Our treasure

Editorial

Just over fifty years ago the only priest known to have born in his body the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, passed away. This holy Capuchin monk, who lived every step of the passion every time he celebrated Mass, had this to say about it:

“The Holy Mass regenerates the world.”

“If men only appreciated the value of a holy Mass they would need traffic officers at church doors every day to keep the crowds in order.”

“The fruits that we receive at Mass cannot be enumerated. We will know it only in Paradise.”

“It is easier for the earth to exist without the sun than without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”

The sacrifice of Calvary took place to bridge the great divide between God and man, the bottomless chasm carved by original sin. By His Incarnation, the Word of God assumes our human nature and becomes visible among us. Moreover, He enables us to become partakers of His divinity and to unite ourselves definitively to Himself. By His redemptive sacrifice Christ pays our infinite debt to God’s justice, setting us free from the bonds of slavery to sin and the devil, and giving us access to God the Father and the heritage of eternal life.

In His sacrifice Christ offers to God the Father, in His human nature, the perfect glorification and praise owed by all of mankind “so as to encompass in His divinity all that is great, all that is beautiful, all that is sublime here below” as Archbishop Lefebvre states.

The Cross is also a declaration of war on all that is unholy. It is the uncompromising declaration of the supreme holiness of God which required the death of Christ to atone for sin. 

No wonder then that the Traditional Mass, the sacrifice of Calvary re-enacted on our altars is the source of holiness, vocations, marriages, and kindles the Faith in the hears of young and old. No wonder that this Mass has always been the inspiration for the greatest minds, the artists, musicians, architects, painters, and authors who formed Catholic civilization around the liturgy. No wonder that the true Mass is a sign of contradiction intolerable to world and those imbued with its spirit. As the Superior General of the Society stated in his letter of July 23, 2021, the Mass “is the standard of a Church that defies the world and is certain of victory, for its battle is nothing less that the continuation of the battle that Our Blessed Lord waged to destroy sin and to destroy the kingdom of Satan.”

God gave us these two priests of the twentieth century, Padre Pio and the Archbishop, to teach us to love the true Mass, to adhere to it, to find in it an inexhaustible source of grace and the only perfect expression of our Faith. May we revere it as they revered it, treasure it as they treasured it, and be ready to sacrifice all for it as they did.

Father Marcel Stannus