Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

No man can serve two masters. But also, no man can serve no master. We cannot serve both God and mammon. But we cannot serve neither God nor mammon. In this life, we either serve God or the world, one or the other.
One of the most basic things that every man desires is freedom. No one wants to be a slave. We all understand that slavery is incompatible with happiness, and we want to be happy.
But the thing is that we are not able to attain freedom and happiness on our own. They are things that we can only attain through service. We either serve the world or we serve God.
Both the world and Our Lord Jesus Christ offer us freedom and happiness. But the way in which they do so is completely different.
Our Lord famously tells us, “Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light”.
In John 8, when Our Lord has His most heated discussion with the Jews, He says, “If you continue in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
How do we attain freedom as human beings? We attain it by following the word of Our Lord, by serving Him, by obeying Him. That is what Our Lord tells us about how we become free. Note how this is one of the many paradoxes that we find in the Gospel: freedom through obedience.
What does the world say? How does it promise to give freedom to its followers? It says, “I will give you freedom by allowing you to do whatever you want without any constraints except the public order. I will give you infinite choices in entertainment, food, clothing and sexuality. You get to choose whatever you want and we will make sure that no one gives you a hard time for your choices.”
Modern technology has made this type of “freedom” so much more accessible in the past, in the sense that the modern world, through its technological devices and its refusal to forbid any type of behavior, provides modern man with many more choices than he had in the past.
And what is the result, for those who serve the world in order to achieve their freedom? The result is an unusually high rate of addiction. For many people today, what up front is an infinite number of choices becomes in the end a loss of the power to choose.
It is estimated that, in 2024, 16.8% of Americans suffered from some form of addiction. Please note that that is one out of every six people you see walking on the street and means close to 50 million people.
Someone may respond to this by saying, “But devout Catholics are addicted to God, and so they have an addiction problem as well”. I actually hope that that accusation is true for many, if not all, of you at St. Isidore’s. We want as many of you as possible to be addicted to God.
But I think that this accusation about devout Catholics will help us clarify what we mean about freedom and how it is attained by us as human beings.
We say that someone is addicted when they know that what they are doing is harming them and yet they still continue to do it. But following Christ, following the will of God, is very good for us. Therefore, someone who is always following the will of God is not suffering from an addiction.
It turns out that, when we serve Our Lord Jesus Christ, we end up serving our own good.

On August 12, Fr. Robinson was interviewed live on the Protestant Radio Program Iron Sharpens Iron, by host Chris Arnzen. Here are the time stamps of what they spoke about:
1:30-7:00 Fr. Robinson’s story
7:00-17:55 Problems with the New Mass
17:55-20:10 Why Latin in the TLM?
20:10-23:45 Continuation of Fr. Robinson’s story
23:45-27:30 What is sedevacantism?
27:30-29:10 What is Feeneyism
29:10-30:10 Are Protestant baptisms valid?
30:50-38:00 Protestant commercials
38:00-52:10 Why does the SSPX exist? How was it founded?
52:10-1:12:00 Relationship of the SSPX with Rome over the years
1:12:00-1:22:00 Protestant commercials
1:22:00-1:25:00 Why isn’t Fr. Robinson sedevacantist?
1:25:00-1:34:10 Continuation of SSPX history and strained relationship with Rome, SSPX excommunications, why they are not valid
1:34:10-1:38:10 What is the Society of St. Pius V? The Nine and their Expulsion
1:38:10-1:49:25 How is the SSPX reacting to the excommunications?
1:49:25-1:54:30 Homosexuality in the Church
1:54:30-end How could a Pope lose his office?

Political conservatives often advocate for a meritocracy, that is, a system whereby people get pay and power based on their skills and hard work rather than on their connections or their social position.
It rarely works that way on this earth, for a number of reasons related to our human condition. But we Catholics believe that, in the next life, we will get exactly what we deserve for what we have done in this life.
On earth, it is often difficult for humans to know exactly what people deserve, according to their talent and work. But God knows us better than we know ourselves; He knows everything that we do and exactly how good or how evil our actions are.
On earth, it is hard for humans to be completely just in giving out rewards or meting out punishments. We often have biases that influence our attitude towards people. But God is perfectly just and will not be influenced in any way by any biases.
For that reason, after this life is over, we will receive a reward or punishment that is precisely fair because we will be receiving it from an all-knowing, all-perfect God.
On this feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, I want to focus on the question of heavenly merit. We know that, for each one of the actions that we perform in the state of grace and for a supernatural motive, we deserve a heavenly reward.
Basically, if we do a supernatural work, for something beyond this life, then we deserve a reward that is beyond this life. And that reward is greater or lesser based on how many supernatural acts we have performed and the intensity of the love of God with which we have done them.
If, in the next life, we all receive from God the reward that is due to us, what, we may ask, is the reward that Our Lady received after her death?
Well, since Our Lady’s actions in this life were the greatest of all human beings, next to her Son, her actions were the most meritorious. They deserved the greatest reward from God.
What was the reward that God assigned to her for actions? They are the rewards that we meditate upon in the fourth and fifth mysteries of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary: Our Lady’s Assumption in Heaven and her Crowning as Queen of Heaven and earth.
We believe that Our Lady has been given the highest position in heaven, after her Son, because she merited more than anyone else.

Two men went up to the Temple to pray. One prayed well and the other did not. One prayed with many words, while another prayed with a few words said over and over. One stood with his eyes lifted up, while the other had his eyes cast down and kept striking his breast. One man went home justified, while the other did not.
The parable of the Pharisee and the publican is one of the most beautiful of all of Our Lord’s parable. It is clear that the purpose of the parable is to encourage us to practice the virtue of humility and to fight against pride.
But the parable also teaches us something else that is very important: it tells us how we ought to pray. When you think about all of the things that you do each day of your life, you must be convinced that praying is probably the most important thing that you do.
The reason for this is that prayer is the way in which we communicate with our Father in Heaven, the way that we spend time with Him, the way that we maintain our relationship with Him.
And if prayer is the most important of the things that we do each day, we must try to get better at prayer as time goes on. We must learn from Our Lord and the saints how we ought to pray, and try to imitate them in the time that we dedicate to prayer.
I particularly want to emphasize that word “dedicate” when talking about prayer today. One of the most important characteristics of good prayer is dedication. Another word for this is “devotion”. A prayer that is devout is one where we are devoted to what we are doing.
What do I mean by this? I mean that, while we are praying, we are focused on God rather than on ourselves. I mean that we actually use the time of prayer to pay attention to God and, even more than that, we try to focus our entire being on Him, as far as possible.
Have you ever tried doing this? Have you ever tried kneeling down, closing your eyes, and focusing yourself as much as you can on God and praying to Him with your whole heart? It is so important that you not just try this, but that you do it every day of your life.
One of the big differences between the prayer of the Pharisee and that of the publican is the question of devotion. The publican seems to be focused on God in his prayer because he is begging God for mercy. His prayer is clearly devout because his eyes are lowered, avoiding distraction; he is striking his breast over and over; and he is repeating the same thing over and over. There is a great focus and intensity to his prayer.
Whereas the Pharisee is not even asking God for anything. He is just talking to God about Himself and just saying whatever comes to his mind.

St. Paul tells us that “the wages of sin is death”, meaning that sin leads you to die. We know that sin leads to the death of the soul; that is why mortal sin has its name. It causes a mortal blow to our soul such that the life of God dies in the soul. The soul becomes dead to God.
But sin also is a cause of physical death. This is obviously true for the sin of murder, but it is true at a more basic level in that physical death came into this world because of sin. And, quite simply, the disorders of sin are not good for our health.
The bottom line with sin is that it causes the death of our bodies, it causes the death of our souls and it leads to the eternal death of Hell after this life is over.
This reality makes sin the greatest evil and even the only evil. We as Catholics believe that this is true. However, are we as careful about sin as we should be? Do we treat sin as a perilous danger to be avoided at all costs?
It all depends on the state of our conscience. Our conscience acts like the immune system of our body, in that it is our soul’s natural defense against sin.If we have a delicate conscience, then our conscience flares up whenever we are in the presence of an occasion of sin.
If we have a lax conscience, then we are not very troubled when we are in the occasion of sin or commit sin. The lax conscience is like the body of someone who has been numbed to pain because of injuries. A person burns his hand and loses sensation in his hand. When his hand is injured the next time, he does not feel anything.

This perspective on conscience shows us how our conscience can change over time, just like the immune system of our body. Good food and drink, and proper rest, help you maintain your immune system. Whereas staying up late and getting up early, not getting any exercise, binging on junk food, and so on, makes you vulnerable to sickness.
Similarly, in our spiritual life, if we pray our daily Rosary, avoid occasions of sin, do spiritual reading, go to confession and Communion regularly, we will maintain our soul in good health. We will be sensitive to sin, pray more easily and be able to live our faith.
Whereas, if we regularly consume worldly entertainment, hardly pray, don’t go to confession, and so on, then our soul starts to become used to sin and numb to spiritual realities. It becomes harder and harder to live the Catholic faith and be a Catholic.
At the end of the day, as long as we are in this life, we are in a state of flux. We are either becoming better Catholics or worse Catholics, as time goes by. We are very capable of changing from what we are today, either for the better or for the worse.
We all know people who used to be fervent Catholics and now have left the faith. We also know people who have undergone conversions and are today much holier than they were in the past.
The reason I mention this is that both today’s epistle and Gospel provide for us examples of the bad path: the slippery slope into mortal sin and apostasy, the numbing of the soul over time by a progressive desensitization to sin.
Let us look at these two examples to understand how sin truly leads to death.