Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

800 years ago, on this very day, a great saint was dying. He had stripped himself naked and lay down on the ground so that he could die like Our Lord, in a state of utter poverty. But another brother said to him, “I would like to lend you this tunic, under the condition that you wear it out of holy obedience and you have no power over it or any ability to lend it to anyone else.”
St. Francis of Assisi, for it was him, commanded that his brothers sing in a loud voice the canticle that he had composed, called “The Canticle of the Sun”. In this canticle, which is a song of praise to God for His creation, are the following words: “Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.”
Then, St. Francis died and one of the brothers, Brother Augustine, saw St. Francis’s soul fly to heaven and asked if he could follow him. Then Brother Augustine also died and went to Heaven
This scene of the last hours of the death of St. Francis encapsulates the two great virtues that he practiced in his life: the virtues of poverty and joy.

Track 1 of the Chant II CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VAe5fYJzAo
Back in the 1990s, a series of Gregorian chants CDs were produced and they became very popular. They were recordings made by Benedictine monks in Spain.
The first of these CDs sold two million copies in the USA and two million copies in the rest of the world. When people were trying to explain why a Gregorian Chant CD could be so popular, they said that people were using it as an antidote to the stress of the modern world.
After the first CD did so well, they produced a second CD and made the first track the monks singing the beautiful Introit of today’s Mass, which starts off with the words: “Give peace, O Lord, to those who have hoped in You”.
The world was looking for some peace of soul and turned to Gregorian Chant. They can find it not only through Gregorian Chant, but also through the TLM.
There is a certain point of the Mass when the Mass becomes focused on asking God for peace. This is right after the Pater Noster. In the prayer which immediately follows it, the Libera Nos, the priest says to God, “mercifully grant peace in our days, that through the assistance of Thy mercy we may be always free from sin, and secure from all disturbance.”
Then the priest prays the Agnus Dei. As you know the last petition is “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace”.
Then, the priest places his hands on the altar, and says to Our Lord, “Lord Jesus Christ, who said to Thine Apostles: Peace I leave you, My peace I give you: regard not my sins, but the faith of Thy Church; and vouchsafe to grant her that peace and unity which is agreeable to Thy will.”
This peace that Our Lord gives is the peace that the people of the world were looking for when they were listening to Gregorian Chant in the 1990s. At the Last Supper, Our Lord explains that the peace He gives us is not like the peace that the world gives.
For there are, in fact, two types of peace: the peace of the world and the peace of Our Lord. Because we use the same word for these two types of peace, we can easily become confused by them.
We can meet people in the world who are living in a state of sin, or Catholics who have left the faith, or who have stopped practicing traditional Catholicism. And they say to us, “I am at peace with my decision”. And we may be tempted to think that people in the world are able to live in a state of sin and be at peace, when in fact they only have the peace of the world.
For this reason, I think that it would be helpful for us to think about three differences between the peace that the world gives and the peace that Our Lord gives.
The main difference between the two is that the peace of Our Lord is “tranquility in order” and the peace of the world is “numbness in disorder”. The peace of Our Lord is in the soul and is obtained by mortifying or putting to death the body. The peace of the world is in the body and is obtained by putting to death the soul.

There are five Sundays during this time of the year that the epistle of the Sunday is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: 16, 17, 19, 20, 21.
Even if we add up all of the verses from Ephesians that we read in those five Sundays, we only get 36 verses, which is only 23% of the entire epistle to the Ephesians. This shows us that we are only getting a small part of the entire epistle each Sunday.
I hope that you take the time periodically to read the whole of these epistles that you only read a little bit of on Sundays. Really, you should read the whole of the New Testament at least once a year.
Since we only see a little bit of an epistle on Sundays, I thought I would take some time today to talk about the whole epistle to the Ephesians: what it is about. I thought this would be particularly opportune on this Sunday because St. Paul touches closely on the main theme of his epistle today.
The Mystical Body of Christ
The main topic of the epistle is the Mystical Body of Christ. Our Lord has a physical body that belongs to His human nature, just like we all have a physical body.
But He has, in addition to this, a mystical Body. We can think of it as a spiritual organism. Unlike a physical body, this mystical body does not belong to one person alone but rather is composed of many persons.
Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body, Our Lady is referred to as the neck, and we are referred to as the members of the Body, like the arms, feet, fingers and toes.
Later in chapter 4, of which we have the beginning today, we hear St. Paul saying: “We are to practice the truth in love, and so grow up in all things in him who is the head, Christ.”
The purpose of our life is to grow spiritually and we do this by our life in Christ. As faithful Catholics, we are living our lives in the body of Christ; we live in Christ and by doing so, we grow up spiritually.
St. Paul Writing to the Ephesians
In all of his missionary journeys, St. Paul had spent a longer time in Ephesus than in any other place. When we think of St. Paul, we think of him as always on the move, traveling from place to place in Asia Minor and Greece in order to spread the Gospel.
And so we might be surprised to hear that he spent three years in Ephesus, from approximately 53-56 AD.
Perhaps the fact that St. Paul spent so long a time in Ephesus is the reason why he talks to the Ephesians about such a deep topic as the Mystical Body. It was some years since he was in Ephesus and he is now a prisoner in Rome. He is going to write a letter to them to explain what that Mystical Body is and how it works.

Tomorrow and the next day, we have two special feast days: the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and Our Lady of Sorrows. Both of these feast days are celebrations of the triumph that comes through the Cross. It was through the Cross that Our Lord redeemed the human race. It was by standing at the foot of the Cross and offering her Son that Our Lady became the Co-Redemptrix of the human race and Mediatrix of All Graces.
As Catholics, we celebrate these feast days because we believe in what they represent for Our Lord and Our Lady, and also what they represent for us. What do they teach us? That the good bearing of the Cross in this life is what makes for heavenly glory in the life to come.
We have these feasts to represent this to us, and we place crucifixes everywhere to remind us that victory comes from the Cross. At the same time, however, we have trouble believing it.
Catechism of Trent: “if one thing more than another presents difficulty to the mind and understanding of man, assuredly it is the mystery of the cross, which, beyond all doubt, must be considered the most difficult of all; so much so that only with great difficulty can we grasp the fact that our salvation depends on the cross”.
This is harder for us to understand than the Trinity, harder to understand than the mystery of the Eucharist: that our salvation depends on the Cross. Do you understand this?
Do you believe that your salvation depends on the way in which you bear suffering in this life? Do you have a supernatural attitude toward suffering, or a worldly attitude toward it?
This one thing must divide us from the people in the world, if we are truly followers of Our Lord Jesus Christ: we must have the capacity of carrying our daily crosses.
If so many people in this world find the doctrine of the Cross so difficult to understand, it is often because of two illusions that they hold in their minds, illusions that come from the world.

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.