All hands brace for impact!
By Hilary White
Look, sometimes you just can’t save the ship. So you concentrate on saving everyone aboard that you can. You keep calm, you count heads and you man the lifeboats. Eventually you have to admit that you’ve done everything you could have done to prevent the disaster and now your job is to survive and help others to survive until the crash part is over.
We (or someone better qualified, thank God) are going to have to sort out the details later.
(And if you think this post was just an excuse to post a video of the Enterprise crashing… you’d be right.)
How do you think the Apostles felt on that night? That terrible, awful night when everything they believed was challenged to the utmost and they had no answers. The only thing they knew was that the man, Jesus, was not as other men, that He was Lord. He had told them what was going to happen and they had resisted and denied and struggled against it, but in the end they could do nothing but watch. There comes a point when you just have to admit that it is out of your hands, and that your duty is to do the task which is placed directly in front of you.
Fortunately that task has been made clear to us and isn’t difficult. It is, after all, the same task it has always been.
Right at this moment the world is not groaning but rejoicing to find itself Bergoglian. Maybe we need to groan on their behalf.
There’s no way I can top this advice:
_Saint Athanasius lived in the fourth century during the time of what used to be considered the greatest crisis of faith ever to befall the Catholic Church, the Arian Heresy… The vast majority of Churchmen fell into this heresy, so much so that Saint Jerome wrote of the period, “The whole world groaned and was amazed to find itself Arian”
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“May God console you! … What saddens you … is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith.
They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way …
“You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.
“Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ.”
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