“He who brings light to darkness must also have courage and faith.”
–St. Michael.
____________________________________________________________________
Today we direct our attention to S. Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia. This was a region in Asia Minor (now modern-day Turkey), just west of Cappadocia. S. Paul had evangelized this area, along with S. Barnabas, during his first missionary journey around A.D. 46. Soon after, so-called Judaizers came in and began to distort S. Paul’s teaching. S. Paul held that salvation was open to all people – both Jew and Gentile – freely. While practicing Jews, who also came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, could maintain their Jewish rituals and practices, these were not necessary to salvation, according to S. Paul. Gentiles turning to Christianity could do so without any Jewish preconditions.
Certain Jewish adherents to the Christian faith taught that it was necessary for Gentiles to conform to the essentials of the Jewish faith. Before a Gentile could become a Christian, he first must be circumcised and follow the precepts of the Mosaic Law. This sect of Jewish Christians was known as Judaizers. They were both zealous for the Law and also feared losing their Jewish identity should the Law ever be superseded. Most likely, they were centered in Jerusalem, and came under intense scrutiny from the Sanhedrin (Jewish leadership).
The apostolic leadership, along with S. Paul, met in council at Jerusalem to discuss this important matter around A.D. 50. Their conclusions are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 15). Here they concluded that it was not necessary for Gentile converts to first convert to Judaism, but required of them only that they adhere to four basic tenets devised to avoid scandalizing potential Jewish converts to Christianity: 1) to abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols; 2) to abstain from eating the blood of animals; 3) to abstain from eating meat from animals that have been strangled; 4) to abstain from fornication (sexual immorality). These precepts seem to have been based on the provisions of the Noahic covenant (found in Genesis, chapter nine) that reach back before Moses and therefore apply to humanity generally. The Apostles were making a distinction between Mosaic coventental obligations and universal obligations belonging to all of humanity under God’s primordial order.
As mentioned last week, several serious problems arose out of the Judaizer controversy. The first and foremost was that it voided the principle that our salvation was given by and through God’s grace towards man, not by anything man might do. Given the reality that it was impossible to keep all the precepts of the Law, if not by action at least by intention, this became an unattainable undertaking. This is why God needed to intercede and provide a means of salvation that stood outside of this conundrum by Christ Himself fulfilling the Mosaic Law faithfully and fully.
The second concern was the matter of table fellowship. Practicing Jews could not enter into the home of a Gentile, nor could they dine with Gentiles without becoming ritually unclean. How could the Church – Jew and Gentile – come together in the Supper of Our Lord, or even practice ordinary hospitality, if this standard was to be maintained? This would necessitate two churches, one Jewish and one Gentile, the very antithesis of both Our Lord’s teaching and the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is why S. Paul fought so vociferously against this distortion of the Gospel.
S. Paul makes the point in today’s Epistle that our salvation is not dependent upon adherence to the Law, but manifests itself in our lives through faith. He uses Abraham as the example. Abraham lived centuries before the Law was given to Moses but yet entered into a covenant with God – through faith. Because this covenant precedes that at Mt Sinai, S. Paul argues that it is superior. It isn’t that the Law is of no value, for God gave the Law for our good – it instructs us in the particulars of sin – but adherence to the Law is not what saves us.
What relevance does this have to our lives and the struggles we experience in our attempts to be faithful Christians? Sometimes we simply need to acknowledge that we are broken by sin. We cannot live as we ought, just as those under the Law could not fulfill perfectly all of its 613 precepts. We have only two precepts – to love God with all our heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, as expressed in this Sunday’s Gospel. Yet we consistently fail.
When we rely on our own efforts to win favor with God, we must admit failure. But this is no reason for despair. When we acknowledge our failings and openly confess our sins, we then experience – when we act in faith – a renewal of our covenant with God. Man is incapable of fulfilling perfectly the terms of this covenant. But the perfect man, Jesus Christ, has done just that. So when we live in Christ, that is, when we place our trust in Him, He gives us confidence to stand before the Father.
This is the good news S. Paul desires to share, not just with the Galatians, but also with us. While sin breaks our relationship with God, when we come to Our Lord in faith and with a contrite heart, we can be confident that we will be restored to the Father. Not through anything we have done, but through our faith in the mediation of Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate.
____________________________________________________________________
In this period of St. Michael’s Lent, it is particularly appropriate to reflect on the legacy of St. Augustine. The article below sheds light on his effect on Christianity.
