Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
Sunday, October 11, 2015
XX Sunday After Pentecost
Last Wednesday was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. It is a feast beloved by so many Catholics,
for the Rosary is one of the most popular, in the best sense of that word,
prayers among Catholics.
And rightly so. For the power of the Rosary lies in its
essence as prayer, in the affirmation of our faith that begins this prayer,
where we affirm our faith in the oldest of all the Creeds, where we pray that
prayer taught to us by the Lord Jesus himself in which we address God as our
Father, where we use the angelic salutation to Mary as the means, the
springboard, to a contemplation of those events in the life of our Lord that
are the historical bases of our faith. For
Christianity, like Judaism, is an historical faith, its basis is in our time
and place; it is not merely other worldly but is linked deeply and finally in
our time and place in this world. The lynch pin of the Rosary lies in the
prologue of the Gospel of St. John: and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among
us full of grace and truth. It is the Incarnation of God in the flesh, the
making of the infinite Word of God flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, that
lies at the heart not only of the Rosary but the whole Christian faith itself.
Both Judaism and
Christianity are historical religions, not merely in the sense that they have
an origin and unfolding in history but also that they are convinced that God
works in human history, even if many times that working is not clear, but
nevertheless real. How God works in human history is not clear, it is not
something that one can point to with definition, but nevertheless, one can and
must insist that God acts in human history and his will for us lies at the
heart of history even if we cannot see this clearly. God could not save us who live in human
history if he not only entered human history in the person of his Son but also
if he does not continue to guide the course of human events. The Jews understood this deeply. For the Old
Testament writers there is no doubt the history of the Jews is the history of
the relationship between the Jews as God’s chosen people and God himself.
The Jews never believed in objective history, as if history
is a dispassionate recording of mere events through time where the viewpoint of
the observer or writer has no relationship to the events themselves. This brings us to the origin of the feast of
Our Lady of the Rosary, whose origins lie not only in piety but in history,
specifically the history of the West. If
we had been alive in the 16th century we would have been
existentially aware of not only of the religious upheavals caused by the
Protestant Reformation, not only of the strong and necessary response of
Catholic Counter-Reformation, not only of the exploration of what was known as
the New World, but also of the constant and ever more serious threat to Christian
civilization by the Turkish-Muslim determination to conquer the Christian
West. Things rapidly came to a head in
the late sixteenth century when the Muslim forces captured Cyprus and besieged
Malta. The plan of the Turks was to
attack Rome itself, and remember what time this was in the history of the West,
to attack and conquer Rome and so establish Islam not only in Europe but in the
New World as well. Under Pope St Pius V a coalition of forces gathered from
Spain, Genoa and the Papal States was assembled to oppose the forces of the
Turks. The Pope, St Pius V, no touchy
feely guy, asked the whole Christian world to pray the Rosary for the success
of the battle against the Turks and the preservation of Christian civilization.
For that was what was at stake:
Christian civilization, something not perfect, and yet open to
perfection through the Christian faith.
So the Pope led a Rosary procession in Rome, and Christians throughout
Europe prayed the Rosary. And despite
being outnumbered in ships and in men, the Christian forces prevailed at the
battle of Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. And in response the Pope instituted the feast
of our Lady of Victory. The next Pope
changed the name of the feast from Our Lady of Victory to our Lady of the
Rosary. But if you go to the church of
S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome, a church I love because it is so over the top
baroque, you will see there a painting of the battle of
Lepanto and Our Lady offering her intercessions for the Christian forces. And so in this way Our Lady of Victory became
our Lady of the Rosary. But it was still
a local feast. It was not until the
battle of Vienna in 1683, in which the Muslim forces of the Ottoman empire were
at the gates of Vienna, the entrance to Europe, and where the great Polish
Catholic John Sobieski rallied and led the troops against the Muslim
forces-here once again Christian civilization was saved when Pope Clement XI in thanksgiving for this
deliverance from the hands of the enemy extended the feast of Our Lady of the
Rosary to the universal Church.
And so you see that the roots of this wonderful feast lie
not only in the piety of the people but also in history, the history of the
Christian West. And this feast is rooted
in the peculiar understanding of history that Christians share with Jews that
God acts in history in behalf of truth against error. And while it is dangerous
to declare at any given time what is God’s action in history, especially to
declare that his action is in behalf of this nation or that, this group or
that, and this pertains to papal
conclaves as well, the Catholic Christian cannot believe that God does not act
in history in behalf of what is true and what is consonant with his will. To
deny this is to fall back on Newton’s God who created all things and got bored
and went away and left us on our own. Or
worse: to believe that if there is a
God, he is ultimately not concerned with the presence of truth in the word he
created.
And so some may conclude from all of this that we once again
stand at Lepanto and at the gates of Vienna, given the increasing Muslim presence
in Europe and the West and the strain of violent Islam that is wreaking havoc
in the Middle East today. That certainly bears consideration. But the enemy of
Christian civilization, that is, Western civilization, today is mainly the
decadent Christian West. We are the enemy.
It is not the Vandals and Goths who threaten us with pillaging and
destruction. It is not the Franks and Gauls, who after all became the French
who became the arbiters of good taste.
It is we who are the enemy, we who have succumbed to the powerful siren
call of that secularism that destroys any objective basis for beauty, goodness
and truth.
And what is the antidote to the poison that spreads through
our society, that not only denies the truth of the Christian faith but that
also insists that there is no truth at all except in the totally subjective
sense? I dare say what the antidote is,
and I say it knowing that in saying it I am a worm but no man, in saying it I
am speaking into the wind that will bear my words away as soon as I have spoken
them. It is true that there is not just
one antidote to the contemporary poison that threatens us in the name of
freedom and mercy and love. But one part
of the antidote is the worship of God in Spirit and in truth. And yet the
worship of God in the Mass has been broken for so many years, broken in the
sense that the worship of God is confused with the worship of man, of each
other, that in the words of Roman Guardini modern man is no longer capable of
worship of God, because he is totally self-referential and so totally consumed
with himself.
One of the antidotes
to the poison that afflicts the world and the Church is how we worship in this
parish. The priest and the people,
according to the Tradition of the Church, face God together to pray and to
offer the Holy Sacrifice in every Mass celebrated in this church. The altar rail has been restored, and our
people are welcomed to come to kneel before the Lord as did the Wise Men at the
Epiphany and as did St. Peter himself in his unworthiness before the Lord. The beauty of this church has been restored
so that it is now a fitting place for the worship of Almighty God to whom we
must give our best. This parish is where children of all ages are learning how
to sing that music that lies at the heart of Catholic worship, namely Gregorian
chant and polyphony and in doing so are transformed by their entering into the
beauty of the Catholic musical tradition. But above all --and this is no put down of nor
prejudice against those who come to the Novus Ordo celebrations of the Mass
that is the Ordinary form of the Mass, either in English or in Spanish, who are
in fact the majority of this parish and who are faithful in the deepest sense
of that word. Nevertheless, it is the
presence of the Traditional Mass in this parish that forms the core of the
renewal of this parish and from here the renewal of the whole Church will come
forth. The Traditional Mass lies at the very heart of Christian civilization.
The history and development of the Roman Mass is coterminous with the history
and development of Christian civilization.
And it continues to be where Catholics can enter the sacred Tradition
itself whose center is Christ and thereby be strengthened to fight the battle
for that civilization that has Christ at its center, and therefore has Love at
its center. The recovery of the Tradition of the Church and its becoming a
living reality in our people at this time in history is the key to the future
of the Church and to winning the battle against the foes of Christian
civilization.
May our Lady of the
Rosary pray for us that we have the courage to fight for truth, goodness and
beauty and the strength to do it with that Love that has already conquered in
the world, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
