Blog Archives

Mondays with Father Muller ~ cont. . . . . . . . . .

10/26/2015

8. Show how the Catholic Church is apostolic.

We answer : The Catholic Church is apostolic, because her chief pastor, the pope, is the lawful successor of St. Peter, and the bishops are the lawful successors of the other apostles,from whom they have their doctrine, their orders, and their mission, through an unbroken succession of bishops.

The Catholic Church can show precisely how she obtained possession of the divine authority of the apostles. The Roman Pontiff, Pius IX, can name the two hundred and fifty-three popes who, without a break, handed down the authority of St. Peter, the head of the apostles, even to himself. He can tell the day and hour of his election and consecration, which are consigned to imperishable monuments. Every bishop of the Catholic Church can also show the authentic titles which prove the transmission of the apostolic authority from the pontiff, who founded his Church, down to himself, the validity of his ordination, and the legitimate character of his mission. Every priest receives his authority from his bishop. Thus there is not a break in those glorious lines of bishops, which each episcopal see, and above all sees, that of Peter, can show alike to friend and foe. Here nothing is arbitrary, nothing uncertain. The apostolic ministry is perpetuated, under the presidency of the head of the apostles, with the perpetual presence and assistance of Him who promised to be with his own, even to the end of the world. Thus the authority of the minister of our altars does not depend on the power of any temporal monarch, nor on the people ; it depends solely on the head and chief pastor in the apostolical hierarchy. What noble independence this ! It is the security of the faithful, and constitutes both the greatness of the Church, and the dignity of her pastors.

In the beginning of the thirteenth century the pope sent ambassadors to the famous Tartar monarch, Gengis Khan. The Tartars asked the ambassadors, "Who is the pope ? Is he not an old man at least five hundred years of age ?" They might have said twelve hundred, and they would have been right ; for, as Pius IX has said so truly, "Simon may die, but Peter lives forever" and Peter will live until time shall have ended its course. Pius IX is to us Peter, for each pontiff, as he comes, reigns upon Peter's throne, speaks with his voice, binds and looses with his hands, opens and closes the kingdom with the keys which Peter once took from the pierced hands of his divine Master ; and he will hold those keys of life and death till the number of the elect is filled, and the last of the redeemed enters his Father's house.

The Church taught and governed in our days by the pope and bishops, differs not in its essential character from the Church taught and governed by Peter and the apostles. Let us see how Peter exercises the authority conferred on him, and, through him, upon all his successors, by Jesus Christ. After the resurrection of our Saviour, who appeared to Peter first of all the apostles, he is the first to proclaim that resurrection to all the people, and he confirms the truth of his testimony by a miracle. ( Acts ii, 14 and, iii, 15.) After the ascension of our Lord, Peter assembled the apostles and some disciples in the upper chamber, and addressed them thus, "The Scripture must needs be fulfilled" which foretells the defection of Judas, and his place being taken by another. We, therefore, must choose one from among us, who has been a witness to the miracles and resurrection of the Son of God, to take his place. (Acts i, 16.) Is the Gospel to be preached to the Gentiles ? It is Peter to whom the solution of the
difficulty is revealed it is he who decides, "all holding their peace, and giving glory to God." (Acts iii, 18.) Peter first received the Gentiles into the Church ( Acts x ), after having been the first to introduce the Jews into her sacred fold. At a later period the question of circumcision and the ceremonies of the law came up. Peter at once rose up, and explained the common faith. All listened in silence. A decree was made in which the faith on this point was determined forever. Peter visited the Christians of Joppe, Lydda, Galilee, Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, etc. ( Acts ix.) Everywhere he founded new congregations of Christians, and visited them all in, his office of Supreme Pastor. From Jerusalem he went to Antioch, from Antioch to Rome, where he combated the heresy of Simon the Magician, and finally sealed his glorious apostleship by dying a martyr's death.

