The Church Hierarchical, the Church Critical, and the Church Mystical

"The sign of good Catholics would be, first and foremost, how they tried to love God with their whole minds and hearts, with their whole bodies and souls, and with their whole strength."

From Crisis

By David Torkington

The sign of good Catholics would be, first and foremost, how they tried to love God with their whole minds and hearts, with their whole bodies and souls, and with their whole strength.

"What are the signs that you would expect to find in a person that would enable you to judge whether or not they are good Catholics?" That is the first question I was asked when I went in to my first oral examination. I answered with uncharacteristic assertiveness,

That they give sincere and wholehearted assent to every article of the Creed, that they submit totally to the Magisterial Teaching of the Church, go to Mass every Sunday, follow the moral teaching of the Gospels, and regularly go to confession when they fail to practice it.

The smiles all around, the heads that nodded, and the distinction that I received proved that I had at least correctly presented the conventional wisdom that prevailed at the time.

However, after several years rereading the Gospels in the context of trying to practice meditation, I discovered that Jesus Christ would have given a different answer. The sign of good Catholics would be, first and foremost, how they tried to love God with their whole minds and hearts, with their whole bodies and souls, and with their whole strength. The sign that they are trying to do this would be demonstrated no longer by the way we love our neighbor as ourselves but much more; it is now by the way we love our neighbor as Jesus Christ Himself loves us (John 13:34).

Jesus Himself began by making it clear that now God the Father was present in Him. Remember what Jesus said to St. Philip at the Last Supper: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (John 14:10). The way to come to know and love the Father in the future, then, was by coming to know and love Jesus Christ. That is why we see a new form of prayer developing in apostolic times that would enable new converts to come to know and love God by coming to know and love Jesus Christ. Those who had already known Him—like the apostles, the first disciples, and Our Lady—spent hours telling new converts about the man who more and more of them had never seen.

This new means or method of enabling people to come to know God, as He revealed Himself in Jesus, came to be called meditation. The Gospels had not yet been written, but no matter; ancient peoples had prodigious memories, so they eagerly took in and retained the stories they were told and retold about Jesus—the most mature, loving, and adorable man who ever lived.

These stories were told not just each Sunday—sometimes by more than one apostle or disciple at Mass—but around the fireside in the evenings, where the Jews had heard and learned by heart the Old Testament. The object of these stories, however, was to set listeners on fire with love of the perfect, loving, Son of God, who had already set the storytellers on fire so that they, too, would come not just to know Him but to love Him.

This was the love that would enable the receivers of every age to be led on and into an even more profound form of prayer that has long since been forgotten by us—namely, contemplation. True love of whatever sort wants not just to be enthralled and besotted with their lover; it wants to be united with them. The problem is that although it may be possible to love someone who has been dead for one or two years, or even for one thousand or two thousand years, it is not possible to be united with them.

That is why, as the love of Christ reaches its high point in meditation and the desire for union reaches fever pitch, the Holy Spirit leads a person on and into contemplation, where they are led up and into Christ as He is now in Heaven in the act of contemplating the glory of God His Father. So from meditating on Christ as He once was in the past, a person is led on and into Christ as He is now in Heaven—not just to share in His being, but in His acting. In other words, to share in His contemplation of His Father, so that as we contemplate the Father in, with, and through Him, we can receive, in return, what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation.

All that I have said leads to one conclusion on which all else depends. We have to freely choose to make a sacrifice. That sacrifice is to do but one thing on which all else depends. Jesus calls this “the one thing necessary,” and that is to love Him and then—in, with, and through Him—come to know and love the Father. The sacrifice that we have to make is the sacrifice of the most precious commodity anybody has, and that is their time.

Our Lady spoke to the Children of Fatima about making the sacrifice of 15 minutes. If anyone were to make this, or at least keep trying to make 15 minutes of their time each day to love Christ as the Early Christians did, then their whole lives will gradually be changed to the glory of God—and to their own personal happiness and to the happiness of others. What begins as a drudgery will eventually become like a drug that you cannot do without, as the Holy Spirit draws you ever more deeply into the love of Christ.

At present in the “Church,” it would seem that there are, among many others, three divisions of “believers.” Firstly, there is the “Church” Hierarchical, then the “Church” Critical, and, thirdly, the “Church” Mystical. Remember, the word mystical comes from the Greek word meaning invisible or unseen.

Before I make a few timely remarks about the Church Critical, let me make myself clear. There are some highly qualified theologians and reporters who do us all a great service by their sharp analytical criticisms of the present Church Hierarchical. Without them, the serpentine subtlety and subterfuge that is continually used to undermine orthodoxy could have eluded us or even, as intended, deceived us into applauding the pope for his charity. This “charity” is often no more than the outer wrapping that hides the half-heresies within.

Read, for instance, his letter of support for the LGBTQ+ promoter of abortion and same-sex marriage who calls herself Archbishop of Canterbury—when the pope in whose footsteps he chose to follow, Leo XIII, condemned Anglican orders anyway. This is not charity—particularly when, in his letter to her, he calls on the Holy Spirit to bless her future work, work that would ipso facto excommunicate a practicing Catholic from the Church.

It is one thing to treat other religions with courtesy, kindness, and respect; but charity does not demand that they should publicly receive our blessing, especially if you happen to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the head of our Church, who died an agonizing death for the Truth. Without the watchfulness of contemporary guardians of our Faith, the innocent and the unwary might be deceived, as many are, into praising what should be condemned.

Sadly, however, there is a danger for many in the Church Critical, with one or two notable exceptions. The danger is that they can spend all their time, year in and year out, week in and week out, day in and day out, criticizing and searching for more and more evidence of the evil machinations used by the Church Hierarchical to deceive the faithful. Unfortunately, their endless daily searching, to prove time and time again what they know anyway, can become the displacement activity that prevents them from doing what Christ calls “the one thing necessary.”

That “one thing necessary” is the one and only act that can open them to the Holy Spirit, through Whom alone the salvation can come that will enable the “True Church Tyrannized” to rise to its former glory. So these critics become drugged not by the love of God but by their fascination with the evil that endlessly lures them like addicts into a mental wasteland that makes them spiritually impotent. As St. Augustine pointed out to the young of his day, evil for sinners does what goodness does for saints, it has the ability to allure, captivate, and enthrall them with what can lead them to spiritual suicide.

The only ultimate and long-term hope for the Church rests with those who belong to the Church unseen—the Church invisible, or the Church Mystical—who are prepared to make the daily sacrifices to do “the one thing necessary.” That is to try to practice the most important of all the New Commandments: to love God with your whole mind and heart, with your whole body and soul, and with your whole strength. Everything else that you need, and God wants to give you, will follow automatically.

But for the vast majority, the major debilitating stumbling block is that they find it all but impossible to sacrifice. And yet, as the cross that we wear around our necks, hang in our home, and place in our schools and churches continually reminds us, this is the beginning, the middle, and the end of a true Christian life in imitation of Christ. Christ and Christ Crucified is the very foundation of all the teachings of our Faith (1Corinthians 1:23).

Can a person call themselves a Catholic if they are not prepared to sacrifice? We are quick enough to insist that, unlike Protestants, we believe that the Mass is a Sacrifice, the Sacrifice of Christ. But His Sacrifice will be pointless for us if we do not make sacrifices ourselves to unite them with His. “Yes, I do believe that Christ sacrificed His life for us, but I am not prepared to make any sacrifice for Him. I need every moment of my life to do what I choose to do and, as Frank Sinatra would put it, ‘to do it my way.’”

Be clear about this, we are not asked to do the impossible. We are asked simply to do one thing, and that is to sacrifice sufficient daily time to put into practice the first commandment, as the early Christians did. The power to do the impossible will be given later.

If we do this, we will first witness how the Holy Spirit will change and transform us. Then we will witness how He will then begin to change the present pagan world, as He did before, through us. If we do not even attempt to put into practice what was called in the early Church “The Great Mandatum,” then we are no more than nominal Catholics destined to serve a long-term sentence in Purgatory; that is if we are very fortunate.

And if you think that purgatory is rather like a featureless Limbo Land, where all you have to do is to put up with boredom until you have served your time, then, as the saints would tell you, you are in for a terrible and painful shock. Do you really think that a life of selfishness in which you continually and knowingly turn your back on God’s Love does not have to be paid for?

God may well be Love, but He is Justice too! Don’t believe the quislings in Rome who downplay the horrors of Hell and the purifications of Purgatory. They blaspheme when they belittle the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, the word of Christ Himself, and when they joke about the “Fatima Hallucinations” in Portugal—and every “Hallucination” since—in which Our Lady confirms and reconfirms the Hell they want to deny. They are “whistling in the dark” not so much to convince you but to convince themselves that the Judas in them will never meet his Nemesis. However, Christ said that it would have been better if Judas had never been born, and one day the same may be said of them.

Many—who in this life are all too busy enjoying themselves, or even trying to change the Church—think that they can put off until Purgatory the purification that they rightly believe they will be asked to undergo in contemplative prayer. They make two major mistakes. Firstly, they are dicing with death, their own eternal death. Trying to live the Spiritual life is rather like trying to walk up a downward escalator. The moment you stop going forward is the moment when you start going backward; nor do you return to where you started but to where your sins have determined.

Secondly, their selfishness means that they will not be able to fulfill the last commandment of Christ’s, which is to go out and preach the Gospel to all nations. Those who are prepared to undergo their purification in this life, and come therefore to enjoy the fruits of contemplation, will become the perfect apostles that God can use in this world to bring about His kingdom on earth “as it is in heaven.” The French mystic Fr. Louis Lallemant, S.J., said that you can do more in a month with contemplation than in a lifetime without it!

That is precisely why we have been called by God in baptism to become apostles. True converts come not because of words alone but by the love of God that possesses those who speak them. In an article like this I can do little more than point to the prayer life that our forebears have practiced before us; so I have produced a free 15-part course, and much more, detailing traditional Catholic prayer for those who want to try to give 15 minutes a day to doing “the one thing necessary” by trying to replicate today what our forebears did almost two thousand years ago.