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Penance brings power, Contrition brings Kingdom, repentance brings restoration. We want a new evangelization within the Church; we need a new repentance. Repent, for the Kingdom of God is here!

Improper catechesis is not the problem, hard hearted children are. I’m all for the God side of things–love, mercy, grace flowing ever flowing–but when the ground is hardened by sin’s justification, we close the gates of heaven in on ourselves. “Break up that fallow ground and humble yourselves to the Lord, so He may lift you up.”

You want to see a new evangelization?  Call a sacred assembly for every foul and corrupt action made.  Call the faithful to join, to weep for the Church. And watch a new evangelization flow, like milk and honey.

Ichabod, the glory has departed, but the sacraments have not departed, the glory remains.  The glory of the Lord has departed from us, the people of God. And why? The deceitfulness of sin. Our sins have caused the Holy Spirit great grief–personal sin, but even worse a culture of sin, and no, not the secular world, but the secular world sitting in our baptized hearts. Children born for the eternal city sitting firmly in the world of men, as common and not set apart.

Asking God to move while we hold on to every unclean bird and foul beast is like asking fine wine to be mixed with vomit. The state of things is not complicated.  It is not too hard to be fixed.  But attempting to make a fine wine pleasant with a little spit up makes the stomach churn.

I’m reminded of Peter’s word, “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and turned away from it.” Many have turned away yet they have stayed within the household of faith, bogging it down with corruption and compromise, heresy and heterodoxy, modernity and malice, resistance and revolt. Sinning against themselves, the people of God, and our Lord. How shall they escape damnation, storms without rain, being tossed around like Satan’s little puppet men?

The only historic source that can bring change that will last is us, and the way is simply this:  repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. Yes, it is God’s mercy that leads us to repentance, but if it leads us to more moral decadence, if His kindness leads us to more broken ethics, more compromised Catholicism, then it is vanity, not His love but us our prayers.  And His great love becomes something to be mourned in the hard-hearted and not celebrated. Unless we as a Church repents, we shall see no new evangelization that effects change in the hearts of men.  How shall we save the world when we cannot save ourselves!