PART TWO

THE FRUITS OF THE CATHOLIC MASS

The Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Power of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Fruits of the Catholic Mass are inexhaustible. Because they lead to eternal life, and eternal life has no end, the graces of the Mass are infinite. They truly are “the fountain of water inside him, welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

The graces of even one Catholic Mass exceed the heights which the greatest Saints have scaled and extend further into the past and into the future than even the most daring thoughts can comprehend. The reasons for this I have set out in Part One above to which the reader is referred to avoid unnecessary repetitions.

However, for a good understanding of what is to follow, mention must be made here of one person who was not present in the Cenacle when, during the Last Supper, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ changed bread and wine into His own Body and Blood, and when He commanded his first Priests and Bishops “to do this as a memorial of Me”. Here we refer of course to the Mother of the Lamb of God at the very moment that Her Son “laid down His life for His sheep” when He signed His own death warrant. For, with the institution of the Blessed Eucharist, that is, with the mystical separation of His Body and Blood, Our Saviour had made the real separation inevitable. So great had been His Love for us that He made the avoidance of the Cross the next day impossible.

And now the Lord had gone, ascended to His Father after His mission had been accomplished. And the disciples returned to the Upper Room, but this time Mary, the Mother of Jesus was with them:

“So from the Mount of Olives as it is called, they went back to Jerusalem, a short distance away, no more than a sabbath walk; and when they reached the city they went to the upper room where they were staying ... All these joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.” (Acts, 1:12-14).

On the encouragement which St. Ignatius has built into his world famous Thirty Day retreat, we may devoutedly meditate on the thoughts that at this moment must have passed through the mind of the Immaculate Conception. Her mission had not yet come to an end. She still had a role to play in the formation of the early Church, guiding the steps of those who had been appointed by Her Son to guide the steps of others.

They were all Her children, born into the Mystical Body of Christ, of which Her Son was the head and She Herself had been the beginning, when, as the sole member at the time, She gave Her consent at the Incarnation. According to St. Paul, it had been ordained from all eternity that the Son of God would redeem the world as the Head of a Body. So, in order that He could be a Head at His coming, the Holy Virgin Mary was asked to supply Him not only with a physical body that made Him human, but also with His Mystical Body that made Him Head. And since at the Incarnation of the Son of God, there were no St. Peter, St. John or a St. Paul, She was the only one to give Her consent, and thus, as the Holy Church teaches, She was, as the sole member of the Mystical Body of Christ, the beginning of the Church, the Mediatrix of all Graces, and the only Mother of all the children who would eventually be born into supernatural Life from that union between Her and Her Head. Just as all the members of the human race are children of Eve, born from the union between herself and her head, Adam.

Now it is inconceivable that St. Paul would know more about these deep and consoling truths then the one who had been asked to make the decision that this Church would ever come into existence. And once Her consent had been given, then the fullness of grace conceived within Her and born from Her made Her the Mediatrix of all Graces that would eventually be poured out over all mankind [Popes Leo XIII and St. Pius X].

Our Lady had not been ordained a Priest, and She was fully aware of the deep significance of this. No woman, in the full knowledge that she has a female body, can stand at the moment of the Consecration in persona Christi and say “This is my (male) body”. It would be a lie at the most holy moment in the universe and would make the whole act totally ineffectual. Thus She depended on the Apostles to receive the Body of Her Lord and Son in Holy Communion. Only to Her, the Mediatrix of all Graces, had it been given to see the full extent to which the Graces from the Cross would flow from the pierced Heart of Her Son in every Mass. No one can mediate what he has no knowledge of. Which means that a mediator must be in the possession of all the facts, and that the Mediatrix of all the graces must be in the possession of every purpose for which the mediated graces are given. And we stress once again that all these graces mediated by the Blessed Virgin Mary flow from the Cross and from the re-enactment of that great Sacrifice, the Catholic Mass.

