(maybe with a little help from French Catholics?).
From Fr Z's Blog
The Church and her Lord cannot be separated. The Church and the Catholic Christian cannot separated. The Lord endured His Passion and Cross. So too must the Church and individual Catholics endure a passions and crosses. The Church is, I think, entering into a particularly savage time of Passion and Cross. So, too, her members, if they are faithful and have not, as Paul warns the Romans, conformed themselves to the world.
A poignant tweet came from Robert Card. Sarah.
“The profanations continue to increase in Europe. Recent acts upon statues of the Virgin Mary in French churches demonstrate how much these gestures reveal barbaric hatred. They call for reactions. Catholics can can no longer remain silent.” +RS
I greatly admire Card. Sarah. Read his books and you get a sense of the depth and steel within his gentle soul.
When someone like Card. Sarah starts to say, “ENOUGH! We need to ACT!”, then it is time to act. Appropriately, but with strength.
The only way that will happen is if we can
RECOVER and REVITALIZE our CATHOLIC IDENTITY.
I’ve written a thousand times here.
How we worship God, in our sacred liturgical worship, is an essential element of our identity as Catholics. We are our rites. They form us and tell us who we are. No wonder the enemy is attacking statues of Mary in our churches in the Church’s “eldest daughter”! The serpent went for Eve, too!
Every initiative, all of our Catholic Thing, starts with worship and all of it is connected to worship. It all must then be brought back to worship.
Without properly ordered worship, we don’t know who we are. We are our rites.
Couple that with ignorance of or the defiance of the content of the Faith, and we wind up with flocks who have no idea who they are as Catholics, who can’t explain themselves, share what they believe.
If that is what we have become, then why should anyone listen to us? We will be easily driven from the public square. That’s what’s happening.
This is yet another reason why Summorum Pontificum is so important.
I’m with Card. Sarah. We must act.
If statues are being attacked in France, then we have to react where we are too. What can we do?
How about organizing a recitation of the Rosary and Litany of Loreto in reparation? How about a day of reflection with a Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin? How about obtaining, or restoring a statue of Mary?
What else can you do, if you can’t go to France and stand guard in a church?
Augustine points out that when there is charity, there are no distances.
How can you act?
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