YEAR OF THE PRIEST - Meditation 1

1. The Holy Father has just called for a 'Year of Faith,' under the auspices of St. Paul who was the apostle who wrote most eloquently and extensively on Faith. The papal instruction was sent to Bishops to be shared with parish priests and their parishioners. The goal was to ask each Catholic to find out if they have Faith. With the culmination of the Year of Faith many Catholics have not answered this question.

2. The steps towards eternal life may be summarized into four steps; first, to live a life of repentance, secondly, to live a life of Faith. Thirdly, to live a life of Hope and fourthly to live a life of Charity. Faith brings us into the Church, into the Mystical Body of Christ and in some way gives us Hope for our salvation, "he who believes is already saved."

3. During the Year of Faith the Pope is asking us to find out if we have reached the second step, Faith. The Catechism gives a concise definition of Faith and St. Thomas gives a clear and elaborate description of it. But most of us do not have the time to study this.

4. So why don't we just read the 'prayer' of Faith at the end of the Compendium of the Catholic Catechism by Pope Benedict XVI. His prayer goes this way: "Domine Deus, firma fide credo et confiteor omnia et singula quae sancta Ecclesia Catholica proponit, quia tu Deus, ea omnia revelasti, qui es aeterna veritas et sapientia quae nec fallere nec falli potest. In hac fide vivere et mori statuo. Amen."

5. The prayer says :' I believe all and every truth that you (Christ) have revealed because You are the eternal truth.' Do we really know 'all and every truth' Christ has revealed in Scriptures? How many truths are there in Divine Revelation? Putting aside the Doctrinal truths, let us just look at the so-called 'Commandments of Christ.' In Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Matthew in the so-called 'Sermon on the Mount', aside from the Beatitudes, Christ enumerates around 35 commands. In the entire Gospel of St. Matthew there are more than 80 commands. If we add to this the commands in the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John plus the commands of Christ as described in the Epistles, Acts and Apocaplypse guess how many commands there could be? And we are not supposed to study these commands directly from Scriptures. We must learn and believe these commands as proposed by the Magisterium of the Church. That is practically hinting that we must know how the Fathers of the Church or Tradition interpreted these commands. Does that sound like having a degree on Exegesis and Patrology? Not really. There is a way of learning these in a faster and shorter way which the Holy Father had been hinting since the beginning of his pontificate.

6. Faith is an act of the intellect. It is knowing, with the help of grace all the commands of Christ and how to obey them. But it is chaos if every priest interprets these commands. So Christ gave the role of interpreting these commands to His Church with the Holy Father as its official spokesman. And so Faith is believing with our intellect the teachings of Christ 'as proposed by the Church' through her spokesman, the Pope. And the reason for believing the Pope is because Christ who revealed the truths 'cannot deceive nor be deceived.'

7. The crisis of Faith is caused by ignorance of those commands the knowledge of which is the object of Faith. Some wh0 know 'what' are the commands do not know the 'how'. Knowledge of both is necessary for the act of Faith.

8. The act of Faith is not possible until all the commands of Christ are known by the intellect. That is the only time when the soul can see that put together all the commands make up the command 'To love God and neighbor'. Knowing this the soul can now motivate his Faith with the virtue of Charity. Thus the Pope's 3rd encyclical Caritas in veritate simply states that Charity can only be attained by knowing the truths that lead to Faith.

9. If at the end of the Year of Faith we have not yet known if we have the true faith or not that would be a sign that we do not have Faith. Because with the virtue comes the certainty that we have it.

8. During the year of Faith few were able to find out if they had Faith. Most do not know how to check on it though they could have checked it basing it on the Year of the Liturgy (during the 24 Sundays between Pentecost and Christ the King.) If the people are doubtful if they had Faith who is to blame? The Bishops and priest who were commanded by Christ to instill the knowledge that brings about Faith. So a Year of the priest should be in place....for the priest to find out if they have Faith.

