True Catholic Faith: Clarion Call of the Church’s Timeless Teaching

God is often blamed for evil, and many times people say if there were a God, there would be no war, there would be no tornado, innocent people would not be killed.

But yet we see in the gospel today the goodness of God.

Not only did He come to bring us eternal truth, not only did our Lord preach to these people for three days, but He actually then had compassion upon them and fed them.

And today I would like to speak about the goodness of God.

He is good because in Himself He is all perfect, and He lacks nothing that we could even think of, that He is goodness and perfection, and He has all of these things to an infinite degree.

And because He is all good, He desired to share His goodness with creatures and create them in a happy and perfect world, and to shower them with both natural and supernatural gifts, and to spend eternity with Him.

That was the original plan for man and the angels, that in the case of man that He would be placed in the paradise.

He would not be subject to death or disease or suffering.

He would not be subject to ignorance.

He was given a perfect world in which to live.

But one man sinned.

The goodness of God did not stop, but He sent the Redeemer in order to redeem them from their sins, His own Son.

How much more goodness could you have than to send your own Son to shed His blood for a race that had rebelled against you?

And which race will continue for the most part to rebel against you where most of the race will finish badly?

What greater goodness could God have than to send His only Son to die on the cross, to be scourged fit upon, in order to save this race?

It says in Saint John, God so loves the world as to give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting.

Let us consider the many gifts of God.

God is often the the object, as I said, of criticism, but He has given us abundant gifts.

First the work of creation.

He gave us first the paradise of creation, which we ruined.

He gave us the beauty of creation which we see every day.

It's order, the precise time of the movements of the sun and the moon, the whole universe, the earth.

All of this in the order with and with greater precision, precision than that of a watch on your on your wrist.

This all comes from God.

Even the consideration of the life of a bee should make us think of the goodness of God and his perfection.

The consideration of the fertility of the earth.

All of the things that it gives to us, the the taste of an orange, for example, or of a lemon, an apple, comes from the goodness of God.

And all of these delicious plants and fruits stay in turn animal life and human life.

Look at the work of procreation, that God, who is the author of human souls, permits human beings to cooperate with him in the production of a child.

Who could not be impressed with the goodness and wisdom of God when he sees a little baby born?

Think of the authority of parents and of the government of nations.

There is a an instinct placed in parents by God to take care of children.

We take that for granted.

But imagine if human beings had no more instincts to do that than dogs or cats or rats.

Oh their children, and in a few days or a few weeks send them out, push them out of the nest.

Imagine if 3 year olds had to run around in in the street and get their sustenance from garbage cans.

But no, the the wisdom and the goodness of God is so great that he placed in human beings this sense of responsibility for children, particularly in mothers who are not content merely to feed their children, but who shower them with protection and instruction and everything else that they need.

And this does not stop even after they fly out of the nest.

A mother is a mother until the day she dies, worrying about her children, whether they will go to heaven, whether they have everything that they need.

And the same is true of fathers.

They don't forget about their children once they're grown.

This is in you from God, and you received of your parents, and now you as parents give it back to your children.

That's from God.

How good it is.

Imagine the disorder if it were not there and think of government.

Yes, we often times criticize the faults of those who govern us, but the idea of government is something natural to man that is placed in US, and without government we would have chaos.

You could not protect your property without a shotgun if there were no government, if there were not police, if there were not the recording of deeds, if there were not the basic order that you find in society today, the punishment of criminals, and that is even man to form government and it's there by God.

That's why society is of the natural order and that's why we say that rulers receive their power not from the people but from God.

That's what Saint Paul said, that the power comes from God because that is something given to us by God, the Church.

Think of the great gifts of the Church and how much we appreciate it.

Now when we see the Church infected in its institutions by the by the heresy of modernism, we look back in books and look at the years of Pius the 12th and think of how beautiful the Church was in those times.

For everyone who gloried in the Catholic name believed as they should.

And there was no difference between liberal Catholic and conservative Catholic.

Everyone was Catholic.

It was a beautiful organization with nuns and priests, brothers, teaching schools, hospitals, and now all of that is gone.

How much we appreciate the gifts of the Church, how much we feel strict and in disorder without that presence.

I was reading just the other day in a review of the movie The Passion, that a Bishop, supposedly Catholic Bishop in California, said that the Gospel of Saint John is not a historical document and it does not relate historical events.

This is supposedly a successor of the apostles, A successor perhaps of Saint John himself, and he says that these things with impunity publicly, and that is the destruction of the unity of the Catholic faith, that that man representing the apostles supposedly could get away with saying such a thing.

And so we we how much we treasure the Church when we are without its guidance in these terrible times.

Think of the temporal goods that God gives us, our life, our health, our food, our clothing, the ability to to make money and to provide for ourselves.

The human body.

Think of its perfection, how it works, how resilient it is.

It's a mystery even to those who study it.

The beauty of all of its balance.

And then he gives us help.

And this is greatly appreciated by those who do not have help.

Food is abundant everywhere.

The planet is able to feed itself with no problem.

Think of all the food that is thrown out and all of the food that is just goes to waste in the supermarket.

Because there is so much because of the goodness of God.

God has given both plants and animals an instinct to sustain themselves and to maintain themselves in their species.

