Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

Our Lord Jesus Christ is the revelation of God. He shows us who God is.This is especially true at the end of Our Lord's life. We reveal what we are particularly in a time of crisis. It is the time of Our Lord's Passion that we see more clearly than ever before Who He is, Who God is.The Last Supper and the Passion make one thing very clear: our God is humble.Each event of the Last Supper and the Passion is a manifestation of Our Lord's humility.There are many aspects of Our Lord's humility that we could speak about. But I want to focus on one of them: Our Lord's effort to lower Himself in order to do good to us.We could say that Our Lord has to make a choice between two things: love and justice. If He chooses justice, He maintains Himself strictly in His state of Godhood. If He chooses love, He lowers Himself so that He can stoop down to His miserable creatures and assist them.We see what Our Lord chooses. He chooses love, a love that works through humility. The love of God uses humility as the most effective way to express itself and achieve its goal of doing good to us.On this night of the Last Supper, Our Lord performs three great acts of humility that enable Him to do great good to the Apostles and also to us.

Have you ever asked God for a miracle? I have.Why not? We know and believe that God is all-powerful.When you are all-powerful, that means that it takes you no effort to do anything that you do.How difficult was it for God to create the universe? It was not difficult at all. It took no effort. How difficult to create my soul? Easy.How difficult is it for Him to work a miracle? He can work any miracle that He wants, at any time, no problem. Curing cancer, removing tumors, raising from the dead, curing blindness, whatever.Besides this, it seems that Our Lord wants us to ask for miracles.His word about having faith the grain of a mustard seed. “the apostles said to the Lord: Increase our faith. And the Lord said: If you had faith like to a grain of mustard seed, you might say to this mulberry tree, Be thou rooted up, and be thou transplanted into the sea: and it would obey you” (Lk. 17:5-6). This seems to be a gratuitous miracle, without any purpose, and Our Lord is saying that they could ask for that.Our Lord working so many miracles without being asked. Today's miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes happened, even though there was no request or faith.Two Masses of this week will give us Our Lord's two greatest miracles: the raising from the dead of the son of the widow of Naim and the raising of Lazarus; in neither case was Our Lord asked to raise them from the dead.Meanwhile, there are many occasions in the Gospel when Our Lord immediately grants a request for Him to work a miracle. Most often, after He works the miracle, He praises the person for asking for the miracle and tells them it was because of their faith that He granted it. It seems that the manifestation of our faith by asking a miracle delights Him.Besides this, Our Lord encourages us to pray for whatever we need. His words are so strong and encouraging! “Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.” (Lk. 11:9-10)

Right now in the United States, there is a lot of basketball being played and sometimes you hear commentators talk about second-chance points. This is when a team makes a shot, misses, gets its own rebound, and then manages to score.Second-chance points are not common because the defending team is in a better position to get the rebound. For this reason, teams know not to rely on second-chance points and always try to make a basket on their first try.In today's Gospel, we hear Our Lord speaking about what might be called second-chance graces. The people who were with Him were experiencing incredible graces but were not fully realizing it. They had in front of them the Incarnate God Himself. They were in the midst of the most important time of the history of the human race.Our Lord was working incredible miracles and so providing proof of His divinity. In today's Gospel, we also see that He was casting out devils. He was freeing people from slavery to the devil. But this situation was not meant to last long. Our Lord would only be among them for three years and then He would be crucified for our sins.If they do not accept Him now, chances are that there will be no second chance. He casts out the devil today and they say that He casts out the devil by the devil. Tomorrow, He is going to go away. Meanwhile, the devil is going to go and get reinforcements and come back to possess their souls. When he does so, who is going to help them?If they reject Him, there is not going to be anyone able to face off against the devil and they will be defeated by him. It is now or never. There will be no second chance.

We have made a lot of sacrifices for our capital campaign. But what good is it if we do not save our souls? That is the whole point of everything that happens here.A priest wants every single person in his parish to save their souls.We want everyone here to be reunited in Heaven one day. We don't want anyone to be missing.Fr. McBride and I don't want to appear before Our Lord and hear from Him, “Yes, you were at St. Isidore's in Watkins. You saved many souls. But look at all of these other souls who went to hell.”One of the most important prayers of the priest is: “Lord, do not let any one of the souls that you have confided to me be lost forever!”Mortal sinIf there is one thing that a priest worries about more than anything else, it is the souls that have a habit of mortal sin.What do I mean by a habit of mortal sin?I mean that mortal sin happens regularly, in a predictable way.The soul commits a mortal sin every day, every week, every month, whatever. It is not something that happens occasionally; it happens according to a regular pattern.It is when a soul usually confesses mortal sin when he goes to confession.ImpurityIf this is happening, we all know the reason. 99% of the time, it is because of impurity.The soul has gotten into a pattern of indulging in illicit sexual pleasure and cannot give it upThere are teenagers who start off on a bad habit of self-abuse. Then, they find that, when they want to stop, they are unable.There are teenagers and adults who have formed bad habits with technological devices. They have the behavior of addicts. They are always telling themselves that they are going to stop and yet they never do stop.What are we exchanging Heaven for? What are we exchanging the love of God for?

Around 175 years ago, a small village in France with a population of only 200 people was receiving 100,000 visitors each year. People would sleep in the fields and wait in lines for days in order to achieve the end of their visit.What was so important that they would make so much of an effort and go through so much hardship? What were they all there to accomplish? They were there to make their confession to a saint. They wanted to tell their sins to a saint, hear what he would say in return to them, and receive his absolution.St. John-Marie Vianney would read the souls of his penitents. He would weep over the sins confessed to him. He would fix the innumerable problems that sins cause and restore peace to troubled souls. Many people would leave the village of Ars changed for life.We do not have any priest here at St. Isidore's who have the ability to read souls or who weep when sins are confessed to them. You do not have saints for priests.But your priests have the exact same power that the Cure d'Ars had, the power to cleanse your souls from sin. In that confessional box, the main thing that was happening in Ars is also happening here: the washing of souls with the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.Despite the fact that you do not have saints for your priests, it is yet extremely important for you have a love for the sacrament of confession, that you have a devotion to confession.Our Lord came on this earth and gave His life for our sins. But His Blood only reaches us through certain channels. The main way for you to access the Blood that He shed for you is through the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion.How many are there among us who like to go to Holy Communion but do not like to go to Confession? How many like the Blood of Our Lord when it comes through the Holy Eucharist but not when it comes through the absolution of the priest?

