A SERMON FOR THE 17TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
It is one of the modern-day errors
that there is no real difference between the three “great” religions of the
world. By these are meant the religions
of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Muslims even have a common name for the worshipers of these three religions—we
are collectively known by them as “the people of the Book.” Obviously, we all do have something in common
with each other, namely, that we all worship one “God”. But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that
only one of these religions worships the real God. We are told that we should focus on our
common beliefs, rather than on the differences that divide us. But let’s remember that to do so, to ignore
the falsehood taught by Judaism and Islam that Christ is not God is to deny the
most basic truth of our faith, the nature of the Most Blessed Trinity.
Since Vatican II, there has been a very strong movement in favor of bringing all the religions of the world together to form a single institution. We refer to this as the one-world religion. It’s an integral part of the globalist movement, the idea that there should be a one-world government, that individual nations should cease to exist as sovereign states, but become part of a single state controlling all the people of the world and imposing an agenda of moral principles and watered-down beliefs that you can’t even imagine. True religion, which speaks with authority to the inner beliefs and conscience of man, is naturally opposed to the idea that these most sacred and deeply held beliefs could be somehow controlled by a secular power.
And so the
globalists have concluded that religion must not be openly banned, but rather be
subordinated to their own ideals, that those profound and sincere beliefs we
hold most sacred must be gradually eradicated and replaced with ideas of
secularism, humanism and rationalism. To
achieve this, the globalists have been whittling away at our most traditional
institutions, aiming always at the destruction of true religion, in
other words, the Catholic Church.
They do this very cleverly. They are not so obvious as the Marxist revolutionaries of Soviet Russia and the China of Mao Tse Tung. They don’t claim that religion should be banished. It’s really not religion they’re after, but those beliefs that we hold dear, those beliefs that we’re prepared to die for. Their brilliant idea is not to do away with religion, but to make all religions the same so that no one knows what to believe any more—the contradictory beliefs of the different religions all become equally valid. In the eyes of man it is becoming morally wrong, arrogant, intolerant, racist, to claim that your religion is the right one and the others are wrong.
Education has been completely perverted so that our colleges and universities replace traditional learning with so-called progressive programs designed to corrupt the minds of our youths. I was at a graduation at St. John’s “Catholic” University in New York a few years ago, and noted the titles of the theses published by the various graduates, a compilation of feminism, gender studies, racial diversity issues, the normalization of sexual perversions, and so on. Our young people are being prepared for these horrors as early as grade school, where the agenda of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement is now being openly taught along with all the other corrupt and deviant beliefs of the far left.
The schools are backed up by modern culture. Hollywood, television, even the so-called news media, have become tools of the globalists. This poisonous culture has infiltrated even into religion, to the point where Pope Francis is himself an avowed globalist and never, ever seeks to correct the theological errors of false religions, but instead prefers to “learn” from them. Even the Satanic voodoo cult is now openly admired by the Vatican, and we should not be surprised by the display of pagan gods like Pachamama in the most hallowed grounds of Christianianity.
In short, we live in a time of general apostasy and the breakdown of all barriers separating truth from error. The current trend is no longer “I’m right and you’re wrong,” but “We’re all of us right.” There is no more unchangeable dogma, no longer any attempt to seek out with good will a deeper understanding of objective truth. Men of good will are unfortunately becoming more and more rare, and it is little wonder then that there is no more true peace on earth, and hardly any glory being given to God in the highest.
Our answer to this problem is the usual answer, one that we should never tire of hearing. It is to love the Lord thy God with all our heart and soul and mind. Notice, we must love God with our mind. That means we must understand with our mind who God is, and who he is not. Our Lord explains this to the Jews in today’s Gospel, reminding them that Christ is not merely the Son of David, but is also the Son of God. Half the truth is as good as a lie. To deny the Blessed Trinity isn’t even half the truth, it’s only a third of the truth. Which is why the Jewish religion and the Moslem religion are lies. They do not lie by saying there is only one God. They lie by saying that Christ is not God, that the Holy Ghost is not God. Lies are always hidden amongst the truth, like chaff among the wheat, weeds among the flowers. When the weeds are hidden like that, It makes them harder to find. St. Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle to the Ephesians that there is one Lord, one God and Father of all, but he also says there is but one faith and one baptism. As Catholics, we know what faith and baptism that is.
But there’s another aspect to this love of God by which we love him as the Way, the Truth and the Life. And that is the second great commandment, which is “like unto” the first. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Even as we look with dismay upon the Jews and the Moslems and the Protestants as they embrace their beliefs in lies and half-truths, we must, for all that, love them.
A beautiful and literal example of this love was shown by Pope Pius XII and many of his priests and nuns of Rome during the Second World War, when they sheltered Jews from the murderous Nazis who occupied the Holy City. At great risk to their own lives, they hid them in their convents and monasteries, even in the Vatican itself. So impressed was the Chief Rabbi of Rome that he converted to Christianity after the war. Such is the supernatural effect of true Christian charity.
Another example was shown by the two saints whose feastday we celebrate today, Saints Cosmas and Damian. They were two brothers, medical doctors who practiced in the time of the Emperor Diocletian, and the Breviary tells us that they healed diseases hopeless causes in many cases, not so much by their knowledge of medicine as by the power of Christ. One such case was of a man who had lost his leg in an accident. They happened to have the leg of a Moslem kicking around in their basement, and so they replaced their patient’s leg with that of the Moslem. They paid no heed to the race or religion of the donor. Cosmas and Damian didn’t care that the new leg was a different colour than the man’s original limb. They had no worries about the fact that it had belonged to an infidel. They simply healed. Let us pray to these two brothers for their help and intercession that they are able to amputate any hatred in our hearts and drain any misplaced venom from our tongues and minds.
The point is, if we truly love God, everything else falls into place. We can’t truly love God while at the same time we despise our neighbor. And we can’t truly love God while at the same time we deny the truths that he has revealed. The difficulty always comes in loving those neighbors who live in error about God. We’ve tried everything from the medieval inquisitions and burnings to the modern-day tolerance of absolutely everything. Neither works because both are too extreme. We need to learn from our Lord’s example, who always healed the sick while showing them the way out of their error. He healed not just their bodies, but their minds and consequently their souls. This is true Christian charity, true love of God and neighbor, and it’s the only way the globalists can be beaten . As they say, “Love conquers all.”
