Dom Guéranger on these Latter Days
Dom Prosper Guéranger, in his commentary on the Epistle of the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, offers a profound description of these times, when there is “an almost universal falling off” from infinite and unchangeable truth. These words can well be applied to our times, where the apostasy has reached the highest cupola of the Church and the sons of darkness seem to be victorious.
We know, however, that after God lets fall a great chastisement on mankind and on the Church representatives responsible for that great apostasy, Our Lady will intervene and we will see a time of peace and holiness, the Reign of Mary promised at Fatima and Ecuador.
Dom Gueranger:
It is then [in the Latter Days] more than at all previous times that the Faithful will have to remember the injunction given to us by the Apostle in today’s Epistle; that is, they will have to comport themselves with that circumspection which he enjoins, taking every possible care to keep their understanding, no less than their heart, pure in those evil days.
Supernatural light will, in those days, not only have to stand the attacks of the children of darkness, who will put forward their false doctrines; it will, moreover, be minimized and falsified by the very children of the light yielding on the question of principles; it will be endangered by the hesitations and trimmings and human prudence of those who are called far-seeing men.
Many will practically ignore the master truth, that the Church never can be overwhelmed by any created power. If they do remember that Our Lord has promised Himself to uphold His Church even to the end of the world, they will still have the impertinence to believe that they do a great service to the good cause by making certain politically clever concessions, which, if they were tried in the balance of the sanctuary, would be found under weight!
Those future worldly-wise people will quite forget that Our Lord will have no need for helping Him to keep His promise of crooked schemes, however shrewd those may be; they will entirely overlook this most elementary consideration - that the cooperation, which Jesus deigns to accept, at the hands of His servants in the defense of the rights of His Church never could consist in the garbling, or in the disguisement of those grant truths which constitute the power and beauty of the Bride.
Is it possible that they will forget the Apostle’s maxim, which he lays down in his Epistle to the Romans - that the conforming oneself to this world - the attempting an impossible adaptation of the Gospel to a world that is un-christianized is not the means for proving what is the good, and acceptable, and the perfect will of God. So that it will be a thing of great and rare merit, in many an occurrence of those unhappy times, to merely understand what is the will of God, as our Epistle expresses it.
Look to yourselves, would St. John say to those men, that ye lose not the things which ye have wrought; make yourselves sure of the full reward, which is only given to the persevering thoroughness of doctrine and faith!
The Liturgical Year, Vol. XI, pp. 426-429
Posted on January 25, 2025
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