The Great Deception: How the West Was Lost, and How to Win It Back

Let us imagine that we had a new pope tomorrow morning who wrote an encyclical addressed to all the faithful in which he listed the complete dogmatic and moral teaching of the Church. Nobody could doubt any longer what is the truth and what has been the falsehood into which we have been led in the past.

Let us imagine that this encyclical was ordered to be read in every parish in the world and was to become the set syllabus for every Catholic school in Christendom. Would this completely solve the contemporary crisis in the Church? The answer is no. Why?  Because since Pope Pius XI, in whose pontificate I was born, popes (but sadly not all) have defended the traditional dogmatic and moral teaching of the Church, but none of them have taken the next and vital step: to instruct and detail how we go about receiving this all-powerful love of God called the Holy Spirit. How the Catholic Churc... Thomas E. Woods Best Price: $8.00 Buy New $9.06 (as of 05:30 UTC - Details)

When I was growing up before the Second Vatican Council, Catholics were seen as a group of guilt-ridden hypocrites. In other words, they might well know what they believe and how they should behave, but they do not do it. That is why they have to keep dashing off to confession every week before going to Mass. This might be a caricature, but like all caricatures it helps the less observant to see what might otherwise have escaped their attention. And that is that unlike the first Christians and their faithful descendants in later centuries who were inspired by the same Holy Spirit who animated Our Lord during His life on earth, they were not sufficiently open to receive God’s Holy Spirit, so their faith remained superficial if not merely nominal.

It is one thing to endlessly condemn the anthropomorphic heresies of Modernism—and feel a certain self-satisfaction in so doing. But that will achieve nothing without simultaneously teaching and detailing the theocentric spirituality of Catholicism. The question is: What must we do to receive God’s love so that one day we can say with St. Paul, “I live, no it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Then we will not only experientially know the living God and what He wants us to do but we will have received and continued to receive His Love to enable us to do it. We all know that Christ is Risen and that the love that the Father wants to give us through Him comes to us through the sacraments, most particularly through the Sacrificial Sacrament of the Mass. But what do we have to do in order to receive it?

Shortly before the contemporary crisis that we all now know has almost reached its nadir, Pope Benedict was inspired to answer this question not from His own teaching but through the teaching of a great medieval mystic whom he proposed to canonize. He died before he could personally canonize her, but his successor rubber-stamped his work and she was canonized in 2013. St. Angela of Foligno was a wife and a mother as well as a great mystic, so she is someone to whom we can all look for guidance on this $75,000 question. What must we do to prepare ourselves to receive God’s infinite loving that is always being poured out for us through Jesus Christ, our King?

Following the same teaching of Christ Himself, she said that the “one thing necessary” to receive this love is to go into what she calls the “Schola Divini Amoris,” the “School of Divine Love,” because this is the only place where human loving learns how to receive Divine Loving. Let me explain precisely what this means. The first thing Jesus told His listeners to do when He began to preach was to keep turning to love God throughout their daily lives, despite the temptations that kept drawing their attention elsewhere. In the Aramaic language in which Jesus preached, this continual turning back to God was called repenting. In essence, each act of repentance was, in effect, an act of love.

The more often a person performed such acts of love, the more it would open them to receive God’s love in return. This is the only love that would, as Jesus promised, eventually lead them to love others as He did—and then, eventually, to be united with God. Continually repenting or continually making acts of love is, therefore, of utmost importance, for it is the most important thing that any human being can learn in order to receive God’s love in return. That is why to speed up the process of learning how to love God, Our Lord taught people that, like Him, they should go to what St. Angela of Foligno called the School of Divine Love, to do and to do regularly and at speed precisely what Christ had understandably called “the one thing necessary.”

When we set aside some daily time to do “the one thing necessary,” we use vocal prayers, meditation, adoration, or contemplation to keep our attention fixed on God. I have written and spoken at length about these different forms of prayer elsewhere, so here I want to concentrate on something that happens to everyone when they go to pray—as it happened to Our Lord Himself—that will help us to understand what is, in fact, the very essence of prayer. I am referring to the hundred and one distractions and temptations that make so many people think that they cannot pray.

According to St. Teresa of Avila, we cannot pray without them; and, short of some sort of divine ecstasy, we will always have them. We cannot pray without them because each time we try to turn away from them in order to turn back to God, we have, in fact, made an act of repentance or an act of love. If, therefore, in the quarter of an hour or so that we have chosen to give to God in prayer we have a hundred distractions or temptations, it means we have made a hundred acts of love.

Vices are bad habits formed by continually performing evil actions; virtues are good habits formed by continually performing good actions. The human virtue of trying to love God can only be formed by continually trying to love Him. This is, of course, easy in sweetness and light; but our perseverance in darkness and aridity is far more meritorious and, therefore, far more effective when practiced in what St. Angela calls the School of Divine Love.

It is essential to realize that whenever we try to raise our hearts and minds to God in this School—most especially in darkness and aridity—then, in the very act of trying to do this, our free will is actively choosing to open our hearts to God, so God can, and always does, respond in kind. But, of course, His kind of love infinitely surpasses our kind of love. Nevertheless, because we pray within and together with His Son, Our Lord, His hypostatic and glorified body enables us to receive our Father’s love through Him. This love then begins the work of transforming our weak human love into a new hybrid form of loving in which our loving is so united with Christ’s loving that it can continually rise to receive the love of His Father in return.

St. Thomas Aquinas explains why, or rather how, God’s love, what the Fathers of the Church call the Pleroma, then begins to remake and reform us into His own image and likeness that can be seen to perfection in human form in Jesus Christ, Our Lord. With the required patience and perseverance in performing acts of love, a habit of loving is gradually formed that creates an inner disposition of heart and mind that enables God to lead us into contemplation, where we then begin to receive the fruits of contemplation.

Diary of a Psychosis: ... Woods Jr., Thomas E. Check Amazon for Pricing. St. Thomas Aquinas calls these fruits the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. That is why he insisted that our calling—our vocation in Christ—is to contemplate and to share the fruits of our contemplation with others. Without the infused theological virtues of love, faith, and hope, and without the infused cardinal virtues of wisdom, goodness, self-control, and fortitude, not to mention more than sixty infused moral virtues, we could never imitate Christ in whom all these infused virtues were perfectly exemplified.

That is why, on the first Pentecost Day, the same infinite life and love of the Holy Trinity who animated Christ when He was on earth is sent out in the form of the Holy Spirit—whose love alone can recreate us in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Just as all the colors of the spectrum are contained within a single shaft of light, as Sir Issac Newton discovered by passing light through a prism, so, also, are all the infused virtues—and all the fruits and all the supernatural gifts—contained within the love of the Holy Spirit.

The prayer, then, that you might have long since given up because you experienced nothing, and the distractions and temptations that made you think that prayer was impossible anyway, is, in fact, the way—and the only way—to your salvation, redemption, transformation, transfiguration, and glorification. There is no other way unless you believe in magic. Mere presence at the Mass, for instance, no matter how well it might be celebrated, without the sacrificial loving learned before you entered the Church that you then unite with Christ’s sacrificial loving, is to believe in magic. God only responds to love, not magic.

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