Purity and Simplicity

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Michael Voris, coming to you from onboard our eighth annual Retreat at Sea with a couple hundred-plus other faithful Catholics.

Our theme this year is a Marian theme because of all the woes and trials afflicting the Church, many of them brought about by faithless members of the hierarchy and cowards. We ask Our Lady every day to snap them back, ASAP. 

One of the glories of the Catholic faith is its pure simplicity and its simple purity, just like Our Blessed Mother. All children resemble their mother, and she is the Mother of the Church, so of course the Church resembles her in this area. All that is required of us is a purity of heart — a single-mindedness of desiring Heaven — like she had. It's why St. Augustine said, "Love [God] and do as you will."

Purity and simplicity share in common with each other the notion of clarity. Everything we need to know in the Catholic Church is very clear: purity and simplicity, bound together with clarity.

Another example is the teaching on the Blessed Sacrament — the Real Presence. This teaches that Jesus Christ is really, truly and substantially present — Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity — under the appearance of bread and wine.

It can't get much more straightforward than that. And don't make the mistake that just because something is cloaked in mystery, it isn't clear. The "how" or "why" or even "what" of something doesn't detract from its simplicity or purity. The Host, which looks and tastes like bread, is Jesus Christ, pure and simple.

So too is the Church's teaching that if a person is to be saved, he must not die in a state of mortal sin. He must die in a state of grace, meaning sanctifying grace — meaning having the Holy Trinity living and abiding in him. This too is a pure and simple teaching.

Depart from this life without the indwelling of the Holy Trinity and a person remains in that state forever, without end. This is Hell. This is Hell because at death, the soul experiences an illumination of reality — that what really mattered was its condition before God.

God does not "know" a soul without Himself present in that soul at the moment of death. He Himself personally attests to this in the gospels when He says, quite clearly of those knocking on the door to get in, "Go away, I tell you, I do not know you."

They insist He does know them; they even remind Him that He ate with them and walked in their streets. But familiarity and socializing is not the same as knowing, and knowing God is what is required. Scandalous Catholic bishops, as well as Protestants of every stripe, should take that particular passage to heart.  

God is life. A person that dies in mortal sin has a soul without life, the requisite indwelling of the Holy Trinity. Dying in that state, the soul is forever sealed in that state — eternal death.

In a somewhat crude analogy, a team with less points than the opponent when the final gun sounds, loses the game. That loss is forever sealed, locked and unchangeable. The competition is unrepeatable. The loss stands forever as a sign of failure to achieve the goal of victory. The loss is — watch the word here — everlasting.

So why should so many people have such a struggle with the concept of eternal damnation? It's a very simple and pure concept — extremely straight-forward. Reject God and His loving Commandments in this life and a person is forever sealed in that condition of rejection of God, everlastingly.

Likewise, live a life of desire to cling to God in this life by following the Commandments of love and that choice is ratified for eternity.

The Son of God commanded that a person be baptized and eat His body and drink His blood. He then underscored, unless you do this, you have no life within you. So how could a soul which departs this life without the life of God, suddenly attain the life of God after death? The time for choosing is this side of death, not the next. It's pure and simple.

A soul must depart this life in a state of grace, with the life of God inside, and the surest means to do that is as a baptized, Holy Communion-receiving, with no conscious knowledge of mortal sin, person. Everything else for a rational, non-invincibly ignorant person is a gamble in the extreme, and more than likely a losing proposition.

The line from the psalm, "deep is calling on deep" is instructive here. When we stand before Almighty God, what He will search for in us is the image of Himself. To the degree that we image Him, then deep calls on deep, and deep responds and goes to deep — like-things to like-things.

But when God calls out to the soul before Him at the Judgment and that soul is spiritually dead, in a state of deadly sin, then there is nothing deep within that soul to respond.

Here we have two things that are not alike and, as such, the soul with death flees from the God of Life and prefers the torments of eternal loss to the even greater torments of being in a state of constant death surrounded by life.

This is why the Church, members and leaders must never retreat from the truth — from its purity, its simplicity and its clarity. To do so is to abandon all things Heavenly, including the pure and simple love of Our Mother. Those who do betray the Lord of Life and demonstrate a frightening lack of love for souls.

The Faith is simple because it flows back and from God, who is simple in Himself. The Faith is pure because God is One. The Faith is blinding in its clarity because God is clarity.

Our call is to conform to God in the way He commands us, pure and simple, just as His Mother did.

Mary, refuge of sinners, pray for us.