The Roman Liturgy – Easter, Resurrection, Faith and Recognising the Church

Just as many failed to recognise our Lord in his Resurrection, so too do those who insist that the Conciliar-Synodal Church is the Roman Catholic fail to recognise the Church in her resurrection.

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In our current ecclesiastical situation, which many have called a “Passion of the Church”, some apologists of the Conciliar-Synodal Church like to say that just as the Apostles fled and abandoned Christ, so too have Traditional Catholics refused to stand at the foot of the Cross.

They say that, just as the Jews failed to recognise the suffering Christ, we too have failed to recognise the Church in her mystical Passion.

This accusation is even applied by some traditionalists themselves, against those who hold (with men such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre) that the Conciliar Church is a separate entity to the Roman Catholic Church.

I have explained this idea, and why we hold it, elsewhere.

Amongst the apologists of the Conciliar-Synodal Church, there are some men of evident bad faith, who delight in the religious revolution and their new religion. I have nothing to say to such men here.

Rather, this is addressed to the many reluctant apologists of this body. Such men feel constrained into defending the Conciliar-Synodal Church because they think that it must be the Roman Catholic Church, and who are afraid of what it might mean, if the traditionalist arguments were true.

Easter is a time to liberation from bondage and from fear. During this holy season, the traditional Roman Liturgy is ever the means by which the Church teaches and guides her faithful sons. Across the holy octave of Easter, the Gospel passages read at each Mass recount the various apparitions of our risen Lord.

Each one teaches us something about the true answer to the reluctant apologists of today’s religious revolution. It is this:

Just as many failed to recognise our Lord in his Resurrection, so too do those who insist that the Conciliar-Synodal Church of Vatican II is the Roman Catholic Church fail to recognise the Church in her resurrection.

The nature of our situation presents us with an opportunity to make very pure acts of faith, with considerably fewer visible aids than previous generations. We may hope that such acts of faith, like Our Lady's after the Passion and before anyone else believed in the Resurrection, may also be pleasing to God in a corresponding degree.

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The Roman Liturgy – an ongoing series of standalone pieces about the liturgy, hope, and the crisis in the Church

Septuagesima I: The Beginning of the Liturgical Year?
Septuagesima II: The Babylonian Captivity and the Crisis in the Church
Lent I: The Protection of God
Lent II: “What Think You of Christ?”
Lent III: Laetare Sunday and the Church
Passiontide I: The Silence of Passiontide
Passiontide II: The Composure and Agony of Passiontide
Holy Week: Maundy Thursday and the Stripping of the Church
Holy Week: Good Friday and Christ’s Royal Throne
Easter: Faith and Failing to Recognise the Church

Christ the King: “Are you a King, then?” – Christendom and the Social Kingship of Christ
Advent I: The Advent Liturgy and the Apocalypse
Advent II: The Close Presence of Christ in Advent
Advent III: Advent and the Preparation for Victory
Christmas and Christ’s Triumph over Darkness
Epiphany as the Manifestation of Christ’s Kingship
Epiphanytide: Ordinary Time or our Entrance into Eternity?

As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases through our Amazon links. See also The WM Review Reading List (with direct links for US and UK readers).

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The Church lives the life of Christ

In previous parts, we have referred to St Augustine’s recurring idea:

“[Christ] is the Head of the Church, and the Church is His Body, [and the] Whole Christ is both the Head and the Body.”[1] 

The idea that the Church is Christ still living on earth is very common and rooted in the New Testament itself. Alongside it is the idea that the Church lives the life of her head. In one sense, this happens because the Church’s members live the same supernatural life as Christ himself. In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pius XII taught:

“Christ our Lord wills the Church to live His own supernatural life, and by His divine power permeates His whole Body and nourishes and sustains each of the members according to the place which they occupy in the body, in the same way as the vine nourishes and makes fruitful the branches which are joined to it.”[2]

Many have tried to argue that the Church is mystically re-living the life of Christ in a linear way through history. This can be a fruitful way of reflecting on our current situation: no doubt the Church is suffering a Passion at this time; and no doubt we all long for a glorious vindication of her claims in the world.

But if this idea is pushed too hard, we may miss what is before our eyes.

In his 1911 book Christ in the Church, Mgr Robert Hugh Benson suggests that the Church lives out the events of Christ’s life simultaneously in her members. At any given time, in her members, “He is born here, lives, suffers, dies, and eternally rises again on the third day.”[3]

The Church will never die; as such she will also never rise from the dead. Nonetheless, metaphorical terms can be instructive so long as they are not pushed too far.

We could call to mind the introit of Easter Sunday:

Introit: “I am risen, and am with thee still.”

The Church has already “risen” from her Passion, and is still amongst us today. She is there for those who are prepared to make an act of faith, and believe that what she has taught about herself remains true today.

