The Myth of the Post-Conciliar Church non-Militant
Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis
Why the Catholic Church will Always
Prevail
“The Church is crumbling because the Vatican,
the Papacy, the Curia, and conservative bishops and priests have lost
touch with changes in the 21st Century world.”
How often have we heard this
criticism leveled at the Church — that has (unlike numberless political
systems and countless social “revolutions” that have been tossed into
Trotsky’s famous “dustbin of history” — before Communism ended up there
in less than a century) endured for over 2000 years.
The truth of the matter is quite to the contrary: it is precisely
because the Church has resisted the prevailing and passing social trends
and political doctrines of history — and remained faithful to
the Depositum Fidei — the Sacred Deposit of the Faith — that
She has prevailed. The doctrines and dogma by which the Church has been
articulated through the prompting of the Holy Ghost remain immutable.
They are unchanging because they cannot be changed. And they cannot
be changed because Sacred Scripture itself cannot be changed, together
with the Sacred Tradition around which it is understood and exercises
its mandate to,
“Go, therefore and teach all nations; baptizing them in the Name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
— Christ’s very last words
in the Gospel of Matthew (28.19 … last chapter, last verse).
Stat
Crux dum Volvitur Orbis — The Cross Remains Standing while
the World Turns (the motto of the Carthusians) — is very much
to the point. The Cross, together with the Church, and inseparable from
it, remains, has remained, and will always remain despite the turning
fortunes and misfortunes of the world. It is Christ's Kingdom and, as
He told us, it is not of this world.
3
She is the Mother of sinners whom She forms into saints. They, too,
were, and are, and will be — in spite of the world ... and, sadly,
in spite of many of those within Her.
The Church appears to be presently unraveling precisely because
— since it began questioning its very raison d'être at Vatican
II — it has made enormous and perfidious efforts to accommodate a world
that hates it and hates its teachings and the Christ Who made His New
Covenant with it.
Do you really imagine that the Church would suddenly flourish if it
is contemptuous of and unfaithful to its spiritual (not worldly) mandate
and decides to have (presuming it can; and it cannot) transsexual
“female” priestesses, adulterous “marriages”, same-sex marriages, abortions-on-demand,
human cloning, human transspecial cloning, while abrogating every
moral proscription concerning every aspect of human behavior, claiming
that all is acceptable to a non-judgmental God (all dogs and clones
go to Heaven) proclaimed by secularists — who largely claim that they
do not believe in a God (not of their own making and whose attributes
are their own)? Do you really think that it would win the adulation
of the world? Such a Godless “church” well may. But it would no longer
be the Holy Catholic Church. It would not even be a good counterfeit.
It would be the world; a world appropriately cross-dressed as
a 'church". It would not have the mark of Baptism, but the mark of the
beast. It would the abrogation of the Church, or better yet, the transmutation
of the Church into the world. In a word, it would be a
pointless state of affairs.
Ecclesia
Militans — the Church Miltant
Since the Second Vatican
Council we have, to an astonishing extent, forgotten who we are, and
what our mandate is, as a Church: not a social service
agency, not an NGO, not a steward of the earth's climate, not an arbiter
of wealth and its distribution 1, and certainly not as masters
of ourselves. We have lost our focus, if not our entire vision.
One no
longer hears of the complete Church: the Church Militant
(Ecclesia Militans, here on earth), the Church Suffering
(Ecclesia Penitens, in Purgatory) and the Church Triumphant
(Ecclesia Triumphans, in Heaven). They are one inseparable Church.
Each exists with the other and prays for the other, and hence we have
a clear understanding of the Communion of Saints (Communio
Sanctorum) and an even clearer understanding of the efficacy of
intercessory prayer. Catholics had always understood this prior to Vatican
II. Since then, however, our understanding of the Church has been truncated,
diminished, incomplete. Our focus has become on the present
with little or no real thought of realities in parallel worlds that
are are, paradoxically, the same world to the Catholic. This
is, or for two thousand years was, the sole province of the Church
Militant whose primary obligation was to tirelessly seek
the salvation of one's immortal soul; to know, to love, and
to serve God in this life that one may be happy with Him forever in
Heaven, and to strive, as
"a good soldier of Christ",
4
against all sin
and every temptation we encounter through the blandishments of
"the world, the flesh, and the devil".
Today,
such notions — central to our lives as Catholics — appear oddly
quaint; indeed, as quaint as the notion of a tripartite Church: Militant,
Suffering, and Triumphant. The Church has been presented
to us, not in its multidimensional reality, but as the very local "Faith
Community" of the here and now, immersed in time rather than eternity,
as broadly inclusive of "sensitivities" (hence our aversion to the word
"sin" and our intolerance of the place "Hell"), as democratic, egalitarian,
and gender-neutral. It is a place to feel good about oneself and to
be assured of ones place in Paradise. It is a place to be indemnified
against ones sins (and definitely not to confess them and be
absolved of them!). It is pure ritual devoid of all religious
ritual. It is not the Church Militant of ages past ... or even a few
decades past. That Church Militant came at great cost to oneself
and in many ways. It was the "Narrow Path". And now, as we all
recognize, "the path is broad"
5,
or has become so since Vatican II. In its unnecessary and dangerous
struggle to "redefine itself" in terms compatible with "the Modern World"
or the "21st century", the Church that emerged from Vatican II hemorrhaged
more than two generations of Catholics who spurn the Church as irrelevant
(as indeed it has made itself) — it largely forgot, or more frightening
still, completely lost understanding of the very reason of its mission,
its purpose, and its very being:
The Church exists
for the salvation of souls
Everything else is ancillary,
secondary, and of incalculably less worth. 2 As such it is
ever at enmity with the world which capitalizes upon men for purely
social, sexual, and political ends that find their short-lived fulfillment
in the here and now. It is why the Church on Earth is called (or at
least was called, for 2000 years) the Church Militant
— Catholics on earth
who, availing themselves of the Sacraments of the Church, perpetually
struggle against, and fight the great spiritual battle with sin as the
greatest affront to God through the instigation of the evil one and
for the salvation of their immortal souls, against an implacable enemy:
Saint Paul is clear on this when he wrote to the Ephesians (6.12)
that, "our wrestling
is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers,
against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against
the spirits of wickedness in the high places."
This,
then, is our vocation: the call to nothing less than holiness
... not fairness; to God ... and not the world, as Saint
John warns us:
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"Love not the
world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man
love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the
flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride
of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world.
And the world passes away, and the concupiscence thereof:
but he that does the will of God, abides for ever."
(1 St.
John 2.15-17) |
Liberals — we will not say “progressives” as they prefer to think themselves,
and, after all, “a rose by any other name …” — both ecclesiastic and
lay — nevertheless demand this transmutation of the Church as a point
of “justice”. Considered carefully, however, a world of such “justice”
is a world of insanity, a hellish world beyond the most grotesque vision
of today’s darling academic sibyls. We know it! But it is not “correct”
to state it … is it? We can, after all, call a rose by any other name
… however ghastly its fumes that we insist on calling “fragrance”. As
long as cadaverine looks like water, we will call it so, but
live not a day if we imbibe it. But because it looks like water we will
demand it be treated like water. Much like justice. No?
The Holy Catholic Church will remain all three — Holy, Catholic,
and a Church — until the end of time. Why? Because Christ promised
it. Can you adduce a better argument? The physical edifice may
(indeed, already has) become mean and mediocre like the meager Faith
of many of Her blighted children. She may become smaller in number,
but for that reason She will be all the more fervent in holiness. That
is okay. Parasitic thistles — that grow for a season and die and never
re-emerge — are planted among the wheat that also dies but grows again,
and manifold, season after season, — these thistles, yes, seem to overwhelm
it, so vast is their number. But they have not reached the Threshing
Floor where the chaff is separated from the wheat, although it is certain
that they will. They must grow to feed the fire that cannot be
quenched, while the wheat must grow to feed the Faithful.
The very gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church
— do you really fear that Caesar with his debauched children will pull
down her walls — from without … or within?
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Printable PDF Version
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1
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God
what is God's" (St Matthew 22.21)
2
"For what doth it profit a man, if he gain
the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?
(St. Matthew 16.26)
3 "Jesus answered: My
kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants
would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but
now my kingdom is not from hence."
(St. John 18.36)
4
"Labor as
a good soldier of Christ Jesus."
(2 Timothy 2.3)
5
"Enter ye
in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that
leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat. How narrow
is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there
are that find it!"
(St. Matthew 7.13)
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