Ave Maria!
Second Sunday after Easter—26
April AD 2009
Denying the Sacrifice of the Cross
[Ordinary of the Mass]
[English Text of Today's Mass]
[Latin Text of Today's Mass]
He “Himself bore our sins in His body upon the tree, that
we, having died to sin, might live to justice”
For many years now, on Palm Sunday, I
have asked our people to pay particular attention to the reading of the Passion
Gospels on that day and on the following Tuesday and Wednesday—to notice,
particularly, that those Gospels demonstrate the connection between the Last
Supper and the Crucifixion of our Lord—the connection between the Sacrifice of
the Cross and the Sacrifice of the Mass. This connection is demonstrated
in a most striking way on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, with Thursday’s Mass
of the Last Supper being fully completed only on Friday, with the priest’s
Communion after the reading of the Passion Gospel and the veneration of the
Cross.
When we read these Passion Gospels, and
when we read the sixth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel, we are left with no
doubt that our Lord, as He promised, gives us His Body and Blood in Holy
Communion, and that each time Mass is offered His Sacrificial death on the Cross
is presented again to those of us who are separated by time or place from the
historical event of Calvary.
Some of you own hand missals that were
printed around 1960, and some have noticed that in those books the Passion
Gospels were considerably shortened—making no mention of the Last Supper, each
of them beginning a few hours later in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of
Olives.
I would suggest to you that this change
was not simply an effort to make the Mass a little shorter for impatient people.
I would suggest that this change in the Mass, like many that came later, was an
attempt to change the belief of Catholic people. Over the past few
decades, we have seen Modernist Catholics go from the Catholic belief in the
sacrificial nature of the Mass to a somewhat Protestant understanding of the
Mass as a mere commemoration of the Last Supper. Indeed, among some of
them, what they still call “the Mass” has been reduced to a communal
celebration of the people who make up the Mystical Body of Christ, with
little or no conception of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The current Pope,
Benedict XVI, before his elevation to the papacy, while Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger was still head of the Holy Office, lamented that significant numbers
of Modernist priests had lost the Catholic belief in the sacrificial nature of
the Mass.
As with all evil, we may be left to
wonder whether it came about through ignorance or through malice—did the
engineers of the liturgical aberrations following Vatican II act because
they did not know better, or because they were purposefully trying to distort
this essential doctrine of the Catholic Faith? Apart from their subjective
guilt on Judgment Day, it matters little—the evil is real, and it has
afflicted many Catholics, whatever may have been the motives of the
perpetrators.
Apparently the perpetrators are not
finished. Just a week or two ago, the head of the German Bishops’
Conference gave a television interview in which he took things a “giant
step” further by denying also the sacrificial nature of the Crucifixion of
Christ!
Archbishop
Robert Zollitsch told [a German TV audience] that Christ “did not die for
the sins of the people because God needed a sacrificial offering ... the
Saviour had simply expressed “solidarity” with the
suffering of the people even to death. ... “this great perspective,
this tremendous solidarity,” that he went so far that he suffered all
“with” me.
[The
interviewer] added after this: “You would now no longer describe it in such
a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would
no longer describe it like this?”
Archbishop
Zollitsch confirmed his fall from the Catholic faith with a clear “no.”
This is outrageous! This
Archbishop of Freiburg expects us to believe that God did not
give His Only-begotten Son for the redemption of mankind and the forgiveness of
sins—but only that Christ suffered in “solidarity”
with all others who suffer! This man denies not just the Mass, but the
very Sacrifice of the Cross Itself!
This is certainly not
the teaching of the Catholic Faith, which comes down to us through the Apostles
from Jesus Christ Himself. Even men like Luther and Calvin who established
the various sects of Protestantism would never have made such a claim, for this
strikes at the fundamental roots of Christianity.
