Be Our Guest / Gary Taylor

We must strengthen our interior lives to overcome challenges to our faith

This is in response to John F. Fink’s editorial “Why Catholics are leaving” in the April 30 issue of The Criterion.

Since Jesus, we have been in the last times. We simply do not know when it will climax, but we do know what it will entail. Scripture and the Fathers of our Church have unveiled that understanding.

Too many Catholics are indifferent, lethargic, ignorant and unrestrained in their love of sensual pleasures.

These common habits of Catholics make it easy for the devil and the power of evil to delude the faith of fully initiated disciples within the Catholic Church. The interior eye of their human soul is being neglected and darkened. To undeceive a soul requires grace, the Holy Spirit and the habit of denouncing the ways of the world and receiving the new resurrected life gifted and offered to all Catholics from Jesus.

The solution is denouncing self, rejecting the world and returning to docility and discernment of the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the perpetual prudent providence of God.

We as Catholics need to enthusiastically open ourselves to the spirit of life receiving God, having his mysterious eternity to once again enter into us.

The solution for spiritually devout convicted Catholics is not illusive; it is interior.

Being Catholic is about being of the kingdom. Being Catholic is about imitating Jesus and embracing our intimacy with him; embracing our adoption into the world of the divine. Being Catholic is our savoring and sensing the supernatural. Being Catholic is our confidence in being connected to the apostolic succession, the origin of the Church Jesus instituted. Being Catholic is our being informed and understanding the truths of the future life. Being Catholic is our life-giving vision inspired and infused from our inner life with the divine Holy Spirit.

The prophecies from holy Scripture warn us that our faith will undergo great challenges. Jesus himself warns us of the coming of the man of sin, and of the days of desolation. There will be a grave apostasy within our Church. The holy word of God informs us that God will allow this time of desolation to test our faith.

The Catholic Church will encounter a great apostasy, a gradual cultural overtake and a severe persecution. All the infidels, heretics, sectarians and depraved men, scattered over the surface of the Earth, will unite with the Antichrist to make war on the saints and to persecute those who are faithful to God.

The solution is in the reading and responding to Father Charles Arminjon’s book: The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life.
 

(Gary Taylor is a member of St. Mary Parish in North Vernon.) †