• 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.”

#sspx #catholic #catholicism #priesthood

• Fr. James Chipperfield is a strange man. He is only 26 years old and he is already a priest. That is a strange and rare thing in today’s world. It is what we call the young vocation.
• The average age of a newly ordained priest in the USA today is 34 years old, but Fr. Chipperfield was ordained when he was still 25 years old. The other Australian who was ordained with him was also 25 and the priests ordained for the SSPX are usually in their 20s.
• These young vocations are a consolation and a blessing because it means that young person has found his path early in life and been willing to commit himself to it. We know how Our Lord tells us in the Gospel that those who hear the call of God should answer right away, that they should drop everything to follow Him.
• His words even seem shocking. Here is the vocational direction He gave to someone approaching Him: “I will follow thee, Lord; but let me first take my leave of them that are at my house. Jesus said to him: No man putting his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Lk. 9:61-62)
• For those who become His priests, Our Lord wants generous hearts. He wants young men who are willing to leave behind a career in the world, leave behind a family, and offer all of their youth and talents to Him unreservedly.
• When they do that, when they become priests at a young age, it typically means that they will be able to minister to the salvation of souls for a long time.
• It also provides a powerful example to the world, for the world, which is so enamored with youth and is trying to remain forever young, to see a young man who has turned his back on the world.

#sspx #suffering #cross #catholic

• “The two persons in the world whom God loved best were Jesus and Mary, and the advantages which they possessed over all creatures on account of their virtue were that they suffered more than all. No two persons were ever so tried as they. Let us console ourselves then in sorrow, for the more of it we have, the more like shall we be to Jesus and to His Blessed Mother.”
• By this quotation from a saint, the Jesuit brother St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, we are taught the Catholic spirit in the face of suffering: suffering is the greatest and best way for us to imitate God and His holy Mother.
• Does this mean that we have to be unhappy our entire lives, if we want to live as good Catholics and become saints? No!
• The word “suffering” is different from the word “unhappiness”. We have many words to indicate unhappiness, such as “sadness”, “sorrow”, and “depression”, but none of these means the same thing as suffering. What this means is that while suffering can cause unhappiness, it can also be borne without unhappiness. You can suffer and be happy at the same time.
• You know that each person has a different measure of suffering in his life, but nobody is without suffering in this life. Everyone has suffering but suffering is not a condemnation to unhappiness.
• What our Catholic faith offers us is the possibility of enduring the sufferings of our life while at the same time being happy. How is this the case?

• In a relay race, there are typically four runners who have the job of passing a baton to one another until they get to the finish line. If any one of the runners drops the baton, his team is disqualified.
• The first runner begins the race with the baton; he does not receive the baton, but owns it. The other runners do not start the race with the baton. Rather, their job is to receive it from the runner behind them and then pass it on to the runner in front of them.
• This is exactly how it works with the Catholic faith. The human race is, as it were, running towards the end of time, which is the finishing of human history. That is when each of the runners will receive their reward through the resurrection of their bodies, which will rise in either a glorious state or a damned state.
• The baton that has to be passed on is the Catholic faith. The baton contains the beliefs of the Catholic faith, but it also contains the practices that enshrine and protect those beliefs.
• The first runner in the faith is Our Lord Jesus Christ. He owns the baton and puts in it all that we need to save our souls, that is, to reach the finish line and win the race. His role was only to give the faith, not to receive it. Our role is to both receive and give. We receive the faith from those who have gone before us and we give it to those who come after us.
• Already, in the first generation of Christianity, St. Paul is talking about this process of receiving and handing on. He tells the Corinthians that he received the faith from Our Lord and he handed that same faith on to them. He says, “I delivered to you a faith. You received it and are standing in it and it is saving you. I also received that same faith.”
• This is the very nature of our faith. We are traditional Catholics because our faith is a traditional faith. It is a handed-on faith, a received faith. Our faith works by way of a relay, a receiving from one and a handing on to another.

• The Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven was the effect of the way that she lived her life and, particularly, three moments of her life: the moment of Our Lady’s conception, the moment she became Mother of God, and the moment of her Son’s death.

Immaculate Conception

• The moment of her conception is important because it is the first moment of her existence, the time of the creation of her soul and the making of her body. It was the first moment of the existence of the body that would one day rise from the dead and be taken up to Heaven.
• We know that the most important aspect of this moment is that God preserved her entire person from sin. Her body was taken from two souls afflicted by original sin, Joachim and Anna, but God prevented her soul from contracting any sin. As a result, we can speak of her body as being sinless as well, as having no contact with sin.
• You know that sin is the thing that causes death. And death is the thing that causes the corruption and destruction of our body. But God prevented this cause of death from touching Our Lady, at the first moment of her existence.

