THEY DID NOT UNDERSTAND

It is said that if the whole world would sit down and think, it would eventually turn Catholic.  But people today don't think.  

Most non-Christian religions appeal to the simple because they are, precisely, simple, easily understood and easy to put into practice.  All Christian sects, in fact, are similar in that their initiators made the teachings of Christ easy to understand and salvation easy to attain.  

But, in reality, this is not so.  St. Thomas of Aquinas states that every time Christ taught we see that even the disciples and apostles were described as "they did not understand."  Every time Christ taught He saw to it that His teachings contained an element of cloud preventing the hearers to understand them fully.  This was His way of discriminating between the sheep and the goats.

The sheep are the listeners who did not understand, like the disciples, but who kept the teachings in their hearts, like the Blessed Virgin Mary and continued to think about them in an effort to understand them. 

The goats are the listeners who did not understand and, because of this, set aside and threw away what they have just heard saying:  This is a hard saying.

In the world today, man is so engrossed in the business of the world that they do not have time to think deeper and longer in an effort to understand their Catholic Faith.  So they transfer to sects that sound Catholic but do not demand too much thinking.  This is the primary reason the Catholic Church is losing so much of her members to Protestant sects.  And there is no solution to this because even the shepherds or hirelings do not have time to understand deeper the teachings of the Catholic Faith.

To appreciate being a Catholic takes much and long thinking, much giving up and many sufferings.  It takes plenty of study and praying.  And that is a product that does not sell at all these days.