As for the failures of the Church: the faithful and the faithless have failed to be perfect in all eras and situations and nations since the beginning of time, and on that all groups agree. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t read the Old Testament or the Greek epics or even Native American myths, because all takes are full of fallen man. The news from last evening where I live was full of overdoses, murders, and domestic disputes.

We cannot keep the Commandments, not without help from above. This is kind of the whole point of the person of Jesus, and why he came, in case you didn’t know, and many today don’t know. It’s an interesting time because millions of people have not heard the Gospel, or have no idea of what it says.

He brought us the second part of what we need, called the Beatitudes, but people are less aware of these than they are of the Commandments. The Commandments are like a beam we have to walk on above a shark filled tank. But the Commandments with the Beatitudes is like a nice sidewalk with a guardrail above the shark tank where we can relax, be joyful, and not be constantly worried about falling off the beam.

We cannot live the Beatitudes by themselves either. We need the Commandments with the Beatitudes, otherwise we just discard the idea of sin altogether. We need to use the cheat code. There is a cheat code, but it’s not as easy as what video game developers build into their systems.

The way to win is to stop trying to cheat. We have to take up our cross and follow Christ.

I think what people fail to understand is that Christ showed us how to live. In the devolving of Christendom, through our obsession with knowledge, we have to unlearn and invert nearly everything that our American teachers have taught us to value, from public school, to Hollywood, to government. Christ’s way of living is an inversion of Americanism (which is why Americanism was called out as a heresy by the Church in 1899). Pope Leo XIII didn’t just go on the offensive against the errors of Karl Marx in Rerum Novarum (a prophetic encyclical that predicted all of the horrors of Communism), he also called out the errors that Thomas Jefferson gave birth to with his mistress, the “pursuit of happiness.” This might be a news flash to some: the Church is neither capitalist nor socialist. Instead, the Church is for both the Commandments and the Beatitudes. Again, Catholicism is a both/and religion, except for when it comes to ideologies - then it is neither/nor.

Sometimes I think we focus on the Commandments too much and forget about the Beatitudes. A common critique of Catholics is that they are “too dogmatic,” and act like Pharisees. But oddly enough, while, yes, Jesus does scold the Pharisees frequently, the reason he does is telling. In Matthew 23, Jesus says, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.”

Now, this can be passed over easily, but Jesus says something really important here. The Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat. The Church today refers to “the seat of Peter,” or “the chair of Peter.” The Pharisees, according to Jesus himself, have authority to interpret Sacred Scripture. This, dear reader, is why the Pharisees bear the brunt of Jesus’ anger in the Gospels. God chose Moses. He chose Moses’ successors, and they are the Pharisees. It is not the Sadducees, or Jesus would have said that they sit on Moses’ seat. This idea of Moses’ seat must be attended to. Later, in Matthew 28, Jesus says before ascending to heaven something extremely important about that authority.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So the Pharisees held the seat of Moses, and Jesus was given all authority in heaven and earth. But what about when he’s gone? Then who has authority to interpret and defend the Word of God? Who will the Holy Spirit be with? Well, that was covered in Matthew 16:18-19. Simon was given a new name, Peter, the rock, upon who he would build his church.

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Let’s recap here. Jesus states plainly that there is to be a Church. One Church. Peter is the leader. This is a direct commission, by name. There’s not even any wiggle room on this for interpretation. Further, nothing will ever defeat the Church that is founded on Peter, even though that Church may be attacked by Hell itself.

There is only one Church founded on Peter. That is the Catholic Church.

Ok fine. So we know there is to be a Church. We also know that Baptism is important, critical to salvation. The Eucharist is as well, which Jesus spoke ample words about at the Last Supper and in the Bread of Life chat after feeding the 5,000. And in this verse above, we know that Confession is important because in order to “bind” and “loose” sins, you have to speak them out loud to someone. You can’t just throw a penny in a well and wish - you have to speak it and take action (body and soul). As far as I know, the Apostles could not read minds like Jesus. (Well, maybe Peter does seem to be able to in Acts with Ananias, but that’s another story).

In Matthew 18:18-19, Jesus also states this “binding and loosing” power. He also says that his followers must gather in Jesus’ name, meaning there should be what? A meeting.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Now, this brings me to a point about the Gospel of Matthew that has led me to many hours of pondering and displeasure, which I will write about later or this will never end. I am teeming with words here, so I need to resist commenting on the lies of 19th century German scholarship and their intentions of tearing down Matthew because of these important phrases.

Let’s get back to the Commandments and the Beatitudes, and why both are needed.

Living by the Commandments and the Beatitudes can only come through following Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. Otherwise you end up a Pharisee, a legalist on the one hand, and on the other hand you are all free-love and dope and Jesus becomes the Big Lebowski, the dude. In fact, if you watch the Big Lebowski, you can see the problems of Pharisees and libertines rather plainly. Walter is a jerk obsessed about the rules, and the Dude cares for no rules. One is all justice and is a hypocrite, and the other is a buffoon that stands for nothing. Donny, the forgotten third character, is a kind of Jesus character, and indeed, he is indirectly killed by Walter and Dude’s dispute with the nihilists, which wouldn’t have happened had they not both been so hell-bent on justice (Walter) and mercy (the Dude). Donny is martyred for their sins.

So we need to be like Donny a bit. Humble. Peaceful. Seeking righteousness while following the rules.

Ok, now forget Donny. Be like Jesus.

When you wake up in the morning, surrender to God, be grateful for breath, and ask Jesus, “What are we going to do today?” To follow him requires surrender and obedience. Freedom requires forgetting the self.

Let’s cut to the chase: nobody loves a list of rules. Rules alone do not inspire. No one ever built a Cathedral because of a list of rules any more than the local swimming pool was built to hang up a sign of “pool rules.” Kids do not go to the swimming pool on a hot summer day to celebrate the rules. They go to the pool to play and cannonball and scream and splash.

This to me is the fundamental error of the Pharisees, and Catholics can become Pharisaical quickly if they think the early Christians were gathering just to celebrate a list of rules instead of cannonballing into a pool with Christ. They came for community, beauty, joy, truth. St. Peter’s Basilica and Notre Dame were not built so that we could hang up a sign that read, “No running. No glass bottles.” They were built because people experience a union with God that unshackles them from life and makes them free, in a way that the pool, or drinking, or sex, or money, or trophies can never even come close to reaching.

The funny thing about the rules is that once you find that key that opens the door, and you follow Christ, only then do the rules make total sense and you actually want to follow them. You even yearn to follow them, because it would please God to do so. In fact, the pool was built for joy, but if there were no pool rules it would be chaos and no one would want to swim there. Lawless pools with loud drunks and kids running wild end up as empty pools. Suddenly, once you believe, the joy singing goes right along with the requirements of fasting. The prayer where the heart surges toward God goes right alongside Confession. That’s the miracle that happens, which I will keep repeating it on this site until I move to my cave someday, following the leads of St. Benedict or St. Anthony of Egypt, where there is no internet.

We’re all “failures” to some degree and we deal with our human flaws in different ways. This is the problem of sin. In order to feel better, we need to elevate our side. Out of this competition, scapegoats are born. We want to scapegoat and point fingers at the failures of our opponents. The notion to blame is always inserted into our heads, put there as a thought from somewhere. I can tell you where that somewhere thought comes from. For many years I assumed thoughts came from myself, but the conception of thoughts have outer origins. It is from the devil, who is the divider and the distractor.

There I said it. The devil is real. What a relief. It’s nice to stop dancing around these things and just say it.

The favorite, perennial scapegoat for all sides is the Church, as in the Catholic Church, because it’s an easy target, and it is the main target. And I mean all sides are on the attack. Even Catholics attack the Church relentlessly, from both the liberal progressive side and the Rad-Trad side. After a while, when you see how much hatred is directed at the Church, it should start to make you wonder. Why?

Why is there so much hate against the Church? Because they say that abortion is wrong? Because they say that marriage is between a man and a woman? Because they reprimanded Galileo? Because of the Crusades? There are hundreds of these reasons, but none of them are the real reason.