As the lawful successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the pope decides, without appeal, matters of faith and morals, convokes general councils, presides over and confirms them, founds churches, visits them in person, or by his delegates, appoints bishops, confirms them in the faith, and acts in all as the Supreme Head and Pastor of the Catholic Church. Peter took possession, for himself and his successors, of all the prerogatives and duties of the Sovereign Pontificate. Now let us see how the apostles exercise the authority conferred on them by Christ, From the Acts of the Apostles we learn that they teach and preach the Gospel, they baptize and impose hands, that is, give confirmation,- they found churches, and give them pastors ; they choose one to succeed Judas; in the Council of Jerusalem, they regulate whatever concerns faith and discipline, saying, "It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us" (Acts xv, 82) ; they resolve difficulties, and repress scandals that arise, and, if necessary, they excommunicate him who deserves to be cut off from the communion of the faithful, till he truly repents ; they command the Christians to avoid teachers who were not sent by Christ (Tit. iii, 10), and to receive their oral traditions as well as their written instructions (2 Thess. ii, 14); they clearly teach that the Church is founded upon the apostolic ministry (Eph. ii, 20) ; that Christ appointed apostles, pastors, doctors, in a word, a teaching and governing body, to accomplish the work of sanctifying the elect, that "we be not carried about with every wind of doctrine" (Eph. iv, 12-14); they also teach that the Holy Ghost has appointed bishops to rule the Church of God (Acts xx, 28) ; that the reading of holy Scripture "is profitable," to those especially who "teach and reprove others," yet that they contain difficult passages, "which the unlearned wrest" from their true meaning "to their own destruction." (2 Pet. iii, 16.) What is all this but precisely what the bishops of the Catholic Church practice today. They teach, decide on points of faith and morals, give confirmation, ordain priests; they govern, punish, excommunicate, grant indulgences, recommend the faithful not to become familiar with heretics; they assemble in council, to regulate in matters concerning faith, morals, and discipline ; and all this they do in the name of the Holy Ghost, who has promised them his assistance. They teach that the unwritten word of God is to be received with the same faith as the written ; and each bishop says, with the great apostle, that he is "appointed , by the Holy Spirit" to govern his Church.

Thus we see that the Church of Jesus Christ, as described by St. Luke, St. Paul, St. James, and the others, is precisely the same as the Church which is called one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

To be continued . . . . . . . . . . . . .

0 Comments

How Do Catholics Lose The Faith?

10/25/2015

0 Comments

1. By going to schools forbidden by the Church;
2. by the neglect of their religious duties;
3. by the reading of bad books;
4. by worldliness and a wicked life;
5. by intercourse with scoffers at religion;
6. by mixed marriages;
7. by becoming members of secret societies;
8. by pride and subtle reasoning on the mysteries of religion.

1. There are different causes which lead to apostasy from the faith—to infidelity. The most successful means ever employed by Satan to bring about gradually a universal falling-away from Christ and His religion, is the introduction of the present system of public, or state-school, education. This I have sufficiently shown in my book, “Public School Education.” In these schools no mention of God and religion is to be made. The best means to abolish religion is not to teach any. Children are to be brought up infidels. But there are some who assert that “there is no sectarian teaching in the public schools, and, consequently, a Catholic may send his children to them without exposing them to any danger.” Now, even supposing there really was no sectarian teaching in the common schools, even then a Catholic parent cannot send his children to such a school without exposing them to the greatest danger. Those who approve of the public school, because nothing sectarian is taught there, act like a certain husbandman who wished to transplant a fine young tree to a certain part of his garden. On examining the new place, however, he found that the ground was filled with poisonous ingredients, which would greatly endanger the life of the tree. He therefore transplanted the tree to a sandy hill, where there were, indeed, no poisonous ingredients, but where there was also no nourishment for the tree. Now, will anyone assert that the young tree was not in danger of perishing in this new place? And will anyone assert that the faith and soul of a child are not in danger of being ruined in those godless common schools? Even if Protestantism is not taught there, infidelity is taught and practiced there: and infidelity is even worse than Protestantism.

