A Sermon Given by the Superior General Fr. Franz Schmidberger

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Dear Reverend Confreres, dear friends, beloved in Christ.

Divine Providence has so arranged it that we are holding our gathering of the laity here in the priory of St. Athanasius in Stuttgart, under the sign of the Holy Rosary.

This is, it seems to me, of special significance since both the praying of the Rosary and the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary are inscribed in the long history of the Church's spiritual struggle down through the centuries. And so I would now like to unfurl before your eyes a little of this struggle carried out by the Church under the banner of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Immediately after the Fall, God proclaims the Blessed Virgin as the woman who will crush the head of the serpent underfoot. Our Lady is set as the sign of the enmity toward devilish deception, toward the realm of Satan, toward darkness and sin—the enmity, my dear friends, established by God Himself. It is the only one established by Him, but it really is one. And this enmity between God and his adversary, between Our Lord with His Holy Mother on the one hand and the Prince of Darkness on the other, has been going on since the beginning of time.

This enmity runs through the Old Testament and reaches a climax in the crucifixion of Our Lord and Saviour by his enemies. It continues during the beginnings of Christianity, in the Early Christian period, with the Gnostics maintaining that Christ did not have a true body, did not take on the true humanity, and thus maintaining His passion was merely an illusion, too. In contrast to this, St. John the Apostle, who as the only disciple to rest his head on Our Lord's breast at the Last Supper and to stand with the Mother of Jesus at the foot of the Cross, had a particularly close relationship with Our Lady, teaches that Christ took on true flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. In his gospel and especially in his first epistle he underlines repeatedly the true divinity and true humanity of Jesus Christ.

A First Great Spiritual Battle

When it seems that he has lost this battle, Satan sows hatred in the hearts of the Roman emperors, who then unleash a bloody persecution or, rather, a series of bloody persecutions of Christians and of the gradually forming and emerging Church. Just think of the persecution under Nero, which cost SS. Peter and Paul their lives in Rome, or the particularly cruel and remorseless persecutions under Trajan, Decius and Diocletian.

And when the blood of the martyrs proves to be the seed of new Christians and when Constantine the Great issues the Edict of Milan in 313 granting the Church peace and freedom and thus ending the bloody persecution, Satan, realizing that this battle, too, has been lost, changes his tactics. He now turns to attacking the Church from within. He infects members of the Church with godless ideas.

Three Major Heresies Come into Being.

First came Arianism. Arius, an Alexandrian priest, to begin with maintains that the Logos, the Divine Word of God, did not assume a human soul but merely a human body and goes on to assert that the Logos was not God by nature but created by the Father from nothing as an instrument for the creation of the world. This teaching is opposed by Athanasius, who defends the true divinity of Jesus Christ. In 325 the Council of Nicaea solemnly condemns Arius and his supporters; however, his heresy lives on and almost all the Germanic tribes are initially converted to Christianity via Arianism.

Then the Devil sows a second great heresy in the form of Pelagianism, which holds that man can take the initial and fundamental steps toward salvation by his own efforts. St. Augustine, the doctor gratiae, the teacher of grace, counters this contention with a firm "No!": grace is a freely given gift of God. It is out of the question that man can earn initial grace earned by man! Such an idea stems from pride, arrogance and self-divinization. This reflects man's age-old delusion that he can redeem himself, be self-sufficient and free himself from the snares of Satan, the flesh and the world. This heresy, too, is condemned by a council, namely the Council of Ephesus.

The third seeds of heresy sown by Satan grow into Nestorianism. This, too, is the first preached by a cleric, Bishop Nestorius, who maintains that Christ Incarnate did not merely have two natures but also two separate persons or hypostases. And here again the above-mentioned Council of Ephesus solemnly raises its voice in 431. It condemns the heresy and in particular defines Our Lady as the "Theotokos", the God-bearer, by upholding the teachings of that great defender of the truth, Cyril of Alexandria, that the Blessed Virgin Mary did not give birth merely to a human being but to God in human nature, that the nature she bore was bound to the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, that she was the mother not only of a nature but also of a person and, thus, the true bearer of God. This victory of the faith is celebrated annually on 11 October, the Feast of the Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

You can see from this how the Marian dogmas erect a protective wall around the Christological ones, how Our Lady appears as the great protectress of Christian truth, Catholic faith and irreformable Catholic teaching. I have spoken of three great heresies—but also of three great saints opposing them and two councils condemning them.

