Three Score and Ten

By Timothy J Cullen " Our years shall be considered as a spider: the days of our years in them are three score and ten years"

(Psalms: 89: 9-10, Douay Rheims Bible)

The year of our Lord 2016 has drawn to a close. During that year, this writer completed his three score and ten in the vale of tears that we share. God willing, he may have no small number of years remaining, but given the Biblical injunction, a summing up is in order nonetheless.

This writer was born in New York City just short of a year after the conclusion of the Second World War, a time in the West that was truly blessed in many ways for the citizens of the United States of America. It was a time during which an incomparable period of material prosperity for the masses developed.

It was a time of great technological advance that continues unimpeded to this day. Even in a Europe largely destroyed by the dreadful war, material prosperity reemerged. This writer grew up in the USA and lived a large part of his stillyouthful, early and later middle-aged life in Europe and now lives the latter years in South America asking himself: At what price did all this material prosperity come? The answer is discouraging.

The price was and remains the widespread abandonment of what less prosperous but wiser folk understood was the purpose and reward for our pilgrimage in the earthly vale of tears: the promise of eternal reward as promised by Christ, assuming we adhered to His teachings and accepted the God-granted benefits of the Sacraments offered us by His Church.

Ah, His Church, broadly speaking a mere shadow of what it was seventy years ago!

Material prosperity is all well and good, but not at the cost of the loss of the Beatific Vision and an eternity in Hell, or at best a painful passage through Purgatory. How can it be that such a simple fact eludes so many? How can it be that so many are willing to succumb to the temptation of immediate sensual gratification in lieu of an eternity of ecstatic awareness of spiritual bliss beyond imagination? Why have the churches emptied, the Sacraments been profaned to so great an extent, even within the hallowed precincts of God’s Church herself? When full in years, one asks these questions with greater urgency, perhaps more for the sake of one’s posterity than for oneself if one has held fast to the Faith through all these years.

"Our years shall be considered as a spider" sings the psalmist, but what exactly is meant by that? When I first came upon this translation, a literal translation from the Latin, I was puzzled and to a certain extent remain so. I believe what was meant was that our years should be thought of as a spider’s web, a fragile weaving of time intended to trap an understanding of our purpose on this earth. Those who have held fast to the Faith have had that latter question answered by the Church, answered well and expounded well not just in dogma but in the great classic The Four Last Things, both in the version written by Fr. Martin von Cochem in the seventeenth century as well as the better known 1947 work of Fr. Reginal Garrigou Lagrange.

No one among us, not the pope, not any churchman and least of all oneself, knows the moment when our particular web of earthly time will surrender to the elements and our lives draw to a close. Fragile indeed is the web of life, susceptible to breakage in its every moment. The egoistic concerns of daily life are trivial—enormously trivial— when viewed from the perspective of eternity. Christ came to this earth to teach us once and for all how to live our daily lives and more importantly how to prepare ourselves for eternity, tasking His Church and her priests with providing us the means. His teachings are not to be meddled with, certainly not to be subjected to sophistic philosophical speculation that leads the unwary to confusion rather than instruction, least of all with respect to adherence to the only true teachings that treat of eternal reward or condemnation and the means by which the former is obtained and the latter avoided; to do otherwise is to betray the sacred office of the priesthood instituted by God in His Second Person.

This writer remembers when the Church was, well, the Church! The Christmastide papal broadcast of Pius XII was an eagerly awaited affirmation of the Faith as it had existed for nearly two thousand years at the time. Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was a solemn ceremony filled with Mystery. The new year was no different from the old with respect to the timeless dogma of the Church. Catholics had no doubt about what it meant to be Catholic: how could they when dogma had settled that once and for all? All the answers to perennial questions were at hand; nothing remained to doubt, at least until Vatican II, when open season on certainty was proclaimed.

The termites likely planted within the Church began their corrosive eating away of certainty at that ill-starred Council and continue to corrode the good and true as 2017, A.D. begins. The present Vicar of Christ is very much a man of his times, a man who believes himself capable of correcting Christ, more’s the pity. Tradition is no longer an "option" for the faithful; it’s a necessity for those who wish to attain Paradise.

