Catholics

ROSARY POWER

ROSARY POWER on August 11, 2024

The humble Rosary, praised by every Saint –

A surer help to Heaven there simply ain’t.

When these “Comments” concluded last week (# 890, August 3) that praying the Rosary was the solution to the present madness of supposed Church laws being “imposed” upon us by modernist Rome, many readers may have wondered, what connection can there be between the two? How can all the Church’s problems be off-loaded onto the Rosary, so to speak?

Yet before Sister Lucy of Fatima was replaced in the 1960’s by a dummy that would be rather more docile to the modernists, she was able to say that in our times God has given to the Rosary a special power, such that it can solve all problems. This power is something that Catholics (and non-Catholics) need to believe in, for the world’s imminent trials. The key is that the world around us empties out God, leaving a shell of Him at most. The prayer of the Rosary restores the sense of God, little by little, in human souls. Let us begin with the man-made absence of God, and pass on to the power of the Rosary.

Mankind’s emptying out of God began in modern times at the latest in the 1400’s with the decline of Catholic faith in God and with the corresponding rise of esteem for man in the so-called Renaissance, or “Rebirth” of man. The underlying idea was that the Middle Ages had so overvalued God as to undervalue man. This idea paved the way for the explosion of humanism, or the super-valuing of man for man’s sake, by Martin Luther (1483–1548), in the form of Protestantism in the early 1500’s. This fragmentary revolt of subjective man against the unified objective order of the God of Catholicism has dominated the modernity of “Western civilisation” ever since. To Protestantism can be traced back all the most important errors of our times, for instance Naturalism, Rationalism and especially Liberalism in the 1800’s, then Ecumenism, Modernism and especially Communism in the 1900’s. The godlessness has come a long way.

For well over 400 years the Catholic Popes held up the Catholic Faith against Luther, so to speak, but with Vatican II (1962–1965) they gave way, and by 2024 the way was clear for worldwide Games to start with a mockery of the Last Supper. Such blasphemy is virtually the new religion of “Western civilisation.” Fully to grasp just how long-standing and deep is the alienation of modern man from the one true God, it is necessary to read a portrait of Luther like that of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book, “Three Reformers.” Luther’s violent uprising against God was in the very depths of the human soul. And so how can anyone pretend that praying the simple and repetitive Rosary can be a cure?

Physically, the Rosary engages, regulates and tranquillises all the most mobile parts of a human being: the fingers with the beads, the mouth with uttering the prayers, the mind with contemplating the Mysteries, maybe also the feet with walking up and down. This captivating of our fickle frame frees the soul to commune with God, i.e. to pray. My mind goes wool-gathering? The beads bring me back. And spiritually, the Mysteries centre on Our Lord, framed symmetrically within Mysteries of Our Lady (the unsymmetrical “Mysteries of Light,” added by modernists, should be disregarded). She gives Him birth, He dies for our sins, She is rewarded with the Queenship of the Universe.

Now “Rome is not built in a day.” Not even the Rosary may re-open Heaven in a few weeks. But whoever perseveres with the Rosary has every chance of getting back onto the wavelength of Heaven, and steadily more off that of the world. Each Mystery has its own lesson of God, and all fifteen together take me through the entire cycle of the history of our Redemption. Here is why I was ever born, and nowhere else. Here, passed in review in less than an hour, is what makes sense of the whole of Creation. Our lives on earth are not just “nasty, poor, brutish and short,” in the notorious words of an English philosopher. To get us to Heaven, Our Lord alone suffered for us all more than all of us put together could ever suffer. I want to get to Heaven. I will be faithful to the special prayer God gave to His Church to get me there!

Kyrie eleison.

ROMANS XI

ROMANS XI on July 27, 2024

God’s planning far surpasses human ways.

Let us not judge, but let us love and praise.

With Romans XI we come to the third and last of St Paul’s three full Chapters meant to explain to Gentiles how so many members of the Chosen Race of the Old Testament can be at that moment causing scandal by refusing the New Testament. On his own missionary journeys St Paul repeatedly met with violent opposition from the Chosen Race, so he knew very well how badly they can behave. See I Thess. II, 14–16, where he says they “displease God” and “oppose all men,” but “God’s wrath has come upon them at last.” St Paul would not have been surprised at all by their latest and cruellest “mowing of the lawn” in Gaza.

However, in Romans XI there is no trace of any such “anti-Semitism” (as the Chosen Race chooses to call it, by which they mean any opposition whatsoever to anything that anyone of their Race does or says). St Paul may well have guessed that any such evocation of their crimes would have turned the Gentile

readers of his Epistle only further away from understanding the infidelity of the Jews’ rejection of Christ. Instead he gives three major reasons why the Providence of God may have allowed that infidelity. Firstly (1–10), it is only partial; secondly (11–24) it is highly useful, and thirdly (28–32) it is only temporary. By lifting his readers to a much higher level than Jewish crimes, St Paul prepares the way to end his three Chapters, IX to XI, with a brief hymn to the glorious mystery of God’s unsearchable ways (33–36).

Thus God has not Himself rejected His people of the Old Testament, because in every generation there is a remnant of Jews saved by grace. St Paul himself is Jewish by blood, and when Jews truly convert to Christ, they can make excellent Catholics, because unlike Gentile converts, they are, so to speak, returning home. So a chosen minority of Jews reach their heavenly goal, even if a large majority are blinded (1–10).