9. So now in the 'Year of the Priest' the Holy Father is calling on all priests, religious, nuns and laymen to go once more through the steps that enable us to enter the Church and find out once and for all if we are inside or still outside the Catholic Church.

THE HIDDEN LIFE - Repentance

The way to Heaven may be described simply in four steps: repentance, Faith, Hope and Charity. These steps are taught to us by Holy Mother the Church throughout the Liturgical year.

We begin with Advent when we are taught the repentance of the Old Testament and as taught by St. John the Baptist. In Lent we are again taught repentance, as perfected by Christ. It is by this New Testament repentance that Faith is given us, by which we become true Catholics, or members of the Catholic Church.

Having reached Faith (by God's grace), God leads us to Hope and Charity.

The reason few souls reach faith (or enter the Church) is because of a wrong concept of Repentance. We think repentance is that brief moment we spent before confession; examining our conscience, saying our sins to the priest, receiving absolution and saying our penance. That is called the Sacrament of Penance. The life of repentance is to develop the Virtue of Penance which is necessary for the forgiveness of sins in the Sacrament of Penance.

The life of repentance was taught to us in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Christ taught us the perfection of repentance. He taught us by word and example, in the hidden Life He lived for thirty years, showing us how to repent, develop the virtue of Penance and receive the virtue of Faith. All we had to do was to imitate Him.

Christ lived thirty years of hidden life, so must we. But what does "thirty" years mean? Depending on how we respond to grace, our "thirty years" of hidden life could be anywhere from three hours to 90 years. But what is important is what we do within that 'hidden life.'

This is summarized in the Gospel incident after Joseph and Mary found Jesus in the temple: 'He was subject to them and grew in maturity and in grace.' What did He do at home during those thirty years of hidden life? He subjected Himself to His parents. This is the model of monasticism. The Rule of St. Benedict begins stating that one enters the monastic life to "subject himself."

Christ was teaching us the life of Repentance during His hidden life at home; while St. John was showing us the life of repentance in the desert. It is ideal to repent at home but if this is difficult we have to go to the desert. This explains the exodus of the first Christians from homes and cities to go to the desert.

We have seen that original sin is man's refusal to subject himself to God. Christ in His Hidden Life teaches us how we can subject ourselves, and therefore go back, to God.

The Fathers of the Church, like St. Augustine, described the life of repentance as consisting in three activities: fasting, prayer and good works, perfectly blended into a way of life where we are constantly performing these activities one after another. St. Benedict in his Rule devised a way of life that perfectly blended these three. During this life of repentance we may not do anything outside these three activities, or there is great danger of committing sin by doing our will.

Repentance, however, is a grace from God. Without that grace we cannot repent. Though He gives this grace generously to everybody it is easy to reject it. That's why it is rare to find someone repenting, i.e. living "the hidden life". But when this grace is given and the person responds favorably to it, living 'thirty years' of hidden life becomes evident by its fruits (the fruits of repentance.)

UNBAPTISED VERY YOUNG CHILDREN GO TO HEAVEN

All unbaptized children go to Heaven when they die, Pope Benedict had finally declared. Earlier saints believed otherwise; but they were not writing "de Fide," -- from faith. In early Christianity, that doctrine was not yet well defined. This contradiction was understandable as explained by St. John Newman in his "Development of Christian Doctrine." Just as the complete man is not recognized while still in the womb, it is the same with Catholic Doctrine: the early saints did not comprehend the full form of certain doctrines at first. Then because of need to defend doctrine (as in defending life) when heresies arise, it becomes a common occurrence in the Catholic Church that knowledge or explanation of doctrines increases as a response to those heresies. In the case of the doctrine about unbaptized children, there were little errors to clarify in the past; it was just a lack of understanding of the most difficult doctrine of the Catholic Church: the theology of grace.

