#catholic #christmas #sermon

• When God Himself became incarnate in this world, when He assumed our human life, He decided that there would be two symbols that would be representative of His life.
• Those two symbols were the manger and the cross.
  • Both of them are made of wood.
  • On both of them, Our Lord lied down. Our Lady laid Him down in the manger, while the Roman soldiers laid Him down on the Cross.
  • On both of them, Our Lord was bound and in a state of helplessness. In the manger, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes, clothes that confine a baby in such a way that he cannot move. Likewise on the Cross, He could not move, because He was nailed to it.
  • On both of them, Our Lord was in a state of poverty. He laid in a manger in a cave, a place that was not his house, a place that belonged to no one. On the Cross, He was naked and completely despoiled of all of His possessions.
  • On both of them, Our Lord was in a state of humiliation. In the manger, He was a tiny, helpless child, born in extremely humble circumstances. On the Cross, He was being executed as a criminal in full view of hundreds of people.
• The Creche and the Cross are the two defining moments of Our Lord’s life; they are the two symbols that He chose to represent His life.
• We know that Our Lord chose the life that He would live, we know that He lived the most perfect life, and we know that His life is the model for our lives.
• This is why being a Catholic and living a Catholic life is always a great challenge, in every age. It is difficult to imitate Our Lord, because it is difficult to embrace poverty, humiliation and suffering.
• This is why Our Lord’s life has always been a scandal to the world. One of the many reasons why the world has always rejected Our Lord is that it does not want to be called to the excellence of Our Lord’s life. It finds His life far too demanding, far too difficult.
• As such, the world has always defined for its followers a different path. In place of poverty and humility, the world presents another “virtue” for everyone to practice. It is the “virtue” of mediocrity.

#catholic #sspx #advent

• There are two comings of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the first at Christmas and the second at the Last Judgment.
• St. Paul speaks of the Last Judgment today when he says: “pass no judgment before the time, until the Lord comes, Who will both bring to light the things hidden in darkness and make manifest the counsels of hearts.”
• We know this is one of the characteristics of the Last Judgment: everything will be revealed.
• But this is also one of the characteristics of the First Coming of Our Lord: His first coming brought to light many things that were hidden before.
• Recall what the old man Simeon said in prophecy to Our Lady, in the very same chapter as today’s Gospel, when He says that Our Lord will be a light of revelation to the Gentiles.
• The first chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which we read at the end of every Mass, also speaks of Our Lord as the light in His first coming, saying that He is “the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world”.
• And in this time of Advent, the Church quotes for us this prophetical passage from Isaias: “The people that sat in darkness, hath seen great light: and to them that sat in the region of the shadow of death, light is sprung up” (Is. 9:2). St. Matthew tells us that this prophecy was fulfilled by the preaching of Our Lord.
• The light that Our Lord brought to the world with His first Coming is very great:
  • He showed us clearly what our purpose is, what we are made for.
  • He taught us the moral law in a much clearer way than the Old Testament did. Recall the Sermon on the Mount, which shines a new light on the Ten Commandments. By doing this, He gave us a much clearer idea of what is good and what is evil, what is sinful and what is not.
  • Our Lord showed us clearly the meaning of suffering and how the Cross is a valuable part of our life, if we bear it with humility and resignation.
  • Our Lord showed us clearly the way that we must live our lives, if we are to fulfill our God-given purpose.
  • Our Lord gave us the fullness of revelation, all of the supernatural truths that we need to know in order to unite ourselves with God.
• St. John says of Our Lord that “His life was the light of men”. His life and His teaching changed the course of the world simply because Our Lord brought a light into this world that it had never seen before and which can never be exceeded.
• But, as you know, the reaction to this light was very different on the part of those who received it in Our Lord’s lifetime.
• When you are in a dark room for some time and then you go outside, the light is too bright for your eyes. There are three things that you can do:
  • Go back inside and return to the darkness.
  • Close your eyes to the light and try to walk in a state of blindness.
  • Allow your eyes to hurt for a little while until they are able to adjust to the brightness.
• These represent the three types of reactions to Our Lord’s light both in His time and ours.

