1. The Catholic Religion is God-made. Other knowledge in the world is man-made. And as such can easily be learned and understood by men. And the history of man shows that he is consistently good in making the wrong choice of gods and religions. The human race is noted in choosing the easiest and the simplest religion…. which is commonly made by ordinary minds. Between a religion that consist of human rituals and a religion that requires logical thinking, he will choose the former.
Herein lays the great disadvantage of the Catholic Religion. It is not man-made. It was instituted by God and only God can teach it. Man can neither teach nor learn it by himself. Man cannot understand it by himself. He cannot learn it through studies.
2. How do you learn it? Through infusion; through a direct act of God granting this grace of knowledge and wisdom. What is the price? Christ’s words: “Learn from Me for I am meek and humble of heart.” Learn how to be humble as Christ, be humble like Christ and as a reward He will infuse this knowledge into your soul. You don’t need a book, nor pencil or paper. This is the first lesson of the Gospel.
St. John the Baptist lived in the desert for an extended length of time. He did not spend his time learning the web-making habits of the spider. He learned the Way and how to make one’s path straight towards the Way. That’s theology! Mary knew something all the women of Israel did not know… that the Messiah was to be born of a virgin and not of a married woman. How did she know that? And the apostles were mere fishermen. How did they become the font of Divine Revelation? St. Therese knew the very essence of Christian Love with few books and a host of
error preaching priests.
Let me put it simply. There are 8 Beatitudes that summarizes the Evangelical life. The first is “poor in spirit” – which is equivalent to Humility. Work first on being humble and the second to the eight Beatitude shall be given you depending on the degree of your humility. If you have a small degree humility, you will receive one or two Beatitudes. If you have perfect humility then you receive the rest of the eight Beatitudes….putting it mathematically.
God will infuse the knowledge of the Catholic Religion in a soul depending on the degree of his humility, like Mary, John the Baptist and the first Apostles. This is the reason the great founders, like St. Benedict, St. Ignatius and St. Bernard decreed the degrees of humility as essential foundations of Christian spirituality.
3. How do you attain humility? The Spiritual writers knew only one way: Obedience. Not any kind of obedience. Military obedience does not lead to humility. Imitation of Christ’s obedience leads to humility. And as one grows in obedience, one grows in humility; and as one grows in humility, he grows in the knowledge of the Catholic Religion.
There are many details involved but I shall set them aside for a while so the whole diagram may be clearly seen.
4. The act of obedience that leads to humility does not exist in a vacuum. It may be likened to a seed that is nurtured around the liturgy. Here we have a way of life geared to the observance of humility (or the degrees of humility) through obedience to Rules instituted by Saints, like Benedict, Francis of Assisi or Ignatius of Loyola. If and when this way of life (of obedience) is nurtured by the Liturgy, the result is a man with an angelic knowledge, like St. Thomas of Aquinas. He, clearly, obtained his infused knowledge while attending the Liturgy (Divine Office and Sacrifice of the Mass) at the Benedictine Monastery of MonteCassino. And he received the near perfection of this wisdom during mass. Faced with ecstatic dumbness the experience brought him to the threshold of the Beatific Vision. St. Thomas ceased writing. He had seen the truth without the meanderings of the logical mind.
5. Mary, the Apostles, St. Paul and St. Therese of Lisieux learned their theology this way; without teachers, without books. This is the only way to learn Catholicism.
6. St. Benedict, monasticism (with the Divine Office as the work of God from which nothing is to be preferred), obedience, humility and silence and knowledge of the Catholic Religion go hand in hand. The best Bishops were monks recruited to the service of the Church. The monks knew the secret on how to obtain this infused knowledge. This is how St. Thomas Aquinas, referred to as the most learned of the saints and the holiest of the learned, became such a great mind. He obtained it in the Benedictine Monastery and spread it as a Dominican. The way is clearly detailed in his Summa.
How do you study the deep truths of the Catholic Religion? Have a school house with the humility of Christ as the walls. Then attend your lectures from the Liturgy where the Holy Spirit is the teacher in the Divine Office and Jesus Christ in the Sacrifice of the Mass.
They do it wrong in most seminaries? Yes, the kind of knowledge learned in seminaries, theological school and catechetical centers are usually the ones that “puffs up.” The content and the methodology are wrong.
7. While the teachings of Christ are spread out throughout the different books of the New Testament, the same teachings are packed in the Psalms in a superior manner, in that it is presented, already, in the form of prayer (and made by the Holy Spirit at that.) And so the Work of God, the Divine Office, recited within an atmosphere of a way of Life of humility (i.e. obedience) is the school of Catholicism. St. Benedict calls it the school of the Lord’s service or the service to the Church. Did you notice how Pope Benedict XVI uses the psalms as beginnings of many of his addresses because of its deep theological contents to theme up his talks?
8. Pope Benedict XVI, conscious of the fact that ignorance is the state of the Catholic Church today, just as in the days of Martin Luther, knows only one way to acquire that knowledge. He is putting his Petrine office under the patronage of St. Benedict. He wants the Catholic Church to re-learn Catholicism the right way, through the way of St. Benedict’s monasticism, which is, by the way an imitation of the Hidden life of the Holy Family. (Painting above is St. Benedict admitting candidates to the monastery.)