The pith has been said many times by many people but for poignance few can top the elder Zosima, as a friend just reminded me with these quotes:
"And if you cannot speak with the embittered, serve them silently and in humility, never losing hope."
"Have faith to the end even if it should happen that all on earth are corrupted and you alone remain faithful."
"And even if you do shine, but see that people are not saved even with your light, remain steadfast, and do not doubt the power of the heavenly light; believe that if they are not saved now, they will be saved later. And if they are not saved, their sons will be saved, for your light will not die, even when you are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. People are always saved after the death of him who saved them. The generation of men does not welcome its prophets and kills them, but men love their martyrs and venerate those they have tortured to death. Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future."
Completely agree. I have seen this quote attributed to Pope St. Pius X. I can’t verify its provenance, but it is true regardless:
For although all our Scripture, both the Old and New, is divinely inspired and useful of doctrine, as it is written, the Book of Psalms, like a paradise contains in itself the fruits of all the others.
Thank you, I truly needed these thoughts today. There really IS a silver lining behind every cloud. The sun shines EVERYDAY but not always over my head.
Many, many thanks for sending me the text of your fantastic address/podcast. I shared it to my WhatsApp friends. I would like contribute in € but that is beyond me at the moment. I live in Dublin, Ireland. I got wiped out in 2010 in the s-c Great Financial Crisis. Cum 2015, I was set to get going again, but then they launched a referendum on same-sex marriage. From then on, it has been an incessant, unrelenting globalist attack on Ireland, to show the world how you can deconstruct and social engineer a country at warp speed to a step by step blue print. Accordingly, as I would have no ambience to enjoy anything I made if they win, I decided to forget the money side and just get out there continuously as an activist and resist. There is not one person of liberty or Faith in the monied class of Ireland. You are so right about faith driving out despair. Thank you for everything you do. You are beacon of light and hope across the world.
Thank you for your courageous witness to truth in the midst of a devastated land! Dublin is pretty much the heart of the beast. May the Lord give you strength to face your foes with love and win at least some of them over to the truth. Our Lady of Knock keep you and guide you.
Descent into apparently invincible darkness -- followed by ascent to unfading light (sometimes sooner, sometimes later) -- is a constant theme of Catholic spirituality.
To use a classic example from St. Anthony the Great:
"Nor was the Lord then forgetful of Antony's wrestling, but was at hand to help him. So looking up he saw the roof as it were opened, and a ray of light descending to him. The demons suddenly vanished, the pain of his body straightway ceased, and the building was again whole. But Antony feeling the help, and getting his breath again, and being freed from pain, besought the vision which had appeared to him, saying, 'Where were thou? Why did you not appear at the beginning to make my pains to cease?' And a voice came to him, 'Antony, I was here, but I waited to see your fight; wherefore since you have endured, and hast not been worsted, I will ever be a succour to you, and will make your name known everywhere.' Having heard this, Antony arose and prayed, and received such strength that he perceived that he had more power in his body than formerly. And he was then about thirty-five years old." (Vita, 10).
Indeed, one could well argue that the phenomenon has its roots in Gethsemane itself, proper qualifications being made. It is fundamentally christological and paschal, an outplaying of the mortifying dimension of baptism -- itself a participation in the death and entombment of the Lord.
Less distressing that the darkness is so very dark today; more distressing that so few recognize it as a basically normal -- even salutary and necessary -- element of the growth in holiness and spiritual maturity. We often speak about the failures of catechesis that have undermined doctrine and liturgy; less frequently do we speak about the failures of catechesis that have undermined the ascetic struggle. (Of course, said failures are not altogether distinct.)
For some reason, we have forgotten that the Christian life is a bitter contest to the last breath, as St. Anthony said. If anything, for most of us, the fight evidently gets more ferocious as death approaches, as the traditional prayers for the dying reflect.
If we expected to endure great interior trials -- bleakness, dryness, all manner of strange and dreadful disturbances of mind and heart -- we would, paradoxically, enjoy much greater peace. As a wise easterner said, "Keep your mind in hell and despair not."
Or, better yet, let us hear David, who knew something about darkness:
Yes! A life without trial, difficulty, darkness, temptation, would be no different from death. If a Christian is truly alive, he will suffer all of these things, and with the grace of God, overcome them, following in the footsteps of the Suffering Servant.
I think what makes our period so difficult is that the evil has settled so firmly within the bosom of Holy Mother Church, or rather, churchmen (a crucial distinction!), and so the last bastion where we might have thought to be safe and to find support has turned against us, like a kind of autoimmune disease. This is the peculiar strangeness of our situation.
But even here, we must remember that Judas, one of the twelve hand-picked by Our Lord, betrayed Him, and that all of His apostles fled except St. John.
"The faithful of Christ who have been placed on earth at just this moment in history are most beloved to their Lord, who is calling them to remain faithful precisely when it is most difficult and most countercultural, even counter-institutional."
This comment from the post you linked which you wrote in 2021 made me ugly cry. It's hard to remember that "we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. A peculiar people, that we should show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light." So hard to remember all this when the darkness does seem to be overtaking the light. But the light shined, and the darkness could not overcome it.
I've said it before, but thank you for this sanity - this antidote to despair. We need more Samwise Gamgees in the world, for us Frodos who are ready to give up.
We are encouraged to offer a "sacrifice of praise," meaning thanking our Heavenly Father in the midst of our physical pain, our emotional pain, and our trials. This is not easy to do, but He calls each of us to trust Him that all that is happening in our life is part of His amazing plan for each of us. Thank you for this lovely post!
Reading this article, makes me feel as if I am reading the Gospel of John chapter 16 to 18.
In this life, after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil, sin entered the world, creation become adulterated, impure, a mixture of good and evil.
Figuratively, reality becomes like night and day, like a tapestry having contrasting sides. As in the life of Christ his seeming defeat it is also this ultimate triumph, the completion of his purpose in life. He is the Light darkness cannot extinguish.
Since it cannot remain that way, God has promised us a new heaven and a new earth in the future.
The Church is the mystical Body of Christ. Christ has given us a preview of what is to come to his mystical body by his own physical body.
It may not look good to be in the back side of the tapestry, as it was with the apostles. To walk in the night make us feel uncertain, and unsafe but the day will surely come and the fear of walking in the night will vanish.
Thise who are in Christ will not sleep forever, but those who have not Christ will. He has given us a proof, an sample, Himself. He is the Life.
I wish Dr. Kwasniewski that you had followed through on your observation that "we are looking at the historic nadir of the Catholic Church on earth, next to which the Arian crisis of the fourth century and the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth look like rough drafts" rather than falling back into the 'they had it rough in those times too' with quips about what some orthodox Christian allegedly would have thought during the life of Athanasius or during the sixteenth century. Because your initial observation was correct.
This one IS different - and for a whole host of reasons especially considering that in 2024 the world is constructed in a way where it is very conceivable that a single man could actually for a brief period of time say two and forty months actually take complete control of the entire planet. That never could have happened in the age of Athanasius nor of Luther. It simply wasn't possible then. It is now.
If I went into all the other reasons this would turn into an overly long essay instead of a comment. Just because Our Lord told us that we will not know the day or the hour does not absolve us from our obligation to watch for his Return, like watchers for the dawn as Cardinal Newman once said. And I'm sorry but we have been warned throughout the prophecies and types of Scripture that before He comes back things will break down and there will be a great apostasy and in the worldly or external sense they won't be repaired until He kills the man of sin and the son of perdition with the breath of his mouth and the light of his coming.
And what things will look like after that I have no idea but one thing I am sure of is that it will be a whole lot better than the Baroque...
Oh, I don't disagree at all. Nor do I think that your objection really "sticks" to this essay. I admit that our crisis is unique, and that we are seeing universal apostasy and meltdown. That is precisely why I wrote what I did: what we should do when everything seems lost (and maybe most things will be lost - for a time). But it is true that a similar frame of mind, a similar temptation to despair or to give in, would have been possible in earlier long-lasting crises.
I can't disagree with you about the temptation to give in being present in all of those crises. I suppose that in a lot of ways neither of those great crises that you mentioned ever really ended.
Arianism went out into the desert, translated itself into Arabic, and became Islam. And then it got its revenge by taking away all of the great Eastern Sees and the sites of the Councils that had condemned it. But that is only temporary.
And Protestantism's man centered religion (however much they would protest otherwise that's what it is) through its natural devolution into atheism now dominates the world. These two have now become probably the two most dominant spiritual forces on the planet. Again though, that is only temporary.
Our Lord knew all of this would happen and He warned us in advance to help us keep our heads. As Saint Peter told us we ought really be meditating on the prophecies as a lamp in a dark place until the sun rises.
