only to a single visible society, to one Church of which all children are marked by the same seal and regenerated by the same Grace: one baptism. Thus, divine unity, which resides for all eternity in the splendors of the glory, has occurred on earth by the unity of the Evangelical dogma, of which the deposit has been committed by Jesus Christ to the hierarchical unity of the priesthood for keeping: One God, one faith, one Church.
An English clergyman has had the courage to do a book on the tolerance of Jesus Christ, and the philosopher of Geneva1 has said in speaking of the Savior of men: "I do not see that my divine Master may have subtilized on dogma." Nothing is more true. Jesus Christ has not subtilized on dogma. He has brought the truth to men, and He has said: "If anyone is not baptized in the water and in the Holy Spirit; if anyone refuses to eat my Flesh and drink my Blood, he will not have part in my Kingdom." I acknowledge it, there is not subtlety there; it is intolerance, the most positive exclusion, the most frank. And further, Jesus Christ has sent His Apostles to preach to all nations, this is to say, to destroy all existing religions, to establish the single Christian religion throughout the world and to substitute the unity of Catholic dogma for all the beliefs received from the different peoples. And foreseeing the movements and divisions that this doctrine is going to excite on earth, He is not stopped, and He declares that He has come to bring not peace but the sword, to incite war not only between peoples, but in the bosom of the same family, and to separate, with regard to convictions at least, the believing spouse from the unbelieving spouse, the Christian son-in-law from the idolatrous father-in-law. The thing is true, and the philosopher is right: Jesus Christ has not subtilized on dogma.
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau] says elsewhere to his Emile: "I do as St. Paul, and I place charity well above faith. I think that the essential of religion consists in practice that not only is it necessary to be an upright man, humane and charitable, but that whoever is truly such, believes enough of it to be saved, whatever religion he professes." There is indeed, my brethren, a beautiful commentary of St. Paul which says, for instance, that without faith it is impossible to please God; of St. Paul who declares that Jesus Christ is not divided, that in Him there is not the yes and the no, but only the yes; of St. Paul who affirms that, when against all probability an angel would come to preach another doctrine than the apostolic doctrine, it would be necessary to say to him anathema. St. Paul, apostle of tolerance!? St. Paul, who marches throwing down all arrogant science which rises against Jesus Christ, converting all minds to the servitude of Jesus Christ.
People have spoken of the tolerance of the first centuries, of the tolerance of the Apostles. My brethren, we do not reflect on this; but the establishment of the Christian religion has been on the contrary, above all, a work of religious intolerance. At the time of the preaching of the Apostles, the entire universe possessed almost completely this so-praised dogmatic tolerance. As all religions were as false and unreasonable as the other, they were not waging war against each other; as all the gods were equal to each other, there were as many demons, they were not exclusive, they tolerated each other: Satan is not divided against himself. Rome, in multiplying its conquests, multiplied its divinities; and the study of its mythology became complicated in the same proportion as the one of its geography. The victor who was ascending to the Capitol had the conquered gods marched before him with more pride even than in the conquered kings he was dragging along in his retinue. Most often, by virtue of a decree of the Senate, the idols of the barbarians were henceforth identified with the domain of the country, and the national Olympus became greater as the empire did.
Christianity, ...at its first appearance, was not pushed aside all at once. Paganism wondered if, instead of fighting this new religion, it should not give it access into its midst. Judaea had become a Roman province. Rome, accustomed to receiving and to reconciling all religions, at first welcomed, without too much fright, the religion corning out of Judaea....But it did not take long for the word of the prophet to prove correct. The multitudes of idols, who usually saw without jealousy new and strange gods come to take their place near them, suddenly sent forth a cry of fright at the arrival of the God of the Christians, and...tottered on their threatened altars. Rome was attentive to this spectacle. And soon, when it noticed that this new God was the irreconcilable enemy of the other gods; when it saw that the Christians. whose religion they had accepted, did not want to admit the religion of the nation; in a word, when it had undeniably established the intolerant spirit of the Christian faith, it was then that the persecution began.
Listen to how the historians of the time justify the tortures of the Christians: they do not speak ill of their religion, of their God, of their Christ, of their practices; it was only later that they invented calumnies. They reproach them only for not being able to tolerate any other religion than theirs.
"I did not doubt," said Pliny the Younger, "whatever their dogma may be, it might be necessary to punish their stubbornness and their inflexible obstinacy."
