A SERMON FOR THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
About a hundred years ago,
the great Pope St. Pius X went to visit one of the colleges of Rome, where men
were being trained for the holy priesthood.
And as he passed through the ranks of the seminarians, he stopped at one
point, and asked one of them: “How many marks has the true Church of
Christ?” “Four, Your Holiness,” replied
the seminarian. “She is one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic.” “Very good,”
said the elderly Pontiff. “But there is
another mark, the Church’s most conspicuous mark, the clearest of all the ways
by which men may know the Church of Christ.
Does anyone know what it is?” And
no one answered. “Well,” said the Pope,
“I will tell you. It is
persecution. We read in the Gospel: ‘If
they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.’ Persecution is for us Catholics our daily
bread, it is the surest sign that we are the disciples of Christ.”
So it is, and so it has
always been. Throughout the many
centuries since the crucifixion, Holy Mother Church has been able continuously to
echo St. Paul’s words, “I bear the wounds of Christ in my body.” The Church bears the same stigmata as her
Lord and founder—the disciple is not above the master. She is persecuted and hated, just as all
those who bear the truth and seek to restore morality to our society are
persecuted and hated. In the past few
months we have seen a massive outbreak of this kind of hatred in our own
society.
For now at least, the hatred
is being more or less confined to the political arena. It is perpetrated by those whose fundamental goal
is the total removal of God from society, whose fanatical creed is one of
self-gratification, and whose sacraments are abortion, multi-culturalism,
political correctness, feminism, same-sex marriage, climate change and
euthanasia. All of these are in conflict,
directly or indirectly, with the teachings of the Church. The propaganda against religion has already
begun, especially in the media and the entertainment industry. The attacks are becoming more direct, and we
should expect that eventually it will be the Catholic Church that will receive
the brunt of the persecution. Pope
Francis is doing his best to ward off this persecution—but that’s not a
compliment. By compromising the eternal
truths, by instructing clergy and faithful to avoid polemics, especially when
dealing with the evils of abortion and homosexuality, by writing encyclicals on
global warming, by his passion for inclusiveness, by embracing the Muslim invasion
of Europe—his methods show a single-minded intention not to defend the Church,
but to betray it.
The Barque of Peter is
rudderless in the storm she sails through today. We must not become complacent in this new
dawn of political change in Washington.
Just as great as our relief and our hope for a new future is the shock
and dismay of the devil and his children.
The shockwave of hatred that was launched against the new President
since the election is surely indicative that the devil must fear something from
the tidal wave of change that seems to be sweeping across the political and
cultural landscape. The incoherent
rantings of evil people, the unbridled and increasingly inarticulate hatred of
their words, the incitements to violence and refusal to accept the
constitutional laws of our land, all this indicates a certain desperation by
the forces of evil at the sudden reawakening of truth and moral reason. Where will this hatred end? Are there any limits to how far these people
will go? The inevitable result of their
surrender to hate will be open violence against decent people.
We should indeed place some
hope in God’s answer to our prayers and the external improvements to our
society. But our hope must be cautious hope. Personally, I have never seen the devil and
his children so upset. When the devil
has a temper tantrum this bad, when his carefully devised plans to destroy our
civilization are so unexpectedly thwarted, we can only expect that the men and
women—and “others”—who follow him will launch a major offensive. Satan’s last stand. Our ship may have steered away from the
rocks, but we still sail in stormy weather.
In fact, we may just be in the eye of the hurricane, experiencing a
brief lull. We must expect that at any
moment, the great storm will resume its fury, and we may yet perish.
In answering our prayers
last November, God reminds us that he is not asleep. Not in any sense of the idea. We have the word of our Lord that a sparrow
cannot fall from the tree without the knowledge of our heavenly Father, and
that our value is far greater than a sparrow.
But this world needs to
learn a lesson, and it was an evangelical Protestant who perhaps best explained
what that lesson is. Billy Graham’s
daughter was being interviewed on the Early Show a few years ago. It was just after Hurricane Katrina had
caused such devastation in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, and she was
asked how God could let something like this happen. Here’s what Anne Graham replied: “I believe
God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been
telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get
out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed
out. How can we expect God to give us
His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?”
The world doesn’t want
God. The world has NEVER wanted
God. On the contrary, the world has
always persecuted those who follow him. And
in the 1960s, when John XXIII and his Second Vatican Council “opened the
windows of the Church to the world”, they let the world into the Church, and
drove Christ out. Since then, our good
and patient Lord has been waiting.
Sleeping if you like, but ever watchful, ever vigilant
nevertheless. He is waiting for us to
come to our senses, to see that we are in peril, and to call upon his Name and
act according to his truth and according to the charity which he commands. “Save us, Lord: we perish.”
So we must repeat and repeat
the words of the disciples as they were about to sink into the raging
waters. “Save us, Lord; we perish!” And when we pray these words, let us not do
so because we are men of little faith, as our Lord reprimanded the disciples. Let’s pray these words with the full trust,
knowledge and confidence that he that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor
sleeps, and that he who created the wind and the waves can calm them and
restore them to their natural balance.
A lot of people think that
when God “wakes up”, he will come and destroy cities, and nations, as he once
did Sodom and Gomorrah, for having defied his laws, that San Francisco will be
reduced to rubble in a great earthquake, and that Hollywood will be swept out
to sea. Perhaps that will happen. But in today’s Gospel, when the disciples
called upon our Lord and woke him from his sleep, “he arose, and rebuked the
winds and the sea; and there was a great
calm.”
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