A REFLECTION FOR WHITSUNDAY
Amidst all the fiery tongues of Pentecost and the fanfare that accompanied the descent of the Holy Ghost on the apostles, we tend to forget that this event, so important that it is one of the great Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, was also the birthday of the Catholic Church. Until this fiftieth day after the Resurrection of our Lord, the Church had been promised to St. Peter, but did not yet actually exist. When our Lord ascended into heaven, he left the apostles in a state of anxiety. Fortunately, they did as they were commanded, remaining in Jerusalem, waiting and praying for the promised Comforter who would guide them in the Spirit of Truth.
On this Whitsunday, almost two thousand years ago, the Blessed Mother was present for the rebirth of her Son in the Upper Room in Jerusalem. This time, God came to dwell amongst us, not in the form of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, with a physical Body, but as the Third Person of that Trinity, to establish the Mystical Body of Christ.
Throughout the ages, men have rebelled against this Body, leaving it to follow the various heresies and schisms that the Devil has inspired to try and destroy her unity. Whether they have followed Luther and his Protestants, Karl Marx and his Socialists, or John XXIII and his Modernists, history has been one long rebellion against the Lord and his anointed. Today, our plight is all the more confusing as in order to follow Christ and his Church, we have been forced to turn our back on those who pretend to lead it. We do so in good conscience, however, because to follow the Church of Vatican II would be to contradict and therefore reject what the Church has taught since that first Pentecost, guided by the Spirit of Truth.
That God has chosen so few of us to keep the faith should not puff us up with pride, but reduce us to tears of humility, as we recognize our own unworthiness to have been chosen in this way. And we have other tears to shed, yet, for those of our brethren, our children, our family and friends, as they stubborrnly persist in rejecting the Spirit of Truth, some losing the faith altogether, others trying to find it amongst those who have long ago rejected it.
Our role is to preserve the integrity of the faith as best we can, inspiring those around us with the same love for the truth of the Gospels displayed by our Lord’s first disciples at the birth of his Mystical Body on that long-ago Whitsun morning.
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