The real reason is because God granted the Church authority on interpreting faith and morals until Jesus returns, and we really, really hate anyone telling us how to live. We hate authority. But that is exactly what Jesus claimed, and he deputized the Apostles, with Peter as the leader. Even “scripture alone” interpreters have to dance around the fact of Jesus giving the keys to Peter, and Peter being the rock of the Church. Furthermore, you have to pretend Peter never lived in Rome, and do all kind of “textual criticism” and other rain-dances to try and undo the fact that the Church was founded on Peter, and Peter’s took his seat in Rome.

We hate authority so much that we’ll do anything to tear it down or avoid it.

And this is precisely what the devil does. It’s really the first line from the serpent over and over again, as he said to Eve: “Did God really say…?” That is his opening phrase and his unending hymn of rebellion.

When Jesus gave Peter the keys to the Church, he chose a leader and gave him and the Apostles the authority to bind and loose sins. This is really irritating to people because it means that someone has the authority, and the reason we dislike that idea is because we, each of us, wants to be king. Thus, the claim to authority over faith and morals becomes a target just as it did in the Garden of Eden, when the authority of God was questioned and rejected.

Now, I know for any of my Protestant friends who read this, they will disagree, and will assume that for 1,500 years the church was in the wrong, and only the Reformation brought Christianity back to life. But that assumes that all of the spiritual battles and bloodshed by every saint and martyr from 30 A.D. onward was for a Church on the wrong track, which to me is ludicrous. The early church was the Catholic Church, and the more I read of early Church history, the more it’s clear that the doctrines in the Catechism we use today matches with what Jesus and the Apostles believed. As John Henry Neumann said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant."

But, even Protestants should be wary of this urge to blame Catholics, because if they pray for the demise of the Church and the Pope, you can bet that the next domino to go is your local Bible-believing neighborhood church, because the only keeper of doctrine is then in the pastor’s head, or three-ring binder, or the next vote at the annual conference. Chastity is currently on the chopping block for many Protestants, and the faith of the early church is being flung aside for the spirit of the age.

The long history of half-truths being told about the Catholic Church will only blow up in the face of anti-Catholic Christians in the end. Why? Because we are all, at the root, brothers in Christ. We are all drinking from the same vine. But here’s my belief: the last stand of Christianity will be made in the barque of Peter, the Catholic Church, not in your local pastor’s three-ring binder, or in the Southern Baptist Convention or in one of the Lutheran Synods or in the First, Second, or Third Baptist Church. And if the barque of Peter goes down, then so shall all other boats, because the focal point of the anger always lands on the Church. If the gates of hell were to prevail against the Catholic Church (which can’t actually happen), then all of the denominations that came after the Catholic Church will lose the boogeyman. Then they will become the boogeyman and would crumble quickly under the weight of the world. The Church, I believe, is in the world, but is not of this world, and Jesus guaranteed that his followers would be hated, and they most certainly are. But that only encourages us to keep speaking, to keep partaking in the Sacraments, and to keep “praying to Mary and our statues” as the detractors like to say.

As for the unbelievers, the “love of others” has taken precedent over the first commandment of Christ, which is to “love God.” And here’s the problem with that:

When love of God and his word gets put into second place and given the silver medal, then love thy neighbor attempts to take the podium, the gold. Unfortunately, this never works. There is a reason for the order. The imitation of Christ is not a game with optional modes of play, it’s guidance for the salvation of your soul. So much has been forgotten in the distractions and fragmentation of modern thought. This is why you now see Pride flags outside of Methodist and ELCA churches that would make the Wesley brothers’ and Martin Luther’s heads explode. It’s honestly hard to imagine a greater insult to their names and legacy than what has happened in their churches, but because their own step to form these churches was one of protest, it’s not terribly surprising that the protestors are now protesting the earlier protestors. This again, goes back to the beginning and illustrates exactly why the odd story of the Garden of Eden has such lasting power.

