Restoring the militant spirit - our fundamental duty as faithful Catholic men

ROME, 19-21 OCTOBER 2018 Created for Heaven: the mission of young adults in today’s world

We have what the entire world needs. Never lose sight that it is a grace, it is an absolute gift from God for you to believe today with everything that is going on. Gratitude is the answer to everything you will ever have to face in your life.

The greatest thing we can do is that which God has called us to, and give our all, nothing less.

Do I feel like a religious? No. I am consumed to love Him, to be what He wants me to be and to tell the world about Him at every opportunity He gives me. And what he wants to do with this is His business.

‘Be you perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect’…Does perfect mean that we do not sin, that we do not make mistakes? Perfect is wholeness. To be perfect is to be complete, to be whole. On this side of Heaven we will always have flaws. St Paul begged God to take his infirmity from him. God said no, my grace is sufficient for you. He wanted Paul to never lose his dependence on God. ‘My power is made perfect in your weakness.’ Every time you feel incapable, say: ‘Bless you Lord!’ Your failures are the way for you to learn. The only failure is to give up. Never ever give up.

Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God, OSB Discerning God’s will for our life The main question about entering into marriage with someone is whether this person is going to help me and my children get to heaven? This is the number one most important question when you are selecting your spouse. Your decision to marry is also your decision about sanctity. Your call to marriage, to priesthood or religious life is to discern what is God’s will for your sanctity. He does have a plan for you!

We are all called to die. We all will die. But we are all called to die to ourselves. In married life – which is a calling to your sanctity, that is what it primarily is – but it is also a calling for the purpose of marriage and that is for procreation and education or rearing of children, rearing them to God. We are called to procreation and that means openness to life. The first commandment given to men is “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). That is something hardly ever talked about. We often hear it talked about in the negative: don’t use contraception. Actually, the teaching is: be open to life, welcome life, life is a gift.

Sr Lucia, one of the three Fatima children wrote to the late cardinal Caffarra saying that the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be over marriage and the family. This is where the decisive battle lies. Dr Peter Kreeft once asked: Have you ever noticed that almost the whole of the culture war is about one issue? Abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, pornography, promiscuity, sex education, divorce, homosexuality, in-vitro fertilisation, embryonic stem cell research are all about the attack on marriage. In the Scripture, St Paul tells us: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh.” But the next line is: “This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the church.” So there is this image that God wants to give us of His own relationship with His Church in the relationship of the husband and wife that is to bear fruit in our souls. It is the relationship between us and Christ. And wouldn’t Satan want to attack that first? Because that is what we are called to – eternal relationship with Christ in Heaven.

John-Henry Westen Truths about Catholic marriage you won’t hear from the pulpit

“Catholic youth today really want to be told the truth, not a watered-down version of the truth.”

“Please protect Catholic tradition, because that is what Our Lord would want. Without following the Lord’s will, what good are we actually going to do? He knows better than we do.”

“We want orthodoxy, we want the Latin Mass, we want religious orders that wear their habits, we want big families. We want everything that the Church has taught for 2,000 years.”

“Do not listen to the world, but rather allow the world to listen to Christ.”

“I’d love to see more formation, especially for young adults, to encourage and equip us to stand up for our faith and to not water it down in the hope that it would be more appealing. I think in order to do that we need more formation in our parishes our schools, our dioceses and also more transparency and authentic leadership.”

“Young people today don’t want the Church to be handing us what the world is handing us. We want to have the unique truth that is found only in the Church.”

“Apostles are not politicians or legislators, they shouldn’t sacrifice the truth.”

“As a young person striving to get myself and my family to Heaven I am asking you to uphold the truths of the Church and to support young people who are striving to live these truths in their daily lives.”

“As regards stopping celibacy in the priesthood, I would like to urge our Church and her leaders to oppose this. Even in the first century St Paul tells us in the Scripture that it is better for men not to be married who are involved in ministry, so that they could focus on what the Lord is calling them to.”

