The Cost of Remaining Catholic
MASS Statuit
LESSON James 1:12-18
GOSPEL St Luke 14:26-33
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“Whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.”
Our Divine Lord does not conceal the cost of discipleship. He does not summon men by promising comfort, public favour, institutional security, or exemption from suffering. He commands the man who would follow Him to sit down first and count the cost. He speaks of a tower that must be completed, a battle that must be fought, possessions that must be surrendered, and a cross that must be carried. Christianity is not an ornament added to an otherwise worldly life. It is an absolute allegiance, sealed in Baptism, nourished at the altar, tested by contradiction, and crowned only in eternity.
Saint Oliver Plunkett counted that cost. He counted it when, as a young Irishman, he left a persecuted country for Rome in 1647; when he was ordained priest on 1 January 1654; and when, after years of study, teaching, and service to the sick, he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in 1669.
He knew what awaited him. He was not returning to an established Catholic society in which a bishop might expect honour, resources, and protection. He was returning to a wounded and scattered Church: churches ruined, schools destroyed, priests driven into hiding, discipline weakened, and generations of Catholics deprived of the ordinary life of the sacraments.
Yet he returned.
That single fact reveals the nature of the true shepherd. The shepherd does not remain where it is safe while his sheep are exposed to wolves. He does not first ask whether fidelity will preserve his reputation, his position, his liberty, or his peace. Saint Oliver returned because Ireland was his flock, and because episcopal consecration is not an ornament but an oblation. The bishop is marked with the fullness of the priesthood so that he may spend and be spent for souls.
The Introit declares: “The Lord made to him a covenant of peace, and made him a prince: that the dignity of priesthood should be to him for ever.” The world hears the word “prince” and imagines privilege. The Church hears it and beholds sacrifice. The priestly prince of Christ is not one who protects himself from the Cross, but one who stands beneath it for the sake of his people. His authority is greatest when self-interest has disappeared. His dignity is most luminous when every merely earthly dignity has been stripped away.
Saint Oliver’s ministry bore astonishing fruit. He held synods, restored discipline, founded schools, ordained priests, and administered Confirmation to more than ten thousand people during the first year of his episcopate. He did not use persecution as an excuse for pastoral inertia. He understood that a Church in crisis needs more doctrine, not less; more sacramental life, not less; stronger priests, not more pliable ones; clearer discipline, not endless accommodation with the spirit of the age.
This is the first rebuke his feast addresses to the Church today. We are repeatedly told that difficult circumstances require the dilution of Catholicism. Because society is secular, doctrine must be softened. Because Christian morality is unpopular, it must be concealed beneath therapeutic language. Because inherited Catholic worship embarrasses the fashionable, it must be restricted or treated as a pastoral problem.
Saint Oliver teaches the contrary. A persecuted Church does not survive by becoming less Catholic. She survives by becoming more consciously, more courageously, and more supernaturally Catholic. When the world grows dark, the lamp must not be dimmed. When souls are starving, the bread must not be diluted. When the road has been obscured, the shepherd must not conceal its narrowness for fear that clarity may offend.
When persecution intensified in 1673, Saint Oliver was driven into hiding. He endured cold, hunger, danger, and exposure, at times living beneath a leaking roof and subsisting upon barley bread. Yet he refused to abandon Ireland. He declared that he would rather die of hunger and cold than forsake the souls entrusted to his care.
Here episcopal fatherhood is seen without disguise. A father does not depart because his children have become burdensome. A shepherd does not flee because wolves have appeared. A successor of the Apostles does not preserve his ministry by refusing to perform it.
The contrast with our own age is severe. How many of the faithful have been abandoned, not because their shepherds were imprisoned, but because Catholic doctrine became inconvenient? How many have searched in vain for reverent worship, sound catechesis, clear moral teaching, and priests willing to speak plainly about sin, grace, judgement, sacrifice, and salvation? How many Catholics attached to the immemorial liturgical inheritance of the Roman Church have been treated not as children asking for bread, but as an administrative difficulty to be contained?
Saint Oliver possessed no media department and no committee to manage perceptions. He had barley bread, a leaking shelter, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the certainty that souls had been entrusted to him by Almighty God. That was sufficient to make him steadfast.
In 1679, he was arrested amid the hysteria generated by Titus Oates and the fictitious Popish Plot. Saint Oliver was accused of planning foreign invasion and organising rebellion. The charges were monstrous, but they were politically useful. A society that wishes to persecute the innocent rarely admits that it hates innocence. It invents a danger, transforms the victim into a threat, and clothes prejudice in the language of public order.
Even an exclusively Protestant jury in Ireland would not convict him upon the evidence offered. Therefore he was removed to London, separated from witnesses who could have defended him, denied sufficient time to bring them before the court, and condemned in proceedings whose conclusion had effectively been determined in advance. The machinery of law remained; justice had departed. There was a trial, but no true hearing. Juridical form became an instrument of persecution.
This danger has not disappeared. Institutions may retain procedures while losing justice. Decrees may be issued, accusations circulated, penalties threatened, and reputations destroyed while the substance of the case remains unanswered. Men may speak reverently of authority while refusing the elementary demands of equity.
This is particularly grave within the Church. Ecclesiastical authority is not made righteous merely by being ecclesiastical. The authority of Christ cannot be invoked to excuse injustice, contempt for evidence, or punishment without a proportionate hearing. Nor can appeals to unity justify measures that deepen alienation by refusing to address the causes of crisis.
Saint Oliver reminds us that legality without justice becomes persecution, and authority without truth becomes mere power.
