Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

Having seen how St. Pius X was totally consumed with love for God, we may wonder how he could also have room for a great love for his fellow man. And, we may say that, in the end, there was not enough room, for he died of a broken heart.

We all know that the spiritual life begins with humility. That virtue provides the foundation on which all else is built. But, then, once its roots have been well watered, the soul is able to grow and extend its branches and leaves, until it finally blooms flowers and starts to produce delicious fruits. Those fruits are the works of charity.

Today, let us look at some such works in the early priesthood of our patron: his almsgiving, his poverty of life, and his tirelessness in working for others.

• We know that Our Lord says that “where your heart is, there also your treasure is.” And I believe that this indicates that every man must have some love within him, some predilections, and that it is the central love of his heart that really directs and explains all of his activity.
• And when we try to plumb the heart of our sainted patron, I do not think that it is too difficult to find what was burning in its depths; indeed, we find there an overwhelming love of God. To say this may seem obvious and even trivial, but I believe that it can be missed in the hype about the many activities of our saint. For this reason, I want to speak today about St. Pius X’s love of God.
• Really, I believe that it was this great love of God in St. Pius X that makes of him for us our hero. There is a certain sadness that afflicts us at seeing all of the causes dearest to our heart failing in an apostate Western world. God has been forcefully driven from the public sphere by the revolution, the highest places in the Church have been occupied by secularized clerics, and civilization at large has descended into the sewer of base hedonism. Evil seems so triumphant and the blindness it engenders irremediable.
• We are tempted to ask ourselves: isn’t there anyone around to stand up for the rights of God? Are there any fighters for the good who are left? Must our age be one without champions?
• And then we look back at that great figure in white, that towering pontiff of 100 years ago who faced off against the same formidable forces that are triumphant today, the same one who said that “evil triumphs when good men do nothing?”
• And what do we see? We see Modernists cowering in fear, the immoral abashed at their behavior, the heretics hesitating to voice their opinions. We see the good rallied around the peasant Pope, young men and women rushing to consecrate their lives to God and Church, Catholics banding together in confraternities and guilds and political groups to fight the revolution tooth and nail.
• In short, we see this Rock of a Pope, standing in gigantic proportions, a look of calm and fierce determination on his face, pushing forward step by step into a world of darkness, with an entire army gathering around him, driving back all that is bad and wrong and evil in this world and the world below.
• This picture is not too far from the truth, as you know! And how can all of this be possible? Because of a most ardent love of God. Because of something we call an interior life.

• When the Israelites were traveling in the desert, God was with them every step of the way. He made His presence manifest to them by appearing as a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night.
• He provided for them. He gave directions to them through Moses. He rained down food for them from Heaven every day except the Sabbath. Once, he caused water to flow forth from a rock to slake their thirst. Once, he caused a huge flock of quails to descend upon their camp in order to provide them with meat.
• Despite this constant presence of God with the Israelites, St. Paul tells us that, with most of them, “God was not well pleased”. God was not pleased with the Israelites because the Israelites were not pleased with God. They were not satisfied with His care for them. They were constantly engaging in complaining, which is the subject of this sermon.
• Once, when the Israelites came to a certain place in the desert, they started to complain about the food that God was giving them, because He gave them the same thing to eat all of the time. They cried out loud, “Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna” (Num. 11:4-6).
• Consider what is going on in this situation: the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians in Egypt. They had a terrible life where they had to work all day long under severe taskmasters. The Egyptians were systematically killing their own children. God delivers them from the Egyptians with great miracles. They have now gained freedom.
• Despite all of this, they are complaining because they don’t have the food that they want. They are looking back at their life of slavery and desiring to have that life back because they could have a variety of food. They are willing for their children to be killed and for them to be slave workers; as long as they get to eat their favorite food again!
• Bottom line: the Israelites had almighty God Himself taking care of them in the desert, feeding them and protecting them. Despite this fact, they were not content but complained.
• The same is true for us. God is with us every step of the way of our life. He is providing for us all of the time. Yet we are not happy. We complain.
• We have been set free from the slavery to the world by our baptism. We are fed with the very Body of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Yet we feel sorry for ourselves. We think that God is not doing enough. We pine for the material things of this world.

• The role of the priest to preach to the faithful is a difficult one because we have to preach about things that exceed human understanding. Any topic about God is going to be something that is above us and that we are not fully able to grasp.
• This is particularly true for the topic of today’s sermon: God’s love for us. God has a love for you that exceeds all other loves. Just as God’s power exceeds all other power, just as His wisdom exceeds all other wisdom, so also His love exceeds all other loves.
• God’s love for us is infinite but we are finite. We only have a limited and finite understanding of an infinite love. What little we are able to understand is just a small part of the reality.
• How do we know that God loves us? How do we measure the love of God? We know that the essence of love is doing good to another. When you love someone, you look after them, you give them whatever you can so that they can thrive.
• We know that God has given us everything that we have and everything that we are. But this thought is too vague and often leaves us cold. We just think “everything comes from God” and we move on. I think it is important sometimes to zoom in on a single thing that God has done for us and look at it carefully.
• I want us to think about the fact that God has given us this Earth as our home, that He created it as a home for us, and that He prepared everything on Earth for us humans. We were the last things that He created. He waited until the end to create Adam and Eve and He said to them, “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”
• I have made this place for you to rule over!