Thus it was imperative that the descent of the promised Holy Spirit on the assembled Church in the Upper Room would be implored from the Blessed Trinity by the offering up of the daily Mass and daily Holy Communion. We can therefore imagine that Our Lady observed proceedings with a watchful eye and if there was any neglect in understanding on the part of the Apostles, that She would fulfil Her role as Mediatrix, and see to it that Peter and John understood. She was not in the position to direct the Church, only to mediate the graces from Her Head to obtain the desired effect. And if there was anything lacking in the leaders of that Church, She would supply the so necessary understanding and follow-up. She may have used words such as these:

“Our Lord and Saviour has gone to His Father in Heaven and so you can no longer depend on Him to do what He commissioned you to do in memory of Him in this very Upper Room: the breaking of the Bread. There are many assembled here with us who depend on you to do what He told you to do in His Name: to change bread and wine into His own Body and Blood and to give them Holy Communion.

As you are aware, before He ascended to His place at the right Hand of God the Father, He promised that ‘you, not many days from now, will be baptised by the Holy Spirit’ [Acts, 1:5].

What better preparation for this coming could we find than the daily breaking of Bread in the Holy Eucharist and to let the Lord implore the Father for this coming from our altar and from our hearts?”

If these noble thoughts had occurred to the Apostles without the prompting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, they would still, as real Graces, have been mediated for them by Her as the Mediatrix of all Graces. As we know now, this preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit took nine days and thus could conceivably have been a coming prompted, or even hastened, by a Novena of Nine Masses.

That Our Lady has the power to hasten God’s Hour is a truth solidly based on scriptural evidence. We can see this power at work during the wedding feast at Cana and in the acceptance in the state of Sanctifying Grace of John the Baptist by the Incarnate Son of God some three months before his circumcision while he was still in his mother’s womb.

“His birth brought great rejoicing. Even in the womb he leapt for joy, so near was man's salvation” [Preface of St. John the Baptist].

Mary’s eagerly looking forward to the daily reception of Her divine Son in Holy Communion taught St. John the Evangelist and indeed all of us a valuable lesson. By Her example, her prayers and Her power of intercession it has become quite clear to the Holy Catholic Church that those of Her children who have found the treasure of a great devotion to the Mother of God become Her Eucharistic children. And the first of these was St. John. Love of the Blessed Virgin Mary, far from eclipsing (as the Modernists so avidly hold up) devotion due to God, leads to frequent Mass attendance and to the reception of Holy Communion. And the ever-increasing descent of the Holy Spirit on these true children of Mary has its origin in the Cenacle where the coming of the Holy Spirit was hastened by the foresight of His power employed by Her who had become His Bride at the Incarnation.

Thus a great love for Our Lady, a great love for the Holy Catholic Faith and for Our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist, the outpouring of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, of which Wisdom is the first and the most important, and lives free from sin and delusion, are among the greatest Fruits of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

“May you walk in His Ways, always knowing what is right and good, until you enter your heavenly inheritance.” [Third solemn blessing on the feastday of the Triumph of the Cross, September 14].

What else is “The triumph of the Cross” than the anonymous sanctity and holiness of those who, at the hand of their Mother Mary, enjoy frequent attendance of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the reception of Holy Communion?

But, as if the foregoing was not enough, there are innumerable other graces to be obtained from what was instituted by Christ at the Last Supper and completed the next day on Calvary, the Fruits of which are impossible to count, for they are truly infinite ...

“... and keep them alive in famine”: a great love for the Sacred Heart in the Blessed Sacrament

 

One of these Fruits we come across in the Liturgy of the Sacred Heart. There, in the Entrance Antiphon we are told:

“The thoughts of His Heart last through every generation, that He will rescue them from death and keep them alive in time of famine.”

To keep them supernaturally alive in the time of a great drought of the Word of God as we experience today in every corner of the globe; and to keep them naturally alive when we experience a great famine of food, as is being prepared by Monsanto and its facilitators in Governments also for every corner of the globe.

"Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it ...” (Amos 8:11-12).

The first victims of this terrible drought are those who created it, the Modernists, that is those who succeeded in their untiring efforts to make many Catholics accept as Catholic all the modern heresies away from Catholic teaching.

“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! For you travel over sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when you have him you make him twice as fit for hell as you are yourselves. (Mt. 23:15).