These are not criminals, said Tacitus, but they are intolerant, misanthropes, enemies of mankind. There is in them a headstrong faith in their principles, and an exclusive faith which condemns the beliefs of all other peoples. The pagans were saying rather generally of the Christians what Celsus has said of the Jews, whom people confused with the Christians for a long time because the Christian doctrine had taken birth in Judaea:
Quote:"That these men adhered inviolably to their laws," this sophist said, "I do not blame them; I blame only those who abandon the religion of their fathers to embrace a different one! But if the Jews or the Christians want to give themselves the appearances of a wisdom more sublime than the one of the rest of the world, I will say that we do not have to believe that they are more agreeable to God than the others."
The principal grievance against the Christians was the too absolute rigidity of their creed, and, as people said, the unsociable disposition of their theology. If their God had been only one of many, there would not have been complaints: but it was an incompatible God who was driving away all the others. This is why the persecution. Thus, the establishment of the Church was a work of dogmatic intolerance, the whole history of the Church is likewise only the history of this intolerance. What are the martyrs? People intolerant in matters of the faith who preferred torture rather than to profess error. What is the Creed? Formulas of intolerance that regulate what it is necessary to believe and that impose on the reason necessary mysteries. What is the Papacy? An institution of doctrinal intolerance, which through hierarchal unity maintains the unity of the faith. Why the Councils? To stop deviations of thought, to condemn false interpretations of dogma, to anathematize propositions contrary to the Faith.
We are therefore intolerant, exclusive in matters of doctrine: we profess it; we are proud of it. If we were not, it would be because we do not have the truth, since truth is one, and consequently intolerant. Daughter of Heaven, the Catholic religion in descending onto the earth has produced titles of its origin; it has offered to the examination of reason incontestable facts that prove irrefragably its divinity. Now, if it comes from God; if Jesus Christ, its Author, has said: "I am the truth," it is certainly necessary by an inevitable consequence that the Catholic Church maintain incorruptibly this truth such as it has received it from Heaven itself. It is very necessary that it reject, that it exclude everything that is contrary to this truth, all that would destroy it. To reproach the Catholic Church its dogmatic intolerance, its absolute affirmation in matters of doctrine, is to address to it a very honorable reproach. It is to reproach the sentinel for being too faithful and too vigilant; it is to reproach the spouse for being too scrupulous and too exclusive.
"Since we tolerate you," the sects sometimes say to the Church, "why do you not therefore tolerate us?" My brethren, it is as if concubines said to the legitimate spouse, "Since we tolerate you, why be more intolerant than we?" The concubines tolerate the spouse, what a great favor (!), truly, and the spouse is very unreasonable to base her claim on rights and privileges solely belonging to her, of which the concubines reluctantly accept to leave her a share, at least until they may succeed in banishing her entirely!
Imagine this intolerance of the Catholics! People often say about us, "They can tolerate no other Church than theirs. The Protestants certainly tolerate them!" My brethren, you were in the peaceful possession of your home and your estate. Armed men hurl themselves at it. They seize your bed, your table, your money, in a word, they establish themselves in your home, but they do not drive you out of it. They carry condescension to the point of allowing you your share. What do you have to complain of? You are quite unreasonable not to be satisfied with the common law!
"Since the Protestants say that one can be saved in your Church," it is said, "why do you pretend that one cannot be saved in theirs?" My brethren, let's put ourselves in one of the public squares of this city. A traveler asks me the route which leads to the capital. I direct him to it. Then one of my fellow-citizens approaches, and says to me, "I acknowledge that that route leads to Paris, I grant you that. But you owe me the same consideration, and you will not dispute with me that this other route–the route to Bordeaux, for instance–leads also to Paris.
Indeed, this route to Paris would be very intolerant and very exclusive not to admit that a route which is directly opposite it would lead to the very same end. It does not have a conciliatory spirit. How far does encroachment and fanaticism creep? My brethren, truly I could give way again, because the most opposite routes would eventually meet each other perhaps, after having gone around the world, whereas one would eternally follow the road of error without ever arriving at heaven. Therefore, no longer ask us why, when the Protestants acknowledge that one can save himself in our religion, we object to recognizing that, generally speaking, and outside the case of good faith and of invincible ignorance, one can save himself in theirs. The thorns can acknowledge that the vine gives grapes without the vine having to acknowledge to the thorns the same properties.