Mother of God

• This blessed creature, who was conceived without any sin, began to grow up. She maintained the purity of body and soul that God had given to her. She was perfectly faithful to her gifts. She did not commit any sin. She lived in humble submission to God.
• This behavior, this holiness prepared her to become God’s mother. It prepared her to receive into her body God Himself. And of course, that was what happened on the day of the Annunciation. Her body changed. God both came inside of her and gave her the power to form His body from her body.
• Her pure body became the source of the body of God.

Co-Redemptrix

• Our Lord was born and she named Him Jesus or Savior, because He was to save the world from its sins by an act of Redemption.

• On the day of our baptism, we came to the church alive with physical life but dead in supernatural life. It was because of this fact that our soul was dead with sin that we, or our godparents, had come to ask for eternal life.
• Then, we went through the ritual of the baptismal ceremony during which we underwent a symbolic death. The pouring of the water on our heads was like a burial in water from which we then rose again to a new life. The ceremony was a symbolic dying with Christ and a symbolic rising with Christ to a new life.
• What was not symbolic was that, when the water was poured upon our heads, the death of sin was driven from our souls and a new life started to dwell there, a supernatural life.
• This is what St. Paul means in today’s epistle when he says, “we were buried with Him by means of Baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.”
• What this means is that, before Baptism, our soul was not capable of doing anything in the supernatural order. It could not move in the supernatural realm and was dead to that realm.
• We know that an animal is dead when it does not move, when it does not have self-movement. We go up to a dog that we are not sure whether it is sleeping or dead. We move it with our foot and nothing happens. Because the dog does not move, we conclude it does not have physical life.
• Our soul before Baptism was like that in the supernatural order. We were not able to make any supernatural movement.
• After Baptism, our soul becomes alive with a new type of life, a supernatural life. That life does not get rid of our physical life or lay on top of our physical life; rather, it goes inside of it.
• The life of God goes inside of our spiritual soul and gives it new capabilities.
  • It goes inside of our mind and gives our mind the ability to believe the mysteries of the faith.
  • It goes inside of our will and gives it the ability to choose a supernatural good, to love God above all things, to seek the salvation of our soul above all things.
• St. Paul focuses particularly on one new ability that the new life of Christ in our soul gives us the ability to do: it gives us the capacity to be dead to sin.

• Today, we have one of the vocation stories in the Gospels. These are some of the most beautiful stories we read about in the Gospels, and we find them in all four Gospels.
• They all consist in three things: a meeting, an invitation, and a following.
• These stories are beautiful and powerful for us because they are a representation of our own life.
• Of course, they are particularly a representation of the life of a priest, a monk or a nun, those people who have given their lives for the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
• But they are also a representation of the lives of the Catholic faithful. All of the faithful are called by Our Lord to be holy, to follow Him, to love Him and serve Him in their lives.

• The vocation story in today’s Gospel helps us understand what we need to do to answer the call of Our Lord. It is interesting that Our Lord was not content with preaching from the boats of these fishermen whom He was going to turn into fishers of men.
• He could have just stopped preaching and said, “Come, follow Me”. But, instead, He wanted to work a miracle before issuing the call. Why did He do this?
• Because great reverence is needed to follow the call of Our Lord. It is not enough that we see Him as a great preacher; we have to see Him as God.
• Our Lord works this miracle of a great catch of fish, so great that there are more fish than can be contained in one boat. Both boats were even sinking when they were filled with the fish. When St. Peter sees this, he has an immediate realization: this man is holy. I don’t think St. Peter knew yet that Our Lord was God. But he knew that He was holy: only a holy man could work such a miracle.
• When St. Peter sees the miracle, a great reverence for Our Lord awakens in his heart. He casts himself on his knees, in an attitude of respect, submission, and petition. He realizes how sinful he is in comparison to Our Lord and tells Our Lord that he is not worthy to be in His presence.
• But, in fact, the truth is the contrary: the reverence of St. Peter for Our Lord is what is going to enable him to answer the call of Our Lord and fulfill his great vocation of being the first Pope.
• The same is true with answering the call to holiness. Our Lord calls all of us to a greater union with Him. It is reverence that will enable us to answer that call. Reverence will make us want to pray, will make us fervent in our prayer, will make us fear sin and keep a close watch over ourselves.
• Reverence is often what leads Catholics to traditional Catholicism. They start to realize the respect that is owed to God, that that respect is not given in the New Mass, and that the TLM treats God with the respect that He deserves.