The Real Warren's Ash Wednesday Sermon

"Sometimes it seems even our own bishops have forgotten, that “the catholic truth” is entirely incompatible with the “happyface” of pop doctrines. Even what we mean by the words “life” and “death” is incomprehensible, without heaven and hell. Baudelaire once said, “Everyone believes in God, but nobody loves Him; nobody believes in the devil, and yet his smell is everywhere.” Except that belief in God has declined, this strikes me as a fair description of Western man in late modernity.

Lent, in its penitential spirit, can make no sense except in terms wherein the reality of evil has been acknowledged -- not as some ancient myth, but as a present force working to our destruction. This was what was faced down in the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ began to lift upon himself the full weight of the sins of this world, the full horror not only of the evil that was done, in times past, but would be done, in times future. For the last time in his earthly ministry, he was tempted by the devil, and offered the “happyface” of a life without suffering, of a mission that might not involve the Cross; offered the intensely attractive lie of an easy way out -- the lie that every human being is offered. It is the side of the devil we find hardest to type-cast: the side that is offering that happyface grin.

For it is an offer that we, collectively, have bought -- hook, line, and sinker. It is an offer that we could only accept, on the assumption that someone else will take care of it, that someone else can pay, since the yoke is thus lifted off our shoulders."