January 2014
This commentary from the great nineteenth century Oratorian speaks to the rampant false ecumenism of our day. In a Church and world now immeasurably worse — penetrated, compromised and corrupted by Masonic naturalism — it serves to underline the syncretic strides taken by the Lodge, in later cahoots with the Communists, over the past 150 years. Always with a view to its final goal: "a centralised world state with a centralised government planned as an [ecumenical] anti-church" (Bishop Graber). From The Precious Blood (TAN, 1959).
The Church:
Sole Mistress of Salvation
At first sight, it seems a strange inconsistency, that those who make it hard to be saved in the Church should make it comparatively easy to be saved out of it. It is indeed curious that such men should regard what they must at the least admit to be one of God's chief means of grace, namely, the Church, as adding very little to the chances of a man's salvation. If two men, born in one country, the one in the Church with all the Sacraments, the other not in the Church at all, have, as some say, nearly the same chances of salvation, it must follow, either that God has one standard for the forgiveness of sin in the one case, and another in the other, which is surely an impiety, or that the Sacraments are of very little consequence or efficacy, which would be hardly a less impiety. That Jesus, God and Man, should be truly received in the Blessed Sacrament, and yet that this should not make simply an incalculable difference between the religious state of those who enjoy this privilege and of those who do not, is a supposition highly dishonourable to Our Blessed Lord....
...[T]hese errors go together for want of a true and tender devotion to the Precious Blood. The doctrine of the Sacraments is the touchstone of all the theology of the day. He who constantly and devoutly adores the Precious Blood of Jesus will not think lightly of the Sacraments, which are the vases to hold it and the channels to convey it. He who magnifies the glory of the Sacraments will make much of the Church whose especial possession and characteristic they are.
... Hence, it follows that all lovers of the Precious Blood should have a cordial devotion to the Church, and should immensely honour, revere, and prize the Sacraments. Scripture calls the Church the Body of Christ, and St. Paul speaks wonderful things of the mysterious union between Christ and the Church. It is one of our greatest dangers of the present day to think lightly of the Church. Now that the world is overrun with heresy, and that in social life almost all distinctions between the faithful and others are obliterated, it is convenient to men's ease and acceptable to their cowardice to regard the Faith as one of many saving opinions, and the Church as one of many saving institutions. Men will make light of the enormous privileges and of the exclusive rights of the Church, either out of human respect, or as an easy way of diminishing the difficulties of a problem which they are unable to solve and do not like to face. A disesteem of the Sacraments follows upon this with a very speedy and disastrous logic... Such men destroy the souls of others by discouraging the frequentation of the Sacraments, and they destroy their own by that laxity of worldly, comfort-loving lives... they put feelings and sensible devotions in the place of mortifications, and so make their whole spirituality a delusion.
... We must look at the Church habitually as the sole ark in the deluge of the world, the sole mistress of salvation... But we remember that His ordinary law is, that there is no salvation whatever outside the Roman Church... The sins of men cannot change the truth of God. They are at His mercy, not He at theirs. In the days of the Antichrist, when two-thirds even of the faithful shall fall away from the Church, their apostasy will not make it less the exclusive mistress of salvation... When we are perplexed, we must stand still and believe... We must like its ways, as well as obey its precepts and believe its doctrines... the salvation of souls is a matter of the present; it cannot wait for a future, because men are dying daily.
... There is a leaven of inherent lawlessness in every man who has once been [or is] a heretic... I never read of any saint being discontented with the intellectual or philosophical, or literary state of things in the Church. I doubt if such a discontent is compatible with true loyalty to the Church. A man's love of the Church is the surest test of his love of God. He knows that the whole Church is informed with the Holy Ghost... our feeling toward the Church should be a devotion... The Church is full of God, haunted by spiritual presences... with a supernatural life ... Our love of the Church is one form of our love of Jesus, the form on which the saints were moulded. It is our love of Our Lord's love of us. It is the enthusiasm of our devotion to His Precious Blood.