Saturday 8th February 2025

Home » Frontpage » Currently Reading:

The Eternal Purity Of Heaven

December 1, 2022 Frontpage No Comments

The Eternal Purity Of Heaven

By JAMES MONTI

God created man to be pure of heart; Adam and Eve came forth from the hand of God with pure hearts. And as they first gazed into each other’s eyes with love as the first husband and wife in human history, they did so with pure and chaste souls. It was their subsequent fall that changed everything; for no sooner had they disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit than the sight of each other no longer brought peace, for “they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).
This did not go unnoticed by Satan; he knew that he now had a mighty weapon for leading souls to Hell, the temptation to lust. Over the ages that followed, lust was to lead countless souls astray, and even entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah. Even a man as deeply devoted to God as King David succumbed to this sin for a time before being led to a profound and lasting repentance by the prophet Nathan.
The perfect purity of soul and body that Adam and Eve originally possessed before the Fall was a reflection of the perfect and infinite and eternal purity of God Himself. So when in the course of time God the Father sent His Son down from Heaven to redeem the world, God the Son was to bring with Him the remedy for man’s concupiscence by His Incarnation and death on the cross. One could say that when our Lord descended to Earth in the Incarnation He carried down to Earth the eternal purity of Heaven.
All the immediate circumstances surrounding the Incarnation proclaim the value that God places upon purity of heart. He chose to come in a totally unique manner as the Son of a perpetual Virgin, as a Son not only conceived virginally but also born virginally, coming forth from His Mother without the opening of her perpetually virginal womb, that enclosed garden forever sealed as having been the inviolate sanctuary of God Incarnate.
Our Lord was to grow to manhood within a home under the headship of the chaste guardian He had foreordained to be the celibate husband of Mary, St. Joseph, a man who had to have already consented to a life of perpetual continence in betrothing Mary even before the Incarnation; for how else could one explain why our Lady asked the Angel Gabriel, “How can this be. . . ?” (Luke 1:34), when he told her that she would conceive and bear a son?
And even though St. Joseph did not share in our Lady’s unique privilege of being conceived without original sin, we can be sure that by virtue of Mary’s incomparable and overwhelming purity and Joseph’s unique holiness and grace as the chosen spouse of such a woman, the two of them could look into each other’s eyes as husband and wife with that pure and chaste peace that Adam and Eve knew before their fall from grace.
A major dimension of our Lord’s Gospel message delivered during His public ministry was a Gospel message of chastity both within and outside marriage. Our Lord put to an end once and for all any talk among His followers of breaking one’s marriage vows to marry a different spouse when He proclaimed definitively the total indissolubility of marriage and condemned remarriage after divorce as adultery. He definitively condemned even looking upon a woman with lustful thoughts as morally tantamount to committing adultery. Our Lord gave so much preeminence to purity of heart that He enshrined it as one of the Beatitudes, promising the pure of heart that they would “see God” (Matt. 5:8). And He announced as an especially exalted calling the evangelical counsel of choosing a life of total celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
The first martyr of the New Covenant following the deaths of the Holy Innocents was a man put to death for calling a powerful king to account for his sin of incest. St. John the Baptist was willing to tell King Herod to his face that his life of lust was an abomination in the sight of God.
The Apostle St. Paul reiterated our Lord’s Gospel message of purity, describing marriage as nothing short of the living image of the union between Christ and His Church. He does not hesitate to call a spade a spade in condemning by name time and again the sins of the flesh and in warning of the consequences for those who refuse to repent of these perverse “lifestyles.”
Across the centuries, the annals of the saints are filled with those who have testified to the virtue of purity by their lives, even to the point of suffering martyrdom for it.
So from the beginning of time and up to the present, the battle between good and evil has been in large measure a battle also between purity and impurity. On this battlefield one can see particularly a face to face combat between Satan and the adversary that in a sense he hates and fears the most, the Blessed Virgin Mary. As we have mentioned in the past, the Devil finds it even more humiliating and galling to his Hell-swollen ego that God would send against him, the mighty angel whose tail can sweep a third of the stars from the sky (cf. Rev. 12:4), this humble girl from Nazareth who has the power to crush his head with her little foot. One can almost hear Satan snarling like the mighty giant Goliath who, when King David confronted him with nothing more than a slingshot, muttered, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (1 Samuel 17:43). I recently came across a wonderful illustration of this mystery of Satan being routed by Mary, a woodcut depicting our Lady placidly standing in her immaculate beauty as Satan is plunging headlong down into Hell, looking like a total imbecile. For although Satan by virtue of his angelic nature possesses angelic intelligence, he has proven himself to be an absolute fool in thinking he can fight God.
This brings us to current events unfolding within the Church right now. We are hearing certain high-ranking prelates calling upon the Church to engage in a collective act of “discernment” regarding a number of heretical and virtually heretical propositions in the run-up to the coming Synod on Synodality set for 2023-2024. That the “discernment” of these propositions is set within the foreordained and fore-announced context that the goal of this synod is to give the Church a radical makeover in the formulation of her teachings and in her very structure and governance tells us volumes.
His Eminence Gerhard Cardinal Mueller has prophetically warned us in a recent interview (The World Over with Raymond Arroyo, October 6, 2022, EWTN) that there is great danger of an attempted “hostile takeover” of the Church by those who want to abolish what the Church has always taught and what she has always condemned as intrinsically evil.
The reality is that there is no one on Earth who has the authority to abolish what the Ten Commandments teach and what Christ has definitely taught in the Gospels, what the apostles have definitely taught in their epistles, and what past councils and Roman Pontiffs have definitely taught. Nor will faithful Catholics be fooled into accepting any abolition of the Church’s definitive teachings masquerading under the false pretense of being just a new “development” of doctrine. True developments of doctrine have never declared what is evil to be good or what is good to be evil.
A number of these pre-Synod propositions constitute an attack upon holy purity, an attempt to declare various sins of the flesh to be compatible with living a faithful Catholic life. These propositions and other recent theological “trial balloons” that are being floated, ranging from validating the wicked “LGBTQ” agenda and approval of artificial contraception to legitimatizing remarriage after divorce and condoning “living together” outside marriage, are all nothing short of blatant and ugly repudiations of the virtue of purity. And this attack upon chastity extends to assailing the Church’s sacred tradition of priestly celibacy.