This life is a contest of love between us and God.When we were in the seminary, we priests learned in moral theology that God has total dominion over all things, while we have partial dominion over some things. What this means is that everything that we have and that we are belongs to God, while we are only stewards of those things.You car belongs to God. Your house belongs to God. Your children belong to God. You belong to God. God has given you these things, but He has only made you a steward over them, an administrator of them. He has not given you the authority to do with them whatever you want.Why has God done this? Because He is your Father, because He loves you, because He cares about you. Because He wants this life to be a contest of love.It is sad that in the Enlightenment and Protestant world that we live in today, most people do not want such a God. They do not like a God Who only gives them a partial control over the things they give them, use and administration but not total ownership.And so they invent a God more to their liking. They invent the Freemasonic God, the Deist God. The Freemasonic God is a manufacturer; He is not a Father. He makes us but then He does not expect anything of us.Think about how it works with a car manufacturer. The cars roll off the manufacturing line. You go to buy one, you like it, you pay the price for it, and you drive it off. Does the manufacturer care what you do with the car after that point? No, not at all! You can use it for transportation; you can use it for target practice; you can use it for off-road racing, whatever.Modern people tend to want God to be like the manufacturer, where He gives us our life, we are born into this world, and then He does not care at all what we do with our life from that point. We can become an Catholic or an atheist, a Buddhist or a Baptist. We can be faithful or unfaithful, we can be loving or hating, we can be selfish or unselfish. God doesn't care.The thing is, however, this God does not exist. He is a false god, an idol created by modern man so that he can worship himself and his own free will.The real God is a father. A father does not just beget children and then leave them to do whatever they want. No, a father instructs his children, looks after his children, sets expectations for his children, makes demands of them. He wants to be united with them.Whenever a father gives something to his child, he does not give it unconditionally, he does not give it to be used however the child wants. The father gives the child life, gives the child his own name, gives the child food and clothing, gives the child the Catholic faith and a Catholic education. And he expects the child to use all of these things wisely and well.Notice that with the manufacturer, there is no union in selling the car. The good father and child, however, are on the same page, think the same way, want the same thing. They have love.What this means is that this life is a contest of love. God has set up our life such that He showers us with love through His gifts and then tests us to see if we are going to take those gifts and use them to love Him in return, or if we are going to take the gifts and use them for our own purposes.

#SSPX #prayerWhen God created man, at the same time He wanted to create the human family. He created one man and one woman, Adam and Eve, and then He married them. He made them two in one flesh.When God Himself chose to come down upon this earth in the fullness of time, He chose to do so in a family. The family had existed for the entire history of man up to that point, but now mankind would have a perfect example of what a family should be in this holy family, where you have God, the Mother of God, and the foster father of God.Families today are reminded not only that they belong to an institution that God has created but an institution that He has modeled for us.There are many aspects of the life of the Holy Family that we could speak about but today I particularly want to focus upon their example of prayer.

Today, we honor the holy name of Jesus. The Church has a special feast dedicated to this name. The name is holy because it came directly from God. It was given to Our Lady by the angel Gabriel just before she conceived Our Lord in her womb. It was given to St. Joseph by an angel in a dream when he was wondering what he should do about the pregnancy of Our Lady.Our Lady and St. Joseph gave Our Lord the name of Jesus on the day of His circumcision, in obedience to the will of God.The name is one of a role. It indicates both the purpose of Our Lord's life and who He is. He is one who saves. He is a rescuer. That is what it means to be a savior.In the case of Our Lord, there is no other savior. He is the only rescuer who is able to save us from death. No can bring us to life besides Him. No one is both God and man besides Him.This is why it is an honor for us to serve Him. It is an honor for us to serve the one alone who is the savior of the human race, the one alone who is the God-man.It is an honor for us to defend His name because “there is no other name under Heaven given to men whereby they may be saved”.It is important for us to understand that, without Our Lord, we are lost, whereas with Our Lord, we have true fulfillment in this life and the next.Our Lord teaches us the true meaning of our lives, He teaches us how to live them in order to attain happiness, and He gives us the means to live them that way through His grace in our souls. His teaching contains a paradox that is mysterious but true.He says, “He that finds his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it.” He says this right after saying, “He that loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loves son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that takes not up his cross, and follows me, is not worthy of me.” (Matt. 10:37)When you serve the noble and true ideal of following Our Lord in this life, and this is the highest ideal possible, you flourish in your life. When, on the other hand, you refuse to serve Our Lord and serve yourself instead, your life is very poor.

The life of man is marked by a paradox: there is in each one of us the desire to serve another because of the fact that we are creatures, but there is also in us the desire to be independent such that we want to stand on our own feet and be free from all control.Firstly, we have a desire to serve another. We cannot avoid the obvious fact that we are limited and helpless in many respects.We try to do things and we fail. Others have talents that we do not. We have a lot of desires which we recognize we have no power to realize.This leads us to look for someone to follow who is more powerful, more capable, who is able to protect our interests and help us achieve what we desire in a much greater way than we could by ourselves. This is why everyone wants a hero to follow.We live at a time in history when the importance of independence is emphasized in society more than it has ever been. Yet there is no less hero worship today than in the past.At the same time, we want to be independent, to be in a state where we do not serve anyone else. We have a fear of serving because we find it hard to trust anyone ruling over us. We realize that if we give ourselves over to serve another, that person might take advantage of us and make our lives worse instead of better.There is great suspicion today regarding everyone who holds power. There is a belief that power necessarily corrupts people. And so, the more power that they hold, the more corrupt they will be.Plus, we do not like to be told what to do. We feel like the act of obedience causes us to surrender our free will, something that is very precious to us.When we face this paradox that exists within us—that we both want to serve and we do not want to serve—we have a number of possibilities as to how we will face it.

Christmas is the night when God gives Himself to us. Isaias gives us a name to call Our Lord when He comes: “God with us”. And he also emphasizes: “A child is born to us. A child is given to us.” It is difficult for us to understand because it exceeds our understanding.God is born, in person. God is born for you, for your sakes.There is a particularity about Christmas, a concreteness, that has to be noticed and emphasized. There are many ways to look at the Nativity scene, many ways to contemplate it. But tonight, at least, I would like you to think about what it would be like if you were the only one there. Just you and the divine Child.When we are there alone with the Christ Child, we are going to realize something right away. We are going to realize that our human condition is important.We are going to look at this Child and say to ourselves, “God is a pure spirit, infinite, eternal, all-powerful. Yet He takes on flesh; He becomes human and He confines Himself within the limits of the human nature that He has created. He has started off as an infant, just like I did, an infant that cannot talk, that cannot walk, that cannot feed itself, that is helpless in every way.”The Christ Child is saying to us, “I have come to be close to you in the very human nature that I gave to you. I have taken on your human nature, as a gift to you. You must accept your human nature as a gift from me. You must reach your salvation through the limits of your human nature.”By that, I mean that we have to live in and love the reality that God has made for us.The limitations of our body: sometimes healthy, sometimes sickThe limitations of a world tainted by sin: sometimes good, sometimes evil we cannot stopThe limitations of desire: sometimes desires realized, many times desires that cannot be realized

#homily #gaudeteFor the past month, there has been a lot of news concerning who President Trump is choosing to be part of his next cabinet when he takes over the reins of government on January 20.When a new name is announced and you read the reaction of the person chosen, you hear them saying something like, “I would like to thank President Trump for his trust in me. This is the honor of my life. I will do my utmost best to serve the American people”.Whenever a person in a place of power singles out someone and chooses them for a particular role, that person feels honored and has a great desire to the do the task assigned.This is how the Apostles felt when they were chosen by Our Lord Jesus Christ to be His followers and the leaders of His newly-formed Church. He told them at the Last Supper, “You have not chosen me but I have chosen you and appointed you that you should go, and bring forth fruit, and your fruit should remain” (Jn. 15:16)St. Paul would often begin his epistles by saying, “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God” and would emphasize that he received his mission from God Himself.Throughout this time of Advent, there is a figure who appears time and again in the Gospels, the precursor of Our Lord Jesus Christ, St. John the Baptist. At the end of every Mass, we read about him that, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to give testimony of the light, that all men might believe through him.” (Jn. 1:6-7)St. John today makes the bold claim that he is a figure fulfilling a prophecy of Isaias some centuries before that there would be a prophet who would prepare the way for the Messias.We still speak of these figures today, and especially of Our Lady, because they were given important roles in the kingdom of God. It is one thing to be given a role by a powerful man; it is quite another thing to be given a role by Almighty God.

St. Isidore Capital Campaign website: growstisidore.orgToday, I want to speak to you about glory.It's the second Sunday in a row that we have a Gospel about the Last Judgment.Typically, when we think of the LJ, we think of a terrifying spectacle, where the world will be consumed in fire, where everyone on the earth will die, where all nations and towns will be wiped away. No more Denver, no more NYC, no more USA.It is true that the LJ will be a day of wrath, a day of trembling and mourning.But it will be a blessed day for the saints. It will be the day that they enter into their glory, body and soul.It is the day that Our Lord will say to them, “Well done, good and faithful servant, come take possession of the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.”This is what we want to happen to us on that day. We want to hear Our Lord say to us that He is going to give us possession of a kingdom.We should want to receive as much glory as possible on that day. It is good for us to desire heavenly glory!But it is not enough to desire it; we must also ask ourselves what we must do to receive it.This is a “thought experiment” that St. Ignatius has us do when we are on retreat.When I appear before OL one day for my judgment, what will I wish that I had done?What things will I have done that I will be glad about?What things will I have done that I wish I did not do?What things will I have left undone that I wish I had accomplished?

#resurrection #catholicAt the beginning of the second century, around the year 100, a man named Justin was born in the city of Flavia Neapolis. That is a town in modern day Palestine.Growing up, Justin was educated as a philosopher in the school of Platonic philosophy. He was a pagan and he heard talk about a group of people called Christians. He was told that they were terribly immoral people.But this did not make sense to Justin. He saw the Christians appearing before Roman judges and willingly being martyred for Christ. He said to himself that it was impossible that they would be doing this while living an evil life or a life of pleasure.St. Justin went on to investigate Christianity and become a convert. Since he came from the pagan world and understood it well, he was in a good position to make the right arguments with the pagans to convert them to Catholicism.St. Justin was eventually martyred when he was about 65 years old and we celebrate his feast day on April 14.One of the things that St. Justin tried to do was to convince the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to stop putting Christians to death. For this end, he wrote two works of explanation and defense of the Catholic faith that were called “Apologies”. This does not mean that he was saying sorry in these works; rather, Apology was a Greek word meaning “a formal defense of one's opinions and conduct”.There is one part of St. Justin's first Apology that I would like to focus upon today. It is the part where he defends the resurrection of bodies and his defense relates to today's Gospel.

#Catholic #SSPXWhether you drive to St. Isidore's from Byers or Bennett, Aurora or Denver, or elsewhere, you come to a church in a rural setting, surrounded by farmland.You come to a church that was built by farmers and which is dedicated to a saint who was a farmer, St. Isidore.You come to the traditional Latin Mass, which often presents Gospels for your reflection that have some relation to farming. There are at least eight Sundays of the year when this happens. This Sunday and next Sunday are two examples.The reason for this is that Our Lord often drew from farming in His teaching. He compared Himself to a shepherd and us to sheep.He compared the Church to a field and us to plants. He talked about seeds being planted and bearing fruit, or landing on the wrong ground and not bearing fruit, about seeds growing up with weeds. He talked about mustard seeds, about vines and vineyards. He compared people to trees and said that we should judge them according to their fruits: how they act and what effect they have on others.Our Lord once came upon a fig tree and cursed it for being barren as a symbol of a soul not making progress; He told us that we should look at fig trees to know what season we are in.Our Lord is the Creator of Heaven and Earth. So, we should not be surprised that, when He comes from Heaven down onto this Earth, He teaches us about Heaven using the things of Earth. He teaches us about His design of Heaven using analogies with His design of Earth.One of the main things that Our Lord is teaching us when He compares us to plants is the duty we have to grow in holiness over the course of our life. It is not acceptable to Our Lord that He would give us this life as a time to make our way to Heaven and then we end up using it for other things.

As we come to the feast of Christ the King this year, everyone has politics on their mind. There are important elections coming up in less than two weeks that will decide the course of our country for the next four years.The coincidence of this feast and the elections provides for us an opportune moment for us, as Catholics, to remind ourselves of our politics.Our political stance is very simple: we have a king to whom we pledge our wholehearted allegiance, Our Lord Jesus Christ. We recognize Him as our God, our Redeemer and as the head of the race to which we belong, the human race.We strive with all of our might to submit our entire lives to Him, to follow His will in everything that we do. It is an honor for us to be able to serve Him.We believe that He established a Church that is a divine institution, the Catholic Church, and that this Church communicates to us the truths that our King came to teach us and the way of life that our King wants us to follow.We know that when we serve this King by living a devout Catholic life and especially by following Him on the royal way of the cross, He gives us a share in His royal power. He gives us the power to rule over the world, the flesh and the devil.Through our service of Christ our King, we become truly free. We have the ability to refuse all that works to destroy us; we have the ability to direct ourselves towards our true good.We know that, if we are faithful to our King during this life, we will be given a kingdom in the life to come. We will be given a share in the eternal reign of Christ the King for all eternity in Heaven. We will join in the triumph of Our Lord, Our Lady and the saints forever.This is our politics; this is our plan for our life. For us, Our Lord Jesus Christ is everything.

With the sudden death of Bishop Tissier de Mallerais on October 8, there are many who are concerned about the future of the SSPX, realizing that the SSPX needs bishops to survive.This is a good moment for us to remind ourselves about three things: why the consecrations of bishops took place in 1988; why there have not been more bishops consecrated since then; and what we might expect for the consecration of bishops in the future.

In our Catholic doctrine classes for the past three weeks, we have been going over Pope Leo XIII's beautiful encyclical on marriage Arcanum Divinae.Early on in the encyclical, he says the following: “the Universal Church has always taught that Christ our Lord raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament; that to husband and wife, guarded and strengthened by the heavenly grace which His merits gained for them, He gave power to attain holiness in the married state”.When Our Lord made marriage a sacrament at the wedding feast of Cana, he raised it to the supernatural level. From that point, marriage was not only able to accomplish natural things like bringing children into this world and having husband and wife assist one another.It was now also able to accomplish supernatural things. Among those supernatural things is this one: your marriage is able to make you holy. Your sacramental marriage is able to draw you closer to God and get you to Heaven. It has the capacity to make you a saint!

#demons #angelsIn our images, we depict St. Michael standing over the devil and thrusting a spear into him while holding the scales of justice. This is because St. Michael is the victor over the devil.The book of the Apocalypse speaks about this victory. “And there was a great battle in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast unto the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” (Apoc. 12:7-9)This passage refers to the future when St. Michael will bind the devil in hell for all time. But we know that St. Michael already defeated the devil at the beginning of time, when the angels had to choose between God and themselves.We will sing about this victory at Vespers this afternoon in the hymn “Te splendor”. Michael bears thy standard dread, And lifts the mighty Cross on high. He in that Sign the rebel power. Did with their Dragon Prince expel; And hurled them from the heaven's high towers, Down like a thunderbolt to hell.The bottom line is that the devil is a loser and the good angels are winners. Everyone who rejects God is on the losing side; everyone who serves God is on the winning side.We are on the side of God; we are on the side of the good angels. And so we are on the winning side. But in today's difficult times, when evil is so triumphant, we can easily forget about the good angels and the fact that the devil has already lost.We obviously have to take the devil seriously. At the same time, we do not have to worry if we are leading a good Catholic life and we have a devotion to the holy angels.Today, I just want to remind us of the fact that the good angels are far superior to the devils. So, if we have a devotion to them, they will definitely be able to keep the devil away from us.

