
The Gate
of Glory

“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you,
and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake.
Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in Heaven. ”
(Saint
Matthew 5:11)
Christ came
down to earth that we might go up to Heaven.
This, then, is our wish for you this
Christmas: that you be rewarded for your life in Christ by joining Mary,
all the Angels and Saints, and the Company of Martyrs in Heaven for
all eternity!
No less a figure than Saint
Peter told us how this is possible:
“If you be reproached for
the name of Christ, you shall be blessed: for that which is of the honor,
glory, and power of God, and that which is his Spirit, resteth upon
you.”
(1 St. Peter 4.14)

What is more, we read in the Acts of the Apostles that
“The apostles left the Sanhedrin,
rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering
disgrace for the Name.”
(Acts 5.41)
It was, however,
Our Blessed Lord Himself Who promised it first:
“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
and rejoice, for your reward is very great in Heaven!”
(Saint Matthew 5:11, Saint Luke 6.22)
We have reason, then — and the means through which to
rejoice — in this holy Season of Christmas!
But will we
avail ourselves of it? Will we as Catholics open
ourselves to disgrace and mockery, ridicule and reproach, by doing
what Christ would have us do — and suffer
— for His Name’s sake ... and account
as nothing the mockery and contempt of
the world?
We know what following
Christ will entail for us here on earth — especially in these dark
and evil times — sadly, both in the
Church and in the world. We have just been
told: we will be hated, ridiculed, disdained, mocked, separated from
the society of the “socially correct” — we may lose our friends and,
quite possibly, our jobs! Such prospects alone will separate the wheat
from the chaff.
What can we
give God?
We can give nothing to God
that He has not given us first — with one absolutely vital exception:
our uncompromising love for Him.
God has endowed
us with a free will — and with that will, which is totally our own,
we — we can choose to love and serve God (as the Holy
Angels did long before Creation, and so entered into beatitude) — or
we can willfully exempt Him from our love, deny it to
Him, withhold it from Him — and choose, instead, ourselves
as the axis of the universe (as the Rebellious Angels did and so were
cast into Hell). God gives us that freedom! He respects our will and
will not revoke our choices — to love Him ... or the world
— and the two are not simply incompatible, but mutually exclusive. “Nemo
potest duobus dominis servire — No man can serve
two masters.” (Saint Matthew 6.24)
And we are completely
free to choose!
If we choose Him, it will
be a TOTAL LOVE — a love above everyone and everything
else that we love: a love so proximately absolute that we can only attain
to it by expressing it in the total oblation, the unstinting
offering of ourselves to Him in everything we do, everything we say,
everything we think, everything we will, everything we desire, everything
we are:
Love
that will accept:
-
Ridicule
for His Sake (yes, even by ones own family and friends)
-
Mockery
for His Sake
-
Being hated for His Sake
-
Being marginalized — especially
by other Catholics ... for His Sake
-
Being considered spiritually
retrograde because of your total devotion to Him and your
defiance of the world.
-
Being deemed “regressive”
because your piety and devotions, your prayers and gestures, do
not conform to “modernized” and “progressive” practices that fail
to reflect a genuine understanding of Who God IS, Where
God is, and How He comes to us in the Seven Sacraments —
before “piety” and “devotion” became “incorrect” and an embarrassment
in today’s “progressive” Catholic Church of Accompaniment and
the God of Surprises.
You Will Pay Tribute
Do not be deceived
or naïve: you will pay tribute. The world will
crown us according to our love: for the world a Crown of
Laurels ... for God a Crown of Thorns.
Can you give Him that gift?
Every day? And in all company? in all places?
It means:
-
Praying
Grace before every meal — and making the Sign of the Cross
in public restaurants — not the shrinking, “as-fast-and-as-hidden-as-possible”
Sign of the Cross that declares how ashamed you are of your
holy Catholic Faith — after all, people may be astonished, scandalized
(and perhaps some even converted …)
-
Bowing
your head at the Sacred Name of Jesus
(Philippians 2.10) — no matter how often it is uttered — and if
it is uttered blasphemously, “finishing” the blasphemous utterance
with a silent “have mercy on us” and so make a prayer of
a sacrilege.
-
Confessing Christ openly
when it is least beneficial to you: you cannot take
refuge in silence about Him
“Who will deny you
before His Angels in Heaven if you deny Him before men.”
(Saint Matthew 10.33)
-
Genuflecting
when you pass by Him in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar
— how dare you pass Him by without anything less than
a bent knee! Do you not know that He is really and truly
present — Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity — in the Tabernacle and
that He deigns to greet you ... who refuse to so much
as acknowledge Him … because you fear being
thought “pious” in the eyes of others — as though piety were a sin!
-
Believing — and so
acting upon! — everything Christ commanded us:
taking the lowest seat, being the last, being despised … for
His sake. In other words, all that deprives you of honor
in this world and solicits the obsequious admiration of men.
Probably one
out of a thousand — no, ten thousand — Catholics have the
FAITH to do these things — all of which are obligatory
to us! And because they are required of us, we must not dare applaud
ourselves when we have done these things — and secretly esteem ourselves
holy because we have done them. We have been admonished in no uncertain
terms about this self-flattery beforehand:
“When you have done all
that you were commanded, you should say, ‘We are worthless
servants; we’ve only done our duty.’ ” (Saint Luke
17.10)
This, then, is your
only possible gift to God: acknowledging
Him openly by loving Him sincerely and obeying Him diligently in all
that you do. This — and only this — you can
give Him Who gave all else to you first.
Your will is totally
free: free to acknowledge Him and love Him — or to ignore
Him and reject Him!
Freedom is meaningless without
responsibility and responsibility is meaningless without consequences.
Not idly did
God speak:
“Behold
I set forth in your sight this day a blessing and a curse:
A blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your
God,
which I command you this day: A curse, if you obey
not the commandments of the Lord your God, but revolt from
the way which
now I show you, and walk after strange gods which you know
not.”
(Deuteronomy 11.26-28)
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We wish
you a most Blessed Christmas and Christmastide
… and pray that you have the willingness to be mocked and marginalized
for His sake … that you may know immortally the inexpressible
joy awaiting those who pass through the crucible of faith to the Collector
of Crosses Who knows His own through the Sign by which they are forever
sealed — the Sign that brought them cruel contempt from the world —
and transfiguration into glory in Heaven.
May you be humiliated for His Name’s sake! For so were His Apostles.
(Acts 5.41)
It is the gate of glory and the pledge
of things everlasting to come.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Printable PDF Version
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com

Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse
3.8)
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