Just as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is Christianity’s defining dogma, so too the anticipated Resurrection of His Mystical Body becomes for us the defining reality of everything we believe. Were it not for that reality, there would be no reason to go on. With it, there is every reason.
WOULD THAT POPE Francis and the Church of Accompaniment Gang would preach the doctrine of the Resurrection with the same enthusiasm with which they preach their false doctrine of unity über alles. As history repeats itself again, the Mystical Body of Christ is being betrayed by a legion of Judas bishops, and Peter is busy denying that he even “knows the Man” to the handmaids of the Global Empire.
So, let’s recall how this Passion of the Mystical Body of Christ will come to a merciful end, i.e., with another Resurrection. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is Christianity’s defining dogma, so too the anticipated Resurrection of His Mystical Body becomes for us the defining reality of everything we believe. Were it not for that reality, there would be no reason to go on. With it, there is every reason.
The Church will rise again; it’s just a question of when. Seems too good to be true? Well, so did the first Resurrection for the first Christians, listening to the sound of pounding hammers on Golgotha. In fact, for some of those first Christians, including St. Thomas the Apostle, the Resurrection was quite literally too good to be true: “Except I shall see on his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 14:5).
It wasn’t until the resurrected Jesus revealed Himself in a glorified state that Thomas was transformed into one of the greatest Christian missionaries in history. “My Lord, and my God!” And with those words, he put himself on the path to martyrdom, after having brought word of the Risen Lord all the way to India.
But this is not to say that Thomas was an unfaithful man. In fact, he was the one who wanted to die with Jesus a few verses earlier: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). So, what happened? The Crucifixion happened! After that horror of all horrors, it wasn’t until the resurrected Jesus revealed Himself in a glorified state that Thomas was transformed into one of the greatest Christian missionaries in history. “My Lord, and my God!” And with those words, he put himself on the path to martyrdom, after having brought word of the Risen Lord all the way to India.
After the Resurrection, Thomas doubted no more.
Nevertheless, it was Jesus who said to Thomas: “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed.” Today, we believe in the coming Resurrection because we have seen what came from the first Resurrection. We know that without the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, there would be no Christianity.
In his The Crisis of Our Civilization, the great Hilaire Belloc directs our attention to something unique about Christianity, and that is this: The objective truth of the doctrines which Christianity affirms is based on the historical reality of the Man Who revealed them.
From the beginning, the historical Resurrection of that Man was based on the historical reality that He existed. If Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist, the Christian claim that He rose from the dead is meaningless.
Belloc notes that Christianity says of the Resurrection, “This happened.” It does not say, as do other religions of their mysteries and rites, “This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the nature and possible fate of the human soul and its relation to the Divine.” No other religion ever claimed to be “founded by a human being whom other men met and knew, who lived in a particular place and time; one to whom there are ‘a cloud of witnesses.’”
No other religion ever claimed to be the sole guardian of revealed truth whose officials hold a Divine commission to explain that truth to the whole world:
“It was the affirmation that a criminal who had been put to death in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and to ignominious death by Crucifixion (whereto no Roman citizen was liable) was Divine, spoke with Divine authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead, and could promise to His faithful followers eternal beatitude. This is what shocked the intellectuals, but this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new society and so led to its persecution.”
C.S. Lewis argues that to “preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection.” His famous Trilemma – that Jesus was either a liar, insane, or God – is tenable only if there is historical evidence to prove that Jesus actually walked the Earth, actually lived, and actually died.
In his Summa, Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that Christ’s Resurrection completes the work of salvation, just as His death was its beginning. Christianity, according to Aquinas, is meaningless without the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then no sane man would have died for His false claim to be the Son of God. And yet eleven of His twelve closest friends were martyred in His Name. and for twenty centuries, “Christ is risen” was an historical reality for which Christians were willing to lay down their lives.
For Saint Augustine, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the only plausible explanation for the rise of Christianity.
If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then no sane man would have died for His false claim to be the Son of God. And yet eleven of His twelve closest friends were martyred in His Name. Why? Because they knew that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, which meant He is God, which meant God exists, which meant Heaven is, which meant death is not the end but only the beginning.
Saint Paul reminds us that if Christ had not risen from the dead, the Christian faith would be futile, and Christians should be pitied as “deluded fools.”