My brethren, we are moreover often confused from what we hear said on all these questions from sensible people. The logic in them is entirely missing when religion is in question. Is it passion, is it prejudice which blinds them? It is both. In the main, the passions well know what they want when they seek to disturb the foundations of the faith, to place religion among the things without consistency. They are not ignorant that by demolishing dogma they prepare a facile morality. Someone has said with perfect accuracy: "It is rather the Ten Commandments than the Creed that makes unbelievers." If all religions can be placed on the very same rank, it is that they are all equal. If all are true, it is that all are false. If all the gods tolerate each other, it is that there is no God. And when we arrive at that conclusion, there no longer remains constraining morality. How many consciences would be at ease the day the Catholic Church would give the fraternal kiss to all the sects, its rivals!
Religious indifference is therefore a system which has its root in the passions of the human heart. But it is also necessary to say that, as regards a great many men of our century, it holds to the prejudices of education. Either it concerns these men...and who have imbibed the milk of the preceding generation, or better, it concerns those who belong to the new generation. The former have sought the philosophical and religious spirit in Jean-Jacques's Emile; the others, in the eclectic or progressive school of these half-protestant and half-rationalists who today hold sway over education.
Jean-Jacques has been among us the apologist and propagandist of this system of religious tolerance. The invention of it does not belong to him, although he has audaciously surpassed paganism, which never extended indifference as far. Here are, with a short commentary, the principal points of the Genevese Catechism, which unfortunately became popular:
Quote:All religions are good; this is to say, otherwise for the French, all religions are bad. It is necessary to practice the religion of one's country; this is to say that truth in religious matters depends on the degree of longitude and of latitude: truth on this side of the mountains, untruth beyond the mountains. Consequently, what is still more serious, it is necessary either to have no sincere religion and to be the hypocrite everywhere, or if one has a religion in his heart, to become apostate and turncoat when the circumstances desire it. The wife has to profess the same religion as her husband, and the children the same religion as their father; this is to say what was false and bad before the marriage contract has to be true and good after, and that it would be bad for the children of the cannibals to turn aside from the estimable practices of their parents!
But I hear you tell me that the century of the Encyclopedia is past, that a longer refutation would be an anachronism. Very well, let's close the book on Education. Let's open in its place the learned Essays which are almost the common source from where the philosophy of the 19th century is poured out by a thousand faithful channels on the whole surface of our country. This philosophy is called eclectic, syncretic, and, with a small modification, it is also called progressive. This smart system consists in saying that there is nothing false, that all opinion and all religions can be reconciled, that error is not possible to man unless he despoils humanity, that every error of men consists in believing to possess exclusively all the truth, when each of them hold only a link of it and that from the union of all these links must form the entire chain of truth. Thus, according to this incredible theory, there are no false religions, but they are all incomplete without each other. The true religion would be the religion of the syncretic and progressive eclecticism, which would gather together all the others, past, present, and future. All the others, this is to say, the natural religion, which recognizes one God; Atheism, which does not recognize any; Pantheism, which recognizes God in everything and everywhere; Spiritualism, which believes in the soul, and Materialism, which believes only in the flesh, in the blood and in the temperament; evangelical societies which acknowledge a revelation, and rationalistic Deism, which spurns it; Christianity, which believes the Messiah came, and Judaism, which still waits for Him; Catholicism, which obeys the Pope, and Protestantism, which regards the Pope as the Antichrist. All this is reconcilable. These are different aspects of the truth. Combining these creeds will result in a larger, more vast religion, the great, truly catholic religion, this is to say universal, since it will include all the others in its midst!
My brethren, this doctrine, which you have all qualified absurd, is not my creation. It fills thousands of recent volumes and publications....Every day it takes new forms under the pen and on the lips of men... At what point of folly have we therefore arrived? We have arrived, My Brethren, where anyone must logically arrive whosoever does not admit this incontestable principle that we have established, namely, that truth is one and consequently intolerant, exclusive of all doctrine which is not its own. And to bring together again in a few words all the substance of this first part of my discourse, I will say to you: If you seek the truth on earth, seek the intolerant Church. All errors can make concessions to each other. They are close relations since they have a common father: "You are of your father, the devil." The Truth, daughter of heaven, is the only one which does not capitulate.
Therefore, you who want to judge this great cause, appropriate to yourself in this the wisdom of Solomon. Among these different societies between which the truth is an object of strife, as was that child between the two mothers, you want to know how to judge it. Ask for a sword, feign to slice, and examine the face that the claimants will make. There will be several of them who will be resigned, who will be contented with the part that is going to be handed over to them. Say immediately, "These are not the mothers." There is one of them on the contrary, who will deny herself every settlement, who will say, "The truth belongs to me and I have to preserve it in its entirety. I will never allow that it be diminished or parceled out." Say to this one, "This is the true mother."
