• There are five Sundays during this time of the year that the epistle of the Sunday is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: 16, 17, 19, 20, 21.
• Even if we add up all of the verses from Ephesians that we read in those five Sundays, we only get 36 verses, which is only 23% of the entire epistle to the Ephesians. This shows us that we are only getting a small part of the entire epistle each Sunday.
• I hope that you take the time periodically to read the whole of these epistles that you only read a little bit of on Sundays. Really, you should read the whole of the New Testament at least once a year.
• Since we only see a little bit of an epistle on Sundays, I thought I would take some time today to talk about the whole epistle to the Ephesians: what it is about. I thought this would be particularly opportune on this Sunday because St. Paul touches closely on the main theme of his epistle today.

The Mystical Body of Christ

• The main topic of the epistle is the Mystical Body of Christ. Our Lord has a physical body that belongs to His human nature, just like we all have a physical body.
• But He has, in addition to this, a mystical Body. We can think of it as a spiritual organism. Unlike a physical body, this mystical body does not belong to one person alone but rather is composed of many persons.
• Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body, Our Lady is referred to as the neck, and we are referred to as the members of the Body, like the arms, feet, fingers and toes.
• Later in chapter 4, of which we have the beginning today, we hear St. Paul saying: “We are to practice the truth in love, and so grow up in all things in him who is the head, Christ.”
• The purpose of our life is to grow spiritually and we do this by our life in Christ. As faithful Catholics, we are living our lives in the body of Christ; we live in Christ and by doing so, we grow up spiritually.

St. Paul Writing to the Ephesians

• In all of his missionary journeys, St. Paul had spent a longer time in Ephesus than in any other place. When we think of St. Paul, we think of him as always on the move, traveling from place to place in Asia Minor and Greece in order to spread the Gospel.
• And so we might be surprised to hear that he spent three years in Ephesus, from approximately 53-56 AD.
• Perhaps the fact that St. Paul spent so long a time in Ephesus is the reason why he talks to the Ephesians about such a deep topic as the Mystical Body. It was some years since he was in Ephesus and he is now a prisoner in Rome. He is going to write a letter to them to explain what that Mystical Body is and how it works.

• Tomorrow and the next day, we have two special feast days: the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Sorrows. Both of these feast days are celebrations of the triumph that comes through the Cross. It was through the Cross that Our Lord redeemed the human race. It was by standing at the foot of the Cross and offering her Son that Our Lady became the Co-Redemptrix of the human race and Mediatrix of All Graces.
• As Catholics, we celebrate these feast days because we believe in what they represent for Our Lord and Our Lady, and also what they represent for us. What do they teach us? That the good bearing of the Cross in this life is what makes for heavenly glory in the life to come.
• We have these feasts to represent this to us, and we place crucifixes everywhere to remind us that victory comes from the Cross. At the same time, however, we have trouble believing it.
• Catechism of Trent: “if one thing more than another presents difficulty to the mind and understanding of man, assuredly it is the mystery of the cross, which, beyond all doubt, must be considered the most difficult of all; so much so that only with great difficulty can we grasp the fact that our salvation depends on the cross”.
• This is harder for us to understand than the Trinity, harder to understand than the mystery of the Eucharist: that our salvation depends on the Cross. Do you understand this?
• Do you believe that your salvation depends on the way in which you bear suffering in this life? Do you have a supernatural attitude toward suffering, or a worldly attitude toward it?
• This one thing must divide us from the people in the world, if we are truly followers of Our Lord Jesus Christ: we must have the capacity of carrying our daily crosses.
• If so many people in this world find the doctrine of the Cross so difficult to understand, it is often because of two illusions that they hold in their minds, illusions that come from the world.

