All people must be led to keep the commandments of God. There is no way around it if life is to succeed and true peace is to reign. Already in the times of the Old Covenant, the transgressions of God’s commandments led to bitter consequences and to further apostasy from God if there was no conversion.
In the biblical understanding, catastrophes of all kinds are God’s permissions in which people are called to repent and must understand on the level of experience what it means to leave the ways of God. This is no different today!
The key to understanding the current pandemic, for example, is not, therefore, the recognition that we have sinned against the environment and that we must now bear the consequences, as the Pontifical Academy under the responsibility of Archbishop Vincent Paglia recently tried to teach us. These are unfortunately misleading statements which have lost sight of the essential. As important as it is to have a smart and sensitive way to handle with the nature and its resources entrusted to us is, the primary causes of the current plague do not lie at this level. The Church should make this clear. If it does not, there is a growing danger that the prophetic voice of the Church will be more like the wrong prophets of the Old Covenant who say at the royal court what the powerful want to hear, and not what God wanted them to say.
It is the grave sins of mankind against God that cry out to heaven, as well as the confusion in the Church, up to and including an act of public idolatry in Rome, the seat of the universal Church! Thus we see in the outbreak of the pandemic a clear rebuke from God and a strong invitation to live according to his commandments.
In the text of the Father’s book to be considered today it says:
“What I expect from you is the faithful observance of the commandments which I have entrusted to my Church. For you should behave like creatures endowed with reason and not be like animals through lack of discipline and bad inclinations. Only in this way can you finally preserve the treasure that is your soul. Remember, I have given you this in the perfect Divine Beauty. Yes, I have adorned your soul with Divine Beauty.”
Here we now encounter the decisive course of action, whether our God-given soul unfolds its divine beauty or enters into the destructive process of sin. Obeying the commandments of God alone – together with the grace of God always offered to us – helps our soul not to abandon itself to its dark inclinations and thus endanger the good of divine beauty.
If the commandments of God are so massively disregarded as, for example, is the case with abortion almost worldwide and in the Church, which is after all the house of God, through the already mentioned publicly unpunished absurd Pachamama idolatry in the Vatican gardens, then God can make us understand through such events as the pandemic how much we need a change of life.
But this change can only happen in the return to the commandments of God and in the acceptance of his love. It cannot consist of us Catholics, together with the great world organization, building a new world order with great vision, but in which sin continues to be committed just as before and perhaps even more planned and comprehensive.
Just now the proclamation of the love of our Father and the invitation to a serious conversion is the given and people need the consoling and guiding presence of God. God never takes revenge on us because of our sins, but always his motivation is directed towards our salvation.
But what happens when man constantly disregards the commandments of God and his heart, instead of becoming God’s resting place, poisons life? The soul becomes dark on such a path and can even become the place of action of the powers of destruction.
The treasure that God has entrusted to us needs to be cared for through the Word of God, through his sacraments, through a daily attention to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the path of sanctification and the perpetual exchange with God.
Only then does the soul awaken permanently in divine love!
Careful observance of the commandments of God is the condition for the soul to find true peace and for humanity not to be further confused and forget its Creator and Father.