Vocation -17th Sunday after Pentecost(2022-10-02)

My dear brethren,

“I … beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called” (Eph. 4:1). What is that “vocation”? There are two levels of vocations. The first vocation is common to all, by which we are called to holiness, and the second vocation is proper to priestly or religious vocations, vocations to a better Christian life.

Speaking of the first vocation to common to all at the very beginning of this epistle to the Ephesians, St Paul wrote that God chose us “that we should be holy and unspotted in his sight in charity” (Eph. 1:4). This holiness starts at Baptism and should grow all the way to perfection in Heaven. This holiness essentially consists in separation from the sinfulness of the world and adherence to God by Charity. Separation from sin and adherence to God are the two sides of the same coin: it is impossible to adhere to God if one is not separated from sin, and it is impossible to be separated from sin without adhering with God. As the psalmist says: “Turn away from evil and do good: seek after peace and pursue it” (Ps. 33:15).

The initial choice for God is sealed at Baptism by the pouring of sanctifying grace in our soul. This is the beginning of a life “dead to sin and living unto God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:11). Note the two inseparable aspects: dead to sin and living unto God. Then, there is need to grow in that grace. Indeed, grace is like a beautiful principle, “a grain of mustard seed” (Mt. 13:31-32) of eternal life, whose consequences have to be drawn and applied in every aspect of our life. Our entire self ought to be in line with God, ought to be ordered towards heaven, ruled by the Law of God. This is done by the practice of virtues; though sanctifying grace is poured into our soul together with “infused virtues”, the practice of these virtues is required so that they may become more solid by acquired virtues, acquired by the repetition of virtuous acts. Man is not an angel: he does not reach perfection in one day, but rather by the multiplication and repetition of good choices: Yes to God, no to sin.

God calls us in a double way: exteriorly and interiorly. Exteriorly, the call to holiness is through the preaching of the Church, continuing the preaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. He calls us when He says: “Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light” (Mt. 11:28-30). That this call of our Lord be a call for holiness is manifest by the words just preceding these: “I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones. Yea, Father; for so hath it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him” (Mt. 11:25-27). Thus, “coming to Christ” consists in this hearing the Son speaking of His Father, which is perfect in Heaven.

Our Lord also said: “If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink” (Jn. 7:37). If any man thirst for holiness, for eternal happiness with God, let him come to our Lord Jesus Christ! And St John says in the Apocalypse: “And the Spirit and the Bride [that is, the Church] say: Come. And he that heareth, let him say: Come. And he that thirsteth, let him come: and he that will, let him take the water of life, freely” (Apoc. 22:17).

Now that external call of our Lord corresponds to the interior call of grace: He made us for Him, and our nature cannot find happiness in the limited things of this earth; there in our very nature is a longing and yearning for eternal happiness. Thus St Augustine writes: “Thou hast made us for Thee, o Lord, and our heart is restless until it can rest in Thee!” But grace goes further and attracts us to supernatural happiness, in the Vision of God face to face.

God calls, and somehow He leaves us free to respond, because He wants a response of love, of charity. However, this response remains due; woe to us if we despise this Love of God for us, if we despise the Supreme Good and if we love the creature more than the Creator! God in His mercy calls repeatedly, He knocks at the door of our soul (Apoc. 3:20) many times. Let us respond with generosity, enthusiasm and love. As the psalmist says: “Come let us adore and fall down: and weep before the Lord that made us. For he is the Lord our God: and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand” (Ps. 94:6-7).

We are called to holiness, not just earthly honesty but heavenly holiness. St Paul says that beautifully to the Romans: “For whom he foreknew, he also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of his Son; that he might be the firstborn amongst many brethren. And whom he predestinated, them he also called. And whom he called, them he also justified. And whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). To be “conformable to the image of His Son”, to become imitators of the Son of God, living images of Jesus, this is the Christian calling, this is the true Catholic life! Thus St Paul says in the next chapter to the Ephesians: “Be ye therefore imitators of God [i.e. of Christ who is God], as most dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odour of sweetness” (Eph. 5:1-2). This includes the practice of all virtues, the perfection of charity. This was the life of all the Saints; this ought to be also our life.

But some will say that this is difficult, especially in this modern world with all its temptations. Yes, indeed, and the situation of the modern world is the devilish effort to snatch souls away from our Lord Jesus Christ. Pope Leo XIII denounced Freemasonry for this: they want power on earth, and to get it, they are intent on destroying the morals of the mass. He wrote: “for since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and purposed that, artfully and intentionally, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless licence of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring.” In one word, they intentionally destroy the morals of the people, spreading vice, in order to dominate the people; people without morals are without strength to resist such rulers! This was the pagan emperors’ motto: “panem et circensem – bread and circus”: give to the mob enough to eat and corrupt games, and you can do with them what you want. The modern world rulers give to the crowds enough to eat and plenty of games, computer games of all kinds, with plenty of vices from vanity to greed and to pornography, then to contraception and abortion, to sodomy and even transgenderism. Then such corrupted crowds can be ruled without any resistance.

St Maximilian Kolbe said: “The Freemasons follow this principle above all: ‘Catholicism can be overcome not by logical argument but by corrupt morals.’ And so, they overwhelm the soul of men with the kind of literature and arts that will most easily destroy a sense of chaste morals, and they foster sordid lifestyles in all phases of human life…” What would he have said today! Behind the push to legalise all kinds of immorality there are the Freemasons.