This writer, now elderly, has grown tired—more to the point, incredulous— with respect to papal pronouncements and if truth be told with all the "theological" philosophizing of the past half-century and more by so-called Catholic theologians. I have completed my allotted three score and ten and now look toward the Four Last Things as my polestar, if you will. Fifty-plus years of theological pap plays no part in my convictions with respect to the final accounting to be made before my judgment comes to pass after my soul leaves this earth; I rely on the dogma of the Church as taught to me and countless millions before the Modernist innovators proposed their novelties; God willing, future generations will do the same.

It was not my original intent to drop the third person ("this writer") narrative, but as the essay began to unfold, I realized that it is eminently personal and therefore only a first person narrative would do. Long ago I learned that the original sin had much to do with hubris, that overweening pride that opens one’s ears to the whispered temptation to believe "You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" Gen 3:5). Our first parents yielded to the temptation to take upon themselves what was right and proper to God, Who had forbidden them this knowledge, an since their expulsion from Eden, all humankind "knows the death" and all who live must die upon this earth.

During all the history and pre-history of sentient beings, only two were born into this world without sin: the Second Person of God and His blessed Mother.

These two had preternatural knowledge of good and evil, but we do not nor should we ever presume that we do; our knowledge is learned.

Natural Law may be written on our hearts, but the laws, tradition, customs and culture of our Faith and our Church are not: we are taught them, learn them, then (hopefully) practice them. What, then, are we to do if or Church takes it upon herself through the agency of her hierarchy and theologians decide it is right and fitting to try and change these time-honored verities with the frequency and ambiguity of the federal tax code?

One cannot help but wonder if these innovations are made more for the sake of intellectual hubris than for the genuine good of the souls of the faithful. The bizarre pronouncements emanating from the Vatican seem not so much intellectually hubristic as the emotionally excessive outbursts of social workers robed in scarlet and the social worker supremo looking back at his youthful underlining of the yellowed pages of his dog-eared copy of Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (1971, first outlined in 1968), by 88 year old Notre Dame theology professor Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., long considered the principal figure in the founding of the prohibited movement that derived from this so-called "theology" that gave us the provocative phrase "the preferential option for the poor".

Anyone at all familiar with the relatively recent history of Latin America knows well the dreadful outcome brought about by this messianic and overly emotional approach to religion when preached to a disadvantaged but uneducated people filled with-not-by-any-means-unjustified resentment with respect to their material and social status. Religion, however, is not the avenue down which societal "progressivism" is meant to be steered: the Faith and Doctrine are incorruptible and not to be tampered with, something that should be obvious above all to those charged with defending it.

I live in the home country of Pope Francis and have friends who were on both sides of the dreadful conflict that arose in this country as a result of a revolutionary fervor that was Marxistinspired and should never have spilled over into "theology", a lesson I wish Pope Francis had learned; it appears, however, that during the so-called "Dirty War" suffered by Argentina, the then-Fr. Jorge Bergoglio chose to conceal his now-evident sympathies with the pseudo-theology/ideology of Fr. Gutiérrez and the Brazilian former priest Leonardo Boff for reasons known only to him; he certainly has no hesitation in espousing them now.

I believe these men (primates of the Church though some of them are) to be men who in the final accounting have as their intellectual and/or subjective emotional motto " Non servum", a motto derived from the primordial rebel against God, His initially pure Creation of the human being, the teachings of His Second Person and the workings of His Third Person in our fallen world. I will serve the Faith, but balk at serving the anti-doctrinal innovations offered up by men, though they be clothed as the primates of God’s Church, a Church now subjected to a trial that appears to be intended to separate the wheat from the chaff. I am but a simple sinner still trying to find his way at age seventy, an age when all should have been decided long since, but now in spite of the fullness of years is assailed by doubt not with respect to the Faith but yes with respect to those charged with defending and promoting it. I confess to unease as I go forward in the latter years of my life and a still-greater unease with respect to my posterity and the teachings they may receive.

There is really no "debate" when it comes to the Faith, not even in its more mundane applications. The unlettered poor need evangelization, not politicization. Conformity with Catholic Doctrine long since expressed and taught is their (and our) "highway to Heaven"; "Heaven" was never meant to nor is it possible to somehow "achieve" in what we know is a fallen world with its multitudinous flaws: Heaven is reached by adhering to Doctrine, availing oneself of the Sacraments and facing the Four Last Things in a state of Grace, not by bettering one’s material lot in this vale of tears.

Let whomever chooses to do so view me as backward, retrograde, whatever they may call me and those who believe as I do: I was taught what was right and true, and I will adhere to those beliefs on my deathbed; and I believe you and all should as well! ■