Who Is He That Will Harm You?
Did you ever wake up one morning and suddenly realize that the world is completely upside down? Probably not, it’s usually a gradual process that instills itself in our awareness as one element after another of order and beauty in our life disappears to be replaced by ugliness and chaos. Slowly but surely though, we get there. We have gradually learned how things really are. By now I’m sure we’re all firmly convinced that the entire world is under the control of the Lord of the World, Satan himself.
How do we know that Satan is the Lord of this world? Because when he tempted our blessed Saviour in the desert, the devil took him up “into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee.” He couldn’t give something he didn’t have. Satan has been permitted a certain control over the material world, and he uses those powers carefully and deliberately, but always seeking the same end, which is the ruin of souls. “I will give you all these things,” he said, “if…” If what? “If thou wilt fall down and worship me.” That doesn’t sound like a very enticing invitation. But the infernal serpent is the slyest of all God’s creatures. God’s first commandment is to have no strange gods before Him. So when we give ourselves up to self-indulgence, to pleasing our own fallen human nature with its sinful inclinations, to doing our own will and not God’s… we are placing all those material pleasures and goods before the will of God, defying his first commandment in favor of Satan’s. What is Satan’s one and only commandment? “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” And if we follow that law and do what we want whenever we want, we are, in effect and whether we know it or not, worshiping the Devil. And oh, so easily!
But to go back to that awareness that you and I all have, that all is not well with the world (to put it mildly), let’s remind ourselves that while things are indeed very, very bad right now, we shouldn’t think they can’t get worse! When you think things can’t any worse, they invariably do. Don’t we all share that feeling of apprehension that something very bad is about to happen? Or that it has already started to happen? Do we not stand, perhaps, on the threshold of a chastisement from God unlike anything that has been seen since Noah’s Flood? It is a nagging fear forever in the back of our minds, it’s a fear that creeps into our nightmares as we wonder what form this evil will take.
So what do we do, as Catholics, when we’re afraid like this? We turn to God. Of course we do, and we should. We pray. We pray for his mercy, for his enlightenment, for his just wrath on his enemies. But we should not stop there. Prayer, we should remember, is not a one-way street. It’s not just “us talking to God.” In fact, God talks to us too. Now you can close your eyes and listen very hard to hear that still, small voice of calm that is the Word of God. Some of you will hear it. Most of us will not. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t hearing our prayers, or that he isn’t responding to them. He speaks to us in ways we ought to know, but often fail to recognize. One of the most effective ways in which he lets us know he’s listening is through the responses he so often provides in the daily, traditional Catholic liturgy.
I’ll give you an example… Do we fear what is going to happen with the Church, with our nation, with the world? Do we wonder how far evil will triumph? Then read today’s Epistle of St. Peter: “For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayers,” says our first Pope and Prince of the Apostles. “But the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.” How great a comfort is that, knowing that all our prayers are heard by the Most High God, and that he is quite aware, thank you, of all the evils we have to face. “And who is he that will harm you,” he goes on, “if ye be followers of that which is good?” Truly, we should have nothing to fear, if indeed we are followers of that which is good. And I believe we are.
Our blessed Lord himself tells us, “Let not your heart be troubled.” Elsewhere though, he says: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” If you must fear anything, he’s saying, fear falling into sin, fear the devil who tempts you, you personally, to commit an offence against God. The loss of our soul is the only thing we should really stand in fear of, eternal damnation is truly the only thing worth fearing. What happens to the world around us, no matter how bad it gets, even if it results in our persecution, even our death, all this is nothing, of no matter whatsoever, so long as we save our souls.
So when we see bad things happening, as we do more and more often, “let not your hearts be troubled.” Again, St. Peter reminds us at the end of today’s Epistle, “But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled; but sanctify Christ the Lord in your hearts.” Words of St. Peter, but more exactly, as they are in Holy Scripture, these are the Words of God! The words he whispers in our ears as we kneel before him in prayer, pouring out our fears and troubles to him. Yes, God speaks. Learn to seek his words in the public prayers of the Liturgy, our daily exposure to his divine will for us.
I’ve given you only one example, based on today’s Epistle, of how God speaks to each of us. But in times of greater tribulation, of momentous events in the Church and the world, God communicates with us in ways too many to mention, ways which only the deaf and the blind can fail to see and hear. You all remember 9-11, that dreadful day of September 11th, 2001, when the United States was attacked by the forces of radical Islam… let us not imagine it to be a coincidence that the very next day was the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary, a feast instituted by the Church after the successful defeat of the Islamic hordes at the gates of Vienna on September 12th, 1683. And then the day after that, on September 13th, the eve of the Feast of the Exaltation of Holy Cross—a gigantic cross of steel beams was discovered standing in the wreckage of the Twin Towers, a cross that would become a focal point for the prayers and tears of so many, a cross that would console and strengthen them in their grief and be a symbol of hope for all people. Answers to our prayers, clear signs of God’s presence and his care for us.
But these events are now distant in our minds. Let’s turn our attention to something that happened this week. As you all know by now, the Vatican has commanded His Grace Archbishop Vigano to appear before a Vatican tribunal charged with the crime of schism. Where are the signs from God, what response does the good Lord give us in the midst of our fears and confusion at this time?