Yes, Holy Catholic Church, you have the truth, because you have unity, and you are intolerant to allow this unity to decompose. There is our first principle: the religion which descends from heaven is true, and consequently it is intolerant with regard to doctrines. I will add: the religion which descends from heaven is charity, and consequently it is full of tolerance with regard to individuals...
It is the characteristic of the Catholic Church to be firm and immovable on principles and to prove itself to be kindly and indulgent in their application. What is so surprising? Is she not the spouse of Jesus Christ, and like Him, does she not possess both the intrepid courage of the lion and the gentleness of the lamb? Does she not represent on earth supreme Wisdom, which takes to its purpose strongly and which disposes everything benevolently? It is especially by this sign that the religion which descended from heaven has to make itself recognized. It is by the condescensions of its charity, by the inspirations of its love. Consider the Church of Jesus Christ, and see with what infinite regards, with what respectful attentions it acts with its children, either in the manner with which it presents its teachings to their comprehension, or in the application that it makes to their behavior and to their actions. Soon you will recognize that the Church is a mother who invariably teaches truth and virtue, who can never consent to error or to evil, but who busies herself to render her teaching amiable, and who treats with indulgence the errors of weakness.
...From the first steps that it has been given to me to make in the domain of sacred theology, what has caused in me the most admiration, what has spoken the most eloquently to my soul, what would have inspired in me the Faith if I had not had the good fortune to possess it already, is on the one hand, the tranquil majesty with which the Catholic Church affirms what is certain, and on the other hand the moderation and reserve with which it abandons to free opinions everything that is not defined. No, this is not as men teaching doctrines of which they are the inventors, this is not the way they express the thoughts that are the fruit of their genius.
When a man has created a system, he supports it with an absolute tenacity. He yields neither on one point nor on another. When he is enamored with a doctrine born from his brain, he seeks to make it prevail with authority. Do not contest a single one of his ideas with him. The one that you allow yourself to discuss is precisely the most important and the most necessary to him. Almost all the books issued from the hand of men are marked with this exaggeration and this tyranny... [T]he holy Catholic theology offers an entirely different character. Since the Church has not invented the truth, but is only the depository of it, we do not find passion nor excess in its teachings. It has pleased the Son of God, in whom resided the plenitude of truth,...to clearly reveal certain appearances, certain aspects of the truth and to show only a glimpse of the others. The Church does not extend her ministry further, and is content to have taught, maintained, avenged certain and necessary principles. It allows its children to discuss, to conjecture, to reason freely on the dubious points.
Catholic teaching has been calumniated so much...that you will perhaps hardly believe what I am going to tell you. There is not a single science in the world which is less despotic than the sacred science. The deposit of teaching has been confided to the Church, but do you know what the Church teaches? A creed in 12 articles which do not form 12 lines, a creed composed by the Apostles and that the first two General Councils have explained and developed by the addition of a few words which became necessary.
We proclaim, we Catholics, that the authentic interpretation of the Holy Scriptures belongs to the Church; but do you know, my brethren, in regards to how many of the verses of the Bible the Church has used this supreme right? The Bible includes about 30,000, and the Church has perhaps not defined the meaning of 80 of these verses. The remainder are left to the commentators, and I can say, to the free examination of the Catholic reader, so that, according to the word of St. Jerome, the Scriptures are a vast field in which the intellect can play and delight, and where it will meet only a few barriers here and there around precipices, and also a few fortified places where it will be able to retrench and to find an assured assistance.
The Councils are the principal organ for Catholic teaching. Now, the Council of Trent, wanting to include in a single and same declaration all the obligatory doctrine, had not needed two pages to contain the most complete profession of Faith. And if we study the history of this Council, we recognize with admiration that it was equally jealous to maintain dogmas and to respect opinions....
Finally, the incomparable Bossuet having opposed to the calumnies of the Protestants his well-known Exposition of the Catholic Faith, proved that this same Church, which was accused of tyrannizing intellects, could reduce its defined and necessary truths into a body of doctrine a great deal less voluminous than were the confessions, synods, and declarations of the sects that had rejected the principle of authority and were professing free examination.
But I repeat, my brethren, this remarkable phenomenon, which exists only in the Catholic Church, this tranquil majesty in its assertion, this moderation and reserve concerning all questions not defined, here is, in my opinion, the adorable sign by which I have to recognize the truth which came from heaven. When I contemplate this serene conviction and this kind indulgence on the face of the Church, I throw myself into its arms, and I say to it, "You are my mother." This is as a mother teaches–without passion nor exaggeration, but with calm authority and wise measure.