What Pope Benedict announced about this doctrine should not encourage abortion. Someone could say, 'since anyway the child would go to heaven, let's kill it.' Well, true, the child would indeed go to heaven, but you will surely go to hell. All efforts to stop abortion consist in refuting the stupidity of this reasoning. Efforts are not meant to save the soul of the child but to save the soul of the parents, the abortionist doctors, the cooperating nurses, the owners of drug companies and the advertisers. The announcement of the Holy Father is meant to console all who are stricken by the great tragedy of children being aborted, children dying in wars and children starving in famine-stricken areas. And it is meant to stop those who would ask: why would a good God allow this? Obviously, it is a better arrangement to bring those souls sooner to Heaven, if we consider that they would be growing up in an evil modern culture or a pagan country or heretical family.

St. Augustine was one of those who thought that unbaptized children were condemned to hell if they die in that state. Of course, his reasoning was logical: If grace was needed to go to heaven and that this grace can only come earliest to us through baptism, therefore without baptism we would be without grace and death would mean condemnation. But St. Augustine himself began to have some reservations. And if we follow his trend of thoughts regarding those reservations, we would see that it leads to the same conclusion as Pope Benedict's.

St. Augustine's thoughts went this way: God gives graces to all men because His will is the salvation of men. These graces are given without man meriting it. So it is given 'gratis.' However, man has to co-operate with this grace. God gives these graces to a child who can not yet co-operate at baptism that's why the child has god-parents standing by to answer for him. The unfortunate pagan child, on the other hand, has no god-parents . Will not both deserve the same graces since both cannot cooperate with God's grace? St. Augustine believes both children deserve the same graces. And in his treatise on anti-Pelagianism, the presence or absence of a god-parent (or parents) cannot influence God's will of giving that needed grace; and to believe otherwise would be heresy.

To be able to respond favorably to that grace that will enable the child to benefit from Baptism, he has to consent to the grace WITH HIS WILL. But the baptized child has no will just like the unbaptized pagan child. The accompanying parent or god-parent cannot be a variable to dictate the worthiness or unworthiness of the child to receive the needed grace which God is so desirous to give all men.

But wait, weren't the heroes of the Old Testament unbaptized adults? They not only had original sin but actual sin. Yet, after a short stint in Limbo they all went to heaven at the Resurrection of Christ! St. Augustine repeatedly stated 'how deep are the ways of God," as an excuse why he could not explain it fully.


Scriptures often repeated the three main things we must do to have eternal life. First, to be born again through Baptism, secondly, to eat the Body and Blood of Christ and, thirdly, to believe. These are the three common ways to get God's graces. Shall we limit God's greatness to these three ways of giving graces? God could have a thousand other ways to give graces that we do not know of. Maybe Pope Benedict has found one.

That unbaptized children go to heaven, as taught by Pope Benedict, is a very consoling teaching. We see the children of the world dying because of man's inhumanity to man; dying within a pagan or heretical religion and even without religion. But we also see that, as God always does, He produces great good from what seems to be a great evil. But that would be another blog.

POPE BENEDICT and his Social Encyclical

Everybody is talking about Pope Benedict's next encyclical. It seems to be a social encyclical. And the suspicion is that it has been signed and waiting to be promulgated. Meanwhile the entire world is going into recession and the people's question is how long will this recession last; and will there be a rebound as in past recessions?
What could the Pope be saying or hinting recently with regards to the present world economy?

Popes are well known to predict many human events way ahead. The rise of communism and its spread around the world has been seen by the Popes of the last two centuries. We wonder, will there be a recovery in the present recession?

Pope Benedict has given us a syllogism in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. Simply stated, if we agree on the major and the minor, we can come to a conclusion.

The Holy Father gave the major saying that true progress is commensurate to spiritual progress. If we progress in the spiritual sphere, everything else in the physical and natural will progress. If we are progressing spiritually, we will progress in the natural sphere: nobody will go hungry. As the Gospel has it: If we seek first the kingdom of God, everything else will be given us. Here, the Holy Father is enunciating a general Evangelical principle.

Now let us come to the minor proposition. The Holy Father mentioned in one of his Christmas messages that greed has ruled world economy. He added that while there is progress in everything material, there has been no commensurate progress in the spiritual sphere.