I really needed this today. I’ve been in such a funk and a feeling of almost despair, but I know it is a temptation of the devil and I need to push through. God wins in the end and we merely have to remain faithful and do His holy will. Thank you for your words. They really helped me.
“There are those who are asserting that the Papacy is empty, or that there’s no chance of recovery; we are too far gone; we are doomed.”
Thank you, Dr. K, for this encouraging article counteracting an all-too-common temptation we face in the traditionalist movement today. As someone who hopes to see the restoration of our glorious Catholic Tradition within my lifetime (Deo volente!), I do not understand the “appeal” of sedevacantism – which is essentially to deprive ourselves of the divinely established visible structure of the Church, the very thing we are trying to restore in the first place! While “declaring Bergoglio a usurper” may temporarily feel good (and generate lots of internet clicks, as we have seen), it does absolutely nothing to fix the problems we face and ultimately leads to irrelevancy (as has quickly happened to certain prominent figures who have followed this path). We cannot afford to consign ourselves to a “solution” that makes the restoration of the Church even harder, regardless of how disfigured her human element has become.
Our Lord said, “by their fruits you shall know them.” We often use this to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the liberalism and modernism that have pervaded the Church, especially since Vatican II. However, I think it can also be applied to the traditionalist movement, to see which parts are bearing fruit and which need to be pruned. I believe it’s no coincidence that the “branches” that have not succumbed to the temptations so admirably combated by Dr. K (whether diocesan, Ecclesia Dei, or even SSPX) are the ones with thriving and expanding TLM apostolates, and hence contributing most to the restoration for which we all hope and pray.
As always Dr Kwasniewski a light in the darkness. This was most apt. Thank you! Romans 8:24-25
“For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for? 25 But if we hope for that which we see not, we wait for it with patience.” And who else is our hope but Christ Jesus
The pith has been said many times by many people but for poignance few can top the elder Zosima, as a friend just reminded me with these quotes:
"And if you cannot speak with the embittered, serve them silently and in humility, never losing hope."
"Have faith to the end even if it should happen that all on earth are corrupted and you alone remain faithful."
"And even if you do shine, but see that people are not saved even with your light, remain steadfast, and do not doubt the power of the heavenly light; believe that if they are not saved now, they will be saved later. And if they are not saved, their sons will be saved, for your light will not die, even when you are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. People are always saved after the death of him who saved them. The generation of men does not welcome its prophets and kills them, but men love their martyrs and venerate those they have tortured to death. Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future."
Beautiful reminder, thank you.
Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well :
And the pools are filled with water (Psalm 84: 6).
Ironically, the trial bears within it the very graces to endure it.
As I get older, I find that the Psalms contain EVERYTHING.
You know, it was St. Basil the Great who said that if we had only the Psalms, we could reconstruct the whole message of revelation.
Completely agree. I have seen this quote attributed to Pope St. Pius X. I can’t verify its provenance, but it is true regardless:
For although all our Scripture, both the Old and New, is divinely inspired and useful of doctrine, as it is written, the Book of Psalms, like a paradise contains in itself the fruits of all the others.
Thank you, I truly needed these thoughts today. There really IS a silver lining behind every cloud. The sun shines EVERYDAY but not always over my head.
Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,
Many, many thanks for sending me the text of your fantastic address/podcast. I shared it to my WhatsApp friends. I would like contribute in € but that is beyond me at the moment. I live in Dublin, Ireland. I got wiped out in 2010 in the s-c Great Financial Crisis. Cum 2015, I was set to get going again, but then they launched a referendum on same-sex marriage. From then on, it has been an incessant, unrelenting globalist attack on Ireland, to show the world how you can deconstruct and social engineer a country at warp speed to a step by step blue print. Accordingly, as I would have no ambience to enjoy anything I made if they win, I decided to forget the money side and just get out there continuously as an activist and resist. There is not one person of liberty or Faith in the monied class of Ireland. You are so right about faith driving out despair. Thank you for everything you do. You are beacon of light and hope across the world.
PS
Thank you for your courageous witness to truth in the midst of a devastated land! Dublin is pretty much the heart of the beast. May the Lord give you strength to face your foes with love and win at least some of them over to the truth. Our Lady of Knock keep you and guide you.
👍✝️🇮🇪🇺🇲
Wonderful piece.
Descent into apparently invincible darkness -- followed by ascent to unfading light (sometimes sooner, sometimes later) -- is a constant theme of Catholic spirituality.