Only those with such faith will be able to see the Church where she is; the rest will be looking for her, sorrowfully, where she is not.

“They have taken away my Lord; and I know not where they have laid him”

Holy Scripture and Tradition tell us that the first “public” apparition of the risen Lord was to St Mary Magdalene.

She has already seen the empty tomb (recounted on Easter Saturday), and Ss Peter and John (who then believes) have come to see it on her account. She returns and is weeping at the sepulchre, even in the face of two angels. We might wonder how it is possible that she could not draw the obvious conclusions from Our Lord’s earlier words, the empty tomb, and the presence of the angels.

Nonetheless, Our Lord condescends to appear to her himself – and yet again he is not recognised, until he says her name.

He then sends her to tell the disciples, and we know from the other Gospels that she is not universally believed. We see an image again of our reluctant apologists, who are not inclined to believe the incredible or apparently hysterical account of those deemed to be unworthy messengers.

The Holy Women: natural considerations and natural loves

On Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, we hear the accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark.

These holy women, distraught following the death of their Lord, come to the tomb to anoint his body. They are worrying about practical questions, like who will be able to roll away the stone from the door of the sepulchre.

While there is much to appreciate in these women, as with St Mary Magdalene – their dedication in setting out as early as is possible, and their sorrowful zeal for their supposedly dead master, we can already see that they are approaching the tomb with a natural, rather than supernatural love. As Severianus, in the Catena Aurea, says:

“The women in this place run abroad with womanly devotion, for they do not bring Him faith as though He were alive, but ointments as to one dead; and they prepare the service of their grief for Him as buried, not the joys of heavenly triumph for Him as risen.” (ap. Chrysologum, sermon 89, in St Mark, 16.1-8)

Similarly, the talk of the stone shows that they are still dominated by natural considerations. Our Lord has already said that he will rise from the dead, but they do not believe.

Nonetheless, Our Lord still has regard, even for this too-natural love. In the Catena Aurea, Cyril explains that it is because of “their love of Christ and the tender care they had shown Him” that they “were thought worthy of the vision of angels.”[4]

What do the angels say?

“Fear not you: for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified: He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come and see the place where the Lord was laid. And going quickly, tell ye His disciples that He is risen: and behold He will go before you into Galilee: there you shall see Him. Lo, I have foretold it to you.” (Mark, from Holy Saturday)

But in spite of all this glorious vision and this declaration of the resurrection, the women remain afraid, apparently struggling to comprehend that Christ is not where they thought they would find him.

Something similar occurs with the reluctant defenders of the Conciliar-Synodal Church. Their considerations are similarly naturalistic, in that they treat the Church of Christ as a society like any other, albeit one which is supernatural and whose continued nominal or legal existence is guaranteed.

As a result, they accept the Conciliar-Synodal Church’s prima facie claim to be the Roman Catholic Church, based on certain appearances and a simulacrum of visibility. This is a crass reduction of what is meant by visibility and perpetuity.

Most people seem to know that the Church must be visible, and stop there. They do not consider that the true Church is “distinctly” visible, in that she is recognisable as the Church of Christ, particularly through her perpetual possession of the constitution with which Christ endowed her. But the Conciliar-Synodal Church is not distinctly visible as the Roman Catholic Church, because it lacks these properties, as discussed previously.

We find a further illustration in the Gospel of St Luke. Fr Henry James Coleridge proposes, based on various reasons, that the similar account given by St Luke was actually about a second set of holy women, visiting the sepulchre with the same intent.

St Luke gives us an extra saying of the Angel, relevant to many of the apparitions:

“Why seek you the living with the dead?” (Lk. 24.5)

In a similar way, our reluctant apologists are looking for the living Church of Christ in a tomb. Like these women, those who weep at the tomb of the Conciliar-Synodal Church are motivated by something good: a love for the Christ and for his Church. But their overlooking of an essential truth leads them to weep at the tomb of one who has already risen and gone ahead of them.

The same applies to those who are looking for the Church amongst a body of non-Catholics who preach a false Gospel and impose a new religion on the faithful.

However, at least these women believed the testimony of their eyes: they knew that the body had gone. What our Conciliar-Synodal friends are doing is more akin to insisting that the body remains; or even spending their time weeping over body of Gesmas, the bad thief, insisting that it is Christ’s. It is not.

“They knew him in the breaking of bread”

On Easter Monday, the Church reads St Luke’s account of the apparition on the road to Emmaus.

Here, we hear how Our Lord rebuked and comforted the gloom of Cleophas and the other disciple, as they were going away from Jerusalem, presumably out of fear.

The Gospel tells us that “their eyes were held, that they should not know [Jesus]”. St Gregory the Great tells us that because these disciples both loved and also doubted, so too Our Lord appeared, but as a stranger.[5] St Bede explains that he really was a stranger to them, because they did not yet have faith in his resurrection.[6]

The situation is tragically similar to those who cannot see that the Roman Catholic Church has already “risen” and is before them.

