The Transfiguration

FATHER GEORGE W. RUTLER

In the Transfiguration, Christ showed that everything must center on Him to be of right service to humanity.

Moses, representing the law and social order, defers to Him, as does Elijah, representing the intellect and spiritual order. The Church recounts this in Lent, because Jesus revealed His glory in preparation for the Crucifixion.

Christ's glory sheds light on His three temptations in the wilderness. Satan tested Him to see if He would succumb to the deceits of secularism (turning stones to bread, as though matter were the only thing that really matters) and power (control of governments in exchange for cooperating with evil) and fantasy (attaining celebrity by flouting the laws of nature).

The Catholic Church is, as Pope John Paul II said, "expert in humanity." Satan's chief enemy is the Church, for this is Christ alive in the world. From hard experience the Church knows the temptations of secularism (reducing Christianity to philanthropic humanism), clericalism (bartering supernatural grace for social power) and subjectivism (living in a parallel universe contemptuous of moral reality).

To succumb to these temptations is to die, both personally and institutionally. The latest figures show that those denominations that surrendered to "the spirit of the age" are vanishing. The liberal Protestant denominations are evaporating. One of their leaders has said that their numbers are dropping because their members are too well educated to have children. It is hardly intelligent to design one's own demise. Our social fabric will have to adjust to the disappearance of these groups, which for a long while defined the public face of society. At the same time, the Catholic Church continues to grow, and would have done so even more had not many Catholics themselves yielded to the threefold temptations. In the most recently recorded year, 2007 to 2008, the number of Catholics worldwide increased by 19 million people. Priests increased from 405,178 to 409,166. Seminarians increased from 115,919 to 117,024. As in the religious orders, the growth is invariably in those where the Faith is kept.

In the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville predicted that, one day, the only options in the United States would be Catholicism and unbelief. In the early twentieth century, Chesterton said that "every man would end up either in utter pessimistic skepticism or as a member of the Catholic creed." In a famous vision, St. John Bosco saw little boats tying up with the Barque of Peter. This September, the Successor of Peter will speak in Westminster Hall on the very spot where St. Thomas More was sentenced to death (and eternal glory) for defending the papacy. This is not a time for self-satisfaction. It is a summons to Lenten penance for our own subtle dalliances with temptations against the Faith, in the hope that we may respond more faithfully to the work of saving souls


 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "The Transfiguration." Weekly Column for February 28, 2010.

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR
Father Rutler received priestly ordination in 1981. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of the Church of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has published 16 books, including: Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, and Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Copyright © 2010 Father George W. Rutler




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