Happy feast day of St. Anthony of Padua!
While I could tell you about St. Anthony, his bio, his miracles, or dig up some facts that you might not have known, I decided to go a slightly different direction tonight.
St. Anthony was known as the gentlest of saints. But he was also known as something else. In his day and age he was known as “the hammer of heretics”. He would actually choose areas—villages, towns, et cetera—to go into that were full of heretics or pagans, and make them his target audience to preach the gospel. He didn’t win any converts by winning an argument. He realized that by winning an argument he could still lose the soul. So he win converts and won souls by preaching truth and beauty.
Tonight I want to talk about a particular heresy that I’ve heard from pretty much every Protestant, but also something I’ve heard from a lot of Catholics as well, and that’s the practical heresy of presumption. Many people sit there and think, “Well, I’m a good person, I’m certainly going to heaven. I’m not a murderer, I’m not doing all sorts of bad things… certainly I’m going to go to heaven.” That’s presumption.
The Church teaches that there are four last things: death, judgement, hell, and heaven. Everybody likes to think about the last thing. Everybody likes to think about heaven. Nobody likes to think about the certainties of death, the certainties of judgement, and the certainty that there is a hell, and that people do go there, though we don’t know who or how many. We concentrate on the heaven side of things because hell is just too scary, right? It’s not something we want to think about, not something we want to talk about, certainly not something we want to tall our kids about. Yet the Blessed Mother when she appeared to the shepherd children at Fatima did not hesitate to tell them and show them a vision of hell. After the visions, one of the seers, Jacinta, would stop in the middle of playing and be lost in thought and her friends would turn to her and say, “Jacinta, what’s the matter?” And she would say, “Oh poor hell and all the souls that go there. If people only knew.”
So we need to think about these four last things, and in particular three of the four last things. St. Alphonses de Liguori in his Considerations on Eternal Maxims puts things pretty bluntly about the nature of death, especially the death of an unprepared Christian soul. He puts things very bluntly about judgement. And he puts things very bluntly about hell. Bluntly enough to scare most people straight into the confessional.
So maybe these four last things should be our four first things, the first things we think about when we wake up in the morning, the first things we think about before we reply to an email or a text or a Facebook post or a Twitter post. We do not have the ability as Catholic Christians to presume that we are saved. As Christians we are not to presume that we are saved. I realize it’s popular in Protestant circles… but we know the truth. And the truth is, as Jesus said, many are called, but few are chosen. Many are called by their Baptism to follow in the footsteps of Christ. But few are chosen because so many baptized people fall victim to this practical heresy of presumption.
So have hope. Have hope that through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that we can achieve heaven, and by our submission to the will of the Holy Spirit that it’s possible that we’ll get there. Most of all remember the truth: everyone dies, everyone is judged, and hell is real.
St. Anthony of Padua, pray for us.