However, the Devil does not give up his plan. He keeps on trying to take hold of the Church, to make difficulties for it, to destroy it. And so in the year 622 he brings to the scene a man called Mohammed, the offspring of a Jewish mother, who mixes Christian and Jewish teaching with Arab elements from his homeland and Arab nationalism and presumes to wage war on the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Mohammed spreads his heresy with fire and the sword, bringing the whole of the once totally Christian North Africa under the sway of his irreligion. Christianity is completely eradicated there, my dear friends! The Devil wins a great victory. Iraq, Iran, all the countries of the Middle East from now on have the Crescent rather than the Cross as their banner. But it does not end there. Islam attacks Spain, takes over the whole country and crosses the Pyrenees until it is beaten back by Charles Martel at Poitiers and forced to retreat south again.

The Holy Roman Empire is thus saved for the time being, but Islam is by no means destroyed. Again and again it attempts to cause Christendom and the Church trouble. The Church sees herself confronted with a dangerous enemy who does not spare its most sacred shrines such as Mount Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre but, instead, occupies them and lays claim to them. The Christian kings and emperors, inspired by the Popes and great saints like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, react by organizing Crusades to wrest the holy places from Moslem hands and return them to Christendom. There are eight crusades in all and many great saints play a part in them. St. Louis IX participates in two of them. St. Bernard preaches in their favor throughout the Holy Roman Empire and calls on the Emperor to take part in them, to set his armies in motion and not to rest but to fight the enemies of Christendom who keep attacking France, plundering and pillaging as they advance up the Rhone, dragging off women and girls to imprison them in their harems. He calls on the Emperor not to rest, but to fight and vanquish this foe. And over and over again it is Our Lady who is called upon for protection, above all by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It is she who leads the Christian armies in the subsequent battles as well, for example when St. John Capistrano seeks her help in defending Belgrade against the Turks in 1456. That battle took place almost 333 years, to the day, before the French Revolution, a figure half the apocalyptic number of 666!

Then comes the great Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, in which the Christian fleet seems to be at a total disadvantage with neither strength nor weather conditions in its favor. Everything seems to point to defeat. Pope St. Pius V and the great minds associated with him in European history place their trust in help from heaven. The Pope, who has numerous charitable works in Rome to his credit, lives a life of penance and calls upon the Roman monasteries to besiege heaven with their prayers. He gives instructions that no public sinners are to be accepted into the Christian armies and that all soldiers should confess before going into battle. The Christian commanders, such as Don John of Austria, do as he says: the soldiers confess their sins before going into battle and enter into the fray, calling upon the Holy Trinity and the Holy Name of Christ and bearing the Cross of Christ in one hand, the sword in the other. And God grants the Christian forces an unexpected victory on the evening of 7 October, when the Muslim fleet is totally routed with only about twenty of their three hundred ships surviving. Fifteen thousand Christians are freed from slavery. A great victory! And Pope Pius V does not hesitate to commemorate this miraculous victory, won with the help of heaven and the intervention of Our Lady, by instituting the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.

The Turks, Moslems and Islam do not, however, remain quiet for long. A mere century later, in 1683, infidel armies are at the gates of Vienna; their defeat on 12 September of that year is commemorated in the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary.

And once again it is a saintly Pope who issues a battle call, Pope Innocent XI, the only Pope between Pius V and Pius X to have been beatified. And once again the Christian army wins a mighty victory under the banner of the Immaculate, whose intercession is called upon when Pope Innocent XI issues a special call to pray the Rosary and the Angelus. And so the dangerous enemy is repulsed, vanquished and forced to retreat.

My dear Christians, the Devil does not leave it at this, but again starts scattering the seeds of heresy within the Church itself. As early as the 15th century Hus, taking up the teachings already spread by Wycliffe in England, is preaching in Bohemia and Moravia the idea of a purely spiritual Church of Love, which did not become incarnate, did not take on flesh. This is once again an attack on the true divinity and humanity of Our Lord and Saviour and thus also on His Most Holy Mother, from whom the Lord took on flesh.

Although both Hus and Wycliffe are condemned as heretics by the Church, their ideas are taken up, revived and even successfully preached by subsequent generations, for example, by the 'reformers': Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, the great heretics of the 16th century.

