By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
“Christ is risen, Alleluia!” “He is truly risen, Alleluia!” A truly joyful and holy Easter to you and yours on behalf of all of us at The Wanderer.
In the Easter season, we reaffirm the contact with the risen Lord that comes to us through our Church in both the sacraments and the word. Only the whole Christ saves us, and thus we must never separate any one element of truth in Him from the other. There is no grace of sacrament without acceptance also of Scripture and the Magisterium.
The voices and faces of the March for Our Lives movement created a parable for our experience in the Church.
The young people advocating the confiscation of guns do not account for the whole reality facing us. Without self-defense, we cannot guarantee the democracy which some teenagers place under assault while claiming to uphold the same. People using weapons to tragically take other lives can also use those same weapons to take away other things, like the way of life we claim to defend while insisting on removal of some means of self-defense.
Your choice to trust the government, or those the government chooses to provide with weapons, cannot be imposed upon others without at the same time taking away freedom itself. Anti-Second Amendment pol puppeteers are using kids to destroy the freedoms that go with and serve life. Those in the Church who join this movement do not have magisterial teaching on their side.
Guns do take lives, but not without cooperation from sick and wounded human beings who lost their own fight for authentic human freedom long before they, with homicidal or suicidal ideation, decided to pick up a weapon or other tool for violent purposes.
One young man has stood up to the false media-fueled onslaught. He is asking his peers to take a good hard look at the facts before joining the anti-gun movement.
In all of this there is a lesson for the Church in what “Catholic” is. Some can learn what this means from their parents, or from their parish, or from the Internet. None of these are possible, however, without the Tradition. Trying to take away the Tradition from the Church is like trying to take away guns from a group based on representative rule. In the Church the power of faith or sensus fidelium resides properly among the people, as deliberative votes do in a democracy, not the government or the state. In the Church the Tradition guarantees that the power of the faith is shared among the whole body, not solely with the hierarchy or the Pope.
There are young people in the Church also who are taking the role of prophet at our time of crisis. Two youths are speaking out about faith, some to support the whole, others to attack a part in mistaken error.
Robert Royal reported in The Catholic Thing on the presence of two kinds of young people recently gathered in Rome. One meeting was held in preparation for upcoming Vatican-sponsored Youth Synod and the other was hosted by Opus Dei. In them we hear the contrasting voices of these “Two Youths.”
One voice parrots the tired and very time-worn shibboleths about women’s ordination and roles in the Church, approval of sodomy, and Communion for adulterers.
Royal described the deliberations of this pre-Synod youth group: “helpful in some ways, predictably conflicted and heterodox in others, particularly in its occasional hopes that Church doctrine can somehow adapt itself — Scripture, tradition, the very words of Jesus notwithstanding — to current ways of life in stark contrast to historic Christianity.”
He pointed out that these are not the only things that youths are saying. Some are advocating for the Tradition. Or, at least in the case of the Opus Dei youth forum, they are friendly to doctrine and the Tradition.
A sense of alarm has arisen in the wake of Amoris Laetitia. Changing how we practice and administer the Holy Eucharist is in fact changing the truth we teach. What we do tells the world who we are: either witnesses for or against Jesus Christ, “The Way, the Truth and the Life.”
Royal described the two approaches to truth by the “two youths” in Rome as enabled by “two papacies”.
“Two papacies are operating here. In the Opus Dei event, there’s something like John Paul’s approach at the beginning of Veritatis Splendor, where he recalls the ‘rich young man’ in the Gospel who asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life. The answer, of course, is: leave everything and follow Him. The main effort is to work primarily with young people already engaged and to help them to become even more so — and only then to move outward to convince others.
“The second approach, Pope Francis’, takes it as basically a given that many have already walked away because they too don’t like what Jesus asks. But some because they may not have been asked yet, or understood properly. Or because of obstacles put in their way by the Church, which need to be removed.”
To the tune of which voice shall we march? The dissenters, young or old, we will always have with us. If our business is truth, why give a podium to anyone who opposes Catholic teaching? Royal reported that “the pre-Synod meeting assembled a heterogeneous group (serious young Catholics, confused young Catholics, nonbelievers, even some Muslims).”
Royal draws our attention to the disastrous effects that following these voices of dissent will have on the identity of the Church herself: “Here’s a further dilemma: can you benefit from the strength of the Faith if you also shy away from necessary judgments, not of persons, but of true and false, of things that demand a decision? Things that might restore family, parish, society, since there really are no substitutes for them? If the Church does not offer a strong guiding hand — if you want it to be there (like your parents) if you fail, but don’t want it actively giving you advice — what good will it be to those most at sea?”
Christ died and rose, commanding that we also “die” to this world in order to live for Him so as to reign with Him, forever. His Kingdom is “not of this world.” Will we unselfishly share this with all questioning young people?
We have thus a tale of two papacies, two youths and two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. Answering the question as to whether or not we are in the Church to save our souls, or for some other reason, can help us to decide which voices we will choose to hear.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever. Twitter: @MCITLFrAphorism
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