But is it really true that Protestantism is not taught in many of our public schools? This is unfortunately far from being the case. Napoleon I. introduced the public-school system into France, in order, as he honestly declared, “to possess the means of controlling political and moral opinions.” Puritans and Freemasons, in this country, have clearly the same end in view in upholding the present system of public schools.

In the early days of New England, and even of several of the other American States, the Puritans always used the public schools as a powerful means of spreading their peculiar doctrines. When they were stripped of this power by the liberal founders of American independence, they still struggled for many years to accomplish, by indirect means, the injustice which they dared not maintain openly. We all remember how the poor Catholic boys and girls of the public schools were harassed by colporteurs and proselytizers, who carried baskets filled, not with bread for the poor hungry children,–no, but with oily tracts, cunningly devised to weaken, or even destroy, the religious faith of those poor little ones. In some schools, even, Catholic children were urged and enticed to go to the sectarian Sunday schools; and pictures, cakes, and sweet meats were liberally promised, in order to induce them to go. Teachers were selected with special regard to their bitter hatred of the Catholic Church, and their zeal for “evangelical” propagandism. Some years ago, in New Orleans, when the school-board was composed of bigoted sectarians; many of them sectarian preachers, all the Catholic teachers, male and female, were turned out of the schools, merely because they were Catholics.

And even if Catholic children are not always expressly taught doctrines opposed to their religion, nevertheless the school-books which they use are, as I have said, frequently tainted with anti-Catholic prejudices and misrepresentations. Nothing can be more evident than the decidedly anti-Catholic spirit of English literature in all its departments. It has grown up, ever since England’s apostasy, in an anti-Catholic soil, in an anti-Catholic atmosphere, and from an anti-Catholic stem. It is essentially anti-Catholic, and tends, wherever it comes in contact with Catholic feelings and principles, to sully, infect, and utterly corrupt them. Sound knowledge, a sound head, strong faith, and great grace, all these combined may, indeed, preserve one whom the necessity of his position may lead into unCatholic schools; but no one will deny that this anti-Catholic literature must exercise a most baneful influence over all those who, without sufficient preparation from nature or grace, plunge into it, in the pursuit of amusement or knowledge. Protestant ideas will not make the Catholic turn Protestant, there is not much danger of that, but they will tend to make him an infidel; they will destroy his principles without putting others in their place; they will relax and deaden the whole spiritual man.

In these schools Catholic children are taught that the Catholic Church is the nursery of ignorance and vice; they are taught that all the knowledge, civilization, and virtue which the world now possesses, are the offspring of the so-called “Reformation.” They learn nothing of the true history of Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Ireland, Austria, and the other Catholic countries of Europe; they learn nothing of the true history of Mexico, and the various Catholic countries of North and South America. They never hear of the vast libraries of Catholic learning, the rich endowments of Catholic education, all over the world, for ages; they never hear of the countless universities, colleges, academies, and free schools established by the Catholic Church, and by Catholic governments, throughout Christendom. Where is the common-school book whose author has manly honesty enough to acknowledge that even the famous universities of Oxford and Cambridge were founded by Catholics, and plundered from their lawful possessors by an apostate government?

Moreover, Catholic children are often singled out by their school-companions, and sometimes even by their teachers, as objects of ridicule. Now, what is the result of all this training? The consequence is, that either the Catholic children become ashamed of their holy religion, and despise their parents, or, if they have the courage to hold out, their tender minds are subject to numberless petty annoyances: they must endure a species of martyrdom. This is no exaggeration: I have it from good authority. Practically speaking, the present common-school system is but a gigantic scheme for proselytism and infidelity.