“There isn’t a crisis of vocations, but there’s a conspiracy against vocations, especially for those who appreciate the Traditional Latin Mass…there is an abundance of young men who love the beauty of the faith as it was before the Second Vatican Council…they’ve been suppressed by their bishops, by those at the Vatican, and by their local clergy, too, who seem to dismantle that vocation.”

Messages to the world’s bishops from the young adults who attended the conference We find the world and the culture in general in a spiralling decline. We observe around us the attacks on life, the attack on the integrity of the family, the attack on the freedom of conscience and at the same time we find the Church herself seemingly in confusion. A culture which has never more needed that the Church speaks strongly and clearly the Truth which is God’s gift to earth in Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet she gives the impression of trying to approach this culture, which is truly a culture of death. This, in my judgement, is really a diabolical situation.

Pope St John Paul II called for a new evangelisation throughout his pontificate and he was always very clear that the new evangelisation had to do not only with the world around, going out to the world to bring the Gospel, but that the Church had to be evangelised internally again, because the evils of secularism, the evils of relativism had entered into the Church herself.

We need to draw close to Him, to His truth, to get to his love in the sacraments and to live the life of the Church with the greatest possible integrity.

Because of the grave sins of certain leaders of the Church, it’s very difficult for us. It’s a scandal for us, but the only answer to it is our Lord Jesus Christ: His teaching, His sacraments, and His governance of our lives in the Church.

I simply want to encourage you in your love for the Church, and also encourage you to be sensitive to those who are suffering a great deal for this scandal and try to help them to understand that, notwithstanding the great confusion and division which has entered into the life of the Church, the Church remains the holy, mystical Body of Christ and we are the living branches of Christ who is the vine.

This is one of the great confusions today – the Church appears to show its love for sinful man by justifying his sin, by not being clear about the sin, and thus emptying the redemptive work of Christ of its meaning.

There is never any love that is not on the side of truth.

Our Blessed Mother will always instruct us in this way as she did with the wine stewards at Cana, she takes us always to Our Lord with her instructions: Do what He tells us and He tells you to take up each day the Cross with Him, the Cross of oblation of ourselves in pure and selfless love.

Raymond Cardinal Burke The Universal Vocation: Holiness of Life

INTERVIEW WITH DR PETER KWASNIEWSKI

BEAUTY:God’s messenger

DR PETER KWASNIEWSKI Peter Kwasniewski holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Thomas Aquinas College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America. After teaching at the International Theological Institute in Austria and for the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austrian Programme, he joined the founding team of Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming, where he taught theology, philosophy, music, and art history, and directed the choir and schola. He is now a full-time author, speaker, editor, publisher, and composer.

Dr Kwasniewski has published seven books, including Sacred Choral Works (Corpus Christi Watershed, 2014); Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (Angelico, 2014); Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Angelico, 2017); A Reader in Catholic Social Teaching (Cluny, 2017); and Tradition and Sanity (Angelico, 2018).

Kwasniewski is a scholar of The Aquinas Institute in Green Bay, which is publishing the Opera Omnia of the Angelic Doctor, a Fellow of the Albertus Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies, and a Senior Fellow of the St. Paul Center. He has published over 750 articles on Thomistic thought, sacramental and liturgical theology, the history and aesthetics of music, and the social doctrine of the Church.

CALX MARIAE: Throughout history, the Church has sought out beautiful music, art, architecture and the finest craftsmanship. Why do these things play a crucial role in Catholic spirituality and formation?

PETER KWASNIEWSKI: The reason is simple: we were made by God as creatures of flesh and blood. We learn through our senses. When God revealed the Law to Moses, He made use of a lofty mountain, lightning, thunder, dark clouds, blood, and stone tablets. When He commanded the building of the tabernacle, He showed the pattern of it in fine detail, demanding the most expensive materials. When God spoke to Elijah, He first made a lot of noise, and then revealed Himself in a “soft, small voice”. When Our Lord wished to give Himself most intimately to His disciples, He used bread and wine, in the midst of a highly structured religious ritual. We can think of thousands of examples from divine revelation of “theophanies”, that is, the manifestation of God in various signs and figures. The Jewish liturgy in temple and synagogue continued this pattern, and obviously Christian liturgy did as well, moved above all by the miracle of the Son of God Himself taking on flesh and blood. The Catholic Faith, with the power of the Incarnation behind it, developed the richest and most beautiful culture the world has ever known – but all in the service of pointing beyond itself, to God.

CM: What is the purpose of beauty? Is it in any way practical or functional?

PK: Beauty is God’s first, last, and most effective messenger. We learn that the world is good and orderly because of the beauty of nature, which we only later come to understand intellectually. And just as we come to know God through His divine artistry, we see the inner beauty of the human person most of all in the great works of human art. A painter like Rembrandt helps us to see the immense, almost heartbreaking beauty of an old man or old woman’s face, which we might otherwise rush past or even find ugly. Christ Himself is “the fairest of the sons of men”, as Scripture says, but He allowed Himself to become “a man of sorrows”, marred beyond belief, to tell us something unforgettable about the invisible Beauty of love, of sacrifice for love. The Church therefore cannot and must not flee from her role of introducing mankind to this immortal Lover, both in the beauties that appeal to our senses, and in the deeper mystery that no sense can reach.

CM: What specifically is the role of beauty in the formation of children and young people?

PK: The first thing a baby notices in the world is his mother’s face, which establishes a first and permanent vision of beauty – not necessarily as the world sees it, but because love discloses the truth. As a child grows in the family, his parents have the serious obligation to train him or her in a love of the beautiful by reading good stories, memorising poetry, putting up good artwork, making art together, and attending liturgy that is outwardly very beautiful, if at all possible. All these things are part of a subtle and pervasive education of taste, sensibility, instinct, and intuition. When we are brought up with beauty, we have a sense of propriety, respect, nobility, dignity. These things are proto-religious or para-religious attitudes that heavily influence the course of one’s life. Without them, we are much more vulnerable to the winds of false doctrine and shoddy excuses.

CM: How would you explain to someone what exactly culture is and what is Catholic culture?

PK: It is not easy to define culture. In a recent lecture I tried my hand at it: culture is “the shared ways in which a society or people is accustomed to expressing, celebrating, and inculcating its vision of reality”. Maybe that’s too broad. Culture is always concerned with the concrete expression of ideas and values. How we eat our food, what we drink and when and why, how we dress and speak, what our buildings and vehicles look like, all this is culture, and does, in fact, express a worldview (or perhaps an eclectic mingling of worldviews). In Europe above all, Catholics developed an extremely rich culture in which even the littlest objects of daily use were decorated beautifully and often with explicit reference to the doctrines of the Faith. In this way, there was a continuum from the cup at home to the chalice on the altar, from the dinner bell to the cathedral bell, from the tablecloth to the houseling cloth. The images of Our Lady and the saints presided over everything –our familiar companions in this world, but as a reminder that “we have here no abiding city: we seek one that is to come”. A Catholic culture, then, is what a society inspired by the Faith will produce and cherish: an environment that turns the mind to God gently and frequently, making full use of the high beauties of fine art and the rugged genius of folk art, the impressive pageantry of ceremonial and the stabilising force of rituals. The result is

a joyful impregnation of the whole of life with the immense reality of God, too great to be limited to any domain or any one expression.

CM: Should there be an overlap in liturgical and popular culture? If yes, in what form? If no, why not?

