Standing for the Truth, Part 1: Praying for the Humility to Hear the Hard Truth
In this new series of weekly essays, to be posted here over the next several weeks, Gerry talks about the new Biblical Foundations International, considers the cunning of clever counterfeits and the cabals that conceive them, blows the whistle on Benedict XVI, sounds off about "sedevacantism" and the SSPX, exposes the prevalence of previously-condemned heresies in "conservative" and even "traditionalist Catholic" circles, explains his "episcopal epiphany" and bemoans the blight of bogus bishops, rediscovers the recusant Roman Catholics of the English "Reformation," reveals why he no longer attends the churches of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), unmasks the New Mass for what it is, blasts those who use "baptism of desire" to "reduce to a meaningless formula" (as Pope Pius XII lamented) the solemnly-defined dogma that there is "no salvation outside the Catholic Church and Faith" but explains why that does not "make him a Feeneyite," demonstrates that most "Catholic apologists" are not in fact doing their job, surveys salvation history to put together the puzzle pieces of the Great Apostasy, maps out his 2006-2009 mega-tour of over 300 cities & towns, and alerts you to a coming campaign of calumniation.
29 January 2006
St. Francis de Sales, Bishop & Doctor
(slightly revised 1 February 2006)
Welcome, in 2006, to the new Biblical Foundations International, an apostolate it has been my privilege to labor at, by God's undeserved grace, for fifteen years now. (I founded BFI in January 1991, in San Diego.) Today in the traditional calendar is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, whom I took as my confirmation saint when I came into the Catholic Church twenty years ago.
I desired his patronage because, as I think all of you know who read this, before I embraced the Catholic Faith I had been an ardent Calvinist (and an ordained minister in the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America). As a Catholic catechumen I learned that St. Francis de Sales, as Bishop of Geneva during Calvin's "Reformation" there, had personally won over 70,000 Calvinists back to the true Faith. I wished, by God's grace, to emulate his success in bringing many Protestants back to the fold, and I'm grateful that God has used this unworthy apostolate to do so, as file-drawers full of thousands of letters gratefully testify.
(By the way, for apologetics I recommend St. Francis de Sales' The Catholic Controversy, available from TAN Books, and for one's spiritual life, his Introduction to the Devout Life, available from Doubleday -- both of which I am currently re-reading.)
In my first paragraph above I spoke of "the new Biblical Foundations International." Why "new"? Well, to start with something small (but significant), I hope to have a new essay written and posted here every week, hopefully changed each Monday. I can thus keep in closer communication with you, my contacts, customers, and comrades-in-arms. That's why I've changed the name of this section of the website from "Gerry's Word" to "Gerry's Weekly Word"; I reasoned that a shorter literary leash might (to mix a metaphor) hopefully keep my nose pressed to the word-processing grindstone.
In truth, I've been wanting to do much more published writing for a long, long time now. (I do write for quite a bit each day, but privately, in my study notebooks, of which I have over 130, each on a different topic -- e.g., "Antipopes," "Ecumenism," "Freemasonry," or "LaSalette" -- in which, on a rotating basis, I record notes from, and thoughts engendered by, my reading in those various subjects.)
I had specifically wanted to increase how often I'd write the "Gerry's Word" feature. But it finally took a kick in the pants from someone I don't really know, just four days ago, to cause me to repent in sackcloth and ashes for my infrequency. Here is what M.S. wrote on January 25:
"Gerry, I wish that you would be more accessible to your fellow Catholics by updating your website regularly with your thoughts and ideas. This may seem tedious, but I assure you that the amount of good wisdom could be spread a hundred-fold if you would just tend to your website more often. Write books and articles; do you realize how many people would buy this stuff from you? Hundreds of thousands. This pains me because you are the most wise and truthful of all apologists and yet you are the least accessible. Just consider us lowly fellow Catholics. We are starving and you have been given plentiful food. Thank you, In JMJ+ M.S."
I thought it highly likely that he had me clearly confused with some other apologist. His words, "the most wise and truthful of all apologists" really threw me, since I did not recognize in them what my many enemies readily say about me! But I still felt so bad (leaving aside the undeserved compliments) about the one true thing he had said about me (my terrible track record in updating my website in a timely fashion and uploading articles thereto), and about having let this poor person down, that I immediately e-mailed him the following reply:
"Dear M.S.,
You are absolutely right. I am ashamed, embarrassed, and most regretful that I have allowed the crushing financial, logistical, and sundry other difficulties of my professional life -- many of which you may perhaps find hard to imagine -- to hitherto keep me from writing more. I am striving by God's grace to make a valiant effort to rectify this from this point onward. Thank you, my brother in Christ, for caring enough to exercise fraternal correction, and for your justly earned rebuke. May God richly bless you always.
In Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart,
Gerry Matatics"
M.S., I should say, wrote me back a nice reply with further compliments. The rebuke, however, and not the compliments, was what I wanted to take away with me.
Perhaps in a subsequent essay I shall try to offer feeble excuses why I have not been able to write more frequently -- either on my website, or in reply to the over 1,000 e-mails, letters, faxes, and phone calls I receive every week, without letup (and without any secretary or staff to assist me in reading and responding to this daily, desk-burying avalanche) -- and why, for the same reasons, I've often taken too long to acknowledge the donations I occasionally receive. Right now I feel that to explain all this might seem too defensive or self-justifying, and I would rather savor the salutary sting of M.S.'s plaintive plea.
If we cannot, in our individual lives, pray for the humility to hear the "hard truth" in the lesser things, we certainly will not be ready to hear the hard truth about the current crisis in Catholicism, and our sobering situation in salvation history.
I say "sobering," for it is my considered opinion that we find ourselves, by God's providence, in the last days predicted by the prophet Daniel, adumbrated by the apostasy engineered by the antichrist Antiochus IV in the days of the Maccabees, outlined by Our Lord in His Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24), and advertised in the Apocalypse of St. John.
And the supreme irony of the prevailing deception of those last days is that the deception is so powerful, by God's permission, that most people will not believe that they are in the last days, but will be chloroformed into an utter unawareness of their perilous predicament:
"For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord shall so come as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, "Peace and security!", then shall sudden destruction come upon them, as birth pangs upon a pregnant woman, and they shall not escape." (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3)
"Because they receive not the love of the truth, so that they might be saved, therefore God shall send them the operation of error ["a powerful delusion," some translations put it], to believe a lie, that all might be damned who have not believed the truth, but have consented to something iniquitous." (2 Thessalonians 2:10-11)
"[Christ speaking:] And unless those days had been shortened, no one would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened ... For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, who shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect." (Matthew 24:24)
"[Christ speaking:] And as it was in the days of Noah, so also shall it be in the coming of the Son of Man. For just as in the days before the deluge they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, right up until the day Noah entered the ark, and they were not aware until the flood came and swept them all away, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be." (Matthew 24:37-39)
"[Christ speaking:] But when the Son of Man comes, will He find, do you the think, any faith left on earth?" (Luke 18:8)
We have the sure testimony of Our Lord and His apostles that lies, clever counterfeits, and doctrinal deceptions will increase to flood-tide proportions in the final days of human history. The worst lies -- the most damnable because they are, literally, damning -- are of course those that seek to deny, or subtly to distort, the revealed truth of God that alone can save our souls and bring us to heaven.
That is why heresy is, according to every Father and Doctor of the Church and every classic textbook on moral theology, the worst of all sins and the most heinous of all crimes. (See the quote from Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany's classic, Liberalism Is a Sin, which can be found in our new "Quotes to Ponder" section of our website, which debuts on February 2; it also rotates periodically into our "Quote of the Day" feature. At the time of its publication in 1899 Fr. Salvany's work was given the highest praise and endorsement by the Holy Office, and I cannot recommend it highly enough to every Catholic in these dark days. It is available from TAN Books.) And the saintly Father Frederick Faber, another nineteenth-century century author whose works are worth mastering, could write:
"The crowning disloyalty to God is heresy. It is the sin of sins, the very loathsomest of things which God looks down upon in this malignant world. Yet how little do we understand of its excessive hatefulness! It is the polluting of God’s truth, which is the worst of all impurities. Yet how light we make of it! We look at it, and are calm. We touch it and do not shudder. We mix with it, and have no fear. We see it touch holy things, and we have no sense of sacrilege. We breathe its odour, and show no signs of detestation or disgust. Some of us affect its friendship; and some even extenuate its guilt. We do not love God enough to be angry for His glory. We do not love men enough to be charitably truthful for their souls."
Koch-Preuss's Handbook of Moral Theology, a five-volume work I have been studying of late (I will have much to share from its pages in a subsequent essay), points out that "the chief sources of heresy are ignorance and pride" (vol. IV, p. 32, emphasis in the original). There is certainly today much lamentable ignorance of Sacred Scripture, of the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, of Church history and canon law -- ignorance that mugs multitudes and makes them vulnerable victims of the sometimes subtle heresies of our day -- ignorance I myself have been guilty of, and insufficiently diligent about dispelling, ignorance I am still struggling to overcome, studying into the wee hours every night, and sometimes until dawn. I hope, in this series of essays, to outline a plan of study whereby Catholics who care about their soul's salvation can come up to speed in what they should know in these areas (Scripture, Church history, canon law, etc.).
But the first step, surely, is to overcome the pride that keeps us complacent with our present state of knowledge, or content with our current explanation of the contemporary crisis in Catholicism. We need the humility to recognize that perhaps we've been wrong about a lot of things, perhaps wrong to oppose people and positions that have been right all along -- the humility to recognize that perhaps what has struck us up until now (in our ignorance) as an extreme or far-fetched position for a faithful Catholic to hold is in fact not so extreme or far-fetched after all.
Are we in fact truly open to adjusting our assessment of the ecclesiastical debacle of our day -- open to arriving at an explanation that is more fully Catholic than the one we've been operating with? Perhaps we are loathe to admit that we haven't been "playing with a full deck," because there are prophecies of Scripture (and other prophecies approved by Church authority) we haven't carefully studied, testimonies of Tradition we're intensely ignorant of, principles of theology and canon law that have been deliberately downplayed in our education, facts of Church history we've ever forgotten or haven't really reflected on.
Relinquishing our reputation as respected, mainstream Catholics, admitting we've been blind to some basic betrayals, publicly abjuring our errors -- these don't come easy to creatures weakened by original sin. But come they must, or we are doomed.
My family and I have had the habit for quite a long time now of praying, after our daily rosaries, the Litany of Humility which His Eminence, Cardinal Merry del Val (Pope St. Pius X's secretary of state and closest confidante) was accustomed to recite daily after his celebration of Holy Mass. It can be found in many books of Catholic prayer and devotion, but it may be that some of you are unfamiliar with it, and so I reproduce it here. I credit it with helping our family, poor sinners that we are, to finally come to see some things that we were too blind to, for far too long. If you do not already pray it daily, I strongly suggest that you immediately begin to do so, asking God not only to grant you the grace of an increase of humility, but also to open your eyes to what has been, perhaps, invisible to you up until now:
"O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, deliver me, etc.
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
From the fear of being humiliated,
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me, etc.
That in the opinion of the world, others may increase, and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I go unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
Amen.
Until next week,
Yours in the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts,
Gerry Matatics