free will

ROMANS, CHAPTERS IX – XI

ROMANS, CHAPTERS IX - XI on June 8, 2024

How can God allow such cruelty in Palestine? 

His reasons will eventually shine!

The Jews are often mentioned in these “Comments” because of the important part which they play in world and Church affairs. In what is arguably the greatest of all fourteen Epistles of St Paul, he devotes three whole Chapters to them, IX, X and XI. This is because they had played such a central part in the rise and formation of the Catholic Church that early believers were scandalised by their having driven Pontius Pilate to crucify Christ, and from then on by their refusing to have anything to do with Christ, a refusal which, with few, but noble exceptions, continues to this day. In fact their accusers will say that ever since the crucifixion of Christ, they have wanted to dominate the world for the Antichrist, and that in our own time they are coming closer to their goal than ever, an unparallelled misfortune for the entire world. But the Jews will reply that all such accusations arise merely from hatred of the Jews, or “anti-semitism.” 

Where is the truth? Jews were the main obstacle in the way of St. Paul’s mission to plant the Catholic Church wherever he could so as to save souls for eternity. Here is why they are so often mentioned in his Epistles, and not always favourably – see especially I Thess. II, 14–16. But every mention of them by St Paul is part of Holy Scripture, and therefore, as the Catholic Church teaches, these mentions are first and foremost the Word of God and only secondarily the word of their human author. 

It follows that to accuse St Paul of “anti-semitism” is to accuse God Himself of being “anti-semitic.” Now whatever that word is taken to mean, the meaning is ugly. But God is Truth itself (Jn. XIV, 6), and He is in no possible way ugly. Therefore whatever St Paul says about the Jews is truthful, and not “anti-semitic.” 

So if we want to know what to think about the Jews, and for that purpose we turn to Scripture to discover what God thinks of them, we cannot do better than turn to St Paul who had such direct experience of them in his apostolate. Turning to St Paul, we find his most complete presentation of the problem that they represent in these three Chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. Not that St Paul speaks mainly from any bitterness of his apostolic experience of them, on the contrary . . . 

In the Epistle as a whole, the three Chapters are sandwiched between the dogmatic teaching of Chapters I to VIII, and the moral teaching of Chapters XII to XVI. In Ch.IX St Paul presents the True Israel, the spiritual Israel, consisting of those souls, Jew or Gentile, who are justified before God by their faith in Jesus Christ. It was merely prefigured by the Israel of the flesh, which included few souls that were not Jewish by race. From Moses onwards this Israel had for 1500 years the exclusive temple, priesthood and sacrifice of the one true God, but God’s ultimate purpose was the training of all mankind for the Catholic temple, priesthood and sacrifice, which would come with the spiritual Israel, the Catholic Church. 

In Ch. X St Paul presents the false Israel, consisting of the Jews who have heard and understood the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but have rejected it. They are not interested in that spiritual Israel, open to all mankind, where they no will no longer have privileged and exclusive access to the true worship of the one true God. So they will hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but refuse it, and crucify Him instead. 

Ch. XI, presents the threefold reasons of God’s Providence for allowing such infidelity of the Jews: it is firstly only partial because some Jews down the ages will be the best of Catholics, as God meant them to be; secondly, the infidelity will be useful to make the Jews jealous and to make the Gentiles humble; and thirdly the infidelity will be only temporary because the Jews will convert before the end of the world. 

Ultimately, Jew (or Gentile) that spurns God is merely exercising his God-given free-will, but St Paul for his part terminates the three Chapters with a brief hymn to the mysterious and unfathomable ways of God. 

Kyrie eleison 

END-TIMES, END-WORLD

END-TIMES, END-WORLD on June 1, 2024

For God’s own view of these two Testaments,

In Romans read how Paul saw the events.

It belongs to the Wisdom of God to leave us human beings ignorant of His exact calendar or programme for the events leading up to the end of the world, but in the most immediate of those events all of us are involved, and it is not forbidden to speculate about them. On the contrary, for the saving of my soul it may be prudent to think about what Almighty God has in mind, in order to avoid certain major errors.

For instance, God may guide us human beings to do what He wants, but He will never take away our free-will for us to do it, and that is why a Golden Age of one thousand years between now and the end of the world is impossible – for it to last, He would have to be constantly nullifying men’s choices. Luther (1483–1546) knew that he was destroying Christendom. It took him 450 years until Vatican II, so to speak (1517–1965), but by the end of that time men had grown steadily more corrupt. There may now be a short Golden Age such as the Triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, but it cannot last long. At La Salette in 1846 Our Lady said that just 25 years of good harvests would see sin coming back, i.e. the close of the Golden Age and the beginning of the descent to the Antichrist. Millennarism, a supposed 1000-year Golden Age before the end of the world, is an error condemned by the Church.