You know that Sts. James and John approached Our Lord to ask Him that they might reign with Him, that they might sit at His right and left hand in His kingdom, once He had entered into His glory. Our Lord, in response, said to them, “Can you be baptized with the baptism wherewith I am to be baptized?” (Mk. 10:38) And they said, “We can.”You see in this request the desire to be identified with Our Lord, the desire for a complete and total association, such that Sts. James and John would be inseparable from Our Lord in His kingdom. Of course, there was a merely worldly ambition in this request. However, we are meant to have a similar ambition: we must want to be completely identified with OL.Our Lord says to Sts. James and John: “You do not know what you ask.” And then He proceeds to tell them what they need to do to have their request granted, and predicts that they will indeed accomplish what is necessary. There are three stages in this whole scene: a) the brothers desire to be identified with Our Lord; b) they understand the means necessary to reach that end through Our Lord's teaching; c) they employ those means by dying for OL.Let me remark in passing how few there are who even make it to the first step. Who wants to be completely identified with Jesus Christ? Is not such a one considered to be a religious fanatic by the world, a fool? Is not such a one obsessive? But who is the fool? Is it the saints who are fools who become fools for Christ, or is it the worldlings who become fools for the world?We, above all people, must have this burning desire to be identified with Our Lord. We, above all people, must understand the wisdom of Christ, and the folly of the world.“Can you be baptized with the baptism wherewith I am to be baptized?” Of course, Our Lord is speaking about His death. And you see from this that it is not enough for Him to die. If He dies and moves towards us, but we do not move towards Him, then there is no identification. This is why He says, “He who does not take up His cross and follow me is not worthy of Me.” We have to live the life of Christ, repeat that life, we may say.Our Lord issues the call “Follow Me” but He also gives us most powerful means of answering it. These means are the sacraments and the Mass. With St. Thomas the Apostle, once we have embraced this desire of identifying ourselves with Christ, we say, “Let us go and die with Him.” How? Well, firstly, we are baptized.In this sacrament, it is not sufficient for sin to be wiped away. On the contrary, it is necessary for the candidate to “switch sides”, to take on a new life, a new mode of existence. Quite simply, the baptized must be brought into the life of Christ Himself.St. Paul is at pains in many passages to make Catholics understand that their lives are now assimilated to that of Christ. In the early Church, catechumens walked down steps to be immersed or buried in a pool of water before rising up and walking up the other side. This was a symbol, St. Paul remarks in Rom. 6:3-4, of their death and resurrection, mirroring those of OL. As a result, they can “walk in newness of life”; they now live the life of Christ.

One of the great roles of Holy Mother Church is to teach us how to speak to God, to create in our hearts the proper dispositions of religion. She does this especially through her liturgy, where we have a ceremony prepared for us such that all we have to do is enter into it and make ourselves one with it, as far as possible, in order to become holy.One of the most powerful ways in which the Church teaches us the sentiments we should have in our souls, and creates those sentiments in us is through her hymns. There are hundreds upon hundreds of hymns that have been created throughout the centuries, providing the Church with a vast musical repertoire.Among them all, there are two, however, that seem to stand out above the rest, two hymns of sorrow, two hymns concerned with the most lamentable topic possible: death.One is the Dies Irae, about the Last Judgment; the other is the Stabat Mater, about Our Lady witnessing the death of Our Lord.Both were composed in the 1200s; both were used as sequences at Mass and were among the five sequences that were kept by Pope Pius V when he canonized the Tridentine Mass.Both of them were set to music by great composers on their deathbed. Mozart was composing music for the Dies Irae when he died at the age of 35; Pergolesi was composing music for the Stabat Mater when he died at the age of 26.Both of them were lost to the liturgy of the Church when the Novus Ordo Mass got rid of Latin and Gregorian Chant. We are blessed to be able to hold on to them and profit from them by holding on to the traditional Mass.We are more familiar with the Stabat Mater than the Dies Irae because we sing the Stabat Mater whenever we pray the Stations of the Cross during Lent.The Franciscans have a great devotion to the Passion of Our Lord and you know that St. Francis of Assisi received the very wounds of Our Lord in his body. Less than a century after the death of St. Francis, the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi composed the Stabat Mater. His composition is so beautiful and inspiring that over 300 composers have set the words of the hymn to music.The hymns has twenty stanzas. The first four stanzas set the scene by telling the story of what is happening; the next four stanzas make an appeal to the one listening to the hymn to have sympathy for this mother who is standing at the foot of the cross of her dying Son. Then there are ten stanzas addressed directly to Our Lady, making beautiful requests of her. Finally, the hymn ends with two stanzas addressed to Our Lord, asking Him that we may go to Heaven when we die.I would like for us to focus upon those ten stanzas in the middle of the hymn where we make our appeal to Our Lady.

Once a man went off to the mountains for a hike. When he arrived at the trailhead, he read a sign that said, “For your safety stay on trail”. He did this for a little bit but soon he became curious about the glittery and shiny things that he saw in the forest next to the trail.So, he left the trail and entered into the forest as the sun started going down. As he got deeper into the forest, it got darker and darker. Pretty soon, he was lost. He tried to find his way back to the trail but he could not find it. He kept walking and walking for days without getting anywhere and without the light of the sun ever coming back, as in this forest, it was dark all of the time.The food in his backpack was running out and he finally just sat down on a rock, immersed in the darkness of the forest. A few more days passed and he was beginning to resign himself to death when he finally saw a glimmer of light off in the distance.After a time, he realized that it was not coming from the sun but was coming from a lady who was holding a child. He walked towards the light. He was very weak but he managed to reach the lady. As soon as he arrived at her, she said to him, “Adam, if you are willing to carry my child, I will show you the way out of this forest and up the mountain”.This story represents the history of the human race. God created us and gave us a path to follow. We strayed from that path and plunged our race into sin and the darkness of moral perversity.Centuries passed in a state of darkness for mankind. Finally, a glimmer of light appeared on the horizon. That light was the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.Her coming was like the first glimmer of dawn for the human race. It was like the announcement of the arrival of a rescue mission for a dying world.We don't celebrate many birthdays in the liturgical year, but we celebrate the birthday of Our Lady because her birth is the source of our life. When we say in the Hail Holy Queen that Our Lady is “our life, our sweetness, and our hope”, we are not playing with words. We are completely sincere in saying that Our Lady is our life. We believe that we cannot live without her. We believe that the one who finds her finds life.

Having seen how St. Pius X was totally consumed with love for God, we may wonder how he could also have room for a great love for his fellow man. And, we may say that, in the end, there was not enough room, for he died of a broken heart.We all know that the spiritual life begins with humility. That virtue provides the foundation on which all else is built. But, then, once its roots have been well watered, the soul is able to grow and extend its branches and leaves, until it finally blooms flowers and starts to produce delicious fruits. Those fruits are the works of charity.Today, let us look at some such works in the early priesthood of our patron: his almsgiving, his poverty of life, and his tirelessness in working for others.

