I have heard of you back when you were a Seminarian under Pope Michael I.
I am now your friend on FB. Your statuses often enough read like quotes from books of devotion. There is a clear sense in which there is truth to them.
Prayer detaches the soul from this world. He who loves the world will never pray. He who hates this world prays and sees the world's true folly. Just as a mirage offers water where there only a desert, the world offers happiness, but it only give you sorrow.
Fidelity to prayer is the health of the soul.
When you are tired, learn to rest, and not to quit.
"They blessed with their mouth, but cursed with their heart" (Psalm 61:5)
The issue of this open letter is actually NOT to be blessing with my mouth.
You see, there are truths which it costs nothing to pay attention to, unless it's the wrong moment. Calculate the equivalence of 3 sqd and 4 sqd with 5 sqd anytime you like, unless it distracts you from prayer or from the steering wheel. Or a sharp farm tool ... you know what I mean.
There are other truths which are emotionally harrowing, but still necessary and cannot be put off to after one dies. If you have committed one clear mortal sin with no mitigating circumstances, after your baptism, you had better confess to a priest or do an act of Perfect Contrition. Or, if you have not admitted Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, if you have not admitted that He is also the promised Messiah, you had better do that too. Whatever the emotional cost. And to some it is high.
But there are also truths that are useful when you are attentive, but actually kind of optional. These are the truths in books of devotion. Like the things quoted that are not Psalm 61:5. Obviously any given one of them can cease to be optional if your father confessor imposes on you to attend to it, but apart from that, they are optional to attend to. Especially, being reminded of the necessity of prayer, when you are in a situation depriving you of the necessary peace for prayer is unnecessary harrowing.
The point is not to unfriend you. You are free to unfriend me. The point is, I'm asking, when you pray for me, as I am sure you do, WHAT THINGS are you praying for? Specifically, I would not want to be prayed for in the hope of me becoming a priest or monk.
You see, I had fidelity to prayer up to concluding someone else's prayer, stronger than mine, was abusing my prayer as a weapon against my preference for marriage. As a weapon against my efforts to get sufficiently known to earn my living from my writing, the day someone starts a publishing house in order to both spread the things I had to say, useful enough in apologetics (and therefore to get people to admit mortal sin leads to an eternity of fire, or Jesus is the promised Messiah), as a weapon against that too.
The Church is always praying. But every single member of the Church isn't praying 24/24, 365/365. The Church is not meant to consist exclusively of monks and nuns. It conceivably could do so for some time (Monseigneur Lefèbvre once mentioned, I think, the theory that the Church could be reduced to one single person if he was a bishop, Pope Michael I quoted the OT prophecy about a small child being able to count the remainder of the Church, and I think he thougfht that fulfilled the day he was elected, so, the Church could be so few that it contained no laymen ... though actually on that day, prior to election and acceptance, it contained only laymen ... unless the Church survived somewhere else, if obscured). But once it has a certain size, it is certain that it will contain people who are NOT monks or nuns or dedicate every day to prayer.
I prayed the Rosary every day when I was a parishioner in St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, as I recall, or there were few exceptions. But I quit that parish, because I was morally certain the priests were not praying for, but against my earthly happiness. There are some who, in order to pray, need a glass of water first. And there are some who, in order to pray, need some of the good things of this world. Wanting a young wife is not just wanting beauty, which is fleeting, it is also wanting fertility and proles primum bonum matrimonii. Wanting to be known as an author is not only, in fact not even, wanting to bask in the kind of fame that a Hollywood actor or a popular singer enjoys. It's also wanting to be sufficiently known to do some good with one's work, and to "do good" in the business sense so one's work also feeds oneself and one's family.
I would like to know that by "learn to rest, not to quit" is not sth you apply to me in the sense of YOUR project for me to be principally a prayer warrior. Let's go back to fidelity to prayer, a bit.
I have run the way of thy commandments, when thou didst enlarge my heart. Psalms 118:32
This was in fact the case, back when I was a parishioner in St. Nicolas du Chardonnet (apart from its basically Eastern Orthodox view on the Papacy's nature, but this was just after my return from these), I did hope to marry and to get an edition of my writings or a performance of my compositions within the year, and I did pray the rosary and I did forgive my enemies. It took me perhaps a quarter of an hour to forgive an especially mean thing. And to pray an our father or a rosary and include them.
What brought me away from that is, someone was praying for me to be basically a monk, which I did not want, and do not want. Monks can live in poverty and therefore also without the fame of authorship and they regularly live without wives and children. That was not what I wanted or want. It was not what I think God was calling me to. For some reason, God was momentarily hearing the prayers of someone else, against mine, I was looking for ways to arrange that. Including and up to quitting the rosary so that St. Nicolas priests couldn't be heard when praying I get the grace of perfect chastity through the rosary. Bad move? Probably. But their prayers for my worldly continued destitution drove me to it. Perhaps, my quitting the rosary was God hearing their prayers, with the rosary, I would have obtained what they didn't want me to obtain.
Anyway, if Pope Michael II wants to concentrate on prayer and devotionals, it is certainly, within limits his right. But 300 (or however many we are by now) true Catholics won't save all the other souls by prayer only and neglecting apologetics. If Pope Michael II wants to shoehorn all Conclavists into prayer and devotion only, no apologetics, no worldly success, it is probable, what he wants to be head of is not the Catholic Church. You can have a Catholic Church (apart from when it's very small, like five people) with thirty-fold, sixty-fold, hundred-fold fruit. You cannot have a Catholic Church even the size of 300 people that's hundred-fold, hundred-fold, hundred-fold only. A lay apologist (and there were such from Justin Martyr) is helping the Pope and the Bishops to these ends:
Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine
[2 Timothy 4:2]
Did you catch the nuance? Preaching the word is in season out of season, but rebuking and reproving is in patience.
For this they are wilfully ignorant of, that the heavens were before, and the earth out of water, and through water, consisting by the word of God Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men
[2 Peter 3:5-7]
One of the most principal things I've done since the very first I was on the internet, or maybe weeks only before starting, way before I had this blogger account, was to write in defense of this truth. It could have been used. Pope Michael I was not obliged to be the sole paper published author in the Conclavist community. 1684 + 1099 = 2783 words, directly from the first pope. The Greek NT has 138,150 words. The first Pope wrote 2 % of the New Testament. Or, if you add in St. Mark, 11,304 words, that makes 10 %. Even more, a Pope has no right to peevishly look at his own success in self publishing via Amazon and then imagine this is the measure above which no one of the Catholics subject to him may reach. I told Pope Michael I, he should have tried to start a publishing house, with a Vatican in Exile goes a Libreria Editrice Vaticana in Exile, he would have been able to secure a much better success for the booklet he republished with nine papal condemnations on Heliocentrism. And he would have been able to print lots of the devotional books you are quoting (unless TAN Books have exclusive rights under US Copyright, they shouldn't have, the authors are long since dead, new translations could be made). And he could incidentally also have secured me a beginning of the income I want. He was master of his time of course ... until God was. He was suspicious of alcohol, I believe, and got a stroke one month before he died. I think the day he died he had opportunity to see some things about me in another perspective, an abcess was healed the same day. Not miraculously, but I was using alcohol to rince and blue cheese as penicilline. He prayed one prayer he hadn't prayed for me when alive. May I suggest yourself and his successor, feliciter regnanti Michael II, not to repeat the delay?
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
IVth Lord's Day after Epiphany
9.II.2025
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