With the Reformation it becomes clear that the Protestant turning away from the Blessed Virgin brings in its wake a turning away from the divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Even though Luther himself still kept to the dogma that the Son is of one substance with the Father, his successors gradually abandoned it. After all, it was liberal Protestant theologians such as Strauss, Bultmann and Harnack, followed today by Pannenberg and countless others of his ilk, who spread the false doctrine of the purely human nature of Our Lord and Saviour all over the world. Here again we see that the Marian dogmas are a protective shield for the Christological dogmas; we see that the Blessed Virgin not only protected her divine child with loving care in Bethlehem and Nazareth but that her tending of the divinity of Jesus Christ continues through space and time in his Mystical Body, the Church, and that Mary's motherly care extends over the centuries.

In the post-Reformation period the great adversary of the great Lady awakens envy anew among the peoples. Heresy continues its corrosive path, establishes itself, finds its way into the salons where the ground is prepared for the French Revolution in 1789, in which God is officially dethroned and replaced by Man in public life. This revolution marks the victory of pure secularism. With the head of Louis XVI it is not only the French king and the French monarchy that fall but also the old divine order, from now on replaced by revolution.

My dear Christians, it is Pope Pius IX who on December 8, 1854 counters these revolutionary machinations, these false concepts of Rationalism and Naturalism, with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This dogma makes it quite clear that grace is a freely given gift of God, that it is essential for man, that salvation is to be found in the supernatural order or not at all. There is no alternative but to accept the divine order, redemption in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with His Cross and His Blessed Mother at its foot, or to reject Jesus and Mary and fall prey to the Evil One, the Devil, Satan, error and sin and finally Hell.

In view of the revolutionary situation it is not surprising that in 1869 this same Pope convokes the First Vatican Council, at which Papal Infallibility is defined as a dogma in order to further defend and protect the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.

The year 1917 can probably be accounted the most crucial one in the struggle between light and darkness in the present century. At Fatima Our Lady warns urgently in advance against the atheistic Communism that seizes power a few months later in Moscow and from there sets out on its triumphal march to all corners of the globe. The battle between Fatima and the Soviet Union is described almost literally in Revelations 12 in the symbol of the woman clothed with the sun who is persecuted by the blood-red dragon.

Thus the enemies of the Church do not give up their struggle.

My dear Christians, after Satan's great victory at the Second Vatican Council and with the post-conciliar apostasy, we have now entered into an even more dramatic phase of the struggle, of the spiritual battles of the Church. Here again it is without doubt the Blessed Virgin Mary who is once more leading the Christian armies, the Catholic hosts. Under her banner God's friends are gathering. Under her banner the servants of her son, Jesus Christ, are assembling. It is under her banner that all who have committed themselves to her body and soul serve, requesting of her only that they may be allowed to act as instruments, as tools, in defending the Church, in saving the faith, in preserving the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Catholic priesthood. Archbishop Lefebvre and his work, willed and called by God as they are, have a role of timeless significance to play. Our Lady is now gathering her children to her in this great struggle, in this enormous spiritual battle which marks the culmination of the age-old conflict, and is mustering her forces against Modernism, that is, against the adulteration of the faith, the replacement of Catholic doctrine by a false humanism and liberalism which bring with them a false accommodation to the world, against an undermining of the Church's traditional teaching and against a denial of the divinity and resurrection of Christ, the historical nature of the Gospels. All these aberrations are combined in the great heresy of the present post-conciliar epoch.

And Our Lady is calling upon her children to pray for strength in the battle to come with the Rosary in one hand, the sword of the Holy Spirit in the other. Prayer and active commitment are, after all, marks of a Christian believer.

According to Pope Leo XIII, the Rosary is a powerful weapon in the struggle against the ills at present besetting us.

The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary are an antidote to pride and the undermining of the domestic order. In them we are taught poverty in spirit, true humility, obedience, subjection to God's law and the joyful acceptance of the dispositions of divine providence. All five mysteries tell of the humility of Jesus and Mary and of poverty, the outward poverty of the house in Nazareth combined with an inner wealth of abounding joy, grace and peace and a sense of security in God; they also tell of an atmosphere of prayer and sacrifice, and of the acceptance of God's holy will in every vicissitude facing the Holy Family.

