Contra Mundum

The Traditional Catholic Priests has one (actually, two) posts about St Athanasius.

St Athanasius did not declare the Pope deprived of his office. He did not start any “Athanasian” church. He did not care about precedent, either.

St Athanasius did the Catholic thing, and kept doing what had always been done to the end; irrespective of how mad, or weak, or evil the Pope of the day was.

We look today at those years and see a coherent development: Satan tries to destroy the Church. Faithful Catholics react. Satan loses.

However, in those times things were certainly not so linear. For many years, actually a couple of decades, vast part of Christianity must have looked like a nuclear wasteland, the air full of Arian nuclear fallout. It was, certainly, not so easy in those days to believe in the Indefectibility of the Church as we do now.

We do now. We know now. We can now look at two thousand years of history and see the Church surviving every crisis.

Whatever happens in October, do not lose faith. Most importantly, do not expect that a solution must arrive very soon. We may face many years, and perhaps decades, of nuclear wasteland. We live nowadays in times of instant response and instant information, but the Lord does not seem to think in this way. When the Blessed Virgin of Quito says that she will intervene when everything seems lost, this certainly does not mean “a couple of days after a devastating announcement”.

This is not how it has worked in the past.  In the past faithful have been expected to live in die in their faith, no matter what; and to trust in the Divine Help for the church on earth, when God finds it fitting. 

If the Kasper hits the Synod, we may be asked to do the same: live and die in our battle.

But how better our situation will be than the on in which the contemporaries of Athanasius found themselves.

Athanasius famously said that if the world was against him, then he was against the world.  He had no precedent. Never had a crisis of such magnitude presented itself in the life of the Church. 

We have at least this big precedent, and we must prepare ourselves as October nears; then never was the good Roman saying si vis pacem, para bellum as fitting as it is in this situation.

If the world goes against us, let us answer like Athanasius.  

M