To use a classic example from St. Anthony the Great:
"Nor was the Lord then forgetful of Antony's wrestling, but was at hand to help him. So looking up he saw the roof as it were opened, and a ray of light descending to him. The demons suddenly vanished, the pain of his body straightway ceased, and the building was again whole. But Antony feeling the help, and getting his breath again, and being freed from pain, besought the vision which had appeared to him, saying, 'Where were thou? Why did you not appear at the beginning to make my pains to cease?' And a voice came to him, 'Antony, I was here, but I waited to see your fight; wherefore since you have endured, and hast not been worsted, I will ever be a succour to you, and will make your name known everywhere.' Having heard this, Antony arose and prayed, and received such strength that he perceived that he had more power in his body than formerly. And he was then about thirty-five years old." (Vita, 10).
Indeed, one could well argue that the phenomenon has its roots in Gethsemane itself, proper qualifications being made. It is fundamentally christological and paschal, an outplaying of the mortifying dimension of baptism -- itself a participation in the death and entombment of the Lord.
Less distressing that the darkness is so very dark today; more distressing that so few recognize it as a basically normal -- even salutary and necessary -- element of the growth in holiness and spiritual maturity. We often speak about the failures of catechesis that have undermined doctrine and liturgy; less frequently do we speak about the failures of catechesis that have undermined the ascetic struggle. (Of course, said failures are not altogether distinct.)
For some reason, we have forgotten that the Christian life is a bitter contest to the last breath, as St. Anthony said. If anything, for most of us, the fight evidently gets more ferocious as death approaches, as the traditional prayers for the dying reflect.
If we expected to endure great interior trials -- bleakness, dryness, all manner of strange and dreadful disturbances of mind and heart -- we would, paradoxically, enjoy much greater peace. As a wise easterner said, "Keep your mind in hell and despair not."
Or, better yet, let us hear David, who knew something about darkness:
I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
-Ps. 40:1-3
Yes! A life without trial, difficulty, darkness, temptation, would be no different from death. If a Christian is truly alive, he will suffer all of these things, and with the grace of God, overcome them, following in the footsteps of the Suffering Servant.
I think what makes our period so difficult is that the evil has settled so firmly within the bosom of Holy Mother Church, or rather, churchmen (a crucial distinction!), and so the last bastion where we might have thought to be safe and to find support has turned against us, like a kind of autoimmune disease. This is the peculiar strangeness of our situation.
But even here, we must remember that Judas, one of the twelve hand-picked by Our Lord, betrayed Him, and that all of His apostles fled except St. John.
Grateful.
"The faithful of Christ who have been placed on earth at just this moment in history are most beloved to their Lord, who is calling them to remain faithful precisely when it is most difficult and most countercultural, even counter-institutional."
This comment from the post you linked which you wrote in 2021 made me ugly cry. It's hard to remember that "we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. A peculiar people, that we should show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light." So hard to remember all this when the darkness does seem to be overtaking the light. But the light shined, and the darkness could not overcome it.
I've said it before, but thank you for this sanity - this antidote to despair. We need more Samwise Gamgees in the world, for us Frodos who are ready to give up.
Thank you for this kind word, and more importantly, thanks be to God.
We are encouraged to offer a "sacrifice of praise," meaning thanking our Heavenly Father in the midst of our physical pain, our emotional pain, and our trials. This is not easy to do, but He calls each of us to trust Him that all that is happening in our life is part of His amazing plan for each of us. Thank you for this lovely post!
Reading this article, makes me feel as if I am reading the Gospel of John chapter 16 to 18.
In this life, after Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil, sin entered the world, creation become adulterated, impure, a mixture of good and evil.
Figuratively, reality becomes like night and day, like a tapestry having contrasting sides. As in the life of Christ his seeming defeat it is also this ultimate triumph, the completion of his purpose in life. He is the Light darkness cannot extinguish.
Since it cannot remain that way, God has promised us a new heaven and a new earth in the future.
The Church is the mystical Body of Christ. Christ has given us a preview of what is to come to his mystical body by his own physical body.
It may not look good to be in the back side of the tapestry, as it was with the apostles. To walk in the night make us feel uncertain, and unsafe but the day will surely come and the fear of walking in the night will vanish.
Thise who are in Christ will not sleep forever, but those who have not Christ will. He has given us a proof, an sample, Himself. He is the Life.
