Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and stiffen your neck no more.
DEUTERONOMY 10:16 DOUAY-RHEIMS
What is supernatural faith? In a nutshell, supernatural faith is having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This sounds like something you hear from an evangelical Protestant especially a Southern Baptist raised on the Billy Graham Crusade. But those evangelicals are correct. You need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in order to be saved. If you don't know Jesus, then Jesus doesn't know you, and He will tell you this on Judgment Day.
Catholics have a hard time with this personal relationship talk because they believe those sacraments are what make you Catholic. This is true. Being baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church makes you a Roman Catholic. Those sacraments along with communion and confession impart real grace. As a Christian, you should avail yourself of these graces.
Supernatural faith is a different thing. You can be married to your wife and not love your wife. You can be married to your husband and not love your husband. We know about these types of relationships, and they are sad and tragic. The ring on the finger does not put love in the heart. Well, the same applies with Jesus Christ. You can be in His Church and not love Him in your heart.
We all know Catholics who don't love Jesus. These would be Catholic politicians that support abortion on demand and genocide. These would be sodomite priests who rape boys and each other. These would be prelates who cover for these crimes. As Bishop Athanasius Schneider put it,
But to me, the deepest cause of the clerical sex abuse crisis is the lack of a deep and personal relationship with Jesus Christ. When a seminarian or a priest does not have a deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in constant fidelity to a life of prayer and really enjoying a personal love for Jesus, he is easy prey for the temptations of the flesh and other vices.
You need to love Jesus Christ. This love is the fire of supernatural faith. Believers in the Old Testament talked about being circumcised in your heart. Likewise, Catholics need to be baptized in their hearts. Supernatural faith is what makes sinners into saints.
Evangelical Protestants stress this need for supernatural faith, and they are correct. You need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in order to be saved. But because they reject the Catholic Church which is the true and only Church instituted by Christ, what they propose is a form of spiritual fornication in the same way that couples will shack up without benefit of marriage. These fornicators will claim that all they need is love, and love is what matters. But how can you love someone if you won't put a ring on their finger? And what kind of love is it that can be dissolved the moment the eye wanders to someone more lovely?
Evangelicals propose a love for Jesus without commitment. Catholics propose a love for Jesus with commitment. Jesus wants this commitment from you. If you can't make this commitment, then you do not love Him.
Loving Jesus is a package deal. You don't come to the Savior on your terms. You come to Him on His terms. Those terms are mediated through the Roman Catholic Church. Anyone who rejects "organized religion" is proposing disorganized religion as a substitute. It would be like a man proposing a one sided open relationship to his bride. This also explains why so many Protestants fall away from the faith and embrace spirituality and atheism. Faith needs to be committed.
For many Roman Catholics, they coast on presumption. These would be cultural Catholics raised in the faith from the cradle and feel free to take a heaping dump on that faith later down the road. As one lapsed cradle Catholic put it to me, "I am more Catholic than you." I had to laugh at this knowing those words will come back to haunt him on the Day of Judgment. He is without supernatural faith and in a permanent and unrepentant state of mortal sin. He has misjudged Catholicism as some sort of exclusive club that you have to be born into to truly belong. He is like Govenor Andrew Cuomo who defended his support for infanticide by reminding people that he used to be an altar boy. Well, Hitler was an altar boy, too. What difference does this make? Do these people love Jesus Christ?
But the hypocrisy doesn't end with lapsed Catholics who haven't been to Mass in decades. There are those who even attend daily Mass and confess monthly who have hearts far from the Lord. If a priest who offers the Mass daily can be dead in his heart, it is also possible for a member of the laity to have a similar deadness of heart. These would be Catholics who do good works for the sake of show or being noticed. Jesus called out this hypocrisy. This is not love but vanity.
Our hearts should be alive to Jesus. Mortal sin is where we have allowed the love for Jesus to die in our hearts. This is where we have extinguished the love for Christ in our hearts by our sins and wickedness. It's like a husband who professes love for his wife but commits adultery. That does real damage to a relationship. But unlike that wife, Jesus truly does forgive and forget. Your sins are not bigger than His heart for you. He will forgive you. He is truly merciful, and He loves you.
Jesus wants your love. He wants your heart. He wants to have a personal relationship with you. He wants to know you better than any friend you could ever have. He wants this so much that He suffered and died for you. This is the essence of supernatural faith. You know that Jesus loves you, and you love Him back as hard as you can.