And who are the ones who are destined to survive this severe drought and its terrible consequences?

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” (Jer. 17:8)

There are two ways open to Satan to make Catholics ‘adore’ his seed, Antichrist. One way is to make those ‘of little Faith and trust in God’ so anxious that they capitulate to him by accepting “the mark of the beast” for fear of not being able “to buy and sell” food, and so face the prospect of dying of starvation.

The other way is to starve them spiritually by making them follow the tortuous roads by which the Modernists enter the One-World ‘Church of Darkness’ through their acceptance of “the mark of the beast”.

The prospect of spiritual ‘death by starvation’ of Catholics is all too real going by the vast numbers that have left the Catholic Church in order to enter the easy church, held up everywhere by Modernism and immorality. The answer to this is the acquisition of much Light and an over-abundance of spiritual life through the possession of that fountain of Grace welling up to eternal Life. We know where that fountain is to be found: in the thoughts of His Heart, lasting through every generation, that He will rescue them from death. We also know where that Heart is present on this earth and where we receive It.

This takes care of the first part of the Entrance Antiphon on the Feastday of the Sacred Heart: that, from generation to generation, He will rescue His elect from spiritual death, a death in time of starvation caused by a drought of the Word of God. This rescue must imply that this terrible drought will not extend to His elect. The Word of God as spoken through His Church will never be lacking to those who combine the supernatural insights of their strong Catholic Faith with the natural understanding of what is going on on this earth. To this golden combination Pope St. Pius X referred when he gave it the name of discipline of the mind. Natural understanding enlightened by the supernatural insights of a strong and a cherished Catholic Faith, and supernatural insights enriched by a good understanding of how this Faith is to be lived while here on earth.

“May you walk in His Ways, always knowing what is right and good, until you enter your heavenly inheritance.”

There is no doubt about it: Satan will succeed in frightening many lukewarm Catholics into submission with the fear that they may not be able “to buy and sell” [Rev. 13:17], and so may not “remain alive in time of famine”. For Catholics like these, “the thoughts of His Heart” are a dead letter ...

Indeed, for those timid Catholics the problem is simplicity itself: ‘How am I ever going to cope under Antichrist?’ And so also is their answer: ‘Give in. Submit’. It is a clear repeat of Adam’s problem: ‘How am I ever going to cope with a fallen wife?’ And of Adam’s solution: ‘Give in to her. Submit’. Without a thought for prayer or turning to God. And from the effects of Adam’s Original Sin we may learn, as a valuable lesson for all the lukewarm Catholics of our days, that the way he saw the problem and its solution was far from simple. For it tied him in a terrible knot: ‘the knot of Eve’ [Vatican II], as well as in dire punishments from which there was no escape. As Scripture says it so clearly for our times:

“A third Angel followed, shouting aloud, ‘All those who worshipped the beast and its statue, or had themselves branded on the hand or the forehead, will be made to drink the wine of God’s fury, which is ready, undiluted, in His cup of anger ... There will be no respite, night or day, for those who worshipped the beast or its statue or accepted branding with its name’.” [Rev. 14:9-11].

Seen in this Light, their ‘solution’ is far from simple. Obviously it is far more preferable ‘to let God do the fighting’. This brings us to intrepid Catholics with their trust in God and in the Promises of the Sacred Heart. To them the ‘problem’ is not: “How are we going to cope under Antichrist”, but is put far more simple like this: “How is Antichrist going to cope with us?” For, if it is put in this way, they have turned tables on the beast by forcing it to cope with their God. As Scripture says:

“They [that is, the worldly rulers and their Modernist advisers] are all of one mind in putting their strength and their powers at the disposal of the beast, and they will go to war against the Lamb. But the Lamb is the Lord of lords and the King of kings, and He will defeat them. And they will be defeated by His followers, the called, the elect, the faithful ones.” [Rev. 17:13-14].

“This is why the Saints must have constancy and Faith.” [Rev. 13:10].

And again:

“This is why there must be constancy in the Saints who keep the commandments of God and Faith in Jesus.” [Rev. 14:12].

