Taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. (Mt. 14:19). ⧾
The healing of the sick and the miraculous feeding of the multitude prefigure the miracle that is the Mass throughout the ages, for the Eucharist is the medicine of immortality and the perpetual memorial of Our Lord’s Sacred Passion that nourishes us with the Bread of Life. Last Sunday, in our meditation we dwelt on the magnitude of the Mass, its importance in the Church and in our own spiritual life. The Mass is truly the pearl of great value and the greatest good in our life (summum bonum). We also saw that there is an undeniable connection between the Traditional Latin Mass and Western Civilization which it can be rightly said, it created. The reform of the Mass that followed the Second Vatican Council has not fared well generally speaking; and ironically though even Pope Paul VI who promulgated this reform lamented what he himself described as the auto-demolition (self-destruction) of the Church, neither he nor the popes immediately after him did anything definitive to correct what has resulted in the literal hemorrhaging of the faithful away from attendance at Holy Mass, the great apostasy. We ended our meditation by calling to mind the incisive observation of St. Peter Julian Eymard, a great apostle of Eucharistic piety and devotion whose Feast is celebrated today: An age prospers or dwindles in proportion to its devotion to the Eucharist. This is the measure of its spiritual life, faith, charity and virtue. The very same may be said of a parish.
I am speaking of these things to you in the interests of truth and out of concern for the salvation of our souls which is determined by our faith and the manner of our life. As we worship, so we become. There is a judgment. As if our negligence for the Mass generally speaking were not bad enough, we now are contending with attendance restrictions and liturgical abuses imposed on us by a pandemic that seems to have no end. What we are living through is unprecedented in the history of the Church. The faith is always one generation deep because each new generation of Catholics has to receive and appropriate the fullness of the faith. We want to preserve the faith and just as important, we want to hand on the faith in its fullness to our children. They deserve no less. The Mass must first be the foundation of the family before it can be the foundation of the culture. And it must be the foundation of our own spiritual life, our pearl of great value. All of life must flow from Our Eucharistic Lord, present in our churches, on the altars, in the hands of our priests. The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart will come about through the restoration of the Mass which in turn will restore the Church; and she, the Bride of Christ will restore order to this sad and violent world of ours.