The Beginning Of An Advent Meditation

[ 7 minute read ]

Humiliation

We recently learned that Michael Voris, the founder of St. Michael's Media, CEO and host, stepped down after a morality clause violation. Voris has always been candid about his past failings.

Be ready to accept humiliations. They can hurt terribly but they can help to keep you humble. Whether trivial or big, accept them. All these can be so many chances to be a little nearer to our Lord. There is nothing to fear, if you are near to the Lord and in His hands. - Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury

Mr. Voris addressed the issue of his resignation in a video posted to his Twitter page in which he referred to "some very, very ugly truths from my past... that I, for essentially 62 years, have avoided facing."

Humility is the only thing that no devil can imitate. - St John Climacus

It is far too easy for any one of us to slip into mediocrity and fall further into sin when that lifeline to God is ignored. That is, without regular disciplined prayer, liturgical and individual prayer by which God meets our willing hearts and nourishes us with His Body and Blood, and accompanies us with His word, we can fade into sin and become a caricature of a Christian.

Unfortunately, for some decades, Catholics have endured added pressure upon their spiritual lives imposed by some from within the Church. The challenge of living the Gospel is difficult in any age. If the last 100 years or so are any kind of commentary or witness, then Catholics and the Church have been accosted more often and to a degree than at any other time in history.

Throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.

Pope John XXIII

First and foremost, we are called to open our lives to God and, like Saint Teresa of Calcutta and many before her, find Jesus and serve Him in each person. Shallow thinkers and anarchists hijacked the Second Vatican Council's direction to throw open the windows to the Holy Spirit for the salvation of souls. When Catholics threw open the windows to the world, sin wafted freely into the sacred precincts of Holy Mother Church, largely through the efforts of the media and their heterodox allies in the Church. Seminaries closed due to a lack of vocations, religious men and women left their orders in droves, lay men and women embraced secular values that resulted in the promotion of abortion (by Catholic politicians), divorce and childless families. Confusion and chaos reign/ed/s.

38. But such an order—universal, absolute and immutable in its principles—finds its source in the true, personal and transcendent God. He is the first truth, the sovereign good, and as such the deepest source from which human society, if it is to be properly constituted, creative, and worthy of man's dignity, draws its genuine vitality. This is what St. Thomas means when he says: "Human reason is the standard which measures the degree of goodness of the human will, and as such it derives from the eternal law, which is divine reason . . . Hence it is clear that the goodness of the human will depends much more on the eternal law than on human reason." - Pacem in Terris

It seems self evident that the much needed human reason took a vacation in the years following the Council.

I would now like to add yet a third point: there was the Council of the Fathers – the real Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media. Thus, the Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers. And while the Council of the Fathers was conducted within the faith – it was a Council of faith seeking intellectus, seeking to understand itself and seeking to understand the signs of God at that time, seeking to respond to the challenge of God at that time and to find in the word of God a word for today and tomorrow – while all the Council, as I said, moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of the journalists, naturally, was not conducted within the faith, but within the categories of today's media, namely apart from faith, with a different hermeneutic. It was a political hermeneutic: for the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of those who seemed to them more closely allied with their world. There were those who sought the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression "People of God", power for the people, the laity. There was this threefold question: the power of the Pope, which was then transferred to the power of the bishops and the power of all – popular sovereignty. Naturally, for them, this was the part to be approved, to be promulgated, to be favoured. So too with the liturgy: there was no interest in liturgy as an act of faith, but as something where comprehensible things are done, a matter of community activity, something profane. And we know that there was a tendency, not without a certain historical basis, to say: sacrality is a pagan thing, perhaps also a thing of the Old Testament. In the New Testament it matters only that Christ died outside: that is, outside the gates, in the profane world. Sacrality must therefore be abolished, and profanity now spreads to worship: worship is no longer worship, but a community act, with communal participation: participation understood as activity. These translations, trivializations of the idea of the Council, were virulent in the process of putting the liturgical reform into practice; they were born from a vision of the Council detached from its proper key, that of faith. And the same applies to the question of Scripture: Scripture is a book, it is historical, to be treated historically and only historically, and so on.

