Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

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.

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.