Transcript:
All my dear brothers and sisters, I greet you, and I would like to speak to you about my two new books and about our Catholic faith. The book Credo, the compendium of the Catholic faith, was to tell the truth, not my idea and not my initiative. I was urged to do these by the requests of courageous Catholic lay people and family fathers. The idea came from the faithful and was aimed at those who in the church have the sacred and grave task of being teachers of the faith. It is the bishops, in this case, me, thanks to the persistence of good lay people, who agreed to take on such a demanding and responsible task to publish a kind of catechism.
A Catholic bishop is obliged to fulfill the public oath he gave at his episcopal ordination, which reads to preserve the entire and immutable deposit of the faith as handed down by the apostles and proclaimed by the church everywhere and at all times. And so the Catholic faith is greater. It precedes and surpasses the popes and bishops because the popes and bishops are the first who must obey the faith in an exemplary manner and pass the Catholic faith on integrally to the faithful. The Catholic faith belongs to all times, all places, and all generations of Catholics, from the apostles to all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and all the saints we know.
What should true Catholics do then when they themselves are confused or persecuted within the church? St Vincent of Lerins, a fifth-century Church Father, provided useful guidance in this regard when he said I quote him, what should one do when a new contagion infects not just an insignificant part of the church but the entire church. Then it is up to you to hold on to what has been handed down to tradition. The sure faith that has been handed down, you must consult the teachings of the tradition, and in any case, be sure that these teachings were always supported and taught not only by one or two authorities but by all Fathers of the Church and popes from the beginning, uninterruptedly, as the words of St Vincent of Lerins state. During the presentation of the book Credo in Rome last year, Cardinal Robert Sarah spoke the following words with which he characterized the extraordinary state of crisis in the church of our day, saying If we speak of a crisis in the church, it is important to point out that the church is the Mystical Body of Christ and remains one holy catholic and apostolic.
The sources of theology and the Church’s teaching on faith and morals remain always unchanged. The Church, as a continuation and extension of Christ in the world, is not in crisis. We, their sinful children, are in crisis. The Church has the promise of eternal life. The gates of hell will never prevail against it. We know and firmly believe that there will always be enough light in the Church for those who sincerely want to seek God. The treasure of faith is a supernatural, divine gift. But today the crisis of the Church has entered a new phase, says Cardinal Sarah, continuing saying that this new crisis, this new phase, this is the crisis of the Magisterium. Surely the authentic Magisterium of the Church, as a supernatural function of the Mystical Body of Christ, exercised and guided by the Holy Spirit, cannot be in crisis.
The voice and work of the Holy Spirit are constant, and the truth to which he leads us is constant and unchanging, so the words to Cardinal Robert Sarah. St John Henry Newman said a sound, accurate, complete knowledge of Catholic theology is so important. This is not controversial. It is the best weapon. The complete knowledge of the Catholic faith. Any child well instructed in the Catechism is, without intending it, a real missionary. And why. Because the world is full of doubts and uncertainty and of inconsistent doctrine. A clear, consistent idea of the revealed truth cannot be found outside of the Catholic Church. Consistency and completeness are persuasive arguments for a system being true. So Cardinal St John Henry Newman. St Augustine wrote in his great work, The City of God, saying that grief which arises in the hearts of the good Catholics who are persecuted by the manners of false Catholics is profitable to the sufferers because it proceeds from the charity in which they do not wish that these false Christians either perish or hinder the salvation of others. Finally, great consolations grow out of their chastisement, which imbue the souls of the pious with a fecundity as great as the pains with which they were troubled.
Thus in this world in these evil days not only from the time of the bodily presence of Christ and His apostles but even from the time of Abel the just whom first his wicked brother slew because he was righteous and hence henceforth even to the end of this world the Church of God the Catholic Church has gone forward on pilgrimage amid the persecutions and the consolations of God at the same time so St Augustine. The Catholic faith cannot allow any change, break, or reinterpretation into a different meaning contrary to what has been constantly believed and taught in the Church for two thousand years. Nowadays, we can notice the introduction of some changes and breaks in the presentation of the truth in terms of doctrine and morals. In such situations, we should say I know my Catholic faith. I will not let myself be confused. For this faith, I am ready with the grace of God to die.
The Church must fulfill its primary task of proclaiming the truth, bearing in mind that it will always be persecuted. Security, contrary to the quite illusory vision of Pope John the Twenty Third and the Second Vatican Council regarding a so-called reconciliation of the Catholic Church with the modern world. Saint John Henry Newman already in 1834 prophetically painted the following realistic picture of the situation of the Church in front of the so-called modern world. I quote John Henry Newman. The Church of God on earth will be greatly reduced, as we may well imagine in its apparent numbers in the times of Antichrist, by the open desertion of the powers of the world.
