I encourage you to make, with me, a 33-day preparation for consecration to St. Joseph, which will take place on May 1st (the feast of St. Joseph the Worker). I’m using Fr. Donald Calloway’s fine book Consecration to St. Joseph. You can get this book in a Kindle edition until you get one in the mail. Each day’s reading takes about seven or eight minutes, and I render full credit for these thoughts, respecting copyright laws, to Fr. Donald H. Calloway, author of the book.

                                                                                          Day Two

Today Fr. Calloway introduces us to the Litany of St. Joseph¸ a prayer said by saints for over 500 years. A litany, which highlights the particular virtues of a saint, is a quick biography of that person. I enjoy reading biographies of great leaders, both because they are fascinating but also to learn “best practices” for my own life. Praying a litany to St. Joseph not only teaches us how to become like him; we also naturally become what we look upon. “Joseph most patient” stood out for me this morning as I prayed the Litany. Help me, St. Joseph, to be peaceful and patient, as God helped you!

 St. Joseph is my namesake, since my mother named me “Joseph”(because I was born near Christmas and she couldn’t name me “Jesus”). Today I begin, and I encourage you to begin with me, a 33-day preparation for consecration to St. Joseph, which will take place on May 1st (the feast of St. Joseph the Worker). I’m using Fr. Donald Calloway’s fine book Consecration to St. Joseph. Although online booksellers have been sold out for weeks, you can get this book in a Kindle edition until you get one in the mail. Each day, until May 1st, I will offer you one tidbit from that day’s reading (which itself takes only seven or eight minutes). I render full credit for these thoughts, respecting copyright laws, to Fr. Donald H. Calloway, author of the book.

                                                                                         Day One

The name “Joseph” in Hebrew means “the Increaser.” Like the Patriarch Joseph in Egypt, Joseph of Nazareth increased the good things entrusted to him (Jesus and Mary). I consecrate myself to St. Joseph because I want to be like him, an “increaser.” Many of us have consecrated ourselves to Mary, so that we become “another Mary” for Jesus: a faithful, loving, and trusting companion. Consecration to St. Joseph helps us become “another Joseph:” a faithful, loving, and trusting companion of Jesus and Mary.

A day before San Francisco went into “lockdown,” I took a Macy’s gift card downtown to buy a pair of shoes. The massive department store was as empty as the streets. One of the salesmen said to the other as I tried on my new shoes: “Now is  a good time to make apocalyptic movies in San Francisco since the entire city already looks like the end of the world.” A day later we were ordered to stay in our homes. Doubtless this was a factor in containing the infection rate in San Francisco, and we thank our leaders for taking decisive action at a time when everyone was scrambling to determine an appropriate strategy.

Emergencies often reveal our unconscious assumptions and deeper motivations. Even at this early stage, I think Corona has revealed our pervasive inclination to isolation: how quick we are to pull back from others. We've become a nation of hermit crabs! C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, describes hell as isolation—people moving ever farther away from each other. Hell is a vast dark plain broken only by a few widely-separated houses, each inhabited by only one person.

I am a professional religious, so to speak, and I “sell” community. The Latin word religion means to re-connect, to re-ligare, meaning literally to “re-tie” two pieces together again. Religion begins with re-establishing our tie with God, and from there our tie with those around us. To do that we need open churches, as much as is possible. We need a House (of God) where all are welcome and all feel at home, in proximity with others (as much as is possible in a time of pestilence). It seems to me  that some bishops were too quick to close our churches, isolating people even more than the government required. Locked churches isolates people not only from each other but even from the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. It is quite possible to keep large churches open safely, by marking out distances, by sanitizing, by letting in only a certain number of people at a time. The supermarkets and coffee shops do it. Why can’t “religion,” whose essential business is to build community (with God first, and therefore with the entire human family)?
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On Wednesday I went to Safeway to get some food for the 14 days I might have to spend alone in my room. The line snaked outside of the store, around the block. Most were staring into their iphones, but the brave lady six feet in front of me turned around to face me. She noticed my Roman collar and said with a smile: “Father, can’t you do something about all this?” I was praying my rosary, so I held it up and said “I’m pedaling as fast as I can!” She laughed. “Say a prayer for me too.” When it was her turn to enter the store she waved an amicable goodbye to me and said “good luck!” We felt an essential human connection had been reestablished. We felt the isolating power of the virus—our current defeatist impulse born of fear—had been mitigated, and we both smiled.

Following is an email I sent to all my San Francisco parishioners, which I now share with those who follow my blog. God is blessing us with so many good articles and during this Epidemic, now that we have the time to consider more deeply our first principle and final end. Here are some thoughts of my own and resources to use this time well.

Why is God doing This to Us?
We are all trying to figure this out, but I know that everything works for the good for those who love God (Rom 8:28). He is using the Virus to clarify what is most important to us. We have all become worldly, and a bit “agnostic.” Bodily health has become all-consuming to us. Agnostics think this life is all we get, and so dying is to be avoided at all costs. We should not be naïve: most of our media and government executives do not believe in God as we know Him; they suffer a hysterical fear of death, and they spread this fear to others.
 
A noble and rational person would give his or her life for justice, beauty, honor, love, and above all for faith (as do the martyrs). They know that it is better to die for love than to live without it. God’s gift of faith, hope, and charity frees us from living in fear of death. I beg you to make every effort, my dear people, to keep your faith and your peace during this epidemic. God is permitting the virus to deepen our faith. Let nothing trouble you, for you are in the hands of God.
 
As Safe as Possible
Having said that, we must make a reasonable effort to prevent sickness and death. The church remains open from 6am to 6pm, but we have roped off pews so that no one sits closer than 8 feet. We wipe down all surfaces daily with disinfectant. Your priests continue to offer Masses at the scheduled times, but only with servers, camera operator, and cantor (for solemn Masses). The Archbishop has directed that we make a Spiritual Communion rather than congregate in the church for sacramental communion, at least until we better understand how to contain the virus. Spiritual Communion sheets are in the church.
 
Live streamed Masses and other resources
Fr. Cameron Faller has an eloquent and heartfelt video (https://www.facebook.com/sfvocations/videos/679693926106566) explaining why we should not merely “watch” live streamed Masses, but how our painful thirst at being denied the Holy Eucharist will lead us to pray the Mass more deeply. Masses at M-F 7:30 & noon, Sat 8:30am, and Sunday 9:30 & 11:30am can be followed here: https://www.facebook.com/pg/starparishsf/videos. I also ask you to sign up for our YouTube Channel and invite your friends to do so as well. Star’s channel has 750 subscribers, and with 1000 YouTube will allow us to stream our Masses for all to see (on our current Facebook page only those with Facebook accounts can see the Mass). Subscribe to our YouTube Channel HERE. My favorite devotional is Magnificat, which I read every day in my Holy Hour. They are offering the beautiful little magazine free, in digital format, during the crisis (www.magnificat.com/free).
 
Our Lady’s Annunciation and St. Joseph’s Consecration
On Fridays of Lent I encourage you to make the Stations of the Cross at home. You can find Via Crucis booklets in the church, but please do not be within 8 feet of others, unless they live in your household. Wednesday is the Solemnity of the Annunciation, and I will offer a sung Mass, as planned, at 6pm tomorrow. You can pray the Mass with me at the link above. Finally, I ask everyone in our parish to consecrate themselves to St. Joseph, father to Jesus and our own “Father and Lord.” I recommend a 33-day preparation, using the excellent book by Fr. Donald Calloway (https://www.fathercalloway.com/books-and-gifts/consecration-st-joseph-wonders-our-spiritual-father). I will be making the 33 day preparation myself beginning March 30. On May 1, God willing, I will celebrate a Sung Mass for St. Joseph the Worker at 6pm in the main church with all of you. At that Mass all who attend may consecrate their lives to the protection and providence of St. Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer and Protector of Holy Mother Church. 

“Quarantine”
The whole world is now quarantined. We’ve given up TV Sports, restaurants, visits with friends, every kind of social event—even Sunday Mass! As one guy said, “I didn’t plan on giving up quite this much for Lent.” You may know that the word “quarantine” comes from the Latin word “forty” (quadraginta), the same word many European languages use for “Lent” (quaresima, cuaresma, le carême, etc). Ships putting in at 14th Century Venice would be sealed off for forty days, until the risk of contagion dissipated. Like it or not, all of us are now living a period of greater simplicity, silence, and poverty. Despite what you hear on commercial and social media, this is not a disaster. It is a blessing, if we manage actually to “shelter in place;” that is, if we keep still, if we maintain our peace, and if we see its deeper meaning. Deeper meanings are always good, because everything God made, and everything God permits, is good in the long run. We call this Divine Providence.
 
