IV.—THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
They are blind to the lesson which every page of the history of the Catholic Church teaches who indulge in the fancy that the Christ laden and guided bark of Peter will not ride safely through the present world-wide, threatening storm. As the fierce beating of the storm against the majestic oak fixes its roots more firmly in the soil and strengthens and expands its limbs, so by the attacks of calumny the militant church of Christ is made better known, by persecution she is strengthened, and the attempts at her overthrow prepare the way for new and more glorious triumphs.
The pages of history point out in other centuries dangers to the existence of the church equal to those of the present crisis, through which she passed with safety and renewed strength. A master-pen in word-painting has given a picture of one of those critical periods, all the more striking as the events which it portrays are within the memory of men still living, and also because the writer is famed for anything rather than Catholic leanings. “It is not strange,” he says, “that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have thought that at length the hour of the Church of Rome was come, an infidel power ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages have consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of victory, or into banqueting houses for political societies, or into theophilanthropic chapels. Such signs might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius VI. a great reaction had commenced, which, after the lapse of more than forty years, appears to be still in progress. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles, and amidst them emerged the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight of the Flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy: it had been buried under the great inundation, but its deep foundations had remained unshaken; and when the waters had abated it appeared alone amid the ruins of a world which had passed away. The republic of Holland was gone, the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and the old Helvetian League, and the house of Bourbon, and the parliaments and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations—a French Empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions. The distribution of property, the composition and spirit of society, had, through great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change. But the unchangeable church was still there.”[[1]]
Three centuries of protests against the idea of the church and of her divine authority have served to bring the question of the necessity of the church and the claims of her authority squarely before the minds of all men who think on religious subjects. So general was the belief in them before the rise of Protestantism that theological works, even the Sum of St. Thomas, did not contain what is now never omitted by theological writers: the “Tractatus de Ecclesia.” The violent protests of heresy, joined with the persecutions of the despotic power of the state, have ended in showing more clearly the divine institution of the church, and proving more conclusively her divine authority.
“In poison there is physic.”
The idea of the church is a divine conception, and the existence of the church is a divine creation. The church as a divine idea lies hid in God, and was an essential part of his preconceived plan in the creation of the universe. Hence the error of those who consider the church as the creation of “an assembly of individual Christian believers”; or as the product of the state, as in Prussia, Russia, England, and other countries; or as the effort of a race, as Dean Milman maintains in his History of Latin Christianity; or as “the conscious organization of the moral and intellectual forces and resources of humanity for a higher life than that which the state requires.” Hence also the failure of all church-builders and inventors of new religions from the earliest ages down to the Luthers, Calvins, Henry VIIIs., Wesleys, Charles Foxes, Mother Ann Lees, Joe Smiths, Döllingers, and Loysons, et hoc genus omne. Poor weak-minded men! had they the slightest idea of what the church of God is, or had they not become blind to it, they would sooner pretend to create a new universe than invent a new religion or start a new church. The human is impotent to create the divine.
Christ alone could replace the Jewish Church by his own, and that because he was God. And this substitution was accomplished, not by the way of a revolutionary protest, but in the fulfilment of the types and figures of the Jewish Church and the realization of its divine prophecies and promises. The ideal church and the historical church which have existed upon earth from Adam until Noe, and from Noe until Moses, and from Moses until Christ, and from Christ until now, which is the actual Catholic Church, are divine in their idea, are divine in their institution, are divine in their action, and their continuity is one and unbroken. The church can suffer no breaks without annihilation.
God created man in his own image and likeness, and supplied from the instant of his creation all the means required for man to become one with himself. This was the end for which God called man into existence. This commerce and union between God and man, with the means needed to elevate man to this intercourse and to perpetuate and perfect these relations in an organic form, constitutes the church of God.
The great and unspeakable love of God for man led God, in the fulness of time, to become man, in order to make the elevation of man to union with himself easier and more perfect. To this end the God-Man, while upon earth, declared to his apostle Peter: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
This places beyond all doubt or dispute the fact that Christ built a church, and therefore its institution was divine. Moreover, it is clear by these words, not that his church should be free from the attacks of every species of error and wickedness which lead to hell—they rather imply the contrary—but that these attacks should never prevail against her, corrupt, overcome, or destroy her.
He added: “Lo! I am with you always, even to the consummation of the world!” This promise connects Christ’s presence with his church inseparably and perpetually. Hence once the church, always the church. The whole world may go to wreck and ruin sooner than Christ will desert his church. “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.” Let, then, attacks come from any quarter, let revolutions shake the foundations of the world and conspirators overthrow human society, let anarchy reign and her foes fancy her destruction—the Catholic Church will stand with perfect faith upon this divine Magna Charta of her Founder as upon an adamantine rock.