We know that Our Lord says that “where your heart is, there also your treasure is.” And I believe that this indicates that every man must have some love within him, some predilections, and that it is the central love of his heart that really directs and explains all of his activity.And when we try to plumb the heart of our sainted patron, I do not think that it is too difficult to find what was burning in its depths; indeed, we find there an overwhelming love of God. To say this may seem obvious and even trivial, but I believe that it can be missed in the hype about the many activities of our saint. For this reason, I want to speak today about St. Pius X's love of God.Really, I believe that it was this great love of God in St. Pius X that makes of him for us our hero. There is a certain sadness that afflicts us at seeing all of the causes dearest to our heart failing in an apostate Western world. God has been forcefully driven from the public sphere by the revolution, the highest places in the Church have been occupied by secularized clerics, and civilization at large has descended into the sewer of base hedonism. Evil seems so triumphant and the blindness it engenders irremediable.We are tempted to ask ourselves: isn't there anyone around to stand up for the rights of God? Are there any fighters for the good who are left? Must our age be one without champions?And then we look back at that great figure in white, that towering pontiff of 100 years ago who faced off against the same formidable forces that are triumphant today, the same one who said that “evil triumphs when good men do nothing?”And what do we see? We see Modernists cowering in fear, the immoral abashed at their behavior, the heretics hesitating to voice their opinions. We see the good rallied around the peasant Pope, young men and women rushing to consecrate their lives to God and Church, Catholics banding together in confraternities and guilds and political groups to fight the revolution tooth and nail.In short, we see this Rock of a Pope, standing in gigantic proportions, a look of calm and fierce determination on his face, pushing forward step by step into a world of darkness, with an entire army gathering around him, driving back all that is bad and wrong and evil in this world and the world below.This picture is not too far from the truth, as you know! And how can all of this be possible? Because of a most ardent love of God. Because of something we call an interior life.

When the Israelites were traveling in the desert, God was with them every step of the way. He made His presence manifest to them by appearing as a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night.He provided for them. He gave directions to them through Moses. He rained down food for them from Heaven every day except the Sabbath. Once, he caused water to flow forth from a rock to slake their thirst. Once, he caused a huge flock of quails to descend upon their camp in order to provide them with meat.Despite this constant presence of God with the Israelites, St. Paul tells us that, with most of them, “God was not well pleased”. God was not pleased with the Israelites because the Israelites were not pleased with God. They were not satisfied with His care for them. They were constantly engaging in complaining, which is the subject of this sermon.Once, when the Israelites came to a certain place in the desert, they started to complain about the food that God was giving them, because He gave them the same thing to eat all of the time. They cried out loud, “Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna” (Num. 11:4-6).Consider what is going on in this situation: the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians in Egypt. They had a terrible life where they had to work all day long under severe taskmasters. The Egyptians were systematically killing their own children. God delivers them from the Egyptians with great miracles. They have now gained freedom.Despite all of this, they are complaining because they don't have the food that they want. They are looking back at their life of slavery and desiring to have that life back because they could have a variety of food. They are willing for their children to be killed and for them to be slave workers; as long as they get to eat their favorite food again!Bottom line: the Israelites had almighty God Himself taking care of them in the desert, feeding them and protecting them. Despite this fact, they were not content but complained.The same is true for us. God is with us every step of the way of our life. He is providing for us all of the time. Yet we are not happy. We complain.We have been set free from the slavery to the world by our baptism. We are fed with the very Body of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Yet we feel sorry for ourselves. We think that God is not doing enough. We pine for the material things of this world.

The role of the priest to preach to the faithful is a difficult one because we have to preach about things that exceed human understanding. Any topic about God is going to be something that is above us and that we are not fully able to grasp.This is particularly true for the topic of today's sermon: God's love for us. God has a love for you that exceeds all other loves. Just as God's power exceeds all other power, just as His wisdom exceeds all other wisdom, so also His love exceeds all other loves.God's love for us is infinite but we are finite. We only have a limited and finite understanding of an infinite love. What little we are able to understand is just a small part of the reality.How do we know that God loves us? How do we measure the love of God? We know that the essence of love is doing good to another. When you love someone, you look after them, you give them whatever you can so that they can thrive.We know that God has given us everything that we have and everything that we are. But this thought is too vague and often leaves us cold. We just think “everything comes from God” and we move on. I think it is important sometimes to zoom in on a single thing that God has done for us and look at it carefully.I want us to think about the fact that God has given us this Earth as our home, that He created it as a home for us, and that He prepared everything on Earth for us humans. We were the last things that He created. He waited until the end to create Adam and Eve and He said to them, “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”I have made this place for you to rule over!

As bad as it is to be physically impaired, however, it is even worse to be spiritually impaired. God has not only given us our senses to know reality; He has also given us a mind. We are supposed to use our mind to know the world around us, to understand the truth.We find this difficult because we are wounded by original sin with the wound of ignorance. This makes it laborious for us to discover the truth and it also makes us susceptible to being influenced in the wrong way in regard to the truth. There is a lot of noise for us to sift through.But there is another difficulty that we have independently of that wound. It is the fact that we have the wrong perspective on reality. We tend to think that we are the center of reality because we are at the center of what is perceiving reality. We tend to think that the world revolves around us because we are at the center of our perception of the world.This leads us to having a spiritual impairment or what might be called a “spiritual disability”. It is through the practice of our Catholic faith that we seek to overcome our spiritual impairment and see reality correctly. Our faith assists us to see reality as it is, with God at its center and with us as just little, tiny creatures.When the world turns away from God and exaggerates the rights of man, it increases spiritual disability. Ungodliness in society makes people detached from reality, unable to see reality. It makes people full of pride; it makes them think that they are god, not only that they are the center of reality, but they actually have the power to make reality.When spiritual disability becomes extreme, we give a special name to the condition that the person is in: we call it “madness”. After a century of deifying man, we have reached a point where we can say that a certain madness afflicts modern society. I think that, when people look back on this decade of the 2020s, they might well call it the “decade of madness” one day because society is so far from reality.There are stories of this madness that come out every week. This past week, a woman boxer had to quit a match after 45 seconds because she was being pummeled by a male boxer in the Olympics. Many were rightfully crying out how unfair it was for a man to be boxing against a woman and how it made all of that woman's efforts useless.

We live in times that are difficult in the Church and the world, in that they are collapsing in a certain sense. In such times, it is very important that we maintain the theological virtue of hope.People are tempted to think that God has abandoned His Church or abandoned the world, or to think that the grace of God is not working any more, that this world is too far gone. That would be to fall into the sin of despair.Today, however, I would like to speak about the situation in which there is too much hope, when hope goes too far. That is when we trust that some good thing is going to come to us, when in fact we have no reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, if we thought that God would give us Heaven even if we were in the state of mortal sin, that would be a false hope.Such a false or immoderate hope is referred to as the sin of presumption.

You belong to a counter-cultural movement called Traditional Catholicism. But the world at large does not at all share your traditional Catholic faith and in some respects is hostile to it.You come here to St. Isidore's because you want the traditional Catholic faith, the same faith taught by the Apostles and held by Catholics throughout the ages. You come here to be instructed in the same moral law that they followed and to receive the sacraments in the traditional forms that have nourished souls throughout the ages. You come here to put your children in a school where they will be taught and formed in the Catholic faith.Then you leave St. Isidore's and go out into a world permeated by a post-modern pagan, anti-culture. And there is this struggle to maintain a Catholic identity. What you do away from St. Isidore's is just as important as what you do here for the maintaining of your faith.In today's parable, Our Lord teaches us that we have to be just as prudent in attaining our supernatural goal as the world is in attaining its natural ends. We must be smart in using our material resources which come from God.