For 400 years the Sacred Heart has been encouraging this constancy in Its most trusted servants in preparation for the terrible upheavals in these last times.

That God remembers His faithful servants and their constancy in their hour of need, and feeds them ‘in times of famine’, can be learned from Sacred Scripture:

“They threw Daniel into the lion pit and there he stayed for six days. In the pit were seven lions which were given two human bodies and two sheep every day; but for this period they were not given anything to make sure they would eat Daniel. Now the prophet Habakkuk was in Judea; he had been making a stew and breaking up bread to put in a basket. He was on his way to the fields, taking this to the harvesters, when the Angel of the Lord spoke to him: ‘Take the meal you are carrying to Babylon and give it to Daniel in the lion pit’. ‘Lord’, replied Habakkuk, ‘I have never seen Babylon and know nothing about the pit’. The Angel of the Lord seized him by the top of his head and carried him off by the hair to Babylon where, by the force of his spirit, he set Habakkuk down on the edge of the pit. ‘Daniel, Daniel’, Habakkuk shouted, ‘take the meal that God has sent you’. And Daniel said: ‘You have kept me in mind, O God, you have not deserted those who love You’. And rising to his feet he ate the meal, while the Angel of God lost no time in returning Habakkuk to his own country.”

“You have kept me in mind, O God.” Compare this with “The thoughts of His Heart last through every generation ...”. But then, Scripture tells us, Daniel had served his God faithfully in exile in the hostile environment of fickle kings, jealous princes, false priests, career-seeking court officials and the like. He was fearless, but never over-bearing or imprudent in his trust in God, always knowing what was right and good ...

And then there is the well-known story of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarepta which Our Lord held up to the Jews of His time as a warning for their unbelief.

“There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah’s day, when heaven remained shut for three years and six months, and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to one of these. He was sent to a widow at Zarepta, a Sidonian town.” [Luke 4:25-26].

It was very dicey, in fact it was utter folly, for renegade people to cross swords with Elijah. Twice he destroyed by fire from heaven a captain and his fifty men, sent out by the king of Israel to capture him, so great had become the arrogance and unbelief of leaders and people. Here then is the story of how Elijah was kept alive in the three-and-a-half year drought he himself had called down from heaven over his wayward people.

“Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to (king) Ahab: ‘As Yahweh lives, the God of Israel whom I serve, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except at my order’.

The word of Yahweh came to him: ‘Go away from here, go eastwards, and hide yourself in the wadi of Cherith which lies east of the Jordan. You can drink from the stream and I have given orders to the ravens to bring you food there’. He did as Yahweh had said; he went and stayed in the wadi Cherith. The ravens brought him bread in the morning and meat in the evening, and he quenched his thirst from the stream. But after a while the stream dried up, for the country had no rain. And then the word of Yahweh came to him: ‘Up, and go to Zarepta, a Sidonian town, and stay there. I have ordered a widow there to give you food’. So he went off to Sidon. And when he reached the city gate, there was a widow gathering sticks. Addressing her he said: ‘Please bring a little water in a vessel for me to drink’. She was setting off to bring it when he called after her: ‘Please bring me a scrap of bread in your hand’. ‘As Yahweh your God lives’, she replied, ‘I have no baked bread’... But Elijah said to her: ‘Do not be afraid ... for thus Yahweh speaks, the God of Israel: "The jar of meal shall not be spent, and the jug of oil not be emptied, before the day when Yahweh sends rain on the face of the earth”’ [1 Kings, 17:1-14].

“Do not be afraid ...” Elijah of course was an exceptional man but that should not prevent us from trusting his and our God just as he did. The widow of Zarepta was not of his Faith, but she shared the rewards contained in his. And so will it be with us and with those God has entrusted to our faith.

In context we can also point to the twofold feeding of the thousands by Our Lord as contained in the four Gospels, as a reward for following Him to that lonely place. At least one of the Evangelists specifically mentions that the miracle was performed lest the people would succumb on the way home. There is ample reason then to put all our trust in the Sacred Heart of Our Blessed Lord that He will keep us alive in famine, even miraculously, after we have served Him fearlessly in the face of the hostile Modernists.

