1. The devil had been destroying the human race since the time of Adam and Eve. In paradise, the devil started with a heresy. It was there that the head of the hydra was first created. It consisted in the heresy of freedom wherein man thought he was free to choose between good and evil, the symbol of the tree that was forbidden. And God reminded them; ‘you may not touch it.’ Man was not free to choose good from evil. He was in fact forbidden to choose between good and evil and this was the spirituality of the Old Testament. The Old Testament states that we must choose good and avoid evil, it is not that we may choose whatever we want from good and evil and freely choose evil. The New Testament will perfect the spirituality of the Old Testament. We are not free to chose between good and evil. We are obliged to choose good and avoid evil. The New testament tells us it is not enough to chose good and avoid evil, our choice is between what is good and what is best. We must chose not only what is good but what is better and best.
As the history of man proceeded, the devil tried to use other heresies to see to what sin man is attracted to. The devil must have tried thousands of heresies but because he lacks imagination in devising heresies all these errors can really be grouped into 5 to 10 major heresies. Alone, these heresies were easy to overcome but joined together they become a formidable spiritual foe.
2. We are all acquainted with some of these: Arianism, Pelagianism, Nominalism,….to mention a few. Put together they become a hydra with no visible recognizable shape, neither Arianism nor Pelagianism. It becomes a little of everything, a poisonous concoction of a hundred different poison. We cannot know what particular poison it is and so we couldn’t know the remedy. We cannot use the medicine used by St. Athanasius against Arianism because it also show signs of Nominalism.
3. This concoction of many heresies attacked the Church between the year 100 to 800. But it was effectively blocked by the Church. It returned around the 1000, Pope Urban with the help of St. Anselm did battle against it but like the hydra, every time a portion of the heresy was cut off, it grew new limbs. It was impossible to kill it completely. And so it continued to torment the Church after Pope Urban and St. Anselm at this era since this 10th century saw a decrease of great Catholic thinkers.
4. This hydra of a monster was so deceitful only Lucifer, himself, could have devised it. Instead of attacking the Church directly, the devil went on guerrilla warfare using germ warfare against the seminaries. These were heretical germs that had mutated into resistant Catholic medications. Essentially this heresy bogged down the Catholic Church into the Old Testament preventing her from crossing from the Old Testament into the realm of the New Testament. It camouflaged the Old Testament spirituality with beautiful New Testament words making it sound like New Testament. It encouraged the New Testament spirituality but stated that this spirituality is only for a few select chosen souls. Note that all the doctrines are right except for the statement that the New Testament, by now described as impossible for most Catholics and is only for a few chosen elite souls. The germ contaminated the whole Church, specially at the level of seminaries. The statement is more than enough to discourage souls from crossing from the Old Testament to the New Testament. This is in effect preventing souls from entering the Catholic Church, preventing souls from having the theological virtues…in short preventing souls from going to heaven. Those bitten by this bug will never know the way to heaven. Martin Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were a few among the terminal cases. The rest of the Catholic priesthood were in different stages of illness. Philosophies like Nazism, democracy, communism would come from this heresy through the philosophy of the enlightenment in France. Every evil today came from this hydra.
At this period it was impossible to find where the Catholic Church was. Seminaries were producing bishops and priest of doubtful orthodoxy. There were so few seminaries that were producing orthodox priest that you could count them, like the seminary of St. Sulpice. The rest were no where in the map of orthodoxy. The few holy priest and thinkers were directly raised by God. They were not products of seminaries.
5. From the 1000 to the 1500 and up to the present, the Church had been undergoing internal spiritual hemorrhage, she was bleeding to death. She looked healthy outside but she was dying inside. The visible Church knew there was something wrong inside so she calls the Council of Trent where all the right doctrinal medicines were prescribed. But the doctors lack the skill to heal. So the post Tridentine resolutions were not wisely implemented. The Moral theology of Trent had this hydra in its womb. So the disease continued. God, as usual raised Popes with the help of God-raised saints like Vincent de Paul and Francis de Sales immediately after Trent, precisely to cure the priesthood of this disease. It only caused a dent. The struggle of the Popes from the 15th century was Herculean. To my memory Pius IX, Pius X indefatigably condemned this heresy. It depleted the strength of Pope Pius the XII that he even thought of retiring as Pope, it disturbed the sleep of John 23 seeing the Church bleeding to death through her five wounds he hurriedly saummoned Vatican II, it opened the eyes of Paul VI that made him warn “Satan had entered the Church.” It was a challenged for the present Pope, Benedict XVI who, up to the present , had very visibly combated this hydra but he sadly knows that the medicine is being administered to a dying patient. The response is not encouraging because the disease is in its terminal stage. The Church could only apply cobalt to slow down the deterioration as shown in the dwindling list of saints and great thinkers of the Church, and the dwindling number of priests and nuns. The stench of the disease has begun enveloping the world in the form of the greatest sin, scandal by priests.
6. The virtue of Faith demands that a soul must know the complete doctrine of the Catholic Church in its purity. The doctrines cannot exist with errors. If the soul knows both the error and truths, he should know that the errors are errors and that the truth is the truth. But if the soul knows both the truth and the errors but cannot distinguish the errors from the truth that soul cannot make a true act of Faith and thus suffer its consequence. This is what happened to the souls from the 1000 up to the present year 2011. Most priests and most lay person do not know the spirituality of the New Testament and therefore, cannot enter the Catholic Church, do not have the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, thus cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And the Church is filled with the signs of this sad state of affairs, signs enumerated in both the Dogmatic and Moral theology of the Catholic Church.
God comes back to the rescue. Part III.