Yet his response was not bitterness. Before his execution at Tyburn on 1 July 1681, he forgave those who had accused and condemned him. He asked pardon for his own sins. He made an Act of Contrition. He prayed the Miserere. He commended his soul to God with the words of the crucified Saviour: “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. Lord Jesus, receive my soul.”
Here we see what distinguishes the martyr from the merely political victim. The martyr does not simply suffer for a cause; he suffers in union with Christ. He does not merely expose the injustice of his enemies; he desires their conversion. He does not proclaim his own sinlessness; he dies repentant.
There is a necessary warning here for all who defend Tradition and the Faith. It is possible to defend truth and lose charity. It is possible to denounce corruption while neglecting repentance. It is possible to identify every betrayal in the Church and society while remaining blind to pride, anger, vanity, and hardness of heart within ourselves. Saint Oliver rejected every false accusation, but he did not refuse self-examination. He forgave his persecutors, yet did not imagine that he himself had no need of mercy.
The Epistle says: “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he hath been proved, he shall receive the crown of life.” The enemy outside is dangerous; the enemy within is nearer. The persecutor may destroy the body, but resentment may poison the soul. Calumny may deprive us of reputation, but pride may deprive us of grace. Saint Oliver conquered both enemies: the injustice of his persecutors and the temptation to become spiritually conformed to them.
Today’s commemorations deepen the lesson.
Pope Saint Pius I governed the Roman Church when Valentinus, Cerdon, and Marcion attempted to corrupt the Faith from within. His pontificate reminds us that the Church has always suffered from two enemies: persecution from without and heresy from within. The first seeks to silence Catholics; the second seeks to alter Catholicism.
A true shepherd must resist both. He must protect the flock not only from those who would imprison Christians, but from those who would retain Catholic words while changing their meaning. Charity does not oblige a bishop to tolerate doctrinal poison. Mercy does not require indifference to error. Unity is not preserved by permitting men outwardly to remain within the Church while contradicting what the Church has always taught.
Blessed Adrian Fortescue presents the third aspect of today’s mystery. He was an English nobleman, husband, father, Dominican tertiary, courtier, soldier, and Knight of Saint John. He had served King Henry VIII faithfully. Yet there came a point at which fidelity to the king could no longer be reconciled with fidelity to Christ and His Church. No specific act of treason was proved against him. His true offence was that temporal allegiance could not be stretched into spiritual apostasy.
Blessed Adrian teaches that obedience is a virtue only when ordered to God. No ruler, government, court, parliament, bishop, dicastery, or pontiff possesses authority to command what is contrary to divine law, the Catholic Faith, or the purpose for which authority was given. Authority is not absolute ownership of subjects. It is stewardship under judgement.
Thus the three saints of today’s liturgy confront three great temptations.
Saint Oliver Plunkett condemns the cowardice of shepherds who preserve themselves while abandoning souls.
Pope Saint Pius I condemns the false charity that tolerates doctrinal corruption in the name of peace.
Blessed Adrian Fortescue condemns the servility that treats obedience to human authority as though it were higher than obedience to God.
And the Gospel places the question before each of us personally: have we counted the cost?
The cost may not be Tyburn. It may be the loss of employment, advancement, status, friendship, or public approval. It may be denunciation as hateful, extremist, divisive, disobedient, or uncharitable merely because one refuses to call falsehood truth. It may even be rejection by those within the visible structures of the Church who have made peace with principles that the saints died resisting.
But we must also count the cost of cowardice.
What is gained by preserving comfort and losing integrity? What is gained by retaining office and betraying the purpose of office? What is gained by maintaining an appearance of peace while souls are deprived of truth? What is gained by winning the approval of a world whose judgement will disappear at death?
“What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”
The tower must be completed. The battle must be fought. The Cross must be carried to Calvary, not merely admired from a safe distance.
And here the liturgy reveals the source of the martyr’s strength. Saint Oliver did not arrive at Tyburn by the power of temperament. He had been formed by the altar. Day after day, he had offered the same Sacrifice offered here: the Sacrifice of Christ, in which apparent defeat becomes eternal victory, bloodshed becomes redemption, and death becomes the gate of life.
At every Mass, the priest places the Host upon the altar. At Tyburn, Saint Oliver placed himself.
At every Mass, the words of Christ are renewed: “This is My Body, which is given for you.” At Tyburn, the bishop’s own body was given in union with his Lord.
At every Mass, Calvary is made present sacramentally. At Tyburn, Saint Oliver’s own Calvary was completed visibly.
He finished the tower because he had first surrendered everything. He won the battle because he accepted apparent defeat. He kept the Faith because he had been nourished by the Sacrifice of the Faith.
Let us therefore ask through his intercession for what the Collect calls “admirable courage for the defence of the Catholic Faith.” Not aggression, not theatrical defiance, not the courage of wounded pride, but the courage of a bishop beneath a leaking roof; the courage of a prisoner denied justice; the courage of a martyr who speaks truth without hatred; the courage of a sinner who forgives his enemies while begging forgiveness from God.
Saint Oliver lost liberty, honour, security, and life itself. Yet in losing all these things for Christ, he received what no court could confiscate, no decree could nullify, and no executioner could destroy: the crown of life.
May we learn from him that fidelity is not measured by what we profess when profession costs nothing, but by what we refuse to surrender when fidelity costs everything.
And when our own hour of trial comes, may we be found not bargaining over the price of discipleship, but completing the tower, carrying the Cross, confessing the Faith, forgiving our enemies, and offering ourselves with Christ upon the altar of God.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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