"A Grain of Mustard Seed"

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JMJ

Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field 

(Mt. 13.31, from the Gospel of the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany)

St. Jerome notes: "The man who sows is by most understood to be the Savior, Who sows the seed [the preaching of the Gospel] in the minds of believers; by others the man himself who sows in his field, that is in his own heart. Who indeed is he that soweth, but our mind and understanding, which receiving the grain of the preaching [of the Apostles and their historically traceable successors (Ac. 1.23-26)], and nurturing it by the [supernatural] dew of faith, makes it to spring up [becometh a tree, v.32] in the field of our own breast?"

But, "alas!" laments St. John Mary Vianney, the Cure d'Ars, "my dear brethren, what have we become ever since our conversion?" He continues, "Instead of always going forward and increasing in holiness what laziness and indifference...! God cannot endure this perpetual inconstancy with which we pass from virtue to vice and from vice to virtue... Is not this the very pattern of the way you live? Are your poor lives anything other than a succession of good deeds and bad deeds?.... How can this be unless the religion you have is unreal, a religion of habit, a religion of long-standing custom, and not a religion rooted in the heart? Carry on, my friend; you are only a waverer! Carry on, my poor man; in everything you do, you are just a hypocrite and nothing else! God has not the first place in your heart; that is reserved for the world, [the pleasures of the flesh], and the devil.... What do you find then so hard and so unpleasant in the service of God that it has repelled you so strangely and caused you to change over to the side of the world?"

Mortifications and abstinence from meat on Fridays. Modesty, chastity and continence. Silence of women in the Church (cf., 1 Cor. 14.34; 1 Tim. 3.11-12) and their heads veiled in churches (cf., 1 Cor. 11.5-15), no 'liberty of conscience', submission (cf., Rom. 13.1-2) without murmuring to the legitimate superiors in all things (except sin and things intrinsically evil and contrary to our Sacred Tradition) though their lives be leavened with the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees - The scribes and the Pharisees have sitten on the chair of Moses. All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works, do ye not; for they say, and do not (Mt. 23.2-3). And, Liturgy in a dead ancient language and a worship of the God Who condemns "MANY" sinners to everlasting misery of torments in the company of devils in hell!

".... If," says St. John Mary Vianney, "we were to put it more forcefully, because we are hypocrites who serve God just as long as everything is going according to our wishes [and conveniences]" so that "the result is... if you were to compare their intentions with those of pagans [praying before their idols], you would not find any difference." Therefore, in chastisement, God abandoned them to a religion of their whim, and in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God [sent] them the operation of error, to believe lying [a "pseudo-religion: something that resembles Catholicism but was not the real thing," cf., our post "The Year That Was 1929"] (2 Thess. 2.10): they would not completely renounce the Catholic religion and neither would they completely renounce the world, the flesh, the 'Rights of Man' of the 1789 Revolution, and the materialist emancipation of the Communist utopia - the Neo-Catholicism of Vatican II: a "New Ecclesial Reality" [Cardinal Hoyos in his justification for the Vatican's intervention to arrest what it perceived to be an increasing prevalence of the "spirit of dissent" in the seminaries of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP)] or a 'Catholic Church' that has finally come out of itself to dialogue with the 'City of Satan'. I know thy works, that thou hast the name of being alive [a 'Catholic' in 'full' communion with and 'loyalty' to the Pope]: and thou art dead (Apoc. 3.1).

"The Gospel preaching," explains St. Jerome, "is the least of all the systems of the schools; at first view it has not even the appearance of the truth: announcing a [God-Man], [the Author of life... killed, Ac. 3.15], and proclaiming the offence of the Cross [cf., our post "Our 'Great Reversal'"]." "Compare," continues the "Greatest Doctor" of the Church, "[these traditional Catholic doctrines and discipline] with the dogmas of the ['Enlightenment' free-thinkers, the 'liberal Catholics', and the 'Modernists'], with their works, the splendor of their eloquence, the polish of their style, and you will see how the seed of the Gospel is the least of all seeds."

"Ah, Dear Lord, what blindness!" laments the Cure d'Ars, "Oh, ugly sin of [religious harlotry] which leads souls to hell.... Unfortunately, such a large body of Christians do not know themselves and do not even try to know themselves. They... do not want to see reason. They are blind, and the move along in their blindness. If... [told] about the state they are in, they do not listen, and if they go through the pretense of listening, they will do nothing at all about what they are told." The Lord tells them to FLEE when they see the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not [Mk. 13.14; cf., our post "The Catholic Sanctuary... (II)"] but they would rather hear the religion of their convenience. "Yes," continues the Cure d'Ars, "we shall see at the Judgment that the largest section of Christians practiced a religion of whim or caprice only... and very few sought [the primacy of God, His rights and interests, the sovereign dominion of His kingdom - the true Catholic Church in the continuity of her historically "Apostolic, Constantinian, Gregorian, Tridentine" reality (cf., Professor R. Amerio, A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th Century) and orientation of restoration of everything in Christ and Him Crucified (1 Cor. 2.2) only through her - and to do more for Him according to the standard of the Crucified] in what they did.