In Germany there is a quarantined seminary of priests and seminarians. “As foreseen, the virus has done its work in our seminary,” the community’s website announced. “All the priests and most of the seminarians are infected. With the powerful aid of faith, hope and charity, we do not let ourselves be torn down. In a few days, the first ones to recover will be able to take the places of the newly infected, so as to maintain the spiritual and material life of the community. Since God only allows evil for the sake of a greater good, we have confidence in the Lord, who alone is able to give meaning to our brief time on this earth.”
 
Rejoice Always
Many people are asking their priests if the Corona Virus is a chastisement from God. The answer is yes, in the sense that every affliction, from a stubbed toe to terminal cancer, can help us dive more deeply into the mystery of life’s essential goodness. The great evils in human history—the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields—produced great saints, from Maximilian Kolbe to Walter Ciszek to Francis van Thuan. “I am content with weakness,” wrote St. Paul, “with affliction and with suffering for the sake of Christ, for when I am weak then I am strong.” The Marines say “pain is weakness leaving the body.” The Corona Virus can destroy us, or it can strengthen us, by the grace of God.
 
Today is Laetare Sunday, so named from the first words of the opening verse: Laetare Ierusalem, gaudete cum Laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis: “rejoice Jerusalem, exult with joy, you who were sad.” This verse, from Isaiah 66, was spoken to the inhabitants of Jerusalem when their city had been overtaken by their enemies, shut down, destroyed and burnt. Cast off your sadness, the prophet urges, by looking to God. “Our hearts are restless,” St. Augustine famously said—what better description of the chaos that has gripped the entire world—"until they rest in you.” It is at times like these, when human agencies fail us, that we either trust in God’s providence, or we despair.
 
Healing
In chapter 6, the prophet Hosea urges his people to “return to the Lord.” It is he, surely, who has struck us, but it is he, and he alone, who will heal us. “On the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence.” The heart of the Christian faith is the death of Christ and his resurrection on this “third day.” Your priests will celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but most likely in a locked church, with only a server and camera operator. I urge you to follow these live streamed Masses, but not merely watching them at your desks, with a cup of coffee. You must pray with your priest, even though we are quarantined. Set up your computer in your living room, for all to see. Stand, sit, and kneel at the proper times. Turn off other devices, so that you can surrender to the Holy Sacrifice, especially when you make your spiritual communion as the priest gives Holy Communion to the server and camera person.
 
“Let us know, let us strive to know the Lord,” the prophet says. Because our “piety is like the morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away.” We Catholics, we Christians, are so inconstant in our love for God! Sunday Mass for most Catholics is at the very bottom of our to do list. When life gets a little hard we so easily blame God and stop praying. We check our stock portfolios ten times more than we check our Bibles. We are so quick to gossip and mistreat each other, who are God’s image and likeness. God is permitting this corona virus precisely to chastise, to break open, our hearts, to humble us, to bring us back to Him and to each other.
 
It is certain that He will “heal” us, even if everyone of us dies in the flesh from this virus. The word “salvation” comes from the Latin word salus, meaning health. Our final health and flourishing is not for this world. God permits death so that we can finally live in perfect joy and peace. It is up to us to either let ourselves be torn down by fear and panic, or to calmly accept this pandemic for what it is: God’s call to deep faith, hope, and charity. We believe in God, we hope in Him, and we love him. And loving him, we become capable of loving others, and loving ourselves. Let us trust Him, and rejoice. A blessed Laetare Sunday to all of you!

We’ve finally made it to St. Joseph’s Day, and I get to offer two Masses today! My other three parish priests are going out to various convents because their regular chaplains have apparently deserted them… perhaps they are afraid of infecting the nuns, or being infected by them. The good sisters don’t know why their scheduled priests have disappeared. But the nuns have called upon us, and so we are braving the deserted streets to bring the Mass to them.

It's a media mogul’s dream! They thought they had addicted us to their 24-hour news cycles, but now they really have us. The 2011 apocalyptic thriller Contagion has become the 2nd most watched movie on streaming sites, but now the outbreak is actually happening, for real! But how “real” is it?

I don’t know how real it is, since I gave up entertainment for Lent: that includes “the news,” which is mostly entertainment. The problem is that some of the news is real.  How much is real and how much is marketed hysteria? How much of the “news” is an apocalyptic thriller fantasy, produced and packaged to make a few men rich, but also used by darker forces to keep an entire people enslaved in fear?

How much should I “know” about the pandemic? I know that the streets of San Francisco are much quieter than last week. I know that I cannot allow my people to attend our Masses, and I cannot visit my parishioners in their homes. I know that the grocery shelves at Target are half empty. I am told that 3000 people have died in Italy from this virus, and that San Francisco has 51 known cases of the virus and zero deaths.

To write these lines I had check the news, which violates my Lenten resolution to give up media. To some degree we must check the news, but the question is to what degree. It’s hard not to turn on the radio in the morning, or check my favorite news sites several times a day. It is hard to be content with silence. But, as Mother Teresa said, “in the silence of the heart God speaks.” I think you and I should not watch Contagion at this time. I think we should wait a few months to check our stock portfolios. I think we should keep our car radios and personal devices off most of the day. I think we should read good books and take brisk walks outside with our families, as in fact I see many San Franciscans doing (now that schools are closed). It’s lovely to see Golden Gate Park full of families for a change! We should spend an hour a day in the silence of our churches rather than in front of hysterical news cycles, now that we have the time. I think we should manfully resist media hysterics; we should keep calm and enjoy the quiet that has descended upon our cities.
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I get to offer two Masses for St. Joseph today! Happy and blessed feast day of blessed Joseph, loving father of Jesus and spouse of Mary, and our own protector here on earth.

I write on the Ides of March, which were ominous for Julius Caesar, but no less ominous for San Francisco. Yesterday I rode through a silent city to offer Mass for the good sisters, and on the way back tried to pop in the local Safeway for a gallon of milk. The store was packed with panicked buyers, unheedful of the government’s restriction on large gatherings. An hour later I stood in a much-diminished gathering for the first Mass of Sunday morning. If only the citizens of our city needed the Holy Eucharist as much as they needed toilet paper!

Who knows how long before public Masses are banned here in San Francisco? Our good archbishop has so far stood strong against pressure from other bishops who have already canceled Masses. I’m fairly certain they feel compelled by their lawyers and PR agents, as they have mostly been through twenty years of handling clergy abuse cases. In the long run it doesn’t work, and we priests in the trenches are sorely tempted to think the hierarchical Church is not putting first things first.
The first thing to do in Lent is not to rush out for more toilet paper, or even for a gallon of milk, but to pray and fast. “These types,” the Lord tells us, “are only driven out by prayer and fasting.” But how hard it is to fast when we don’t have a clear reason to do so! I set out on Ash Wednesday, like all of you, to deny myself unnecessary food, but then stress levels rise, frustration discourages us, and we instinctively think of the refrigerator.

The three children at Fatima did not pray and fast well at first. They would cheat shamelessly on the rosary so they could get to their games, and they didn’t fast much. But then Our Lady visited them, and in July 1917 she showed them “hell, where poor sinners go.” The vision of hell shocked them; they began to pray from the heart, and they lost their fear of fasting. They now had a reason to fast, to keep even one person from falling into that abyss of horror.

When a priest hears a heartfelt confession of a “poor sinner,” someone who confesses his longing to do good but feels helpless before his demons and compulsions, the priest’s heart is moved. He assigns a bracing penance before granting absolution, but his heart bleeds for his penitent. He resolves to do the penance with his suffering child. “For your penance, I want you to skip lunch today.” And the priest himself feels the need to give up lunch that day too. Real suffering gives the priest a reason to fast, and makes the sacrifice sweet.
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We will find it relatively easy to fast, and offer other sacrifices, if we have a reason to do so. “Confess your sins to one another” St. James tells us. Open your hearts to your spouse, your parents, your children, and your friends (always prudently, of course), and you will find that reason to offer sacrifices for each other. We can only fast well if we fast together. Jesus brought his three closest disciples into the Garden of Gethsemane with him. Let us go with Him too, to offer the sacrifice.

Go to a Land that I will show you
​The entire Bible can be summed up in three stories: Adam, Abraham, and Peter. In the first story, Adam and Eve leave paradise, deciding to live life on their own terms. We have been wandering, lost and confused, ever since. In the second story Abraham, correcting Adam’s faithlessness, follows the God’s direction. As we hear in the first reading today, Yahweh tells him to “go from the land of your father’s house, to a land that I will show you.” In the third story, in today’s Gospel, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain to enter into the land of eternal life, peace, and joy. “Lord, it is good for us to be here,” Peter says. “Let us build three tents.” Let us live here, in your presence, forever. That’s the bible, and the Christian life, in three stories: Adam leaves God’s garden on earth; Abraham follows God back to the Holy Land; and Peter enters God’s dwelling in heaven. The Garden of Eden, the first earthly paradise, was not enough for us. Jerusalem, the second earthly City of God, also fails us. It is only in the Transfiguration, when Peter and the others enter heaven, that mankind glimpses of our true and lasting home.
 
Transfiguration
God promised Abraham’s a land “flowing with milk and honey,” which is the biblical way of saying all the good things of this life—a good job, loyal friends, your own house, sound investments, a car that starts when you turn the key, children who bring honor to your old age, etc. But these things will never fully satisfy us. They are only signposts on a journey which ends in heaven. We’ve always had trouble keeping our focus on our final end, but over the last 20 years or so, we’ve become especially disoriented. Since the “digital revolution,” people raised with unlimited entertainment, social media, pornography, and 24-hour newsfeeds have more trouble focusing on their essential purpose and final end. Constant noise and distraction, made possible by recent technologies, confuse us as never before.
 
The Lord’s Transfiguration focused the disciples on the one thing necessary: staying close to God, both in this life and in the life of the world to come. Pope Leo the Great explained the Transfiguration in a homily from around the year 450: “The great reason for this transfiguration was to  remove the scandal of the Cross from the hearts of his disciples …they were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.” The absurdity of the Crucifixion is the archetypical distraction. The absurdities and brutalities of life can easily derail our faith in God and the rational order. But don’t let yourself be distracted when friends and family and your career fail you. Everything this side of the grave will fail you at some point, but you were never meant to stay here anyway. We are pilgrims, on our way to a land that God will show us. “Go,” Yahweh told Abram, “to a land that I will show you. And Abram went as the Lord directed him.”
 
Dominus Pars
I just finished the little book on the priesthood co-authored by Pope Benedict and Cardinal Robert Sarah, From the Depths of Our Hearts. Some bishops, especially in Germany and other very wealthy countries, are petitioning the Pope to end priestly celibacy. Celibacy is hard for priests, just like fidelity to one woman is hard for married men. But when a priest chooses to live for God alone, sacrificing his natural right to a wife and children, he refocuses all of us on our final end, which is eternal life with God in heaven. “The true foundation for celibacy,” writes Pope Benedict in the book, “can be contained in the phrase: Dominus pars. You are my land.” With Abraham, the Catholic priest leaves the comfort and security of his home; he journeys blindly to a land God will show him. He gives up wife and children, his “land.” His “portion” and his “inheritance” is God alone. “The priest,” Cardinal Sarah writes, “can and must have nothing but God.” Not many priests in affluent countries like ours live this calling well. But make no mistake: this is the vocation of every Catholic priest: to point the way to heaven by their poverty. The fundamental problem with the priesthood today is not sex. It’s money: priests whose incomes far exceed their needs. Priests in poor countries, or priests who live simple lives of service, generally do not commit sexual crimes. A priest’s purity of heart refocuses every heart on the life of the world to come; a priests impurity sends souls to hell. Let us pray for our priests to be men of God, to wholeheartedly give what God asks, and to point us all to heaven. “You have shown me the way to Ars,” St. John Vianney told a boy who had pointed the way to his new parish. “I will show you the way to heaven.”

The Church is Not in Crisis
And there are many honest men and women who are working with their hands to shore up the Faith. God will always raise up saints to rebuild his crumbling Church, and in dark times, extraordinary saints. In fact, the Church is not, and cannot, be in crisis. We must maintain our serene faith in God. We are David standing before Goliath, sure that the victory will be the Lord’s. “Scandals there will always be” the Lord told us, and in his mysterious providence God works through them. It was through the betrayal of Judas, and the faithless desertion of every apostle but one, that the world was saved. It was through the execution of her Lord, and from his bleeding side, that the Church was born. Christ was sold to the Romans by his own priests, both by his own apostle Judas and by the temple priests of his own faith. There has never been a time when the Church has not been attacked both from without and from within. But be quite sure that the Church’s deposit of faith remains unchanged and unchangeable.
 
We are probably seeing the most serious crisis of faith in the Church’s history, brought about by the pervasive trivialization of the Holy Mass. But the Sacred Liturgy itself remains untouched. We are celebrating it today, here in Monterey, in our own poor way, but faithfully. While in normal times the faithful depend on their bishops, a Catholic community, as Bishop Athanasius Schneider points out, can survive for some time without bishops, as it did during the Soviet era, and as it is becoming likely in China today. In Japan the faith survived for 200 years even without priests and the Holy Eucharist. God normally comes to us through the sacraments, but He is not bound by them.
 
Credo Ecclesiam: an act of hope
​The Church Militant will always be at war. A friend of mine, a faithful and educated Catholic, had a dream some years ago. His guardian angel led him to a broad and raging river, on the other side of which lay heaven. Church leaders were frantically building a bridge, and multitudes began crossing over it, but his guardian angel told him not to step on the bridge. Within a short time the bridge collapsed and multitudes fell into the abyss, swept away by the raging waters. His guardian angel then carried him over the chasm, explaining that “no human effort can get a man over this river, but only grace.” In other words, God does not always grant success or visible progress in the Church. Many days we work hard but see no fruit. We see only apathy. We have our holy hour, we have the Holy Mass, the rosary, our spiritual reading. We can pray and fast and do penance.
 
My friend’s dream continued: “On other side of the river we came into heaven, and I saw the hosts of God, myriads upon myriads of angels and saints. But they were not seated, nor even standing. They were on the move. The hosts of heaven are on the march.”
 
The Church Militant must keep marching too, with the hosts of heaven. In the third secret of Fatima, Our Lady showed Lucia a devasted city. In her words:
 
We saw … a Bishop dressed in White ... Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross … before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins; half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way….
 
Until the pervasive corruption of Church leaders began to be revealed in recent years, most of us would assume the ruined city littered with corpses represented external attacks on the Church, by her enemies. Now we begin to see that a good many corpses are actually suicides, and the ruined city depicts a hierarchy that is destroying itself. The Church today is littered with corpses of priests like Judas, who hanged himself, or the unfaithful Maccabean soldiers, on whose corpses were found idols sacred to the false gods of Jamnia.
 
Bishop Schneider quotes Pope Pius XII’s address to Americans in the depths of the Cold War: “Revive your sense of the invisible world, which is all around us … have a certain familiarity with the angels, who are forever solicitous of your salvation…” (CV, 297). We must strengthen, we must exercise, the virtue of hope. Hope is a constant battle, requiring continual vigilance, the virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven. We must consider everything sub specie aeternitatis, and as Bishop Schneider says again, “more than other people, a priest has to live principally for these two aims: for truth and for eternity” (CV 242).
 
Hope finds its deepest source in the Holy Eucharist. When all hope seemed lost for those two on the road to Emmaus, Our Lord gave them the Holy Eucharist, and their hearts, burning already with the Word of God, then “saw” what they hoped for. Sunday Mass, however, is no longer enough. Those who possibly can should attend daily Mass. Occasional holy are no longer enough. Those who possibly can should spend at least one hour before the Blessed Sacrament every week. Two women in my parish spend every night, all night, in prayer before the monstrance, the holy women of San Francisco. If God gives them the grace to pray “day and night in the temple,” he will provide graces for us, proper to our states in life, to be apostles of hope in a dark time.
 
Communio sanctorum means both “communion in the holy things”—the sacraments, most especially the Holy Eucharist—but also “communion with holy people.” Time spent with the saints makes us saints. St. John Vianney, the very model of the Catholic priesthood, kept the lives of the saints always on his night table. Reading the lives of the saints, cultivating holy friendships, making pilgrimage to the shrines of saints, praying to them daily, and calling upon their intercession will greatly help us.
 
Credo in unum Deum; credo ecclesiam. Bishop Schneider quotes Hilary of Poitiers—the “Athanasius of the West”—that the Church is unique among all human institutions in that “she triumphs when she is defeated, that she is better understood when she is attacked, that she rises up when her unfaithful members desert her.” The Church today is persecuted, vilified, mocked, and undermined both by her enemies and by her own shepherds. It has ever been thus, but it has always also been the devil’s ploy to convince us that evil has gained the upper hand within the Body of Christ. “Pray, hope, and do not worry” said St. Pio of Pietrelcina. Do not let the evil one trip you—“scandalize” you—into losing your peace. Where sin abounds, St. Paul wrote, grace abounds all the more. This is the time of great saints. I will conclude where St. John concludes the bible, from the book of the Apocalypse:  
 
 
After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door! … I saw a great multitude which no man could number … standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice … “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.”

On February 22 I gave a talk at a Latin Mass Conference in Monterey, sponsored by the Latin Mass Magazine. The question Catholics face today is how to believe in the Church, which we profess every Sunday to be "one and holy." The vicious quarrelling between cardinals in the last few years, and of course the exposed crimes of her clergy, invalidate the Church's claims of unity and holiness. In the following talk, I try to show how we can stay with the Church established by Our Lord, despite its manifest corruption.

Credo Ecclesiam: an act of faith
​The day after Pope Francis released his apostolic exhortation on the Amazon Synod, I received an email from an old priest friend in Europe: “Big relief: the Pope is still Catholic.” We have to give thanks for small favors, meaning: he didn’t explicitly abolish priestly celibacy and establish a female diaconate. How on earth do we keep faith in the Church in times like these? The Nicene Creed states “credo … in unum Deum … et in unum Dominum Jesus Christum … et in Spiritum Sanctum… et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. In other words, we do not believe in the Church; we believe “in” God alone, but we do believe that God founded a Church, and that this Church is indefectible.

The Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, in article IX, explains why the preposition “in” was not included in the Nicene Creed in reference to the Church: “We are, therefore, bound to believe that there is one Holy Catholic Church. With regard to the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, we not only believe them, but also believe in them. But here we make use of a different form of expression, professing to believe the holy, not in the holy Catholic Church. By this difference of expression we distinguish God, the author of all things, from His works….”

In other words, we believe the Church because we believe in God. By his infinite condescension, the Lord, mysteriously, sustains the essential holiness of His Church, despite our continual perfidy. The fact that the Catholic Church still exists, and even, in the words of Eph 5:27, “a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish,” is hardly believable. How are we to imagine that the Church is “without spot or wrinkle, holy and without stain?” Simply as the Council of Trent stated: we believe in God alone, and that He founded a Church that is one, catholic, holy, and apostolic. We must distinguish between Head and members: the Church’s members will never be wholly “without stain,” but her Divine Head (and, I would add, in the Mother of her Divine Head) she cannot be stained.

A young priest friend remarked, after completing Cardinal Sarah’s recent book The Day is Now Far Spent, that one good thing about bad times are the good books written in bad times. Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s book Christus Vincit is another such book, as well as many recent books on the priesthood and priestly celibacy. Good books have a good ending, and the books worth reading today maintain the hope that “this sickness will not end in death but is for God’s glory.” The Lord God leads his people through deserts for a reason, to strengthen them.

In Deuteronomy 8 Moses addresses the children of Israel in the fortieth year of their exile. On the first day of the eleventh month, Moses (who himself will not enter the land of promise) explains the ways of God to men. “Yahweh your God led you for forty years in the wilderness to humble you, to test you, …. He made you feel hunger, he fed you with manna … to make you understand that man does not live on bead alone… learn from this this that Yahweh your God was training you as a man trains his child…” God is permitting apostasy in the Church, even among bishops and cardinals, to humble us, to refine our faith, and to strengthen our hope. “In the history of the Church,” writes Cardinal Sarah, “the ‘little remnant’ is what has saved the faith … the stump that will always revive so that the tree will not die. However destitute it may be, a little flock will always exist, a model for the Church and the world.” The same cardinal recently wrote a small book with Pope Benedict, the English edition of which began shipping on yesterday. I was able to get an electronic version from Ignatius Press, so I quote from the co-authored Introduction: “The Lord is asleep while the storm is unleashed. He seems to abandon us to the waves of doubt and error. … On every side, the waves of relativism are submerging the barque of the Church. The apostles were afraid. Their faith had grown lukewarm. The Church, too, sometimes seems to be unsteady. … We are experiencing this same mystery. Nevertheless, we are at peace, for we know that Jesus is the one steering the ship. We know that it will never sink. We know that it alone can bring us to the port of eternal salvation.”

The Scandal of Faith
The Christian faith is a scandal to this world in two ways: First, the fidelity of her saints scandalizes a world seeks to abolish God, and second, the infidelity of her sinners scandalizes a world that yearns, after all, for holy purity. Former Cardinal McCarrick’s sins scandalize the New York Times, but Mother Teresa’s speeches on contraception and abortion also scandalizes the Times.

1. The scandal of fidelity

First, the scandal of faith: if you devoutly make the sign of the cross over your meal in a restaurant, you will disturb those around you. If the White House Press Secretary appears on CNN with a black cross on his forehead (because it is Ash Wednesday), CNN is embarrassed. Vice-President Pence shocked the world when he stated simply that he attends no Washington parties where alcohol is served without his wife. The German bishops’ conference, on the other hand, thinks appeasing world will gain the its approval. “An orienting of the Church toward the world, wrote Pope Benedict, “would mean a turning away from the cross; it would lead not to a renewal of the Church but to her decline and eventual decay … the Christian faith is a scandal for men of all ages.”
 
The Catholic priesthood, most of all, scandalizes the world. Satan and that part of this world claimed by him especially hates the pitiful and weak human beings whom God chooses to approach His sacred altar. His angelic powers are disgusted that, at God’s command, they offer the divine sacrifice with their dirty fingers. We can understand, then, why non-believers ridicule the priesthood, why they call all priests hypocrites and money-grubbers, and almost always since 2002, “perverts and pedophiles.”
 
Holy celibacy goes a long way to purifying the sons of Levi. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Sir Alec Guinness, once a happy Anglican, on the set of a BBC production of GK Chesterton’s Fr. Brown series. They were filming in France, and one evening he was returning to his apartment still dressed in a cassock. Suddenly a little French boy darted out of an alley, put his hand the British actor’s, and began telling “mon Pere” all about his day at school. Mr. Guinness realized, at that moment, that the Catholic priesthood was real. The Church’s fidelity to the priesthood as a consecrated sacrifice, so different from the Anglican priesthood, led Alec Guinness to Catholicism.  
 
“Celibacy,” writes Cardinal Sarah, “reveals the very essence of the Christian priesthood… it is the seal of the cross on our lives as priests, a cry of the priestly soul that proclaims its love for the Father and gift of self to the Church.” “Satan,” he continues, “has a fierce hatred of priests. He wants to defile them … because they will always be a subject of scandal for the world.” As the demonic manifestly present in the Church today belittles marital fidelity by encouraging divorced and remarried persons to receive Holy Communion, so it shames men into forsaking priestly celibacy, which is the source of their supernatural paternity. Satan can generate no offspring, and so when a priest, by his angelic purity, engenders spiritual children, they infuriate his envy.

       2. The scandal of infidelity
We’ve considered the scandal of sanctity; now let’s turn our attention to the scandal of sin. All of us scandalize the “little ones” from time to time by our weak faith and routine infidelities. But some Catholic clergy have surrendered to the idols of this world. Still, the deeper scandal is the pervasive loss of Catholic faith over the last fifty years: prelates who govern their churches more like businessmen rather than men of God—when is the last time we saw our bishops wearing cassocks rather than business suits at their annual meeting, and why do they not end their meetings with an hour before the Blessed Sacrament rather than sipping liquor around little tables? The deeper scandal is priests spending five hours in meetings to every half hour in prayer, who live like bachelors rather than apostles. It is the scandal of Catholics divorcing and contracepting and aborting and porning at the same rates as atheists, the scandal of Catholic school children who do not know or believe in the Eucharist, the scandal of Catholic politicians selling their souls for a few votes. The scandal even greater than high ranking Churchmen leading double lives is the scandal of only 3% of French Catholics at Sunday Mass, the scandal of Cardinals who are not made ill by the collapse of the Christian family, who joke and smile and glad-hand people to and from the altar but refuse to correct their wayward children from the pulpit—this is by far the greater scandal. We seek to be like God without God, playing to the applause of unbelievers.

           Acedia
This despair or even hatred for the faith has a name, which the ancients called “acedia,” a refusal to accept joy from God, a pouting disdain for any happiness that one does not manufacture oneself. It leads to a deep and persistent disgust with life. Acedia is always a syndrome of the rich man, which makes us all like embittered old men who “no longer shiver with joy before the manger scene nor weep with gratitude before the Cross.” It deems reality to be unintelligible, with no first principles or final ends, leading to a hatred of being: it would be better not to exist. And so “death by despair” (alcohol, drugs, and suicide) especially among young people, has doubled over the last 20 years. Death from drug overdose, for example, has increased fourfold since 1999, such that, even with amazing advances in health care, workplace safety, and nutrition, the life expectancy in America has been in decline since 2016.
 
Priests are especially susceptible to acedia. As the faith becomes increasingly irrelevant and ridiculed, priests ask what they have to offer a post-modern society. They begin to replace prayer with Netflix and labor for souls with travel and hobbies. A taedium operandi or disgust with activity takes hold of the priest. The fathers Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian wrote that the best remedy for this spiritual torpor is honest manual labor, imitating the Incarnate Son of God, who worked for 30 years with his hands. Priests, and all Catholics, need to get back to work, beginning with consistent prayer, and fidelity to the simple tasks proper to one’s state in life.

Next Week: Part II of the Conference Talk: "The Church is Not in Crisis"