Another major error to be avoided is that the Church will come to its end on earth in a blaze of human glory. A single quotation of Our Lord Himself puts paid to that illusion – Lk. XVIII, 8: “When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on earth?” In other words, at world’s end the Church will almost have disappeared from sight, presumably as a result of its persecution by the Antichrist, the most ferocious persecution of all its history. That world which has the Devil for its ruler (Jn. XIV, 29) will see in that persecution a tremendous defeat for the Church, but God will see in it the last drops of sanctity being squeezed from it in the form of some of the greatest martyrs and saints in all of its history, in other words one of its greatest victories. It should be no surprise if the Church’s end most resembles Our Lord’s Cross.

The Church’s universal victory follows immediately in the General, or universal, Judgment.

Another error surely to be avoided is to confuse the end of “times” (see Lk. XXI, 24) with the end of the world. In terms of the Venerable Holzhauser’s commentary on Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Revelation, where he divides Church history into Seven Ages, the “end times,” or end of the times for the Gentiles to be entering God’s Church, to replace all the former Chosen Race choosing no longer to be God’s own people (Mt. XXVII, 25), comes at the end of the Fifth Age. On the contrary, world’s end comes at the end of the Seventh Age. For indeed the former Chosen Race will convert back to Our Lord, their own Messiah, at world’s end (Rom. XI, 26), but until then Jewish converts will still be the exception rather than the rule, in other words they will be too few for God’s purpose of populating His Heaven. Hence God’s whole plan for salvation by the two Testaments – see Romans, Chapters IX, X, XI.

Here is why the New Testament had to replace the Old; why the richly natured Chosen Race by race had to give way to the supernaturally gifted Chosen Race by faith; why the Jews have had for so long to give way to the Gentiles; and why they have made war upon them ever since (I Thess. II, 14–16) – especially on the Palestinians. But Catholics must never forget how much we owe to God’s own heroes of old – of the Old Testament. Without them we would have had no Incarnation of Jesus.

Kyrie eleison.

Liberalism – Blasphemy

Liberalism – Blasphemy on January 26, 2013

Is liberalism really as horrible as it is made out to be? This or that person is accused of being a “liberal,” yet a number of those accused vigorously deny that the label attaches to them. Who is right? Accusers or accused? Since “liberalism” is one name for the all-embracing error of modern times, responsible for throwing souls without number into the fires of Hell, it surely deserves one more approach.

Now freedom relates either to what I am free from, i.e. some constraint or other, or it relates to what I am free for, i.e. some purpose or other. Of these two relatives of freedom, the negative freedom from constraint comes both before the positive purpose in time, but after it in importance. It comes before in time, because if I am constrained from achieving a purpose, my achieving that purpose is out of the question. On the other hand it comes after it in importance because the value of the non-constraint will depend on the value of the purpose for which it is used. Thus holding a knife frees me from being unarmed, but if I use that freedom-from for cutting up food to eat, the freedom-from is good, but if I use it for carving up my grandmother, the freedom-from becomes murderous.

Now what liberalism does is to make the freedom-from a – or the – supreme value in itself, regardless of the freedom-for, or the good or bad purpose for which it will be used. Thus liberty or freedom-from is made independent of a good or bad purpose, independent of right and wrong. But the difference between right and wrong is an essential part of God’s creation, designed from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden onwards for man to make his choice between Heaven and Hell. Therefore to put man’s lack of constraint in front of God’s law is to put man before God.

Being then the implicit denial of God’s moral law, of right and wrong, liberalism implicitly makes war on God, putting man’s human “right” to choose in front of God’s divine right to command. Now as Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, liberals come in 36 different varieties, by no means all of which mean to make war on God. But war on God remains the logical conclusion of liberals giving supreme value to liberty, and it is the reason why for many of them, anything goes. God and his rules having been pushed to one side, then the adoration of liberty becomes for liberals their substitute religion, a religion with no rules except their own will. Being moreover a substitute religion, it must get rid of the true religion which blocks its way, and so liberals naturally become crusaders against God’s order in all corners of his Creation: marriages free of gender, families free of children, States free of a head, life free of morals, and so on, and so on. Such a war on God’s reality is completely insane, yet liberals, apparently so sweet to their fellow-men whom they are “liberating,” can in fact be utterly cruel to anybody who gets in the way of their crusade. It is in the logic of their substitute religion that they need observe no normal decency in trampling upon anti-liberals, who deserve no compassion.