#catholic #sspx #sermon

• Doctors tell us that if we want our bodies to be healthy, we must exercise our bodies regularly. If our bodies are always at a state of rest, not moving, not straining, they will deteriorate over time.
• It is interesting to note that many exercises consist of pushing back against gravity. We have this force of gravity that is always being exercised upon us, which pulls us down. We find that, if we sometimes work against that force of gravity, if we strain our bodies against it, it is helpful for our bodies, rather than just letting gravity always pull us down.
• We can think about the exercises of pull ups, push ups, sit ups, and so on. There is a kettlebell exercise where you simply hold a weight above your head and walk with it.
• God has made our body in such a way that it needs periodic movement and strain in order for them to be in good health.
• Today, I want to speak to you about a spiritual exercise that is like the anti-gravity bodily exercises. It consists in pushing back against the weight of our fallen human nature that is always weighing down upon us.
• Our fallen nature works on our souls like the force of gravity works on our bodies. It is always pulling us down to earthly things. We can think of our souls as naturally being stooped over and always tending to look at ourselves, to want creature comforts, to be consumed with the things of this world.
• If we made a log of what we are always thinking about for one day, we might be surprised. We might find a lot of vanity, selfishness, and pride in our thoughts.
• Just as if we leave our bodies alone and do nothing with them, they fall apart, so too with our souls. If we let them live this way all the time, we will lose them. Our souls will be always consumed with the things of this earth and will end up falling into hell rather than rising up to Heaven.
• At the beginning of this season of Advent, we heard these words of Our Lord: “when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand.”
• We have to be continually be lifting our souls up to heavenly things. This is the spiritual exercise I would like to talk about. It consists in lifting our souls up to God throughout the day.
• Sometimes, you will hear this referred to as the “practice of the presence of God”. In other places, you will hear it referred to as the practice of recollection.

#catholic #sspx #ourlady

• The Immaculate Conception of Our Lady was a unique privilege given to her alone by God. Of all of the people born into this world after the sin of Adam and Eve, only one was prevented from contracting Original Sin by the intervention of God.
• This is implied by Pope Pius IX when he defined the dogma in 1854: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God” (Ineffabilis Deus)
• At the beginning of the same document, the Pope says, “Above all creatures did God so love her that truly in her was the Father well pleased with singular delight. Therefore, far above all the angels and all the saints so wondrously did God endow her with the abundance of all heavenly gifts poured from the treasury of his divinity”.
• Our Lady saw fit to make it clear that the Immaculate Conception is her unique privilege in an extraordinary way just four years later, in her apparitions to St. Bernadette in 1858.
  • St. Bernadette was given the mission by the parish priest to ask the lady who was appearing to her to say what her name was. It was uncertain that Our Lady was appearing.
  • The Lady asked St. Bernadette to come for fifteen days in a row. St. Bernadette kept asking her name but the Lady never gave it, and the fifteen days ended on March 3.
  • But St. Bernadette would sometimes get a strong urge to go to the grotto and this urge came to her on March 25. When Our Lady appeared to her, Bernadette was still quite focused on her mission. She asked the lady three times if she would not mind saying who she was and what was her name. Each time, the lady just smiled. She asked a fourth time and finally the lady became serious, lifted her eyes to heaven, and said those incredible words, “Lourdes: I AM the Immaculate Conception.”
  • Bernadette was a simple girl who could not read and hardly knew her catechism, even though she was fourteen years old. She had no idea whatsoever what was meant by “Immaculate Conception”. Plus, her memory was bad so she just kept repeating the phrase to herself so she could faithfully tell it to the priest.
• If Our Lady chose to speak of herself in such an extraordinary way, it was to communicate to us an important fact about her immaculate conception: God gave the privilege only to her.

