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June 1, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In the secular world and in the Catholic Church today, there is, to be sure, plenty of cause for an attitude of negativity. The political trends are ranged against the divine law and the natural law, from which we are receding at warp speed; our shepherds are either asleep on the job, cavorting with wolves, or busy lycanthropizing themselves. I need not go on about the many particular problems that afflict us on all sides. The question always is what we are going to do with the negativity: Will we face it down or let it enter into us, take up residence in us, and dominate us? I can’t help thinking of Denethor in The Lord of the Rings, the steward who gazed into the Palantir and saw the inevitable defeat of the good (which was making a pathetic showing at best) and the irresistible triumph of Sauron — seeing, in short, just what the enemy wanted him to see, and despairing.

On Passion Saturday in the traditional Roman rite, the end of the Gospel reads: “Yet a little while the light is among you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness may not overtake you. He who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light. These things Jesus spoke, and He went away and hid Himself from them” (Jn 12:35–36).

These verses prompt one to think about how much darkness there is, and where the light is still to be found. Jesus speaks as if the light is available only for a certain time and will then be taken away. But He also implies that those who believe in the light become light themselves. And then He hid Himself.

For me, the Church isn’t primarily about the Church. It’s about union with Christ. In baptism I died and rose with Him; in the Eucharist I receive Him. For me, there is no other reason to belong to the Church except to guarantee life from the Life, light from the Light. The Church gives me access to Him by divine guarantee, and that’s why I’m a Catholic. I’m not a Catholic in order to have access to clergy or even to liturgies; I welcome the (good) clergy and the (good) liturgies because they lead me closer to Him, who is my life and my light.

The Church has been corrupt in her hierarchy in some other ages, too, but we survived those centuries, and periods of renewal followed, ignited by this or that reformer or reforming movement. Not everyone who lived during the dark times got to see the renewal that came later. Human beings generally don’t live long enough to see major changes from good to bad or bad to good, which tend to move at a glacial pace in comparison to a normal lifespan.

Unlike certain reassuring voices out there who think they are “putting things in perspective,” I don’t believe we are passing through just another crisis — and not the worst — among the many crises that the Church of God has had to face over twenty centuries of history. Quite the contrary: I believe we are looking at the historic nadir of the Catholic Church on earth, next to which the Arian crisis of the fourth century or the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth look fairly tame in comparison. Yet anyone living during the life of St. Athanasius of Alexandria could have placed a highly probable bet that Nicene orthodoxy was doomed and would disappear as a matter of course. The same is true now: There are those who are betting that the papacy has perished, or that there’s no chance of recovery; we are doomed. Tradition-loving orthodox Catholics are holding an impossible position; they are a trivial minority; they can be crushed in an instant by the gears of power. That is what our Catholic Denethors see in their internet Palantirs.

But why should we think Satan finally has God “stumped,” has Him backed into a corner from which there is no escape? Do we think so highly of Satan’s power — or so poorly of God’s?

At the end of the day, there are two alternatives: faith or nihilism. For the thinking man, it comes down to these two, and the only goal in life is to become a saint or to die trying.

The saints are madmen, but so are the atheists (e.g., Marx, Nietzsche, Derrida, Dawkins). I would rather cast my lot with the saints. Call it an updated Pascal’s Wager: I would rather take all my chances on the promise of eternal life with Christ than throw away the hope of it for the sake of the temporary and ultimately unsatisfying satisfaction of being a pessimist or skeptic who can look around at the world and say: “That’s right: it’s a gigantic, meaningless mess.” Or: “The Church is a gigantic, hopeless mess. It’s not what it claims to be. Either Christ lied, or He’s abandoned us.” Or: “Christianity is a gigantic system of guilt-driven repression and exploitation by which pastors profit at the expense of the sheep.”

Not long ago I read the biography of a Trappist abbot, Dom Gabriel Sortais, who lived from 1902 to 1963. He had a fiery temperament, was politically involved, was engaged to be married. Then he heard the call to monasticism, dropped everything, and became a Trappist (that is, a member of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance). So far, so good. But then, after his simple vows, he entered into a total darkness, where he could no longer think of God or religion without distaste. He kept making acts of faith. And after three years, the darkness vanished one fine day like clouds giving way to sun. He was shortly after elected abbot of the community at the age of 33, and took up that burden, which he didn’t want. He then entered a second darkness, this time of the virtue of hope. He could not believe that God loved him or wanted him to be in heaven; in fact, he believed that he was predestined to be damned, and nothing could shake this conviction. This darkness lasted much longer than the first, but he kept on with determination, praying simply out of love for God — as he said at the time, even if I’m a sinner and a castaway, God is still good and deserves my love, so I will give him all that I can. His fidelity and love throughout this time of interior misery won the day, and when this darkness was lifted at last, he emerged into a peace and confidence that nothing could ever shake again, in spite of terrific trials.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux suffered a similar dark night at the end of her life: She said “only someone who has passed through a tunnel like this could ever understand what I have gone through.” Other saints have spent years in the absence of any feeling or awareness of God. They kept praying and working as they had done before. The light did not fail them in the end; they became even more “sons of light,” and they went on to see the Light in person — but with this advantage: They had already been purified and needed no purgation. The saints we now revere as paragons of virtue knew massive interior crises while they were in this mortal life. They held on even when they couldn’t see through the fog or the darkness. That’s why they became saints (no one starts out there).

