In the theology section of my site, I write very confidently about tradition versus modernism. But to be honest with the few readers who read the Life Update section of my site here, I have to admit I am very confused at the current Church crisis. Try as people might compare it to past crises in the Church, it always falls flat. We’ve never had someone on the Chair of Peter worship a demon-idol (Pachamama) or promote gay-blessings (Fiducia Supplicans) before the 21st century.
And then the next guy on the Chair tells us all he’s in heaven and he’s going to totally imitate his synodal church.
Lay folks who podcast on these scandals can make money on them but then go back to their wives and children. Even parish priests who admit there’s an unprecedented Church crisis have a parish to run. For me, it’s pretty lonely and personal that unbelievers have infiltrated the Church and not only bad—but even good—Catholics cheer them on to keep the false-peace.
Not to whine and complain, but I forewent marriage to a woman to enter seminary. I had no idea I would ever be staring down an abyss without a family or a parish at age 46 as the Church auto-destructs herself. (Or, perhaps it is the ape of the Church, since the true Church could never do this.)
On this topic of the “ape of the Church,” we come to an excellent new piece on Substack by a man who goes by Nicholas Owen. In Are You Abraham Ready? he writes:
The paradox for all of us who want to be faithful Catholics right now is as follows:
1) We know that we must never leave the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church, for She is the Bride of Christ.
2) We know that, by divine institution, our Catholic Church has a visible head in Rome and a visible bishop in every major city, and in order to be Catholic we have to be in union with the Bishop of Rome and those bishops in communion with him. This truth is proclaimed by the priest in the Canon of every Mass “in union with N. our pope and N. our bishop.”
Thus far, no objections.
3) The man whom all regard as Bishop of Rome affirms all sorts of things that are not consonant with the Catholic faith, and so we are kind of “stuck” with him if we want to be Catholic. If we want to remain Catholic, we have to stay “in union” with Fiducia Supplicans, Amoris Laetitia, the Abu Dhabi declaration, Traditionis Custodes, vaccination as a way to love our neighbor, the list goes on and on.
Like hell we do.
And, make no mistake, Hell assuredly likes it when we do.
Are you tired of all this? Of course you are tired, but you are not tired enough, yet. Otherwise you would not still be suffering by thinking you have to remain in union with the lies and abuse of the Bergoglian anti-church. This is the entire premise of the assault: that you — and not only you “good laity” but above all and especially you “good priests” and you “good bishops” — will remain obedient to the false church ruled by Satan.
Let’s pray right now. Pray for the grace to WAKE UP and understand what is really happening. Pray for the faith to do whatever God is asking you to do in response to the anti-Church. I don’t know what that is. But the Holy Spirit does. It will be simultaneously much harder and much easier than you think. Remember we worship a God who loves paradox.
A little later, Owen adds:
In order to persevere through the final trial of the Church, each one of us, individually and collectively, will be required to have the faith of Abraham, to offer up our Isaac. God is and will be asking something far greater than any of us yet realize. We will be called like Abraham to let go of all that seems certain and all that is familiar in order to rely, perhaps for the first time ever, only on God’s promise of unfailing fidelity to us. It will not make sense in terms of human wisdom. It will require a divine surrender. And it will unfold over time in each of our lives as pilgrimage…Something similar is true of we who believe during this final trial of the Church.
Switch gears for a minute before we bring all this together. I’m currently in the Middle-East. (I’ll reveal where I am in a couple weeks when I leave this country.) Before my own Roman Rite Missa Privata last Sunday, I attended a Greek Catholic Divine Liturgy. The Canon was written (more likely conglomerated) about 1500 years ago by St. John Chrysostom and there was a line before the Thanksgiving and Dismissal that struck me:
We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith worshipping the undivided Trinity who has saved us.
That line is in the Divine Liturgy of both Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholics. (As I wrote two paragraphs up, I heard this line in the Liturgy of the Eastern Catholics.) In any case, the line from that quote that keeps coming back to me in consolation is this:
We have found the true faith.
Of course, some smarty-pants theologians would say to that line: “Well, no, you were either born into the true faith or the ‘hound of heaven’ tracked you down to convert you.” Fine, smarty pants. But I’ll also stick with St. John Chrysostom, a saint and doctor of the Church, who did not blush to put it in the Canon sung by hundreds of thousands of priests over 1500 years to glorify God by chanting “We have found the true faith.”
