A blessed memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, co-workers of Saint Paul, both of them ordained by him into the early episcopacy of the Church, when every bishop was a ‘missionary’, charting forth into unknown, hostile, pagan territory, meaning an almost certain martyrdom. Paul’s two letters to Timothy and one to Titus are certainly bracing for the soul, and an excellent focus for the mind. Their lives, and the words of the Apostle, provide the blueprint for what a bishop should be.

Perhaps more of our current leadership – and not just in the Church – should get out into the ‘real world’ more often, to see what it actually happening on the ground, so to speak. Wood-paneled chanceries, with thick sound-absorbing carpets, filled with computers and well-compensated apparatchiks and ‘spokesmen’ clicking and scrolling, issuing ‘media bites’ – all of this tends to have the precise opposite effect, of smothering and weakening our strength of soul. And that goes for all of us in our own ‘cocoons’. Go forth, and preach the Gospel to all creatures! And, with Saint Paul, woe to me if I do not…

As Paul urges the recently ordained bishop Timothy in his second letter:

I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control

Such words take on particular significance in light of the recent comments by Joseph Biden on the very anniversary of Roe v. Wade, to ensure abortion-on-demand throughout the United States, and many other aspects of the ‘culture of death’ to which his administration is going full-speed ahead. We may also recall the legalization of abortion in the state of New York a few of years ago, through all nine months of pregnancy – just like our dear old Canada – signed into effect by the professedly Catholic governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had the World Trade Centre lit up pink in celebration. Blood-red might have been more appropriate. There were calls for Cardinal Dolan to excommunicate him, even by his fellow bishops, which His Eminence has so far dismissed, citing that such penalties are not to be used as a ‘weapon’. I can’t think of any bishop who has not followed His Eminence’s irenic path. (See Sean Fitzpatrick’s sobering reflection this morning)

Hmm. In one limited and unwitting sense, Dolan and others are right, for canonical sanctions such as refusal of Communion, interdict and excommunication, are only ‘weapons’ in the same way a scalpel is: They wound, but with the purpose of healing. Our political leaders have put their souls – and the souls of many others – in grave jeopardy of eternal damnation, and bringing Biden, Trudeau, Pelosi, Cuomo and the rest of them to that realization is a ‘saving truth’, without which the Church is remiss in her duty to teach that truth and save souls.

To stand against the powers-that-be, and to lose the acclaim and praise of the world – with all of its attendant comforts and accolades – is difficult indeed. But the days may be coming, and now seem upon us, when, to paraphrase Christ to Peter, his first vicar, ‘all of that is taken away from us’, and as Cardinal Ratzinger predicted, we return to something more like the early Church, smaller, scattered, but more focused, intentional, powerful.

Only then, perhaps, will we see more fully what Christ’s Mystical Body really is, and the lord of this world in all his manifest evil.

Saints Timothy and Titus, pray for our bishops, that they and we may be and do all that God wills and inspires, with the grace He offers. +

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