Little by Little

TRANSCRIPT

Yesterday, Pope Francis announced that Jesus is not God, having faith does not matter at all, and everyone goes to Heaven, so it doesn't matter how you live your life — commit as many sins as you like; have sex with whomever you want and as often as you like; marriage is just a social construct, so you can have sex before marriage because, well, nothing is a sin, because sin is just a theological construct.

Actually, he didn't say any of that. But that is the effect of what the Vatican and huge numbers of bishops have allowed through their unholy silence. Large numbers of people actually believe all that stuff we just mentioned, to one degree or another. Why? Because to actually believe requires the supernatural virtue of faith, and the more you indulge in sin and come to actually embrace it, the less you believe.

And let's draw a bright line here. We aren't talking about struggling with sin, believing it to be wrong and evil and in need of being confessed. We are not talking about the habit of sin that a weak man frequently succumbs to. We're talking about the sin that occurs when a weak man actually steps over the line, crosses the threshold and has so embraced the sin that he begins to rationalize it, makes excuses for it and eventually comes to believe that it's fine.

When a man reaches that point, good luck — because he's going to need it. At that point, he has crossed a boundary from which it is extremely hard to come back. Why? Because such a man comes to believe in his sin, which means he comes to disbelieve the Church and Her divinely instituted teachings.

Let's take, for example, a man who gives into the capital sin of lust but actually tells himself it's OK. At the beginning of his process of losing his faith, and thereby his eternal life, he's got really good reasons:

• We live together because we're going to get married anyway 
• Right now neither of us can afford to live on our own, so being under the same roof makes sense, financially
• Everyone I know is doing the same thing, so it just makes sense

Yes, every one of those is a reason — but not an excuse. Sin is never able to be excused as being right. God hates sin. He completely and utterly despises it, and His followers cannot claim to believe in Him and believe sin is OK.

God hates sin because of what it does to the individual. These are not arbitrary commands placed on fallen man to make his life difficult. Sin destroys. It is spiritual cancer that, if not checked early or battled against continually, will kill the person — first in this life, and then in the next.

Sin is, without exception, always an act turned in on oneself, even if another person is involved in the sin. But it's not about the other person. It can't be, no matter how much the man or woman pretends it is, covers it over in romantic talk and so forth. If they really cared about the other person, they wouldn't be using the other person's body as an instrument for self-satisfaction and then rationalizing it. They would not be leading that person they claim to love straight into Hell.

Illicit sex always leads down a road that ends badly. One way or the other, somehow, someway, it always ends in death. The philosophical reason is that sex is about life, giving life, creating life; and to pervert it brings about death. Just like fire properly understood and employed is about warmth and comfort — when perverted, it brings about ferocious destruction.

No human being walks this earth who is not a complex bundle of psychological factors. No one. It is there, in the recesses of our pain, confusion, lack of understanding and passions that sin finds an incubator. And it doesn't matter what the sin is. For many, it is sexual or sex-related, but just because it is probably the most common area of sin, it doesn't mean it gets a pass. Will the damned really rely on the excuse, "Well, everyone I knew was just like this too," as they are plunging into the depths of the fiery pit?

Sin destroys faith. A man cannot serve two masters. Sooner or later, the man who first succumbs to and then embraces sin will begin to embrace other sins as well or go deeper into that sin. Sin, like God, wants to take total possession of a person. There are no half measures when it comes to the soul. The soul does not half-commit to something.

True, it takes steps, baby steps at first, as it moves toward its end, but it is never not moving toward an end, be it good or bad. Heaven is the total embrace of God. Hell is the total non-embrace of God. Few people achieve either state fully in this life, but they are "rewarded" with it in the next.

There is a line in Scripture that is truly horrifying. It is, "God will grant you your heart's desire." It's true. He will give you whatever it is you will, wherever it is you direct your will. He gave you your free will, and He will give you whatever it is you will.

What we will, however, is entirely our choice. But because we are victims of fallen nature, what we will is oftentimes completely twisted, perverted, corrupted. Even when it is something good in and of itself, we often have a way of spoiling it in the day-to-day.

This is why grace is so absolutely necessary and, without it, a soul is damned. It's why the Church teaches that a person must die in a state of sanctifying grace with the life of the Blessed Trinity present in him in order to spend eternity with that same Trinity. Nothing has the power to save but grace. But a soul must have faith, supernatural faith, to correspond its actions to the free gift of grace and increase in holiness.

Repeatedly rejecting grace, not by sinning per se, but by embracing sin, destroys the soul's ability to cooperate with that grace. Oftentimes, all this is playing out in people's lives slowly, emphasis on slowly, in the background. It's on the slow boil. And every moral act inclines a person to one side or the other. As long as a person remains within what we might term the "moral range," there is always the possibility of straightening up again, of flying right.

Whatever degree of sin a person's soul is in, as long as he believes, he is always just one confession away from being brought back from the dead. God's mercy is that far-reaching. But a soul also has the ability to place itself beyond God's reach, not through any fault or failure of God, but because of the soul's embrace of sin — its desire for and love of sin; its embrace of sin, which is always, in the last analysis, an embrace of self and not of God.

Such a soul, therefore, has turned off all means of salvation by the person's own free will. He is the one who has shut off the channels to supernatural faith and grace. He is in a state not of grace but of mortal sin. But more than just mortal sin, such a soul now sins against the Holy Spirit because the soul is so entwined in sin that it no longer perceives its actions as sinful and, therefore, never seeks forgiveness because it perceives there is nothing to be forgiven for. Such a soul is bound for Hell and will die in that state.

When sinful actions erode supernatural faith to such a point that a person no longer believes, that is the worst possible case. But sinful actions cannot really be battled against, resisted or overcome without grace. The Catholic life — working out a person's salvation in fear and trembling — really is an all-or-nothing proposition. In the end, there is either Heaven or Hell. 

While there is, of course, Purgatory, that is merely a necessary purification for Heaven. The soul in Purgatory has attained salvation — it just isn't ready to fully stand in the glory of God's omnipotence and love. But it will.

The utter failure of the bishops to teach these ultimate truths will earn them the lowest depths of Hell. It was to preach these truths that they were ordained and eventually consecrated. It was not to cooperate with governments in COVID restrictions and work behind the scenes to help legislate carbon emissions taxes and construct a global reset.

It was not to construct a scenario where lousy clergy could call the cops on faithful Catholics and have them thrown out of a church. It was not to allow scandal to remain in the midst of the Church by permitting sacrilegious Holy Communion. And it certainly was not to spread the lie that we have a reasonable hope that all men are saved. 

Perhaps a larger number than we expect will be saved, but that number will not include bishops who helped steer souls into Hell like they were shoveling coal into a furnace. Such men need to be denounced. The souls they have corrupted will be damned. But the punishment for that will pour down on their heads. Their pains will be the worst of all — forever.

God despises sin. He hates it. Anyone who embraces it and turns from Him merits what their heart desired here on earth.