“Salus Animarum”
the
Salvation of Souls
Whatever became of this
most
Fundamental
Imperative
that is nothing less
than the very reason
CHRIST ESTABLISHED HIS
CHURCH?
It
is unlikely that
the vast, indeed, the overwhelming majority of today’s
Catholics have not so much as heard of this phrase as old as
the Church itself; certainty, not in English — and with
greater certainty still, not from the pulpit.
The very concept of “the salvation of the soul”
appears to have been non grata in homiletics for
quite nearly 60 years (corresponding, unsurprisingly, to the
implementation of Vatican II) — despite the fact that the
imperative itself is clearly and unambiguously codified as
the
supremus lex (the supreme law) of the Roman
Catholic Church in (Canon Law 1752):
“Salus animarum suprema lex esto”
— “the salvation of souls … must be the supreme law
in the Church.”
It is nothing less than
the sole reason for the Incarnation …
the Suffering, Crucifixion,
Death, and Resurrection … of
Christ:
the salvation of souls!
Christ as Savior, Christ as
Redeemer, cannot be understood apart from this most
fundamental and utterly simple concept:
He came to save souls — not to heal bodies
(although He did), not to rectify injustices, not to
rehabilitate politics, not to instruct us on
economics, and certainly not “save
the Environment” — which, sadly, appear to be the
principal if not the sole concerns of the present
pontiff, who, sadly, is more an emissary of the United
Nations and Globalist Ideology than the Vicar of
Jesus Christ on Earth. Certainly an indifferentist (every
religion is sufficient to salvation) and most definitely
a heretic, he is nothing remotely proximate to his putative
job description.
Jesus Christ,
on the other hand, came with only two purposes that
are really one:
-
To do the will of the
Father
-
Which is:
to save souls for all eternity in Heaven (and in
so doing, to deliver them from Hell).
It is really that simple; in
fact, so simple that it eludes us in our worldliness, in our
pretensions to sophistication, and our penchant for
sophistry and correctitude.
For 2000 years the mission of
the Church (and its raison d’etre , the very reason
for its being) could be summed up in two words instantiating
that same beautiful simplicity: “Salus animarum —
the Salvation of souls”. Through Christ in the
Sacraments this is its
sole mission.
No other Mandate
The Church has no other
mandate from Christ. Even healing the sick, raising the
dead, delivering men from demonic possession, and all that
He taught in the
Sermon on the Mount were means only to the principle
end: the salvation of the soul. Christ Himself
emphatically asks:
“What
does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul?”
(St. Matthew 16.26).
The purpose of all
that He said and did was always eschatological, that is to
say, pertaining to
the Four Last Things:
-
Death
-
Judgment
-
Heaven
-
Hell
Everything else pales in
significance. Two come once only, and two are everlasting.
To pretend that we really do
not fully understand what Christ was talking about, and
which He proclaimed in the clearest terms, is just that:
pretension. We know very well what Christ said and did —
but to our own devious and often deviant ends, we assume an
air of erudite perplexity concerning them:
“Despite what He appears
to say; indeed actually says, this
is what He really means …”
And our own
interpretation only accords with what we wish
He had said, for this would provide us with excuses for our
sins or alternatives for His extremely unsettling
pronouncements. We go from the reality of: “This is
what Christ said …” to the fiction: “This is what
we wish Christ had said” … because I am much more
comfortable with this interpretation — which, rather
coincidentally, allows me to continue in sin.” In short,
it is nothing more than wishful thinking because they cannot
be both true.
However contradictory to what
Jesus and His Apostles really said and taught,
we choose to believe another narrative, however
factitious; a simulacrum that borrows the vocabulary
of the real but with connotations utterly incongruous with
it. It is disingenuous, a sham. There is a pathos of
similitude but the depiction is counterfeit. We have not
entered the mythical: we have fabricated it. Shamelessly. It
pleases us … and this is the first clue that it is
deceptive. We have both an aversion and an affinity for the
truth. It is the patrimony of our broken heritage from the
beginning. We ineluctably desire the true, but when it
indicts us we demur from it; unable to accommodate
both we resort to dissimilation, to a semblance of the real
that is, despite our collusion with pretensions, a defection
from it. Hence our penchant for comfortable and spurious
“interpretations”.
For all our carefully
fabricated allusions to what Christ really
said and meant, we know the truth — because He is
the Truth Who does not deceive nor can be deceived. We are
not
pleased with all He said, especially concerning things that
frighten us because they describe us … and convict us
— and we know it!
Despite this, we insist that
so many vitally important things that Jesus clearly
uttered
are nevertheless not true — because
they are not “inclusive” and do not accord
with our delicate post-modern sensitivities that any real
deity would surely ascribe to. That some, perhaps many, are
left in “outer darkness", excluded from Heaven because of
their depravity and perversion, their penchant for sin and
their obstinate predilection for evil, is unacceptable
to our presently enlightened humanity. The list of our
objections would be too long to enumerate and ultimately too
tedious. Let us be satisfied with a few:
The Short List:
