Oppositions

To the cult of man who has made himself God, the Church opposes the cult of God-made-man.

To the absence of God in the world, the Church opposes His Real Presence on the altar.

To the banality and sterility of evil, the Church opposes the wondrous life-giving Cross.

To the sacrificial machinery of liberalism, the Church opposes the one liberating Sacrifice of Calvary.

To the empire of the Prince of this world, the Church opposes the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven.

To ineffectual laments and humanistic dreams, the Church opposes her potent Sacraments of life and death.

To the hollow monotony of materialism, the Church opposes the adoration and vigilance of hosts of angels, each its own species with its own voice of praise.

To navel-gazing nihilism, the Church opposes the only human beings who are fully real: the saints.

To the worship of free will, the Church opposes the service of charity.

To the obsession with activity, the Church opposes the inscrutable power of resting at the feet of Christ.

To instant communication, the Church opposes timeless communion.

To the pursuit of novelty and relevance, the Church opposes her perpetual newness and essential rightness.

To the stifling self-limitations of modern art, the Church opposes the grandeur and creativity of the arts she has nurtured in her bosom.

To the noise of the modern world, the Church opposes the still, small voice of God.

To the cacophony of amplified sound, the Church opposes the imperturbable silence of her prayer.

To the ennervating clichés of worldly music, the Church opposes the elevating freshness of her chant.

To inundation with empty words and shifting images, the Church opposes one Word of infinite density and one stable set of signs.

To suffocating pleasures of the flesh that end in worms, the Church opposes the flight of contemplation and the glory of resurrection.

To the deathly ennui of life without God, the Church opposes being lost in Christ and found by Him.

To the idolatry of Progress and mindless modernization, the Church opposes the inexhaustible fruitfulness of age-old Tradition.

If there were ever a body of people that called itself “the Church” but did NOT oppose the world in these ways, we would know that it is not and cannot be the immaculate Bride of Christ, permanently united to Him, imitating Him, faithful to Him; it is not and cannot be the Mystical Body founded and sustained by Jesus Christ, its Head and Master. This, in turn, may prompt the realization that the Church is smaller, more scattered, more of a remnant than perhaps we had been accustomed to thinking before.

It may also prompt the realization of the irreducible centrality of authentic religious life, in which all of these characteristics of the true Church are concentrated and crystallized, enfleshed and exalted.