In the minor proposition the Holy Father is hinting that the recession is due to this dichotomy and divorce between human and spiritual progress. He is not insinuating that he is attributing the recession to economic factors existing in the world today. He is saying that there is a higher and greater factor involved in the recession....a Divine Factor which, every time man forgets the end for which he was created, chastises them with war, famine, plagues, earthquakes and .... recessions. And it is this factor that we must consider as to whether we will rebound from the recession or not.

The Holy Father declared this year a year of faith in honor of St. Paul. Why did he do that when the faith has been preached in every corner of the world? Because as seen by St. John the Baptist in the Old Testament and mentioned many times by the Blessed Virgin in her apparitions, man has no faith. Even Christ mentioned it: "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth? "

If we consider the Divine Factor in this syllogism we are forced to conclude that this recession, just like natural calamities and wars, is a chastisement as St. Alphonsus Liguori would have said, and because of the impossibility for men to obey the reason for which he was created, the recession will be here to stay .... and worsen. This conclusion is what follows if we consider the major and minor of the syllogism.

When he went to Assisi in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI said that the solution to all the problems of the world, since they are all interrelated, is to return to the spirit of poverty of St. Francis of Assisi. But for a world wallowing in greed as the Holy Father mentioned last Christmas 2008, there is no way to do that. ("St. Francis honored by a simple man" by Giotto)

Forgetfulness of ORIGINAL SIN.

Pope Pius IX noticed the sinfulness of the world during his time. He had to escape with his life to Gaeta pursued by the Romans! During one of his meditation he saw what was wrong with the world: it forgot the existence of original sin. Jesus came to save us from original sin and its consequences, actual sins. This was the whole story of salvation and we forgot it.

Pope Benedict XVI also had been reminding us to review the doctrine of original sin because many Catholics neither know nor understand it.

As Mary had always been Jesus' co-worker in the salvation of souls, what better help can the Church get than to call on her, the mother of the Church and the type of the Church to help out? And what wiser move than to declare her Immaculate Conception? Thus the Pope declared to the world the cause of its problem: original sin ... and the solution? The imitation of Mary, who was spared from it.

From the beginning and up to the end of time original sin will be the cause of every evil in the world. It is because of it that death entered into the world.

What is original sin? God created us and willed to save us after the Fall. So He made a plan of salvation by which we could be saved. On our part all we had to do was to subject ourselves (our free will) to His Will. Adam and Eve went against His Will. The refusal to subject one's will to God's Will is original sin. And ever since the Fall, man could not subject himself to God's Will: "I will do what I want."

Christ had to die to restore man to his original state. With this restoration, greater graces would enable man to know God's Will so he could once again subject himself to God and be saved. Without this grace, he would remain outside the sphere or influence of God's Divine Providence.

The natural state of man in his fallen nature is that he goes against his supernatural end, he goes against his natural end and he goes against the nature around him. The consequence is that he destroys his soul by immorality, he destroys his body with illnesses and he destroys his environment. It is natural to fallen nature to abort babies, and wipe out the whales.

To be truly Catholic, to be truly restored to our original state, we must be like Mary, not an Immaculate Conception, but, through repentance, be without sin. This is what Pope Pius IX was trying to say when he proclaimed a doctrine that was believed from the beginning of the Church but whose application in one's personal life many were ignorant of.

That we have forgotten the teachings on "Original Sin" is putting it mildly. We have not at all learned the doctrine on original sin: what really happened in paradise, how Adam and Eve were in paradise and after the fall, what is the true spiritual state of each person today and finally how the Catholic Religion is the only way that can reinstate man to his former place. (Portion of " The Creation" late 12th century, Miniature from the Bible de Souvigny.)

THE NEED FOR UNCEASING PRAYER

Grace works on this principle: he who does not progress, retrogresses. God gives us grace every second. This grace contains three elements: the will of God, how to do the will of God and the strength to do God's will. God does this every second so we move towards Him every second by responding favorably to these graces.