“Harsh Rules”

One of the principal strategies of those who want to give our Church and our faith this radical makeover is to undercut the meaning and validity of the scriptural passages regarding the sins of the flesh by claiming that the “historical Jesus” did not teach such “harsh rules,” that the Gospel passages in question were far more the work of human time-bound minds rather than the inspired word of God, and that therefore their interpretation can be refashioned to suit the tastes and preoccupations of our own times.
A maverick Protestant theologian by the name of Johann Salomon Semler (1725-1791) proposed precisely this “solution” to the hard sayings of the Gospel three centuries ago. Just a few decades after his death, a fellow Protestant of his astutely critiqued what Semler and his intellectual colleagues had been threatening to do to Christianity:
“The facts of Christianity are stripped of all that would raise them above the dead level of common and daily experience, while its doctrines are lowered down to the freezing temperature of heathen ethics. Its celestial sanctions are neutralized; its supernatural evidences are explained away; its heavenly influences and divine communions are treated as the mere excitements of credulity….All this is set forth with a great parade of criticism. . . .
“These partial inquirers . . . fail at the outset, insomuch as they take no account of the moral exigencies of human nature. The manifestations of the Divine glory, and the illustrations of the Divine character, as exhibited in the Gospel, do not adapt themselves to their critical canons; and instead of questioning the soundness of their own views, or the justness of their reasoning, they quietly take to pieces the whole evangelical system, that they may reconstruct it by their own hypothesis. . . . This, these self-complacent men willingly are ignorant of, that human nature is laboring under the oppression of moral disorder, and that the Bible, the word of God, contains the only authentic definition of the malady and its cure” (Review of The Ecclesiastical History of the Second and Third Centuries, by John, Bishop of Bristol, in The Eclectic Review, volume 26, n.s., November 1826, pp. 433-434).
In coming to us as an Infant, as a real Baby, and in teaching us that we can only enter the Kingdom of God by becoming like children, our Lord is in this way also proclaiming the Gospel of purity, summoning us to live chastely in heart, mind and body. Purity is a foretaste of the fragrance and beauty of Heaven. In this Advent season, may holy purity bring true peace to all our Catholic homes!

