Father drew a line on the board. Then, he explained that the horizontal line was the ideal of doctrine as taught by Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity. Father said that the Catholic Church expected each member to reach this ideal, which was made up of the Teachings of the Magisterium, and to become holy. In other words, all Catholics were called to be saints, to transcend the ordinary expectations of daily life for the heroic life of the virtues.
Then, Father drew another line under the first one and he called this line "reality". He said that the Protestants looked at what people were actually doing and believing and determined teaching from that reality, which included sin and imperfections.
In other words, the human expectation for holiness had been dropped for the acceptance of the status quo.
Father noted that Protestants did not believe in saintliness, in transcending the daily hum-drum of life, but accepted less than what God had taught. Therefore, the doctrines of the Protestant congregations were being, as he spoke to us, changed, lessened, meeting the lowest common denominator.
A few years after this talk, all but two of the Lutheran synods accepted abortion. A few years later, homosexuality was no longer seen as an aberration, but as an acceptable difference. When Humanae Vitae was promulgated, many Catholics fell into this Protestant mind-set, declaring that it was too hard to follow the Church's teaching against contraception. Those Catholics forgot about grace.
What we saw last week in the synod was the ugly head of Protestantism. In fake language invoking tolerance, soft love, as opposed to hard love, and the horrible use of the term "pastoral", as if there was an opposition between doctrinal and pastoral truth, which there is not, some bishops and cardinals revealed that they were thinking and believing like Protestants.
Catholicism is like a diamond, hard, brilliant, expensive. The truth cannot be bought with cheap grace.
Too many of our leaders, especially those from the States, but not exclusively, believe in cheap grace. They want to dumb-down Catholicism and make the Church one more Protestant denomination.
Some will succeed in protestantizing their dioceses. Some will fight for the truth. The Church will never be the same, but enter into a period of chaos and purging.
Make sure you are on the right side of this battle. Make sure you teach yourself the truths of the faith so that you will not be swayed into accepting rebellious, Protestant thinking.
We all have to make choices. I, for one, choose Christ and His Church, not a man-made construct, not Protestantism.
I shall strive to meet the high bar, knowing that with the grace of God, I can become a saint. That is my calling and your calling. Anything less is a lie. Anything less insults the Trinity and blasphemes Christ on the Cross. Remember that some of the Sanhedrin taunted Christ while He was sacrificing Himself for the Church. This cry was heard last week in Rome-without the Cross there is no salvation, no Church.
Mark 15:30 Douay-Rheims
Save thyself, coming down from the cross.