Renew The Church! – website and Blog

How do you get lukewarm water?  Easy – mix some hot and some cold, roughly in equal amounts.  How do you get a lukewarm Catholic?  Easy – mix into the baptized human soul, both spiritual heat (supernatural divine truth, love and light) and spiritual cold (natural love of the world, the praise of men, carnal pleasures, self-love) – in roughly equal proportions.  Simply disregard the warnings in Scripture and try anyway to live a contradiction: an impossible “compromise,” a combination of love for God and love for Mammon.

See – Lk 16:13, 1Jn 2:15-17.

Here are some observations of a Jesuit priest of the 1600’s, Fr. Louis Lallemant, SJ (d. 1635).  In a book of his teachings, “The Spiritual Doctrine”, are notes from his lectures as teacher and spiritual director to seminarians, in the year 1630.  He observed in his time, among religious congregations and orders,  that the effect of lukewarm men or women in a religious congregation can be disastrous.  He wrote of “the religious” – meaning, men or women in a religious congregation – monks, brothers, sisters, nuns, etc., in a religious order:

ADDITIONS:  CERTAIN THOUGHTS OF FATHER LALLEMANT;  COLLECTED BY  FATHER JOHN JOSEPH SEURIN, OF THE COMPANY OF JESUS, DURING HIS SECOND NOVITIATE IN THE YEAR 1630.

 VIII. – OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF RELIGIOUS, AND OF THE THINGS THAT ARE MOST PREJUDICIAL TO CERTAIN HOLY COMMUNITIES.

THERE may be said to be four kinds of religious: 1) some perfect; 2) others bad, proud, full of vanity, sensual, opposed to all regularity; 3) others, again, tepid, slothful, careless; and lastly, 4) such as are virtuous and on the way to perfection, although they may perhaps never attain to it.

The holiest orders in religion may contain these four kinds of members, as well as those orders that have fallen into laxity, with this difference, however, that in an order that has fallen from its first fervor, the majority are tepid persons, and the remainder consists of some that are positively bad, a few who are laboring after perfection, and a very few who are perfect. But in an order in which discipline is still strictly observed, the bulk of the community is composed of those who are tending to perfection, and the remainder comprises some who are perfect, a few who are tepid, and a very few who are bad.

One very important remark may here be made: it is, that a religious order inclines to degeneracy when the number of the tepid begins to equal that of the fervent, I mean those who labor from day to day to make fresh progress in prayer, recollection, mortification, purity of conscience, humility. For those who do not use this diligence, even though they keep themselves from mortal sin, must pass for tepid persons; they corrupt many others, inflict extreme injury on the whole body, and are themselves in danger, either of not persevering in their vocation, or of falling into interior pride or great disorders.

The duty of superiors in religious houses is to labor, as well by their own good example, as by exhortation, private conversation, and prayer, that their subjects may persevere in the ranks of the fervent who are aiming at perfection; otherwise they will themselves bear the penalty of it, and that a terrible penalty.

Can these observations and conclusions be applied to a Catholic parish today, as it was to a religious order several centuries ago?  It seems they can.  How then can spiritual lukewarmness, or tepidity, take root and spread in a parish?  What is needed to rightly “shepherd the sheep” and enable them to grow, rather than stagnate or sicken and die, spiritually?

Question: What happens to the Christian supernatural virtues of Faith, and Hope, when the most important virtue, Holy Charity – Divine Love – diminishes or is lost?  God is Love!  When Holy Love is neglected or rejected, Faith in God diminishes or can be lost.  If Faith in God and Holy Love are lost, what in the supernatural realm can be hoped for?

When a poor soul loses or rejects supernatural and spiritual Faith and Hope and Charity – that is, the whole supernatural Christian Life! – then all that is left of God Himself are natural human ideas – that is, shallow, superficial idols. “Religion” is left tepid, barren, empty, mere idolatries.   Case in point: Laodicea, Rev. 3:14-22.