“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:
