Throughout history God has always raised up great saints to help heal the church in moments of chaos like these. Where are these saints now? As has been written by others recently what feels most palpable in the Church right now is a deafening silence. Could it be that the ones God planned to send to us in this hour of need were prevented from being born by the widespread use of birth control and abortion in recent decades? Look at other great saints who have sustained the Church like St. Catherine of Siena, who was the 24th child born to her parents… The implications of this possibility are terrifying.
The Church is the Body of Christ, and every body is sustained by the heart. This is what I think is missing in the modern Church. Everywhere and every day, from the pulpits and the Magisterium, we hear exhortations to love our neighbor. This is the second greatest commandment and of course no one can underestimate its importance. But why does no one ever speak anymore of loving the Lord our God with “thy whole heart, thy whole soul, thy whole mind and all of thy strength” (Mark 12:30)? This love for Christ, our adorable Savior, the love He Himself gives in abundance to those who ask it reverently and earnestly of His Most Sacred Heart, this is where our love of neighbor must originate. The modern Church seeks to constantly give love away without drawing enough from its source. This is simply unsustainable.
If the Eucharist, the visible representation on Earth of the love contained in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is the “source and summit of the Christian life” as Lumen Gentium stated, where is the reverence for the Eucharist in the modern Church – where the priest turns his back to Christ in the tabernacle (if one can even see or find the tabernacle) and He is given out by unconsecrated hands to standing recipients who self-communicate? St. Peter Julian Eymard once said “An age prospers or dwindles in proportion to its devotion to the Holy Eucharist. This is the measure of its spiritual life and its faith, of its charity and its virtue.”
Herein lies the reason and the remedy for the sacrileges and heresies of our age. Bring back honor and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through profound reverence for Him in the Eucharist, in every Mass and in our daily lives, and the emphasis on receiving Him only in a state of grace, and we can avert schism in our Church. The progress Satan has made in weakening the Church can be reversed and many souls can be saved. God will restore to us “the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25) and an unequivocal consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as Cardinal Raymond Burke has proposed, can become the unanimous desire of the Magisterium. The long awaited triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary can become a reality.
Most Holy Trinity, through the intercession of the Queen of the Universe and her most Chaste Spouse and by virtue of your unfathomable and incomprehensible abyss of Divine Mercy, let that world be the one in which we get to see our children grow up. Blessed Imelda Lambertini and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us!
Andrea Chamberlain