St. Athanasius – When You Are On the Outside

As churches are being pressured to ban the “unvaccinated” from attendance, and some, in fact, have already done so…[1]Professor calls for “comprehensive measures” to ban the unvaccinated from “places of worship”; cf. thestarpheonix.com and as we hear of bishops departing from the faith onto a new “Synodal Way”…[2]www.pierced-hearts.com/2021/03/17/english-catholic-bishop-fears-germanys-synodal-way-will-lead-to-de-facto-schism/ the words of St. Athanasius find their echo again in our times… 

Letter of St. Athanasius (c. 296-298 – 373), 20th bishop of Alexandria, to his flock:

May God console you! …What saddens you … is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises─but you have the apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in this struggle-the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith?

True, the premises are good when the apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way… You are the ones who are happy: you who remain within the church by your faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis.

No one, ever, will prevail against your faith, beloved brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.

Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.

Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ. —fragments from Letter XXIX, cf. tertullian.org


 
The Church will be reduced in its dimensions, it will be necessary to start again. However, from this test a Church would emerge that will have been strengthened by the process of simplification it experienced, by its renewed capacity to look within itself… the Church will be numerically reduced. —Cardinal Ratzinger (POPE BENEDICT XVI), God and the World, 2001; interview with Peter Seewald

There is a great uneasiness, at this time, in the world and in the Church, and that which is in question is the faith… I sometimes read the Gospel passage of the end times and I attest that, at this time, some signs of this end are emerging… What strikes me, when I think of the Catholic world, is that within Catholicism, there seems sometimes to pre-dominate a non-Catholic way of thinking, and it can happen that tomorrow this non-Catholic thought within Catholicism, will tomorrow become the stronger. But it will never represent the thought of the Church. It is necessary that a small flock subsist, no matter how small it might be. —POPE ST. PAUL VI, The Secret Paul VI, Jean Guitton, p. 152-153, Reference (7), p. ix.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1 Professor calls for “comprehensive measures” to ban the unvaccinated from “places of worship”; cf. thestarpheonix.com
2 www.pierced-hearts.com/2021/03/17/english-catholic-bishop-fears-germanys-synodal-way-will-lead-to-de-facto-schism/
Posted in Messages, Other Souls.