PK: I think, in fact, it has been a tragedy that high culture and popular culture have parted ways almost completely, and that the liturgy is no longer the driving force of culture, as it had been for well over a thousand years. Today’s “inculturation” is often cheap, random, and secular, because it is not guided by strong and clear thinking rooted in divine revelation and Church tradition. For example, people try to take contemporary pop music and bring it into the liturgy. This is a giant mistake, because this music is saturated with emotionalism, strongly associated with the liberal anti-culture and its sexual promiscuity. It does exactly the opposite of what church music is supposed to do: raise the mind up to God, purify the heart of disordered affection, discipline the body. Instead of assisting in our assimilation of the Word of God, it rather promotes the secularisation of religion. But it is possible to do inculturation well. The missionaries of Europe who came to the New World often incorporated external features of the evangelised cultures into music, devotions, and visual arts. For instance, Spanish missionaries in Mexico taught the natives how to compose in the style of Renaissance polyphony, but allowed or even encouraged the addition of native flutes and percussion. The result still sounds ecclesiastical, yet with a Central American flavor to it. (If you are interested in listening to some of it, just look up the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, or SAVAE.)

CM: What is our duty as the heirs of Catholic tradition? Do we need to reform, preserve, or recreate?

PK: This is an important question. Here is what Our Lord Himself teaches us in the parable of the prodigal son. What we do to, or with, our family inheritance shows what we think of our father and of our entire family. Now, no one can deny that things like Latin, Gregorian chant, and offering Mass ad orientem are central, constitutive, and characteristic treasures of our Catholic patrimony. The liturgical reform suppressed them or marginalised them, acting just like the prodigal son who squandered his family wealth on loose living and ended up impoverished and miserable. The only way out of this bad situation is what the parable shows: conversion, repentance, return, and reestablishment in the house of the father. The right attitude towards our inheritance is to protect it, preserve it, defend it, and make use of it to the greatest extent possible. To do this, we must know it, and the better we come to know it, the more we will love it. This love, in turn, will inspire new works of beauty in continuity with what has come before. That is the experience of every serious Catholic artist – architect, painter, iconographer, sculptor, composer, poet. Knowing our tradition, we imitate it, emulate it, develop it, and carry it forward into the 21st century. There is no need to seek originality. The only fully original person is God the Father, since He has no origin from anyone else; even the Son is not original, but originated; and the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. God Himself teaches us that the perfection of all persons after the Father consists in their derivation from another. The creature who tried to be wholly original was Lucifer, of whom Our Lord says that he is “the father of lies” because he “speaks from himself”. That’s where sheer originality will get you: into hell. And that, of course, is what we see in so many modern artists.

Incidentally, Martin Mosebach has made the observation that the notion of reform makes sense only if one takes the word itself seriously: it is a return to form, a re-forming of that which has lost good form. Reform doesn’t mean loosening up, wandering off, or blowing things up. It means more discipline, more attachment to good models, more self-control, more humility in the service of greatness. That’s the kind of reform that the Church always needs, not the “reform” we have gotten in the past half-century, which should more truthfully be called deformation.

CM: How would you describe your own discovery of Catholic tradition and what effect did it have on your formation and work?

PK: For me, the discovery of Gregorian chant was a huge revelation. I can’t say why I was so fascinated by it at the tender age of 17, but then again, the chant really is mesmerising and haunting in a way that no other music is. By listening to recordings of the Wiener Hofburgkapelle, I taught myself to read the neumes in an old Graduale Romanum that had been discarded by the Benedictine boys’ school I was attending at the time. I think my study of composition – being introduced to J. S. Bach’s chorales and trying to imitate them in my exercises—also played a role: there is something about this kind of discipline that helps the mind to perceive beauty not as something vague, fluffy, and sentimental, but as the result of labour, craft, rule.

Other important influences at the end of high school included the reading of Plato’s dialogues and Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. At the time, I felt that Plato, though a pagan, was really “one of us” – a sort of “closet Catholic” – and that to be educated meant to read Plato, and authors like him. All this made me want to go to a college where I could be steeped in the riches of Catholicism that I had begun to taste. That’s why I went to Thomas Aquinas College in California, where I could study the “Great Books”.