I want to tell you an amazing but true story. It is a story you know well. It is about a Jewish man who claimed to be God 2000 years ago. He chose twelve uneducated men as His disciples. After teaching them for three years, He commanded them to go throughout the entire world preaching the message that He had given them.They accomplished this command with incredible success. Over a period of 1000 years, they and their followers built a new civilization called Christendom, a civilization greater than has ever been known in the history of man.But the native peoples in North and South America, as well as in Asia, had to wait many centuries before the message of Our Lord Jesus Christ was preached to them. Catholic missionaries did not even know that these places existed until the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. As soon as they knew they existed, they went there.In Korea, where Fr. Kim is from, it was not until the early 1600s that Catholicism arrived and it was brought there by a layman. Now, 400 years later, thanks to the efforts of the missionaries, 11% of the population of South Korea is Catholic.Why has there been all of this urgency, throughout the centuries, to bring the Catholic faith to the various nations? Because it is a matter of life and death, eternal life and eternal death. Our Lord said that those who believed and were baptized would be saved while those who did not believe would be condemned. And when He said condemned, He meant condemned to Hell.This is often what motivates souls to pursue a priestly or religious vocation. They realize that the main drama in this life is about the eternal destiny of souls. They realize that the real success after this life is over is going to be the salvation of souls.

Holy Mother Church dedicates this Sunday to the capital vice of anger. Let us look at three different types of sinful anger and then a story that illustrates a Catholic view on anger.First type concerns those whom we call “irritable”: they are angry too quickly and for a slight cause. These are people who blow up for no reason or who easily snap. Those who are around them know that they can lose their temper easily.Second type concerns those who are sullen. They are angry for too long because they are continually refreshing the memory of the injury done to them. They stew over their anger. Instead of trying to get rid of it, they foster it within themselves and keep it burning.Third type concerns those who do not rest until they have exacted revenge, or a certain punishment on those who have done them wrong. This is even worse than simply holding a grudge; it entails holding a grudge and passing into action in order to harm the other.The Betrothed by Alessandro ManzoniThis story has such a Catholic spirit on the question of anger. It shows how dangerous is the spirit of revenge and how we must imitate Our Lord's spirit of forgiveness.

Sermon for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2024

We are tempted today by the false idea of religious indifferentism: this is the idea that all religions are equally good, that they all lead to Heaven.The Athanasian Creed is very clear in saying the opposite. Its opening words say the following: “Whoever wills to be in a state of salvation, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith, which except everyone shall have kept whole and undefiled without doubt he will perish eternally. Now the catholic faith is that we worship One God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance.”These words, while they represent what we believe, are very jarring to modern ears. Modern people say: “Why is this the case? How is it that we can be damned to Hell for a single false belief? “How can God damn me to Hell for the way that I think? Did He not give me free will? Why would He care what I think?”1. The truth is part of what gets you to Heaven. You cannot get to Heaven without the truth. The truth of the Trinity is a truth about God Himself. It is God telling you Who He is. If God tells you who He is and you refuse to believe it and worship something else, then you are not worshiping the true God. You are worshiping a false god!2. Heresy is a sin against God. We are obliged to obey Him because we are His creatures. If God tells me Who He is and tells me to believe Him, then I sin against Him by rejecting what He has said. I am saying that I do not believe Him. I am saying that I do not want Him. This is why belief in the Trinity was so important for Our Lord. Remember what He said:“Go 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” (Matt. 28:19-20). “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believes not shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16)This is why the martyrs throughout the history of the Church were willing to die rather than deny the faith. They realized that when they were being asked to deny the faith, they were being asked to make a choice: lose your physical life or lose your eternal life.

When Our Lord came on this earth, He issued a new commandment, one that summarized and complemented the ten commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.He did not issue this commandment from a mountain, accompanied by thunder and smoke, but He issued it in the midst of a last supper with His twelve Apostles.It was then that He said, “A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” (Jn. 13:34)The teaching of Our Lord transformed the world. It made the world Christian and civilized in the truest sense. It did so by teaching the world how to love. He clarified that true love means:We love God above all things. We acknowledge Him as our Father, we worship Him as our God, we seek to honor Him in all that we do. We follow His will. We love Him by keeping His commandments.Love means giving ourselves; it is not about receiving. It is about doing good to others. It is about sacrificing ourselves. It is about spending ourselves; it is about giving away our lives.Giving ourselves for God and for others means suffering. Love requires suffering. It requires that we carry a cross. This is what Our Lord makes clear for us. Do you want to follow the commandment of love? Do you want to be a lover like Christ? Take up your cross! Die on the cross! Our Lord has the most astonishing words to say to us: “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it.”

The four sets of Ember Days are a beautiful part of our Catholic heritage. According to Pope Leo the Great, the Ember Days go all the way back to the Apostles. Think about the millions of Catholics for whom the practicing of fast and abstinence on the seasonal Ember Days was just part and parcel of their Catholic life.Despite their age-old practice, they were done away with in 1966 by Pope Paul VI and most Catholics today do not even know what they are.Let us hold on to these important practices so that we can love God more and live our faith better.

The book of Job tells us that “the life of man upon earth is a warfare”. We are in a battle over our own souls. We are besieged by the cares of this world, by our daily grind, by the relentlessness of life.In this battle, sometimes we need to attack life head-on; at other times, we need to retreat, in order to recuperate our spiritual forces and renew ourselves for the battle. Sometimes, it is by retreating that we are able to gain a victory that otherwise was not possible.The faithful may ask themselves: why do priests, monks, and nuns need to go on retreat? They are doing holy things all of the time. It is clear that the Church thinks it very important for those who have dedicated their lives to God to take this time once a year, in order to maintain their spiritual stamina in the battle for souls.If priests and nuns need this time, how much more do the faithful need it, when they do not have as strong a spiritual life?There are several reasons why retreats are needed for everyone: priests, religious and layfolk.

This feast represents the first stage of God's great plan to save mankind from death. It is a mystery of life.We know that one of the most horrible scenes that can be imagined in this life is for children to be slaughtered in front of their parents.This is what happens daily before the face of God. He sees everything that happens in this world. In so many cases, what is happening is that souls are dying before Him because of sin.Sin kills the life of God in our souls and it makes us insensible to spiritual things. We become numb in our souls through sin; we become like spiritual zombies.God the Father cannot stand to see His children dying in this world, and then dying eternally in the next. He wants them to live! And so He decides on a plan to give them life.God decided that He would restore the souls of His children to life through a woman, an extra-ordinary woman. It belongs to women to give life. They bear life in their wombs and they bring it forth into this world.Eve was the first woman to do this. She was meant to be the mother of all the living. But she put her soul to death and then led her husband to the death of sin.This did not make God abandon His plan to have life come into this world through women. No, He decided to bring another woman into the world through whom eternal life would be communicated. Because He wanted her to be able to give life, He made her alive.The Immaculate Conception is about Our Lady being full of life so that she could give life to others. God made it such that, the very first moment of her existence, she should be full of His eternal life. Her soul had physical life and divine life at that moment.

