True Peace

The following is from Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand's classic work Transformation in Christ:

"..mindful of the words of our Lord, 'I came not to bring peace, but the sword,' we should be soldiers of Christ. The holy Church on earth is called ecclesia militaris ('the Church militant'). We cannot at the same time hunger and thirst for justice - an inherent basic attitude of the true Christian - and be at universal peace with the doers of evil and the unjust. The meek St. John the Evangelist goes so far as to advise the faithful against greeting heretics...we must first of all understand that an outward truce with evil - that is to say, a passive toleration of all objective wrongs, an attitude of silence and of letting things pass, which in some circumstances has the appearance of consent and sometimes actually results in consent - can never derive from a love for true peace. For the real value of peace resides in its being an outgrowth of love and an expression of genuine harmony. The unison we pretend to establish with evil - the attitude of coolly allowing a power of wrong to unfold - neither rests on actual love nor reflects true harmony. Rather it is a product of weakness and involves a defilement with evil, a participation in the wrongdoer's guilt. Through our feeble submission to evil, we merely increase the disharmony that lies in evil as such an aggravate the discord that is implied in all evil, in all wrong that offends God: a discord deeper than the one implied in the sheer fact of conflict, however fierce. It is, on the contrary, our struggle against evil that must be recognized as a necessary consequence of a true love of peace, inasmuch as it also means a struggle against discord and an endeavor to limit its empire."

There are many chicken Catholics who no longer understand this truth. In their zeal to compromise with evil (which is rooted in lukewarmness or fear or both), they quickly condemn those of us who actually possess the Holy Spirit's gift of fortitude (because we have prayed for it) and engage in slanderous gossip against us. Lacking the moral courage to oppose the evil in our midst, they instead prefer to keep in the shadows and to ridicule those of us who have joined the fight, taking up the banner of the Ecclesia militaris.

Their punishment will be all the worse - see Revelation 3:16.

God love you all,
Paul Anthony Melanson