____________________________________________________________________
5 ways St Augustine shaped Christianity
Hippo Regius, North Africa — August, A.D. 430
The 75-year-old bishop’s condition was worsening. He was trapped inside the Vandal-besieged city of Hippo, for three months. He was struck by a fever and confined to his bed. Fellow bishop St. Possidius, writes about his final moments. His excellency Augustine (354–430 AD) withdrew, allowing only physicians and those with food to enter. Sources provide no precise modern diagnosis beyond fever and progressive decline. He remained mentally clear, with his sight and hearing intact. Today, this North African city is Annaba in Algeria.
5 Key Effects on Christianity
- Doctrine on Grace and Original Sin. In his debate with Pelagius, St Augustine split the hairs to show human vulnerability and dependence on divine grace. His life and teachings evidence how—salvation is impossible without God. This has become central to Christian theology as demonstrated in CCC 1996-2005.
- Theology of the Church. St Augustine contrasts the City of Man with “The City of God”. He writes of pilgrim souls, journeying together toward the eternal city. In 1684, St Augustine’s concepts were hijacked by the anti-Catholic protestant preacher, John Bunyan in The Pilgrims’ Progress. One of Bunyan’s cruel. elderly giants is named “Pope.”
- Integration of Faith and Reason. St Augustine used orthodox interpretations of Plato which helped later theologians like St Thomas Aquinas. Augustine demonstrated that faith and reason are allies, not enemies as referenced in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Examination of Conscience via Spiritual Biography. “Confessions” is a compilation of 13 books. Not only is it a theological masterpiece but it pioneered the way for Western autobiographies. It models the Catholic practice of conscious examination and seeking God’s mercy in the Sacraments. This free spiritual therapy is not offered by any other faiths.
- Pastoral Leadership. He was made a doctor of the church because he used his authority as a bishop, to address heresies, guide his flock through political turmoil and leave behind sermons and letters that inspire Catholic preaching today, see Augustine’s Sermons. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI,
St Augustine remains, “a man of passion and faith, of the highest intelligence and tireless pastoral care,” whose voice still echoes in the life of the Church today.
Summary. St Augustine did not only write abstract theology—he wrote from the heart, wrestling with questions of sin, grace, and the human longing for God. His ability to articulate the inner life of the soul have made his works timeless. St. Augustine’s legacy is not just in the doctrines he clarified, but in the way he demonstrated how the “human heart is restless until he rests in God.”
Annaba, Algeria—August 28, A.D. 430
Spending his final days in prayer with the penitential Psalms of David, St Augustine’s soul was taken by the angels. The last recorded prayer associated with him was his plea that God would either:
- deliver Hippo from the Vandals,
- give His servants strength to endure or
- “take me from this world unto Himself.”
As they watched and prayed, St. Possidius wrote that the bishop now “slept with the fathers.” At that time, this giant-among-men’s headstone, was inscribed as below.
“Wouldst know that poets live again, O traveller, after death?
These words thou readest, lo, I speak! Thy voice is but my breath.”
____________________________________________________________________
The 2 articles below touch on the incompatibility of God and socialism. Please read carefully.
____________________________________________________________________
Collectivism And God
People need meaning in their lives, and the decline in faith and uptick in socialism mark a very dangerous shift in that search
BY: Allan J. Feiffer, The American Thinker (August 26, 2026).
The West is losing faith in God, individual responsibility, and the institutions that restrain our worst tendencies. In their place, an increasingly secular culture is bending the knee toward collectivist ideas. Collectivism falsely promises to solve problems that neither human beings nor traditional institutions have. In doing so, it completely forgoes history’s lessons.
As a belief in God declines, people are not abandoning a desire to believe in something larger than themselves; instead, they are looking to the collective—in a misguided belief that government, society, or some other institution will magically deliver equality, justice, security, belonging, and moral order.
This ongoing transposition is accompanied by a loss of faith in individualism and institutions built on individual liberty, private property, voluntary association, and personal responsibility. Increasingly, individualism is viewed not as the cornerstone of a free society, but as the source of inequality, injustice, and social disorder. The collective, by contrast, is portrayed as society’s savior.
Western civilization did not achieve its wealth and power accidentally. Our best features—individual liberty, private property, limited government, and the rule of law—are bedrock requisites for a civil society, developed through centuries of painful trial and error. Human beings are imperfect, and the power of the state is an omnipresent danger to our essential freedoms.
