Faith and the Role of Our Lady
Summary of Headings
Announcements
Today is the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost and several announcements. Since it's the third Sunday of the month, as usual, we will have the second collection for the Priory today as opposed to the Building Fund. So your help is much appreciated in this regard. Also we'll have the blessing of religious articles after Mass. So please make sure in a timely fashion you get whatever it is you want blessed into the table in the back hallway so we can get them blessed. Also we'll have questions and answers in the session of questions and answers after this Mass as usual on the third Sunday. So those who are interested, have questions, or just want to hear the answers, please stick around. We'll probably start about a half hour after Mass is completed. We've been having issues with people leaving the church. People coming at times outside of the Mass, leaving things open, or the alarms turned off, or the like. Now I will say that at least one of the priests is guilty of this on occasion. But don't worry, I straightened him out. But the point is that it does happen. It's been happening too frequently. So please, if you're the last ones here, if you come in just to say some prayers, if you don't know the alarm code or anything else, that's perfectly fine. But just make sure all the doors are locked before you leave. And if you have any questions, you can contact Mr. Ron Ramos, who is the coordinator, or Santos Ramirez, who is the security man. So please make sure you do take good care of this. This is the house of God. We are supposed to preserve it. This is the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord humbles himself to appear before us in the most vulnerable way possible. So we are given the charge of protecting and taking care of him. December the 7th, so in three weeks, we will have a market day after the three Masses. We are looking for people to volunteer to be vendors. People who might want to sell, I don't know, artwork, baked goods, things that you've made or things that you have, or things that you'd like to donate that we could sell, whatever it is. But we're looking for vendors. We're looking for vendors, and there's a sign-up sheet in the vestibule. So please make sure you sign up. If anyone has any questions about that, please contact Joy Arias or Mirna Mendez with any questions. Advent is coming up, and we have, of course, lots of things in the bookstore to suit your every need. So there's things for Advent, for Christmas, for Christmas. For all that. So please do come and take a look. Especially calendars, by the way. We have next year's calendars, so you can be among the first to get them. Please make sure you hurry up and do that. The end of each Mass we are doing today, we are doing an act of reparation for the attacks against the titles of Our Lady from the Vatican. Namely, the titles of Mediators of All Graces and Co-Redemptrix. So what that's going to look like is, you may have noticed that we had a couple of little additions to the Rosary before Mass. But now at the end of each Mass, we're going to first recite the Litany, as is given to everybody on the cards that were put out before Mass. With the invocations that are granted there. As well as we're going to sing the Stabat Mater. So please make sure that you follow along. And so that will be right at the conclusion of Mass. And then we'll process out. And lastly, I didn't get a chance to tell you last week that I was going back up to Jacksonville to get more tests done and the like. But I did, this last week. And I appreciate your prayers just in general because everything is still clear. So thank you very much for that. I am very appreciative. The Epistle of the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost is taken from the Gospel of John. From St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, Chapter 3. Brethren, be ye followers of me, and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you weeping that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is their shame, who mind earthly things. But our conversation is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our loneliness, made like unto the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself. Therefore, my brethren, dearly beloved, and most desired, my joy and my crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. I beg of Avodah, and I beg syndicate, to be of one mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also, my sincere companion, help those women who have labored with me in the Gospel, with Clement and the rest of my fellow laborers, whose names are in the book of life. And the gospel? Second, the gospel according to St. Matthew chapter 9. At that time, as Jesus was speaking to the multitudes, behold, a certain ruler came up and adored him, saying, Lord, my daughter is even now dead, but come lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. And Jesus, rising up, followed him and with his disciples. And behold, a woman who was troubled with an issue of blood twelve years came behind him and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself, If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed. But Jesus, turning and seeing to her, Be of good heart, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour. When Jesus was coming to the house of the ruler and saw the minstrels and the multitude making a tumult, he said, Give place, for the girl is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. And when the multitude was put forth, he went in and took her by the hand. And the maid arose. And the fame thereof went abroad into all that country. Thus for the gospel. Please be seated. Please note also, I should have mentioned it earlier, that the district has asked us to pray that version of the litany along with the invocations at the end of the litany. Each day after our daily rosary, because we should do our daily rosary every day, in reparation for what was done between now, from today, on November 16th, all the way to January 11th, the Feast of the Holy Family. So please make sure you take them home with you and make sure you study them, make sure you use them. And again, be a part of that act of reparation. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Amen. Such a beautiful thing, the Lord says when the lady touches his garment with such faith, and he says, Because this is what faith does. It makes us whole. Obviously, it's symbolic in the physical form that it gives to her in this Mass, in this gospel. But at the same time, the faith completes us. It perfects us. Without faith, we are blind. Without faith, we are spiritually dead. Without faith, we are slaves of sin and of our past. Without faith, we are not in the right direction. The faith is given to us so that we may find and see God in all things. That we may be his faithful servants in all things. That is why we have the faith. And to make sure we have that faith, and to protect the faith, and as well as to expound the faith, God gave us his Holy Mother, the Church, to make sure that the deposit of the faith would never change. The deposit of the faith would only expand and increase and be more clear. And that is clearly defined. Which is why the declaration of the Vatican about the titles of Our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces and Co-Redemptrix is such a blow to Our Lady. It's such a blow to our faith as well. And it's a betrayal of the office that the Vatican is supposed to hold, which is that not only the protector of the faith, but the one who defines and declares and clarifies the faith for us. If there is confusion, they are the ones we turn to. Or supposed to be able to turn to, to find out exactly what is meant. There is a certain amount of conflict, shall we say, and opinions about certain ideas. Well then, the Church is the one who has the final say. Rome is the one who is supposed to declare exactly what is the fact. Just as an example, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was not a declared and defined dogma of the Church until the 19th century. Before that, there was a lot of debate, including the greatest thing, theologian of all, St. Thomas Aquinas, once in a while making an error when he would talk about it, because that was part of the common speech. It came from a good place, but he also submitted his judgment entirely to the judgment of the Church. When the Church was going to define the doctrine, he would have fully accepted it. People are talking about John Henry Newman as well, as being a liberal or whatever else, being opposed to the centralization of all authority in the papacy. But he also openly stated that, regardless of his personal opinions of what might be politically correct in the environment in which he was in England at that time, if the Council found that the Pope was the head of the Church, he would submit himself to it. And that is what the Council found, the First Vatican Council, and so he accepted it. We must also have that same spirit of faithful acceptance and subordination to the teachings, of the doctrine, according to what the Church gives us. So when the Church, when the Vatican actually comes up with something erroneous, it is a massive problem. Because it betrays all the confidence we're supposed to have in her. It betrays the very essence of the core of their purpose. Why the Vatican exists is to protect and illumine the faith for the faithful. It is supposed to be a guide, not a place to be. It is supposed to be a place to get lost and confused. What was said? It was not a formal condemnation. The Church doesn't really do that anymore, as we well know, unfortunately. It was not a condemnation of those titles. The idea that Our Lady is the Mediatrix of all graces and she is the co-redemptrix causes a lot of controversy, shall we say. During the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Lefebvre and the other Fathers of the Cetas Internationalis put together a document to define Our Lady as Mediatrix of all graces. Asking the Council to formally and finally proclaim infallibly that Our Lady is the Mediatrix of all graces. It was turned away for two reasons, both of which were more specious than we can believe. One was that this Council is not an ecumenical Council, it is a pastoral Council. We're not here to define or to condemn. We are here not to make infallible statements, but to provide guidance, pastoral guidance. The second reasoning was because it might cause confusion and problems and discord with our so-called separated brethren, which is their euphemism for Protestants. Our response, very much like what Archbishop Lefebvre's was, should be, well that's their problem. They don't have Our Lady as their mother. We want them to. We want them to have her as their mother. But we can't denigrate her to make that happen. We can't dishonor her. We can't make her to make that happen. This time, what the explanation was, was these are confusing titles. They confuse the very concept of the redemptive work of our Lord. They confuse people about who is the real Redeemer. Now quite honestly, I actually find that ridiculous. But, if they say so, again, that's not our problem. Our problem is, if there is confusion, we don't remove those titles from Our Lady or tell people they shouldn't use them, which is what they did. But rather we should explain the title so everybody knows what they mean. That is the Church's purpose. That is the purpose of the Vatican's teaching power. They are supposed to define and declare and clarify and explain. They did not do that. On the contrary, they took the conciliatory way out. I'm trying very hard to be charitable. And they removed Our Lady, removed two titles from Our Lady's lexicon. This is an offense to Our Mother. So let's talk about the terms that were being removed from her. First one, Mediatrix of All Graces. First of all, what is grace? Grace is the life of God that dwells in our souls. It is a created form of the life of God that is given to us so that we may have the very life of God and possess Him entirely within our souls. It is a supernatural life. So we are no longer just humans. We are now adopted children of God. Participants in the very nature and essence of God Himself. That is what grace is. That is how God created humanity all those millennia ago. But because of sin, that life was no longer accessible to us. We were cut off from divine life. We were cut off from the life of grace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, through His suffering and death on the cross and His resurrection, grace was able to come back into the world. That is how grace came back into the world. But what was the means for Him to come into this world to do that? It was Our Lady. Our Lord asked