#wdtprs

[septembersung]

Concerning The Four Last Things:

The Church teaches authoritatively about matters of faith and morals.  She is pretty clear about the important issues.  If you act in a way that is contrary to what the Church teaches, you are not a good Catholic.  If you know what the Church teaches and you persist in acting against what the Church teaches, you are a bad Catholic.  You are in peril of Hell.

If you are really poorly formed, through no fault of your own, and you have acted out of ignorance, you are still on a slippery slope, but you may be less culpable for your objectively errant acts.

While you breathe, there is hope!  When you die, you will no longer have any chance to change your fate.  That’s will be it.

That WILL happen.

If you take anything about the Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell – seriously, you will seek to form your conscience properly according to the clearly expressed mind of the Church. The ultimate fate of your eternal soul depends on it.

If you recognize what you are going face, then you will examine your conscience and figure out if you are a good Catholic or a bad Catholic  – yes, there are good and bad Catholics – and then do something about it.  If you are in the state of grace, you will strive to remain good and faithful.  If you are in the state of mortal sin you will strive to correct your life, make amends, seek reconciliation and go to confession.

If, by seeking to form your conscience well according to the mind of the Church, you discover that you have been wrong about something, culpably or inculpably, you will make corrections.  If you don’t, you put your soul at risk of Hell.

This is pretty simple stuff. It might not be an easy path to walk, but it isn’t all that tough to figure this out.

[septembersung]

Overcoming Habitual Sin

“Friend, you have a bad habit here.  It is going to be hard to replace it and the Enemy and your own interior weakness from Original Sin are going to fight you.  When you say “No’ to yourself, you are going to begin to suffer.   If its a really rooted vice, you will suffer more and more.   Plan on it.   You have to be willing to suffer. Be aware ahead of time so that you will know what your PLAN is to face the suffering.  Maybe it will be a cold shower or more manual tasks.  Maybe gazing a a crucifix and kissing Jesus’ feet over and over.   You have to PLAN for the suffering and then plan NOT to come down from the Cross the Lord is sharing with you.  Be ready for it and it won’t surprise you, bad as it is.   Stay on that Cross.”

Read more about Making A Plan

[septembersung]

Each year – in fact more than once each year – a serious problem for our enervated Catholic identity rises to the surface to demand our attention. The lack of Latin in the Latin Church. I am sure that there are those who would just as soon jettison every Latin aspect of our lives as Latin Church Catholics, thus making us into something else.  What, exactly?  Who knows.  We’d be adrift in every shifting currents and shoals of the world’s ways, conformed precisely to what Paul warned the Romans about: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…” (Romans 12:2). If we are going to call ourselves Roman Catholics, Catholics of the Latin Church, then we need Latin. The chorus of clerical lament rises now around my toes, moving upward, ever upward in a swirl of complaints and excuses.   “It’s toooo haaard… I have too much to dooooo… People aren’t asking fooooor it…. I’m too ooooold to change… I’d don’t liiiiike it….” B as in B.  S as in S.

Latin and You

[septembersung]

There is nothing easy about sacred liturgy.  It takes effort because everything that we are trying to accomplish through it and obtain from it is hard.   We need our worship to be hard.  We need it to require something from us, real effort, lest we run the risk of being liturgical parasites.

Latin and You

[septembersung]

Ascensiontide: The Hope That Informs Our Trials

When the Lord ascended to heaven He did not lose touch with us His people in this vale of tears.  St. Augustine in s. 341 talks about Christ’s presence in every word of Scripture as Word equal to the Father; or as the mediator in the flesh dwelling in our midst; or Christ as the Head and Body together as in a spousal relationship, Christ and His Church intimately bound.

This means that Christ is not insensible to our sufferings.  Our faith in this unbreakable bond of Head and Body calls us to be clean and worthy of this saving intimacy.

Allow me to get a little mystical for moment. Another thing that this means is that Christ, as High Priest, is now at the heavenly altar eternally offering His Sacrifice to the Father.  This means that His High priestly action is in eternity and not just in points of historical, past time.  The immense implication of all of this is that, by having our High Priest in heaven and eternity, what He does is still present to us.  All the mystery of the Passion and Resurrection is still available to us, not bound by chronology or by geographical location.  The High Priest in heaven now guarantees that we can have many Masses at many altars at the same time, many Communions, many people encountering the Mystery through the time that hurtles toward the summation of all things when Christ will take all things to present them to the Father so that God will be all in all.

[septembersung]

This is important.  If you are without Latin, you are someone else’s puppet when it comes to all the Church’s liturgical texts and the Church’s law and the Church’s doctrine.  For your Cult, Code and Creed, you are enslaved to translations, which do not provide the riches of the original content. This is particularly important in the realm of our sacred liturgical worship.  Change how we pray and we change what we believe, and, hence, how we live. Losing Latin was a terrible blow to our identity and we have not recovered from it.  We’ve just learned how to limp and shuffle with our broken limbs and now we think that shuffling is normal.

Latin and You

[septembersung]

I think that, by making your good confession, you good lay people help priests.

You help them to be priests.  Fabricando fabri fimus… we become carpenters by doing carpentry.  Priests become priestly by doing priestly things.

Priests are ordained for offering sacrifice.  They do this mainly through sacred liturgical worship in its proper forms.  The main things they are for in the Church is celebration of the sacraments.  Anyone can do other things, but only priests can do certain things.  The main things that priests are really ordained to do are celebrate Mass and, in a routine way, hear confessions.

Priests who are not into all things liturgical, priests who are not into hearing confessions… what’s that all about?   The sanctuary and confessional, not the rectory, are the proper places for the priest.

- Fr. Zuhlsdorf, “Want to be a modern priest? Hear Confessions”

[septembersung]

Our Lord gave us a Church which, because it is His, is indefectible.  Indefectibility doesn’t mean that it will remain prominent and influential.   It only guarantees that it will remain until He returns in glory. Because the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body, offered now for eternity to the Father by the High Priest at the heavenly altar, the Church will have to experience its Passion as well.   On the other side of that Passion is glory. Before the Ascension, the Lord breathed on the Apostles and made them “witnesses” (martyres) to the Good News.  The Holy Spirit “breathed” down on the whole Church.  You, the confirmed, are “in-breathed” by the Holy Spirit also to be strong in living as “witnesses” in the Church’s commission.

Hold firm to our purpose