• No man can serve two masters. But also, no man can serve no master. We cannot serve both God and mammon. But we cannot serve neither God nor mammon. In this life, we either serve God or the world, one or the other.
• One of the most basic things that every man desires is freedom. No one wants to be a slave. We all understand that slavery is incompatible with happiness, and we want to be happy.
• But the thing is that we are not able to attain freedom and happiness on our own. They are things that we can only attain through service. We either serve the world or we serve God.
• Both the world and Our Lord Jesus Christ offer us freedom and happiness. But the way in which they do so is completely different.
• Our Lord famously tells us, “Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light”.
• In John 8, when Our Lord has His most heated discussion with the Jews, He says, “If you continue in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
• How do we attain freedom as human beings? We attain it by following the word of Our Lord, by serving Him, by obeying Him. That is what Our Lord tells us about how we become free. Note how this is one of the many paradoxes that we find in the Gospel: freedom through obedience.
• What does the world say? How does it promise to give freedom to its followers? It says, “I will give you freedom by allowing you to do whatever you want without any constraints except the public order. I will give you infinite choices in entertainment, food, clothing and sexuality. You get to choose whatever you want and we will make sure that no one gives you a hard time for your choices.”
• Modern technology has made this type of “freedom” so much more accessible in the past, in the sense that the modern world, through its technological devices and its refusal to forbid any type of behavior, provides modern man with many more choices than he had in the past.
• And what is the result, for those who serve the world in order to achieve their freedom? The result is an unusually high rate of addiction. For many people today, what up front is an infinite number of choices becomes in the end a loss of the power to choose.
• It is estimated that, in 2024, 16.8% of Americans suffered from some form of addiction. Please note that that is one out of every six people you see walking on the street and means close to 50 million people.
• Someone may respond to this by saying, “But devout Catholics are addicted to God, and so they have an addiction problem as well”. I actually hope that that accusation is true for many, if not all, of you at St. Isidore’s. We want as many of you as possible to be addicted to God.
• But I think that this accusation about devout Catholics will help us clarify what we mean about freedom and how it is attained by us as human beings.
• We say that someone is addicted when they know that what they are doing is harming them and yet they still continue to do it. But following Christ, following the will of God, is very good for us. Therefore, someone who is always following the will of God is not suffering from an addiction.
• It turns out that, when we serve Our Lord Jesus Christ, we end up serving our own good.

On August 12, Fr. Robinson was interviewed live on the Protestant Radio Program Iron Sharpens Iron, by host Chris Arnzen. Here are the time stamps of what they spoke about:

1:30-7:00 Fr. Robinson’s story

7:00-17:55 Problems with the New Mass

17:55-20:10 Why Latin in the TLM?

20:10-23:45 Continuation of Fr. Robinson’s story

23:45-27:30 What is sedevacantism?

27:30-29:10 What is Feeneyism

29:10-30:10 Are Protestant baptisms valid?

30:50-38:00 Protestant commercials

38:00-52:10 Why does the SSPX exist? How was it founded?

52:10-1:12:00 Relationship of the SSPX with Rome over the years

1:12:00-1:22:00 Protestant commercials

1:22:00-1:25:00 Why isn’t Fr. Robinson sedevacantist?

1:25:00-1:34:10 Continuation of SSPX history and strained relationship with Rome, SSPX excommunications, why they are not valid

1:34:10-1:38:10 What is the Society of St. Pius V? The Nine and their Expulsion

1:38:10-1:49:25 How is the SSPX reacting to the excommunications?

1:49:25-1:54:30 Homosexuality in the Church

1:54:30-end How could a Pope lose his office?

• Political conservatives often advocate for a meritocracy, that is, a system whereby people get pay and power based on their skills and hard work rather than on their connections or their social position.
• It rarely works that way on this earth, for a number of reasons related to our human condition. But we Catholics believe that, in the next life, we will get exactly what we deserve for what we have done in this life.
• On earth, it is often difficult for humans to know exactly what people deserve, according to their talent and work. But God knows us better than we know ourselves; He knows everything that we do and exactly how good or how evil our actions are.
• On earth, it is hard for humans to be completely just in giving out rewards or meting out punishments. We often have biases that influence our attitude towards people. But God is perfectly just and will not be influenced in any way by any biases.
• For that reason, after this life is over, we will receive a reward or punishment that is precisely fair because we will be receiving it from an all-knowing, all-perfect God.
• On this feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, I want to focus on the question of heavenly merit. We know that, for each one of the actions that we perform in the state of grace and for a supernatural motive, we deserve a heavenly reward.
• Basically, if we do a supernatural work, for something beyond this life, then we deserve a reward that is beyond this life. And that reward is greater or lesser based on how many supernatural acts we have performed and the intensity of the love of God with which we have done them.
• If, in the next life, we all receive from God the reward that is due to us, what, we may ask, is the reward that Our Lady received after her death?
• Well, since Our Lady’s actions in this life were the greatest of all human beings, next to her Son, her actions were the most meritorious. They deserved the greatest reward from God.
• What was the reward that God assigned to her for actions? They are the rewards that we meditate upon in the fourth and fifth mysteries of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary: Our Lady’s Assumption in Heaven and her Crowning as Queen of Heaven and earth.
• We believe that Our Lady has been given the highest position in heaven, after her Son, because she merited more than anyone else.