Before Christ’s ascension he appointed the rulers in his church; he gave “some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the ministry, for the edifying the body of Christ.” He commanded them to tarry in Jerusalem until they should receive the Holy Ghost. When the days of Pentecost were accomplished, the Holy Ghost descended upon them visibly, “and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.” That was the moment when the divine institution of the church was completed, and then began her divine action upon men and society that never was to cease while the world lasts. The past dispensations of God were all fulfilled in Christ, and his church, which was to embrace all mankind in her fold and guide humanity to its divine destination, was divinely established.
It is quite natural that those races which, by God’s providence, have been intimately connected with the church from her cradle should be inclined to think that the church is confined to their keeping and is inseparable from their existence. Christianity and the church are undoubtedly affected in their development by the peculiarities of the races through which they are transmitted, and it is natural that they should accentuate those truths and bring to the front those features of organization which commend themselves most to the genius, instincts, and wants of certain races. This is only stating a general law held as a maxim among philosophers: Whatever is received, is received according to the form of the recipient. Thus, the contact of the church with the intellectual gifts of the Greeks was the providential occasion of the explicit development and dogmatic definition of the sublimest mysteries of the Christian revelation. And through her connection with the Latins, whose genius runs in the direction of organization and law, the church perfected her hierarchy and brought forth those regulations necessary to her existence and well-being known under the name of “Canon Law.”
The objective point of Christianity, the church of Christ, is to embrace in her fold all mankind; but she is, in her origin, essence, and institution, independent of any human being, or race of men, or state, or nation.
The Italians, the Spaniards, the French, or any other nation or nations, may renounce the faith and abandon the church, as England and several nations did in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, yet the church exists and is none the less really and essentially Catholic. The church has existed in all her divinity without including any one nationality or race, and, if it please God, can do so again. The sun would give forth its light the same though there were no objects within the reach of its rays, as when they are reflected from nature and display all their hidden beauty; so the divinity of the Catholic Church would exist in all its reality and power the same though there were no Christians to manifest it by their saintly lives, as at some future day when, after the victory over her enemies, she will unite in one the whole human race, and all her hidden glory will be displayed.
This law also holds good and is applicable to her visible head, the supreme pastor of the faithful. The pope, as pope, was no less the father of the faithful and exercised his jurisdiction when driven into the Catacombs, or violently taken by a despot and imprisoned at Fontainebleau, or, as at present, forced by the action of a desperate faction of Italians into retirement in the Vatican, than when his independence and authority were recognized and sustained by the armies of the Emperor Constantine or defended by the sword of Charlemagne, the crowned emperor of Christendom.
“The pope,” to adopt the words of Pius IX., “will always be the pope, no matter where he may be, in his state as he was, to-day in the Vatican, perhaps one day in prison.”
The perpetuity of the Catholic Church is placed above and beyond all dangers from any human or Satanic conspiracies or attacks in that Divinity which is inherently incorporated with her existence, and in that invincible strength of conviction which this divine Presence imparts to the souls of all her faithful children. It is this indwelling divine Presence of the Holy Spirit from the day of Pentecost which teaches and governs in her hierarchy, is communicated sacramentally to her members, and animates and pervades, in so far as not restricted by human defects, the whole church. Hawthorne caught a glimpse of this divine internal principle of life of the Catholic Church and embodied it in the following passage: “If there were,” he says, “but angels to work the Catholic Church instead of the very different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety-valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its origin.”[[2]] This statement put in plain English would run thus: The Catholic Church is the church of God actualized upon earth so far as this is possible, human nature being what it is. The indwelling divine Presence is the key to the Catholic position, and they who cannot perceive and appreciate this, whatever may be their grasp of intellect or the extent of their knowledge, will find themselves baffled in attempting to explain her existence and history; their solution, whatever that may be, will tax the faculty of credulity of intelligent men beyond endurance; and at the end of all their efforts for her overthrow these words from her Founder will always stare them in the face: “Non prævalebunt”—“the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.” If this language be not understood, perhaps it may be in its poetical translation:
“The milk-white hind was fated not to die.”
The radical party now in power in Italy may succeed in ruining their glorious country, but they may rest assured that this does not include, as her foes foolishly and stupidly imagine in every turn of her eventful history, the ruin of the Catholic Church. “What God has made will never be overturned by the hand of man.”