God is at the origin of two orders in creation, the natural and the supernatural.The natural order concerns God's material reality and the things of this earth. The supernatural order concerns God's spiritual reality, the things of Heaven.These two realms are very distant from one another. When we speak of two things being very far from one another, we say it is like the distance between heaven and earth.At the same time, they are connected. God does not separate them into two completely separate realms but He makes there to be an interaction between them. We ourselves are natural creatures but God has elevated us to the supernatural level.Many of the realities that we experience in our everyday natural level also exist on the supernatural level, only they are more elevated and sublime.I want to take one example of this today: that of motherhood. Let us look at the motherhood that God has created in our natural world and then look at supernatural motherhood.

If you want to listen to the message of Fatima, and you believe that it provides a roadmap for salvation in our difficult times, there are two things you must do to honor Our Lady: recite the Rosary daily and make reparation on the first Saturdays of the month.Our Lady of Fatima asked for the daily recitation of the Rosary each of the six times that she appeared there. She stresses the daily Rosary so much because God has willed to communicate so much power and grace to the Rosary.Pope Leo XIII said, “The rosary is the most excellent form of prayer and the most efficacious means of attaining eternal life. It is the remedy for all our evils, the root of all our blessings.”

In 1978, four businessmen pooled their resources to found the home improvement chain Home Depot. The point of the store was to provide a place where homeowners could go to buy tools and parts to renovate or repair their house. One of the slogans over the years was, “You can do it. We can help.”Home Depot represents something of the American spirit. We have a go-getter, do it yourself attitude. Why hire someone when you can just figure things out, buy the parts and do it on your own. Doesn't that save a lot of trouble?What I want to point out in this sermon is that such a spirit is not proper in the realm of religion; it must not be translated to the religious sphere such that we become Home Depot Catholics, such that we pursue a do it yourself salvation.What do I mean by a Home Depot Catholicism or a Do It Yourself Catholicism?Home Depot Catholics come to church merely to acquire the material parts they need to keep their souls going and so attain salvation. Get Mass. Get confession. Get Communion. Throw some money in the collection basket. Go home. Save my soul.This is not the way that Our Lord established His religion, His Mystical Body. He established it in such a way that the members of the Catholic faith are not only united with Him, but they are also united with one another through Him. They all live the same life; they form one body together. And they are meant to live that reality by associating themselves with one another.

I would like to focus on the parable of today's Mass and explain what it means in relation to our salvation. The parable tells the story of a day of hiring.“Day” in this parable, as far as the story goes, refers only to a 12 hour period, or that part of the day that is in daylight. But the Fathers have understood this 12 hour period to be a symbol of two different longer periods of time, namely, the time before Christ, and the duration of our life.If we take the “day” of the parable as the time before Christ, following Origen, we can understand the various calls at the different hours as missions given to the great figures of the Old Testament by God to accomplish His work. They are to work in His vineyard, which represents the field of labor in which a person is living for Heaven and is trying to get as many people as possible to follow him on that path to Heaven.The second sense of the “day” is the span of the lifetime of each individual. Each person is called to work for the kingdom of Heaven, that is, for his own salvation.Some are fortunate enough to be called in the morning of their life, by being born into a Catholic family. Others convert as teenagers, others as young adults, others as mature men, others as old men. For each of these is reserved the denarius of salvation or eternal life.But there is a condition. Each one must remain working in the vineyard, once they are called. It is only when evening comes that the payment is given. Those who are not present at the evening, or the end of their life, will not receive payment from the householder. We must remain in the state of grace if we are to receive the reward of Heaven.

Modern society hates families. It is directed to pleasure and wealth and families are an obstacle to that. Even the Church today seems to be joining in on the attack against families by approving the blessing of same-sex couples.To attack families, you have to attack the components that make up families: men and women.Since men are the heads of families, there is a special attack directed against them.There is an effort today to make men anything but what they need to be in order to fulfill their God-given mission to be good husbands and fathers.The typical man that today's society creates is soft, pleasure-seeking, selfish, emasculated.This is why society so desperately needs good Catholic families today. This is why we pray, “Lord, grant us many holy Catholic families”. But to have good Catholic families, we must have good Catholic men, men of faith who have as their model not some football player, not some womanizing politician, not this Hollywood star or this MMA fighter, but Our Lord Jesus Christ.What society needs is men who dedicate their lives to the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to the service of His name, to the service of His Kingship, to the service of His Church.

Right before Our Lord left the Apostles on the day of His Ascension, He said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me”. He also said to them, “I will be with you all days, even to the consummation of the world”.We believe that Our Lord is omnipotent. We believe that He rules this world. But how often are we also not tempted to think the opposite, to think that Our Lord is powerless?How often are we not tempted to say: “Lord, where is your power? Evil is triumphant today! How can you let things go so far? How can you let things get so bad? If you have all power.”How can you allow there to be such a crisis in the Church? How can you allow the Conciliar Popes to do so many scandalous things? How can you allow there to be a fake Catholic as President of the United States?Lord, if you have all power, when are you going to arise and use it?When Our Lord said that all power on Heaven and earth has been given to Him, He did not say how He would use that power. He certainly did not bind Himself to step in and consume with fires or floods anyone who commits evil.What we all have to understand is that there are two ways of exercising power, not one way. One way is certainly the way of exercising force on people and things. We compel them to do our will or we simply remove them from our way.God is able to exercise His power in another way than nuclear destruction. God can exercise His power by building up rather than destroying. He can compel people by love rather than fear. He can conquer by relinquishing power.

The crisis of today's world is a crisis of leadership. God has so created human beings and human society that it is absolutely necessary that there be leaders if the common good is to be fostered.There need to be good parents to direct and instruct children; there need to be good mayors and presidents to organize cities and countries and work for the welfare of its citizens; there need to be good bishops who labor unceasingly for the spiritual welfare of their diocese and all of its parishes.But authority is failing at every level today. Parents no longer want to tell their children what to do and take responsibility for their upbringing. Mayors no longer want to stop crime and enforce laws. Bishops no longer want to excommunicate egregious offenders against the faith, enforce the dogmas of the faith, and stand up against the world for the rights of Christ the King.St. Pius X was an incredible leader and, as a result, his eleven-year pontificate was one of the most fruitful in the 2000 year history of the Church.One of the bishops who knew him, Monsignor Baudrillart, identified in St. Pius X the three qualities that many modern leaders lack: “His look, his word, his whole being express three things: goodness, firmness, faith. Goodness was the man himself; firmness was the leader; faith was the Christian, the priest, the pontiff, the man of God.”

The life of God is greater than the death of men. God came upon this earth and men put Him to death. But God cannot die. This is what the Cristeros told the Communists who were trying to destroy Catholicism in Mexico. You may kill us and we will die. But God never dies. Dios nunca muereThe life of God exists before our life, during our life, after our life. The life of God is the existence that is at the basis of all reality. The life of God is the basis for our life. It is not so much that God lives; He is life itself.Our Lord died in His humanity, but He lived on in His eternal divinity. Nature was not dying but was being renewed by the death of Our Lord.The life of God is greater than the death of men, and the death of God is the life of men. By the death of Our Lord, we will all live again.