You recognize this character in the teaching of the Church, in its most eminent doctors, in those of whom it adopts and authorizes the writings nearly without restriction. Augustine undertakes his immortal work The City of God, which will be until the end of the ages one of the richest monuments of the Church. He goes about avenging the holy truths of the Catholic Faith against the calumnies of dying paganism. He feels the ardors of zeal boiling within him. But if he has read in the Scriptures that God is truth, he has also read that God is charity. He understands that excess of truth can become absence of charity. He places himself on his knees and he sends toward heaven this admirable prayer: "Send, Lord, send into my heart the consolation, the temperament of your spirit, so that carried away by the love of the truth I do not lose the truth of love."
And at the other extremity of the chain of holy doctors, listen to these beautiful words of the blessed Bishop of Geneva:2 "Truth which is not charitable ceases to be the truth because in God, Who is the supreme source of the true, charity is inseparable from the truth."
Read Augustine and Francis de Sales. You will find in their writings the truth in all its purity and, on account of this very thing, all imprinted with charity and love.
Oh, priest of Carthage,3 I admire the nerve of your energetic language, the irresistible power of your sarcasm, but...will I say it? under the surface of your most orthodox writings, I seek the unction of charity. Your incisive syllables do not have the humble and sweet expression of love. I fear that you were defending the truth as one defends a system to himself, and that one day your pride abandoned the cause that your bitter zeal had sustained. Why, having consecrated his immense talent to the service of the Gospel, has Tertullian not prayed to the Lord as Augustine did, to send into his heart the consolations, the temperaments of His spirit? Love would have maintained it in the doctrine. But because he was not in charity, he lost the truth....With more love in your heart, your intelligence would not have made such a deplorable defection; charity would have maintained you in truth.
If the Catholic Church presents to our minds the teaching of the truth with so much discretion and sweetness, it is with still more condescension and goodness that it applies its principles to our conduct and our actions. Incapable of ever supporting bad doctrines, the Church is tolerant without limit for people. It never mixes error with the one who teaches it, nor the sin with the one who commits it. The Church condemns error but continues to love the man. The Church brands sin but pursues the sinner with tenderness. It earnestly desires to make him better, to reconcile him with God, to call peace and truth into his heart.
The Church makes no preference of persons. There is for the Church neither Jew, nor Greek, nor barbarian. It is not interested in your opinions. It does not ask you if you live in a monarchy or in a republic. You have one soul to save; here is all that is necessary to save it. Call on the Church. It comes to you with hands full of graces and pardon. You have committed more sins than you have hairs on your head. That does not frighten it. It expunges everything in the blood of Jesus Christ. Some of its laws are too onerous for you, it consents to accommodate them to your weakness; their rigor yields before your failings. St. Thomas Aquinas poses in principle that if no one can dispense with the divine law, condescension to the laws of the Church on the other hand does not have to be too difficult, for the sake of the sweetness which makes the foundation of its government. When the civil law is rigid and inflexible, so much more is the law of the Church yielding and supple. What other authority over the earth governs or administers as the Church?
May the world which preaches tolerance to us be as tolerant as we. We reject only principles; the world rejects persons. How many times we forgive and the world continues to condemn! How many times, in the name of God, we have pulled the veil of oblivion over the past, and the world always remembers! The very same mouths which reproach us with intolerance, blame us for our too credulous and too easy benevolence. Our inexhaustible patience towards people is almost as impugned as our inflexibility against doctrines!
...[N]o longer ask us for tolerance with regard to doctrine. Encourage, on the contrary, our solicitude to maintain the unity of dogma, which is the only bond of peace on earth. The Roman orator has said, "The union of minds is the first condition for the union of hearts." And this great man showed even in the definition of friendship the unanimity of thought with regard to divine and human things.
Our society is prey to a thousand divisions. We complain of them everyday. Where does this weakening of affections come from, this coldness of hearts? My brethren, how should hearts be brought together where minds are so far apart? Because each of us lives alone in his own thought, each of us also confines himself to the love of himself. Do we want to put an end to these countless differences of opinion which threaten to soon destroy all the spirit of family, city, and country? Do we no longer want to be strangers to each other, adversaries and almost enemies? Let's come back again to one creed, and we will soon return to harmony and love.
