The Only Living Witness
Fr. Campbell
Jesus
warns us in the Gospel today (Mt.7:15-21), to beware of the false
prophets that will abound in the days before His return as Judge of the
living and the dead. He also gives us a sure way to tell whether we are
dealing with false or true prophets, when He says:
“By
their fruits you will know them… Every good tree bears good fruit, but
the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can
a bad tree bear good fruit” (Mt.7:16a;17b-18).
The
Vatican II Revolution has given the false prophets a stage from which
to throw their rotten fruit at an unsuspecting Catholic population. The
faith of Catholics has, as a result, declined at a disastrous rate, to
the extent that we can call it an apostasy, the great “falling away”
from the Faith, as spoken of by St. Paul (2Thess.2:3). Some struggle to
maintain their faith against great odds, but most of us have friends and
relatives, once Catholic, who are now Catholic in name only. They live
like all the other pagans. They may “go to church”, but their Catholic
faith is “blowing in the wind”.
The
false prophets, many of them so-called biblical scholars and
theologians, Catholic as well as Protestant, do their best to discredit
the Holy Scriptures, so that they can cast doubt even on Our Lord’s life
and miracles. They claim that the Gospels were written by the Church a
century or more after the time of Our Lord and the Apostles. The real
authors of the Gospels then dreamed up fanciful stories about Jesus and
the Apostles to make their religion look good. But the evidence that the
New Testament Gospels and Epistles are the accounts of eyewitnesses is
conclusive, as the Church herself was a witness to the life and miracles
of Our Lord.
The Church was a witness? Yes, the Church was there!
And it’s the same Church today. It has not lost its identity. The
Church of Peter and Paul is the same as the Church of those who hold
tenaciously to their Catholic faith as it was believed and preached by
the Church from Apostolic times until the Vatican II Revolution. They
have remained true to her original teaching, her Sacraments, the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass, and the Chair of Peter, and they have not
abandoned “the faith of our fathers.”
What’s more, the Catholic Church is the only
witness. The followers of the heretical Protestant sects think of
themselves as “witnesses”, but all they can give witness to is that
their split from the living body of the Catholic Church was initiated by
heretics like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Henry VIII, hardly
truthful witnesses themselves. Still less able to make that claim are
those on the fringe, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons.
But
the Catholic Church was there, a witness to the Birth of Jesus Christ
in Bethlehem, witnessed by the Holy Virgin Mary herself, the first and
preeminent member of the Church. The Church is also witness to His life
and miracles, His Crucifixion, His Resurrection, and the coming of the
Holy Ghost at Pentecost. It is the only competent living witness as to
the absolute reliability of the Holy Bible, the written Word of God.
Actually, the Church was preaching the living Word of God, handing on
the living Tradition of the Church even before the Epistles and Gospels
of the New Testament were written.
Who
compiled these inspired writings, together with the inspired books of
the Old Testament into the one book we call the Bible, but the Catholic
Church? The Bible did not fall from heaven into the hands of Martin
Luther and his fellow heretics, as many of our Protestant friends seem
to think. In fact, in order not to allow his false teachings to be
exposed to the truth of God’s word, Luther deleted several books from
the biblical canon. Some witness! Only the Catholic Church has the
ability to interpret the Scriptures authoritatively. St. Peter, our
first pope, gives this warning concerning the interpretation of the
epistles of St. Paul:
“In
these epistles there are certain things difficult to understand, which
the unlearned and the unstable distort, just as they do the rest of the
Scriptures also, to their own destruction. You therefore, brethren,
since you know this beforehand, be on your guard lest, carried away by
the error of the foolish, you fall away from your own steadfastness. But
grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ”
(2Pet.3:16,17,18a).
The Church witnesses that Jesus really did
feed the thousands of hungry people by multiplying the loaves and the
fishes, on more than one occasion. “Oh,” say the false prophets with an
indulgent smile, “The real miracle was that Jesus inspired some of those
good people who had brought along a basket lunch to share their
sandwiches with the others.” Really!
And Jesus really did walk on water! He did
raise from the dead the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of
Naim, and Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, after he had been
lying dead for four days in the tomb! And He did rise from the dead Himself! And He did give His Body and Blood to be our food and drink!
Deny
any one of these miracles of Jesus Christ and you open the door to the
denial of all biblical miracles. These Modernist false prophets think
that miracles are impossible. They have no supernatural faith, so they
must build up a structure based on human reason alone unenlightened by
Divine Revelation. In that structure, the New Church, there is room only
for those things which are acceptable to a faithless world. The “New
Springtime” for the Church foretold by the false prophets of Modernism,
has turned out to be its darkest winter.
We
may be few in number, but we carefully and jealously treasure our
faith, encouraged by the words of St. Peter, great witness for the
faith, and first pope of the Holy Catholic Church: