The Sunday Sermon Archive

Dear Friend,

St. Thomas was wrong in refusing so obstinately to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, when only Mary Magdalen and the other women who had visited the grave, but also Peter, the other Apostles, and the two disciples who had returned from Emmaus, unanimously assured him that our Lord had appeared to them, and had spoken with them, had showed them marks of His wounds, and in their presence had eaten with them. God permitted this unbelief for our good; his lack of faith should strengthen our faith. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed."

Faith is a virtue infused by God into our souls, by which we believe without doubting all that God has revealed and that His Church proposes to us to be believed.

Faith is a firm conviction, a permanent adherence to the Christian truths. We cannot of ourselves, by study and inquiry, acquire faith, but only through the grace of God. God does not only send teachers to instruct us in the Faith, but He also enlightens our understanding, and works upon our wills, that we may acknowledge these truths and accept them.

We are bound to accept and believe all that God has revealed. All that God has said must be believed without any doubting. God is eternal, infallible truth, Who can neither deceive nor be deceived. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away." (Matt. 24: 35)

The question then, is how do we know that God has revealed a certain doctrine? We know this through the Catholic Church. It would be a very tragic situation if we were required to believe but we had no way of knowing if a particular teaching was revealed by God or not. This uncertainty would bring us to a doubtful faith, and divine faith can never be doubtful; it must be certain. Christ has appointed the Apostles and their successors, the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church, as His representatives, and has given them the commission to preach His doctrine to all nations to the end of time. (Matt. 28, 19) To enable them to fulfill this commission and always to preach pure and unadulterated doctrine, He promised and sent them the Holy Ghost, who would teach them all truth and abide with them until the consummation of the world. (John 14: 16-26) Therefore to believe the Church is to believe God. For the Church cannot propose anything for our belief but what God has revealed, she makes no new articles of faith, but preserves and delivers only those which have been entrusted to her by Christ. She is the mouth through which God speaks to us, and she can say with Christ: "My doctrine is not mine, but His that sent Me." (John 7: 16) Those who do not believe and accept as truth what the Church, the pillar and ground of truth, proposes to our belief, is an adversary of Christ, and causes his own damnation. Consider this well, and always pray with mouth and heart: "O my God, I firmly believe all the sacred truths which thy holy Catholic Church believes and teaches, because thou hast revealed them, who canst neither deceive nor be deceived."

Tragically there are many who once had the faith and have now lost it. History repeats itself. Those who were the children of Israel were given the faith, but when God came down from Heaven to strengthen and direct that faith, they turned against Him. So today, the majority of those who were chosen and given the gift of the true faith as members of the Catholic Church have turned against her and Christ. Like the unfaithful Israelites who pretended to continue in their belief, so too the Protestants and the modernist Novus Ordo. They pretend to believe in the same faith while they openly deny what has been given to them.

When those branches of the tree become old and useless either bearing no fruit or bad fruit, they are cut off. They lose that which is so important, the virtue of faith. The time has come for all those who would accept and keep the faith to stop looking to these dead branches for the fruit of the true faith. It is not there — they are dead. The Novus Ordo church along with all the Protestant sects is a dead branch that has been broken off.

We might make the words of St. Paul to the Romans our own: "Thou wilt say, then, `Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in.' True, but they were broken off because of unbelief, whereas thou by faith standest. Be not high-minded, but fear. For if God has not spared the natural branches, perhaps He may not spare thee either. See, then, the goodness and the severity of God: His severity towards those who have fallen, but the goodness of God towards thee if thou abidest in His goodness; otherwise thou also wilt be cut off." (Rom 11, 19-22)

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