Our founders did not assume perfect individuals would lead us. To the contrary, they assumed that leaders would frequently pursue their own self-interest, that governments might become oppressive, and that even the best of us might abuse their position. Our system is not perfect; however, it was designed to be realistic: intended to prevent imperfect people from acquiring too much power over one another. These are the classic checks and balances collectivists wish to dispose of.
Collectivism is diametrically opposed. For socialists and communists, the collective claims control over economic resources. It’s rational—economic equality is essential; labor is central to economic justice; capitalism is exploitative and ultimately fosters inequality; economic decisions should be subject to collective control; individual freedom is subordinate to collective objectives.
Socialism is Communist lite; fundamentally, it’s only a question of scale that ultimately tilts toward harsh and repressive communism as the means to enforce edicts humans will ultimately reject when they discover they’ve been enslaved.
But underneath the economics is something more fundamental: a different conception of the individual. Collectivists don’t care a whit whether individuals are good or bad. Collectivists simply lack confidence in an individual’s ability to govern themselves. Individual choices are seen as heavily influenced by economic circumstances, culture, class, institutions, and other factors. The individual therefore becomes someone who must be managed, corrected, indoctrinated, and protected from his limitations.
The collective became that answer. This is where the relationship between socialism and religion becomes important. Marx’s intellectual framework was fundamentally materialist. He viewed religion as a false truth arising from human social and material deficiencies. Communist regimes subsequently went further, frequently treating religious faith as a competing source of authority and allegiance to be eliminated.
There is an intriguing contemporary parallel. In a 2021 survey of nearly 13,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America, roughly 60% identified as atheist or agnostic. The broader ideological divide is striking as well. Gallup found in 2022 that 94% of conservatives said they believed in God, compared with 62% of liberals.
This doesn’t prove that secularism causes socialism, nor that every socialist has rejected God. It does, however, raise a more interesting question:
What happens when people lose faith in God but desire to believe in something larger than themselves?
They still want meaning, moral purpose, and to believe their lives matter. The collective claims it can provide these things by fooling people into believing they are part of a historic struggle and that they, and only they, understand how to produce a superior and just society. It can then justify demanding sacrifice from the individual in the name of the greater good.
In that sense, collectivism can become more than an economic theory.
It becomes a substitute for faith.
However, there is a fundamental difference between religious faith and secular collectivism. Traditional Judeo-Christian traditions start with the concept of imperfection.
Man’s burden is the duality of being capable of extraordinary good as well as extraordinary evil. We therefore place moral limits on everyone—including those who govern us.
Collectivism places its faith in institutions rather than the individual. That distinction matters. If the problem is human nature, changing the economic system doesn’t eliminate it; it merely shifts who has the power to impose it.
The Soviet Union did not abolish human selfishness by abolishing private property, nor did Mao’s China eliminate inequality by collectivizing agriculture. Communist regimes never believed in individual freedom, yet they produced new elites, new privileges, coercion, and enormous human suffering.
Yet those failures have not killed collectivism. Collectivism itself is extraordinarily resistant to a reckoning with its own failures. When socialism or communism fails, believers blame corrupt leaders, insufficient commitment, hostile outsiders, poor implementation, inadequate planning, or something else, but the essential belief lives on like Count Dracula. This time will be different. This time the right people will be in charge. This time the lessons of past failures will finally be applied.
For many adherents, the problem isn’t that the experiment has repeatedly failed. It is that they don’t know—or don’t want to know—how often it has failed and why. And that is where the misunderstanding of history becomes existentially dangerous.
We were never ignorant of inequality or indifferent to suffering. Our systems were constructed because earlier generations understood something that modern collectivists seem to have forgotten: the greatest threat to freedom is not simply inequality; it is concentrated power.
Private property gives each person a stake in the system, while economic independence provides political independence. Voluntary association allows us to separate ourselves from the state, while religious institutions provide moral authority outside it. At the pinnacle of society, the rule of law constrains those who govern us.
Remove these restrictions on wanton power, and the individual becomes nothing more than a subject. That is the paradox of modern collectivism: by seeking to address economic inequality, it gives institutions control over people’s lives and concentrates the power to allocate resources, assuming whoever receives that power will use it wisely. History reveals this fallacy.
The real danger is not simply that Americans might become socialists. Eight percent of Americans describe themselves that way, but most Americans remain far from embracing collectivism. Today’s danger is that the intellectual foundations that kept collectivism in check are being undermined.
When a majority of people desire to give up their independence in favor of the state, no longer understand the importance of private property and individual responsibility, forget why institutions were designed to restrain power, and replace faith in God with faith in government’s ability to perfect mankind, the American experiment will end.