Well, there are some, but before we examine them, let’s just take a quick look at the crime of which the Archbishop is supposed to have committed. The crime of Schism. Schism is a very serious charge. Schism is indeed a most terrible thing. It is the ripping apart of the Mystical Body of Christ, the destruction of the unity of the Catholic Church, her oneness that is the first of her four marks by which we may recognize her. This is what the Vatican is saying the Archbishop is doing. They are mistaken, or more likely, just lying. Unfortunately though, many conservatives in the conciliar church, prelates, podcasters, and ordinary people make the mistake of clinging to a misguided loyalty to the person of Jorge Bergoglio no matter what he says and does. They will gasp and complain in horror as he worships Pachamama, as he blesses same-sex couples, promotes unnatural vice and attempts to abolish the true Mass—but they will do nothing else. He is still, they fondly imagine, the “Holy Father”, the Vicar of Christ, although even Bergoglio himself has renounced this title. They actually think that to denounce him, a heretic and apostate from the faith, would be a sinful act of rebellion against the legitimate representative of Christ himself. They would be tearing the Catholic Church apart, creating a schism. And so, they moan and groan, but they take no action. They just wait to see what will happen. Eventually, many if not all, will probably side with Bergoglio in condemning Archbishop Vigano as a schismatic, smug in their security blanket of being members of a church the whole world recognizes, even though God does not.
What they cannot seem to grasp is that the schism—and yes, there is a schism—goes back all the way to the Second Vatican Council. Let’s not list all the abuses that followed that council. It would take too long and we have over seventy years of experience to become quite familiar with them already. But Vatican II had already ripped apart the Mystical Body of Christ with its counterfeit, modernist, and masonic doctrines. As Archbishop so nicely put it, “the Council represents the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian “synodal church” is the necessary metastasis.” The Catholic Church was not only infiltrated by the modernists, it was transformed into a new and very much false and counterfeit “church” that remained Catholic only in name. The true Catholic Church went underground after Vatican II and especially after the introduction of the sacrilegious “Mass” of Paul VI. She has remained in hiding ever since, still in existence thanks to the likes of brave men like Archbishop Viganò. The clarity of his faith and the frankness of his statements show us exactly who the true schismatics are, something which should be obvious to anyone who isn’t blinded by misplaced loyalty to those same schismatics. We should be praying today that all the children of God will be inspired by God and by the words of the Archbishop to put an end once and for all to this schism by denouncing and deposing the schismatic-in-chief Bergoglio and all his co-conspirators.
And so we do pray. We speak to God, we complain to God, we question why God allows all this to happen. But today I would ask you to stop for a moment. Stop and Listen. Is God hearing our prayers? Yes he is—remember St. Peter’s words, “For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers…” Is God answering our prayers? Let’s look at his response. Let’s turn to the Liturgy.
We don’t have to go any further than yesterday. Yesterday, June 22, was the anniversary of the death of St. John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester and a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church at the time of the Reformation in England. I think his actions in the face of schism might resound with the current situation… It was John Cardinal Fisher alone among all the bishops of England who refused to go along with the schism that had been created by Henry VIII. When all the other bishops and clergy fell into line behind the heresies of the new religion, when they all turned their altars round to face the people and say their communion service in English, when they ripped out their tabernacles, when they removed all mention of sacrifice from the Mass and replaced it with a community celebration, when they replaced the Pope as head of the church with an apostate king—any of this sound familiar?—only John Cardinal Fisher said no. He was accused of being a schismatic from the false Church of England and a traitor to the head of the new false church, King Henry VIII. If ever history repeats itself, we can surely see the parallel with today. God, you see, has given us a very plain and precise declaration that he knows what’s going on and that it is on Him that we should place our trust.
And as if this were not enough, God places before us another shining example of speaking truth to power, that of St. John Baptist, whose feastday is tomorrow. Like St. John Fisher, he too would stand up to his king, Herod, and for similar reasons of defying God’s law by marrying his brother’s wife. For his pains, again like St. John Fisher, the king ordered his head to be cut off. Today we stand between the feastdays of the two St. Johns, St. John Fisher yesterday, St. John Baptist tomorrow, and we make our prayers to God, the God who is the same, yesterday, today and forever.
One last word from God in answer to our prayers. At the Anticipated Vigil of St. John Baptist’s Nativity yesterday we read at the proper Last Gospel at Mass one more message from God. It was the beginning of the Gospel of St. Luke, and described the announcement by the Angel Gabriel to St. John Baptist’s future father, Zacharias. Gabriel is describing to Zacharias the type of man his son would be. We can apply this description to the present crisis once again—God wants to make sure we understand just who Archbishop Vigano is. Here’s what the Angel said: “He shall go before [God] in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” These prophetic words of the Angel are placed before us now, to renew our hope for the future, for surely this is exactly what the Archbishop’s role appears to be in this our brave, new world. “To turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,” that is, to turn the bishops and priests to the faithful, to make them realize their duties in instructing them in the true Catholic faith revealed by God. “And to make ready a people prepared for the Lord?” Make no mistake, Archbishop Vigano is preparing the people. And who are these people whom the Archbishop is preparing? We are the people, his people and the sheep of his pasture. So let’s listen to the good Archbishop, that strong voice crying in the wilderness, and let’s make sure we are prepared.