Discouragement kills hope. And “when hope dies, there is very little chance for faith and charity.” Hope is directly tied to the final end; it makes us believe that the end is attainable. When this belief is lost, we have no reason to go on.Why does discouragement have such a power over us? Dom Zeller compares it to the cockle which chokes out the good seed. The good plants are continually having to struggle against the weeds and that is what we do not like. We get tired of the struggle. Discouragement is tied to weariness and fatigue. Everything seems too difficult.In the end, discouragement is an “excuse to go on falling.” It tells us that we are justified in giving up the fight. This problem is rampant today in the realm of morals; we live in an age of ‘easy defeat'.In the end, the temptation to discouragement is necessary for our perfection. We need to prove our love. Our perseverance must be tried; our courage must be tried.“Courage is not courage until it has experienced fear: courage is not the absence of fear but the sublimation of fear. In the same way perseverance has to be tried by the temptation to give up, by the sense of failure, by an inability to feel the support of grace.”Dom Zeller points out the difference between the way the Catholic faces discouragement and the Stoic and the Buddhist do. The Stoic feels interior pain, but refuses to issue an external complaint with his voice. The Buddhist faces discouragement by trying not to feel anything at all.The Catholic, on the other hand, faces discouragement, shoulders it, and moves forward in the midst of it. “A man cannot deny discouragement any more than he can deny his existence. It is part of his existence. All he can do is to deny himself the luxury of discouragement; he can mortify his tendency to self-pity.”

Our goal is to develop a supernatural outlook on failure. When we do this, “the flaws which inevitably attend a created order which has known original sin no longer have the power to daunt utterly: they are judged materially no longer. When supernatural values are substituted for earthly values, a complete reversal takes place and the things which menaced before are now so many evidences of God's loving providence.”First principle: Failure is necessary for our self-knowledge. We are incomplete without failure. We have to die before we can live; we have to be weak in order to be strong; we have to be crucified before we can rise up.Second principle: Our failures teach us God's love for us.Our failure is always a failure “of a kind that can be explained by love, and which will therefore not destroy but perfect … without failure, the soul's experience of love is incomplete.” We do not properly understand the depth of God's love for us until we have been lifted up by Him in the midst of our failure, instead of being ‘lifted up' by impurity, drink, power, success, or any of the other artificial stimulants of the world.Third principle: Christ failed in order to show us how to fail.Christ came to redeem a race of mortals in a state of rebellion against God and suffering all the consequences of that rebellion. Our Lord had to choose a means of redemption that would not only satisfy the justice of God, but would also indicate for us the way to overcome the rebellion within us and around us. He had to be our model as well as our redeemer. This is why He chose to redeem us through failure.

Recollection based on Dom Hubert van Zeller's Approach to the CrucifiedFirst principle: “God tells man what is needed for happiness.” God has constructed us; He has constructed us perfectly. He made us for happiness, but He made us for a happiness that can only be achieved on His terms. We have no power to change our user's manual.Second principle: “God does not condemn man to suffering; man condemns himself to suffering.” “In refusing God's terms man condemns himself to unhappiness.” We humans have introduced a new element into God's order, an element of opposition, an element of conflict, an element of rebellion.Third principle: Man's disorder cannot defeat God's goodness. God can both allow men to be evil and use their evil for good. It is not the will of God to get rid of suffering, because He cannot eliminate it without eliminating free will. What He does is enable those who wish to follow His order to be happy in suffering. This is the happiness to which we are called.

I do not know if we are in the end times or when the end of the world is going to be. I have no idea. It could be tomorrow. It could be a 1000 years from now.What I do know and what we have to recognize is that there is a triple iniquity in our time that makes it harder for us to save our souls.Firstly, the crisis in the Church, where churchmen in the highest positions of the Church have betrayed the teaching of Christ, adulterated the liturgy, and given terrible scandal by their actions. Consider how much more difficult it has become to live a true Catholic life today than during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. Back then, everyone was going to the TLM, there was not radical religious indifferentism all throughout the church, and there were not incessant scandals going on.Secondly, there is the crisis in society. The Christian ideals that used to inform society are now gone. Immorality is fostered; families are attacked; political institutions have become corrupted. We find it hard to imagine a world where birth control, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, adultery, drug use and so on were against the law. It was easier for people to save their souls then because the law was encouraging them to be moral.Thirdly, there is the crisis of a new way of life that has been made possible through technology. Technology is not evil in itself but it can be used for evil. The more powerful technology becomes, the harder it is for us to use it virtuously, for the good. The human race is now living in a very different way from the rest of mankind in the history of the world, through the smartphone, through the Internet, through our rapid transportation. Because it takes more effort on our part to use these things well, we are becoming more selfish, more superficial, more sensual. Charity is growing cold.

We must make this effort today: to set aside revolutionary man and give way to redeemed man. We must somehow put away the atmosphere of our modern world, so that we can joyfully proclaim Our Lord Jesus Christ as our King. How do we do this?We do it first of all by hating the revolution because it gives us terrible leaders. The revolution has destroyed leaders by destroying authority and it has left us very unsatisfied. Deep down, we all desire to have clear and firm direction. The revolution can destroy kings, but it cannot destroy our nature. Our nature pines after good leaders.Then, we must realize that Our Lord is the perfect leader. He will not compromise our happiness for any reason whatsoever; He will always do what is most perfect for our good. He will always stand by the truth.And He is a King. A King rules for life; his office is not a job, it is a way of life. It is not for four years or six years; it is for life. How tired we become of the constant swings of power in our democratic nations. One party institutes policies that they like and we may like them as well. Then another party comes into power and everything is overturned.But this is not the way it is for Our Lord. How many times does Scripture not say that His reign is forever? How many times do we repeat in the Mass “Through Our Lord Jesus Christ Who lives and reigns with thee forever and ever?” He cannot be thrown out of office! The Allelluia of today's Mass says that Our Lord's kingdom will never be corrupted. It will never fall.We have a perfect leader who has all power and reigns forever. What a blessing! What a joy!

Purgatory really exists and we must want to reflect on the doctrine of Purgatory, thinking about why it exists and what it is like to be there.Scripture tells us that “nothing defiled can enter Heaven” (Apoc. 21:27). Our Lord also tells us that “every idle word that men shall speak, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment” (Matt. 12:36)These two quotations indicate to us why there is a Purgatory. First of all, nothing defiled can enter Heaven. If we pass from this life and we are in the state of grace, yet we still have habits of sin, we have a soul tainted with self-love, then we are not ready to go to Heaven. Our soul needs to be purified; it needs to be purged. And so we go to Purgatory.Secondly, we are going to be judged when we die. Our Lord may say to us on that day, “You have died a friend of God, with the love of God in your soul. At the same time, you have done evil things in your life that you still have to make up for. You still have to satisfy justice for the things that you have done in your life. Thus, you have to go to purgatory.”Purification and payment: these are the two reasons why Purgatory exists; these are the two things that take place in Purgatory.

I don't hate rock ‘n' roll with my lower nature, the side of my emotions and passions. I am a human being just like everyone else. As human beings, we have an animal side and a spiritual side, a side on which we are like the animals and a side on which we are like God.Rock ‘n' roll speaks to our animal side, it appeals to it, and our animal side is incapable of resisting that appeal. Anyone who is human will be attracted to rock ‘n' roll by his lower nature.Thus, anyone hating rock ‘n' roll, like myself, is not able to hate it with his lower nature; it can only be hated by our higher nature, with our mind and will, and with the grace of God working in us.The reason why my mind and will have an aversion for rock ‘n' roll is simple: rock ‘n' roll is toxic for the soul. I am not saying that listening to it is a sin in itself, though sometimes it certainly is. It is mainly that rock ‘n' roll is permeated with a spirit of sin; it has a loving and committed relationship with the world, the flesh and the devil.