• As bad as it is to be physically impaired, however, it is even worse to be spiritually impaired. God has not only given us our senses to know reality; He has also given us a mind. We are supposed to use our mind to know the world around us, to understand the truth.
• We find this difficult because we are wounded by original sin with the wound of ignorance. This makes it laborious for us to discover the truth and it also makes us susceptible to being influenced in the wrong way in regard to the truth. There is a lot of noise for us to sift through.
• But there is another difficulty that we have independently of that wound. It is the fact that we have the wrong perspective on reality. We tend to think that we are the center of reality because we are at the center of what is perceiving reality. We tend to think that the world revolves around us because we are at the center of our perception of the world.
• This leads us to having a spiritual impairment or what might be called a “spiritual disability”. It is through the practice of our Catholic faith that we seek to overcome our spiritual impairment and see reality correctly. Our faith assists us to see reality as it is, with God at its center and with us as just little, tiny creatures.
• When the world turns away from God and exaggerates the rights of man, it increases spiritual disability. Ungodliness in society makes people detached from reality, unable to see reality. It makes people full of pride; it makes them think that they are god, not only that they are the center of reality, but they actually have the power to make reality.
• When spiritual disability becomes extreme, we give a special name to the condition that the person is in: we call it “madness”. After a century of deifying man, we have reached a point where we can say that a certain madness afflicts modern society. I think that, when people look back on this decade of the 2020s, they might well call it the “decade of madness” one day because society is so far from reality.
• There are stories of this madness that come out every week. This past week, a woman boxer had to quit a match after 45 seconds because she was being pummeled by a male boxer in the Olympics. Many were rightfully crying out how unfair it was for a man to be boxing against a woman and how it made all of that woman’s efforts useless.

• We live in times that are difficult in the Church and the world, in that they are collapsing in a certain sense. In such times, it is very important that we maintain the theological virtue of hope.
• People are tempted to think that God has abandoned His Church or abandoned the world, or to think that the grace of God is not working any more, that this world is too far gone. That would be to fall into the sin of despair.
• Today, however, I would like to speak about the situation in which there is too much hope, when hope goes too far. That is when we trust that some good thing is going to come to us, when in fact we have no reasonable grounds for doing so. For instance, if we thought that God would give us Heaven even if we were in the state of mortal sin, that would be a false hope.
• Such a false or immoderate hope is referred to as the sin of presumption.

• You belong to a counter-cultural movement called Traditional Catholicism. But the world at large does not at all share your traditional Catholic faith and in some respects is hostile to it.
• You come here to St. Isidore’s because you want the traditional Catholic faith, the same faith taught by the Apostles and held by Catholics throughout the ages. You come here to be instructed in the same moral law that they followed and to receive the sacraments in the traditional forms that have nourished souls throughout the ages. You come here to put your children in a school where they will be taught and formed in the Catholic faith.
• Then you leave St. Isidore’s and go out into a world permeated by a post-modern pagan, anti-culture. And there is this struggle to maintain a Catholic identity. What you do away from St. Isidore’s is just as important as what you do here for the maintaining of your faith.
• In today’s parable, Our Lord teaches us that we have to be just as prudent in attaining our supernatural goal as the world is in attaining its natural ends. We must be smart in using our material resources which come from God.

• I want to tell you an amazing but true story. It is a story you know well. It is about a Jewish man who claimed to be God 2000 years ago. He chose twelve uneducated men as His disciples. After teaching them for three years, He commanded them to go throughout the entire world preaching the message that He had given them.
• They accomplished this command with incredible success. Over a period of 1000 years, they and their followers built a new civilization called Christendom, a civilization greater than has ever been known in the history of man.
• But the native peoples in North and South America, as well as in Asia, had to wait many centuries before the message of Our Lord Jesus Christ was preached to them. Catholic missionaries did not even know that these places existed until the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. As soon as they knew they existed, they went there.
• In Korea, where Fr. Kim is from, it was not until the early 1600s that Catholicism arrived and it was brought there by a layman. Now, 400 years later, thanks to the efforts of the missionaries, 11% of the population of South Korea is Catholic.
• Why has there been all of this urgency, throughout the centuries, to bring the Catholic faith to the various nations? Because it is a matter of life and death, eternal life and eternal death. Our Lord said that those who believed and were baptized would be saved while those who did not believe would be condemned. And when He said condemned, He meant condemned to Hell.
• This is often what motivates souls to pursue a priestly or religious vocation. They realize that the main drama in this life is about the eternal destiny of souls. They realize that the real success after this life is over is going to be the salvation of souls.

Holy Mother Church dedicates this Sunday to the capital vice of anger. Let us look at three different types of sinful anger and then a story that illustrates a Catholic view on anger.

• First type concerns those whom we call “irritable”: they are angry too quickly and for a slight cause. These are people who blow up for no reason or who easily snap. Those who are around them know that they can lose their temper easily.
• Second type concerns those who are sullen. They are angry for too long because they are continually refreshing the memory of the injury done to them. They stew over their anger. Instead of trying to get rid of it, they foster it within themselves and keep it burning.
• Third type concerns those who do not rest until they have exacted revenge, or a certain punishment on those who have done them wrong. This is even worse than simply holding a grudge; it entails holding a grudge and passing into action in order to harm the other.

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

• This story has such a Catholic spirit on the question of anger. It shows how dangerous is the spirit of revenge and how we must imitate Our Lord’s spirit of forgiveness.

Sermon for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2024