In fact, Archbishop Zollitsch sounds
rather like a Buddhist, describing our Lord as what the Buddhists call a “Bhodi
Satva,” a “compassionate Buddha” who refuses to leave the sufferings
of this world until all of the beings of the Earth have been enlightened, and
they can enter Nirvana together. This is yet another chapter in the
nonsensical Modernist story that “our Lord was a great man, a great
philosopher, but not essentially different from any of the other great men of
the ages.” Perhaps the Archbishop will die his cassock bright yellow,
and go off to live in India or Tibet. (Let us pray to the Lord.)
Clearly, none of this is what our Lord
said in today’s Gospel: “I lay down My life for My sheep,” nor what Saint
Peter was saying in his epistles: “He bore our sins in His body upon the
tree.”
It is not what He meant when He established the eternal link between the Mass
and the Cross, saying: “This is a chalice of My blood, of the new testament,
which shall be shed for many unto the remission of sins.”
I urge you to learn from this event.
“Innovation is the mother of perversity.” Anyone who comes along
saying that “the Church had it wrong for 15 or 20 centuries, but now I have it
figured out right” is very probably wrong—no matter what color his
cassock; black, purple, red, white, or saffron.
Recognize, please, that our Lord was far
more than a great teacher, and that His mission was far more than one of mere
“solidarity with suffering mankind.” In reality, His mission was the
mission of “transformation,” rather than mere “solidarity.” His
was the final sacrifice along that river of blood that was poured out by the
priests of the Temple, by Abraham, by Noe, and all the way on back to the
sacrifice of Abel the Just. His was the Sacrifice that redeemed fallen man
from the sin of Adam, and made it possible for us to become adopted sons and
daughters of God. His is the blood of which, if you do not drink, you will
not have life in you.
Remember that each time you assist at
Mass, you stand at the foot of the Cross—and if you will but allow it, you
will be transformed by the graces of the Holy Sacrifice of Christ. The
“compassionate Buddha” may have been a wise man in his time, and one with
pity on the “unenlightened” around him—but he pales in comparison with
Jesus Christ, who has purchased our souls with the ransom of His Blood.
He “Himself bore our sins in His body
upon the tree,
that we, having died to sin, might live to justice.”
Sources:
(1)
Rarely do you get a Newchurch prelate denying an article of
Faith directly, but Robert Zollitsch, Archbishop of Freiburg, and Chairman of
the Newchurch German Bishops Conference has done it. On German television, April
18, 2009, Zollitsch denied that Christ died on the cross to redeem mankind.
According to Zollitsch, Christ died only to express "solidarity" with
the suffering. The interviewer asked Zollitsch: "You would now no longer
describe it in such a way that God gave His own Son, because we humans were so
sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?" Zollitsch answered, No!
[Some information for this Commentary was contributed by German Television.]
(2)
For the Chairman of the German Bishops' Conference who has
fallen away from the Catholic Faith, the crucifixion of Christ is just a
psychological support in suffering. On Holy Saturday, the Archbishop of Freiburg
and head of the German Bishops Conference, Msgr. Robert Zollitsch, denied the
Expiatory Death of Christ.
Archbishop Zollitsch said this in an interview with
Meinhard Schmidt-Degenhard on the program "Horizente" of the German TV
station 'Hessischer Rundfunk',
Christ "did not die for the sins of the people because
God needed a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat" - said the archbishop.
The Saviour had simply expressed "solidarity"
with the suffering of the people even to death
He had shown that even suffering and pain were taken up by
God. According to Mons. Zollitsch "that is this great perspective, this
tremendous solidarity," that he went so far that he suffered all
"with" me.
Schmidt-Degenhard added after this: "You would now no
longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans
were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this? "
Archbishop Zollitsch confirmed his fall from the Catholic
faith with a clear "no":
God had given "his own son in solidarity with us unto
this last death agony” to show: So much are you worth to me, I go with you,
and I am totally with you in every situation."
Finally, the archbishop said one’s own sins were
responsible that Christ "has become so involved with me". (Cathcon- he
seems to row back a tiny way here, but nothing like as far as his original
denial went).
"He has become involved with me out of solidarity –
from free will."
Christ had "taken up what I have been blamed for,
including the evil that I have caused, and also to take it back into the world
of God and hence to show me the way out of sin, guilt and from death to
life."
