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OT: Is 50:4-7

Epistle: Phil 2:6-11

Gospel: Mark 14:1-15:47

Today we read through the Passion of our Lord, according to Mark’s account this year. During this Holy Week, we are brought face to face with the cost of discipleship, and we start with the Palm Sunday readings. We read before the Processional hymn of Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem amid the Hosannas and the waving palm fronds. Ten minutes later we are hearing him taken away by the high priest’s soldiers, and his Passion is under way.

The reading from Isaiah and from Paul’s letter to the Church in Phillipi describe the characteristics of the Lamb of God, the one who was sacrificed for our sins. It is inescapably obedience. Isaiah prophetically describes Jesus: a man with “a well-trained tongue,” given to him for a purpose: “that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.” In our own less powerful lives, we are given skills for a purpose — for God’s purpose. Isaiah intimates our free will, our freedom to say ‘no’ to God, as he says “Morning after morning he opens my ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have not turned back.” God speaks to us. He leaves it to us whether to listen. Elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear.” [Mk. 4:9] We choose to rebel or not. We choose to walk with God or turn back. Our act of obedience to God’s will is our act of Love, since God is love. Co-operating with God’s will, we can offer ourselves in love to everyone, even our enemies. Isaiah says the good man gave his back to those who beat him. Perhaps more jarring to our modern ears is the claim he “did not shield from buffets and spitting.” Our popular culture seems to take more offense at “disrespecting” than at something truly awful. The obedient servant is strengthened to the point of being able to endure our time’s greatest sufferings.

Paul reminds us that Jesus was able to endure his time’s greatest suffering: death on a cross. Somehow his deep obedience became a source of strength. Like the prophesy by Isaiah, Jesus did not retaliate when he was beaten. He too offered his back. His obedience was the perfect sacrifice. His obedience glorified him such that at his name every knee shall bend. Because of his submission to the Father’s will, every tongue shall confess Jesus as Lord of all.

In my own broken life, perhaps I can seek to be just a little more obedient to my heavenly Father’s will. It is a form of slight suffering for me when I demur from my usual stance of equating myself with God. But is is possible, and I can receive, as Isaiah and Jesus did, strength through my suffering because my suffering suddenly has a purpose. My little Passion (the root word is suffering) can in a small way be a holy sacrifice. It is my choice. I do not have to turn back from Him.

In the Passion we see the people of this world mock Jesus and his weakness. They taunt him, daring him to call on his angels or come down from the Cross under his own power. They think they know what power is, but they are blind to the ultimate power. Jesus preaches through his actions, or more precisely his inactions, on the Cross. He is meek, he is weak, he endures indignity for obeying his heavenly father. He commends himself into his Father’s hands.

May God give me the strength to be weak and in so doing glorify Him.

OT: Jeremiah 31:31-34

Epistle: Hebrews 5:5-10

Gospel: John 12:20-33

The new covenant promised by God through the prophet Jeremiah is coming through Jesus Christ. Jeremiah says it will be a new covenant, not like the old. It seems from what he says that the new feature is our inability to break it. God’s commitment to us in the new covenant is unconditional. He loves us so much he sends his only begotten son to offer a perfect sacrifice for our sins.

We hear in the letter to the Hebrews that the Son’s suffering perfected the offering. The sacrifice was perfect because redemption came through one who obeyed even to acceptance of a terrible death he did not deserve. Truly, there is nothing we can do to work our way into Heaven. Only God’s love is sufficient to the task. His love is so great it overwhelms our ingrained patterns of sin and disobedience. His obedience redeems our disobedience.

In his discourse during the Last Supper, Jesus said that he knew what was coming. He opened briefly to us the mystery of how his two natures exist in one Person. In his human nature, Jesus was like us in every way except sin. In his divine nature, Jesus is eternal and omniscient. On the night before he suffered, Jesus admitted he was troubled. What man would not be troubled as he anticipated the events of Good Friday? Beyond the awful physical abuse — the loss of sleep traveling from official to official all night, the beating, the crown of thorns, the carrying of the cross, nails in his arms and feet — there was the injustice of it all. He was the one Good Man there, yet he would be beaten and killed as one having committed the worst crimes. Luke tells us his agony was so great he sweat blood, that the physical stress was so great capillaries broke and mixed his blood with his sweat. The flow of blood and water from his side mark both the beginning and the end of his Passion.

