Inspired by something sent to me today from a Twitter feed. [UPDATE It’s also quoted by Matthew Schmitz at the Catholic Herald in June 2017 in a round up article about how much people hate Card. Sarah and the amazingly unkind things they say about him. It just goes to show that no one hates like a liberal. It leaves me amazed to watch Twitter right now… @jamesmartinsj @massimofaggioli “GET ‘IM! GET ‘IM BOYZ! GO FOR THE KILL!]
From Robert Card Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, p. 159:
Speech can assassinate, a word can kill, but God educates us in the school of forgiveness. He teaches us to pray for our enemies. He surrounds our heart with an enclosure of tenderness so that it may not be sullied by rank or. And he constantly murmurs: “The disciples of my beloved Son have no enemies. Your heart must not have enemies, either.” I speak from personal experience. I painfully experienced assassination by gossip, slander, and public humiliation, and I learned that when a person has decided to destroy you, he has no lack of words, spite, and hypocrisy; falsehood has an immense capacity for constructing arguments, proofs, and truth is out of sand. When this is the behavior of men of the church, and in particular of ambitious, duplicitous bishops, the pain is still deeper. But men look at outward appearances, and God sees the heart (1 Sam 16:7). Relying on his view alone, we must remain calm and silent, asking for the grace never to give in to rancor, hatred, and feelings of worthlessness. Let us stand firm in our love for God and for his church, in humility.
The key to a treasure is not the treasure. But if we give away the key, we also hand over the treasure. The Cross is an exceptionally precious key, even when it appears to be folly, the subject of ridicule, and a scandal; it is repugnant to our mentalities and our search for easy solutions. We would like to be happy and live in a peaceful world without paying the price. The Cross is an astonishing mystery. It is the sign of Christ’s infinite love for us. In a sermon by Saint Leo the Great, on the passion, we find this extraordinary passage:
Christ being lifted up upon the cross, let the eyes of your mind not dwell only on that site which those wicked sinners saw, to whom it was said by the mouth of Moses, “And thy life shall be hanging before thine eyes, and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt not to be assured of thy life.” [Deut 28:66]…. But let our understandings, illumined by the Spirit of Truth, foster with pure and free heart the glory of the cross which irradiates heaven and earth, and see with the inner sight what the Lord meant when He spoke of His coming Passion: “… Now is the world’s judgment, now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things unto me.” O, wondrous power of the cross! O, ineffable glory of the passion!
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This post is both beautiful and astounding, given the news everywhere this morning that Pope Francis has responded with uncustomary speed to Cardinal Sarah’s position on Magnum Principium, indicating Cardinal Sarah is wrong, and that it is his own intention to vest local Bishops conference with final authority on liturgical translations.
And…that Cardinal Sarah himself must now publish Pope Francis’ letter in all of the media outlets which previously published Cardinal Sarah’s position, deemed incorrect by Pope Francis.
This is a public humiliation of enormous, crushing proportions for Cardinal Sarah being perpetrated by Pope Francis.
We are now in the twilight zone…..
What Ann Barnhardt has been saying about diabolical narcissists (and their close ties with homosexuality) in the Church seems to me to be true.
Can’t say I agree with her about Francis being an antipope, though, even though were that to be true it would easily clear up much of the current mess, which is why I understand the appeal of such a stance.
[I had attempted to past the following comment on the next post, but it doesn’t appear to have an active combox]:
Your advice that we invoke Saint Michael is essential. I’ve begun a Perpetual Novena to him for his protection against the Demonic very clearly in evidence in the church and throughout the world today.
Everything “Traditionalists” began saying immediately following Vatican II and all of the concerns they raised, the alarm signals they sent out, the censures and objections stated by Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX all these years, have all come to pass exactly as predicted, and it is taken the rest of the truly faithful in the Catholic Church 50 years to catch up.
It is not because we were smarter or wiser; it was because we were willing to admit the obvious outcomes inherent in the Modernist formulations coming out of Vatican II.
All of these consequences were inevitable and foreseeable as a matter of the principles set in motion by that Council.
The tangent was set, and those Catholics clear-sighted and honest enough (recognizing the hand of an enemy at work from the very start) could see where it would easily and eventually lead.
Archbishop Lefebvre witnessed very revealing and alarming things at Vatican II and identified them as the first tremors of an earthquake that would shake the Church to its very foundations.
This is why it is so important that we stop trying to put the best face on ambiguity. Ambiguity itself is one of the most effective tools of satan. It’s the tool he used in the Garden of Eden and it has been the bane of the human race ever since. Given his treachery and fallen human nature, ambiguity always ensures our own crushing defeat, and the obfuscation of Truth.
Sawyer, I was shunned, abused, and slandered by a malignant narcissist group of priests and can’t seem to find a parish that hasn’t been contaminated by them. They are deeply closeted and spout orthodoxy in public and so have a wonderful reputation, making me look worse. It’s very painful. I am praying and fasting for them.
“The Cross is an exceptionally precious key….”
Ooh, that’s very patristic. “Crux Christi, clavis Paradisi est.” St. Jerome uses that in his homily on Lazarus and the Rich Man (CCSL 78: 515). St. Augustine says something similar (Enarrationes in Psalmos, 45, 1 – “Crux Domini nostri clavis fuit” and Sermon 125A – “Nonne crux illa clavis fuit?”) St. John Damascene also uses it in On the Orthodox Faith, but in Greek.
The exemplary and forthright patience of His Eminence is a sharp corrective to the desperate indifference to which today’s Catholics—hostages to a clerical establishment steadily detaching itself from reason and from Tradition—can too easily fall prey.
I am three-quarters of the way through Cardinal Sarah’s book, Power of Silence, which I recommend to everyone. The Cardinal is a very strong man. If the people who hurl insults at the Cardinal, think that they are sending him into a hysterical weeping fit, I’m afraid they’re mistaken. The Cardinal is most likely praying for them. In silence.
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I, too, like Cardinal Sarah’s book. I liked his first one too.