#catholic

• In today’s Gospel, we see that Our Lord allows Himself to be tempted. He does this for many reasons, but one of the reasons is this: to show us that everyone is tempted in this world, no matter how holy they are.
• This is comforting for us, because we all experience temptation and we are sometimes tempted to confuse temptation with sin. Our Lord is perfectly sinless and He was tempted. Thus, it is clear that the mere fact of being tempted is not a sin, and also that we are meant to have temptation in this life.
• There is another extreme, however, and this is the extreme of those who are complacent about temptation. They say, “I’m going to be tempted no matter what, so I don’t have to be too careful about temptation”.
• There are also those who have a habit of grave sin and yet are constantly putting themselves in situations where they will be tempted to repeat the sin. They say to themselves, “This time I will be stronger” or “The temptation is not really that hard to fight”, even though they usually fall into the sin, whenever they experience the temptation!
• The fact is that, while we are meant to experience temptation in this life, we are also meant to avoid bringing temptations upon ourselves. This is especially true when we have habits of mortal sin. If we have a habit of drinking, a habit of gambling, a habit of impurity, and so on, we have a strict duty to avoid situations that will tempt us to fall back into those sins.
• In the language of the Church, we have the strict duty to avoid the “near occasion of grave sin”.
• In today’s sermon, I want to speak about what we mean by an “occasion of sin” and what we have to do to avoid occasions of sin.

#catholic #sermon

• Superbowl billboard during halftime show: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love”. Comment on Twitter that got four million views: “Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person”.
• But the halftime performer Bad Bunny was singing songs that were completely sensual and debased, and calling it love, while the dancers were cavorting in a perverse way on the stage.
• What we have here is a debate about the meaning of love. Both sides agree that love is good. But they disagree on what love is. One side believes that love is pleasure; the other side believes that love is sacrifice.
  • Those who believe that love is pleasure think that any enjoyment that any two people have with one another is good, as long as there is mutual consent.
  • They believe that all forms of pleasure should be tolerated and celebrated, just because of the fact that they provide pleasure.
  • They believe that all those who criticize the idea that “love is pleasure” are engaging in hate because they say that such people are opposed to love.
• St. Augustine famously described these two competing ideas on love in his master work The City of God: “Two loves have built two cities: the love of self even to the despising of God, the city of the earth; the love of God even to the despising of self, the city of God. One glorifies itself in self, and the other in the Lord.”
• There is a famous Catholic manual on the spiritual life and it lays down two important principles on this topic of love that help guide us. (Tanquerey, par. 310-311)
• The first principle is that the essence of your perfection is charity. What this means is the primary thing that indicates your worth as a human being, your goodness, your value in the eyes of God, is your level of true love, the Catholic idea of love.
• We know that Our Lord confirms this in the Gospel when He says that the way we obtain everlasting life is by fulfilling to two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor.
• This is what St. Paul confirms in today’s epistle wherein he seeks to prove that charity is the greatest of the virtues. He excludes the false notion of love when he says, “Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, is not pretentious, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked; thinks no evil, does not rejoice over wickedness, but rejoices with the truth.”
• Then he goes on to say that charity is the essence of our perfection by explaining that charity is the virtue that remains when we are in our perfect state, while faith and hope go away. “There remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity”. That is where our perfection lies.
• The reason why our perfection lies in charity is that supernatural charity unites us directly to God. There is nothing that unites us more to God that true supernatural charity. But our whole perfection is in uniting ourselves with God. That is what makes us perfect.
• The second principle that we must understand about love is that love requires sacrifice. We do not subscribe to this false notion of love wherein love consists in giving yourself pleasure, wherein using another person for your enjoyment is considered our perfection.

• Thirty-eight years ago, Archbishop Lefebvre performed the heroic act of consecrating four bishops without papal mandate. Because of that act:
  • The movement of traditional Catholicism has been able to grow and thrive in the past four decades.
  • Countless souls have been able to receive the traditional and authentic teaching of the Church and worship at the Mass of all time.
  • Other traditional communities, like the FSSP and the ICK, have been allowed to exist.
  • Many, many souls have been saved.
• This past week, our Superior General, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, announced that the SSPX plans to repeat this act of its founder. New bishops will be consecrated this coming July 1, even though we have not received permission from Rome to do so.
• This is a huge event in the life of the Church, and will have enormous consequences.
• In this sermon, I want to explain two things: why this act is necessary, and why it is justified.

Why it is necessary

• These consecrations are necessary because first of all because we have a duty to Holy Mother Church, to her spirit and her traditions. We do not want to abandon our Mother in this time of her greatest trial. On the contrary, we want to do all that we can to support her and sustain her.
• By the Providence of God, the life of Tradition in the Church today lives and dies with the Society of St. Pius X. These consecrations are necessary for the continuation of Tradition.
• Secondly, we need to do these consecrations for your sake, my dear faithful, for you faithful who have come to us in the midst of this crisis, who have asked the SSPX, “Please, give me the traditional catechism, give me the traditional sacraments, give me a traditional Catholic community.” The SSPX takes care of hundreds of thousands of souls around the world and, if it does not consecrate bishops, it will not be able to continue this work.
• The SSPX was established for the formation of good Catholic priests. But priests cannot be ordained without bishops. Only bishops can make priests.
• Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops for the SSPX in 1988. Since then, two of the bishops have died and the other two are in their late 60s. The two bishops who remain are traveling around the world in order to administer the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Orders. They have been keeping up this insane rate of travel for 38 years.
• It is clear that, if the SSPX does not provide new bishops for itself soon, its work will not be able to continue.
• Think about St. Isidore’s. We have been having this capital campaign and the faithful have been so generous contributing to it. For what purpose? So that our church can stand the test of time, so that this community can flourish. But without these consecrations, it would not be able to exist one day.
• Without these consecrations, all of the work of the SSPX around the world would ultimately have to cease. The SSPX currently has about 1500 members, between its priests, brothers, and nuns; it is located in 77 countries and it has almost 800 Mass locations. Between the SSPX and the religious communities associated with it, there are 140 schools in the world. All this would go away without bishops. The hundreds of thousands of faithful would have to find somewhere else to go.