REFLECTION
ADOPTING GOD’S PERSPECTIVE IN A TROUBLOUS TIME THE PATTERN OF GOOD AND EVIL WOVEN THROUGH HISTORY IS NO DIFFERENT TODAY n BY JOSEPH PEARCE
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t is all too easy in these troublous times to become discouraged and disheartened. What preserves us from such despondency is the ability to see the bigger picture. We must see things as God sees them, as far as this is possible. We must see all of time, all of history, from the omnipresent perspective of eternity. There is no past or future with God. All is present to him. Since this is so, each of us is always present to him as is all of history. A knowledge of history illustrates that the Church Militant, the Church at war within the devil’s domain, is always being besieged from without and betrayed from within. The pattern was established during the life of Christ and has woven its way through history for the past two thousand years. The secular powers, from Pilate and Herod onwards, have always had much more political power than the Church and have always been at war with Her. As for the soldiers of Christ, the pattern was established by the Apostles at the time of the Passion. Of the twelve men selected by Christ to be His inner sanctum, one was a traitor, ten were cowards, and only one had the courage to accompany Christ’s Mother to Golgotha, standing with her at the foot of the cross. This same pattern is present throughout the whole history of the Church. For every single saint there are always ten cowards who run for cover as soon as times get hard or perilous; for every saint, there is always the traitor who is ready to betray Christ and His followers. This 26
INSIDE THE VATICAN MARCH-APRIL 2021
Left, the stark Pardoner of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Below, Dante Rebukes Pope Nicholas III, by Gustave Dorè, from the Inferno, Canto XIX, the circle of simoniacs. Simony is the act of selling Church offices and roles or sacred things
perennial pattern, woven through history, was present in the so-called good times, as well as in the bad. It was present in the history of the middle ages, as is evident to all who have studied the medieval world and to all who have read the works of Dante and Chaucer. Even as the great cathedrals were being built, there were corrupt Popes and sometimes two or three different people claiming to be Pope at the same time. Even as the power of Christian Rome seemed triumphant, Popes were being exiled from Rome itself. Even as the great saints walked the earth, great sinners walked beside them. Even as the Church defined orthodoxy, the world was being ripped apart with heresy. For every saint in Dante’s depiction of the so-called “golden age” of Christendom, there is a sinner wallowing in his self-made hell. For every good and holy parson on Chaucer’s pilgrimage, there are drunk and avaricious friars and monks; for every noble and pious ploughman, there is an ignoble and uncouth miller. The world is always at war with Christ and His Church, and the worldly within the Church are always in an unholy alliance with the world. The world, as the Salve Regina reminds us, is a vale (and veil) of tears and a land of exile. Nothing essential has changed, from the time of Christ to the present day, which means that everything essentially remains the same. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales we see essentially the same unchanging humanity struggling with essentially the same unchanging prob-