Sunday, March 26, 2006
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...
It's easy today to believe the Church is under an unprecedented attack from those who would like to see an end put to Catholicism. There are challenges in the courts turning up in the news weekly. The Church is being cursed for refusing to arrange gay adoptions, for opposing abortion, for allowing sexual abuse. It can and does become discouraging.
The Vatican webmasters have developed a very good search engine that I was exploring the other day. This fact actually has a relationship to the above topic, if you'll bear with me.
Pope Leo XIII is well known for his encyclical Humanum Genus which opposes Freemasonry. I was searching the Vatican website for other documents on Freemasonry when another of Pope Leo's encyclicals turned up--Dall'alto dell'Apostolico Seggio or On Freemasonry in Italy. Strong stuff.
It is needless now to put the Masonic sects upon their trial. They are already judged; their ends, their means, their doctrines, and their action, are all known with indisputable certainty. Possessed by the spirit of Satan, whose instrument they are, they burn like him with a deadly and implacable hatred of Jesus Christ and of His work; and they endeavour by every means to overthrow and fetter it. This war is at present waged more than elsewhere in Italy, in which the Catholic religion has taken deeper root; and above all in Rome, the centre of Catholic unity, and the See of the Universal Pastor and Teacher of the Church.
And
Hands were laid upon ecclesiastical property, partly by absolute confiscation, and partly by charging it with enormous burdens, so as to impoverish the Clergy and the Church, and to deprive the Church of what is necessary for its temporal support and for carrying on institutions and works in aid of its divine apostolate. This the sectaries themselves have openly declared. To lessen the influence of the Clergy and of clerical bodies, one only efficacious means must be employed: to strip them of all their goods, and to reduce them to absolute poverty.
And
All know with what salutary effect and in how many ways the influence of religion penetrates society. It is beyond dispute that sound public and private morality gives honour and strength to States. But it is equally certain that, without religion there is no true morality, either public or private. - From the family, solidly based on its natural foundations, comes the life, the growth, and the energy of society. But without religion, and without morality, the domestic partnership has no stability, and the family bonds grow weak and waste away. - The prosperity of peoples and of nations comes from God and from His blessings.
I thought about this while Father talked about the 23rd Chapter of Chronicles which was the source of the first reading at Mass this morning. According to Father, the liturgy had failed and so the people had lost faith and had fallen into evil practices. It ended in the Babylonian Captivity which did not end until the liturgy was restored. He then related this to Vatican II at which the first topic on the agenda was the liturgy.
Liturgy is central to keeping the faith. When liturgy falters faith also falters. This can be just as much a factor in personal faith as it can in Catholic theology. We don't cling to faith long without worship, and the surest road to apostasy and atheism is a rejection of or a neglect of the Mass.
Which, of course, is why our current timeframe is critical, because we have a weakened form of Mass in far too many places, and it is undermining the faith. This is the reason why rubrics are so important. This is the reason why doing your own thing at Mass is destructive. This is why the laity have a right to complain when the rubrics are not followed. Not because a changed word here or a new gesture there is going to matter to God all that much, but because it is going to matter to those in the pew who are trying to understand and to cling to the faith that has been passed down through the centuries. Little things do really matter in the big picture.