permission through the angel Gabriel to use Our Lady as His instrument so that He could come here to bring grace back to this world. She was the essential instrument in the plan of salvation that brought Christ to this world to bring grace back to us. And as such, she is the Mediatrix of Graces. Not in essence, because she is not God. Christ is God. Therefore, the grace that He gives us is His own life. It is not her life, but it is the life she brought into this world. So she is the Mediatrix of all graces. Not by nature, by instrumentality. She is the first and chief instrument of the grace of God, and therefore she is the Mediatrix of all graces. Because all grace comes from Christ. He is the source of all grace. He is grace itself. And she is the one who gave Him to us. Therefore. More than that, not only did she give her fiat, her let it be done to me according to thy word, to the angel Gabriel at the moment of the Annunciation, but during the wedding at Cana, she is the one who pushed Him out of His private life for the 30 years that He had in His life. She was the one who put Him on the road to Calvary to begin His actual labor of redemption. To actually win grace back for us through the crucifixion and death. Because He was the one who said, my hour has not yet come. But she is the one who pushed Him out and told Him to perform that miracle. Which started His public life. She is the Mediatrix of graces twice over. Co-redemptrix. Again, the church has never disputed the idea, or never disputed the principle that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Redeemer. He is the only one. We know this. He is the only one by His nature. Because He is God. Sin was committed by man, but it was committed against God. Therefore it is an infinite offense. The only person, the only being that could actually repair an infinite offense is infinite God Himself. But because it came from the humans, it should be a human who would make that sacrifice that would cause that redemption. So therefore we have the beautiful hypostatic union of our Lord Jesus Christ. God to forgive the sin, and human to be able to repair the sin. Again, by His very nature, He is the Redeemer. Because that is what He did. His labor was one great act of obedience, serving His Father, so that we could be redeemed. So that grace could come back to the world. So that our souls have a chance of heaven. That was His labor. He is the Redeemer. But each and every one of us can participate in His redemption. Each and every one of us can participate in His redemption by uniting ourselves to His sacrifice, by being a part of His labor of love in saving our souls. By volunteering. By voluntarily and willfully accepting to choose to do His will above all other things. To choose Him above all things. To love Him above all things. That is how we can actively participate in our own redemption. Most specifically by coming to the Mass and participating in the offering of the same sacrifice that won us the opportunity of heaven yet again. And being an active part in it. A beautiful thing. So if we can participate in our own redemption, how much more so could Our Lady? Because whatever intention that we put forward to unite ourselves to the will of God, to obey the will of God, to try to embrace the will of God absolutely, to love Him above all things, to sacrifice ourselves on the same altar as Him, She did infinitely better than we could. Well, not infinitely, but the most possible. Without being infinite. She is the perfect creature. She is the only creature whose union of will to that of God is inseparable. She cannot, we cannot distinguish between her will and God's will. It is so perfectly united to God's will. She is the only creature that we can say that about. She is the queen of all creatures because she is the mother of God Himself. So therefore, the excellence with which she offers herself and sacrifices herself, participates in the redemption, a redemptive act of our Lord Jesus Christ, is perfect. She is the only creature we can say that about. And so therefore, she deserves the title, above everybody else, of being a co-redeemer, or redeeming with God. People can get a little hung up over the term, or the prefix, co-redeemer, which comes from the Latin, con, which just means with. We think that it means an equality. But for example, the chairman of the board can have a co-chair, which is higher. Well, the chairman. A co-host on a television program. The host is, of course, the first seat. Co-host, second seat. Things like that. St. Thomas Aquinas explains it as being instrumentality again. We can talk about somebody being a part of something else, through instrumentality and not through essence. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the redeemer because of who He is, because of what He is. He was created, excuse me, He was put on this earth for that purpose. To redeem our souls. Our Lady was brought into this world, so that He could do that work. So she was an instrument in doing that work, and therefore she is co-redemptrix. Again, she is the instrument beyond all instruments. We can say that the Romans who executed our Lord were also instruments in the death of our Lord. That's true. But they were unwilling because they didn't know what they were doing, and they were sinful while doing so. Our Lady was doing everything willingly and willfully, and accepting it wholly and entirely, and in perfect union with His will, regardless of what it meant for her. The other aspect is how much she sacrificed in union with our Lord. She sacrificed Him every bit as much as He sacrificed Himself. Obviously on a different level. His sacrifice is infinite. Hers is the closest thing to it. There's many images from the ancient church, the first centuries of the church, where Our Lady is depicted in priestly garments, like with the chasuble and everything. Later that was taken out because the Vatican said, well, that could promote some confusion about if she was a priest. She was not a priest, but she performed the work of a priest in sacrificing her son. The priest performs his duties on the altar in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. She did it in perfect union with Him, but never as Christ. She sacrificed Him. From the moment she received the Annunciation, she was sacrificing her son to God for us. She earned the title of co-redemptrix. Not by nature, not by her essence, but by her instrumentality and her mission and her perfection. These are the truths of the Holy Spirit, the truths of these two titles. It wasn't that hard to explain. I hope everybody understands it now. Surely the great theologians in the Vatican, or supposedly, could explain it in a way that the entire world could understand it. Rather than denigrate her by telling us not to use those titles for her. These are not new titles. They go back centuries, more than a millennia. This is nothing new. The concept of Our Lady as holding these two offices goes back to the very first years of the Church. There is no need for them to have done this, except to conciliate or to coddle the hurt feelings of people who are not even Catholic, who are not even her children. They would stab their mother in the back to try to protect the feelings of people who don't recognize her as their mother. It's the ultimate betrayal. We can cast stones all day long. We can talk about how horrible it is, what a terrible thing it is, and we should. But, that is not where we should stay. The fact that it was done is horrific. But now we've got to think about what are we going to do about it. By the grace of God, for better or for worse, we're in the situation where, through the madness of the world and the madness in the Church, we are the ones left holding the standard. Not so that we can conquer Rome and make all things back in His image or whatever else. That's not really our mission. We're just holding on by the skin of our teeth to the standard that was given to us. We're just holding on to tradition and we are just preaching it and professing it as it must be preached and professed no matter what. That is all we are supposed to do. Throughout the storm, we hold fast. Nothing else. We must grip closer. We must grip more tightly the doctrine of Our Lady. We must get to know her better. We must, must, must study her better. Get to know her better. She should become our first refuge when we are in crisis. She should become the light when we are in darkness. She should become all things to us. It's easy for us to give her lip service, but now she must be truly our Queen and Mother. This is not an option anymore. We must make reparation for what was done. We're not responsible for it. But we better start buckling down. We have to be more devout to Our Lady. When we pray our rosaries every day, which if we don't, let's make that our first step. If we don't pray our rosary every day, hopefully as a family, let's make that our first stop. We have to pray and we have to pray together as best we can. Let it not be just absolute pandemonium and confusion or something we do kind of as a secondary thing while we're focused on something else. Let's start by praying the rosary better. Make it a true meditation. Maybe throw in a little, very brief meditation, minute meditation between decades, something. Really make the rosary a consecration of ourselves and our families to the service of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We also need to pray. We also need to make sure that we start following her example better. Her silence, her peace, her gentleness, at the same time her ferocity. If we want to learn how to be more like Christ, we're going to learn it by trying to be more like Mary. As is frequently said, adies un per mariam, to Jesus through Mary. If we want to understand and appreciate him better, she is the one to give him to us. She already has. We have, on December 8th, we're going to celebrate the Immaculate Conception. So on December 7th, after all the Masses, we're going to offer to everybody to perform the true devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the method of Saint Louis de Montfort. It's essentially a perfect slavery. We hand everything over to her, all of the credit and the debit that we have in our spiritual life, and we let her deal with it. We surrender ourselves completely to her. Put better, we surrender entirely to Christ through her. It's actually the consecration to the Eternal Word through the Blessed Virgin Mary. Amen. And that is how we are supposed to live our lives. She needs to be our guide and our support. Let's start trusting her a little bit more. But let's also make reparation. There are billions of people who, even if they don't speak badly about her, don't speak of her at all on this world right now. She's supposed to be all of our mothers. Let's ask her to help us conquer them. She's as terrible as an army arrayed for battle. Let us ask her to help us win this war for souls, ours first. Let us faithfully serve her and serve her Son through her. Let us turn to her to find Him in every darkness, in every storm, in every problem, in every way of life. And let us be so grateful that we have such an excellent mother and queen and general guiding us through the terrors of the night. And we may be able to make any sort of reparation we can for any offense against her, because an offense against her is an offense against Christ. And let us turn ourselves wholly and entirely into her faithful children just as He is. So that we may be able to be eternally happy in their kingdom in heaven. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Amen.
Summary
Today is the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost and several announcements. Since it's the third Sunday of the month, as usual, we will have the second collection for the Priory today as opposed to the Building Fund. So your help is much appreciated in this regard. Also we'll have the blessing of religious articles after Mass. So please make sure in a timely fashion you get whatever it is you want blessed into the table in the back hallway so we can get them blessed. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Amen. Such a beautiful thing, the Lord says when the lady touches his garment with such faith, and he says, Because this is what faith does. It makes us whole. Obviously, it's symbolic in the physical form that it gives to her in this Mass, in this gospel. But at the same time, the faith completes us. It perfects us. Without faith, we are blind. Without faith, we are spiritually dead. Without faith, we are slaves of sin and of our past. Without faith, we are not in the right direction. The faith is given to us so that we may find and see God in all things. That we may be his faithful servants in all things. That is why we have the faith.