This desertion will begin in a professed indifference to any particular form of Christianity under the pretense of universal toleration, which toleration will proceed from no true spirit of charity and tolerance but from a design to undermine Christianity by multiplying and encouraging other religions and false religions. The pretended toleration will go far beyond a just toleration, even as it regards the different religions and sects. The governments will pretend an indifference to all and will give protection in preference to none. All establishments will be laid aside. From the toleration of the most pestilent heresies, they will proceed to the toleration of Mohametanism, and atheism, and at last they will proceed to a positive persecution of the truth of Christianity. The merely nominal Christians will all desert the profession of the truth when the powers of the world desert it. And this tragic event I take to be typified by the order of Saint John in the Apocalypse to measure the temple and the altar and leave the outer court. These are the false Christians to be trodden underfoot by the pagans.
The property of the Church will be pillaged. The public worship was insulted and vilified by these deserters of the faith, who once professed but are not called apostates because they never were in earnest, true Christians. In principle, they were always what they now appear to be, pagans. When this general desertion of the faith takes place, then will commence the sackcloth ministry of the witnesses described in the Apocalypse. There will be nothing of splendor in the external appearance of the churches. They will have no support from the governments, no honors but those which no earthly power can take away, which they derived from God, who commissioned them to be his witnesses of his truth. So the words of John Henry Newman, written in 1834. Already as early as 1938, Hilaire Belloc presented an almost prophetic analysis of the current situation facing Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular, saying the modern attack on the faith, the latest and most formidable of all, has advanced so far that we can already affirm one all-important point quite clearly. It is to say one of two things must happen.
One of two results must become definite throughout the modern world. Either the Catholic Church will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and so far as public appreciation goes to silence, or the Catholic Church will, in this case, as throughout past times, react most strongly against her enemies than her enemies have been able to react against her. She will recover and extend her divine authority, and she will rise once more to the leadership of true civilization, which she created, and will thus recover and restore the world. In a word, either we Catholics shall become a small, persecuted, neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle cry Christus Vincit. The normal human conclusion in such conflicts that one or the other combatant will be overwhelmed and will disappear cannot be accepted.
The Church will not disappear for the Church is not of mortal stuff. The Church is the only institution among men not subject to mortality. Attack upon the Catholic Church, there will always be and never will the quarrel of men know complete unity, peace, and high nobility through the complete victory of the faith. For if that were so, the world would not be the world nor Jesus Christ at issue with the world, so Hilaire Belloc. In our day, true Catholics have the duty to know well the faith to give an account of what they believe and to defend the faith inside and outside the Church. It is urgent to restore solid Catholic apologetics. Hilaire Belloc made this important observation that the mood of faith has been largely ruined ruined certainly for the greater part of man. All will admit so true is this that already a majority do not know what the word faith means. For most men who hear it in connection with religion, it signifies either blind acceptance of irrational statements or of legends which common experience condemns, or a mere inherited habit of mental pictures which have never been tested and which, at the first touch of reality, dissolve like the dreams they are.
The whole vast body of apologetics defense of faith, the whole science of holy theology, the queen of all sciences, has for the mass of modern man ceased to be. He continues. Lastly there is this very important and perhaps decisive consideration though the social strength of Catholicism in numbers and certainly in most other factors as well is declining throughout the whole world the issue as between Catholicism and the completely new pagan society is now clearly marked and so they are today already almost quite distinct and sharing the field between them soon to be as markedly exposed as black and white true Catholicism and a new paganism. Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men talking vaguely of the Church are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk in Protestant countries at least of churches. The present generation cannot. There are not many churches because there is only one Church, the true one, holy Catholic Apostolic Church, on one side, and on the other side, its mortal enemy the world paganism.
So the words of Hilaire Belloc, which he wrote in 1938. Already, in order to know love and transmit and defend the greatness of the Catholic faith, we must know also the attempts that throughout the ages tried to undermine and disfigure the divine truth, and these attempts we call heresy, which constitute also a kind of desecration of the holiness and beauty of the Catholic faith. I have therefore composed a book with the title Flee from Heresy: A Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors. The title is taken from an expression of St Ignatius of Antioch, a great martyr bishop and disciple of the apostles from the first century. The book has three goals. First, to console faithful Catholics in showing how heresies and other forms of religious error have already been part of Church history since the first century, and that, like every form of evil, God has always used error to bring about some greater good in his mysterious providence. All things work together unto good for those who love God, says St Paul.
Second, to inform the faithful about the more prominent and harmful errors that the Church has faced bringing from the first century to our own time. It may come as a surprise to learn that many of today’s errors within the Church have already been clearly addressed and condemned by the Church, often centuries ago. Third, to challenge the faithful to better know love and pass on their Catholic faith to others. For how shall they believe in Christ of whom they have not heard, says St Paul. The true gravity of heresy cannot be understood apart from charity.
We are accused sometimes today by high-ranking clergy, when we defend and present simply the Catholic truth, the doctrine that we are rigid or we are throwing stones at other people, this is completely wrong. On the contrary, it is charity. It is an expression of love. Why. The one who truly loves living by authentic charity will combat whatever comes between him and the object of his love. He will fight for this because he loves this object. The knight fights valiantly to save his bride. The mother protects her child. The soldier defends his homeland. Similarly, the soul that loves God will always seek to grow in deeper knowledge of Him, for love follows knowledge. First knowledge and then love. And yet how can he love God whom he sees not, says St John, unless one truly knows God.
