Masters of Terror?
Everywhere today in Our Church, even in Hellish Syria, we forget that human beings are so much more than physical.
From the SSPX:
The bodily persecution of Middle Eastern Catholics is terrible indeed. And yet, Christ teaches us that those who persecute the soul are even worse:
And there is no need to fear those who kill the body, but have no means of killing the soul; fear him more, who has the power to ruin body and soul in hell.” (Matt. 10:28—see also Luke 12:4-5)
The letter of a Syrian to a French friend, bears out this truth by showing how the internal enemy of Modernism is an even greater danger to the souls of persecuted Catholics in the Middle East.
Dear friend,
During your latest visit, you asked us to put our thoughts in writing. For many years, you have devoted yourself to showing our French friends how the most ancient Christianity of the East is dangerously threatened in the flesh and in its very existence. But will you dare to tell them today the terrible truth and to speak of the danger for our souls? For it is not so much the Christians that are being assassinated in Syria; it is their faith.
Contrary to popular opinion, we believe that the Sunnite Muslims who behead our brothers and devour their hearts are in fact less deadly for our Christianity than a Church that has ceased to transmit the Faith to us. And yet, that is the dramatic truth: the proportion of practicing Catholics is somewhere between 20 and 30%.
Our clergy is disappearing. I am not talking about the priests who have abandoned their flock to seek shelter in America or Europe; I am talking about the number of vocations, which are becoming seriously rare. Can we excuse those who remain among us, even as we deplore the fact that they have not received any serious formation on the doctrinal, spiritual and even moral levels? And to prove it, take the fact that—on the pretext that the faithful would have more trust in a married clergy than in a celibate clergy, (it is all too easy, alas, to guess why)—it only took a few months to start ordaining married men priests. Shall I confide to you that this practice satisfies neither their wives nor their communities, who both complain of their lack of availability, since in most cases, the priest has to practice a profession in order to support his family?
Since the ’70’s, the secular clergy in the Middle East has scarcely received a better formation. Not to mention the “monks”, who are monastic only in name, living in luxurious monasteries where there are often more servants than religious, and where the religious are free in their acts and under no control. It is only too easy to imagine the wanderings of a liberty left to the control of each individual, and the habitual scandals for the weak in our narrow East, where everyone takes pleasure in spying on and judging the priests in order to comfort their own consciences.
But let me come back to Syria. What would be the point of distinguishing between a hierarchy completely preoccupied with money, whose priests worry only about feeding the poor, without ever giving them the bread of the Word, and those who care about neither and often scarcely even set a good example?
The obvious reality today is this: that the Christians have no more trust in their priests than their priests have in their hierarchy. And the concrete consequence is dramatic: in the face of the indescribable sufferings they have been enduring since the beginning of the conflicts, more and more Christians in Syria have come to declare: “God does not exist!“
What does the FrancisChurch bring us by attacking the faithful, heretically lauding all Protestant sects as if they’re in union with the Church, and chasing the world?
‘Traditionalist’ Catholics lament modernism and refer to Pope St. Pius X but I don’t think framing our disease as a heretical cocktail of everything modern advances anything. Our problem is simple worldliness. Where Our Lord rejected Satan’s offers in the desert, we accept them. Rather than the follow disciplines of ancient rules and prayers, the sacraments, and the sacrificial ascetic lives of poor servants, we take the easy road and reap its spiritual blindness.
Today everyone is celebrating Cardinal Sarah’s revelation that Pope Francis told him to continue the liturgical work of Benedict XVI. That sounds very encouraging and so unlike the rest of things Pope Francis has said about the Mass, but according to Cd. Sarah, Francis also told him to continue the liturgical ‘reform’ of the Second Vatican Council.
Such a hybrid bi-directional vision was in fact put forth by Benedict, but in practice where does it lead? What can one make of the liturgical reforms of Vatican II? How can they be developed or integrated? It seems the Pope Francis has, via third party, once again said something politically reassuring yet ineffectual and, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, we praise Him for briefly relenting.
We cry and bark about terrorism today, but the crimes against our own souls have been so much worse. The crushing installation of Hell on earth is happening to us right here and now. We have already been shrunken and disfigured into something much less than human; no longer men, women, fathers, or mothers. How long will we continue to be distracted by worldly causes that pretend to be Christian and political games where we can only lose?