Secondly, the infidelity of Jews is highly useful, because the Gentiles’ conversion is designed to provoke them to jealousy, and if their rejection of Christ opened the way for Gentiles to be saved in God’s Church, then their reversion to Christ at world’s end will be the resurrection of the Gentiles. Moreover, the basic Jewish vine-stock (e.g. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) is still holy, even if many Jews have broken off it, and so let Gentile Christians, who are mere grafts onto that vine-stock, remember that they too can break off it, even if they can be re-grafted onto it. In any case, all Gentiles depend, as Christians, on that vine-stock for their Christianity (11–24).

And thirdly, the infidelity of the Jews to the Gospel of Christ and to the New Testament is only temporary, because at world’s end, when the Gospel has been preached to all the Gentiles, the remaining Jews will convert collectively, i.e. as a whole, albeit with exceptions. For indeed the Jews are still the chosen, gifted and called People of God. The Sacred Heart has never forgotten His own People, as He will show when He converts them just before the end of the world. In the meantime they disbelieve in Him in order to obtain the same mercy which He granted to the once disbelieving Gentiles (30–32).

And by way of conclusion for all three Chapters on the mystery of the Chosen Race of His Old Testament rejecting His New Testament, St Paul glorifies the marvellous and unfathomable ways of God. For 2000 years since the Incarnation Our Lord has not been understood by the large majority of His own People, and moreover, since “The higher they are, the harder they fall,” then not only did they reject Him, but the Chosen Race of God made themselves into the chosen instruments of Satan, as we have seen since last October in Gaza, in such wilful cruelty towards the Palestinians as to have been condemned all over the world. And did God exterminate them, or did St Paul rail against their enmity to God and man (I Thess. II, 16)? No, God made use of their inhumanity as a constant scourge to lay across the backs of unfaithful Catholics to bring these latter back to Him, and He inspires St Paul to discern what profit He draws from their enmity towards Him. Let us imitate St Paul, if we can.

Kyrie eleison

ROMANS IX

ROMANS IX on June 22, 2024

Let us recall how Jews served God at first,

But the best, that fall, can turn into the worst.

When the savagery of today’s Israelis continues unabated against the Palestinians in their midst, their most savage “mowing of the lawn” yet (that is their own term for it) since the founding of Israel in 1948, it is an opportune moment to consider the nature of the Jews and where they are coming from, as seen by their Creator Himself in the text of His own Word. For in no less than three full Chapters of St Paul’s greatest Epistle, Romans IX to XI, the Apostle to the Gentiles strives to explain to them how the mass of Jews, truly the Chosen Race for 2000 years from Abraham to Christ, could, when their own Messiah at last appeared, have crucified Him and become not converts to His Church but its worst persecutors.

St Paul must have known how the Jews of his time, as of ours, would utterly dismiss him as a “Jew-hater” or “antisemite,” because he begins the three Chapters with his “sorrow and anguish” at not being able to bring to Christ his fellow-Jews (v.2), because as Israelites they enjoyed a little litany of incomparable privileges from God. To this day, if Jews are dominant in so many different fields, it is only because God has not taken away from them the natural gifts of intelligence and understanding which they would need, to provide the Messiah with His human cradle for the benefit of all mankind.

Nor does the failure of the gifted Jews to follow up from the Old Testament to the New mean any failure on the part of Almighty God (v.6), because it was by His own choice, preceding any human choices, to allow the Jews to fall away from Him while He would have mercy on the Gentiles. Thus all Jews by race are the Israel of the flesh, represented by Agar and Ishmael, and Esau, while all Catholics by faith in Jesus Christ, Jew or Gentile, are the spiritual Israel, represented by Sarah and Isaac, and Jacob, merely fore- shadowed by the Israel of the flesh. The entire Old Testament only existed for the New Testament.

Objection: but if God’s choice precedes all choices of men, then it is God’s fault if the Jews reject Christ.

Reply: No, God is sovereignly free to choose on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will allow to harden their own hearts by their own free choice of evil, in order to show forth His own power and justice (v.14–16). Thus for nearly 2000 years, ever since the Crucifixion, the special persecution of the Church by Jews has served to highlight the mercy of God towards all Catholics by faith in Christ, Jew or Gentile by race. That God would in fact throw open His New Testament to Gentiles as well as to Jews was prophesied in many places in the Old Testament (v.24–29) – St Paul lists four such quotations in Romans XV, 9–12.

In conclusion, while Gentiles are justified by their faith in Jesus Christ (v.30), all the Jews who stumble over Jesus Christ by putting their trust in their own good works instead, are not justified but condemned

(v.31–33). They may still belong to Israel of the flesh, that Israel of the Old Testament and of the Law, but ever since Jesus Christ died on the Cross they cannot belong to the true Israel of the spirit unless they have faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord, Redeemer and Messiah.

In fact, the last two millennia since the Crucifixion have shown how the Jews have even fallen away from the true Old Testament, because they preserve in their post-Christian synagogues the original text, no doubt as evidence of their prestigious origins and glorious vocation, but the essential meaning and content of that text they refuse, because every page of the Old Testament, if one knows how to read it, points to Jesus Christ. Of course. So within a few hundred years the Jews had concocted their own substitute for the Old Testament, namely the Talmud, which mentions Our Lord only to blaspheme against Him. So the Talmud, and not the Old Testament, is the holy text of the Jews of today’s synagogues. The distinction is most important. Talmudic Jews continue the false Israel. Jews Catholic by faith belong to the spiritual Israel, which is the Catholic Church.