A deep and serious study pertinent to the intensity and profound significance of the horrors suffered by Jesus Christ in the Night of the Garden of Olives is something sorely missed throughout the History of Christian Spirituality. The ancient Prayer Books dedicated to the Passion of the Lord used to begin their considerations from the moment of the Arrest and the beginning of the interrogations. In the movie The Passion of Christ (nowadays forgotten and, it seems, wilfully vanished), Mel Gibson has the Virgin, who, accompanied by the other Holy Women, contemplates how Jesus Christ was taken to Caiaphas, say the following words: It has begun, Lord. So be it…

Christianity, it is true, has become used to perceiving the events of the Night of the Garden as a merely painful occurrence that signalled the Prologue to the Passion of the Lord. The reality, however, was not exactly thus. But this perception is not surprising if one takes into account that human beings are more prone to consider the sufferings of the body as something more obvious and tangible (and even more painful) than those of the soul. The truth, though, – and even more so in this Story – is very different.

The true zenith of the Passion of the Lord; the moments of His most deadly anguish; His feelings of supreme failure in His Mission; His horrible shame because He felt Himself burdened with the sins and miseries of the whole of Humanity; to which it should be added His sensation of finding Himself wrapped up in the most terrifying of solitudes… ; all these moments which the Man Jesus Christ suffered had already taken place in the Garden of Olives. What followed was but the visible, physical development of what was already first contained in potency and then accomplished, with a dreadful intensity, as an act in the Garden. The physical tortures suffered by Jesus Christ in the following hours (flagellation, crowning of thorns, the very torments of the crucifixion…), carefully considered, in no way differ from the same sufferings that an infinite number of martyrs who gave their lives for the Faith would suffer. Later on, we must consider that it is not there where the deepest core of the Mystery of the agonizing Suffering to the point of death undergone by Our Lord lay.

Such Agony of Death, with its ensuing sensation of Defeat and Failure, together with the feeling of guilt before His Father, was suffered, in turn, before Satan’s very countenance. The same who, with his horrible grimace of Victory and satisfaction, looked on, convinced of the reality of his Triumph. It was the moment of his Glory, to which, in the darkness and silence of that horrible Night, the Olive Trees of the Garden became witnesses. All of which must have brought about in Jesus Christ an Affront of truly lethal pain and intensity, impossible to be fathomed by any human being.

 His loneliness was total in spite of having looked, in vain, for consolation. His most intimate friends had abandoned Him and surrendered themselves to sleep (You could not stay awake with me even for an hour...).

Should we admit the hypotheses with which we have been working –that The Glory of the Olive Tree is a motto applied to the current Pontificate—, such premise would authorize us to transpose the events that occurred in the Garden to the current moments of the Church (the Church being the Body of Christ and He being her Head). Then we are facing a horrible and disturbing reality: Never before has the Church found Herself more discredited vis a vis the World, less reputable, and in greater loneliness than in these current moments. The influence that for so many centuries the Church had exercised in the World has almost completely disappeared. To top it all, her discredit has reached heights that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. Of course, these statements will create a scandal for many and denial from not a few; which, of itself, is not enough to demonstrate that these statements are not based in reality. The Word of the Pope no longer means anything (although, according to some, it is worthwhile to take into account that, almost continually, all seems to point to the fact that the Pontiff himself avoids facing real problems). Never before has his Person been so accused, slandered, despised, and persecuted in the way and manner in which it is happening in the present time. Even the United States Supreme Court dares to accuse and condemn the Vatican (an independent State ruled by a religious Pontiff who is also Sovereign in the civil sphere). The most prominent theologians, Archbishops with prestige, and even Cardinals do not find any inconvenience in confronting the Pope and criticizing him openly and even opposing his decisions (the Austrian church, for instance, has rejected Episcopal appointments emanating from the Holy Father; and nobody has raised the slightest objection to such behaviour). The Catholic Church, formerly the Supreme Teacher defining behavior and human relationships throughout the World, has been reduced nowadays to practically one more NGO.

In the Night of the Garden, Jesus Christ felt Himself a complete failure before His Father. And He felt the same before Satan’s countenance, the latter completely convinced of his definitive Victory. The defeat of the Son of Man was also, from that moment, the defeat of His Church that would take place some day: according to the prophecy of St. Malachi, precisely in our own time.

One should notice, nevertheless, an important point that implies a decisive difference: Jesus Christ, through His Humanity along with His Divinity with which it forms a whole (although without intermingling) in his one Divine Person through the Hypostatic Union, was, at all moments and in spite of all, the Innocent Par Excellence among the Innocent. The sins and crimes that He willed to carry and make His own never were, truly, committed by Him; which is not an obstacle in defining His Failure as entirely real; otherwise, his absolute Victory and definitive Triumph would have never been real either. The Church, nevertheless, which is His Mystical Body (He is the Head) is formed by men who truly are sinners – and absolutely guilty. They have not carried alien crimes, no; they have committed them. That is why it is fittingly stated that the Church is both Holy and Sinful. Already since time immemorial, the Church was known as Casta Meretrix, an expression that the early Church Fathers made their own.

Hence it may be stated in all truth that the current crisis is entirely imputable to the men who constitute the Church. Now it is not an Assumed Failure, but a Personal and Guilty Failure. The Desertion (one may also say Apostasy) of the Catholic World has reached such a depth and seriousness that merely alluding to it gives one the chills. In fact, we have been outlining the depth of the crisis, at least in its most visible and graspable aspects, to the average faithful. There exist, nevertheless, in such a crisis, two issues of extreme seriousness and profound iniquity which current Catholicism has fallen into. Both suppose the highest, most serious and detonating point of the current crisis; so much so, that one may legitimately think that it is impossible that God will refrain from intervening with the strength of His Justice. These are the issues that we will endeavour to explain next.