Jesus admits his suffering, but he knows he must do it. He says, “but it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.” Only his divine nature could know what that really meant. In his divine wisdom, Jesus knew the Fall of Man, God’s repeated embrace of his people, and our repeated rejection of his embrace. Jeremiah was one of those holy messengers sent from God to save his people, to tell his people to turn around and walk toward him. The people of God rejected Jeremiah, as they rejected all God’s messengers. Finally, the world rejected God through the Crucifixion. But God never rejected the people of God. He retained his claim on us, extending his claim to anyone who turned to him. Only a remnant remained at the foot of the Cross, but his sacrifice was so perfect it made sense and opened the eyes of disciples as they walked the road to Emmaus, and it opened their mouths as they preached at Pentecost.  It opens our hearts even today.

Jesus illuminates in his discourse the root of the problem as he explains the power of his anticipated sacrifice: “the ruler of this world will be driven out.” Satan rules this world. He whispered lies to us — Adam stands for every man that came after him — and we chose to believe those lies. Death and destruction entered into the world as a result of our choice. God’s messengers came to call us back, but Satan rules this world. The pull of evil was too strong, and God’s people refused to listen.

In Jesus’ offering of himself — both priest and sacrifice, as Hebrews tells us — was the perfect oblation. Satan, the father of lies, could not see Truth because he had lived in lies so long his eyes were darkened beyond all hope. He had lived in despair so long, he could not see Love. Love offered itself and the offering was sufficient: Love triumphed over Death. Communion with God triumphed over alienation from God.

In his image of the necessity of the wheat to die so as to yield a rich harvest, Jesus is calling us to do more than just open our hearts. He is calling us to see the nobility, the mercy, and the righteousness of the sacrificial life. When I deny myself the desires of this world for the glory of God, I participate in some small way in the Way of the Cross. Perhaps he will not ask me to give up my life as he gave up his: brutalized by a bureaucratic machine marching to the Devil’s drumbeat. Perhaps he will only ask me to give up some small pleasure I pursue when nobody is looking, the kind of thing that I might be tempted to tell myself brings no harm to anyone. The acts of self denial we take on in Lent are training opportunities for greater acts of self denial the rest of our lives. (When we use the term “self-denial” we are talking about saying “no” the self-centered impulses and designs that otherwise run amok in our lives.)

We already redeemed. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross paid the debt incurred by Adam’s sin. We have an opportunity, an invitation, to be sanctified, to become more holy. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross — his obedience and self-denial — is a model for our sanctification. As we grow stronger in our faith, we will be able to be more obedient, and we will be able to deny our selfish impulses, just a little bit more than we could. Our sanctification will increase the Kingdom of God just a little bit, and Love will triumph over Death just a little bit more through our sanctification. We will participate in a small way in the Way of the Cross and the Easter joy that follows Good Friday.

OT: Exodus 20:1-17 (Ten Commandments)

Epistle: 1 Cor. 1:22-25 (Christ crucified is a stumbling block to Jews and madness to the pagans)

Gospel: John 2:13-25 (Jesus vs. the temple merchants and his statement to the Jews)

The desire for a “humanized” and “human-sized” deity is strong. We are told of Moses’ reading the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel, but let us be reminded that they sent him alone to the holy place at the top of the mountain because they were afraid of direct intimacy with the Deity. We find it hard to live out the simple commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” By “heart,” do we mean “the deepest, most interior part,” as the people at the time of the writing of the Scriptures meant it? Or do we mean it as “a powerful wave of uplifting emotion,” which is the meaning of the current age? By “mind,” do we mean that deepest part of our thinking, where knowledge and wisdom come together and recitation and cleverness are left behind? Or do we mean rhetorical techniques perfected to permit us to push people in arguments to the position we prefer? What of “strength?” Am I as a Christian somehow to have the burst of strength that comes easily to men and the sustained strength that is so often characteristic of women? Is this what God meant in Genesis 1:27-28 about “male and female, in his image he created them?” It is more than any man can do.

That is all just too much work for most of us. Ten rules read to us by the holy man is much more attractive. Moses was a man, just like me. The Ten Commandments are rules we can follow, and they are guardrails that offer protection from wandering too far along the path to Perdition. Some of the rules are dramatic and compliance is easily verified: do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie. Others are more subtle rules for our minds as well as our actions: do not let thoughts dwell on others’ property and perhaps lead you to violate the injunction against theft, and do not let your thoughts dwell on others’ spouses and perhaps lead you to adultery.

We might say that the first of the Ten Commandments given to us by God through Moses is so difficult we should not be surprised that man was unable to keep the covenant of the Old Testament. “Have no other gods except me.” Every aspect of this fallen world conspires to promote polytheism: it is the rare person in human history who has not worshipped, if only for a moment or two, the gods of celebrity or authority or safety. The effort to “leave one’s mark on the world” is service to the god of being known by strangers to the glory of oneself. The effort to “change the world” by activists of every persuasion almost always devolves into the pursuit of power, albeit for allegedly noble ends. How do we reconcile our constant efforts to accumulate enough resources to ensure our long-term comfort with the commandment to rely totally on God?

Our human understanding is overwhelmed by the Cross. Surely we have some sympathy for Judas Iscariot, a zealot looking for the messiah promised in the scriptures. Judas had fixed in his mind what the messiah would do, and it involved political action even to include violence if necessary to effect the noble outcome. This weakling, Jesus, needed to be removed from the scene so a stronger and more combative messiah could emerge. The ends justified the means, the omlette could not be made without breaking a few eggs. But the Cross is the unavoidable path if we are to obey the Ten Commandments with all our heart, our mind, our soul and our strength. We may not be lifted up on a wooden cross and killed by that terrible method, but we will only live in Eternity if we are willing to die to self. The message of the world is to glorify self, and so the Cross is insanity to the world.

Our commitment to following God can mean we engage in behavior that confounds the sensibility of the world. We are temples of the Lord, and we must be willing to drive from our temples the comfortable accomodations we have made to the world’s priorities. Are we renewing and purifying our practices, or have we become comfortable in our religious routines? The path after Baptism is one of sanctification, or growth in holiness. God will not give me more than I can handle, but he knows better than I what I can handle. We are told the road is narrow but straight. I think most serious Christians would add that it slopes upward. We do not coast our way to Heaven.

This time of ascetic reflection we call Lent prepares us to be more attuned to the reality of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Like a a careened ship, we are turned on our sides so the debris to which we have become attached can be scraped away. Like a ship from which the barnacles have all been removed, we will move toward our destination more smoothly and with more efficiency. Our intended destination is reunion with the risen Christ. We cannot be an Easter People, however, if we refuse to participate in the Lenten preparation.

Turn me on my side, O Lord, and scrape away!

OT: Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13,15-18
Epistle: Romans 8:31-34
Gospel: Mark 9:2-10

Abraham and Sarah had waited so long without a child. Their gift, Isaac, had grown strong. The walk up Mt. Moriah must have been so painful for Abraham, who knew how it would end if he was obedient to God’s will. Abraham was obedient to God, following the awful instructions to take his only son up the mountain for a holocaust, a sacrificial offering from a sinful people to Yahweh. The boy was growing into a young man, able to carry wood up the mountain and still have energy to converse with the father he loved so much. A strong boy like Isaac would have little difficulty preventing an old man like Abraham from binding him. The son acceded to his father’s wishes even to the point of helping to prepare the sacrifice: himself.

The knife must have been like a heavy weight in Abraham’s hand as he lifted it to kill his son. What agony he must have experienced, obeying the commandments of God yet not fully comprehending them. We can imagine the turmoil in his mind. Take my only son up the mountain and kill him? Where is God’s glory in that? How can that be consistent with the promises God made to me about the number of my descendants? This is the child God sent me, yet he wants him to die. This makes no sense to me.

It made no sense to Abraham, yet he found the strength to be obedient to God’s will. At the moment of truth, Abraham demonstrated he would pay the full price of discipleship and God stayed his hand.

God sent his son at the fullness of time. The world had waited so long for him. He grew into a strong man and powerful teacher and healer. God will do what he would not ask of Abraham: sacrifice his only son. This is not just a good and powerful man. This is not just somebody’s son. This is God’s own son.

Jesus carried the means of his execution to the place of his execution, just like Isaac. Jesus knew the nature of his execution. He had spent hours in the Garden of Gesthemane, his stress level so high he was in a bloody sweat. He knew that Abraham’s words were true. God would provide the lamb for the holocaust. God was the Lamb.

Lent is a time of preparation. St. Mark tells us Peter, James, and John kept the transfiguration to themselves, “questioning what rising what rising from the dead meant.” We know what it means, yet we, like they, run from the Cross on Calvary rather than stay in peace as Mary and the women and young John stayed. Let us prepare ourselves so as to be able to stay with Jesus when we find ourselves on Calvary.

