KEEP THE FAITH!

{This is an article which I wrote for the First Issue of the traditional Catholic newsletter Ipsa Conteret. (http://ipsaconteret.com/)}

If you have Faith the size of a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, remove from hence hither, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you. (Luke 17:20)

But yet the Son of man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth? (Luke 18:1-7)

All the virtues are important, yet they become meaningless without the True Faith to back them up. It is in the Catholic religion that all the virtues are explained, and through the Church that the practice of true righteousness is attained. Even if we are few, and spread to the 4 corners of the world, it is our duty to preserve the Faith on earth as best we can until the end of time.

In our day and age, it almost seems like the Church is in the tomb waiting for God to resurrect Her. So, I would like to present a parallel of faith for us to imitate in Our Blessed Mother and how she reacted to the Death of our Blessed Savior. Father William Fredrick Faber explains Mary’s unbounded faith despite her terrible anguish at the loss of Jesus in Chapter 8 of his remarkable book, At the Foot of the Cross:

"The magnitude of Our Blessed Mother’s faith, in that dark hour of that seventh dolor, did of itself worship the Holy Trinity most incomparably. This is another of the many resemblances which there are between the seventh dolor and the third, the immensity and the repose of faith in the sense of faith, the enjoyment of faith, without the ever-present self-reward as well as self-conviction which faith ordinarily brings with it. Here also is the same spirit of contradiction to unregenerate nature. We believe God the more readily, the more firmly, the more lovingly, just the more incredible He vouchsafes to make Himself to us. He never seems more good than when we ourselves have the least cause to think Him good, never more just than when He looks as if He were positively unjust.

Faith is a gift which grows under demand, and becomes the more inexhaustible when its waters are let loose. It is in itself a worship of the truth of God, and in this perhaps resides the secret of its apparently unaccountable acceptableness with Him. Hence the more clearly we see this eternal truth in the midst of blinding darkness, so much the more firmly do we adhere to it in spite of seeming evidence to the contrary, and so much the less are we moved by difficulties; or, rather, the less we apprehend them as difficulties, so much the more worship does our faith contain. Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him, were the grand words of Job.

Hence too it follows that calmness enhances faith. It is a testimony to its reality, and an evidence of its empire. Tranquil faith is sweetest worship, because it seems to say that all is at peace because God is concerned. There is no need of agitation, or of trouble, or of any manner of unquietness; God is His own guarantee: all must be right and best and most beautiful, because it is from Him. His word is dearer to us than knowledge, easier to read than proof, and nestles deeper in our hearts than a conviction. Yet never was faith exercised under such circumstances as by Mary in this dolor, never was faith greater, nor ever faith more tranquil. The faith of the whole of the little scattered Church was in her; and there is not more faith today in the whole of the huge worldwide Church Militant than was in her single heart that night."