In fact, that line is more true now in this Church crisis than ever. As I mentioned on a recent podcast, you could walk across any large city in America, stop at ten Catholic Churches asking if IVF is okay, and you would get eight different answers from those ten different Catholic parish priests (if they actually answered the doorbell.) If you doubt me, try it. Or just send emails to the few priests courageous enough to reply in writing to bioethics.
Now we put all this together. My question to you is this: How did you sift through all the garbage of a dozen versions of “Catholicism” and somehow land in the real deal, namely, traditional Catholicism? Of course it’s grace, but it’s also your cooperation with grace. (And of course, even that cooperation with grace is a grace!) But it’s also free will (which is also a gift from God!) Therefore, you and I can glorify God (hopefully without any spiritual-arrogance) that in a time when so few Catholics knew the ancient Apostolic faith, we do.
It doesn’t mean we’re better than others. Rather, it only increases our responsibility to live deep lives of prayer and penance and charitable evangelization. But it also gives us the chance to carry the cross like Jesus who was also rejected by the hierarchy.
In fact, following the truth wherever it leads may charge us traditional Catholics with some very difficult Abraham-like decisions to keep losing more and more friends and family as we continue to insist the Emperor in Rome has no Catholic clothes on. This is why Nicholas Owen (in the above linked article) again wrote:
We will be called like Abraham to let go of all that seems certain and all that is familiar in order to rely, perhaps for the first time ever, only on God’s promise of unfailing fidelity to us. It will not make sense in terms of human wisdom. It will require a divine surrender.
I don’t know where it will land us, but I glorify God that I have found the true faith after three decades of searching and fighting for it. Yes, it really took me that long after converting from liberal-Catholic to conservative-Catholic to traditional-Catholic. Now I know we all (yes, if you’re still reading my site after all my seemingly-crazy-takes, I can confidently include 97% of you in the “we” of this) have to be thankful that we found the true faith.
Something else happened at that event last week that brought me to tears. I saw a man behind me at the Divine Liturgy at the Greek Catholic Church and he had elephantiasis (now called filariasis.) I immediately intuited how grateful I need to be for my current life. It also brought me to tears to see how devoutly this man praised God—this man who never had a normal day in his life with how many stares he endures. (Do a Google image search of filariasis if you want to see why I write this.)
Every time I enter self-pity, God shows me the answer in prayer is to increase praising Him in thanksgiving. Almost two years ago, I wrote in a Life-Update post called “Thanksgiving” Is What Was Missing in My Life. I wrote about a dozen reasons why it came to me in prayer why I had to give God much more gratitude in my prayer:
- Thanksgiving stops pride because it makes me thankful for the little I have.
- Thanksgiving stops self-pity because it makes me thankful for the lot I have.
- Thanksgiving increases trust because it eradicates self-reliance.
- Thanksgiving helps my prayer because it means Eucharist and because God “seeks a sacrifice of praise.”—Heb 13:15
- Thanksgiving because it stops my wandering bad-thoughts, even as it makes me thankful for a lonely life.
- Thanksgiving may even help me forgive, as I see what God has given me amidst being such a sinner.
- Thanksgiving because it means total-reliance on the maternal-protection of Our Lady against my enemies visible and invisible.
- Thanksgiving is our only stance before God as He gives us everything and we give Him almost nothing.
- Thanksgiving is praising God like St. Andrew on his cross for two days before he died in Turkey, as we read in the Roman Martyrology a few days ago.
- Thanksgiving is abandonment to Divine Providence, which may be the only measure of holiness.
- Thanksgiving prevents any reflection of Satan’s grasping and envy (Wis 2:24) that caused Lucifer’s initial rebellion against God.
- Thanksgiving, because lack of it is why American Catholics aren’t as happy as African Catholics.
- Thanksgiving is not opposed to suffering, for as St. Peter wrote: “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when His glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.”—1 Pt 4:13-14.
- Thanksgiving, because even though I miss my Mom a lot, she seems to have died a holy death earlier this year (RIP 3 Apr 23.)
Icon of St. John Chrysostom in a Greek-Catholic Church in the Middle-East.