For 20 centuries the Catholic Church condemned such insanity. Yet at Vatican II the official Church gave way to it, by for instance declaring (“Dignitatis Humanae”) that every State must protect rather its citizens’ freedom-from civil constraint in the practice of their choice of religion than their freedom-for the practice of the true religion. And now the leaders of a certain religious Society want to put it under the authority of the Vatican II Romans. For the true religion, such action is, as Archbishop Lefebvre called it, “Operation Suicide.” But then liberalism is intrinsically suicidal.

Kyrie eleison.

Deep Problem

Deep Problem on November 17, 2012

Many Catholics do not conceive of the full depth of the problem posed by the Conciliar Revolution of Vatican II (1962–1965) in the Catholic Church. If they knew more Church history, they might be less tempted either by liberalism to think that the Council was not all that bad, or by “sedevacantism” to think that the Church authorities are no longer its authorities. Did Our Lord question the religious authority of Caiphas or the civil authority of Pontius Pilate?

The problem is deep because it is buried beneath centuries and centuries of Church history. When in the early 1400’s St Vincent Ferrer (1357–1419) preached all over Europe that the end of the world was at hand, we today know that he was out by over 600 years. Yet God confirmed his preaching by granting him to work thousands of miracles and thousands upon thousands of conversions. Was God confirming untruth? Perish the thought! The truth is that the Saint was correctly discerning, implicit in the decadence of the end of the Middle Ages, the explicit and near total corruption of our own times, dress rehearsal for the total corruption of the end of the world.

It has merely taken time, God’s own time, several centuries, for that implicit corruption to become explicit, because God has chosen at regular intervals to raise Saints to hold up the downward slide, notably the crop of famous Saints that led the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century. However, he would not take away men’s free-will, so that if they chose not to stay on the heights of the Middle Ages, he would not force them to do so. Instead he would allow his Church, at least to some extent, to adapt to the times, because it exists to save present souls and not past glories.

Two examples might be Molinist theology, made virtually necessary by Luther and Calvin to guarantee the protection of free-will, and the Concordat of 1801, made necessary by the Revolutionary State to enable the Church in France to function at all in public. Now both Molinism and the Concordat were compromises with the world of their time, but both enabled many souls to be saved, while the Church allowed neither to undermine the principles which remained sacred, of God as Pure Act and of Christ as the King of Society respectively. However both compromises allowed for a certain humanising of the divine Church, and both contributed to a gradual secularising of Christendom. Compromises do have consequences.

Thus if a slow process of humanizing and secularizing were to go too far in that world from which alone men and women are called by God to serve in his Church, they could hardly enter his service without a strong dose of radio-active liberalism in their bones, calling for a vigorous antidote in their religious formation. Naturally they would share the instinctive conviction of almost all their contemporaries that the revolutionary principles and ideals of the world from which they came were normal, while their religious formation opposed to that world might seem pious but fundamentally abnormal. Such churchmen and churchwomen could be a disaster waiting to happen. That disaster struck in mid-20th century. A large proportion of the world’s 2000 Catholic bishops rejoiced instead of revolting when John XXIII made clear that he was abandoning the anti-modern Church.

So nobody who wants to save his soul should follow them or their successors, but on the other hand the latter are so convinced that they are normal in relation to modern times that they are not as guilty as they would have been in previous times for destroying Christ’s Church. Blessed are the Catholic souls that can abhor their errors, but still honour their office.

Kyrie eleison.

Free-will Valued

Free-will Valued on August 11, 2012

Concerning the drama of souls falling into Hell (and many choose to do so – Mt.VII, 13; XXII, 14), a reader raises a classic problem which can be framed briefly as follows. Either God wants souls to be damned, or he doesn’t. If he does want it, he is cruel. If he does not want it, yet it still happens, then he is not omnipotent. Then is he cruel, or is he not omnipotent? Which?

Let us establish immediately that God sends no soul to Hell. Every one of the many souls damned sent itself to Hell by the series of choices that it made freely during its time on earth. God gave to it life, time and free-will, and also any number of natural helps and supernatural graces to persuade it to choose to go to Heaven, but if it refused, then God let it have what it wanted, namely an eternity without him. And that loss of God, for a soul made by God only to possess God, is by far its cruellest suffering in Hell. Thus God wished that the soul might choose Heaven (“He will have all men to be saved” – I Tim. II, 4), but he wanted to allow the evil of its choosing Hell in order to bring out of that evil a greater good.