We’ve been down this road before. The destination has not changed simply because a new generation has lost its way.
God Bless America.
____________________________________________________________________
At the heart of socialism: Hatred of God
Faith, science and free enterprise gave the world prosperity that collectivism never could
BY: Robert Knight, The Washington Times (August 23, 2026).
For thousands of years, people typically had short lifespans and were at the mercy of bad weather, crop failures and tyrants. By modern standards, life was “nasty, brutish and short,” as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651.
Today, we can barely imagine life before electricity, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, jet travel, automobiles, smartphones, modern medicine and dentistry, and the internet.
All of these things came out of the free market West, which for centuries after the Greco-Roman period was simply called Christendom. None of it came from socialism, which was born during the atheistic and murderous French Revolution in 1789.
Fifty-nine years later, socialism was given monstrous force by Karl Marx’s and Fredeich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto.”
A perversion of Western philosophy, socialism operates like cancer in otherwise healthy tissue.
Socialism was weaponized by Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and others who used it to tyrannize their fellow countrymen and spread misery.
Socialists refuse to acknowledge their debt to Western civilization. Beijing now has electricity thanks to Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. Much of the world has air conditioning thanks to John Gorrie, Willis Carrier and General Electric. Cars are affordable (at least, they were) thanks to Henry Ford. And so on, up to computers and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The free West’s inventions have benefited billions of people. Socialism does not create wealth or spawn original discoveries. It is why the Soviet Union had to steal and adapt. It is why the Chinese communists work so hard to hack Western technology.
At the heart of socialism, Nazism and communism is hatred of God. The Bible sacralizes life and marriage, defends property ownership and truth, and puts government under the authority of heaven.
The Old Testament proclaims the sovereignty of God over man and the promise of a messiah. The New Testament teaches that redemption flows from the wounded hand and side of Jesus Christ, not the grasping hand of government.
To this day, leftists portray Christianity as the enemy of science and equality. That view filters down to schoolchildren via Marxist-educated teachers. It is one of the main reasons that so many young people have benign views of socialism and negative views of Christianity and capitalism.
What the students are not told is that Christianity, far from being a hindrance, has been the key to progress, as explained by Stanley L. Jaki in his 1988 book, “The Savior of Science.”
Jaki was a Catholic Benedictine priest and physicist who earned his Ph.D. at Fordham under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Victor Hess, who discovered cosmic rays. The book explains that the biblical concept of a God-created, predictable order laid the groundwork for the scientific method.
Other societies, such as China, India and Egypt, excelled at some early discoveries such as algebra, architecture, paper and fireworks, but they hit a theological wall at some point.
“They all were dominated by a pantheistic concept of the universe going through eternal cycles,” Jaki wrote. In other words, why bother if it is just an endless cycle of rinse and repeat?
“The pattern is the stillbirth of science in each of them in spite of the availability of talents, social organizations, and long periods of peace,” Jaki said.
Islam, he noted, preserved Greek math and science, such as from Euclid and Archimedes, and created elements of beauty. However, Muslims became content with a capricious reality conferred by Allah — a God whose creation, according to some Islamic scholars, cannot be predicted.
As such, Muslim science began declining in the 11th century, never to recover.
By contrast, the biblical concept of an ordered, discoverable universe has propelled science, with Christians such as physicist Isaac Newton opening up new worlds.
Over the centuries, the West evolved, birthing the Industrial Revolution. In 1776, America’s founding was grounded in the understanding that people are created in the image of God and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Against this, what did socialism offer? Divisive envy harnessed to political power aimed at making government a virtual god. This diabolical doctrine appeals to man’s vices, including sexual excess, while punishing virtues, such as forming God-centered families and self-governing communities. It hates independent thought and life.
Socialism is sold as fairness and compassion, but in practice, it spreads misery while enriching a few at the top. It operates like a man who watches another man build a house, then taxes him out of it, giving the home to people who hail the tax man as a hero.
It is also prone to violence. From the 2020 George Floyd riots to ongoing acclaim for Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in cold blood on a Manhattan street, the left hums with an undercurrent of savagery.
How else can you explain the coven of Democratic women happily applauding Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, as she signed a law allowing the killing of unborn babies right up to the moment of birth?
It is only by God’s grace that any of us can escape the urge to blame our problems on others and take what is not ours.
To the extent that it interferes with our growing in the admonition of God and opening our hearts to his offer of mercy, socialism is doing the devil’s work, and Americans need to put it behind them.
____________________________________________________________________
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 