A SERMON FOR THE FEAST OF THE HOLY FAMILY
When we come together on this
Feast of the Holy Family, our thoughts usually center around our own family,
and our responsibilities to ensure its continued stability and unity. Today, however, I’d like to divert our
attention to something else in the Gospel of today, and that is our
relationship with a far greater family, the family whose Father is God himself,
and whose Mother is our Holy Mother Church.
When we think of our Blessed Lady
and St. Joseph spending three agonizing days searching for their lost Child, we
can imagine how annoyed we ourselves would be if our twelve-year-old boy
decided to wander off on his own and put us through three days of worry and
guilt. Indeed, our Lady seems to
reprimand him when she finally catches up with him in the temple. She asks: “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” Note the reference
to St. Joseph as our Lord’s “father.”
But our Lord’s reply is, as they say, “outside the box.” “Wist ye not,” he
asks—in other words, “Didn’t you know that I must be about my Father's business?” Our Lady had just referred to St. Joseph as
our Lord’s father. Her divine Son
reminds her that he is indeed the Son of God himself. With this reminder, made more for our benefit
that his Mother’s, he announces to us in very specific terms, that our heavenly
family of the Church must hold more importance to us than our earthly family
and the ties of unity we have with each other in this world.
Let’s note too what our Lord
was doing for those three days in the temple.
He was sitting with the doctors of the Church, the Jewish equivalent of
popes and bishops and theologians, and he was interrogating them. And if we love our holy family, the Church,
we must follow his example, questioning our priests and bishops about the
faith, and in these strange and dark times in which we live, questioning them
about the Church itself.
One of those questions, one
that perhaps distracts us today more than any other, is whether Francis is
truly the Pope. The position we take in
the Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula is that, as the Church herself has not
pronounced on the matter, we are free to make up our own minds, hopefully based
on a somewhat informed conscience after studying the issue. But we are not theologians, we are certainly
not “The Church,” and whatever conclusion we reach can never have the certainty
of Faith. We cannot turn our conclusion into
a dogma that others must believe in order to be Catholic. There may be many Catholics who believe that
Francis is not the Pope, myself for one.
But there are equally many traditional Catholics who believe that he is,
some of them far more intelligent than we are.
What assurance of infallibility do we have to tell them they are wrong
and we are right?
Accordingly, the Guild of St.
Peter ad Vincula is somewhat unique, I think, in leaving this question well
alone. After all, whether he is or he
isn’t should not affect our actions in rejecting any falsehood he utters, or
bad doctrine or moral advice or even liturgical practice that he encourages. The Church never taught that every utterance
from a pope’s mouth has the blessing of infallibility. While the faithful were always taught to
respect the words of a pope or bishop, it has become increasingly evident since
Vatican II that their words are not to be believed, not to be trusted. Gradually, we faithful Catholics came to the
realization that their words were more likely to draw us away from God’s truths
than toward them. Eventually, we adopted
the default position of rejecting what they have to say.
Likewise, the fact that
Christ was in the temple does not mean that he accepted the false teachings of
the Jewish Synagogue that had crept in since the establishment of the Old
Covenant. On the contrary, he went on in
later years to denounce the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees, just as we
must denounce the false teachings of Vatican II and the immorality of the
priests and bishops and popes who have ruled the Church ever since. The High Priests of Jewry went on to demand
the crucifixion of the very God who had placed them in their high positions,
the God who had created them and who continued to give them breath. Pope Francis seems likewise determined,
“hell-bent,” we might say, to crucify Christ’s Mystical Body the Church. But we must remember that we follow not the
people who govern the Church, but the Church herself, our Holy Mother, our Holy
Family of souls like ours, who seek their salvation within her walls and
through her sacraments.
The Church, like the
Synagogue in our Lord’s day, has been infiltrated by corrupt men who work for
her destruction. But we, as faithful
children of the Church, must not be taken in by their wicked and nefarious
teachings and practices. Like our Lord,
who returned to Nazareth with his family, and was thenceforth “subject to
them,” we too must subject ourselves to the Church herself—not to its high
priests, who like Annas and Caiphas in our Lord’s day betrayed the covenant
between God and man. The modern-day
versions of Annas and Caiphas have similarly betrayed the new and everlasting
covenant between God and man, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and have replaced
it with an abomination of narcissistic desolation and emptiness. We must follow the teaching of St. Paul who
wrote these memorable words: “But though
we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which
we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” And believe me, Pope Francis is no angel from
heaven.
We must remain loyal children
of the Church even as we reject Pope Francis and his evils, and work to maintain
the true Faith, the true moral values, the true Sacraments, the true Mass of
the “True” Church that still exists within the ruins brought about by these
evil men. If possible, we must work even
to restore that Church and the true Mass as best we can, by means of whatever
opportunities God gives us. Even if it
is only by word of mouth, we must build up the Church, soul by soul and
silently, until the Word of God once more reigns supreme and she is again the
bastion of Truth and Morality. This
family has always prayed for unity, but remember— “unity only through the
Faith.” There is no other unity worth
having. The same goes for our larger
family of Church Militant, Suffering and Triumphant, which can find her unity
ONLY through the Truth that is Christ.
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