Obedience to God must be first. Not flags, not clubs, not organizations, and certainly nothing national or political. None of those things can provide the foundation needed. If Jesus said that not one letter of the law would be undone, meaning the Commandments, then how on earth can you skip Sunday Mass for youth sports or claim that sex outside of marriage is allowed? You can only do that if you are ignoring what Jesus says. And the Church was established to defend and follow his example. To argue against marriage and chastity means you have to throw out the Gospel, and if you start throwing out parts, you’ve thrown out all of it. It comes as a package. Moreover, it only makes sense as an entire package. The baby and bathwater are both out on the lawn now in those churches because they have rejected the Gospel and called it “love.” What they really mean by love is “lust.” Many people have forgotten that Jesus was a celibate man his whole life and ardently, clearly stated that there is to be one marriage in life, and if you aren’t married, no sex. No one wants to hear that, but it’s incredibly loud and crystal clear if we would just take a minute to open up the book and actually look at the words. The only thing the Church is saying to make people so angry is the exact words of Jesus in Mark 6. It’s remarkable really, that just repeating the Gospel words, as they are written, can cause such madness among us lusty moderns. That is how you can tell that we are under a kind of slavery to the passions. The same happens when you try to take away an addict’s drugs or when a wealthy person’s finances collapse. When the devil finds the right bait for each of us, he keeps using it and sets the hook deep.

In our era, methinks the Protesting hath gone on too long and each protesting generation tries to remake the world anew in its own desires. This is why the saying rings true that “A church that marries the age it finds itself in will find itself a widow in the next.”

This is the logical conclusion of sola scriptura and sola fide. By faith alone, you can do whatever you want because you were saved fifteen years ago. With sola scriptura, you can interpret the book yourself, however you like, which is being proved out right now before our eyes. Want to throw out chastity? It’s gone! Poof. Want to sacralize greed? As you wish, says Kenneth Copeland. Want to rid yourself of the Eucharist and just focus on preaching? Welcome to the party, Zwingli, and all you other random people who want to start your own church. The only problem is that Jesus only appointed Peter as the rock, and said nothing about Zwingli or Wesley or anyone else. Every heresy since Christ rose from the tomb has played out again and again over the past five hundred years by wannabe Simon Peters, thanks to the five solas of Protestantism, but mostly because of two: sola fide and sola scriptura.

You can argue yourself into any position, because, well, why not? If you’re saved by your faith, actions don’t matter. If traditional interpretations of scripture doesn’t quite match your desires, then you can hammer doctrine intellectually into the shape you like, just like Henry VIII called in all the scholars of Europe to to bless his divorce. Works? Works mean nothing. Works are optional. You can pretend Jesus said what you want, and even pretend the letter of James doesn’t exist at all.

As soon as you cut out the physical, as soon as the Sacraments are not needed, you’ve cut the body from the soul, because the body is what carries out “works.” In fact, if there is one damning bit of evidence against Protestantism’s shedding of the Sacraments it’s that Covid proved that church attendance is not necessary if you have no sacraments. The internet and streaming video seems to be God’s humorous way of proving that “four walls and a sermon” make not a Church, because now everyone can stay home to watch it online. Covid presented this fact in full, because a community gathering to hear a sermon is only as compelling as the speaker, and if the mouthpiece can be piped into the ear alone, then getting dressed and driving to church is not needed. With the Catholic Mass, attendance is required. You cannot do confession over Zoom, and you most certainly cannot receive the Eucharist through an iPhone. Again, body and soul are required in the Catholic Church. This is a great feature of the Church.

It’s worth noting that Jesus isn’t here in the flesh. He is risen. So that means that we must act as the arms and legs now. He is the head of the Church, but the mystical body is important, too. We can use our individual bodies like cells of the mystical body. Our bodies can move around. We can use our bodies to feed the poor or to carry out sinful actions. Ideally, we move toward using it for God’s purposes rather than our own. Socialists understand that the body is needed to do good things, so they have half of this whole thing figured out, except they deny the soul. Protestants have the soul and faith part figured out, but can’t quite factor in the body because it’s not really needed. Put them together and you have something more whole, body and soul, and it’s called the Catholic Church.

I don’t believe that scripture alone or faith alone jives with the Gospel. Otherwise, when you are on your third marriage or looking at porn or having extra-marital sex, you get angry when the Church merely points out the words that Jesus said. Simply reminding others what Jesus said about marriage gets people fired up. It’s not like the Church made any of this up. Jesus said these things and the Apostles wrote them down. Merely saying what Jesus said invokes rage from many unbelievers and Protestors, because they have already decided that Jesus is some watered down hippy teacher. But he’s a knife that divides people. He was clearly offensive. Nice people don’t get crucified.

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