Every creed concerning the things of here below is very far from us. A thousand opinions divide us and for a long time there has no longer been any human dogma. I do not know if it will ever reconstitute itself among us. Fortunately, the religious creed, the divine dogma, has always maintained itself in its purity in the hands of the Church, and that way a precious germ of salvation is preserved for us. The day when all men will say: "I believe in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Church," all hearts will not delay to draw near, and we will find again the only truly solid and lasting peace, the one that the Apostle calls peace in truth. Amen.
Translated exclusively for Angelus Press by Mr. & Mrs. William Platz from OEuvres Sacerdotales du Cardinal Pie, Choix de Sermons et d'Instructions de 1839 a 1849. The couple responded to an invitation in The Angelus for translators to make the work of Cardinal Pie, a mentor for Pope Pius X and Archbishop Lefebvre, available in English, for most of it is only known in French.
Louis-Edouard-Desire Cardinal Pie [say: "pea"] (1815-1880), renowned Bishop of Poitiers, France, was a major-league player in the fight against the anti-Catholic movement of the 19th century. "...He is best known for his opposition to modern errors, and his championship of the rights of the Church. Regarding as futile the compromises accepted by other Catholic leaders, he fought alike all philosophical theories and political arrangements that did not come up to the full traditional Christian standard...." His distinguished service to the Church was recognized by Leo XIII, who made him cardinal in 1879. (From the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913 ed., Vol. XII, p. 76.)
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
2. St. Francis de Sales.
3. Tertullian.
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| Second Sunday after Epiphany |
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Posted by: Stone - 01-17-2021, 08:45 AM - Forum: Christmas
- Replies (6)
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SECOND SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
Taken from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Gueranger (1841-1875)
The third Mystery of the Epiphany shows us the completion of the merciful designs of God upon the world, at the same time that it manifests to us, for the third time, the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The Star has led the soul to faith; the sanctified Waters of the Jordan have conferred purity upon her; the Marriage Feast unites her to her God. We have been considering, during this Octave, the Bridegroom revealing himself to the Spouse; we have heard him calling her to come to him from the heights of Libanus; and now, after having enlightened and purified her, he invites her to the heavenly feast, where she is to receive the Wine of his divine love.
A Feast is prepared; it is a Marriage Feast; and the Mother of Jesus is present at it, for it is just that having cooperated in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, she should take part in all that her Son does, and in all the favors he bestows on his elect. But in the midst of the Feast, the Wine fails. Wine is the symbol of Charity or Love, and Charity had failed on the earth; for the Gentiles had never tasted its sweetness; and as to the Synagogue, what had it produced but wild grapes? The True Vine is our Jesus, and he calls himself by that name. He alone could give that Wine which gladdeneth the heart of man; He alone could give us that Chalice which inebriateth, and of which the Royal Psalmist prophesied.
Mary said to Jesus: They have no Wine. It is the office of the Mother of God to tell him of the wants of men, for she is also their Mother. But Jesus answers her in words which are apparently harsh: Woman! what is it to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come. The meaning of these words is that, in this great Mystery, he was about to act not as the Son of Mary, but as the Son of God. Later on, the hour will come when, dying upon the Cross, he will do it as Man, that is, according to that human nature which he has received from her. Mary at once understands the words of her Son, and she says to the waiters of the Feast what she is now ever saying to her children: Do whatsoever he shall say to you.
Now, there were six large waterpots of stone there, and they were empty. The world was then in its Sixth Age, as St. Augustine and other Holy Doctors tell us. During these six ages, the earth had been awaiting its Savior, who was to instruct and redeem it. Jesus commands these waterpots to be filled with water; and yet, water does not suit the Feast of the Spouse. The figures and the prophecies of the ancient world were this water, and until the opening of the Seventh Age, when Christ, who is the Vine, was to be given to the world, no man had contracted an alliance with the Divine Word.
But when the Emmanuel came, he had but to say, Now draw out, and the waterpots were seen to be filled with the wine of the New Covenant, the Wine which had been kept to the end. When he assumed our human nature—a nature weak and unstable as Water—he effected a change in it; he raised it up even to himself, by making us partakers of the divine nature; he gave us the power to love him, to be united to him, to form that one Body of which he is the Head, that Church of which he is the Spouse, and which he loved from all eternity, and with such tender love, that he came down from heaven to celebrate his nuptials with her.
