#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.

• God has created a law for the natural order such that what goes up must come down. God has made there to be the same law for the supernatural order: what goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up.
• If you are prideful in this life, if you make yourself out to be something greater than you are, if you despise others and are selfish, you will go down to hell after this life is over. If on the other hand, you are humble during this life, if you willingly accept corrections and humiliations, if you think well of others and poorly of yourself, if you are unselfish and sacrificial, then you will go up to Heaven after this life is over.
• This is the law of Divine Providence that Our Lord teaches us in today’s Gospel, and also in other places of the Gospel: “everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”
• If we want to save our souls, we have to be humble. There is no other way. There are only prideful souls in hell and only humble souls in heaven.
• There is no one who has understood this plan of God better than the saints. For the saints, there are only two places: the first place and the last place. But the first place is already taken; it is occupied by God. Thus, the only other place available is the last place, and that is my place.
• The saints thought of Our Lord as speaking to them in today’s Gospel when He says, “Take the last place.”