Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX Fr Paul Robinson

In 1978, four businessmen pooled their resources to found the home improvement chain Home Depot. The point of the store was to provide a place where homeowners could go to buy tools and parts to renovate or repair their house. One of the slogans over the years was, “You can do it. We can help.”Home Depot represents something of the American spirit. We have a go-getter, do it yourself attitude. Why hire someone when you can just figure things out, buy the parts and do it on your own. Doesn’t that save a lot of trouble?What I want to point out in this sermon is that such a spirit is not proper in the realm of religion; it must not be translated to the religious sphere such that we become Home Depot Catholics, such that we pursue a do it yourself salvation.What do I mean by a Home Depot Catholicism or a Do It Yourself Catholicism?Home Depot Catholics come to church merely to acquire the material parts they need to keep their souls going and so attain salvation. Get Mass. Get confession. Get Communion. Throw some money in the collection basket. Go home. Save my soul.This is not the way that Our Lord established His religion, His Mystical Body. He established it in such a way that the members of the Catholic faith are not only united with Him, but they are also united with one another through Him. They all live the same life; they form one body together. And they are meant to live that reality by associating themselves with one another.

I would like to focus on the parable of today’s Mass and explain what it means in relation to our salvation. The parable tells the story of a day of hiring.“Day” in this parable, as far as the story goes, refers only to a 12 hour period, or that part of the day that is in daylight. But the Fathers have understood this 12 hour period to be a symbol of two different longer periods of time, namely, the time before Christ, and the duration of our life.If we take the “day” of the parable as the time before Christ, following Origen, we can understand the various calls at the different hours as missions given to the great figures of the Old Testament by God to accomplish His work. They are to work in His vineyard, which represents the field of labor in which a person is living for Heaven and is trying to get as many people as possible to follow him on that path to Heaven.The second sense of the “day” is the span of the lifetime of each individual. Each person is called to work for the kingdom of Heaven, that is, for his own salvation.Some are fortunate enough to be called in the morning of their life, by being born into a Catholic family. Others convert as teenagers, others as young adults, others as mature men, others as old men. For each of these is reserved the denarius of salvation or eternal life.But there is a condition. Each one must remain working in the vineyard, once they are called. It is only when evening comes that the payment is given. Those who are not present at the evening, or the end of their life, will not receive payment from the householder. We must remain in the state of grace if we are to receive the reward of Heaven.

Modern society hates families. It is directed to pleasure and wealth and families are an obstacle to that. Even the Church today seems to be joining in on the attack against families by approving the blessing of same-sex couples.To attack families, you have to attack the components that make up families: men and women.Since men are the heads of families, there is a special attack directed against them.There is an effort today to make men anything but what they need to be in order to fulfill their God-given mission to be good husbands and fathers.The typical man that today’s society creates is soft, pleasure-seeking, selfish, emasculated.This is why society so desperately needs good Catholic families today. This is why we pray, “Lord, grant us many holy Catholic families”. But to have good Catholic families, we must have good Catholic men, men of faith who have as their model not some football player, not some womanizing politician, not this Hollywood star or this MMA fighter, but Our Lord Jesus Christ.What society needs is men who dedicate their lives to the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to the service of His name, to the service of His Kingship, to the service of His Church.

Right before Our Lord left the Apostles on the day of His Ascension, He said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me”. He also said to them, “I will be with you all days, even to the consummation of the world”.We believe that Our Lord is omnipotent. We believe that He rules this world. But how often are we also not tempted to think the opposite, to think that Our Lord is powerless?How often are we not tempted to say: “Lord, where is your power? Evil is triumphant today! How can you let things go so far? How can you let things get so bad? If you have all power.”How can you allow there to be such a crisis in the Church? How can you allow the Conciliar Popes to do so many scandalous things? How can you allow there to be a fake Catholic as President of the United States?Lord, if you have all power, when are you going to arise and use it?When Our Lord said that all power on Heaven and earth has been given to Him, He did not say how He would use that power. He certainly did not bind Himself to step in and consume with fires or floods anyone who commits evil.What we all have to understand is that there are two ways of exercising power, not one way. One way is certainly the way of exercising force on people and things. We compel them to do our will or we simply remove them from our way.God is able to exercise His power in another way than nuclear destruction. God can exercise His power by building up rather than destroying. He can compel people by love rather than fear. He can conquer by relinquishing power.

The crisis of today’s world is a crisis of leadership. God has so created human beings and human society that it is absolutely necessary that there be leaders if the common good is to be fostered.There need to be good parents to direct and instruct children; there need to be good mayors and presidents to organize cities and countries and work for the welfare of its citizens; there need to be good bishops who labor unceasingly for the spiritual welfare of their diocese and all of its parishes.But authority is failing at every level today. Parents no longer want to tell their children what to do and take responsibility for their upbringing. Mayors no longer want to stop crime and enforce laws. Bishops no longer want to excommunicate egregious offenders against the faith, enforce the dogmas of the faith, and stand up against the world for the rights of Christ the King.St. Pius X was an incredible leader and, as a result, his eleven-year pontificate was one of the most fruitful in the 2000 year history of the Church.One of the bishops who knew him, Monsignor Baudrillart, identified in St. Pius X the three qualities that many modern leaders lack: “His look, his word, his whole being express three things: goodness, firmness, faith. Goodness was the man himself; firmness was the leader; faith was the Christian, the priest, the pontiff, the man of God.”

The life of God is greater than the death of men. God came upon this earth and men put Him to death. But God cannot die. This is what the Cristeros told the Communists who were trying to destroy Catholicism in Mexico. You may kill us and we will die. But God never dies. Dios nunca muereThe life of God exists before our life, during our life, after our life. The life of God is the existence that is at the basis of all reality. The life of God is the basis for our life. It is not so much that God lives; He is life itself.Our Lord died in His humanity, but He lived on in His eternal divinity. Nature was not dying but was being renewed by the death of Our Lord.The life of God is greater than the death of men, and the death of God is the life of men. By the death of Our Lord, we will all live again.