For twenty centuries, “Christ is risen” was an historical reality for which Christians were willing to lay down their lives. And so today, as the Mystical Body of Christ enters into this second passion, we’ve got to stay focused on the fact that the Resurrection is coming, that without this Good Friday, noted Archbishop Fulton Sheen, there can be no Easter Sunday:
“The Church is something that dies and rises again. The law of the Church is the law of our Blessed Lord. Unless there’s a Good Friday there will not be an Easter Sunday. The Church is always coming out of a tomb. And the Church will come out of this.”
It is the first order of business for Antichrist to deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ even if he would, as Archbishop Sheen contended, first hail Him as a “great man,” even a great philosopher. But did He rise from the dead? “Absolutely not,” says Antichrist, “since only the Divine can conquer death. And Jesus Christ was not God!” And now we arrive at the point and purpose of the entire Revolution.
For the followers of Jesus Christ, it should come as no surprise that when the Freemasons set out to build a Brotherhood of Man, their first order of business was to deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because if you want to erect a post-Christian New World Order, you must first deny the event on which the old-world order of Christendom was built – the Resurrection.
And so, for the followers of Jesus Christ, it should come as no surprise that when the Freemasons set out to build a Brotherhood of Man designed to supplant holy Christendom, their first order of business was to deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, as part of his war on the Social Kinship of Jesus Christ, first rejected the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why? Because if you want to erect a post-Christian New World Order, you must first deny the event on which the old-world order of Christendom was built – the Resurrection.
Christian men know that Christ conquered death. That is why we are Christian men. We don’t care how many Deists and Freemasons tell us that Christ remains in His tomb. They are the ones who are dead and buried in theirs, while Christ lives on. He is still here, as is His Church, despite the scourging, the crowning, and the Crucifixion. She will rise on the third day because she, like her Divine founder, is both human and divine.
Again, Archbishop Fulton Sheen put it this way:
“There emerges, then, from her history one great and wonderful lesson and it is this: Christ rose from the dead, not because He is man, but because He is God. The Church rises from the sepulcher in which violent hands or passing errors would inter her, not because she is human, but because she is Divine. Nothing can rise from the dead except Divinity. The world should profit by experience and give up expecting the Church to die. If a bell had been tolled on a thousand different occasions and the funeral never took place, men would soon begin to regard the funeral as a joke. So, it is with the Church. The notice of her execution has been posted but the execution has never taken place. Science killed her and still she was there. History interred her, but still she was alive. Modernism slew her, but still she lived.”
Still she lives – despite Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial. And today, history repeats itself. In the name of Christian unity, Pope Francis, before he went to hospital, met with a group that is promoting something called the “Pasqua Together 2025” initiative, which seeks to promote the common date for the celebration of Easter among all “Christian denominations.”
The “Pasqua Together 2025” initiative is spearheaded by something called JC2033 – an ecumenical group that seeks to prepare the world for the return of the Messiah in 2033. Let this photo speak its thousand words:
Pope Francis – arms outstretched, palms up – praying with Evangelicals and other Protestant leaders, pledging to “unify Christians” by calling them, not to convert to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by Jesus Christ, but rather to settle on a common date for the Easter party, which brings me back to my opening salvo: “Would that Pope Francis and the Church of Accompaniment Gang would preach the doctrine of the Resurrection with the same enthusiasm in which they preach their false doctrine of unity über alles.”
The betrayal at the highest echelons of the Church today has led many to lose the Faith. But we cannot allow that to happen to us. The FACT of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ obliterates all doubts and transforms all of the Doubting Thomases into missionaries who will die for “my Lord and my God.”
You could cut the irony with Peter’s sword! A photo of one pope boldly violating the authoritative teachings of another. In January of 1928, Pope Pius XI promulgated his landmark encyclical Mortalium Animos on Religious Unity, in which he condemned such “pan-Christian gatherings” ostensibly held in the name of Christian unity.
Pius XI writes:
“That class of men who are known as pan-Christians. . . have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality, beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.”
The betrayal at the highest echelons of the Church today has led many to lose the Faith. But we cannot allow that to happen to us. The FACT of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ obliterates all doubts and transforms all of the Doubting Thomases into missionaries who will die for “my Lord and my God.”
The Church will rise again, the unfaithful shepherds will either hang themselves by halters, or they will repent. That is between them and God. The rest of us must content ourselves to walk with Magdalene from the Cross to the empty tomb if we have the courage and the faith and the hope to follow her.
And on that note, dear friends, I wish every reader of The Remnant a happy Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is risen, as He said.
