Quietism continued , in a little series, five out of six

I am again looking at Quietism. Here are some more points from the Pope's Letter I have been looking at the past two days.

31. No meditative person exercises true interior virtues; these should not be recognized by the senses. It is necessary to abandon the virtues.

The virtuous life is an absolute necessity for being a saint. The virtuous life is not only essential, but antecedent to the purification and eventual unity of the soul with God. The goal of life is heaven and Beatific Vision. The virtuous life is one of the themes on my blog, and I need to get back to it at some time, as so much as been going on, I interrupted the series.

32. Neither before nor after communion is any other preparation or act of thanksgiving required for these interior souls than continuance in a customary passive resignation, because in a more perfect way it supplies all acts of virtues, which can be practices and are practiced in the ordinary way. And, if on this occasion of communion there arise emotions of humility, of petition, or of thanksgiving, they are to be repressed, as often as it is not discerned that they are from a special impulse of God; otherwise they are impulses of nature not yet dead.

Could it be that the reason why people, in my parish, talk before and after Mass, besides being lazy, is that these parishioners simply do not understand or see the value of responding to grace, the grace of thanksgiving, of love. I wonder is this poor heretic Molinos ever experienced the love of God in any intimate way? How sad, as it seems that he did not.


33. That soul acts badly which proceeds by this interior way, if it wishes on feast days by any particular effort to excite some sensible devotion in itself, since for an interior soul all days are equal, all festal. And the same is said of holy places, because to souls of this kind all places are alike.


What can I say? This is SO Quaker....


Next.

34. To give thanks to God by words and by speech is not for interior souls which ought to remain in silence, placing no obstacle before God, because he operates in them; and the more they resign themselves to God, they discover that they cannot recite the Lord's prayer, i.e., Our Father.

A sure sign of satanic influence would be the inability to say the Lord's Prayer, or any other standard prayer, such as the Hail Mary. But, of course, a heretic, with low church ideals, would eschew the need for standard prayers. Again, this is also a denial of the human need for vocal prayer and even for Gregorian Chant, for example. One can see the overlapping false thinking of Quietism and those non-denominational, pseudo-Christian churches which deny that there are sacraments and the Mass. etc.


35. It is not fitting for souls of this interior life to perform works, even virtuous ones, by their own choice and activity; otherwise they would not be dead. Neither should they elicit acts of love for the Blessed Virgin, saints, or the humanity of Christ, because since they are sensible objects, so, too, is their love toward them.

Again, the low church, heretical impulse to get rid of all sensible devotion for a false sense of the spiritual. We are not disembodied spirits and to deny love is to deny Christ and the Indwelling of the Holy Trinity. The very goal these heretics wanted is denied to them by the denial of eros, to agape, to caritas, as I outlined last week in the encylical series on Deus Caritas Est.

We should be daily grateful for our present Pope, who has elucidated Love for us so clearly in his first encyclical.

36. No creature, neither the Blessed Virgin nor the saints, ought to abide in our heart, because God alone wishes to occupy and possess it.

See last week's series on love. Love begets love, begets love.....This was supposed to be a three-part series, but it shall go into six, with the small one yesterday counting as three.  A thanks to my readers, who like these mini-series.

This is not the last little posting on Quietism, hopefully, to show how this heresy has effected some Catholics of a certain age.

37. On occasion of temptations, even violent ones, the soul ought not to elicit explicit acts of opposite virtues, but should persevere in the above mentioned love and resignation.

Where do I start? The good nuns taught me years ago that the way to combat a vice is to emphasize the opposite virtue. When one is raising children, this is also part of their training. Again, to assume that the virtues “just happen” reminds me of a student I had years ago, whose history project, “just didn't happen”. She earned an “F” for the course. I highly recomment Garrigou Lagrange on the virtues.Josef Pieper is another great writer on the virtues, and start here.

38. The voluntary cross of mortifications is a heavy weight and fruitless, and therefore to be dismissed.

Again, this is a denial of the Passion of Christ, His Incarnation and the entire tradition of redemptive suffering. St. Therese of Liseaux is an answer to this false idea, as is the long tradition of honoring Christ in His Passion and Death on the Cross, our Redemption.

39. The more holy works and penances, which the saints performed, are not enough to remove from the soul even a single tie.

Blessed John Paul II on suffering is an excellent answer to this point. If one has never read the Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris, the link is on the name.