Notice the use made here of the two English words, “wish” and “want.” To “want” something is more full-blooded than merely to “wish” it. Thus a family father may well not wish his son to suffer harsh experience in life, but in view of all the circumstances he can want to let him suffer because he knows that that is the only way his son will learn. Similarly in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father did not wish to let his younger son leave home and squander his heritage, but he wanted to let him do so because that is what the father in fact did, and good did come of it – the return home of the son, now repentant, a sadder but wiser young man.

In the same way God wishes on the one hand all souls to be saved, because that is what he created them for, and that is why he died for all of them on the Cross, where one large part of his suffering lay precisely in his knowing how many souls would not choose to profit by their Redemption to be saved. Such a God can in no way be considered or called cruel! On the other hand God does not want all souls to be saved unless they also want it, because if he did, they would all be saved, because he is all-powerful, or omnipotent. But, given all the circumstances, that would mean in effect overriding the free choice of those who, left to themselves, would choose not to be saved, and that would mean trampling on their free-will. Now just see how passionately men themselves value their free-will, when you see how they dislike being given orders or like being independent. They know that their free-will is the proof that they are not just animals or robots. So God too prefers his Heaven to be populated with men and not just with animals or robots, and that is why he does not want all men to be saved unless they also want it.

Yet God does not want souls to be damned, because that again would be cruelty on his part. He only wants to allow them to be damned, in view of the circumstances that souls will thus have the eternity of their own choice, and he will have a Heaven of human beings and not just animals or robots.

Thus his wish to save all souls means that he is by no means cruel, while the damnation of many souls proves on his part not a lack of omnipotence, but a choice to value his creatures’ free-will, and the infinite delight that he takes in rewarding with Heaven souls that have chosen to love him on earth.

Mother of God, now and in the hour of my death, help me to love your Son and to choose Heaven!

Kyrie eleison.

More Cheerful

More Cheerful on January 28, 2012

Your Excellency, please tell us something more cheerful!

God exists. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just, but his mercy is also boundless. He is in perfect control of all that is happening in the world. Neither the Devil nor his human servants, including the criminals now running the world, can lift a finger without his permission. He knows every detail of their diabolical plans and is using every single one of them to fulfil his own Providential design.

But how then can he be allowing so much evil in our world? Because while he never wants evil, he wants to allow it, so as to bring out of it a greater good. Many prophecies indicate that out of today’s global corruption will arise tomorrow the greatest triumph ever of the Catholic Church, e.g. Our Lady of Fatima; “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” What is happening right now is that Our Lord is using his enemies to purify his Church.

But could he not have found a less unpleasant way of purifying his Church than for us to have us go through today’s unbelievable corruption? If it depended only on him, undoubtedly he could have found other ways of purifying his Church, but if you and I knew all that he knows – foolish thought! – and if above all you and I wanted, as he does, to respect the free-will that he gives to all human beings, then there is every likelihood that you and I would see that the way he is choosing to do things is the best.

And just what does man’s free-will have to do with it?

God does not want robots or merely irrational animals to share with him in his bliss. Now even he cannot give to his creatures a deserved happiness which they have done nothing to deserve, because that is contradictory and his power is over all being, not over non-being such as things contradictory. But if creatures are at least in part to deserve his bliss, then he must give them free-will, which if it is to be for real, must be able to choose the opposite of what he wants for it, and if it is really able to choose evil, then that is what will happen, more or less often.

But you say that the true Church follows Our Lord in teaching that narrow is the path to Heaven and few there be that find it (Mt.VII, 14). How can it be worth God’s while to have created, just today for instance, a mass of human beings, if only relatively few reach Heaven? How can so many falling into the horrors of Hell not be too high a price to pay for the relatively few reaching Heaven? Because God works in quality, not in quantity. That a mere ten men could have saved from his wrath the whole city of Sodom (Gen. XVIII, 32) proves how precious to God is one single soul responding to his love, over a large number that by their own free choice do not want his love. “I would have gone through the whole Passion just for you,” said Our Lord once to a soul. He would say it to any soul.

Do you mean that if, when the world worries and torments me, I merely stick all the more closely to God, then he takes account of it, for me and for those around me? I might almost want the world to be still worse! Now you are getting the idea!

Kyrie eleison.