Penance
Must Increase
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Seputagesima
Sunday came early this year, occurring a week ago today. The season
introduced by Septuagesima Sunday is given us by the Tradition of Holy
Mother Church to prepare us for the rigors of the forty days of Lent,
which will begin in earnest on Ash Wednesday, February 9, 2005. The
sloth that is part of fallen human nature inclines us to be "good
to ourselves," to eschew penance and self-denial even though we
know that our own sanctification depends upon making prayer, penance
and self-denial essential parts of our daily lives. We tend to postpone
the sacrificing of legitimate pleasures and the embracing with serenity
of all of the crosses, both petty and demanding, until we are absolutely
forced to consider doing some kind of penance for Lent.
In her wisdom,
therefore, the Church has traditionally given us a period of sixteen
days before Ash Wednesday to help us focus our attention on the necessity
of embracing the Cross with every beat of our hearts. As we have been
taught in recent centuries, starting with Saint Louis de Montfort, we
should be offering up all of our daily penances to Our Lady's Sorrowful
and Immaculate Heart as her consecrated slaves. This very day, Sexagesima
Sunday, occurs exactly eight weeks before Easter Sunday, which will
occur this year on March 27, 2005 (which is also our daughter's third
birthday). There is yet one more Sunday of preparation, Quinquagesima
Sunday, to help us be ready for the solemn season of reparation, Quadregesima,
the forty days of Lent. Penance must increase with each passing day.
Ash Wednesday will be here in the blink of an eye.
The liturgical
calendar is such this particular year that the season of Septuagesima
impinges on the joy of the Christmas season, which does not end until
the Feast of the Purification of Our Lady, February 2, 2005. An early
Easter means, obviously, that Septuagesima will begin shortly after
Christmas Day itself. This is eminently appropriate if one considers
the simple fact that Our Lord became Incarnate in Our Lady's virginal
and immaculate womb and was born in utter poverty in Bethlehem so as
to pay back in His Sacred Humanity the blood debt of our sins on the
wood of the Holy Cross. The shadow of the Cross hung over Bethlehem
at the first Christmas. It is thus quite appropriate for the shadow
of the Cross of Christ to hang liturgically over the Christmas season
by the overlapping of Septuagesima Sexagesima with the forty days following
Our Lord's Nativity.
This period of preparation
that started a week ago should remind us of the fact that Our Lord has
mercifully kept us alive to this point in salvation history. That is,
we are alive to at least start another season of Lenten prayer,
penance, sacrifice, and almsgiving. Whether we live to see the completion
of Lent 2005 is known to God alone. The season of preparation for Lent
has started, though, and we must give great thanks to God for this as
it affords us yet another opportunity in the liturgical calendar of
the Church to prove our mettle as disciples of the Word Who was made
Flesh and dwelt amongst us, the One Who offered Himself up once in a
bloody sacrifice on Calvary and Who permits that same Sacrifice to be
offered in an unbloody manner at the hands of a sacerdos acting
in persona Christi in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Once
again, you see, we have a chance to bear down, if you will, and to detach
ourselves more from our various attachments to the world and its creature
comforts that "creep" up on us from one Easter Sunday to the
following Seputagesima Sunday or Ash Wednesday. It is now time to take
stock of what legitimate pleasures and conveniences we can give up in
order to make reparation for our own sins and for those of the whole
world, attempting to develop habits of sustained prayer and penance
and mortification that may last well beyond the completion of the recently
begun sixty-three days of penance signified by Septuagesima Sunday.
Our Lord has
granted an extraordinary grace to a handful of genuine mystics of knowing
how the sins of all men caused Him to suffer unspeakably in His Sacred
Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross. Most of us would die if we saw
just how much our own sins, both venial and mortal, caused Our Lord
to suffer once in His Passion and Death and how they have wounded His
Mystical Body, the Church, today, starting with the scars we have left
on our own souls. Mercifully, God restrains most of us from the knowledge
given to genuine mystics. It is enough for us that we should come to
an understanding of the fact that our sins caused the God-Man to suffer
as He redeemed us and that we must come to despise even the thought
of sin by scaling the heights of sanctity in imitation of the Blessed
Mother, Saint Joseph and all of the saints. While our sins are forgiven
in the Sacrament of Penance by the words and actions of an alter Christus,
we nevertheless must be conscious of doing not only the particular penance
assigned as the condition for the absolution given by a priest but of
living penitentially at all times so our intellects, enlightened by
sanctifying grace, will always be ready to accept the truths of the
Faith and that our wills, strengthened by sanctifying grace, may help
us to choose to live in accord with what Our Lord has revealed through
His Holy Church as true and thus for our sanctification and salvation.