That a severe famine is being deliberately prepared by the forerunners of Antichrist is of great concern to the poor of this world. The forebodings are truly ominous. The main cause for anxiety is the worldwide enforcement by the so-called ‘rich’ countries and their Governments of genetically modified (GM) food at the expense of organically grown food. GM grains are being made sterile, so farmers can no longer do what has been an age-old practice: to sell two-thirds of their crop and sow the remaining one-third the next year. They are forced to buy sterile GM grains from GM outlets at monopolistic prices which the Third World farmers cannot afford. Thus their land gets sold and they lose their livelihood.

The world’s supermarkets are already stocked with GM food products which cannot be recognised by the customers because the GM food producers are not requested to label their products so as to facilitate the deception. The whole set-up is an overt and shameless preparation for buying and selling under conditions, one of which has been mentioned in the Bible as ‘the mark of the beast’.

So, while there is still time, let us love, revere and implore the Sacred Heart in numerous Holy Communions lest we too succumb on the way to our eternal Home to the combined forces of Modernism (‘the second beast’) and Antichrist (‘the first beast’). According to the Book of Revelation, “the second beast will do everything in its power to subjugate the whole world to the tyranny of the first beast” [Rev. 13:12].

“I love those who love Me.

And those who wait early at My door shall gain access to Me.

With Me are riches and honour, enduring wealth and Divine favour.

My Fruit is better than gold, yes, even the purest,

Better than the finest silver My return.

I walk in the way of virtue, in the paths of justice,

Enriching those who love Me, filling their treasuries ...”

[Book of Proverbs, 8:17-21]

 

No cause for alarm here. As we already know, Wisdom (speaking here) is personified by both Our Lady and the Holy Catholic Church of which She is the beginning. And the Fruit mentioned here is what this Part II is all about.

A Great Love for the Catholic Church

One of these Fruits of the Holy Catholic Mass is just as hard to find in these troubled times as it is to gather and to keep: a great love for the Catholic Church.

The greatest Object of the love of all the Saints was Christ crucified, Our Lord maltreated, tortured, cursed, abandoned, rejected. Which means of course that they could not find a greater joy and satisfaction than to share in some way this Sacred Passion and Death in their own life’s circumstances. But inseparable from this first love was their combined love for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Catholic Church, the two means by which all their knowledge of Christ and all His graces had come to them. Here the reader is referred to the Epilogue of Part I of this book where enough has been said of this love for the Catholic Church.

A Great Love for the Light of Catholic Faith

The spectacle of an orthodox Catholic in our modem society is truly a sorry one. No one resembles more the suffering Christ than he does. No one is closer to Our Lady of Sorrows than she is. From the four corners of the globe we hear the same reports: how misunderstood and mistrusted they are by their own bishops and priests, shunned and ignored by fellow Catholics who have followed the winds of change and no longer share their beliefs; how they are treated with impatience and contempt by the catechists, who go through the motions of pretending to teach their children the catechism, and how disobeyed they are by their own teenage sons and daughters: the products of this teaching.

Redress by their bishops is denied them; the road to the parishpriest is blocked; they are unable to get a hearing in the ‘catholic’ press; Sister and Curate are altogether on another wavelength, and the few words they manage to utter at parents meetings are drowned in a torrent of modern jargon, spiced with derision and intolerance.

To add to their daily agony, what do they see? They see a renewal which has been cleverly hijacked and twisted into some unrecognisable shape, which bears no resemblance to what was originally intended. They see bishops silent in the face of a monstrous perversion of catholic doctrine. They see the seminaries empty. They see their Priests and Nuns leave the Church and leave Catholic education. They see teenagers refuse to attend Mass on Sundays, and adopt practices contrary to Catholic teaching. They see apostates and atheists appointed to catholic schools as teachers in compliance with some spurious ‘anti-discrimination laws’. They see their children come out of ‘catholic schools’ with hardly any knowledge of their Faith and with barely the rudiments of morality, all in the name of some ‘renewal’. To say nothing of what they read in their catholic papers, or hear from the pulpit, or in the never ending seminars and gatherings, where it is all explained to them that this ‘renewal’ comes from Vatican II, and must be seen as the work of ‘the Spirit’, who is preparing us for some united, ecumenical church of the future ...

