VaticanNews portal on December 13, 2025 publishes a reflection by Fr. Edmund Power OSB titled “Lord’s Day Reflection: Rejoice in the Lord always!” analyzing the Third Sunday of Advent. The text presents joy as arising from personal interpretation of “signs” in Christ’s ministry while omitting the regnum sociale Christi (social reign of Christ) as taught by Pius XI. This selective reading exemplifies the neo-modernist destruction of liturgical consciousness.
Naturalistic Subversion of Prophetic Eschatology
The commentary reduces Isaiah’s Messianic prophecies to psychological metaphors:
“The blind receive their sight: reading our lives and our history through the eyes of faith… The lame walk: no longer blocked and stumbling, we resume our joyful journey… Lepers are cleansed: all that renders us ‘unclean’… is transformed”
This transforms miracula Christi (miracles of Christ) into therapeutic self-help platitudes, directly contradicting the literal-historical sense upheld in Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus (1893). The six signs become tools for existential self-actualization rather than proofs of divine authority demanding submission.
Omission of the Church’s Militant Reality
Nowhere does the reflection mention the Ecclesia militans (Church militant) or the necessity of conversion for salvation – a silence that screams apostasy. When Power claims “the poor have good news preached to them” refers to “not only the literally poor, but the poor in spirit”, he subverts the Gospel’s praedicatio conversionalis (conversionary preaching) into a vague spiritual disposition. Compare this to Pius X’s condemnation in Lamentabili: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him” (Proposition 58). The article’s sevenfold “signs” schema creates a gnostic numerology alien to Thomistic exegesis.
Evasion of the Cross as Scandal
The treatment of Christ’s warning – “blessed is he who takes no offence at me” – exposes modernist equivocation:
“The word offence can also be translated scandal, and the scandal is the Cross: a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles”
This reduces the scandalum crucis (scandal of the Cross) to mere cultural misunderstanding rather than the necessary stumbling block for unrepentant sinners as defined by the Council of Trent (Session VI, Canon 11). The text’s reference to Ephesians 5:14 (“Awake, o sleeper…”) is ripped from its context condemning sexual immorality and darkness – a typical conciliarist tactic of selective quotation.
Linguistic Markers of Modernist Subjectivism
Throughout the commentary, we observe telltale signs of neo-modernism condemned in Pius X’s Pascendi:
- The repeated phrase “our lives” (3x) centers interpretation on subjective experience rather than objective revelation
- Vague references to “the kingdom of heaven” devoid of its dogmatic definition as the Una Vera Ecclesia (One True Church)
- Psychological terminology: “doubt our value”, “exclusion and despair”, “open to their need”
This fulfills Pius X’s warning that modernists reduce faith to “a certain religious movement” (Proposition 59 of Lamentabili).
Symptomatic of Conciliar Apostasy
The reflection’s core error lies in its implicit denial of the Regale Sacerdotium (Royal Priesthood) exercised through the Church’s magisterium. By treating John the Baptist’s inquiry as a template for personal discernment rather than prophetic witness to Christ’s divinity, it undermines the depositum fidei (deposit of faith). The complete absence of Mary – whose Magnificat forms the traditional Advent narrative – reveals the anti-Marian spirit of the conciliar sect.
When Power claims “the prophetic message of John… is of another order” than worldly concerns, he tacitly endorses the heresy of separating faith from society condemned in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Proposition 55). True Gaudete joy comes not from emotional excitation but from certitudo de veritate (certainty of truth) as defined by pre-conciliar Catholicism – a reality systematically destroyed by the Vatican II revolution.
Source:
Lord's Day Reflection: Rejoice in the Lord always! (vaticannews.va)
Date: 13.12.2025