Our Lady stressed
the importance of penance in her Fatima apparitions. Who are we to refuse
her, who was given to us by her Divine Son to be our Mother as she stood
so valiantly by the foot of His Holy Cross? The penances we are asked
to undertake need not be anything extraordinary. That is, a voluntary
self-denial of some sort of food that we really like is an act of penance.
God knows how much we become attached to sensible pleasures and delights.
Our voluntarily acts of penance, which must be kept to ourselves and
not announced to others, detach us from self and self-pleasure, inclining
us to pray all the more for truly great crosses to bear for the sake
of souls and for the sake of the restoration of Catholic Tradition within
Holy Mother Church herself. Getting up when we don't want to get up,
doing our chores when we would prefer doing something else, indeed,
just going about our daily duties in a spirit of love for the Cross
can help us to grow in a love of Heaven and a detestation of anything
that impedes our growth in sanctity to the highest degree possible below
that of the Blessed Mother herself.
The ordinary
penances of daily living are so obvious that it is difficult to see
them. Refraining from saying a cross word when provoked by another.
Accepting insults and slights with grace, understanding that the intentions
of all hearts will be made manifest on the Last Day at the General Judgment
of the Living and the Dead and that the insults and slights that we
endure from others pale into insignificance when we consider how our
sins helped to crown Our Lord with thorns and to cover His Holy Face
with spittle. Forgiving others without any hint of bitterness or resentment,
understanding that nothing anyone does to us is comparable to what our
sins did to Our Lord, Who forgives us in the Sacrament of Penance. Who
are we to refuse to forgive others when we are forgiven so freely? We
are required to forgive. Actually doing so, though, may take an act
of humble self-denial. In brief, therefore, we must accept every little
thing that happens in the course of a day as having been foreseen by
God for all eternity as being precisely the particular cross at that
moment in our lives that He knew was best for us and which we can make
redemptive if we cooperative with all of the sufficient grace provided
for us at that very moment. In short, we are given moments of relatively
small penances all throughout the course of each day of our lives.
True, there will be
times of the more difficult crosses. Painful, debilitating long-term
illnesses. An accident that wipes away in a second a person's ability
to think or to speak or to walk or to see or to hear. The loss of a
loved one. The uncertainty and material instability caused by the lack
of an income sufficient to provide for one's own needs despite hard
work and sacrifice. The real human pain of having to live in a time
when ravenous wolves are dressed in the clothing of shepherds and seek
to confuse the faithful by denying almost every article contained in
the Deposit of Faith, acting as though the Church began in 1962 and
that nothing before then matters at all (and that is indeed
a schismatic act to even mention anything before 1962). Oh, yes, there
are the difficult crosses that come our way.
Through it
all, though, Our Lord is with us. He has not abandoned us. He has not
abandoned Holy Mother Church. He wants to use us, especially by means
of Total Marian Consecration, to help undo the harm our sins have done
to ourselves and the Church and to thus plant the seeds for a restoration
of all things in Him. The season that commenced on Septuagesima Sunday
and continues today on Sexagesima Sunday reminds us that we must live
in accord with the liturgical calendar of the Church, thus placing what
should be an habitual spirit of penance into a higher state of assiduous
and faithful practice. Our Lady will keep us company as we assist at
Holy Mass each day, spend time with her Divine Son before the Blessed
Sacrament, and pray her Most Holy Rosary with fervor and devotion, keeping
in mind our desire to make reparation for our own sins and those of
the whole world.
The joy of
Easter Sunday awaits us in but eight short weeks. The period of time
between now and then is a simile for life itself. Whether we live fifty
or sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety years and beyond, life is over
in but a flash. An unending Easter Sunday of unparalleled joy awaits
the just who persist until their dying breaths in a state of sanctifying
grace. Is not a life of penance, lived in a more intensified manner,
to be sure, during some parts of the liturgical year, worth the prize
of an eternal Easter Sunday in Paradise?
Our Lady, Refuge of
Sinners, help us to be like thee. Help us to be so consecrated to thy
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart that we will one day come to detest even
the thought of sin and will work more attentively to root it
out in our own lives and thus be an instrument of rooting out in the
life of the Church and the life of the world. O Mary conceived without
sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.
P.S. Speaking
of sacrifices, I want to thank each of you who made sacrifices to support
the work of Christ or Chaos, Inc., in 2004. Our tax receipts have been
mailed to you. You should be getting them within the coming week. I
just wanted to take this opportunity to once again express our gratitude
to those who have indeed made sacrifices to help us as we attempt to
plant a few seeds for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ
the King and Mary our Immaculate Heart as the fruit of the restoration
of the Traditional Latin Mass and the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart
of Mary. The work of Christ or Chaos, Inc., and the very existence of
Christ the King College would not be possible without your generosity.
We are always grateful to you and remember our benefactors every day
at Holy Mass and in our family Rosary.