And then it is finally brought home to them that the only thing that stands in the way of this renewal is they themselves. They are the obstinate obstacles, the cross of the bishops, the bone of contention in parish life: the splitters, the wreckers, the cause of divisions. They must constantly show cause for their existence, for their Faith; all the others have it made. Their opposition to Modernism is suspect: the intolerance of Modernism to them is claimed to come from ‘the Spirit’ and is taken for granted.

It is obvious to friend and foe alike, that this situation cannot go on indefinitely. Sooner or later one camp will prevail over the other. One camp will show to have Supernatural Faith, Hope and Love on its side, the Communion of Saints, the Catholic Church. That camp will first suffer apparent defeat, and rejection, like Christ had to go through. And to sustain that camp through the agony of defeat and rejection, before it can take heart in the final victory, God has given to His camp one thing and one thing only that the opposite camp never can claim and will never possess, and that is truth. Finally, when all is said and done, when it no longer matters who had the ear of the bishops, who had the parish priest in their pocket, who had the numbers, who monopolised the catholic press, who could lay hands on unlimited sums of money for their propaganda: the deciding factor is: who is in the company of the same Jesus who divinely revealed before Pilate, that He had come into this world to testify to the Truth, and that all who are of the Truth would hear His voice. For Truth and Christ are synonymous, are one and the same, as He himself told us: ‘I am the Truth’.

With this we have come across yet another Fruit of the Catholic Mass: a great love for the Light of Catholic Faith in which Jesus’ Truth is seen and recognised, and a great respect for the faculty in man, the human mind, that contains this Supernaturally infused Light, recognises the Truth, and makes it its own.

For well over one hundred years our Holy Mother the Catholic Church has been warning us that the Enemy has been concentrating his attacks on the Catholic Faith. This attack has become very refined, and subtle and brutal. Everywhere in the world our good Catholics are being put under an almost intolerable pressure to hand over their Catholic Faith in exchange for a teilhardian, modernist persuasion, which is being proclaimed as the new Catholicism ensuing from Vatican 11, in line with modern, evolutionary trends. It is the purpose of this little book to alleviate this pressure, help to put a stop to this by showing every catholic reader what it is they are asked so insistently and relentlessly to surrender.

The more we grow in love for our God-given Catholic Faith by frequent Mass attendance, the more we will come to see in its Light that Catholic Faith is, in a real sense, undoubtedly the most precious gift of Almighty God to finite little man here on earth. For, although nothing could surpass in greatness the Gift of Himself in the Blessed Eucharist, where on earth is this Gift accepted and appreciated other than by a lively Catholic Faith? And the same goes for all the other Holy Realities revealed by God and given to us: Our Lady, the Sacraments, the Catholic Church itself: all only seen and appreciated in the Supernatural Light of Catholic Faith.

Yet, how many are there who, today, would know what this exceptional Gift is, and are able to tell the difference between It, and any other faith, including so-called ‘Christian’ faith? This startling fact alone is sufficient to bring home to us how very successful the ferocious attacks on Catholic Faith have become, and that a discussion on these matters has become imperative. For, if there are many Catholics - teenagers especially - who no longer can recognize Catholic Faith, and are no longer able to see how it is different from any other faith, then they are no longer in a position to know if they have lost their Catholic Faith, and have gone over to another persuasion.

Christ’s promise that He will be with His Church till the end of time, and His assurance that His Elect - in final analysis - will not be deceived, are synonymous, and together mean that Catholic Faith will not disappear altogether from this earth, no matter how reduced the number of His Elect may become at one time. For Catholic Faith to exist, the Catholic Church is essential: no other faith will do, no other church will do. And so modernism and teilhardism are doomed. They may succeed in gathering millions of Catholics: bishops, priests, nuns, layfolk into their modernist ecumenical church of darkness, but they will never deceive the Elect who in the Supernatural Light of their Infused, Divine and Catholic Faith will always be able to unerringly tell the difference and so preserve the Catholic Church. And with it the salvation of mankind. And that is what this is all about.

This is too good an opportunity not to proclaim the wonderful words of St. Paul by which he extols – in the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews - those heroes of the Old Testament who through their steadfast Faith in God and in God’s promises were justified by Him. How truly appropriate did it seem to St. Paul to put before us in the New Testament the example of these extraordinary men and women who lived centuries, even thousands of years, before the Birth of Christ, yet managed to please God so much by their Faith in Him.

(1) Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (2) For by it the men of old received divine approval. (3) By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear. (4) By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous, God bearing witness by accepting his gifts; he died, but through his faith he is still speaking. (5) By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was attested as having pleased God. (6) And without faith it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (7) By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, took heed and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; by this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which comes by faith. (8) By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go. (9) By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. (10) For he looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (11) By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. (12) Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore. (13) These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. (14) For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. (15) If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. (16) But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (17) By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, (18) of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.” (19) He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead; hence, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. (20) By faith Isaac invoked future blessings on Jacob and Esau. (21) By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. (22) By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his burial. (23) By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. (24) By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, (25) choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. (26) He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward. (27) By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. (28) By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the first-born might not touch them. (29) By faith the people crossed the Red Sea as if on dry land; but the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned. (30) By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they had been encircled for seven days. (31) By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given friendly welcome to the spies. (32) And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, (33) who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, (34) quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. (35) Women received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. (36) Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. (37) They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, (38) of whom the world was not worthy, wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (39) And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, (40) since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. [Hebr. 11:1-40].

Is what the cold, lukewarm, worldly, pleasure-seeking and yes, even apostate Catholics of our days have to offer to God really better than what these heroes of the Faith had to give to the Almighty? Are they truly making them perfect, they, who have received all that the Cross of Christ and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass have won for us, but are no longer seeking it? How harder it will be on Judgement Day for those who received everything that the New Testament has to offer, and could not even equal, let alone surpass, the Faith of those of the Old Testament described here by St. Paul ...

We will meet these Saints again in the next episode.

A Great Love for the Communion of Saints: the Kingdom of God

Because of the almost unanimous decision taken by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council not to issue a separate Decree on Our Lady, but to treat Her as an integral part of the Mystery of the Church at this time of great trial and tribulation, the children of Mary will clearly see the Great Lady in the Church, and the Church in Our Lady. And their filial devotion for the Mother of God will become inseparable from their great love for the Church.

It is truly amazing to see so many Catholics, who have survived ‘cyclone Teilhard’, who successfully withstood the onslaughts of Modernism, who have no time for false apparitions, but kept untrammelled their childlike Catholic Faith, are found to have a singular devotion to Our Lady, and more specifically are greatly devoted to Our Lady of Fatima. The devout wearing of Her Sacred Scapular has re-enacted for them the wondrous protection by the Angel of God, who descended with the three young men in the burning, fiery furnace of king Nabuchadnezar, making the inside of this raging furnace bearable to live in. (Dan. 3:4-50).

Our first concern is the Kingdom of God, Our Holy Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, which, as we know, is in this world but not of this world. The grave injunction of Our Lady at Fatima: to be concerned for sinners and for the avoidance of sin, as well as for the reparation of sin, is a 20th century reminder of Her Son’s command to us:

“Set Your hearts on His Kingdom first, and on its righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well.” (Mat.6:33).

The fact that Our Lady’s solemn warning has largely fallen on deaf ears is the surest sign that by and large Catholics too have ceased to be concerned for the Kingdom of God first. And when Teilhard came along with his song: “Build the earth, for that is from now on the Kingdom of God; that is now ‘the divine milieu’, and then evolution will take care of the rest”, countless Catholics believed him and went over to his substitute faith. What was the cause of that erosion?