It is there, and anywhere there, that they will hear expounded the whole doctrine of Christ, just as he expounded the Scriptures on the road to Emmaus.

This cannot be said of Conciliar-Synodal Church, where one might receive Catholic doctrine, but will most likely receive some modernist distortion.

It is there thus that their hearts will burn with them, as they are taught, ruled and sanctified by Christ even in our day.

It is there that they will find the received rite of Mass and the other sacraments, and so know Christ, with opened eyes, “in the breaking of bread”. The only way one might succeed in knowing Christ in the rites of the Conciliar-Synodal Church is by closing both eyes and ears.

“But they were troubled and frightened”

On Tuesday is read the passage following the road to Emmaus, in which Christ appears in the midst of his Apostles and bestows peace upon them.

St Luke tells us that, rather than accept this peace, they were “troubled and frightened” and “supposed that they saw a spirit”.

Does this not describe those reluctant Conciliar-Synodal apologists in the face of us happy, peaceful traditionalists? We are like a ghost from the past to them, as terrible as Banquo appearing at table in Macbeth. And yet all we want is for them to share the peace which we have accepted.

On the road to Emmaus, Christ said that these disciples were “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” He says something similar in this passage.

Our Conciliar-Synodal friends are similarly “slow of heart” to believe all that the Church and her theologians have taught about her; and thus they are forced to rethink and throw away this traditional ecclesiology in order to maintain the claims of this imposter body.

Lack of Faith

On Easter Friday, we hear the following:

“[T]he eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And seeing him they adored: but some doubted.”

It is not entirely clear when this event took place in the overall chronology of the Resurrection – but we know that this confusion of faith continued amongst the disciples even up until the Ascension, in that some of them still expected a temporal restoration of the kingdom of Israel.

By contrast, we see (in the Gospel of Easter Wednesday) the blossoming of some sort of faith, in that St Peter believed that Christ is present on the shore when he heard St John say so.

But the ultimate gospel passage about faith and doubt is read on Low Sunday, the Easter Octave. Our Lord appears to the apostles, without the presence of St Thomas.

In spite of all the testimony which he has received, St Thomas stubbornly refuses to believe that Christ has risen from the grave, and sets his own arbitrarily-chosen criteria for belief.

In a similar way, those who are too timid to accept what has happened to the Church produce an artificially high bar for their belief.

More than this: some are driven to a position in which they openly reject and “rethink” what the Church has taught about herself, and say that they will only accept the prior, traditional teaching if their artificially high requirements are met.

Some want miracles to be worked in testimony of either the traditional principles or our application of them. Others want miscellaneous details proved with degrees of certainty above what is proportionate to the circumstances. They might demand that, in order for traditional principles or their application to be accepted, we must (for example) produce the names of the extant successors of the apostles, whoever they might be – as if it were possible or necessary for us to do so.

They demonstrate no appreciation of the fact that these principles are in possession; that the burden of proof is on those who wish to rethink them; and that the circumstances call for acts of faith and trust, rather than their private judgment.

Instead, ironically, we are the ones accused of private judgment.

Our Lord condescends to St Thomas, for his sake and for ours, and elicits from him the confession of his divinity.

But we should note that Our Lord’s condescension to St Thomas, made for our benefit, is the exception to the rule. The rule, rather, is that given in the parable of Dives and Lazarus:

“They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them […] If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe, if one rise again from the dead.” (Luke 16.29, 31)

This is why Our Lord also says:

“An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign: and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet.

“For as Jonas was in the whale's belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” (Mt. 12.39-40)

The “sign” vindicating the Church and her teaching about her nature and constitution has already been given in Christ’s resurrection, which he mentions himself here.

It is for this reason that Christ says:

“Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed.” (John 20.29)

There have been few generations who have seen fewer visible proofs of the Church's claims than ours; let us, then, believe so that we may also be blessed.

The testimony of the Church’s magisterium, the teaching of her theologians, the history of the Church, and the continuity of the four marks, even in a form obscured by our current crisis: these are sufficient grounds for these reluctant apologists to leave the empty tomb of the Conciliar-Synodal Church – rather, a whitened sepulchre – in favour of the Roman Catholic Church.

Conclusion

The Church has not transferred herself from one body to another; once again, what has happened is that a vast number of laymen and clerics have ceased to be Catholics. In other words, they have transferred themselves, in a moral sense. In retaining the Catholic name and (on the part of the clergy) some semblance of holding office, they have obscured the true identity and location of the Church.

Our current crisis is strange and horrible. But there can be no doubt about what it demands of us: Faith.

In the face of our current difficulties – and indeed anything that appears to contradict the Gospel – we are obliged to make an act of faith.