It also works on a negative way in that Grace tells us what is contrary to the Will of God, how to avoid it and the strength to avoid it. Every second God, through His grace, tells us what good we must do and what evil we must avoid, how to go about doing each and the strength to obey His graces.

But these graces does not come every second...unless we respond favorably to it. When we reject His promptings He withholds it to encourage us to ask for it in prayer thus the necessity for unceasing prayer in asking God to respond favorably to it.

Every second God presents to us the good we must do and the evil we must avoid. Sometimes He presents to us consecutive goods to do or consecutive evils we must avoid. So we need graces to do the consecutive goods God presents to us and graces to avoid the consecutive evils we have to avoid. Since these goods and evil comes in floods and graces (to do good and avoid evil) can only from God, if you are following my reasoning we would need to pray unceasingly.

The choice between the good we must do and the evil we must avoid does not cease. It is continuous. God constantly presenting the good and the devil presenting the evil. Now comes the problem, one cannot pray unceasingly in the world with all its destruction. More often than not, man misses the good he must do (if he is without God's grace) and does the evil he must avoid (which is natural without grace.)

In fact, in the example of Christ, he demonstrated to us how to develop the habit of unceasing prayer during His 30 years of hidden life, before he went into the world (though He had the unceasing presence of God all the time.) That is why He overcame Satan in the desert. Without this habit of prayer it is impossible to walk through the world safely. What most people have is sporadic prayer. That won't work.

The first monks, inspired by angels, tried developing this by reciting 150 psalms a day and keeping that attitude of prayer in between the divine office. That is impossible for most people, even for most monks today. That's why Pope Benedict keeps on repeating the importance of prayer in his addresses to the Bishop. If they don't do it, they won't receive the grace to know God's will, one of which is to pray. Without knowing how to pray, how can they teach people how to get those graces. Without those graces men will find it impossible to do good and avoid evil.

WHY THE POPE TAKES RISKS.

When we heard that the Pope would be going to Turkey, our panic button went wild. Why take such an unnecessry risk?! Now we hear him planning to go to Jerusalem and visit Gaza, there goes our panic button again! Why? Is this really needed?

Because He is the Pope, he must go about doing his act of love for Christ by feeding Christ's lamb and sheep. And he knows his theology of grace which he has summarized in the first five items of his Compendium of the Catechism.

The Holy Father is always an external source of grace. This grace is given to those he gets in contact with in any way and has three effects on the recipients. First, it reveals to the soul what is the will of God. Secondly it makes the soul love the will of God. And thirdly, it gives the soul the strength to do the will of God. But, of course, the free will of the soul must give its stamp of approval to the grace of God. Just by going to those places mentioned above the Pope knows he is a Mediator of graces.....even without speaking. So much more when he speaks!

He also knows that if there is any one who has any evil design towards His holiness, the free will of that evil doer is under the control of God. For a person to sin he needs the permissive will of God. Without that permission, no one can do evil to anyone. God can even give such a person efficient graces to make him do good instead of evil, as what happened to St. Paul. So why worry since everything is in God's hands?

It is for the same reason that the late Pope John Paul II was holding those much maligned ecumenical prayers at St. Francis church. He was not giving approval to the other religions or sects. He was allowing himself to be an instrument of God's grace for the participants and for the whole non-catholic world. We can only understand such acts if we understand the theology of grace.

The documentary "Into the Great Silence" has caused waves around the world. But sadly, one comment was : "I just want to to go to heaven the ordinary way. That life is not for me." If one truly understood the theology of grace, one would see that all the things the monks did had to be done in order to enter Heaven. And if any monk there left the monastery, the reason would simply be that 'he did not learn the theology of grace;' which shows the necessity of what the monks were doing: they were just responding to the movement of grace.

Pope Benedict is not worried that the Church is disappearing from Europe and other parts of the world because he knows that God is not remiss in sending the needed graces for those meant to be saved. And with all the problems besetting the world today the Holy Father knows that those who respond favorably to the graces that God gives will know exactly what to do, will love to do His Will and will have the strength to do the right thing, while the rest of the world will continue to go on panic mode!