#sspx #catholic #catholicchurch

• We have a special feast day today, the dedication of the archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. It is interesting that the Church makes this a second class feast, while the feast of the dedication of St. Peter’s Basilica, which will take place next Tuesday, is only a third-class feast.
• The main reason for the special honor given to St. John Lateran is that it was the first official church of the Catholic Church. When you visit St. John Lateran in Rome, you see an inscription written on it: “the mother and head of all the churches in the world”.
• You know that Catholics were persecuted by the Roman Empire as soon as the Church was founded. Sts. Peter and Paul themselves were martyred in Rome.
• The persecutions continued for an extremely long time, for close to 300 years! Some Roman emperors were more aggressive than others in their attempt to destroy the Catholic Church but the fact is that the Catholic religion was more or less illegal for these 300 years.
• Imagine what it was like for the faithful during these difficult times. They knew that Our Lord was God; they knew that they belonged to the true faith. At the same time, they had a heavy price to pay for the practice of their faith.
• They could not use public buildings to practice their religion or build their own temples. They rather had to meet in secret, in their homes and in the catacombs. They had to be careful who they talked to. They had to be very discreet in telling people that they were Catholic.
• Think about how weary they must have been with this situation, when it continued decade after decade. The persecutions made it difficult to convert people to the faith, because everyone knew that the Empire did not like Catholicism. Everyone knew that they could be executed if they became a Catholic.
• Think of all the prayers that the Catholics of the first centuries lifted up to Heaven, to ask Our Lord to send them an emperor who would at least allow them to practice their Catholic faith in peace.
• Our Lord did not want to intervene right away to help these first Catholics. On the contrary, He wanted the first Catholics to be strong and sacrificial. He wanted them to have their life on the line at all times.
• For that reason, He waited! He waited not for 100 or 200 years, but for over 250 years. This is how we have the examples of all those martyr saints from the first centuries of the Church. This is why we have so many great saints to honor from those centuries.
• In due time, however, Our Lord decided that He would make His Church triumph. He decided that He would answer all of that blood that was shed and all of those prayers that were offered.
• He gave to the Catholics of the empire something they were always dreaming about but had never been given: an emperor who converted to the Catholic faith.

#catholic #sspx #christtheking

• If we look at all the of the problems in the world and in the Catholic Church today, they all really boil down to one problem. It is a first commandment problem. The first commandment is hardly being honored and practiced today.
• Now, it may seem that the first commandment is the easiest one of all to practice. “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.” We can understand this commandment too simplistically, thinking it just commands us not to worship false gods, not to be an idolater.
• In the Gospel, however, Our Lord shows us, as it were, the other side of this commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind”. Our Lord tells us that the whole of the law and prophets rests on this one law.
• This commandment might be referred to as a declaration of the rights of God. God is our Creator, our Redeemer, and our final end. As such, He has a right to demand our love. He has a right to make a law for every single one of us that we love Him above everything else.
• The biggest question for each one of us in our lives is whether or not we will respect the rights of God over us, whether we will love Him above all things or not. If we do, then we will spend all eternity with our heavenly Father in a state of perfect happiness. If we do not, we will go to Hell, because we had a first commandment problem. We could not follow that commandment.
• As I say, this is precisely the problem with the world and the Church today: the first commandment is not being followed. The rights of Christ the King are not being respected.
• Who is the idol that has been put in the place of God and is being loved more than God? The idol is man. Man today is worshipping himself.

• By the design of God, the first second of our existence passes in a dark place, the womb of our mother. We remain in the darkness for three quarters of a year, growing, making the transition from an embryo to a fetus to an infant.
• Finally, the day comes when we emerge into this world and we get to see for the first time what sort of world we are born into. Our vision is at first very blurry and is limited to a range of about half a foot.
• The infant’s perception of reality, of the world that he has newly entered, in his narrow range of sight, is dominated by one figure: his mother. She is the one whom his feeble sight is most often able to perceive. She is the one who always seems to be around when he is awake: the one who feeding him, the one clothing him, the one speaking to him, the one holding and kissing him.
• This is how God designed things for His human beings: that, coming out of the well of nothingness, we should spend nine months in the womb of our mothers; and then, coming into the world, our whole perception of that world should be dominated by the face and contact of our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.
• If such is the way it is in the natural world and with our natural life, it should not be surprising to us that God should want something similar to be true for the supernatural world and our supernatural life.
• God wants us to have a mother. At the moment of our baptism, the first moment that our souls lives a supernatural life, the first moment it exists in the supernatural order, we receive the Church as our mother (we become members of the Church) and we receive Our Lady as our Mother.
• We go to our Mother the Church to receive our supernatural life. We get the sacraments from her, which nourish our soul. Especially confession and Communion.
• But God also gives Our Lady, His own Mother, to be our mother. She is a human being like us, but she is a human being who has been given a crucial role for the human race, the role of being the New Eve, the new Mother of all the living.
• And just as we saw with the natural order, so too must we say of the supernatural order: God made it to be that way for us. God has made us a supernatural world where we have Holy Mother Church and we have a human mother, the Mother of God, to be our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.