Readings at Mass
Genesis 9:8-15.
I Peter 3:18-22.
Mark 1:12-15.

The Kingdom of God comes at a great price. In the 9th chapter of Genesis, the flood has receded, and God tells Noah he will never again send a flood to devastate the whole earth. Now, after the chastening flood, God establishes a covenant with the remnant. Whether or not there were only eight human beings on the Ark is less important than the statement made in the story: a faithful relationship with God is offered to all but regrettably accepted by few.

That so many choose a life on Earth that leads to eternal destruction is demonstration of the power of Satan and the need for regular official periods of reflection and re-dedication. Lent is one such period in the Church’s annual cycle of seasons. The Gospel of Mark is noted for its brevity, so we are told only, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.” Other Gospel writers give us more details about the temptations, which we might summarize in today’s vernacular as an offer by Satan to give Jesus a really great life on Earth if he will acknowledge Satan as his lord. Riches, power, authority; these are the temptations Satan threw at Jesus. He also threw in the temptation that currently reigns in our world: skepticism. Satan tested Jesus saying, “You cannot really trust the Father, can you? If you could, you could jump off a high place and he would send his angels to save you.”

Faith is the triumph over skepticism. Throughout the world, we receive a cultural message that we should rely on ourselves, that we should take what we need. The American culture of rugged individualism is taken too far, and we have no understanding of the depths of our communal identity as mankind. St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that it was through one man sin entered into the world, and it was through one man love conquered sin. Shortly after sin entered into the world, murder followed. Murder was quickly followed by denial of brotherhood. When Cain asked his question, he implied it was rhetorical: no, he is not his brother’s keeper. In truth, we are brothers, and we have a responsibility to them. Our first responsibility is to see them as brothers. Our second is to care for them as brothers.

A life of faith, as demonstrated by Noah, by Jesus, and by Peter, is a life of trials and temptations. Noah was tempted to abandon his project because it was completely at odds with the lived experience of his entire community. Sometimes our life of faith means we are walking in a direction different than everyone else. But we are not alone. Jesus was ministered to by the angels, and we will be cared for by them, too. So we are not left to our own devices, which is the message of the world. We are left to the remnant living the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. If perhaps that group is not numerically dominant, it is the group that eventually triumphs.

When we watch a movie, we know the producers are not going to let the main actor die. We sort of know the outcome. In the climatic scenes in which he is in peril, we remain confident he will make it to the credits. Our earthly life is no movie, but we know the winning team, the one that will be victorious in the end. When we are dangling from life’s cliffs or careering through life’s traffic, we do not have to be terrified. The Kingdom of God is at hand. We can reach out to God and be helped by his angels. We can be his angels and reach out to our brothers. We can withstand temptation and remain in a covenant relationship with God.

Responding to a homily preached in late 2009 by the diocese’s director of the Permanent Diaconate, I started the process that might lead to ordination in early 2017. As of February 2012, I am in what is called the year of aspirancy, a year of further discernment and confirmation of the decision last year by the archdiocesan formation team to accept my application and recommend to the archbishop that he accept me into the program.

The year, November 2010 to November 2011, I spent in Inquiry sessions and waiting for an answer to my application gave me time to do some other projects that will be harder as the workload increases should I and the formation team agree I should continue in the formation program. I took on these endeavors because they offered me settings replete with opportunities to practice Christian charity and compassion. As a man who constantly struggles with issues of pride, I need to work always on loving the people I am with even in a business setting where sometimes the ends justify the means. Of course, a good Christian cannot ever accept the idea that ends ever justify the means, but my compartmentalizing leads to times when efficiency dominates empathy. These times are always followed by regret. Going into these recent endeavors, I told myself the process was more important than the outcome, that these people were Christ’s children and much more valuable than my need to feel like the smartest man in the room.

I had mixed results in my efforts. Charity in a business setting is something I do not find natural. The competitive, materialistic nature of the business world lends itself to enabling the worst aspects of my type A personality. I am generous and kind until I sense there might be some kind of competition. Then I get defensive and argumentative. My tour of duty with one of these endeavors is at the halfway mark, and I have had halfway levels of success.

My year as a aspirant has started, and already I have been enriched by a loving God. We are twenty men from all walks of life and from all around the archdiocese. We have a full day of class work one Saturday each month, and our subjects range from Logic & Metaphysics to Spiritual Discernment. We will have classes on Sacred Scripture and we are getting a double helping of Catholic Social Teaching. I never took philosophy or logic in high school or college, so that class is both a lot of fun and a lot of work. Spiritual discernment doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of academic work, but the session was interesting and does cause one to think about things.