#advent #catholic #sspx

• Advent is a holy season of waiting. We learn how to wait for God.
• Waiting well is an important spiritual skill, because God often moves slowly. When we look at the history of the world and of the human race, we see that God is never in a hurry.
• God is outside of time. All of time is like a single moment for Him. He sees all of human history from the highest perspective.
• When we interact with God, we have to be willing for Him to act slowly. We have to be willing to wait. “Show, O Lord, thy ways to me. Teach me thy paths”, we say in today’s Introit. His ways are slow.
• Abraham: God first appears to him when he is 75 years old, and promises that he will make a great nation of him. But his wife is not able to have any children. After 25 years, God appears to Abraham, when he is 100 years old, and promises that he will have a child by Sara, who is 90 years old. She has Isaac and the whole race of the Chosen People comes from him.
• Moses: the Israelites are being oppressed by the Pharaoh. He is telling the midwives to put their male children to death. Moses is saved from the water and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the Egyptian court. When he is 40 years old, he flees to the desert. Only after 40 years more does God appear to Moses and ask him to go back to Egypt to deliver the Israelite people. They had been in slavery for 80 years at that point.
• Coming of Our Lord: God waits a number of centuries after Adam. When Our Lord comes onto this earth, He is not rushed. Rather, He spends 30 years living a hidden and unknown life. Only then does He come out into the public.
• Bottom line: God often waits a long time before acting. (same will be true of end of world!)
• We find this characteristic of our God difficult because we are naturally impatient as human beings. We are willful and we want control. We want things to happen when we want them to happen. We find it humbling to be forced to wait.

#endtimes #catholic #ourlady

• Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year and it represents the end of time. That is why the Church gives us a Gospel passage of Our Lord speaking about the Last Judgment.
• Whenever Our Lord speaks of the Last Judgment, He wants to give us certain means by which we may identify it, while at the same time He does not want to tell us when it will happen. Rather, He wants us to always watch and be ready for His coming.
• Today, I would like to speak about some other general information about the Last Judgment and the End Times. We do not have this information from the Gospels but from a saint.
• This information comes from St. Louis de Montfort and it concerns the role of Our Lady in the End Times.
• We have to understand St. Louis’ perspective on the Providence of God. It is that God the Trinity desired to make use of Our Lady in every aspect of the work of the Redemption and salvation of mankind.
• This was a free choice on the part of God because of the fact that He is almighty and does not need anyone. It is not that He needs to make use of Our Lady; it is that He wills to do so out of His goodness.
• Think of a situation in the home where the father is fixing a door. He is the most capable member of the family to do it and he does not need anyone’s help. But he chooses to ask his daughter to help him, for her sake. He wants to spend time with her, he wants her to learn, and he wants her to be a part of the upkeep of the house.
• Something similar goes on with our salvation. It’s like the door into Heaven was broken and could not be used any more. The heavenly Father is going to fix it. He does not need anyone to help Him to do so. But He chooses to ask one of the members of the human race, the ones who broke the door, to help Him in fixing the door.
• He asks Our Lady for her help and she consents. By her consent, one of the members of the human race that is being redeemed and saved participates in the work to save us.
• We all know what this meant for Our Lady during her lifetime. She consented to become the Mother of Our Lord. She took care of Him during His hidden life. She requested Him to perform His first miracle. She accompanied Him during His public life and was with Him at the foot of the Cross.
• During the first centuries of the Church, Marian devotion was present but was not very strong. As the centuries go by, Our Lady becomes more and more known. She becomes more honored. Catholics understand better the role that God gave her. They start to make more use of devotions to her, like the Office of Our Lady and the Rosary that she revealed to St. Dominic.
• Our Lady herself begins to reveal herself more through apparitions: her apparitions to St. Dominic, St. Simon Stock, the founders of the Servite Order—all these in the Middle Ages.
• Then, the more modern apparitions to St. Bernadette in Lourdes, to St. Catherine Laboure in Paris, and to the three children of Fatima.
• St. Louis de Montfort notices these two things and he applies them to the end times: a) God wants to make use of Our Lady in the whole of the work of our Redemption and salvation; b) God wants Our Lady to become more and more known over time.
• From the realization of this plan of divine Providence, he draws a conclusion: “It was through Mary that the salvation of the world was begun, and it is through Mary that it must be consummated… In the second coming of Jesus Christ, Mary has to be made known and revealed by the Holy Ghost in order that, through her, Jesus Christ may be known, loved and served… God wishes to reveal and make known Mary, the masterpiece of His hands, in these latter times” (True Devotion, par. 49-50).

