Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on 
another; every one will be thrown down.” 
Why does Jesus warn us about the end of the world in the first place? To frighten us? No, to protect us from the emptiness those feel who put their hope in what can never afford lasting joy. Jesus states unequivocally that Heaven and earth will pass away. Everything one can buy at a store, every earthly love and friendship, even our own bodies, will pass away. It will blow away as a bit of dust in the wind. The earth itself, and the sun, the entire galaxy and known universe, will eventually pass away. Only Christ and his Word will not pass away. The Church seeks to spare us the bitter pain of disappointment. Yes, this life is good, but it is not a lasting good. We all need a lasting good, a joy that nobody can take from us. If we keep hoping in things that continue to fail us, we end up forging a prison of disappointment and bitterness around our earthly lives. The season of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross frees us from that prison by fixing our hope on the only one who will never fail us. 
   God will always raise up saints to rebuild his crumbling Church, and in dark times, extraordinary saints. In fact, the Church is not, and cannot, be in crisis. We must maintain our serene faith in God. We are David standing before Goliath, sure that the victory will be the Lord’s. “Scandals there will always be” the Lord told us, and in his mysterious providence God works through them. It was through the betrayal of Judas, and the faithless desertion of every apostle but one, that the world was saved. It was through the execution of her Lord, and from his bleeding side, that the Church was born. Christ was sold to the Romans by his own priests, both by his own apostle Judas and by the temple priests of his own faith. There has never been a time when the Church has not been attacked both from without and from within. But be quite sure that the Church’s deposit of faith remains unchanged and unchangeable. The Church Militant will always be at war.  The Church today is persecuted, vilified, mocked, and undermined both by her enemies and by her own shepherds. It has ever been thus, but it has always also been the devil’s ploy to convince us that evil has gained the upper hand within the Body of Christ. “Pray, hope, and do not worry” said St. Pio of Pietrelcina, whose feast we celebrate this coming Monday, September 23. Do not let the evil one trip you—“scandalize” you—into losing your peace. Where sin abounds, St. Paul wrote, grace abounds all the more. This is the time of great saints, be one!