We are not obliged to start checking the teaching of the Church to see whether or not we are willing to accept it in light of the supposed facts around us. But we are also not obliged to ignore the facts around us (which is the route more or less taken by the defenders of the Conciliar-Synodal Church).

Our grounds and motives for making the act of faith are as they ever were. Such an act, under these circumstances, can surely be very meritorious indeed: after all, we are assenting to these propositions solely on the authority of what God has revealed and is proposed to us by the Church.

Only once we have made this act of faith, and only while we continue in it, can we try to understand the details about the situation.

As Fr John MacLaughlin wrote:

“We concede, moreover, that there may have been occasions in the past (and such intervals may occur in the future) when, through the opposition of anti-Popes and a variety of untoward circumstances, it was difficult for individuals for the moment to tell where the right source of authoritative teaching was to be found.

“This, however, does not change the state of the case in the least; the one true Church was in the world somewhere all the same, and in full possession of all her essential prerogatives, although, for the passing hour — from transient causes — she may not have been easily discernible to the less observant.

“Just as there have been times when some dense fog or mist made it impossible for the ordinary observer to tell the exact spot the sun occupied in the sky, although everybody knew that he was there somewhere; knew, too, that he would in due course make the exact location of his presence visible to all, and that, as soon as the mist lifted, his rays would come straight to the earth again, and every one would see that he was identically the same luminous orb that had shone before.”[7]

It is essential that we make an act of faith in the continuing existence of the Church, as we find her described in her own teaching and in her approved works of theology – no matter how difficult this may seem. As Cardinal Newman famously said, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”

All that is left for our reluctant friends is to put aside these doubts and embrace, in its full integrity, the religion believed and practised by their grandparents, whilst maintaining unity as far as is possible with all other Catholics.

While we might be terrified, as were the apostles, the solution may be found in the Gospel of Easter Wednesday – that of Our Lord appearing to some of the Apostles as they were fishing at the sea of Tiberias.

In this passage, Our Lord miraculously bestows a draught of 153 fish on his disciples. This has been applied to the 153 Hail Marys said in the Holy Rosary.

Many reluctant Conciliar-Synodal apologists do indeed persevere in saying the Rosary: perhaps they should use it to pray for the grace to see the Church truly as and where she is today.

Our Lady maintained faith in Christ's claims while he suffered, died, and was buried. She believed in resurrection immediately, while many of his friends were weeping over his death or the theft of his body. May she obtained for us all a similarly unwavering faith today.

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For more on where the Church is and is not today, read here:

The Conciliar-Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church – Editors' Updates

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The Roman Liturgy – an ongoing series of standalone pieces about the liturgy, hope, and the crisis in the Church

Septuagesima I: The Beginning of the Liturgical Year?
Septuagesima II: The Babylonian Captivity and the Crisis in the Church
Lent I: The Protection of God
Lent II: “What Think You of Christ?”
Lent III: Laetare Sunday and the Church
Passiontide I: The Silence of Passiontide
Passiontide II: The Composure and Agony of Passiontide
Holy Week: Maundy Thursday and the Stripping of the Church
Holy Week: Good Friday and Christ’s Royal Throne
Easter Octave: Faith and Failing to Recognise the Church

Christ the King: “Are you a King, then?” – Christendom and the Social Kingship of Christ
Advent I: The Advent Liturgy and the Apocalypse
Advent II: The Close Presence of Christ in Advent
Advent III: Advent and the Preparation for Victory
Christmas and Christ’s Triumph over Darkness
Epiphany as the Manifestation of Christ’s Kingship
Epiphanytide: Ordinary Time or our Entrance into Eternity?

As Amazon Associates, we earn from qualifying purchases through our Amazon links. See also The WM Review Reading List (with direct links for US and UK readers).

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[1] St Augustine, Sermon 87 on the New Testament (Tenth chapter of the Gospel of John), n. 1. Translated by R.G. MacMullen. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 6. Edited by Philip Schaff, Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, NY, 1888. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. Available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160387.htm.

[2] Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christ, 1943, n. 55. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_29061943_mystici-corporis-christi.html

[3] Mgr Robert Hugh Benson, Christ in the Church, p 10. The Cenacles Press, Stamullen, Ireland, 2022.

[4] Cyril, in Luke 24.1-12

[5] Catena Aurea of St Luke for this verse.

[6] “[T]hey thought Him a stranger, whose countenance they did not recognize. But in reality He was a stranger to them, from the infirmity of whose natures, now that He had obtained the glory of the resurrection, He was far removed; and to whose faith, as yet ignorant of His resurrection, He remained foreign.” Ibid.

[7] Rev. John MacLaughlin, The Divine Plan of The Church, Where Realised, and Where Not, Burns & Oates, London, 1901., Chapter VI, on indefectibility. Pp, pp. 93-94.