1. The Liturgy.
The Liturgy had been teaching how man must progress from being a slave of original sin and, recently, teaching how one must be perfect to deserve everlasting life in heaven.
God made man, Adam and Eve, almost perfect. And they could have remained perfect if they passed their test in the garden of Eden. But they failed by disobeying God. This disobedience had been called original sin which all man inherited. This state is the lowest sinful state man can be.
The Liturgy had been describing how man can rise up from this lowly state and reach the state of being perfect like God. This is God’s requirement for the salvation of one’s soul after He has taught the human race through the Liturgy how to rise from the state of abominable sinfulness to the heights of being perfect like God.
2. Of course, man cannot be as perfect as God.
Man can only be like God. But up to what point? God gave the maximum required for salvation; perfect Faith with love of God, love of neighbour, love of husband, wife, children, friends. Up to love of enemy.That’s it. Christ showed the example on the cross, martyrs showed it in the Coliseum. Christians, today, are showing it in Egypt, Nigeria, etc. We must show it today.
We must love our enemies to be ‘as perfect as God.’ And we do it by praying for him that he may be saved. We do not have to do anything else. Just pray for him that he may be converted. Probably he will never be converted but we, on our part, must pray for the salvation of his soul, that we may become as perfect as God.
3. The stages leading towards Christian perfection.
First stage. Each man begins as a child with natural holiness, thus Christ said, ‘unless you become like little children.’ But he loses this natural holiness when he reaches the age of reason and makes his first act of free will to sin. A man becomes a deplorable sinner in the image of Cain. He has the inward tendency to kill ‘the good,’ because of the rising evil in him influenced by original sin. Cain killed his brother Abel, not because he was his brother but because he saw him as ‘pleasing to God,’ a good person. From this stage God taught man to rise up to the natural law with the ‘golden rule,’ to do to others what you want others to do unto you.’
Second stage, the natural law. With ‘do unto others what you want others to do unto you,’ man was given a rule of life to be able to do good to others and avoid doing evil to others. But due to original sin, man keeps on making mistakes on what ‘good’ to do to others and what ‘evil’ to avoid. In fact, in an attempt to worship God they tend to commit more mistakes by worshipping the wrong god and the mistake of offering human sacrifices to the wrong god, like the Aztecs at the time of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Third stage. To guide man higher, God gave them the 10 commandments in the Old Testament where it is written ‘ not to kill.’ But man continue to kill. It seems mankind was having great difficulty to advance from sinfulness towards ‘perfection.’
Fourth stage. So Christ was born to begin the era of grace where God, Himself, will teach man what is right and what is wrong, teach him how to choose what is right and give him the power to obey God’s commands that lead towards being ‘perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.’ This last stage is impossible without grace. It is attainable, only, with the help of grace. God, only, requires that man have the proper disposition, which is humility; i.e. man must fully realise that he cannot be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect without the grace from God. Unfortunately, most of the human race believe they can be perfect all by themselves without any help from God. In fact, man’s greatest sin is that he thinks he is god, who, only, needs a little help from science and he can do thing perfectly without God.
4. To be saved.
To remain in the three lower stages means condemnation. To be saved man must rise up to the level of grace and be ‘perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.’
To be perfect means to rise up to the level of grace. It means to have perfect Faith, the theological virtue. And to have the beginnings of the theological virtue of Charity. The Liturgy from Ash Wednesday, which was celebrated last year just before God chastised the world with the Corona virus, was meant to teach mankind how to prepare for the eventuality of death due to the virus. We are now in the second year of the Liturgy and man has not learned how to prepare for the eventuality of death. The effort is still in trying to avoid death which could come in a hundred different ways.
Here is the complete steps to reach perfection. First, one must live a perfect life of repentance. This is attained when a soul receives from God the virtue of Penance through a life of prayer, fasting and good works. Having attained perfect Penance, a soul receives from God the theological virtue of Faith together with graces and the theological virtue of Charity. The virtue of Charity must be perfected until one receives from Christ the first breath of the Holy Spirit that will enable the soul to love one’s neighbour. With love of neighbour, the soul must rise up to loving parents, husband, wife, children, relatives and friends. And lastly, the soul must love one’s enemies. Loving all the above is from the same virtue of Charity that includes love of God’s creatures.
That is the highest perfection that man can achieve with the help of the grace of God. Man does not become as perfect as God; he, simply, become perfect ‘as God is perfect.’ Man imitates in a lower degree the perfection of God.
For Catholics, he must be perfect as God the Father is perfect, otherwise, he is not even a Catholic. He cannot do this on his own. He cannot reach this without the grace of God. Thus he must, in fact, be a contemplative in his way of prayer, to be able to reach this stage. Being a highly spiritual state, no one can see or discern this. It is impossible for most to know who these people are.
To be ‘perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect,’ is the first requirement for canonisation of a saint. The present Vatican bureaucracy does not know this, thus they are canonising without fulfilling this requirement which make their canonisation process doubtful. All the recent documents for the process of canonisation lacks this requirement, which is present in the process in the canonisation of St. Therese of Lisieux.
To be truly Catholic, we must be as ‘perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect.’ Most men are not even observing the 10 commandments of God. Most have not even graduated from being Aztecs, offering human sacrifices. The whole world, like the G7 had even fostered the killing of babies world wide, while US citizens pay taxes to support abortion with the consent of many of the US bishops. Some have not even stopped being Cains, killing the ‘good’ Abel. The human race have not progressed at all towards the life of grace.
And, yet, God said clearly, that only those who are ‘perfect as the Heavenly Father is perfect’ can go to heaven.