#catholic #sermon

• Dramatic shift with Septuagesima Sunday: we stop saying Alleluia until Easter; we put on purple, the sign of penance. In the office, we go back to the beginning of the Bible, the opening chapter of the book of Genesis. This season represents a new start for us.
• We learn about the creation of the world along with the creation of mankind. We learn about the sin of our first parents.
• The Church wants us to start off this season with a reminder that we are wounded with Original Sin. Our souls are sick and in danger of dying.
• Original Sin with its wounds is like a genetic disease that is passed on through the ages, from generation to generation. Our first parents, Adam and Eve contracted the disease and modified the spiritual DNA of the human race. From that point forward, the disease is transmitted every time a child is conceived.
• This is a doctrine of the Catholic Faith. Trent: “If any one asserts, that the sin of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity; and that the holiness and justice, received of God, which he lost, he lost for himself alone, and not for us also, let him be anathema.”
• Trent also defines that Baptism takes away original sin, but that its effects remain in us. “This holy synod confesses and is sensible, that in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive to sin; which, whereas it is left for our exercise, cannot injure those who do not consent, but resist manfully by the grace of Jesus Christ,”

The effects of Original Sin

• Here is the situation: we received a defective spiritual DNA from our parents, such that Original Sin was communicated to our souls when we were conceived. The sin itself was taken away when we were baptized, but the effects of the sin remain in us.
• We are sick in our soul with these effects. And when someone is sick, you take them to the emergency room or urgent care, depending on how severe their condition is. The doctor would say to us: you have the wound of ignorance in your mind, you have the wound of malice in your will, and you have the wounds of concupiscence and weakness in your emotions.
• Holy Mother Church is like our nurse and doctor. She makes us aware of our condition and she prescribes remedies. She encourages us to fight against our spiritual sickness and gives us the seasons of Septuagesima and Lent to train us in that fight.
• When you have a disease, you try to fight it. You do not do anything that you know will foster the disease. You do not go to a place where the disease is rampant. If I go to a rock concert or a bad website or a bar, the disease within me will grow stronger. I will become more sick, weaker.
• But we do not just fight the disease by avoiding places where the air is infected with sin. We take the disease everywhere we go, because we carry it within ourselves.
• We know that when a disease is inside a person, it seeks to propagate itself. Think of cancer for instance. It is always trying to grow more and take over our body, until it has destroyed us. The sin within us tries to do the same. Just as cancer patients have to fight the cancer within them if they want to survive, so too we have to fight the cancer of sin if we want to reach eternal life.

Mortifying ourselves

• The epistle of today’s Mass is all about carrying on this crucial fight for our eternal lives. St. Paul compares it both to a race and to a fight.
• And he tells us what he does to fight the fight: “I chastise my body and bring it into subjection”.

The audio file for this sermon has very bad audio from 2:00=15:40.

• One of the cornerstones of a Catholic civilization is the phenomenon known as the large family. Catholics have always been known for having large families. But large Catholic families stand out more today than they have in the past just because families themselves are becoming rarer, not just large families.
• Young people today are finding it harder and harder to get married.
• The median age for marriage today is 30 for men and 28 for women, while it was 23 for men and 21 for women back in 1970.
• Fewer people are getting married: there were around 10.5 per 1000 in 1970, while there are around 6 per 1000 today. This is a difference of over 40%.
• Marriage requires a commitment for life and the shouldering of great responsibilities. You have to be very motivated to take on that commitment.
• Many young people find it difficult today to commit themselves to something so big as marriage and they find it even more difficult to commit themselves to having the children that come with a Catholic marriage.
• They don’t trust themselves and they don’t trust others to be able to make the marriage commitment. And so they just remain single.

Good Catholic Marriage

• This rarity of commitment makes a good Catholic marriage shine with all the more splendor today.
• We know that, when two Catholics get married, they make vows to one another. They vow to live marriage in the way that God made it.
• They exchange vows and they give to one another their life-giving powers. They promise that they will never withhold their life-giving power in their marital union.
• This gift on the wedding day is a sign of their unconditional love for one another. They accept in advance whatever life will come forth from their love.
• This helps us see how false is the love which says, “I will come together with you but I do not want to have children by you. I do not want new life to come from our union.”

Big Families Rare Today

• When there is rampant and easy birth control in a society such as ours, as well as a plague of immorality, the only thing that will lead people to make such a commitment to one another is a religious motivation. They have to believe that God wants it of them and they will only be following God’s plan if they have the children that God gives to them.
• The reason for this is that we as human beings tend to take the easy way out. It is difficult to have the children that God wants to give you and so people will opt to have just a few or none, when they are given the option. So many countries are trying today to get their citizens to have children and it is just not working. They are not motivated by money or benefits.
• Meanwhile, in the Church today, Catholics simply ignore the Church’s teaching on birth control. Studies indicate that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control at some time in their life.
• Meanwhile, it takes a special set of circumstances to have large families (like six or more children) and those circumstances are very rare today.
• The couple has to get married young, in their early 20s. And they have to be committed to having all the children that God wills to give them. Both of these extremely rare today.

• Meanwhile, it is a great blessing to a family and to the world when the family abounds with life. In 1958, Pope Pius XII gave an address to representatives of a number of associations for large families in Italy. In this address, he pointed out three testimonies given by large families.

#catholic #sspx

• On this Second Sunday after Epiphany, it is customary to speak about the sacrament of matrimony, because of the Gospel about the wedding feast at Cana.
• Today, however, I would like to speak about a different kind of marriage, the union that exists between Christ and His Spouses in the religious life.
• We have this incredible blessing here at St. Isidore’s that the Consoling Sisters are planning to build a novitiate. This will be a place where young women will be prepared to become spouses of Christ.
• They will be prepared to enter into a way of life that has existed from the earliest days of the Church, wherein young ladies forego marrying and having a family in order to give their lives completely to Christ.
• There are three stages at every novitiate:
  • first is the postulancy, which is the period of time when the young lady comes to the novitiate and adjusts to the life there. This usually lasts for six months.
  • Second is the novitiate. It is started by the young lady taking the religious habit and receiving a religious name. The novitiate is a time for her to practice in earnest the three religious vows and for her to be trained in the religious life by the mistress of novices. The novitiate typically lasts for two years.
  • The third stage is the taking of vows, also known as the first profession. That is the day when the young lady approaches the altar and binds herself to the three vows of religion for the first time. She takes the vow of poverty, whereby she can only use material things under the direction of her superior; the vow of chastity, whereby she does not seek any earthly love but only the love of Christ; and the vow of obedience, whereby she submits her will to the will of her superiors. She makes these three vows in order to give herself to Christ in the most perfect way possible. This is why she typically receives a ring on the day of her first profession. From that point, she officially lives the religious life and is given some assignment by her order. She leaves the novitiate and joins a community of sisters somewhere else.
• This special way of life, this beautiful way of life, is a treasure of the Catholic Church. The fact that the Catholic Church, and pretty much the Catholic Church alone, has promoted and fostered this way of life throughout her entire history is a sign of her holiness. The fact that millions of women have lived this way of life in the past 2000 years is a sign that the Catholic Church is truly a divine institution.
• This way of life is also a great gift to the world, because the nun is a very special kind of woman. She is a woman who is a bride of Christ, living a supernatural life and possessing a special kind of love that she brings to everything that she does. Her life of sacrifice and her intense love of Christ make her able to do great things for God in this world, that no one else can do.