So the animals reproduce, the plants reproduce, so we have things to eat.

Imagine if God did not place this instinct to reproduce in animals and to and for plants.

Imagine if there were no bees to carry the pollen from flower to flower so that we can have an apple to pick up in the supermarket.

That all comes from God.

Do you think about that?

Do you realize that the goodness of God in maintaining all of this, if one thing went wrong, there would be nothing at the supermarket.

If one of the elements of God's goodness went wrong, if He pulled back a single thing, if He did away with the bees, there would be no reason for you to go there, because there would be nothing on the shelf, because God has given us so many temporal goods.

He said, Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.

They labour not, neither do they spin.

Yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.

How true that is when human beings try to imitate natural things like fur, for example.

No matter how good it is, no matter how much research is spent on it, none of it is as good as the fur of a single dog or cat.

None of it is of such high quality as what God has made.

And what are the most expensive clothes on the rack?

Are they made of polyester?

No, they're made of cotton.

They're made of linen.

They're made of wool.

They are made of things that God has made because those are the high quality things.

Because what He makes is perfect.

That is the goodness of God.

He gives us spiritual good reason and understanding.

We can know Him.

The animals cannot know him.

We can know him.

We can know the truth.

We have the joy of knowing Him and the joy of knowing things that He has made for us.

The joy of music, the joy of a poem.

No dog can enjoy either of those things, the simple things that pertain to our soul.

He has made all of this.

He has given us memory and conscience.

He has given us an immortal soul, and he invites us to his home forever in heaven, and He gives us the means to get there.

He gives us grace.

He gives us his Son to come and preach the gospel to us.

He raises up priests by his grace to do what I'm doing right now, to try to draw you to God forever.

Where do you think priests and religious come from?

They come from the grace of God.

Why would a man or a woman give his whole life So what I am doing, or what a religious sister does, except by the grace of God?

Just as he puts instinct into animals, so by His grace he moves people to do things.

Why did the North American martyrs leave their comfortable friends and go and live with the Indians who lived in squalor, indescribable squalor, to preach to them, to the gospel with the knowledge that they would most probably be killed in a violent death, as they all were?

Why did they do that except moved by the grace of God?

There is no other explanation.

There's no money, there's no pleasure, there's nothing but the grace of God.

And that is the goodness of God, who just as the as the wind blows, he moves people to accomplish the good that he needs to accomplish in his church.

Why?

Because he wants to spend eternity with you, and he puts himself in the Blessed Sacrament, himself, his own flesh, so that he can come to you every day, if you would approach him every day.

This is the goodness of God.

So why is there evil?

The first reason, God is never the cause of evil, even indirectly.

That's against His goodness.

He can only think of goodness, just as the devil can only think of evil.

He is incapable of a good thought.

So God can only think of goodness.

So he does not 'cause evil, even indirectly.

Secondly, evil is permitted by God always for a greater good.

And we must remember that God, not man, is the center of creation.

Man is not the measure of all things.

God is and the purpose of creation.

The primary good to be accomplished is not the good of man, but the glory of God.

And so many things must be permitted in order to manifest the glory of God.

His justice must be manifested.

His mercy must be manifest His omnipotence.

And so at times, evils must be permitted for that goal.

Thirdly, the reason why God permits certain evils is often mysterious but not contradictory.

For example, He permitted St.

Mary Magdalene to sin gravely as a terrible woman on the street, in order that he be glorified by the forgiveness of her sins.

So that that incident could take place whereby she burst into the House of the Pharisee, washed his feet with her tears, dried his feet with her hair.

And she And he said to him, Thy sins are forgiven thee, for thy faith hath made thee whole.

And that all of thee, all of the evil that she committed is outweighed by the glory that Christ was given by that act of the forgiveness of her sin.

So the the weight of sin of Saint Augustine, who had a child out of wedlock when he was a young man, was permitted in order to make the Saint out of him, in order at the propitious moment to strike him with grace, so that those sins would weigh on him his whole life as a humiliation, as a darkness in his soul, so that he would become the Saint.

If he had not committed those sins, most probably we would not have a Saint Augustine.

But in order that he become the Saint, those things were permitted.

So that every Sinner, no matter how bad they get, no matter how low they sink, can look at a Saint Mary Magdalene and a Saint Augustine and say, look at the glory of God.

Look at the goodness of God, that these people who were probably lower than I am in sin could go back to God and confess their sins to penance and become St.

and are venerated on our office.

And so do not blame God for evil, but understand the Providence of God.

How many times in your life has something gone wrong?

And you say how could God permit this?

How could this happen to me?

And later you say it was the best thing that happened, and you may not see it in this life, but in the next you may see it that the misfortunes that befell you in this life gain for you eternal salvation.

The things of this life pass away.

Saint Theresa of Avila always said this too shall pass.

When people are on a sinking ship, they're not worried about who said what to whom or who's upset about what.

They are worried about a single thing, and it's they're going to survive the sinking ship.

And so also we must, when misfortune hits us, keep our minds on the single goal of light, which is eternal salvation.

Because God is good.

He wants us to go to heaven, and if he permits us to have evil, it is for our good.

This is our confidence, this is our imitation of the generosity of the Sacred Heart, of Jesus in offering himself for sinners in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Amen.