Long before Teilhard’s fancies were openly preached within the confines of the ‘City of God’, affluent Western Catholics had become ashamed of being identified with simple people whose first concern was the spiritual Kingdom of God; and so it came about that this concern was left to the Saints, or to ‘religious fanatics and crancks’. Self- respecting Catholics became self-conscious about their religious practices and fervour; and the ‘childlike faith’ as demanded by Our Lord’s solemn warning: “Truly I say to you: unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven” got lost. (Mat. 18:3). This abandonment of the concern for the Kingdom of God, and the grateful acceptance of the fortuitous teilhardian substitute of ‘Building the earth’, has been hailed everywhere as a sign of Catholic maturity, of which the reception of Communion in the hand has become both the symbol and the excess. And with their exodus from the Catholic Church it became clear to those who remained in their Father’s House how Catholics lose contact with Our Blessed Lady and are unable to see Her in the various ‘churches’ that are being presented to them.

We may gauge from the throngs of Catholics who have flocked worldwide to one or another of these above-mentioned agglomerates, how serious the loss of their cohesion has become away from the Mother Church, the only one where Mary can be seen in the Church and the Church in the Mother of God. In times like these great strength and consolation are given to Catholics who, under the impulses of grace, turn to the Lives of the Saints to see how they served their God and their Church and how to be inspired by the ways in which they overcame their difficulties and turned apparent defeat into victories for the Lamb of God.

To be thoroughly at home in The Communion of Saints, that spiritual intercourse between the Blessed in Heaven, the faithful on earth and the Holy Souls in purgatory, is a great Fruit of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as well as being a Dogma of the Catholic Church and an article of Faith in the Creed. The roots of this Sacred Tradition go back to the Old Testament. Vatican II, sensing strongly the corrupting influence of an earth-centered substitute for the Catholic Faith, has stressed with unusual emphasis the overriding importance of this Dogma in her Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, Ch, 7. There is rich material here, and the reader is referred to this section for enlightenment in the traditional teachings of the Church on this topic.

Out of the legacy which he Saints have left us from their lives in their work for the Church in fighting sin and all the evils of their day that flowed from it: ignorance, error and the corruption of doctrine, we must learn how to deal with the consequences of sin in our own times. And this great gift of knowing and applying this so necessary Catholic resourcefulness in the Communion of Saints is obtained in frequent Mass attendance and Holy Communion. The world is full of books of the Lives of the Saints, and it is a great consolation to know that God will never refuse us access to these if we ask Him for it.

“Set your hearts on His Kingdom first, and on its righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well.” (Mat.6:33).

“Truly I say to you: unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mat. 18:3).

It is here, as I said we would, that we meet up again with the Heroes of the Faith as depicted by St. Paul in his Letter to the Hebrews. If they were such an inspiration for the Apostle of the Gentiles, so should they, and all the Saints in the New Covenant, be for us. And after two thousand years of Christianity we have even more justification than St. Paul had to apply to ourselves the words which this great Apostle used to conclude this part of his Letter:

“Surrounded then on every side by this great cloud of witnesses we too should throw off everything that hinders us, especially the sin that clings so easily, and keep running steadily in the race we have started. Let us not lose sight of Jesus who leads us in our Faith and brings it to perfection. For the sake of the joy that was still in the future He endured the Cross, disregarding the shamefulness of it, and from now on has taken his place at the right of God’s throne. Think of the way he stood such opposition from sinners, and then you will not give up for want of courage. In the fight against sin you have not yet had to keep fighting to the point of death.” [Hebr. 12:1-4].

“How blessed are the poor in spirit,

the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.

Blessed are the gentle,

They shall have the earth for their heritage.

Blessed are those who mourn,

They shall be comforted.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right,

They shall be satisfied.

Blessed the merciful,

They shall have mercy shown them.

Blessed the pure of heart,

They shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

They shall be called the sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the cause of right,

Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

 

It would be difficult to find a better way to finish this section on the Fruits of the Holy Catholic Mass than with the Eight Beatitudes, which the Son of God has laid at the foundation of the Kingdom of His Father both in time and in eternity.

If one of these Beatitudes is to be singled out, then we must say that seven of them form the crown in which is set the pearl of great beauty: ‘purity of heart’. Those who possess that jewel ‘see God’. They see God’s Hand in all that happens here on earth, and they will see Him in a very special way for all eternity ...