• On July 13, 1917, Our Lady appeared for the second time to the three children of Fatima. She promised to work a miracle on October 13, so that everyone would believe. Then, she asked the children to sacrifice themselves for sinners and to pray the following prayer when doing so: “O Jesus, it is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
• These three young children were already familiar with the conception of praying and making sacrifices in order to make up for sin.
• God had sent an angel to them the year before, to prepare them for the apparitions of Our Lady. This guardian angel of Portugal taught the children about their mission: it was for them to do prayer and penance for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for sin, to stop sin from being committed in the future and to repair for sin already committed in the past.
• Later, Our Lady came to ask for the practice of the five first Saturdays devotion. This is a devotion of reparation for the offenses committed against Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. There are five first Saturdays because there are five types of blasphemies that are committed against Our Lady.
• The fourth type is the “blasphemies of those who seek openly to foster in the hearts of children indifference or contempt for this Immaculate Mother.”
• These facts about the message of Fatima show us that Heaven takes very seriously the offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady would not come down on earth, speak to the three children, and work incredible miracles for no reason.
• Another thing that we learn is that the work of reparation is very important. Every sin is a crime against God, an injustice. Every sin deserves a punishment to make up for the injustice.
• There are many sins being committed around the world all the time. God looks for souls who are willing to pay for the sins of mankind. Our Lord and Our Lady, of course, paid a great price for the sins of the world, enough to wipe them all away.
• However, God did not want to leave us with nothing to do in the supernatural order. Rather, God asks that we unite with the work of Our Lord and Our Lady to do something to pay for sin ourselves. He asks for the work of “reparation”, making up for sin by prayer and sacrifice.
• This is what the Sacred Heart asked of St. Margaret Mary and us. This is what the Immaculate Heart asked of the three children of Fatima and us.
• Doing this work is part of living a Catholic life.
• The most important sins for us to make reparation for are sins of blasphemy. St. Thomas says that blasphemy is “the disparagement of some surpassing goodness, especially that of God”.
• What Fr. Pagliarani and Fr. Fullerton are asking us to do is to make reparation for a sort of blasphemy against the Mother of God in the form of the document Mater Populi Fidelis of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith.
• This document disparages a surpassing goodness, namely, the roles of Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces.

#sspx #catholic #catholicchurch

• We have a special feast day today, the dedication of the archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. It is interesting that the Church makes this a second class feast, while the feast of the dedication of St. Peter’s Basilica, which will take place next Tuesday, is only a third-class feast.
• The main reason for the special honor given to St. John Lateran is that it was the first official church of the Catholic Church. When you visit St. John Lateran in Rome, you see an inscription written on it: “the mother and head of all the churches in the world”.
• You know that Catholics were persecuted by the Roman Empire as soon as the Church was founded. Sts. Peter and Paul themselves were martyred in Rome.
• The persecutions continued for an extremely long time, for close to 300 years! Some Roman emperors were more aggressive than others in their attempt to destroy the Catholic Church but the fact is that the Catholic religion was more or less illegal for these 300 years.
• Imagine what it was like for the faithful during these difficult times. They knew that Our Lord was God; they knew that they belonged to the true faith. At the same time, they had a heavy price to pay for the practice of their faith.
• They could not use public buildings to practice their religion or build their own temples. They rather had to meet in secret, in their homes and in the catacombs. They had to be careful who they talked to. They had to be very discreet in telling people that they were Catholic.
• Think about how weary they must have been with this situation, when it continued decade after decade. The persecutions made it difficult to convert people to the faith, because everyone knew that the Empire did not like Catholicism. Everyone knew that they could be executed if they became a Catholic.
• Think of all the prayers that the Catholics of the first centuries lifted up to Heaven, to ask Our Lord to send them an emperor who would at least allow them to practice their Catholic faith in peace.
• Our Lord did not want to intervene right away to help these first Catholics. On the contrary, He wanted the first Catholics to be strong and sacrificial. He wanted them to have their life on the line at all times.
• For that reason, He waited! He waited not for 100 or 200 years, but for over 250 years. This is how we have the examples of all those martyr saints from the first centuries of the Church. This is why we have so many great saints to honor from those centuries.
• In due time, however, Our Lord decided that He would make His Church triumph. He decided that He would answer all of that blood that was shed and all of those prayers that were offered.
• He gave to the Catholics of the empire something they were always dreaming about but had never been given: an emperor who converted to the Catholic faith.

