A MESSAGE FOR THE FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
Thank you to the parishioner
who texted me with this insightful observation of human behavior: “Most people don’t really want the
Truth. They just want constant
reassurance that what they believe is the Truth.”
We should all think good and
hard about this little saying, and ask ourselves if it applies to us. What does the Truth mean to me? How important is it to me? Am I prepared to give up everything, even my
life, for the Truth? Let’s remember what,
or rather, who the Truth is: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” saith the
Lord. Ultimately, it is God who is
Truth, and all other truths merely participate in this one Truth that is God.
How important it is, then,
for us to defend the Truths of our Faith, even with our last breath if
necessary. We must defend these Truths,
because in so doing we are defending God.
Dying for these Truths is Martyrdom.
To reject them would be apostasy.
As “traditional” Catholics
(as if there were any other kind of Catholic!), we claim to know our
faith. We recognize that modernist Rome
has indeed rejected many of the truths that God has revealed to us, and that it
continues a preach a gospel other than that preached to us by our Lord, his
apostles, and their successors. In
rejecting this new modernist faith of Rome, we are doing so only out of a
spirit of loyalty to the true faith of our fathers. This is the essence of who we are—the remnant
faithful of Christ’s Church.
This Sunday’s Gospel is a
timely reminder how difficult it can be sometimes to discern between what is
true and what isn’t in the world we live in.
Many are those who believe something other than what Christ preached and
his Church teaches. For us, the degree
of blame they hold for doing so is irrelevant, and is between them and
God. For us Catholics, however, having
been brought up to know the true faith, having practiced that faith since
childhood, what for us would be the degree of culpability that we would incur
if we were to willingly reject any of the truths of our faith or the authority
of the Church that teaches it?
We must make every effort to
know our faith. How can we defend what
we don’t know? How can we love our faith
if we aren’t intimately familiar with the truths of God’s love for us? Read the catechism, understand it, teach it
to your children. Don’t just keep the
faith—spread the faith!
Father Hall
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