• Two men went up to the Temple to pray. One prayed well and the other did not. One prayed with many words, while another prayed with a few words said over and over. One stood with his eyes lifted up, while the other had his eyes cast down and kept striking his breast. One man went home justified, while the other did not.
• The parable of the Pharisee and the publican is one of the most beautiful of all of Our Lord’s parable. It is clear that the purpose of the parable is to encourage us to practice the virtue of humility and to fight against pride.
• But the parable also teaches us something else that is very important: it tells us how we ought to pray. When you think about all of the things that you do each day of your life, you must be convinced that praying is probably the most important thing that you do.
• The reason for this is that prayer is the way in which we communicate with our Father in Heaven, the way that we spend time with Him, the way that we maintain our relationship with Him.
• And if prayer is the most important of the things that we do each day, we must try to get better at prayer as time goes on. We must learn from Our Lord and the saints how we ought to pray, and try to imitate them in the time that we dedicate to prayer.
• I particularly want to emphasize that word “dedicate” when talking about prayer today. One of the most important characteristics of good prayer is dedication. Another word for this is “devotion”. A prayer that is devout is one where we are devoted to what we are doing.
• What do I mean by this? I mean that, while we are praying, we are focused on God rather than on ourselves. I mean that we actually use the time of prayer to pay attention to God and, even more than that, we try to focus our entire being on Him, as far as possible.
• Have you ever tried doing this? Have you ever tried kneeling down, closing your eyes, and focusing yourself as much as you can on God and praying to Him with your whole heart? It is so important that you not just try this, but that you do it every day of your life.
• One of the big differences between the prayer of the Pharisee and that of the publican is the question of devotion. The publican seems to be focused on God in his prayer because he is begging God for mercy. His prayer is clearly devout because his eyes are lowered, avoiding distraction; he is striking his breast over and over; and he is repeating the same thing over and over. There is a great focus and intensity to his prayer.
• Whereas the Pharisee is not even asking God for anything. He is just talking to God about Himself and just saying whatever comes to his mind.