We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy … and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real force of the Council was present and, slowly but surely, established itself more and more and became the true force which is also the true reform, the true renewal of the Church. It seems to me that, 50 years after the Council, we see that this virtual Council is broken, is lost, and there now appears the true Council with all its spiritual force. And it is our task, especially in this Year of Faith, on the basis of this Year of Faith, to work so that the true Council, with its power of the Holy Spirit, be accomplished and the Church be truly renewed. Let us hope that that the Lord will assist us. I myself, secluded in prayer, will always be with you and together let us go forward with the Lord in the certainty that the Lord will conquer. Thank you! - Meeting With The Parish Priests And The Clergy Of Rome, Address Of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 14 February 2013

The seeds of that true renewal, that true reform, are indeed being manifest. For example, the Personal Ordinariates established by the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.

The basis of true renewal is conversion in Christ. The saints are exemplars of repentance. Their stories can provide us with context, relief and a challenge to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

The struggles of one, for example of Michael Voris, can serve to remind us to strive for daily conversion to the Gospel. Sadly, that need for conversion and readiness to permit room for God in our daily lives has yet to find more willing hearts in people willing to become zealous witnesses to the Gospel for the salvation of souls. Perhaps there would be greater willingness to risk all for Jesus if the sacred Liturgy - where Jesus is found to be at His most vulnerable - was celebrated in a manner that helped rather than hindered unwavering commitment to the beautiful, true and good Presence of Jesus Christ.

We would say that, through some mysterious crack - no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.

The Church is no longer trusted. We trust the first pagan prophet we see who speaks to us in some newspaper, and we run behind him and ask him if he has the formula for true life. I repeat, doubt has entered our conscience. And it entered through the windows that should have been open to the light: science. - from a letter penned on 29 June 1972 by Pope Saint Paul VI, published by Fr. Leonardo Sapienza in La barca di Paolo, 2018.

Those who drank the Kool-Aid of sin and death, the swill of the Medial Council, have proven the observation that malevolence itself entered the Church, an evil that has pushed aside beauty, truth and goodness, and humility. The devil cannot stand truth, goodness and beauty. Banal churches, wrecked sanctuaries, ignorant and defiant laity, narcissistic and abusive clergy, irreverent liturgies, universities that are far more pagan than Catholic - how dare anyone say such pervasive ugliness is a realization of God's will for His Church?! If anything speaks of the near triumph of evil in the post-Council era, it is the ascension of the bland and the popularity of scorn toward anything of God.

There have been many prominent Catholics whose atrocious actions have been exposed in recent decades. The founders of orders and fraternities and sodalities or various apostolic works, clergy, religious and laity, have cause inestimable damage to others. Marcial Maciel, Marko Rupnik, Jean Vanier, Theodore McCarrick, Rembert Weakland. Any good they did is greatly overshadowed by their horrifyingly manipulative and exploitative bad actions.

The symptoms of an insidious cancer were there for decades, but ignorance, naivete and a false mercy that enabled serial abusers to assault vulnerable youths and adults, created cover for wicked men. That victimizers like Marko Rupnik and David Haas have not been held to account adds insult to injury, and is a sobering reminder that we can never forgo our shared responsibility to remain watchful for the sake of the health and well being of our beloved children and dear vulnerable adult brethren.

Seattle, Wash., Oct 17, 2004 / CNA

In a recent interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Archbishop Alexander J. Brunett said he revealed the homosexual culture that was rampant at the Michigan seminary, where he served as academic dean in the 1960s, but was dismissed.

His students included a "large colony of homosexual people" who liked to go to gay bars at night, he told the newspaper. He was also fighting drugs and a hippie subculture. He complained to his archbishop and tried to block the ordination of some students. However, he was deemed "counterproductive" and was sent back to the parish.

The now-archbishop of Seattle observed that many of the clergy sex-abuse cases in the United States involve priests ordained in the 1960s and that 81 percent of minor victims were male.

There are those who express their sorrow publicly, and there are those who build legal walls in an attempt to shield themselves from prosecution. The latter show little or no sorrow for their sins, for a public admission of guilt would likely lead to incarceration.

Death, judgement, heaven or hell.

We are free to invent stories we create for ourselves and others, whether or not those stories are rooted in truth or falsehood, fact or fantasy, reality or fiction. We are free to tell the stories we tell, true or false as they may be. However, the day will come when our earthly lives will cease, and, freed of any obstacles to encountering absolute reality, we will be confronted with those stories. The penitent person shall then be purified of falsehood and enter into God's glory and eternal life, and the impenitent person shall be trapped in an eternity of misery and an eternal death of his own making, because he clung to those illusions he worshipped as real and that he demanded others to burn incense to.