I wish Dr. Kwasniewski that you had followed through on your observation that "we are looking at the historic nadir of the Catholic Church on earth, next to which the Arian crisis of the fourth century and the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth look like rough drafts" rather than falling back into the 'they had it rough in those times too' with quips about what some orthodox Christian allegedly would have thought during the life of Athanasius or during the sixteenth century. Because your initial observation was correct.
This one IS different - and for a whole host of reasons especially considering that in 2024 the world is constructed in a way where it is very conceivable that a single man could actually for a brief period of time say two and forty months actually take complete control of the entire planet. That never could have happened in the age of Athanasius nor of Luther. It simply wasn't possible then. It is now.
If I went into all the other reasons this would turn into an overly long essay instead of a comment. Just because Our Lord told us that we will not know the day or the hour does not absolve us from our obligation to watch for his Return, like watchers for the dawn as Cardinal Newman once said. And I'm sorry but we have been warned throughout the prophecies and types of Scripture that before He comes back things will break down and there will be a great apostasy and in the worldly or external sense they won't be repaired until He kills the man of sin and the son of perdition with the breath of his mouth and the light of his coming.
And what things will look like after that I have no idea but one thing I am sure of is that it will be a whole lot better than the Baroque...
Oh, I don't disagree at all. Nor do I think that your objection really "sticks" to this essay. I admit that our crisis is unique, and that we are seeing universal apostasy and meltdown. That is precisely why I wrote what I did: what we should do when everything seems lost (and maybe most things will be lost - for a time). But it is true that a similar frame of mind, a similar temptation to despair or to give in, would have been possible in earlier long-lasting crises.
I can't disagree with you about the temptation to give in being present in all of those crises. I suppose that in a lot of ways neither of those great crises that you mentioned ever really ended.
Arianism went out into the desert, translated itself into Arabic, and became Islam. And then it got its revenge by taking away all of the great Eastern Sees and the sites of the Councils that had condemned it. But that is only temporary.
And Protestantism's man centered religion (however much they would protest otherwise that's what it is) through its natural devolution into atheism now dominates the world. These two have now become probably the two most dominant spiritual forces on the planet. Again though, that is only temporary.
Our Lord knew all of this would happen and He warned us in advance to help us keep our heads. As Saint Peter told us we ought really be meditating on the prophecies as a lamp in a dark place until the sun rises.
I really needed this today. I’ve been in such a funk and a feeling of almost despair, but I know it is a temptation of the devil and I need to push through. God wins in the end and we merely have to remain faithful and do His holy will. Thank you for your words. They really helped me.
Deo gratias. Funks will come and go, and that's quite normal. What's crucial is remembering where our hope lies, who is our anchor and mainstay.
“There are those who are asserting that the Papacy is empty, or that there’s no chance of recovery; we are too far gone; we are doomed.”
Thank you, Dr. K, for this encouraging article counteracting an all-too-common temptation we face in the traditionalist movement today. As someone who hopes to see the restoration of our glorious Catholic Tradition within my lifetime (Deo volente!), I do not understand the “appeal” of sedevacantism – which is essentially to deprive ourselves of the divinely established visible structure of the Church, the very thing we are trying to restore in the first place! While “declaring Bergoglio a usurper” may temporarily feel good (and generate lots of internet clicks, as we have seen), it does absolutely nothing to fix the problems we face and ultimately leads to irrelevancy (as has quickly happened to certain prominent figures who have followed this path). We cannot afford to consign ourselves to a “solution” that makes the restoration of the Church even harder, regardless of how disfigured her human element has become.
Our Lord said, “by their fruits you shall know them.” We often use this to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the liberalism and modernism that have pervaded the Church, especially since Vatican II. However, I think it can also be applied to the traditionalist movement, to see which parts are bearing fruit and which need to be pruned. I believe it’s no coincidence that the “branches” that have not succumbed to the temptations so admirably combated by Dr. K (whether diocesan, Ecclesia Dei, or even SSPX) are the ones with thriving and expanding TLM apostolates, and hence contributing most to the restoration for which we all hope and pray.
Agree 100%.
Thank you for this encouraging reminder. I love the phrase “internet Palantir.”
As always Dr Kwasniewski a light in the darkness. This was most apt. Thank you! Romans 8:24-25
“For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for? 25 But if we hope for that which we see not, we wait for it with patience.” And who else is our hope but Christ Jesus
❤️🙏
Thank you so much for words of sanity in this mad world