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I cannot
connect with statements that Saints were either accosted, or so spiritually
“moved” by such revelations of Christ or Mary coming to
them—person to person. . . . I’ve been sifting through
this in prayers and meditations. . . . My energy is spent.
And it’s spent to the point, that if it means to give up Catholicism,
I’ll do it, as a means of trying to find something new—trying to
find one last hope of energy that will revive the neurons in my brain-dead
soul. and please don’t take this the wrong way—REALLY, I mean
it—I’m not giving up Catholicism to be rebelliously blasphemous.
It’s just that I would rather give up on the daily Eucharist, if it
means that I can have my soul and my psyche revived in a different
church—everyone claims to have “theeee one true doctrine”
—someone’s gotta be lying. Will Lutheran/ Methodist/
non-denominational/ Pentecostal pastors go to hell because of their denial
of the daily Eucharist? Hmmm. . . I wouldn’t think that Heaven is just
for Catholics because of their belief and participation in the Eucharist.
Hence, why not leave the Catholic Church?
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 o one goes to heaven who does not
love perfectly.
Consider this statement carefully
though. It does not mean that anyone can be perfect in this life. Nor does it
mean that anyone has to be perfect in order to love.
It means that in Purgatory, in the fires of God’s love,
souls in preparation for the passage to Heaven are purged of their inability
to love perfectly.
So how do we get to Purgatory? Well,
we get there through our desire to love perfectly.
We get there because, in this life, we repent
our wretched inability to love
perfectly.
Thus it is true that the saints are
those men and women who were so spiritually moved by the desire to love perfectly that
they eventually reached the state of loving perfectly. It’s that simple.
Condoning
Sin
Now, not every Protestant will
go to hell. Nor will every Catholic go to heaven.
The problem with the Protestant heresy is that
many Protestants condone sin. They tell their followers that “This
doesn’t matter,” and “That isn’t a sin,” and “The
Catholic Church doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it talks
about sin.” And it’s all a lie because many well-meaning persons
are led straight into sin with no thought of repenting
it. How can they repent their sins if they reject the truth that their behaviors
are sin?
Of all the religions in this
world, only the Catholic Church has all the resources necessary to know what
exactly is sin and to teach you how to repent your sins.
Sadly, many persons, Catholics
included, reject those resources.
Why?
Anger: The Rejection
of Grace
Well, as I have seen in great
detail through my clinical experience, the most pervasive sin of all is
anger. At its core, anger is
hatred, the desire to do to others
what was done to you. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,
and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him” (1
John 3:15). Yet most individuals, because of the
emotional wounds of their childhood, have
more anger within their unconscious than there is oil under the rocks of
the earth. And just like oil in the rocks, unconscious
anger has so insidiously infiltrated our largely Protestant and non-Christian
culture that every aspect of our daily lives is
soaked in anger, where it seeps out in cynicism, sarcasm, argumentativeness,
arrogance, competition, meanness, hostility, and you-name-it. It all comes
from the deep pain of emotional wounds, it all leaks out as hatred, and it
poisons the heart with the sin of spiritual murder.
Most persons don’t see this
anger for what it is. They don’t realize what they are doing. But in
their defiance of Tradition, and in their persecution
of the Church herself, they end up taking it out on God, and that leaves
them spiritually dead, because when you’re angry at
God you shut out His graces from your soul, leaving you in
darkness—and that hurts only
you.
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O Lord, my God,
You are no stranger to those who do not estrange themselves from You. How
can anyone say that it is You who absent Yourself? |
—St. John of the Cross
The Sayings of Light and Love, 50 |
The Church
Weeps
The Catholic saints have seen
it all. They have seen it clearly. They have seen it because they had the
courage to do anything it takes to find
real love. And the sorrow of seeing things for what
they really are has brought them to tears, because they know that no one
gets to heaven who does not love perfectly.
“Blessed are the pure of
heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). Where, then, does that
leave the angry and bitter heart? Well, the Catholic Church—the
real Catholic Church—knows. She weeps and
she prays, because she knows the truth of hell.
Love Cannot be
Killed
And you? Well, you
fear love, and you can push love away, but you can’t
kill it. Isn’t that what Christ proved to us in the Resurrection? And
isn’t that what He proves to us each day when we celebrate the
Eucharist?
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