• St. Paul tells us that “the wages of sin is death”, meaning that sin leads you to die. We know that sin leads to the death of the soul; that is why mortal sin has its name. It causes a mortal blow to our soul such that the life of God dies in the soul. The soul becomes dead to God.
• But sin also is a cause of physical death. This is obviously true for the sin of murder, but it is true at a more basic level in that physical death came into this world because of sin. And, quite simply, the disorders of sin are not good for our health.
• The bottom line with sin is that it causes the death of our bodies, it causes the death of our souls and it leads to the eternal death of Hell after this life is over.
• This reality makes sin the greatest evil and even the only evil. We as Catholics believe that this is true. However, are we as careful about sin as we should be? Do we treat sin as a perilous danger to be avoided at all costs?
• It all depends on the state of our conscience. Our conscience acts like the immune system of our body, in that it is our soul’s natural defense against sin.
  • If we have a delicate conscience, then our conscience flares up whenever we are in the presence of an occasion of sin.
  • If we have a lax conscience, then we are not very troubled when we are in the occasion of sin or commit sin. The lax conscience is like the body of someone who has been numbed to pain because of injuries. A person burns his hand and loses sensation in his hand. When his hand is injured the next time, he does not feel anything.
• This perspective on conscience shows us how our conscience can change over time, just like the immune system of our body. Good food and drink, and proper rest, help you maintain your immune system. Whereas staying up late and getting up early, not getting any exercise, binging on junk food, and so on, makes you vulnerable to sickness.
• Similarly, in our spiritual life, if we pray our daily Rosary, avoid occasions of sin, do spiritual reading, go to confession and Communion regularly, we will maintain our soul in good health. We will be sensitive to sin, pray more easily and be able to live our faith.
• Whereas, if we regularly consume worldly entertainment, hardly pray, don’t go to confession, and so on, then our soul starts to become used to sin and numb to spiritual realities. It becomes harder and harder to live the Catholic faith and be a Catholic.
• At the end of the day, as long as we are in this life, we are in a state of flux. We are either becoming better Catholics or worse Catholics, as time goes by. We are very capable of changing from what we are today, either for the better or for the worse.
• We all know people who used to be fervent Catholics and now have left the faith. We also know people who have undergone conversions and are today much holier than they were in the past.
• The reason I mention this is that both today’s epistle and Gospel provide for us examples of the bad path: the slippery slope into mortal sin and apostasy, the numbing of the soul over time by a progressive desensitization to sin.
• Let us look at these two examples to understand how sin truly leads to death.

• In this life, we find ourselves at a midway point between earth and Heaven. We are some years away from the first moment of our existence and we are likewise some years away from our eternal home.
• As Catholics, we know that, while we are on the journey of this life, we must live it, in some way, like the life to come. Our life on earth now must resemble what our life in Heaven will be for us to be able to enter into Heaven when we die. “As the tree casts its shadow, so does it fall”
• The essence of what Heaven will be is that we will delight in God. We will be filled with immense joy and happiness by being in the presence of God.
• Thus, it would seem to mean that we are meant to possess a certain joy and happiness, through God, on this earth. We know that this is one of the characteristics of the lives of the saints. Though they suffered much, they yet possessed in their souls a continual joy.
• In the Hail Holy Queen, we call this earth a “valley of tears”. We call ourselves “banished children of Eve”. We say that we come to Our Lady “sinful and sorrowful”. We say that we send up our sighs to her “mourning and weeping”.
• The trials of this life are very real. But they must be also be accompanied by a real joy.
• I want to consider what I believe is the main problem we face in striving to have supernatural joy, as well as the resources that we have, as Catholics, to maintain that joy, so that our joy on earth may be a preparation for our joy in Heaven.
• St. Thomas says that joy is caused by love: either by us being in the presence of the thing that we love or because the thing that we love is in good shape.
• This shows us that any joy in our life has to come from us loving the things that we have. Do we have blessings in our lives that are able to provide us a constant joy? Yes, we do. If we are not joyful, it is because we do not love them sufficiently.
• Just to take some examples. We believe that, when we receive Holy Communion, we receive Our Lord Himself into our souls. This is an incredible gift and blessing. Some souls are comforted and strengthened when receiving Our Lord; they delight in dwelling with Him. This is what the Communion verse of today’s Mass tells us: “Taste and see how good the Lord is; happy the man who takes refuge in Him.” Others receive Our Lord and it has little or no impact on them.
• Or think about the fact that we have a Father in Heaven who dwells in happiness and loves us and bestows all manner of goodness upon us. We know this gives great joy to the Church because she expresses it in the Mass, especially at the Gloria: “We praise Thee. We bless Thee. We adore Thee. We glorify Thee. We give Thee thanks for Thy great glory.” What sort of joy does the existence of God give us on a regular basis?
• Sometimes, traditional Catholics allow the situation in the Church to put a damper on their joy. This is especially true when we are receiving these terrible condemnations from Rome.
• But there have always been crises in the Church and we must not let the current crisis be an obstacle from us drawing joy from our faith. When I talk to people who are new traditional Catholics, I always tell them: “make sure you do not become obsessed with the crisis. Rather, profit from the traditional Mass and the traditional devotions that you have found. Make them the center of your life, not these Church controversies”.