Share Button

2019 The Wanderer Printing Co.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE? An Open Letter to My Brother Bishops (and to the lay faithful!)

You gather here today, present-day apostles, as the Church and, therefore, the world stand perched on the edge of a cliff. And yet you who are entrusted with the keeping of souls choose to speak not a word of the…Continue Reading

Former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards Dies Of Brain Cancer At 67

(LifeSiteNews) — Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards died Monday of brain cancer at age 67, leaving behind the largest abortion chain in the nation.  “This morning our beloved Cecile passed away at home, surrounded by her family and her…Continue Reading

Vatican and USCCB leave transgender policy texts unpublished

While U.S. bishops have made headlines for releasing policies addressing gender identity and pastoral ministry, guidelines on the subject have been drafted but not published by both the U.S. bishops’ conference and the Vatican’s doctrinal office, leaving diocesan bishops to…Continue Reading

Biden says Pope Francis told him to continue receiving communion, amid scrutiny over pro-abortion policies

President Biden said that Pope Francis, during their meeting Friday in Vatican City, told him that he should continue to receive communion, amid heightened scrutiny of the Catholic president’s pro-abortion policies.  The president, following the approximately 90-minute-long meeting, a key…Continue Reading

Federal judge rules in favor of Gov. DeSantis’ mask mandate ban

MIAMI (LifeSiteNews) – A federal judge this week handed Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis another legal victory on his mask mandate ban for schools. On Wednesday, Judge K. Michael Moore of the Southern District of Florida denied a petition from…Continue Reading

The Eucharist should not be received unworthily, says Nigerian cardinal

Priests have a duty to remind Catholics not to receive the Eucharist in a state of serious sin and to make confession easily available, a Nigerian cardinal said at the International Eucharistic Congress on Thursday. “It is still the doctrine…Continue Reading

Donald Trump takes a swipe at Catholics and Jews who did not vote for him

Donald Trump complained about Catholics and Jews who did not vote for him in 2020. The former president made the comments in a conference call featuring religious leaders. The move could be seen to shore up his religious conservative base…Continue Reading

Y Gov. Kathy Hochul Admits Andrew Cuomo Covered Up COVID Deaths, 12,000 More Died Than Reported

When it comes to protecting people from COVID, Andrew Cuomo is already the worst governor in America. New York has the second highest death rate per capita, in part because he signed an executive order putting COVID patients in nursing…Continue Reading

Prayers For Cardinal Burke . . . U.S. Cardinal Burke says he has tested positive for COVID-19

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke said he has tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. In an Aug. 10 tweet, he wrote: “Praised be Jesus Christ! I wish to inform you that I have recently…Continue Reading

Democrats Block Amendment Banning Late-Term Abortions, Stopping Abortions Up to Birth

Senate Democrats have blocked an amendment that would ban abortions on babies older than 20 weeks. During consideration of the multi-trillion spending package, pro-life Louisiana Senator John Kennedy filed an amendment to ban late-term abortions, but Democrats steadfastly support killing…Continue Reading

Transgender student wins as U.S. Supreme Court rebuffs bathroom appeal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to a transgender former public high school student who waged a six-year legal battle against a Virginia county school board that had barred him from using the bathroom corresponding…Continue Reading

New York priest accused by security guard of assault confirms charges have now been dropped

NEW YORK, June 17, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A New York priest has made his first public statement regarding the dismissal of charges against him.  Today Father George W. Rutler reached out to LifeSiteNews and other media today with the following…Continue Reading

Untitled 5 Untitled 2

Attention Readers:

  Welcome to our website. Readers who are familiar with The Wanderer know we have been providing Catholic news and orthodox commentary for 150 years in our weekly print edition.


  Our daily version offers only some of what we publish weekly in print. To take advantage of everything The Wanderer publishes, we encourage you to su
bscribe to our flagship weekly print edition, which is mailed every Friday or, if you want to view it in its entirety online, you can subscribe to the E-edition, which is a replica of the print edition.
 
  Our daily edition includes: a selection of material from recent issues of our print edition, news stories updated daily from renowned news sources, access to archives from The Wanderer from the past 10 years, available at a minimum charge (this will be expanded as time goes on). Also: regularly updated features where we go back in time and highlight various columns and news items covered in The Wanderer over the past 150 years. And: a comments section in which your remarks are encouraged, both good and bad, including suggestions.
 
  We encourage you to become a daily visitor to our site. If you appreciate our site, tell your friends. As Catholics we must band together to rediscover our faith and share it with the world if we are to effectively counter a society whose moral culture seems to have no boundaries and a government whose rapidly extending reach threatens to extinguish the rights of people of faith to practice their religion (witness the HHS mandate). Now more than ever, vehicles like The Wanderer are needed for clarification and guidance on the issues of the day.

Catholic, conservative, orthodox, and loyal to the Magisterium have been this journal’s hallmarks for five generations. God willing, our message will continue well into this century and beyond.

Joseph Matt
President, The Wanderer Printing Co.

Untitled 1

Catechism

Today . . .

The Brew: President Trump Keeps Flooding the Zone with Sane Policies That Expose Sick, Squalid Secrets

No, it’s not manna from Heaven or multiplied loaves and fishes, because Caesar isn’t Jesus. We don’t look to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or any mere human being to save us from our sins; Jesus already did that. But we can and should demand that the men who wield the secular sword aren’t sticking it in our backs or using it to abort babies and sexually mutilate children. Some people say that asking for that…Continue Reading

Trump Defunds International Planned Parenthood

President Donald Trump added to his excellent pro-life record today by reversing Joe Biden’s policy forcing Americans to fund International Planned Parenthood. While on Air Force One today, President Trump signed crucial pro-life executive orders which pro-life advocates have strongly prioritized and advocated for. During his first week in office last term, Trump signed the Mexico City policy in one of his first acts as president. The pro-life policy prohibits American tax dollars to groups that promote…Continue Reading

Pope Francis appoints Austin, Texas, Bishop Joe Vásquez as archbishop of Galveston-Houston

Vatican City, Jan 20, 2025 / 08:00 am In an important move for the Catholic Church in Texas on Monday, Pope Francis named Austin Bishop Joe Vásquez to replace 75-year-old Cardinal Daniel DiNardo as head of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. DiNardo, who was made a cardinal in 2007 and who led the U.S. bishops’ conference as president from 2016–2019, turned 75 — the standard retirement age for Catholic bishops — in May 2024. The 67-year-old…Continue Reading

Trump CDC Nominee Dave Weldon Protected Pro-Life Doctors From Being Forced to Do Abortions

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the reason the government doesn’t give money to entities that discriminate against pro-life health care providers. In 2005, then-Rep. David Weldon, R-Fla., first proposed the Weldon Amendment, which prohibits Department of Health and Human Services funds from going to entities that discriminate against providers that don’t pay for, provide, cover, or refer for abortions. The amendment has been readopted in every HHS…Continue Reading

Donald Trump elected president in decisive win over Kamala Harris

(LifeSiteNews) — Republican former President Donald Trump has won this year’s election to become the 47th president of the United States, defeating Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Fox News called the 2024 presidential race for Trump around 1:50 a.m. EST on Wednesday after declaring him the winner of swing states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Associated Press has since called the election for Trump.

The King of Kings

Cindy Paslawski We are at the end of the Church year. We began with Advent a year ago, commemorating the time awaiting the coming of the Christ and we are ending these weeks later with a vision of the future, a vision of Christ the King of the Universe on His throne before us all.…Continue Reading

7,000 Pro-Lifers March In London

By STEVEN ERTELT LONDON (LifeNews) — Over the weekend, some seven thousand pro-life people in the UK participated in the March for Life in London to protest abortion.They marched to Parliament Square on Saturday, September 2 under the banner of “Freedom to Live” and had to deal with a handful of radical abortion activists.During the…Continue Reading

An Appeal For Prayer For The Armenian People

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke on August 29, 2023, issued this prayer for the Armenian people, noting their unceasing love for Christ, even in the face of persecution.) + + On the Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, having a few days ago celebrated the…Continue Reading

Robert Hickson, Founding Member Of Christendom College, Dies At 80

By MAIKE HICKSON FRONT ROYAL, Va. (LifeSiteNews) — Robert David Hickson, Jr., of Front Royal, Va., died at his home on September 2, 2023, at 21:29 p.m. after several months of suffering and after having received the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. He was surrounded by friends and family.Robert is survived by me —…Continue Reading

The Real Hero Of “Sound of Freedom”… Says The Film Has Strengthened The Fight Against Child Trafficking

By ANA PAULA MORALES (CNA) —Tim Ballard, a former U.S. Homeland Security agent who risked his life to fight child trafficking, discussed the impact of the movie Sound of Freedom, which is based on his work, in an August 29 interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. “I’ve spent more than 20 years helping…Continue Reading

Advertisement

Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

Catholic Replies

Editor’s Note: This lesson on medical-moral issues is taken from the book Catholicism & Ethics. Please feel free to use the series for high schoolers or adults. We will continue to welcome your questions for the column as well. The email and postal addresses are given at the end of this column. Special Course On Catholicism And Ethics (Pages 53-59)…Continue Reading

Color Politics An Impediment To Faith

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK The USCCB is rightly concerned about racism, as they should be about any sin. In the 2018 statement Open Wide Our Hearts, they affirm the dignity of every human person: “But racism still profoundly affects our culture, and it has no place in the Christian heart. This evil causes great harm to its victims, and…Continue Reading

Trademarks Of The True Messiah

By MSGR. CHARLES POPE (Editor’s Note: Msgr. Charles Pope posted this essay on September 2, and it is reprinted here with permission.) + + In Sunday’s Gospel the Lord firmly sets before us the need for the cross, not as an end in itself, but as the way to glory. Let’s consider the Gospel in three stages.First: The Pattern That…Continue Reading

A Beacon Of Light… The Holy Cross And Jesus’ Unconditional Love

By FR. RICHARD D. BRETON Each year on September 14 the Church celebrates the Feast Day of the Exultation of the Holy Cross. The Feast Day of the Triumph of the Holy Cross commemorates the day St. Helen found the True Cross. It is fitting then, that today we should focus on the final moments of Jesus’ life on the…Continue Reading

Our Ways Must Become More Like God’s Ways

By FR. ROBERT ALTIER Twenty-Fifth Sunday In Ordinary Time (YR A) Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9Phil. 1:20c-24, 27aMatt. 20:1-16a In the first reading today, God tells us through the Prophet Isaiah that His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially when we look at what the Lord…Continue Reading

The Devil And The Democrats

By FR. DENIS WILDE, OSA States such as Minnesota, California, Maryland, and others, in all cases with Democrat-controlled legislatures, are on a fast track to not only allow unborn babies to be murdered on demand as a woman’s “constitutional right” but also to allow infanticide.Our nation has gotten so used to the moral evil of killing in the womb that…Continue Reading

Crushed But Unbroken . . . The Martyrdom Of St. Margaret Clitherow

By RAY CAVANAUGH The late-1500s were a tough time for Catholics in England, where the Reformation was in full gear. A 1581 law prohibited Catholic religious ceremonies. And a 1584 Act of Parliament mandated that all Catholic priests leave the country or else face execution. Some chose to remain, however, so they could continue serving the faithful.Also taking huge risks…Continue Reading

Advertisement(2)