Now, we intend that our children shall be taught to love and revere their holy Church. We wish to teach them that that Church has been, for over eighteen hundred years, the faithful guardian of that very Bible of which Protestants prate so loudly, and which they dishonor so much. We wish our children to learn that the Catholic Church has been, in all ages, the friend and supporter of true liberty; i.e., liberty united to order and justice. We wish them to know that the Catholic Church has ever been the jealous guardian of the sanctity of marriage; that she has always defended it against brutal lust and heathen divorce courts. We wish our children, in fine, to regard the Church as the only hope of society, the only salvation of their country, the only means of preserving intact all the blessings of freedom.

The public schools are not only seminaries of infidelity, they are, moreover, in many cases, hotbeds of immorality. In these schools every child is received, no matter how vicious or corrupt he or his parents may be. “One mangy sheep,” as the homely proverb says, “infects the whole flock.” So one corrupt child in a school is capable of corrupting and ruining all the others. And, in fact, where have our young people learned the shameful habit of self-abuse, and many other foul, unnatural crimes, that are bringing so many thousands to an early grave? Ask those unhappy victims, ask our physicians throughout the country, and they will tell you that, in almost every instance, it was from the evil companions with whom they associated in the common schools. Ah! you will see, only on the day of judgment, how many unnatural crimes have been taught and propagated, from generation to generation, in these very hotbeds of iniquity.

A certain friend of mine a man of great learning and experience wrote to me, one day, that he himself had been, in his youth, subjected to college-training; that, be it by nature or by grace, or both combined, he resisted and escaped. “But,” he adds, “from my observation and experience, I would say it did require a miracle for Catholic youth to escape the damnable effects of a non-Catholic education.” I have had opportunities, in this line, that many a priest has never had. I assert that a Catholic boy of tender years, and perhaps careless training, can be preserved from moral contamination, in public and mixed schools, by nothing less than a miracle. I will not chop logic with any one about it. It is a matter of fact. I therefore assert it as of ascertained result, that in most cases especially in those cases where there are enough of Catholics together to have a school of their own their frequenting a school without religion will land most of them in utter carelessness of their religion.

2. Many fall away from the faith because their parents neglected giving them any instruction in religion. There is a certain class of parents who have their children instructed in everything but their religion. There are other parents who allow their children to grow up in ignorance of everything except in the manner in which they may make some money. Now, when the time draws near for these children to make their first communion, their parents will take them to the priest to prepare them for this holy action in a week or two. Now, what can children learn in a couple of weeks? Certain it is that what they learn very seldom enters their hearts. Their hearts are not prepared for the Word of God; they are light-minded, and, in many cases, corrupted, and what they do learn is learned from constraint. No sooner are they free from constraint than they throw their religion overboard: they become the worst enemies of the Catholic Church. The young man who set fire to St. Augustine’s Church, in Philadelphia, Pa., was a Catholic, and he gloried in being able to burn his name out of the baptismal record. By a just punishment of God, these neglected Catholic children will become our persecutors. Thus is verified in these children what God says through the Prophet Isaias: “Therefore is my people led away captive because they had not knowledge.” (Isa. v, 13.)

There are others who do not wish to be instructed in their religious duties, in order that they may more easily dispense themselves from the obligation of complying with these duties. Now, it is this very class of men that easily give ear to the principles of infidelity, because these principles please their corrupt nature better than those of our holy religion. The class of these men is very numerous, and their number is on the increase every day. For, not having any religion themselves, nor wishing to have any, what wonder if their children follow their example? Such as the tree is, such also will be the fruit. A few weeks ago, a Catholic lady of New York asked a little child: “How many Gods are there, and who made you?” The child could not answer these questions. So the Catholic lady said to the child: “Say, ‘There is but one God;’ say, ‘God made me.'” When the mother of the child heard this she flew into a passion, and said: “My child shall never learn such a thing: God has nothing to do with my child.” Behold how infidel mothers bring up their children!