Since the class is so broad, the instructors appear to have assumed we have no prior exposure to their subjects. It turns out I have in my own way done some of the work they believe is important. Spiritual discernment turns out to involve a number of activities I am already doing. My writing in a journal is a good thing. My recent preparation of a talk for a parish renewal retreat was very close to the spiritual autobiography we are encouraged to develop. The study of sacred scripture assumes no prior knowledge, but I have spent years in scripture studies. The topic that loomed large prior to starting this year was Catholic Social Teaching because I knew the course would be based on the JustFaith syllabus, and I had studied up on the folks that authored JustFaith.

While I continue to find in the JustFaith materials evidence of association with Marxist radicals who pursue power by any means necessary in their quest for “social justice,” closer to Rousseau’s use of that term than St. Thomas Aquinas’ use, our teacher has not shaped his sessions around that. We are reading Compassion, by three priests of the 1960s and 1970s. Henri Nouwen is the most familiar author. After an inauspicious start in which we turn to an aging Senator from Minnesota as an authoritative voice from which to hear the definition of compassion, the authors turn to the Bible. In the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, they find something deeper than the Senator’s pencil eraser. Unlike the Senator, Jesus is not interested in earthly power. He is the ultimate power, and his power is part of his love for his children and his obedience to his Father’s will.

In my preliminary reading of the materials used in the JustFaith program, and in learning more about the primary authors of those materials, I know I will have to be careful to cull from a lot of leftist claptrap the authentic Catholic social teaching. It is sad that something so marvelous would be packaged in something so inappropriate to the subject matter.

To communicate what the Church teaches about the poor and the hurt and the sick and the old without use of Marxist class mentality or other Modern materialistic hermeneutics would indeed be something worthwhile. One could do a lot just with the Bible. Jesus certainly gives us many examples of how to behave toward the less fortunate. It seems we are to serve them. Nowhere does He mobilize them into action using the tactics of Saul Alinsky. Jesus was not a community organizer. Lenin was. Jesus was a servant and a good shepherd, not a revolutionary.
Jesus was — and is — Love. Love is compassion and generosity, so Love is at the heart of Catholic social teaching. Already the session leader is encouraging us to practice the activity of seeing Jesus in every human person, to be with that person regardless of his human condition. Whether that person is materially poor or spiritually poor, we can see them as God sees them and be with them as God is with them. In so doing, we can live authentic Christian lives.

The Keynesians led vocally today by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argue that the failure of President Obama’s stimulus to produce sharp increases in Gross Domestic Product was the result of too little government spending rather than too much. They rely on Keynes’ mechanical approach to macroeconomics: the famous P = C + I + G + X formula. According to the formula, the lack of growth in P despite the dramatic increase in G must be the result of too much retrenchment on the part of C (the Consumer) and I (net Investment, or business activity).

The Keynesians think of us the way Charles Shultz drew Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football: always running up for another kick even though she pulls it away. We laugh at pathetic Charlie because we know human beings learn from the past, albeit imperfectly. In contrast to the Keynesians, the idea of rational expectations put forward by Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago offers an explanation for the failure of this round of Keynesian stimulus: we have seen it before and we know there must be increases in taxes to pay for all this spending. Unlike Charlie Brown, we are not running forward to kick the football because we know Lucy will pull it away before we get a chance to swing our foot at it.

The Chicago School is famously the home of Milton Friedman, who offered the theoretical framework we call Monetarism. Friedman suggested that the main role for macroeconomics should be to maintain a steady rate of monetary growth. In this approach, he struck a middle ground between the Keynesians and the Austrians. Like the Keynesians, he accepted the framework of aggregates and equations that undergird the concept of macroeconomics. Like the Austrians, he accepted the limits of collectivist policymaking. The principal benefit of a steady state of monetary growth is that it offers a stable and predictable environment for business planning and investment. It presumes rational economic actors will in the main make rational economic decisions with the happy result that capital gets rationally rationed. It presumes intelligence where Keynes was left relying on “animal spirits.”

The Chicagoans’ monetary growth targeting ran into problems as the definition of “money” proved more dynamic than they anticipated, and we had a flood of “money” that was really credit somehow accorded the legal protections extended previously only to money. The money/credit supply increased under Monetarism, albeit surreptitiously, with the result expected by the Austrian business cycle theory: too much money distorted the investment/saving equilibrium such that a wave of malinvestment led to a boom and the inevitable bust.

