1. The Church.
During the Ascension, Jesus had completed the image of the Catholic Church that He had just established. That was the job He was sent by the Father to do. The Liturgy described how that Church looks like, its teachings, its teachers, its classrooms, its pupils.
Tuesday and Wednesday shows with the commemoration of St. Gregory VII, St. Bede and St Mary Magdalene de Pazzi how the Church look like years after its establishment.
St. Gregory VII, the Pope, shows how a Pope should look like. St. Bede shows how a priest should look like. St. Mary Magdalene shows how a layman should look like. All of them have one thing in common which united them into one Church. They all knew the commands of Christ as enumerated in the New Testament; they knew how those commands should be put into practice; and they put into practice all those commands. In short, they recipients of the Apostolic Commission Christ gave the first Apostles and they put them into practice. They conformed to the image of the Church, Christ established before He ascended to heaven.
How does our Catholic parish or diocese look like? How does the Vatican look like? Nowhere near the Church before the Ascension and nowhere near the Church of Gregory VII, Venerable Bede and Mary Magdalene de Pazzi. In fact, just the opposite.
2. The Catholic Faith.
The Catholic Faith is established by obeying the Apostolic Commission given by Christ to the apostles. The last two phrases are the significant points whose goal is for listeners to make an Act of Catholic Faith; ‘teach them all that I have commanded, and how to observe them.’
The Catholic Faith is to know all the commandments of Christ as found in the New Testament, and how to observe them as taught by Christ to the first Christian communities but written down later by the Fathers of the Church.
For the above Faith to be alive, it must be enlivened by Charity which consist in obeying the commandments of Christ. Theologians describe this as Faith and Charity, or Faith and Good works. There are approximately 82 commandments of Christ as found in the Gospel of Matthew. True Faith with Charity consist in obeying all of them.
The image of the true Catholic Church described before the Ascension of Christ to heaven is that the Pope must have mastered all the 82 commandments of Christ and have obeyed them. He must, in turn, teach these to the cardinals, bishops and priests, who in turn must master them and obey them. And lastly they must teach these commandments to the laity in the dioceses and parishes, who, in turn must obey all of them.
When Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests and lay people have obeyed them all, then God will send them the Holy Spirit to unite them into One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This is how the true Catholic Church looked liked before the Ascension; this is how it should look like today. But it does not look like this today; not before the pandemic, more so during this pandemic.
During the ongoing pandemic, neither the Pope, nor the cardinals and bishops, nor the priest or nuns, nor the laity have heard the commandments of Christ as laid down in the Liturgy of the Mass since the last two Holy Weeks up to today, Tuesday of the 8th week of Easter. No one is showing he has the Catholic Faith, except a very few who have it through a very special intervention of Almighty God.
3. Proof of what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the 1980s on the ‘crisis of Faith,’ in his best selling ‘Ratzinger Report.’
In the above treatise, Ratzinger noted that the crisis in the Church is due to lack of Faith. Unbelief or the sin against Faith is the greatest sin. Through unbelief, man remains in sin and becomes totally incapable of progressing forward. Chastisement is a punishment for unbelief.
4. The sin of unbelief during the Corona pandemic.
The present pandemic is a chastisement from God for man to see what is his sin. His sin is unbelief and the punishment is condemnation according to Christ. What does the world not believe in? It does not believe in the Divine Providence of God, i.e. in that God controls all of creation. That God decides when a man lives and when he dies. And nobody can change God’s Providence.
Man may wear anything; he may wear a mask, a face shield, a gas mask, a hood. He can wear anything and that is alright. He can observe social distancing and live in the opposite side of the earth if he wants.
5. The Church.
But Faith consist in that man must believe that God dictates who the virus will infect and who will not be infected; who will die and who will live. And most importantly, who will go to heaven when he dies and who will go to hell.
Faith, also, consist in believing that there is a direct Will of God wherein He willed to create the Chinese and the Americans. And that there is a permissive Will of God that made Him allow the Chinese to make the Corona virus and for the Americans to have a new President.
Faith consist in believing that God allowed the Corona pandemic to test the Faith of all men with the end of rewarding the faithful while punishing the unfaithful. True Catholics are those who believe in this Divine Providence of God and have passed this on going test of Faith.
6. He who does not believe in God’s truth will believe in every lie.
He who does not believe in Divine Providence but believes in every lie does not belong to the true church completely established by Christ before His Ascension.
7. The reaction of the whole world shows it has no Faith.
This reaction of unbelief is more pronounced in the institutional Catholic Church; The behaviour of the Vatican and almost all Diocese and parishes is total unbelief in the doctrine of Divine Providence.
There is nothing wrong with the face masks, face shields and social distancing. It is the reason for wearing and doing these that shows no Faith. One can use five masks and shields and still believe in the doctrine of Divine Providence. Unbelief is an act of the mind and will; it is not a physical act.
There is nothing wrong with not attending Mass if one is ill. But it is a sign of unbelief if one misses Mass due to fear of the virus; ‘fear not what can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Fear God who can kill both body and soul.’ God kills those guilty of unbelief. Unbelief was the Chosen People’s greatest sin when Christ preached to them.
Christ, Himself, prophesied that an age will come when people will experience ‘decay of Faith’ and the ‘waxing cold of Charity.’ Perfect Faith goes hand in hand with Charity; both are theological virtues that go together. Both are needed for salvation, because God gives the virtue of Charity, only, to those with perfect Faith. That is why God did not send the Holy Spirit, the author of Charity, on Pentecost until the apostles had perfect Faith which they had before Christ ascended to heaven.
Most of mankind, today, do not have Charity, i.e. love of God and neighbour. St. Augustine wrote; if you do not love God, you will hate everybody. So what we have is hate crimes. And the only love man know is ‘love of concupiscence,’ the love one has for another for what pleasure he can get from the other.
There is no Charity because there is no perfect Faith upon which Charity is based. And there is no perfect Faith because man has not repented of their sins; it is for this reason that God sent the on going Corona virus pandemic, because man has not repented for his sins. And why has man not repented? Because he does not know his sins. How come he does not know his sins? Because he does not know the commandments of Christ, the violation of which is called sin. If Pope Francis and most of the US bishops do not know that abortionist cannot receive Holy Communion, demonstrators will not know that looting is wrong.
8. How does the true Catholic Church look like.
It should look like the day before Ascension Day as described above. We must have a Pope like Gregory VII, priests like Venerable Bede and a laymen like Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Is the present institutional Church like that? Reading how the Church look like before Ascension, and reading the lives of the above saints commemorated in today’s Mass………..it is not.