Until the beautiful feast of February 2, the Purification, we remain in Christmastide. The stunning good news the angels announced to the shepherds should be still ringing in our ears all this time: “Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will” (Luke 2:14).
The angels that heralded the birth of Jesus to the shepherds continue to announce it throughout all the ages in the Church’s liturgy, assigning to us what should be our top priorities: Glory to God and peace to men of good will. When the Divine Infant grew to full manhood, He put these priorities in His own words: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30-31).
While I do not hold that we are in the end times, it does appear we can say of the present something Our Lord said of those days (though perhaps not in so high a degree): “And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold” (Matt. 24:12).
I anticipate that this year of Our Lord 2024 will present us with many difficulties. The world situation — in both the spiritual society of the Church and the temporal society of the State — looks very bleak. In the Church, there is growing confusion, frustration, and scandal over Fiducia Supplicans (the DDF document approving blessings of adulterous and homosexual “couples”) and the ongoing implementation of the anti-Traditional Latin Mass document, Traditionis Custodes. The US is currently funding the wars of two horribly corrupt regimes that are destroying both Ukraine and Gaza respectively. The American military industrial complex and its “uniparty” supporters in Congress are, as usual, completely adverse to peace. These crimes, and the continued slaughter of our unborn in America, make me wonder when the punishing hand of God’s justice will be lowered on the United States.
Yet, we should not look at this bleakness as a cause of depression, discouragement, or anxiety, but, rather, as a challenge and an opportunity to grow in the love of God and love of neighbor.
Some rich passages I extracted from the writings of Hilaire Belloc, Orestes Brownson, and Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos fifteen years ago come to mind. All agreed that persecution was a good thing; or, rather, that the evil of persecution would be an important instrument in the righting of many wrongs and the strengthening and growth of the Church. Brownson and Father Seelos were explicitly considering the advantages of persecution in the ultimate triumph of the Church in the unfinished business of evangelizing America. (See The Right Stuff: On Barack Obama and the Conversion of America to read these passages; they would lengthen this piece too much.) But the supernatural point of view these great men expounded presumes that persecution will occasion a growth in virtue among the faithful — especially a growth in charity, which orders all our virtues.
Shortly after Grace Filipi’s review of Interior Freedom was published on our site, I began to read this little book by Père Jacques Philippe. I have read other works of his with profit, but this is my first read of Interior Freedom. While I have occasional arguments with the author along the way, I find I am profiting from the book. The following excerpt gives sage advice regarding how to deal with evil. After saying some extremely wise and enlightening things on the subject of forgiveness, he goes on:
“Badness isn’t all bad.” The bad behavior of those around us, which causes us suffering, offers certain benefits!
In our relations with other people we naturally seek that which we lack, and especially what we lacked in childhood. Other people’s imperfections, and the disappointments they cause us, oblige us to establish a relationship with them that is not limited to an unconscious search for satisfaction of our needs, but tends to become pure and disinterested, like God’s love: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Those imperfections also help us not to look to others for happiness, plenitude, and fulfillment we can find only in God. Thus they invite us to “take root” in God. Disappointment in a relationship with someone from whom we were expecting a lot (perhaps too much) can teach us to go deeper in prayer, in our relationship with God, and to look to him for that fullness, that peace and security, that only his infinite love can guarantee. Disappointments in relationships with other people oblige us to pass from “idolatrous” love to a love that is realistic, free, and happy. Romantic love will always be threatened with disappointments. Charity never is, because it “does not insist on its own way” or seek its own interest.
Other people’s offenses take nothing from us
One of the biggest obstacles to forgiving is the feeling that the other party’s behavior has deprived us of something important, even vital. This confused feeling nourishes resentment. The thing in question may be material, or affective or moral (not getting the love I had a right to, or the esteem, etc.), or even spiritual (the behavior of the person at the head of my community keeps my spiritual life from developing as it should…).
To live at peace, even when it is the people around us who are causing us suffering, we must take a fresh, radical look at our frustration. It does not correspond to reality. Other people’s faults do not deprive us of anything. We have no valid reason for resenting them or their actions.
On the material plane, of course, other people can deprive us of many things. But not of what is essential, the only true and lasting good: God’s love for us and the love we can have for him, with the inner growth it produces. Nobody can prevent us from believing in God, hoping in him, and loving him, everywhere and in all circumstances. Faith, hope, and love make human beings fully human. All else is secondary and relative; even if we are deprived of it, that is not an absolute evil. There is within us something indestructible that is guaranteed by God’s faithfulness and love. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Rather than wasting time and energy blaming others for what isn’t working out, or reproaching them for what we think they are depriving us of, we should strive to acquire spiritual autonomy by deepening our relationship with God, the one unfailing source of all good, and growing in faith, hope, and disinterested love. That others are sinners cannot prevent us from becoming saints. Nobody really deprives us of anything. At the end of our lives, when we come face to face with God, it would be childish to blame others for our lack of spiritual progress (pp. 70-72).
In the above excerpt, everything is as in the original, including italics and ellipses. I left nothing out and did not seek to emphasize anything the author did not emphasize. The big lesson is that we can always grow in faith, hope, and charity no matter what craziness happens around us. In fact, if our inner life is healthy, then all that craziness can contribute to our spiritual growth, our increase in merit. This is somewhat analogous to the explanation of human pathology called “Terrain Theory,” as one of our Sisters recently pointed out to me. (Yes, this is a can of worms. It seems to me that germ theory and terrain theory are both parts of the whole picture, and that a healthy organism can deal with pathogens the way an unhealthy organism cannot. It strikes me as strange that this common-sense observation is even remotely controversial.) The enemies of the Cross who occupy positions of power in Church and State cannot prevent us from being Catholics and saints if we put up no obstacles to God’s grace acting in us. As Père Philippe argues further on, “Harm does not come to us from external circumstances, but from how we react to them interiorly. … The harm that other people do to me never comes from them, it comes from me. Harm is only self-inflicted, the Fathers of the Church said long ago” (p. 76, emphasis in original).
We must never be indifferent to evil, and must do all we can to repel it, but as Father Philippe notes — invoking Rom. 12:21 without actually referencing it — “evil is only overcome by good.” If we let the “bad guys” arouse the worst in us as we seek to combat evil, they have won. Recent Church history provides us too many examples of those who very publicly engage in an epic battle against evil, but who fail and succumb to evil in a monstrous way. The remedy is found in the celebrated passage of a letter Saint John of the Cross wrote to Madre María de la Encarnación, a Discalced Carmelite in Segovia, on July 6, 1591: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will harvest love.”
Those who struggle to repel the myriad errors against faith in our day — including, but not limited to, the rampant indifferentism — need to recall those words, as well as Saint Paul’s admonition that, “if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2).
In Real Love is Ordered, I discussed the “vertical causality” whereby what is higher perfects the lower by giving it a more perfect form. This is how the theological virtue of charity perfects our faith, which is “dead faith” unless it is animated by charity. Real love is never contrary to faith or hope; in fact, it can only be built upon them as upon a necessary foundation. Yet, where charity is present in the soul, it vivifies and perfects the act of faith. Saint Paul said it best: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision: but faith that worketh by charity” (Gal. 5:6).
So important is this theological love that our wonderful patron, Saint Louis Marie de Montfort, considering the Marian apostles of the latter times, writes,
Nor shall they leave behind them, in the places where they have preached, anything but the gold of charity, which is the fulfillment of the whole law (Rom. 13:10). [True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, § 58, my emphasis]
Saint Vincent Pallotti, whose feast-day is on the the twenty-second of this month, gave a lovely Biblical motto to the institute he founded, the Society of the Catholic Apostolate: Caritas Christi urget nos (“the charity of Christ presseth us”; II Cor. 5:14). I borrowed it for the title of this Ad Rem. Maybe we can all adopt it as our own, if only for a year, and let Christ’s charity press us to love God and neighbor more and more in the midst of whatever this new year has in store for us.
Merry Christmas, and happy (and holy) new year!
