“People reject the Church because she speaks against the sins they love” – St. Augustine…. NOT! Wherein Fr. Z corrects and then rants.

I ran across this quotation which the writer attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo (+430):

“People reject the Church because she speaks against the sins they love”

While this is true, Augustine did not say or write that in any of his extant works.  It does, however, distill the essence of something else he did say in a sermon:

Hoc autem fit dum amant peccata sua, et oderunt praecepta Dei. Sermo enim Dei adversarius tuus est, si tu amicus sis iniquitatis tuae.  … This happens because they love their sins and hate the commandments of God. For the word of God is your adversary if you are a friend to your own iniquity.

This is from the Enarrationes in Psalmos 35, 1.

The wording “People reject the Church because she speaks against the sins they love” captures Augustine’s thought, but should be labeled a paraphrase, especially since Augustine says “sermo Dei …  the word of God,” rather than “Ecclesia … the Church.”

Let’s extend this principle in a natural way.

For a Catholic, the sacred liturgy is the preeminent locus of encounter with both the Ecclesia and the sermo Dei.

In her sacred liturgical worship, especially in her tried by test over millennia worship, Holy Church appears most fully as herself, confessing the faith, proclaiming Scripture, offering sacrifice, administering the sacraments, and rendering to God the worship that is His due according to the virtue of Religion.

In the liturgy, the Word of God confronts man sacramentally, doctrinally, morally, and bodily. This encounter with mystery in the Word requires kneeling, silence, obedience, repentance, and adoration. It tells man that God is God and that he is not.

This explains the peculiar vehemence with which some attack the traditional sacred rites.

Their objection may concern aesthetics, history, or pastoral practice. Their claims may be rooted in assertions without foundations but imposed by bullying and power.

Hatred, however, is something stronger.

When a person cannot merely dislike the older liturgy but must mock it, suppress it, or denounce those who love it, Augustine’s diagnosis becomes uncomfortably pertinent. The rite may be touching a wound he refuses to have healed.

This might be what is on display at RNS in a piece by the infamous Jesuit Thomas Reese: Why I hate the old Latin Mass: A confession

I may write more about that embarrassing slop in another post if I get a few more important things done first. It is irritating to waste daylight on him.

Returning to the point, the traditional liturgy does not flatter modern man. It speaks constantly of sin, judgment, sacrifice, propitiation, penance, and the need for grace. In other words, it tells you how to attain the eschatological joy which the Novus Ordo emphasizes.

Whoever has made peace with a cherished sin will naturally experience such worship as an adversary.

Hatred of sacred tradition may therefore be less a liturgical judgment than a moral symptom.

The man who clings to his sin believes that he is judging the TLM.

The TLM, quietly and relentlessly, is judging him.

From his feat and hatred of the rites, there grows as a consequence a fear and hatred of the people who desire those traditional rites.