When the Dead Stand Again

By Christopher A. Ferrara

"And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished." A few days ago, I watched my dear friend John Vennari being lowered into the ground in his coffin. A shovel full of earth from my hands was added to those from his family and friends. This vibrant personality, so full of life and learning, a figure who loomed large in the lay movement for Tradition for so many years, is suddenly gone from this earth at the age of 59, leaving behind a devoted wife and the three extraordinary children with whom they have both been blessed, though late they came to the married state.

The natural man looks upon death in such circumstances as a scandal. He shudders at the very thought of death and labors to drive it from his mind.

And should someone—an impertinent Catholic perhaps—remind him of his inevitable fate, he is likely to react with irrational anger over being confronted with the most unwelcome truth of all: that sooner or later his body will fail him and he will die. Or, as a French

~ See Dead Stand/ Page 6

John Vennari

Defender of the Old Faith, RIP

When the Dead Stand Again

C. Ferrara/ Continued from Page 1

proverb more earthily puts it: health is a precarious affair that always ends badly.

For the natural man, however, there are more clever ways to hide from the reality of death than a simple refusal to think about it. We have all witnessed the posturing of the modern stoic, often a celebrity or public intellectual, who professes to be indifferent toward death and to care not at all about his fate after death. He will enunciate some shallow philosophy of life along the lines of "living life to the fullest" and will express the rather pathetic hope that after "living life to the fullest" he will simply die peacefully in his sleep.

The entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes, posthumously revealed to be a homosexual, once expressed that same stoic sentiment in an interview. The text of that interview eludes me today, but I will never forget the substance: "I have everything I have ever wanted in this life, and I expect nothing in any life to come, if there is one. I wish only to die in my sleep." Six months later, Forbes got exactly he asked for, dying from a heart attack at the age of 70 while taking a nap in his New Jersey home, surrounded by his collection of Faberge eggs.

"Mr. Forbes had obviously died in his sleep. He had died very peacefully, apparently," said his personal physician.

"I don’t know anyone who enjoyed life so much or gave so much back," said Barbara Walters, as if that were the most that one could possibly say about the existence of an immortal soul with an eternal destiny. But Our Lord said something quite different about those who would live for the goods of this world alone: "Woe to you rich, for ye have received your consolation." (Luke 6:24) Yet is too easy to make light of the natural man’s futile attempts to avoid the inescapable reality of death. Where would we Catholics be without God’s gratuitous gift of the supernatural virtue of hope infused at our baptism, along with faith and charity? Hope is "a Divine virtue by which we confidently expect, with God’s help, to reach eternal felicity as well as to have at our disposal the means of securing it." That is, no man can attain the theological virtue of hope in life eternal by his own effort, not even by the habitual practice of moral virtue. Hence Pope Gregory XVI, in his anti-liberal encyclical Mirari vos, condemned the error of religious indifferentism, which even in the early 19th century was among "the evils with which the Church is afflicted at present." Today, of course, that error has penetrated to the Church’s very summits. As Gregory warned: This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked, who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained. Surely, in so clear a matter, you will drive this deadly error far from the people committed to your care. With the admonition of the apostle that "there is one God, one faith, one baptism" may those fear who contrive the notion that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever.

The supernatural virtue of hope in life eternal, infused by Baptism, is not a feeling arising from the passions, but an act of the will governed by reason, as is the exercise of the natural virtues.

Thus, it is no cause for despair that our feelings about death—the same feelings of dread that afflict the natural man— might seem at times to be at odds with a supernaturally infused hope. This is only an effect of the weakness of the flesh, though the spirit is willing.

Now, we cannot possess hope in the supernatural sense without the supernatural virtue of faith that precedes it, for the object of hope is the very God in whom we have faith as opposed to some earthly object that we might hope (in the natural sense) to attain by the mere habit of moral virtue. As Saint Thomas explains: Absolutely speaking, faith precedes hope. For the object of hope is a future good, arduous but possible to obtain.

In order, therefore, that we may hope, it is necessary for the object of hope to be proposed to us as possible. Now the object of hope is, in one way, eternal happiness, and in another way, the Divine assistance, as explained above, and both of these are proposed to us by faith, whereby we come to know that we are able to obtain eternal life, and that for this purpose the Divine assistance is ready for us, according to Hebrews 11:6: "He that cometh to God, must believe that He is, and is a rewarder to them that seek Him." Therefore it is evident that faith precedes hope. (ST II-II, Q.

17, Art. 7).

The faith that precedes hope is likewise an act of the will, enabled (as is hope) by the grace of justification received in baptism. But faith in turn rests upon belief in a single truth whose commemoration we are about to celebrate: that Christ is risen from the dead in a literal and bodily sense; that the Risen Christ walked again among His subjects, preached to them and even ate with them. This truth and this truth alone—which the neo-Modernism that plagues the Church today constantly seeks to undermine with emasculating interpretations—is the foundation of our faith and thus our hope. As Saint Paul teaches: Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say, that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins.

Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now Christ is risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep: For by a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead. And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.

Without the Resurrection, says Saint Paul, we would be left with nothing but the hope of the natural man, and we would be fools not to do as the natural man does by "living life to the fullest" rather than suffering for the sake of a faith that is in vain: Otherwise what shall they do that are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not again at all? why are they then baptized for them? Why also are we in danger every hour? I die daily, I protest by your glory, brethren, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. If (according to man) I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me, if the dead rise not again? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.

The faith of the Christian is thus no mere "blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality," as the generality of indifferentist churchmen more or less preach today, contrary to the abandoned Oath Against Modernism from which I have just quoted. Rather, as the Oath prescribed by Pope Saint Pius X declares, our faith is "a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source. By this assent, because of the authority of the supremely truthful God, we believe to be true that which has been revealed and attested to by a personal God, our Creator and Lord."

That is, our faith depends upon an actual event in history at a particular time and place, that being the advent of the Word Incarnate, whose life, death and resurrection were witnessed by the Apostles, who have handed down to us the truths the Word Incarnate revealed by the spoken word, to which we must assent if we would be saved—first and foremost the truth of the Resurrection, without which we would have nothing but the noble sentiments of a merely human teacher.

It is only by the light of faith that the believing Christian knows that "death is swallowed up in victory." (1 Cor. 15:54) And it is the Risen Christ alone who shows the way to our victory over death: "In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world." (Jn. 16:33) Above all, He has overcome death itself.

My dear friend John died with the confidence that the Resurrection alone makes possible. In the hope of life eternal, he faced down death with all the helps the Church that Christ founded can provide to the dying. The greatest thing he had ever done, John told one friend in his last hours, was to endure by the grace of God the illness that brought his earthly life to an end. The grace of final perseverance is indeed the greatest accomplishment any man can hope for: Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour.

Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly, even though your impatience makes doubtful what is certain, and turns a very short time into a long one. Dream that the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end. (St.

Theresa of Avila) ■