Fr. Murray: degrees of unbelief in God and in his revelation

My friend Fr. Gerald Murray hit another dinger at The Catholic Thing.

A tease…  read the whole thing there.

Cardinal Sarah and Our Silent Apostasy

The book God or Nothing, a wide-ranging interview with Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, by the French journalist Nicolas Diat is one of the most refreshing things published in recent memory. I cannot praise this book too highly. [Ditto.] It breathes forth the wisdom, insight, and deep faith of a truly devoted servant of the Church. It is a prophetic witness to the truth. Sarah gets to the root of what is ailing the world today, and proposes the Church’s unchanging remedy: faith in God as revealed by His Son Jesus Christ. Along the way, he also chides fellow churchmen and the faithful for those occasions when surrender to a worldly spirit has brought great harm to the Church.

Pope St. Pius X was asked after his election what would be the program of his pontificate. He pointed to a crucifix and said, “This is my program.” In a similar vein, asked about the current situation, “Is it a crisis of the Church or a ‘crisis of God?’,” Sarah responds: “Contrary to what we may think, the greatest difficulty of men is not in believing what the Church teaches at the moral level; the most difficult thing for the postmodern world is to believe in God and in his only Son.”

The root problem in Western society – and the Church – comes down to this: degrees of unbelief in God and in his revelation. This unbelief ranges from atheism (theoretical and practical) to agnosticism (often the fruit of ignorance, laziness, or spiritual blindness) to pick-and-choose Catholicism. When we fail to adhere unreservedly to Christ and his teaching, we are left to our own devices – not a happy thought.  [And, both within the Church and without, the world has become more confused in great part because we screwed up our sacred liturgical worship of God!]

Sarah states: “If the tie between God and Christians is weakened, the Church becomes simply a human structure, one society among others. [Dumb down and humanize our worship and what do you get…?] With that, the Church becomes trivial; she makes herself worldly and is corrupted to the point of losing her original nature. Indeed, without God we create a Church in our own image, for our little needs, likes, and dislikes. Fashion takes hold of the Church, and the illusion of sacredness become perishable, a sort of outdated medication.”

Consider such remarkable things as the recent praise of the late David Bowie by L’Osservatore Romano. This follows upon earlier elegizing of Michael Jackson and the recent use of St. Peter’s Basilica as a projection screen for various profane images. [Laudato si’: The Movie] Even more significantly, the Faith has been trivialized by the campaign to give Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried. The mere repetition of the Lord’s words, “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery” (Lk 16-18). is dismissed as harsh, uncharitable, and morose.

The reception of Holy Communion by those living in an invalid second marriage is viewed by the innovators [In their Salvador Dali worldview] as a matter of justice – a remedy for unjustly excluding them from the community of the faithful, exposing them to unwarranted shame, and frustrating their laudable desire to be nourished by the Lord. The innovators derisively stigmatize 2000 years of Catholic teaching as an outdated, rigorist, and fundamentalist reading of the Lord’s words. Such intransigence allegedly prevents the Church from carrying out the Lord’s “real intention”: that everyone who wants to receive Holy Communion be invited to participate at the banquet of his Body and Blood.

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Again… read the rest there.