" The height of disloyalty to God is heresy. It is the sin of sins, the most hateful thing that God contemplates from heaven in this evil world. We barely understand, however, how detestable it is. It is the contamination of the truth of God, the worst of impurities.
Even so, we do not give importance to it. We contemplate the heresy and remain calm. We touch it and we do not shudder. We mix with her and we do not feel fear. We see how it affects sacred things and we have no sense of sacrilege. We breathe in its scent and show no signs of rejection or disgust. Some of us seek their friendship and even mitigate their guilt. We do not love God enough to be angry because of his glory. We do not love men enough to have with them the charity of telling them the truth that their souls need.
Having lost touch, taste, sight and all the heavenly senses, we can dwell in the midst of this hateful plague, with imperturbable tranquility , accustomed to its vileness, boasting how liberal we are, even with some diligent ostentation of sympathy and tolerance .
[...]
We lack devotion to the truth as truth, as the truth of God. Our zeal for souls is meager, because we do not have zeal for the honor of God . We act as if God had to be congratulated for our conversions, instead of as trembling souls, rescued by a display of mercy.
We count men half truths, the half that best fits our pusillanimity and their conceit, and then we wonder why so few are converted and why, of those few, so many apostatize . We are so weak that we are surprised that our half-truths do not have the success of the complete truth of God.
Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no sanctity . "
P. Frederick William Faber, The Precious Blood , 1860
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Father Faber, an Anglo-Catholic convert of Anglicanism
, said more than a century ago what no one dares to say today and, for
this reason, we desperately need to hear: faith is the most valuable
thing we have (...) To not be indignant when one commits adultery is not a sign that we are very tolerant and
merciful. It is a sign that we have long lost that faith and our salt does not know anything. Precisely because faith is what saves us, the Church has no more important mission than to preserve without contamination that faith that is worth more than gold , transmitted to the saints once and for all. With it we play the most serious thing we have, it depends on the path we take: life without end or eternal death, the Truth that frees or the enslaving error, the divine Love or the sin of man, the grace that saves or the hopelessness of useless effort. That is why the martyrs die before renouncing the faith, that is why the missionaries have gone to the end of the world to announce it. And that is why today our Church is agonizing in so many parts of the world, because we have stopped believing that faith is worth more than life .
Heresy is not an abstract theme of theologians, a healthy sample of pluralism or an inevitable evolution of the doctrine, as so many pretend. It is, in reality, a diabolical and mortal deception, which prevents us from knowing the true Christ , replaces it with a false Christ invented by us and destroys the life that He wanted to give us with His sacrifice on the Cross. If we do not hate it, it is because we are lukewarm and, in addition, stupid.