But God’s grace is greater than the efforts of Hell. God is glorified by still making saints in the midst of this wicked world. Already St Peter says: “Save yourselves from this perverse generation” (Acts 2:40). How to do that? First, we ought to keep our eyes on the goal, eternal glory: “We testified to every one of you, that you would walk worthy of God, who hath called you unto his kingdom and glory” (1 Thess. 2:12). The very thought and hope of the reward strengthens us in tribulation; St Paul teaches us that when he wrote to the Hebrews about Moses: he “Rather choose to be afflicted with the people of God, than to have the pleasure of sin for a time, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasure of the Egyptians. For he looked unto the reward” (Heb. 11:25-26).

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Then stay away from temptations, aways from the worldly activities, especially worldly medias; stay absolutely away from any sinful games. Do not fear to stand up for Christ, by objecting when people use blasphemous words, or when people promote sin under any kind. That includes not only sins against purity, which are easily recognisable as sinful, but also sins against Faith. Do not enter into arguments, but do stand up for the truth, for the True Faith. In one word, be resolutely on the side of our Lord Jesus Christ; do not try to be “in the middle”. And do not fear the contempt of the world: “Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Be glad in that day and rejoice; for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For according to these things did their fathers to the prophets” (Lk. 6:22-23).

 

Positively search for God, in particular by daily prayer, by some small penitential practices which you choose, discretely, for yourself. I strongly recommend daily spiritual reading of some holy book, either life of the saints or writing of the saints. There is something in the writings of the Saints: they were really inhabited by the Holy Trinity, and this their inner life comes out in their writings, and lifts our soul to follow them on the path to Heaven.

Beyond this common call to holiness, there is for some souls a further call to a life of greater holiness, with greater separation from sin and from the world and with greater attention to the practice of all virtues: this is the religious life. The heart of the religious life is the practice of the Evangelical Counsels, the counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience. To all Jesus says: “Thou shalt not steal” (Mt. 19:18, Ex. 20:15); but to some Jesus says: do not even own anything. “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me” (Mt. 19:21). To all Jesus says: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Mt. 19:18, Ex. 20:14); but to some Jesus says: “there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. He that can take, let him take it” (Mt. 19:12). As all Tradition explained, this is not by mutilation, but by the practice of perfect continence, thus imitating our Lord Jesus Christ more perfectly, more closely. St John saw in the Apocalypse a choir of 144,000 virgins singing a canticle which they alone could sing and following Christ wherever He goes. And our Lord gave the counsel of obedience by His own example, “becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8).

Indeed, our Lord gave the supreme example of the three Evangelical Counsels on His Cross: who is poor as our Lord Jesus Christ stripped of everything and crucified? Who is pure and detached from all pleasures as our Lord Jesus Christ scourged, crowned with thorns and crucified? Who is obedient as our Lord Jesus Christ “obedient unto the death of the Cross”? The world cannot understand that, this is beyond its comprehension: how could one give up worldly successes and pursue a life of sacrifice? How could one give up bodily pleasures and pursue a life of penance and sacrifice? How could one give up one’s own freedom and put oneself under the authority of a religious superior for life? Yet, this is Jesus’s way to lead us to the heights of holiness. Look at the life of the Church: most of the saints we celebrate had taken that path of the Evangelical Counsels. Religious bind themselves by the religious vows to the practice of these counsels; the priests are bound even more by their very priestly ordination, by which they become “the man of the sacrifice”. Thus the bishop told them on their ordination day: “imitamini quod tractatis – imitate that which you offer”, hence live a life of sacrifice, imitating Christ poor on the Cross, Christ chaste on the Cross and Christ obedient on the Cross.

The very existence of such religious life manifests the fruitfulness of the grace of our Lord: we see this in particular by the contrast with the non-Catholic religions, which either never had or have lost that religious life. Protestants do not have such religious; Muslims do not have religious life; Buddhist have monks without God and most are “monks” only temporarily. In the same way, faithful priestly celibacy and chastity is a witness to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus St Cyprian says that the holy virgins are “the flower of the ecclesiastical seed, the grace and ornament of spiritual endowment, a joyous disposition, the wholesome and uncorrupted work of praise and honour, God's image answering to the holiness of the Lord, the more illustrious portion of Christ's flock.” The pagans admired these consecrated souls, whose life was entirely reserved to God, consecrated to God. If it was possible, by the grace of God, in the pagan world at the time of the early Church, it is still possible today, by the same grace of God, in our neo-pagan world.

 

With these examples of virtue, and especially the ultimate example of martyrdom, the Church converted the pagan Roman world. Today, the Church needs these generous souls, answering wholeheartedly the call of the Divine Spouse of the souls, to give themselves entirely to Him, doing penance both for themselves and for the conversion of the world. The Church needs ministers of Christ, instruments of Christ, even more: alter Christus – other Christ, Christ continuing His mission in them for the glory of the Father and the salvation of many souls. St Paul says of the Apostles and early clergy: “Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ, and the dispensers of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). Let us pray for the fidelity of the Clergy, as St Paul says right after: “Here now it is required among the dispensers, that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2). In today’s world, the Church suffers from the infidelity of many in the clergy and religious life. Yet, the remedy is to return to what our Lord Jesus Christ has instituted, not to invent new things: a true return to the practice of the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, and perfect fidelity to the faith, the morals and the Liturgy of the Saints passed on to us faithfully in Tradition.

Let us pray the Blessed Virgin Mary, Virgin most faithful, that she obtains to us to live faithfully to our common vocation to holiness and to whatever special vocation God has called us, so that we may attain to the heavenly reward! Amen.

Father François Laisney