Set Your Face Like Flint

What number have you written in the “amount” box on the check you are giving to God?

Whatever number it is — I care not how generous it seems to you — erase it now. For God has absolutely no use for even the world’s most generous check. He only has use for blank checks.

How important this is to remember today more than ever; as the drumbeat of the coming persecution grows louder and louder. God only knows when the crescendo will peak; but it is seeming that it might be very, very soon.

And when that day comes, if you have chosen not to leave that box blank, then the amount God asks of you may very well be more than the number you have placed in the box. You cannot say “I will sacrifice only this much money, only this many friends, only this or that position I hold, or only this or that family member, if it be God’s Will.”  For whenever we place any limit on the Will of God, we blaspheme against His absolute right to our entire selves, ensure that we are living in the self will, not the Divine Will; we ensure that the day will soon come when our love is proven human, not Divine.

I write this in the wake of a good Bishop, Bishop Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, having utter hatred spewed at him, publicly, on a “Catholic” site, on a moderated comment thread. And why? For some horrible sin or crime?

No. Rather, this hatred spewed at him (in the name of “tolerance,” of course), was motivated merely by his reiteration of an abundantly obvious and basic Church teaching. A teaching contained explicitly in both the Old and New Testaments. A teaching held infallibly by the Catholic Church for 2,000 years. A teaching that has never, will never, and can never change. The teaching that homosexual acts are illicit (and that, as such, they may not be explicitly or implicitly blessed by the Church).

At the bottom of this post I have attached screenshots of these quotes; completely unedited, so as to refute anyone who claims I am making this up. I have also directly archived the website itself in case I am accused of fabricating these screenshots.

 

• These commenters — many of whom are no mere anonymous angry couch sitters, but are evidently significant voices in the world today — accuse the good Bishop of “formal spiritual abuse.”
• They accuse him of being a “rotten medieval legalist,” a “power loving mad man,” a “bigot [who] should not even be a priest,” and a “repulsive individual.”
• They call for his “browser history” to be checked, for him to be defrocked, for him to get “an exorcism ASAP,” and for him to be “stopped.”
• What is more, they claim they are “disgusted” and “enraged.” “Rage” comes up multiple times. They claim he is “cruising for a bruisin.”

All of this hatred is of course barely the tip of the iceberg, as it comprises only what was allowed past the moderation queue on a “Catholic” website. It is far worse in reality, and far worse in the secular realm.

I write this post now as a brief reminder to set your face like flint right now, to never deny any teachings of the Catholic Faith — especially not the most “difficult” ones — in thought, word, or deed; and to never formally cooperate with any denial thereof. For the time when heroic virtue is demanded of ordinary Catholics may be close at hand, and we set ourselves up for failure if we have no considered this and firmly committed to absolute faithfulness.

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