IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CATHOLICISM AND MODERNISM
Editorial: I heard the most absurd thing today. A journalist was interviewing the new Roman Catholic Bishop, recently appointed by Pope Francis; and the report ended by quoting the Bishop, that he was working to make the Church what it used to be, “a happy place to be” (sic)!
When I was on pilgrimage in France in the winter of 2004, I had the opportunity to beg a ride from a Catholic layman, whose name I do not remember, who after sometime began spontaneously to talk to me of his sorrow concerning the horrible state of morals into which the Catholic Church in France had fallen in recent decades. I asked him, to what he attributed the primary cause of this decline. He said to me, “Its the bishops! I cannot understand why Rome is appointing the worst of men to be our Bishops!” Then he “confessed” his personal sense of guilt, in having spoken thus, because he considers that as a good catholic, one should not think like that, and asked me what I thought.
I was completely honest with him: I said, “You are telling me nothing different than what the laity tell me wherever I go, whether in North America or in Europe: they all say, the problem is the Bishops; even clergy lament to me, saying, “Where on earth did they find such a man to be the bishop of such and such a diocese?”
It is remarkable, even more so, when the individuals nominated do not even understand the very nature of the Church. The Church, it should be obvious to anyone who has read the Gospel, is not a restaurant: a happy place to be; which must sell Herself like a commercial operation, pandering to each and every opportunistic proposal or desire of its patrons.
The Church is Christ’s mystical Bride, which He founded and redeemed by His Most Bloody Passion and Death, as the Ark of Salvation for all who want to be rescued from their own perdition, merited by their personal sins and/or the sin of Adam. The Crucifixion of Our Lord is not a source of entertainment, except for the wicked headed to perdition: for the faithful it is a most serious, grave and sorrowful thing to remember.
Hence it is, that to make of the Liturgy or a church, a “happy place to be” is tantamount to overturning the entire Catholic religion in that place. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is, yes, a “Sacrifice”, not a “celebration”. To make it the latter is not to participate in it. To approach and celebrate with the former, is to authentically celebrate.
Let us not delude ourselves: to be at mass in the latter spirit, is to spiritually adulterate the mass, is to spiritually abuse Christ, making of His most Bitter Sufferings, the occasion of my own personal enjoyment, entertainment, satisfaction. That is nothing short of perverse sadism at the highest theological level.
The Church, indeed, every Church, is a place where man rejects sin, purges himself with mortification and penance, receives the reconciliation merited by Christ’s horrible Passion and Death, is nourished by the most perfect participation in that Sacrifice, which is a humbly, contrite, penitential participation in the Sacrifice by a worthy communion and a life lived in the same spirit, in fidelity to the unchanging perennial Faith, taught by Christ, received by the Apostles, handed down in Sacred Tradition.
The trick of the Modernists has been to make us change the words we use to express our Faith, so as to make of forgetful of what the Catholic Faith is all about; and to substitute in its place the sticky-sweet terminology and philosophy of the world: of hedonism, in which personal satisfaction is placed before all other things.
Perhaps, that is why the Bishop who was interviewed by this journalist is so overweight as to no longer even have a neckline.