Help Thou My Unbelief

The familiar story of Doubting Thomas makes its annual appearance this Low Sunday, the Octave Day of Easter.  St. Thomas was not present for our Lord’s first manifestation to his apostles, making him the only one to miss having seen the glorified Body of the Saviour.  He has not yet seen the holes left by the nails in our Lord’s hands and feet.  He has not witnessed the wound in our Lord’s side left by the spear of Longinus, and from which flowed the lifegiving blood and water of infinite grace.  None of this has he seen.  He knows that our Lord died on the Cross just a few days ago, and his experience tells him that once someone is dead, they remain dead.  It was natural for him, therefore, to doubt the tall tale of the other apostles that Jesus once more dwelt amongst them.

While his unbelief was natural, it was nevertheless a great lack of faith on the part of Thomas.  After all, our Lord had given the apostles ample warning of what was going to happen to him, long before the events of Good Friday actually took place.  He had told them that his enemies would take hold of him, abuse him horribly, and then put him to death on a cross.  Even more importantly, he had told them that on the third day he would rise again from the dead.  Evidently, Thomas had either forgotten this memorable prediction, or had chosen to disbelieve it entirely.  In either case, when his fellow-apostles gave witness to the truth of the prophecy, we would have expected Thomas to react with more trust to their story.  Instead, he refuses to put any faith at all in their testimony, thereby denying the words of our Lord himself.

Of course, when he finally did see our Lord, he quickly acknowledges his weak faith, affirming the divinity of Christ in his humble words, “My Lord and my God.”  Our Lord gently rebuked his failure to believe, declaring (for the benefit of Thomas and for all Christians who would later find themselves doubting God), “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

And let’s face it, we are all quite capable of doubting God.  How many times have we questioned the providence of our divine Creator, as he “fails” to intervene in our difficulties and troubles?  Hopefully, when we catch ourselves contemplating the “failures of God” we will realize what we’re doing, stop ourselves in our tracks and utter that famous little prayer uttered by the father of the possessed child, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief!”

Let’s remember that doubt is usually not a sin on our part, but rather a temptation.  Like any sin, brief thoughts about something sinful are not sinful in themselves.  It’s only when we dwell on these thoughts to the point that we take pleasure in the idea of the sin, or when we deliberately continue the tempting thought and give in to it, that we truly offend God.  Our temptations to doubt God are sometimes a significant part of the battle to save our soul.

The three sources of the temptation are, as per usual, the devil, the world, and our fallen human nature.  This nature of ours has a hard time allowing our intellect to control our emotions—as our Lord put it, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  The world certainly doesn’t help, constantly placing blasphemy and sacrilege before us, filling our heads with vile objections about the Catholic Church, our faith, and even the very existence of God.  And of course, the Devil is always there to take advantage of our weakness, encouraging the worldly agenda to fester in our minds, and using every means at his disposal to undermine our faith in God and his loving care of us.

There is an important prayer that we should all know by heart.  It is the Act of Faith, and we must always be ready to repeat it in times of doubt.  It reminds us exactly who God is—the God who is Truth, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.  It is absolutely impossible for God to “make a mistake”, and even more impossible for him to deliberately lie to us.  If either were possible, then God would not be God.  There would be no God.  What God has revealed to us about himself through Holy Scripture and the Tradition passed down from the Apostles is all true and must be true!  Through the means of our Catholic Church, guided infallibly by the Holy Ghost, we find our way to the source of all Truth as revealed to us by God himself.  We give our assent to these truths, and for two thousand years have placed our trust in popes who are the vicars of Christ.  It is truly the work of the Devil himself, therefore, when the man who claims to be the vicar of Christ betrays these truths and instead feeds the faithful children of God with lies.  How many souls have been lost because of the errors being shoved down our throats by evil men?  How many have sought the truth and firm unchanging guidance of the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church only to find confusion and ambiguity?  It is singularly difficult today to keep the faith ourselves, let alone to attract others to that faith.

Without that unfailing guidance we came to expect from the Church, the road to the truth is sometimes long and arduous, and we must have compassion for the souls who are obviously of good will but find themselves stuck along the way.  Many there are who are on that path but still believe that the popes and bishops of Vatican II actually do represent God and not Satan.  They might seek to condemn everything they say and do, but at the same time they stick to their misguided notion of “humble obedience”.  “He might be an evil heretic but he’s still the pope and we have to respect him…” This wishy-washy type of thinking is not the way of God, who has promised to vomit out of his mouth those who sit on the fence and do not choose good over evil.  Meanwhile, it’s up to us, their neighbor, to give an encouraging helping hand to our overly cautious neighbors, these new “doubting” Thomases who hesitate to call a spade a spade and who fail to recognize that their shepherds are actually wolves.  Help our Novus Ordo friends and family members to use the power of the purse to bring about a revolution within their parish—“give us the Latin Mass, stop your nonsense or you won’t get a penny more of our money!”  That’s the kind of talk that gets the bishops worried…  We should raise our voices and join Archbishop Vigano’s call for the arrest and canonical trial of Bergoglio and his henchmen.  While that may seem an improbable thing to wish for, if enough Catholics are brave enough to rise up and demand it, it could happen, simply by force of numbers.

Meanwhile, and most importantly of all, we must carefully foster a true and profound faith in our own souls, rejecting the doubts the Devil and the world place before us, and remaining firm in our determination to subject our emotional weakness and vulnerability to our almighty Creator and his loving Providence, as we utter those simple yet solid words of St. Thomas, “my Lord and my God.”