Attending TAC introduced me to a world of immense depth and beauty. This included the traditional Latin Mass, where all that is purest, loftiest, and loveliest in the Catholic Faith comes to roost. I think of that psalm verse: “Even the sparrow finds herself a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young: Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.” (Ps 83:4 [84:3]) The Mass truly was and must once again become the inspiring force of Catholic culture. Certainly for me and my family, it has been the place where we can make a spiritual home, and where we may bring up our young in the peace and fragrance of Christ.

CM: So much of modern culture is ugly, even grotesque, many people have a real hunger for what is beautiful and good. Can you suggest how we may satisfy this hunger? PK: I strongly believe, as I hinted earlier, that we need to surround ourselves with beauty. I don’t mean in a cluttered or kitschy way, but by suitable decorations, by investing if we can in works of art, by listening to really good music (and by this, I do not mean any particular period, but certainly not pop, rock, rap, techno, or any of that barbaric stuff, which is the musical equivalent of junk food or drugs), and by seeking to understand the greatest art that European and Catholic civilisation has bequeathed to us. I would recommend several practical steps.

First, find the most beautiful celebration of the liturgy you can, and go to it. If it’s in a beautiful church, even better! The liturgy is where most of the fine arts blossomed and where they are meant to be experienced: as offer-

ings to God, caught up in (and ideally assisting in) the ascending movement of prayer. The liturgy is not just the “source and summit” of the Christian life, it is also – or it has been and should once again be – the source and summit of Christian culture as well.

Second, think about the rooms you are living and working in, and how you might elevate them with prints, watercolors, engravings, etc. It takes time to find works of ‘original’ art, but in the meantime, or supplementally, a good quality giclée reproduction of a Fra Angelico or a Giotto, a Rembrandt or a Vermeer can make a big difference in the ambience, encouraging a more contemplative spirit. (I recommend The Catholic Art Company, which has a fine selection. They don’t sell junk, and they don’t support immoral causes.)

Third, pick a place in your home and make it the “prayer corner”, with icons or holy images, a candle, holy water, rosaries, flowers. This should be a place around which it is natural to gather for morning or evening prayers. (You can read more about this in David Clayton and Leila Lawler’s The Little Oratory: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying in the Home. Other beautiful customs can develop from this center point; see Mary Reed Newland’s We and Our Children: How to Make a Catholic Home.)

Fourth, acquire some good recordings of sacred and “classical” music, and take time to listen to them, to develop your ear and your soul. (At LifeSiteNews, I’ve written some pertinent articles: “What makes Gregorian chant uniquely itself – with recommended recordings” and “These new recordings of sacred music will transport you to the courts of the King”.)

Fifth, make time for ongoing education. I cannot recommend highly enough the lectures by art historian William Kloss available from The Great Courses: such eye-opening and fascinating explorations of the genius of the greatest artists, who have a special gift for seeing – and thus, for helping us to see – the luminous depths of reality. Obviously, if one can visit a good or great museum, one should do this on a fairly regular basis.

Sixth, at least once a year, go on pilgrimage. The pilgrim, too, gets to enjoy the sights and sounds of the journey and the destination, but he has a higher purpose than the mere tourist. Aesthetic experience becomes more meaningful when united to the love of God, the practice of religion, and the expression of devotion to a saint and to Our Lord Himself. This is what I loved, by the way, about attending the All Souls Pontifical Requiem Mass at St John Cantius in Chicago this past 2nd November: the choir and orchestra performed Mozart’s Requiem in its authentic liturgical context. Somehow, hearing it in the right place and at the right time made the music even better.

Seventh, if we have the means, or if we are in a position to influence people of means, we should try to patronise new works of art that are truly beautiful, and if intended for the Church, truly sacred also. I admire clergy and laity who, when a special occasion is coming in the future, commission a piece of music or a painting for the occasion. Obviously, as a composer myself, I recognise that if Catholics stop asking for and expecting good art for the Church, good artists will starve and disappear. The same can be said of supporting music programmes and the right kind of church restorations (often undoing the damage wrought by postconciliar iconoclasts).

CM: In your new book Tradition and Sanity you make a number of compelling arguments in favour of returning to the traditional liturgy – not for liturgical or aesthetic reasons alone, but also because the way we live the Sacrifice of the Mass lies at the heart of every aspect of our lives. Could you explain this a little?

PK: In keeping with what I was saying earlier about how a grateful son should approach his father’s house and his family patrimony, I would say that worshiping God with the Roman Catholic liturgy in the form in which it organically developed for a period of over 1,500 years is crucial to having (or, for many, to recovering) a stable identity, a profound spirituality, a sound doctrinal foundation, and a compass for the moral life – this, in addition to the obvious literary and artistic merits that the old liturgy has in itself and has inspired for so many centuries.

Given that Catholicism is inherently a religion of tradition, it should strike us as quite troubling that Catholics of today pray in a manner terribly different from, and even at odds with, how our ancestors prayed, including the vast majority of saints. Either they were wrong and we are the enlightened ones – or, rather more likely, we have gone off the rails in our quest for modernisation and need to get back on if we would reach our destination safely. Liturgy is not something that each age needs to redesign and recreate in its own image. On the contrary, the vicissitudes of history are to a large extent transcended in a still point, an immovable center, a pole star from which we can always take our bearings. You could apply to the Mass the Carthusian motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis,“the Cross is steady while the world is turning”. This, to my mind, is the reason why the old liturgy is winning so many “converts” today. The world is turning at a mad pace, careening out of control, and unfortunately, because of the conciliar prejudice for aggiornamento, the world has pulled the postconciliar liturgy in its wake, like a moon orbiting a planet. The classic Roman liturgy abides in its grandeur, and seems, perhaps not too surprisingly, more “relevant” to us today than something devised by a committee in the 1960s.

My book goes into all this, but also into the crisis in the papacy and in evangelisation, which I believe are linked with this tragic decision to “re-orient” Catholicism along new lines. This has led not to renewal but to accelerating deformation and irrelevance. Thanks be to God, we see a countermovement gaining strength across the world, and characterised by its opposition, point for point, to the official program. That will be the drama of the next decades: how this massive “civil war” inside the Church plays out under the hand of Divine Providence. For more information, article links, sacred music, and the home of Os Justi Press, please visit his personal website: www.peterkwasniewski.com

Falling in Eucharistic love

BY FR ARMAND DE MALLERAY, FSSP This talk was delivered at ‘Restoring all things in Christ’, a conference organised by the Lumen Fidei Institute and Catholic Voice in Limerick, Ireland on 24 Nov 2018.

Dear friends, why are we here? We are here because we believe that what our eyes see as bread in the hands of the priest at Holy Mass – is God. Or perhaps we have heard that such is the faith of the Church and even though we are not entirely sure, we are interested to know more about it. Holy Mother Church has always taught that the Holy Eucharist is the very heart and centre of our faith. So it is essential that we have a very clear idea about what we mean when we refer to the Holy Eucharist.

We know that it is one of the seven sacraments, instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ. But while the six other sacraments give us the graces from God, the Holy Eucharist makes truly present the God of graces.

In the Holy Eucharist – that is, God made man – Jesus Christ is really, truly, substantially present with His Body, His Precious Blood, His human Soul and His Divinity under the externals of bread and wine. This occurs by virtue of the Consecration formulas enacted by the priest acting in persona Christi when offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. And how can the priest do that? By virtue of the priestly character, an indelible spiritual mark imprinted in his soul through the hands of the bishop at his priestly ordination.

This is, in a nutshell, what the Church believes about the Holy Eucharist. And there are many consequences to that. One of them is that the true, real, substantial presence of the Lord Jesus in the Sacred Host will remain as long as the externals of the bread remain. So if a Host is kept in a tabernacle for, say, one month, the Lord is still there. If for two months – He is still there. Depending, of course, on the weather, the climate, the humidity, the Host may eventually become corrupt and when the Host ceases to be recognisable as bread (speaking of the externals), then the Real Presence ceases as well.

And what about all of us? When we receive Holy Communion, when we receive the Lord Jesus – really, truly, substantially present in the Host – how long does His presence remain then? The same rule applies. His presence will last for as long as the externals remain, and since our body takes about 15 minutes to digest the Host, so after about 15 minutes the Real Presence is not in us anymore. It does not mean that God is not within us spiritually if we are in a state of grace. He is with us and in us, but He is not in us in that supreme mode of presence which is unsurpassed in the Holy Eucharist.

The Holy Eucharist is the very centre of our faith. It is no secret that over the past decades, there has been an eclipse of faith with regard to the Holy Eucharist in the Catholic Church. Even though the truths I have just summarised are shared by, one would expect, every bishop, priest and member of the laity in this country or anywhere in the Church,

FR ARMAND DE MALLERAY, FSSP we must admit, that the words used, the gestures or the silences surrounding the handling of the Blessed Sacrament often do not seem to support this faith. The Eucharistic Presence is not expressed or surrounded with the reverence, love and discretion that should help us believe in it.

The problem with the Holy Eucharist, if I may say so, is that by definition we do not see Our Lord under the externals of bread. There have been Eucharistic miracles, of course, in Lanciano in Italy and in other places where, for various reasons, the celebrant or the people have actually seen flesh and blood. But ordinarily, at least in my experience, I do not see anything, but simply bread in my hands. And so, it requires an effort. It is difficult to believe that what we see as bread is God, literally! And that is why it is so important to surround the Blessed Sacrament with rites of reverence which will then be a sign for our souls, telling them “look, now the priest is genuflecting very slowly” or “only the priest is touching the Sanctissimum, because he has anointed hands” or “only this sacred vessel will be used, not a clay vessel” and so on. All these things together are for the glory of God, but also a service to the souls of the believers, because it shows us what great care is taken by Holy Mother Church, by our priests and the people to handle the Sanctissimum. This all facilitates faith in the reality of the presence of God.

Sadly, it also works the other way around. When, gradually, you take away the signs of reverence, you are making it more difficult for people to believe that it is not bread, but God.

The modern era is poisoned by a philosophical disease that one could call nominalism. Basically, it says that things do not exist in themselves. They do not have a reality, an essence in themselves. They are what you say they are. So for instance, MPs in parliament can vote, saying: ‘Well we think that such or such a thing is from now on what we say it is.’ And people will understand it as a new reality from then on. In fact, I am thinking of abortion, of course – we see laws against human personhood of little babies being subject to a vote. They were called human beings, and one morning MPs get together and say no, not anymore. From that moment – as a miracle – all these human persons in the womb cease to be persons and they become mere things. This is of course the arrogance and pride of the modern time that does not even admit obvious facts or reality.

However, what we see happening with regard to the pro-life question, sadly, also applies in the sacramental realm and this is, in a way, a variation of Protestantism. People – Christians and sadly even some Catholics – will look at the Host and say: “Well, for me, it is only a symbol of Jesus.”

We have become almost incapable in modern times to admit that things exist in themselves and that they have a nature, which God the Creator has given them. As rational human beings made after the image and likeness of God, we need to decipher the nature of the gifts that God has given to us – because they tell us in a limited way about God’s perfection.

Either the Eucharist is the Body of Christ or it is not. It has to be one or the other. There is no in-between. Everybody has to make up their minds. It is not a matter of opinion. The Lord Jesus Himself instituted the Sacrament to perpetuate His presence amongst us and, since that Sacrament occurs in the context of the Holy Mass, to make us partakers in the offering of the Divine Victim for our salvation. So, we have to be very serious and real about this. Do we believe that it is God made man, Jesus Christ, in the Blessed Sacrament, present in a sense as real and incarnate as I am before you – or are we perhaps unknowingly contaminated with a purely symbolic interpretation, thinking that it is bread loaded with the faith of the people? Or, that the Eucharist is the gathering of the people of God, and what we celebrate is our union in willing to share