Today’s economic rationalists operate with skepticism about government policymakers, and the rising price of commodities that cannot be explained by increased demand from emerging nations is the canary in the coal mine of monetary growth. Rational economic actors know we cannot create money from nothing but so long. While they wait for the other shoe to drop, the global economy stagnates. Lucy waits with the football in place, but Charlie Brown is willing to wait longer.

What would Job look like if he were moved from his ancient times to our modern time? Would he not be a successful businessman, the kind of man who serves on the finance council at his church or synagogue? The successful businessman with three healthy, well-adjusted children and a beautiful wife with kind eyes and a warm smile? Modern Job saved while he built his business, he moved into the distinguished neighborhoods. He had nice cars but never bought the red convertible in middle age. There was never a breath of scandal about him. Job would be the man in the pictures in the neighborhood newspaper covering local fundraisers for charity. Job reaped the rewards of living the good life that comes from hard work and moral rectitude.

How hard it was for Job, and is for us today, to accept God’s providence. Our modern Job would look on his earthly record and conclude he had done everything the right way. He would not be wrong, would he? Indeed, he had done it all the way God asked. Almost all, that is. God asked him to live that prudent and sober life full of joy in the knowledge of God’s dominion and provision. What trapped ancient Job traps modern Job: the sense that the fruits were the result of man’s labors. In truth, everything Job had was gifted to him by God to be enjoyed by Job and shared with God’s other children in full and public display of their ultimate source. Job believed he earned his own material well-being. Worse, he believed he established his own righteousness. Even when all his material wealth — and then his family and health — were lost, Job gripped tightly to his sense that he was righteous by his own merit.

Job’s peace is our peace. When we come to accept that everything is because it is God’s will, we take the first steps toward seeing the world clearly. When we come to accept that every situation is an opportunity to serve God irrespective of how we came to be in that situation, we take the first steps toward closely following God. When we come to see that lasting joy and peace are the gifts we receive from abiding in Him, we take the first steps toward loving him with all our hearts. We can take these steps each and every day. Day by day, we can see Him more clearly, follow Him more nearly, love Him more dearly. We can do this rich or poor, healthy or sick, surrounded by family or all alone.

From a book by the same title written in 1911 by Henry Osborn Taylor:

Nevertheless, the Latin Christianity of the Fathers and the antique fund of sentiment and knowledge, through their self-conserving strength, affected men in constant ways. Under their action the peoples of western Europe, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, passed through a homogeneous growth, and evolved a spirit different from that of any other period of history – a spirit which stood in awe before its monitors divine and human, and deemed that knowledge was to be drawn from the storehouse of the past; which seemed to rely on everything except its sin-crushed self, and trusted everything except its senses; which in the actual looked for the ideal, in the concrete saw the symbol, in the earthly Church beheld the heavenly, and in the fleshly joys discerned the devil’s lures; which lived in the unreconciled opposition between the lust and vain-glory of earth and the attainment of salvation; which felt life’s terror and its pitifulness, and its eternal hope; around which waved concrete infinitudes, and over which flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment Day.

After the High Middle Ages, there is another flowering watered by the rediscovery of additional antiquities: that period we call the Renaissance. Whether as consequence of or as cooperator with the Renaissance, the Church fractures and a new age is born. As Latin Christianity loses its hold on the minds of the elites, a new spirit rises. The new spirit, the Modern Spirit, is in many ways the antithesis of the Mediaeval Mind: it no longer stands in awe of any external power, either divine or human, but deconstructs both; it sees no sin in itself; it revels in its senses, trusting feelings much more than logic despite adoption of appellations like Empiricism and Objectivism; it strips from the Church whatever is not earthly, worships the flesh and promotes lust and vain-glory and finally denies the reality of a Judgment Day.

Here in the first part of the 21st century, we see what a few hundred years without the Mediaeval mind can do. Civilizations die because of corruption. Loss of the knowledge from the storehouse of the past has led Western Civilization to the brink of death, as we no longer believe the Church is authoritative on Reality, nor do we believe we can learn from the Past. Like a drunken old man, we wheeze our way toward death mumbling incoherently the lies only we believe about our greatness.

There is no salvation outside the Church. Nobody dares say that these days, yet we see it is so not only for individuals seeking eternal bliss but also for civilizations seeking strength and renewal. If we love our country and we suppress the church, we prove ourselves to be either fools or liars.