• God is in the business of showing His creatures unconditional love, and this will never change. It is part of His very being. God can only be good to us, because He is goodness itself. God can only love us, because He is love itself.
• We learn from the first chapter of Genesis that God created us in His own image. “Let us make man to our image and likeness”, God says to Himself.
• This not only indicates what God made us to be; it also indicates what we must strive to be. We are made in the likeness of God, but we must also strive to hard to be like God.
• What I am going to claim in this sermon is that we especially do that through the pursuit of our vocation, whether that be the priesthood, the religious life, or the married life.

Unconditional love in a vocation

• There is a special quality in a vocation, in that it demands of us unconditional love. We are required to commit ourselves up front to pursue a certain path for the rest of our lives, to stay on that path and never deviate from it.
• This is what married couples do when they exchange vows before the altar; this is what religious do when they make their perpetual vows; this is what a priest does when he is ordained.
• These vocations require unconditional love because of the fact that they do not know up front all that their vocation is going to require of them. They make a commitment up front to be faithful to a path but they do not know all that is on that path.
• Spouses, for instance, tell one another that they are going to stay by one another for life, no matter what happens in the future. If one of them gets cancer, if their house burns down and they lose their life savings, if they have quadruplets, no matter what, they will stick together.
• Spouses offer this unconditional love to one another when they marry. Priests and religious offer it to God. When a priest is ordained, he dedicates his life for the salvation of souls. He says, “I give myself unconditionally for the salvation of souls, for life, no matter what that may demand of me.
• We know that, for priests, sometimes the demands are costly. A priest does not know how the years of his priesthood are going to play out when he is ordained, and yet he commits himself.
• He may be asked to leave his home country and live overseas. He may have a superior who does not understand him. He may have faithful who do not listen to him and make bad decisions for themselves and their children. He may at times feel as if he is a failure. He may suffer an apparent excommunication just a week after he is ordained.
• It is beautiful to think that God created us human beings in His image and likeness and then also created ways to live our live that help us resemble Him, and that those paths of life require unconditional love of us.
• He created marriage at the same time that He created the human race. Then, when He became incarnate, He instituted two vocations that are intrinsically supernatural: the priesthood and the religious life.
• But Our Lord did not only institute the life of the Catholic priesthood and the life of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He also lived them. He showed us how to resemble God in these paths of life.

• In response to the consecrations of four SSPX bishops last Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV has taken exceedingly strong measures. He has declared that bishops, priests, and all formal adherents of the SSPX are excommunicated. That means those who “participate habitually in the celebrations of the Society of St. Pius X and formally share formally their doctrinal positions.”
• These measures are extremely harsh because the Vatican has refused to use the penalty of excommunication for many very serious situations in the Church in the past 60 years. You can deny the Catholic faith publicly, you can offer very scandalous Masses, you can show approval for same sex couples, for divorce and other forms of immorality.
• But these actions have not resulted in excommunication by those who have done them, in the Church, since the Second Vatican Council. And, certainly, it is extreme and novel for the Vatican to not only excommunicate the bishops of the SSPX, but to excommunicate hundreds of thousands of Catholic faithful!
• How is it possible for Pope Leo to take such extreme measures? Even the secular media outlets have been astonished by what they call the “exceptional harshness” of the decree. The contrast between how outright heretics in the Church are treated in comparison with traditional Catholic would seem to indicate that Rome is seized by a certain Tradition Derangement Syndrome.
• The one thing that Rome does not want to see in the Church is for the New Mass and the Second Vatican Council to be challenged. It does not want the traditional movement to have the means to continue. It does not want lay faithful to be traditional Catholics.
• This situation is very sad because it is a situation of a father treating his own children with great injustice. And the father is the representative of Christ on this earth.
• There is one section of the Church that is booming today, that is full of good, devout Catholics and large Catholic families, while the rest of the Church is dying. And this is the one section of the Church that the Pope harshly punishes.
• Rome is putting immense pressure on you faithful to stop attending with the SSPX and be assimilated into the Conciliar Church. Instead of promising to start fighting heresy and guaranteeing the practice of the traditional Catholic faith to you, they are offering full communion in exchange for you becoming a Vatican II Catholic.