One could look at someone like that and say: “The saints are nuts. There’s no humanly good reason for them to keep believing, to keep hoping, to keep loving, when all is darkness, emptiness, meaninglessness.” And there’s something true about their reaction, for they are madmen. But the nihilists and atheists are madmen, too. In fact, all the most sane people are mad, because they can see that either God exists and therefore gives meaning to everything, including darkness, suffering, abuse, chaos — and this makes them become fools for Christ — or there is no God and life is a sheer absurdity from which the most consistent will liberate themselves by suicide (except that there is no such thing as consistency; any action would be equally pointless).

I have read searing accounts online of the hell through which certain Catholics have been put by abusive clergy. I would not dare give such a victim trite advice: “Chin up, man, it’s not so bad. Forgive and forget. Move on.” No, that would be a new form of cruelty. But if he stops believing or if he stops going to church, what will he find? A Christ beyond the visible Church? A God beyond organized religion? That’s been tried: It’s called Protestantism, which evolved into liberal Protestantism, which collapsed into liberalism plain and simple. No, we interact with God religiously, and we receive and adhere to Christ in and as a body, in and as His Body. We put our faith in Christ, not in the Church; the Church is the means, not the end — the opening, not the destination. We are saved by Him, and we will not be saved apart from Him. That is the basic faith of the Christian. Even in the worst of times, it has a lot to be said for it, especially because, while no one who walks the earth is perfect, there are good, holy, generous, and wise laity, religious, and clergy still in the Church, and there always will be. It is not all a wasteland.

Anyone who is trying to follow Christ will experience trials, just as He promised, and if Christians are serious enough about discipleship, or if they are in a position of leadership, they can be guaranteed to face massive interior crises. The question I have to ask myself — the question you have to ask of yourself — is this: Am I doing what I need to be doing in order to nourish my faith? I heard a priest once say in a homily: “Faith is a like a muscle: it grows stronger when you exercise it, and weaker when you don’t.”

At one point when I was in college, someone recommended to me that I read a bit from one of the Gospels every day, to get to know Christ better, to meet Him anew. It sounds way too easy and simplistic, but there’s much truth in this advice. Going back to what I said earlier, He is the reason I am doing all that I am doing — or at least I want it to be true that He is. And why? “No man has ever spoken like this man!” (Jn 7:46). He’s the only one in the human race, in human history, who seems to know reality through and through — mine, yours, everyone’s, everything’s. If He’s not the real deal, the one worth following, the one worth living and dying for, then nothing is, because nothing else holds a candle up to Him. Or rather, all the other good things are candles, and He is the Light itself from which they are ignited.

I find that reading from just about anywhere in Scripture, and especially praying the Divine Office, has a similar strengthening, focusing, and elevating effect. One comes into contact with the meaning of things, with the origin and end of reality, with the one who says: “I am who am.” The daily contact with God in prayer and spiritual reading does not cause problems to evaporate, burdens to lose weight, or evils to cease; rather, it gives us sight to see through them and past them, capacity to endure until we rest in Him, and a certainty that the world’s evils are finite, temporary, and conquerable. That holds for the evils in the Church, too.

We all need a lot of grace to persevere in a most unholy and unchristian age. Let us pray more than ever for an increase of faith in God, hope in His promises, and love for His goodness — kindled from the burning furnace of charity that is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

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Peter Kwasniewski, Thomistic theologian, liturgical scholar, and choral composer, is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College in California (B.A. Liberal Arts) and The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC (M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy). He taught at the International Theological Institute in Austria and the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austria Program, then helped establish Wyoming Catholic College in 2006. There he taught theology, philosophy, music, and art history and directed the choirs until leaving in 2018 to devote himself full-time to writing and lecturing.

Today he contributes regularly to many websites and publications, including New Liturgical Movement, OnePeterFive, LifeSiteNews, Rorate Caeli, The Remnant, and Catholic Family News, and has published thirteen books, including four on traditional Catholicism: Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis (Angelico, 2014, also available in Czech, Polish, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Belarusian), Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Angelico, 2017), Tradition and Sanity (Angelico, 2018), and Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass (Angelico, 2020). His work has been translated into at least eighteen languages.

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 a thousand articles on Thomistic thought, sacramental and liturgical theology, the history and aesthetics of music, and the social doctrine of the Church.

For news, information, article links, sacred music, and the home of Os Justi Press, visit his personal website, www.peterkwasniewski.com.