By FR. JAMES ALTMAN
Dear family, this meditation is, as hopefully it always is, on Truth.
Friday night and Saturday morning of this past week, I had the privilege of being with the Troops of St. George, the Catholic answer to the insanity that has overwhelmed Scouting in America.
Sadly, confusion reigns in the Boy Scouts, and as I have said to you many times, confusion is not from God. Remember, Jesus would not have endured His Passion — the arrest, the trial, the mocking, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the climb to Calvary, the crucifixion — only to leave us confused about Truth. Clarity is from Heaven, confusion is from hell.
Well, here you have the confusion in the Boy Scouts summarized by an April 17, 2019 headline in Bloomberg Businessweek: “Boy Scouts Are Just Scouts Now, and That’s Making Girl Scouts Mad.” As the article reads, because the Boy Scouts changed their name to just “Scouts,” both sides were preparing to go to court over identity confusion. Some things you just cannot make up. But there was the article, quote:
“One evening in early February, in the back room of a small Lutheran church in Blacksburg, Va., seven girls joined the Boy Scouts. They stood in front of an American flag, wearing the same khaki shirts and bandanna neckties as the 19 boys there with them.”
By way of a healthy contrast, I was with the Troops of St. George — a genuinely Catholic group of fathers and sons — who, get this, also asked me to celebrate the Tridentine Rite — The Latin Mass — on Saturday morning. Friday night, and again after Holy Mass Saturday morning, I spent over three hours both times answering question after question all related to the Truth.
Unlike the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus — “What is truth?” — they were asking what do we do with all the confusion outside the Church in the secular world, but also inside the Church. What do we do with all the confusion that muddles Truth into nothing more than personal opinion?
In other words, what do we do with the moral relativism that has infected our society like the virulent cancer that it is? What are the parents supposed to do, in a secular sense, when the earthly temporal powers push them to vaccinate their families with an untested, unproven vaccine?
Dear family, God gave us all brains. Let us use them.
And the fathers of the Troops of St. George asked what are they to do in a Catholic sense when earthly shepherds act outside the unchangeable Truth handed down to us since Abraham — our father in faith — handed down to us since Moses, whom we heard in Sunday’s first reading — handed down to us in the Psalms we hear every day — handed down to us since Jesus in the Gospel?
These were faithful, loving husbands and fathers, put in a quandary largely because of bad and confusing leadership, sometimes Godless leadership, in the Church. So — so that we do not get confused, here is a short and simple meditation.
We hear these words from Psalm 95: “Come, let us bow down in worship; let us kneel before the Lord who made us. For He is our God, and we are the people he shepherds, the flock He guides.”
When we come to Holy Mass, we come to bow down in worship. We kneel before the Lord who made us because He is our God and we are His people, the flock He guides. How does He guide His flock? With Light. And Jesus told us He is the Light. Now, just as it was in Moses’ day, Almighty God provides His sheep with human shepherds who are called by God to shine the Light of Christ and lead His people along right paths.
If only that always were true — that shepherds would guide the people along the right paths. Yet we know going in that that isn’t true. It was not true in Moses’ day, which is why God told Moses to tell the people, quote: “But if a prophet presumes to speak in my name an oracle that I have not commanded him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, he shall die.” We cannot be surprised, then, when we encounter false prophets in our day. As it was in Moses’ day, so it is in ours. As I’ve said many times, if there was a “Judas” at Jesus’ table, then there will be Judases at ours.
So how do we discern the difference between true prophets and false prophets? Well, it is not that hard to do, but it does mean that we have to keep up on our faith daily. Ignorance of our faith leaves us vulnerable to the rat poison being fed to us by Judases. As you know, the reason a rat eats rat poison is that about 99 percent of what’s in that box tastes really, really good to the rat. The 1 percent of poison is mixed right in so the rat cannot tell the difference, gobbles it all down, and it kills him dead. So, too, is rat poison in our lives of Truth — our lives of faith. Fr. James Martin, SJ, for instance, with his “love is love” philosophy, introduces ambiguity into Catholic teachings that should be solidly, 100 percent based on truth.
The Face Of Jesus
With all this truth for our foundation today, let us examine the Truth as to mandatory masking. We know that God gave us eyes to see, and what we see are other of His children. We see them in their faces. We recognize them in their faces. We communicate the fullness of our human emotions in the fullness of our faces — faces made in the image and likeness of Almighty God Himself. After all, when Jesus came, He did not come as a T-Rex, because T-Rexes are not made in the image and likeness of God. We are.
Can you imagine if Jesus showed up in Galilee all masked up?! Do we think Peter and Andrew, James and John would have left behind their boats to follow a masked man? Listen, I’ve told priest friends of mine from around the country:
“Do not mask up in God’s Sanctuary. You are the father to your people. They need to see your face, now more than ever. You are supposed to be the Face of Jesus to them.”
In fact, just this morning I read through over 50 passages of Sacred Scripture that spoke about the Face of Almighty God. Some were on the premise that we are a people that longs to see His face. Some, though, were on what Almighty God does when the people turn away from faith in Him. It always ended in disaster.
So look at what we see all around us now. We are being pummeled with the anti-Christ now known as “science.” That heresy, that abomination is straight out of “The Enlightenment” when man turned inward, away from God and in pride thought man can solve all the answers with “science.” But just listen to Jeremiah and Ezekiel speak the word of God when God had had it with the faithlessness.
Jeremiah proclaimed: “Like an east wind I will scatter them before the enemy; I will show them my back, and not my Face in the day of their calamity” (Jer. 18:17).
And Ezekiel said: “I will also turn my Face from them, and they will profane my secret place; then robbers will enter and profane it” (Ezek. 7:22).
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