St. Matthew, the Evangelist of the Humanity of our Lord, has received from the Holy Ghost the commission to announce to us the Mystery of Faith by the Star; St. Luke, the Evangelist of Jesus’ Priesthood, has been selected, by the same Holy Spirit, to instruct us in the Mystery of the Baptism in the Jordan; but the Mystery of the Marriage Feast was to be revealed to us by the Evangelist John, the Beloved Disciple. He suggests to the Church the object of this third Mystery by this expression: This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Glailee, and he manifested his glory. At Bethlehem, the Gold of the Magi expressed the Divinity of the Babe; at the Jordan, the descent of the Holy Ghost and the voice of the Eternal Father proclaimed Jesus (known to the people as a carpenter of Nazareth) to be the Son of God; at Cana, it is Jesus himself that acts, and he acts as God, for, says St. Augustine, He who changed the water into wine in the waterpots could be no other than the same who, every year, works the same miracle in the vine. Hence it was that, from that day, as St. John tells us, his disciples believed in him, and the Apostolic College began to be formed.
Mass
The Introit proclaims the joy of this day, which shows us the human nature espoused to the Son of the eternal Father. Surely the earth will henceforth surrender itself wholly to the love and praise of this sacred Name which, in the Marriage Feast, has become that of the Son of Adam.
Introit
Omnis terra adoret te, Deus, et psallat tibi: psallmum dicat nomini tuo, Altissime.
Ps. Jubilate Deo omnis terra, psalmum dicite nomini ejus: date gloriam laudi ejus. Gloria Patri. Omnis terra.
Let all the earth adore thee, and sing to thee, O God: let it sing a psalm to thy name, O Most High.
Ps. Shout with joy to God, all the earth, sing ye a psalm to his name; give glory to his praise. Glory be to the Father. Let all the earth.
This name of Sons of God which has become ours by right through the bond of the sacred nuptials is none other, as Jesus himself tells us in his Beatitudes, than Peace—the Peace of God, ours truly through the action of his grace ever working it out within us. In the Collect Peace again figures as the final end of God’s government both in heaven and on earth, likewise as the supreme desire of the Church.
Collect
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui cœlestia simul et terrena moderaris: supplicationes populi tui clementer exaudi, et pacem tuam nostris concede temporibus. Per Dominum.
Almighty and Eternal God, supreme Ruler both of heaven and earth, mercifully give ear to the prayers of thy people, and grant us peace in our time. Through, etc.
Commemoration is made, by their proper Collects, of the Saint whose feast may occur with this Sunday; the third prayer will be that of the Blessed Virgin.
Commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Deus qui salutis æternæ, beatæ Mariæ virginitate fœcunda, humano generi præmia præstitisti; tribue, quæsumus, ut ipsam pro nobis intercedere sentiamus, per quam meruimus auctorem vitæ suscipere, Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum. Qui tecum.
O God, who, by the fruitful Virginity of the Blessed Mary, hast given to mankind the rewards of eternal salvation, grant, we beseech thee, that we may experience her intercession, by whom we received the Author of life, our Lord Jesus Christ, thy Son. Who liveth, etc.
Epistle
Lesson from the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle, to the Romans. Ch. xii.
Brethren: Having different gifts, according to the grace that is given us, either prophecy, to be used according to the rule of faith; Or ministry, in ministering; or he that teacheth, in doctrine; He that exhorteth, in exhorting; he that giveth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with carefulness; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good. Loving one another with the charity of brotherhood, with honour preventing one another. In carefulness not slothful. In spirit fervent. Serving the Lord. Rejoicing in hope. Patient in tribulation. Instant in prayer. Communicating to the necessities of the saints. Pursuing hospitality. Bless them that persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that rejoice; weep with them that weep. Being of one mind one towards another. Not minding high things, but consenting to the humble.
Quote:This peace which characterizes, in the abode of saints, the Sons of God, effects in like measure on earth the oneness of the Bride, that is of the Church: peace it is that makes her to be but one body wherein the many members find their multiplicity upheld and guided by the head, the one lord; their functions, so diverse in themselves, regulated and brought under the rule and love of the Bridegroom, Christ Jesus. The Epistle which has just been read sets before us the different operations of this peace which has as its ruling motive Charity, the Queen of virtues, and which is so essential to Christianity; the Apostle specifies in detail its forms and conditions and adapts its practice to every social condition and circumstances of life. Of such value does the Church judge these considerations, that, on the following Sunday, she resumes the text of the Apostle where today she has interrupted it.
Far from a divine life in the peace of God which was its precious gift, the human race incurred death with its penalty of separation. Let us then in the Gradual sing of this wonder that has been wrought in our midst, and with the angelic choirs exalt the Lord in praise and admiration.
Gradual
Misit Dominus verbum suum, et sanavit eos: et eripuit eos de interitu eorum.
