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: