Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina.
O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me.
In our parish weekly bulletin, an excerpt from Pope Pius XI's encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus really lays out what we, as Christians need to do today. Keep in mind that this was in the early part of the 20th century. I'm sharing parts of the excerpt here. The Encyclical is Caritate Christi Compulsi.
"But to prayer we must also join penance, the spirit of penance, and the practice of Christian penance. Thus our Divine Master teaches us, whose first preaching was precisely penance: 'Jesus began to preach and to say, Do penance' (Matt. iv. 17). The same is the teaching of all Christian tradition, of the whole history of the Church. In the great calamities, in the great tribulations of Christianity, when the need of God's help was most pressing, the faithful either spontaneously, or more often following the lead and exhortations of their holy Pastors, have always taken in hand the two most mighty weapons of spiritual life: prayer and penance. By that sacred instinct, by which unconsciously as it were the Christian people is guided when not led astray by the sowers of tares, and which is none other than that 'mind of Christ' (I Cor. ii. 16) of which the Apostle speaks, the faithful have always felt immediately in such cases the need of purifying their souls from sin with contrition of heart, with the sacrament of reconciliation, and of appeasing divine Justice with external works of penance as well................
".....but nowadays there are some who would put aside external mortifications as things of the past; without mentioning the modern exponent of liberty, the 'autonomous man' as he is called, who despises penance as bearing the mark of servitude. As a fact the notion of the need of penance and expiation is lost in proportion as belief in God is weakened, and the idea of an original sin and of a first rebellion of man against God becomes confused and disappears........
"He who makes satisfaction to God for sin, recognized thereby the sanctity of the highest principles of morality, their internal binding power, the need of a sanction against their violation. Certainly one of the most dangerous errors of our age is the claim to separate morality from religion, thus removing all solid basis for any legislation. This intellectual error might perhaps have passed unnoticed and appeared less dangerous then it was confined to a few, and belief in God was still the common heritage of mankind, and was tacitly presumed even in the case of those who no longer professed it openly. But today, when atheism is spreading through the masses of the people, the practical consequences of such an error become dreadfully tangible, and realities of the saddest kind make their appearance in the world. In place of moral laws, which disappear together with the loss of faith in God, brute force is imposed, trampling on every right. Old-time fidelity and honesty of conduct and mutual intercourse extolled so much even by the orators and poets of paganism, now give place to speculation in one's own affairs as in those of other without reference to conscience. In fact, how can any contract be maintained, and what value can any treaty have, in which every guarantee of conscience is lacking? And how can there be talk of guarantees of conscience, when all faith in God and all fear of God has vanished? Take away this basis, and with it all moral law falls, and there is no remedy left to stop the gradual but inevitable destruction of peoples, families, the State, civilization itself.
"Penance then is, as it were, a salutary weapon placed in the hands of the valiant soldiers of Christ, who wish to fight for the defense and restoration of the moral order in the universe....."
There is much more, of course, before and after what was written here. I thought it apropos, with the destruction of our own country's moral order, and with the horrors taking place around the world. We must see that all this is caused by the increasing ignoring of God's laws, living our lives as if we are the center of life, we don't recognize our own sins, the obscenities and blasphemies against God, abortion, and on and on. We are being punished by God right now. How much prayer and penance is needed to turn His wrathful hand away from us? How Christian are we who claim to be Christians? 8/11/14
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