There are others who gradually fall away from the faith and become infidels, because they neglect a most essential Christian duty, that of prayer. “The impious,” says David, “are corrupt, and they become abominable in their ways . . . They are all gone aside; they are unprofitable together: there is none that does good, no, not one . . . Destruction and unhappiness are in their ways.” “Now, the cause of all this wickedness,” continues David, “is because they have not called upon the Lord.” God is the light of our understanding, the strength of our will, and the life of our heart. Now, the more we neglect to pray to God, the more we shall experience darkness in our understanding, weakness in our will, and deadly coldness in our heart. Our passions, the temptations of the devil, and the allurements of the world, will draw us headlong from one abyss of wickedness to another, until we fall into the deepest of all, into infidelity, and indifference to all religion.

3. There is another special cause of the loss of faith: it is the reading of bad books. Bad books are, 1. idle, useless books which do no good, but distract the mind from what is good. 2. Many novels and romances which do not appear to be so bad, but often are bad. 3. Books which treat professedly of bad subjects. 4. Bad newspapers, journals, miscellanies, sensational magazines, weeklies, illustrated papers, medical works. 5. Superstitious books, books of fate, etc. 6. Protestant and infidel books and tracts.

There are certain idle, useless books, which, though not bad in themselves, are pernicious, because they cause the reader to lose the time which he might and ought to spend in occupations more beneficial to his soul. He who has spent much time in reading such books, and then goes to prayer, to Mass, and to holy communion, instead of thinking of God and of making acts of love and confidence, will be constantly troubled with distractions; for the representations of all the vanities he has read will be constantly present to his mind.

The mill grinds the corn which it receives. If the wheat be bad, how can the mill turn out good flour? How is it possible to think often of God, and offer to him frequent acts of love, of oblation, of petition, and the like, if the mind is constantly filled with the trash read in idle, useless books? In a letter to his disciple Eustochium, St. Jerome stated for her instruction that, in his solitude at Bethlehem, he was attached to, and frequently read, the works of Cicero, and that he felt a certain disgust for pious books, because their style was not polished. Almighty God, foreseeing the harm of this profane reading, and that, without the aid of holy books, the saint would never reach that height of sanctity for which he was destined, administered a remedy, very harsh, no doubt, but well calculated to make him alive to his fault. He sent a grievous sickness on him, which soon brought the solitary to the brink of the grave. As he was lying at the point of death, God called him in spirit before his tribunal. The saint, being there, heard the Judge ask him who he was. He answered unhesitatingly: “I am a Christian; I hold no other faith than thine, my Lord, my Judge.” “Thou liest,” said the Judge; “thou art a Ciceronian, for, where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also.” He then ordered him to be severely scourged. The servant of God shrieked with pain as he felt the blows, and begged for mercy, repeating with a loud voice, “Have mercy upon me, O Lord! have mercy upon me.” Meanwhile, they who stood round the throne of that angry Judge, falling on their faces before him, began to plead in behalf of the culprit, implored mercy for him, and promised in his name that his fault should be corrected. Then St. Jerome, who, smarting with pain from the hard strokes he had received, would gladly have promised much greater things, began to promise and to swear, with all the ardor of his soul, that never again would he open profane or worldly works, but that he would read pious, edifying books. As he uttered these words he returned to his senses, to the amazement of the bystanders, who had believed him to be already dead.

St. Jerome concludes the narration of this sad history with these words: “Let no one fancy that it was an idle dream, like to those which come to deceive our minds in the dead of night. I call to witness the dread tribunal before which I lay prostrate, that it was no dream, but a true representation of a real occurrence; for, when I returned to myself, I found my eyes swimming with tears, and my shoulders livid and bruised with those cruel blows.” He tells us, finally, that, after this warning, he devoted himself to the reading of pious books, with the same diligence and zeal that he had before bestowed upon the works of profane writers. It was thus that Almighty God induced him to that study of divine things which was so essential to his own progress in perfection, and destined to do so much good to the whole Christian world.

It is true that, in works like those of Cicero, we sometimes find useful sentiments; but the same St. Jerome wisely said, i