The Sheep Of His Pasture

It’s Good Shepherd Sunday, and our minds turn once again to this special role of our blessed Lord, who truly is the Good Shepherd, and of ourselves, who, equally truly, are his sheep.  It’s important we put aside any misplaced feelings of superiority for a moment as we have a tendency to recoil from thinking about ourselves as dumb beasts of the field.  Instead, we need to take our Lord’s analogy and see what he really means as he compares certain aspects of our nature to those of our woolly friends.  Let’s put aside the sheep’s lack of intelligence for a moment and look at its good qualities instead, its meekness and docility, its unwavering loyalty to the shepherd who provides it with food and protection.

When the Good Shepherd founded his Church on the rock of St. Peter, it was his intention that Peter and his successors would follow him as shepherds, acting as his Vicar on earth, taking his place as the Supreme Pastor of souls.  Our Lord wanted each Pope to act as Good Shepherd in his place, providing the sheep—us—with the things we need from God.  These are pretty much the same things every good sheep needs, as described above, food and protection.  This is what we look for in our popes.  We expect to be fed with the infallible doctrinal and moral truths revealed by God, and we expect to be protected by the grace that comes from valid saraments.  Fed and protected—that’s basically it.  In return our Lord expects us to remain fiercely loyal and meekly submissive to our Holy Mother the Church.  That might sound outdated to the modern generation, which prefers independence and complete freedom to do whatever it wants.  But this is not the Catholic mindset, which understands our desires must be submitted to the will and laws of God.  So let’s ignore the ignorant opinions of this modern generation and remind ourselves instead what our blessed Lord told us he wants from us.  He wants us to be good sheep.  Obey the Church, obey its laws, obey its pastors.

Catholics have done this, and it all worked very nicely for nearly two thousand years.  It worked so long as the pastors kept their side of the bargain, so long as they fed and protected the sheep.  Being good little sheep is dependent upon our pastors feeding and protecting us.  Three times our Lord told St. Peter, “Feed my sheep.”  Why three times?  Because St. Peter had denied him three times.  Our Lord wanted to impress on St. Peter that if he and his successors do not feed and protect the flock, they will not only fail in their most important task but would deny Christ all over again.  “Feed my sheep!”  From the first Pentecost to the Second Vatican Council, they acted as good shepherds, never feeding us false doctrine, never jeopardizing the validity of the sacraments.  In return, we remained submissive to them.

But in the 1960s, while the rest of the world experienced the cultural revolution against common sense and moral integrity, the devil finally succeeded in infiltrating wolves into the pasture.  The Church’s fundamental duty to bring Christ, the light of the world, to all people, was suddenly set aside.  Under the guise of modernizing the Church to make it more acceptable to this ever more permissible world, she allowed the world to take her over.  A growing number of modernist clergy were only too happy to take on the role of wolves, questioning and changing the meaning of God’s revealed truths, morality and worship.  Perhaps even worse than the wolves were the hireling popes and bishops who fled in the face of these wolves, capitulating everything we hold holy to these evil men and allowing our Holy Church to be desecrated in more ways than anyone could ever have imagined.

The faithful—we sheep—had no say in these events, which were foisted upon us even as we were told how wonderful these changes would be by the shepherds we trusted.  Everyone went along with the changes for a time, but eventually, as we realized their fundamental and existential nature,  we were faced with a choice.  Whether to remain blind followers, accepting the wolves who were devouring the faith and destroying the sacraments; or to follow the hirelings who fled the scene, abandoning the Catholic Church to her fate.  Many were happy to join the wolves, applauding the progessive reforms.  Thousands more chose the latter path and fled, taking refuge either in the Protestant sects, in staying at home, or in losing the faith altogether.

Desperately, some sought a third option.  We felt unable to stay in a sheepfold that was now being run by the wolves.  But we certainly didn’t want to desert the Good Shepherd, just because his successors had failed him and us.  So we looked for a way to remain good Catholics in this crisis.

These particular sheep who ended up choosing the third option have been dubbed as “traditional Catholics.”  In reality, however, we’re just simple sheep who try to remain loyal to the Good Shepherd in spite of the bad shepherds who now pretend to be his successor.  Make no mistake though, without a shepherd to feed and protect us, we have been scattered.  Many different theories have arisen about how to handle our situation: some groups are sedevacantists and don’t believe that Francis is the pope at all; some groupsfall into the “Recognize and Resist” category, believing that while Francis is a true pope, a true successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, and yet claiming the right to disobey him; there are even some groups who not only recognize Francis as pope but actually beg him to recognize them, knocking constantly at the gates of the Vatican and begging him to grant them the authority to hear confessions and conduct marriages and ordinations.  History will eventually judge which of these positions was the most Catholic and prudent, but in the meantime we poor sheep are left out in the cold to fend for ourselves.  We must do what we can to feed ourselves with the faith and sacraments, and to protect ourselves against the constant attacks of a modernist world that sees us as the last bastion of defense against their godless values.

Let’s face it, sheep without a shepherd are not in a good position.  Yet we console ourselves with the thought that if we follow our conscience and do our best to do our best, no matter who we end up recognizing or not recognizing, resisting or obeying, our blessed Lord will recognize us!  “I am the good shepherd,” he told us, “I know my sheep, and am known of mine.”  This must surely be the most encouraging thought of all, that so long as we follow the Good Shepherd himself, that is, the truths he revealed, the moral values he taught, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass he commanded us to offer in his Name—then we will continue to be his people and the sheep of his pasture.