#catholic #sspx #christtheking

• If we look at all the of the problems in the world and in the Catholic Church today, they all really boil down to one problem. It is a first commandment problem. The first commandment is hardly being honored and practiced today.
• Now, it may seem that the first commandment is the easiest one of all to practice. “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.” We can understand this commandment too simplistically, thinking it just commands us not to worship false gods, not to be an idolater.
• In the Gospel, however, Our Lord shows us, as it were, the other side of this commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind”. Our Lord tells us that the whole of the law and prophets rests on this one law.
• This commandment might be referred to as a declaration of the rights of God. God is our Creator, our Redeemer, and our final end. As such, He has a right to demand our love. He has a right to make a law for every single one of us that we love Him above everything else.
• The biggest question for each one of us in our lives is whether or not we will respect the rights of God over us, whether we will love Him above all things or not. If we do, then we will spend all eternity with our heavenly Father in a state of perfect happiness. If we do not, we will go to Hell, because we had a first commandment problem. We could not follow that commandment.
• As I say, this is precisely the problem with the world and the Church today: the first commandment is not being followed. The rights of Christ the King are not being respected.
• Who is the idol that has been put in the place of God and is being loved more than God? The idol is man. Man today is worshipping himself.

• By the design of God, the first second of our existence passes in a dark place, the womb of our mother. We remain in the darkness for three quarters of a year, growing, making the transition from an embryo to a fetus to an infant.
• Finally, the day comes when we emerge into this world and we get to see for the first time what sort of world we are born into. Our vision is at first very blurry and is limited to a range of about half a foot.
• The infant’s perception of reality, of the world that he has newly entered, in his narrow range of sight, is dominated by one figure: his mother. She is the one whom his feeble sight is most often able to perceive. She is the one who always seems to be around when he is awake: the one who feeding him, the one clothing him, the one speaking to him, the one holding and kissing him.
• This is how God designed things for His human beings: that, coming out of the well of nothingness, we should spend nine months in the womb of our mothers; and then, coming into the world, our whole perception of that world should be dominated by the face and contact of our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.
• If such is the way it is in the natural world and with our natural life, it should not be surprising to us that God should want something similar to be true for the supernatural world and our supernatural life.
• God wants us to have a mother. At the moment of our baptism, the first moment that our souls lives a supernatural life, the first moment it exists in the supernatural order, we receive the Church as our mother (we become members of the Church) and we receive Our Lady as our Mother.
• We go to our Mother the Church to receive our supernatural life. We get the sacraments from her, which nourish our soul. Especially confession and Communion.
• But God also gives Our Lady, His own Mother, to be our mother. She is a human being like us, but she is a human being who has been given a crucial role for the human race, the role of being the New Eve, the new Mother of all the living.
• And just as we saw with the natural order, so too must we say of the supernatural order: God made it to be that way for us. God has made us a supernatural world where we have Holy Mother Church and we have a human mother, the Mother of God, to be our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.