Through the right doctrine, we know God. Through right prayer, we know God. I stress the right doctrine, not simply religion. It is right not only prayer, right prayer, Catholic prayer, because all heresy is an obstacle to right knowledge of God. It hinders man’s ability to fulfill the first and greatest commandment, the very purpose of our existence, to love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with thy whole mind and with thy whole strength. As such, those who truly love God will always oppose doctrinal error as among the greatest evils, casting down imaginations and every higher thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, says St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, Second Corinthians. St Augustine maintains that this love and zeal for right doctrine for truth have always characterized the true Church of God, the Catholic Church, since the earliest days, and always will it. He said the one Church, the true Church, the Catholic Church, is fighting against all heresies. Fight it can be thought down, it cannot. The Church as for heresies, they all went out from members of the Church, like unprofitable branches pruned from the vine, but it still abides in its root, in its vine, in its charity. So St Augustine. As may be read in the writings of all the Church Fathers, heresy was regarded as one of the greatest of all evils.
St Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who was a direct disciple of St John the Apostle, was regarded at his time as a famous heretic. Marcion, the founder of a Gnostic sect, and this holy Polycarp regarded this man and said to him You are the firstborn of the devil. A disciple of St John said this. St Ignatius of Antioch, also a disciple of the apostles, sees in heretics poisonous plants in the garden of the Church or animals in human form. St Theophilus of Antioch, a bishop of the second century, compares the heretics to barren and rocky islands on which ships are wrecked. And Origen, a Church writer from the third century, says that as pirates place lights on cliffs to allure and destroy vessels in quest of refuge, so the prince of this world devil, lights the fires of false doctrine in order to destroy man.
St Jerome calls the congregations of heretics synagogues of Satan, and says their communion is to be avoided, like that of vipers and scorpions. This is the voice of the church from the times of the apostles, continuously until the 20th century, without interruption, always the same.
Him wise. We have to reject heresy and all this ambiguity. It is among the greatest mysteries of divine providence that God should allow the evil of doctrinal error to ever afflict His Church. Also, as an institution, the Church is forever preserved free from error in her official teaching and binding commands in the event the Church is teaching in a definitive and solemn dogmatic manner. We have to stress this is a difference. Then she is preserved and free from error. There are times when even the shepherds of the Church, teachers of the bishops, successors of the apostles, are permitted by God to fall into error, issuing faulty teachings or harmful commands in their ordinary ministry.
God has even permitted, in the past, some popes to affirm doctrinal errors and ambiguities. It was very rare, but it happened and cannot be denied. Of course, this was outside their solemn and definitive teachings. In God’s good time, doctrinal errors will always spur the members of the Church onward to a greater knowledge of the truth, to greater love, and to greater holiness. We certainly witness in our day a return to paganism in the explosion of gender ideology in all its forms, from feminism to LGBTQ movements, transgenderism, and legal recognition of all manner of so-called unions as on a par with true marriage. The common threads connecting these phenomena are the spirit of antichrist, the denial that the Son of God came in the flesh, and the rejection of His uniqueness as His only way to salvation. According to St Louis Grignon de Montfort, Our Lady needs new apostles in order to prepare with her the triumph and final victory of Christ.
These apostles’ souls should be instructed by Mary and totally consecrated to her service, entirely dedicated in her hands to the mission of snatching souls from the darkness of errors and from the danger of final perdition. As we witness in our day a growing immensity of evil which the powers of darkness seem to have installed in all corners of the world, yet we are living in a world of slavery, slavery of money of power of lust of passions of fashions of public opinion of narcotics, and the internet, and so on. The results are before our eyes: despair, frustration, neurosis, violence, and degradation. These are the very wages of sin, as St Paul says. By contrast, we must be servants of Our Lady and bind ourselves in our consecration like the chains that bind us to Mary as our mother. Just as Jesus came to us through Mary, so let us go back to Jesus along the same wonderful way that He came to us.
This is the opening invitation of St Louis Grignon de Montfort in his spiritual program of the total consecration to Our Lady. This is a kind of sacred code of Catholic spirituality for the difficult times. St Augustine spoke of the Church as a chaste virgin whom the apostle speaks of as a spouse to Christ, exhorting all Christians to do in the inner chambers of your soul what you view with amazement in the flesh of Mary. He who believes in his heart unto justice carries Christ in his heart. It is right to hope that, as in the past, so in our day, the Blessed Virgin will obtain from her Divine Son that the waves of the present tempest be calmed and let a brilliant victory crown this rivalry of Christians in prayer. Therefore, in these our dark times of doctrinal confusion with its deceitful flashes of relativism, naturalism anthropocentrism often masked in terms of dialogue or pastoral accompaniment, let us often invoke Our Lady with confidence and filial love. Rejoice, O Virgin Mary, for thou alone hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world. Mother of God, pray for us. I give you a blessing now.
Dominus vobiscum, et cum, spiritu tuo. Et benedictio dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et spiritus Santi descendant, super vos et maneat semper. Amen
Let us greet Our Lady in the Salve Regina. Salve Regina (Singing of Salve Regina)