Pope Leo XIII points out that the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary are an antidote to a second evil of our times, namely the flight from sacrifice and the redemptive value of suffering. He says that what mankind needs most today is to learn to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as he carried the Cross: this would enable him to understand that grace springs from the Cross and that there is no Redemption without Calvary, that the path to the resurrection cannot bypass Golgotha. In this context Pope Leo points out that the third error of our times lies in seeing things from a purely worldly, human and rational perspective and ignoring grace, faith and divine providence as bases for our thought and action.

Then come the Glorious Mysteries as an answer to this pernicious view, to the secular attitudes prevailing today. These mysteries express the glorious dawning of Christ's Kingdom in the Resurrection, Christ's Ascension with its concomitant graces, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit from Christ's heavenly throne as High Priest. There is nothing man needs so much today, that our contemporaries need so much, as to be told anew of the grace of Christ, of His kingdom and the supernatural realm of his divine being. Consequently there is nothing man is in greater need of than the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the example of the Blessed Virgin, the mediatrix of all graces, who, assumed into heaven and crowned as its Queen, gathers her children to her, calling upon them to continue the Church's spiritual struggle, not to tire, but to fight on until victory is theirs.

My dear friends, perhaps you will allow me to pose the question of the meaning of all these battles in this gigantic conflict in the realm of the spirit. We have seen how on the one occasion Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother carry off the day whereas on another the Devil's machinations are crowned with success. On the one hand, we have Luther and company dragging whole countries, whole peoples away from the Church and leading them into heresy, on the other, St. Francis Xavier speeding off to Asia, to Japan, and recruiting hosts of new converts to the Church. What are we to make of these spiritual battles?

A threefold interpretation seems to be in place here.

First of all, such struggles sanctify the Christian soul. As gold has to be refined in the fire, the soul has to prove itself in battle. The prophet Job already said, "Vita hominis militia est," life on earth is service in war, is a battle, a struggle, a conflict. For Christians this means bearing Christ's redemptive Cross. There is no victory without struggle. Consequently, the outward scenario of battle is simply the framework of Christian life, a framework in which we are placed and have to prove ourselves. Depending on how we comport ourselves in it, God will one day judge us and decide on our eternal reward or punishment.

Secondly, these spiritual battles reveal Evil as such. Anyone who dips into history a little will recognize what mendacious means the Devil and his consorts employ to deceive and confound man, will grasp the ugliness and wages of sin and godlessness. Just look at the perversions and absurdities that the French Revolution has led to! Just look at the autonomy evil develops, so that sin brings forth more sin: a small lapse turns into a more serious one, the latter then leading on to the incurring of great guilt, with one personal transgression dragging a whole nation with it into destruction. In this context we only have to think of Henry VIII of England: a single sin, the infidelity of a man who had not long before been granted the title of "Defensor Fidei" by the Pope, caused so much mischief, not only leading his own people into schism and then heresy, but also exporting this heresy throughout the world with the expansion of the British Empire. This is the realm of sin, the power of darkness revealing itself in the course of history, and reveal itself it must. St. Paul himself says that the Son of Darkness, the Antichrist, must reveal himself so that what is opposed to God, opposed to Christ is made manifest, thus allowing us to turn away from it in revulsion.

Thirdly, the ultimate meaning of history itself is made clear in that the Glory of God, the efficacy of grace, and Christ's Kingdom are revealed to man.

My dear Christians, it is only at the end of time that we shall understand how God's grace has transformed sinners into just believers, how it has worked in men's souls, and what tremendous victories it has won in the course of history. Some of these victories are perhaps not visible to the human eye but take place in the secret depths of the soul, while others, like the Battle of Lepanto, the defense of Vienna or the Battle of Belgrade in 1456, are open to human view. Men come and go, God is always the same.

And all these battles, all these victories presage and symbolize the final victory of Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother over the enemies of God.

If we wish to be on the winning side, we must gather under the banner of Our Lady, for it is she who will carry the day. And so the ultimate meaning of history is revealed as praise of the Holy Trinity. Those who have fought on God's side in this spiritual struggle will receive no other glory, praise or honor than to share in praising and glorifying the Triune God in all eternity and to enjoy the Beatific Vision of Light, Life and Love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.