℣. Confiteantur Domino misericordiæ ejus, et mirabilia ejus filiis hominum. Alleluia, allelluia.
℣. Laudate Deum omnes Angeli ejus: laudate eum omnes virtutes ejus. Alleluia.
The Lord sent his word and healed them: and delivered them out of their distresses.
℣. Let the mercies of the Lord give glory to him: and his wonderful works to the children of men. Alleluia, alleluia.
℣. Praise ye the Lord, all his angels, praise him all his hosts. Alleluia.
Gospel
Sequel of the holy Gospel according to St. John. Ch. ii.
At that time: there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee: and the mother of Jesus was there. And Jesus also was invited, and his disciples, to the marriage. And the wine failing, the mother of Jesus saith to him: They have no wine. And Jesus saith to her: Woman, what is that to me and to thee? my hour is not yet come. His mother saith to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye. Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three measures apiece. Jesus saith to them: Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And Jesus saith to them: Draw out now, and carry to the chief steward of the feast. And they carried it. And when the chief steward had tasted the water made wine, and knew not whence it was, but the waiters knew who had drawn the water; the chief steward calleth the bridegroom, And saith to him: Every man at first setteth forth good wine, and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse. But thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee; and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.
Quote:O the wonderful dignity of man! God has vouchsafed, says the Apostle, to show the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which had no claim to, nay, were unworthy of such an honor. Jesus bids the waiters fill them with water and the water of Baptism purifies us; but, not satisfied with this, he fills these vessels, even to the brim, not to be drunk save in the kingdom of his Father. Thus, divine Charity, which dwells in the Sacrament of Love, is communicated to us; and that we might not be unworthy of the espousals with himself, to which he called us, he raises us up even to himself. Let us, therefore, prepare our souls for this wonderful union, and, according to the advice of the Apostle, let us labor to present them to our Jesus with such purity as to resemble that chaste Virgin, who was presented to the spotless Lamb.
During the Offertory, the Church resumes her songs of joy and give free course to her holy transports. All faithful souls are invited by her to the celebration of this adorable Mystery, the intimate union of man with God.
Offertory
Jubilate Deo universa terra: psalmum dicite nomini ejus, venite et audite, et narrabo vobis omnes qui timetis Deum, quanta fecit Dominus animæ meæ. Alleluia.
Shout with joy to God, all the earth, sing ye a psalm to his name. Come and hear, all ye who fear God, and I will tell you what great things he hath done for my soul. Alleluia.
Secret
Oblata, Domine, munera sanctifica: nosque a peccatorum nostrorum maculis emunda. Per Dominum.
Sanctify, O Lord, our offerings, and cleanse us from the stains of our sins. Through, etc.
After the Secret of the Saint who is being commemorated today, that of the Blessed Virgin is said.
Commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Tua, Domine, propitiatione, et beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis intercessione, ad perpetuam atque præsentem hæc oblatio nobis proficiat prosperitatem et pacem. Per Dominum.
By thy merciful forgiveness, O Lord, and by the intercession of blessed Mary, ever a Virgin, let this offering avail us for welfare and peace, both now and for evermore. Through our Lord.
The Communion Antiphon recalls once more the miracle of the changing of the water into wine. This was only a dim figure of that wondrous transformation which is accomplished on our altars, only a symbol of that divine Sacrament, the food of our souls whereby, in an unspeakable way, is realized our union with God.
Communion
Dicit Dominus: Implete hydrias aqua et fert5e architriclino. Cum gustasset architriclinus aquam vinum factam, dicit sponso: Servasti vinum bonum usque adhuc. Hoc signum fecit Jesus primum coram discipulis suis.
The Lord saith: Fill the waterpots with water and carry to the chief steward of the feast. When the chief steward had tasted the water made wine, he said to the bridegroom: Thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus before his disciples.
Postcommunion
Augeatur in nobis, quæsumus Domine, tuæ virtutis operatio: ut divinis vegetati sacramentis, ad eorum promissa capienda tuo munere præparemur. Per Dominum.
May the efficacy of thy power, O Lord, be increased in us, that being fed with thy divine sacraments, we may, through thy bounty, be prepared to receive what they promise. Through, etc.
Commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Hæc nos communio, Domine, purget a crimine: et intercedente beata Virgine Dei Genitrice Maria, cœlestis remedii faciat esse consortes.
May this communion, O Lord, cleanse us from sin, and by the intercession of blessed Mary, the Virgin-Mother of God, make us partakers of thy heavenly remedy.
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