@ @ © © © CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan, D.D., LLJD., Rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, Pa. Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, spon- sored by the National Council of Catholic Men with the co-operation of the National Broad- casting Company and its Associated Stations I. The Incarnate Word. II. The Motive and the Mystery. III. Christ, in Type and Prophecy. IV. The Divinity of Christ. V. Christ, the Founder, Prophet, Priest and King. VI. The Juridic Foundations of the Church. VII. The Church: Christ's Mystified Body. VIII. One Fold and One Shep- herd. # W 9 $ NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC MEN Sponsor of the Catholic Hour 1314 Massachusetts Avenue Washington, D. C. CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan, D.D., LL.D., Rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, Pa. Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, spon- sored by the National Council of Catholic Men with the co-operation of the National Broad- casting Company and its Associated Stations I. The Incarnate Word. II. The Motive and the Mystery. III. Christ, in Type and Prophecy. IV. The Divinity of Christ. V. Christ, the Founder, Prophet, Priest and King. VI. The Juridic Foundations of the Church. VII. The Church: Christ's Mystified Body. VIIL One Fold and One Shep- herd. NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC MEN Sponsor of the Catholic Hour 1314 Massachusetts Avenue Washington, D. C. Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor Imprimatur: * JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D. Bishop of Fort Wayne Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1931 DeacWTfled AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION Very great and precious has been the privilege of uttering the words which carried across this great country, on the wings of the newest vehicle of evangelization, the sublime story of the union of the divine nature and of our human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. The speaker has hesitated however to become the writer,! and does so only in a most willing spirit of submission of his thought-expression, even to its slightest word, to the correc- tion of the Masters of Theology, whom he is aware he has at best but poorly interpreted.- DEDICATION To the Men of Malvern, and to all the pioneers of the Lay- men's Retreat Movement in these United States who, inspired by the ardent words of our Holy Father, Pope Pius XI, are earnestly striving to spread the kingship of Christ among their fellows. Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan. THE INCARNATE WORD (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, January 4,- 1931.) In the course of sermons upon wiiich we are about to enter, we shall meet with a series of sub- jects of a high supernatural order, all ultimately founded in the nature and action of God. We are to deal with the mystery of the Incarnation; with the person and natures of Christ, God and man; with His life on earth in the flesh, and continuing even now in His mystical body, the Church. At the very outset we feel justified in asking of you, our hearers, an earnest response, worthy of the theme itself, despite any halting failure in our presentation. Even the commonest conversation demands intelli- gent co-operation, and in any lofty theme such as ours, there is required your sympathetic and ap- preciative attention. God's message to man, even in its highest terms, is for the many, not merely for the few. No one who wishes to see God's sovereign will done on earth as it is in heaven, no one who has the highest good of his fellowmen at heart, can fail to feel deeply gratified at the rapidly growing spirit of in- telligent inquiry evident on every side today con- cerning the higher things of religion. It is, there- fore, in the earnest hope of a common spiritual purpose uniting us here tonight that we shall seek to do whatever, with the help of God, may lie in our power in the direction of fanning the flame of that fire of fai th working through love, which Christ the Lord and Master came to cast upon the earth and which, as He Himself confesses, He is so eager to have enkindled (LUKE xii, 49). 6 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH It is in this spirit that we accept this pulpit of the radio which science, achieving thus her own highest possible purpose, has placed at the service of religion. From this pulpit, in this vast mystic cathedral of land and sea, whose invisible spires pierce the ether, whose dome is the arching sky, and whose walls the fa r confines of earthly space, we must seek to send for th the glorious message of the supreme exaltation of our fallen human nature; an exaltation reaching even to personal union with the divine. The vast physical mysteries of throbbing waves and forces all around us here might well tremble even more deeply in wondering awe as they bear forth these incomparably higher spiritual mysteries of God, and their message of triumph to the last limits of the universe; messages which will pass indeed, though unheeded, through vast waving forests and amongst f a r surging bil- lows; but not unheeded, in God's design, as they fall here and there upon eager and attentive ears— this one reward sufficient, if these waves shall flash a single ray of light divine to some anxious inquiring mind, or speak soft accents of divine peace and love to any silently striving heart. May the invisible but loving Lord of this great cathedral of His uni- verse make f rui t ful this message in earnest hearts until its last far-vibrating echoes shall have forever died away. The Mystery of the Incarnation! The real eternal consubstantial Son of God, infinite in His own per- fections, beloved by His heavenly Father with an infinite love, taking to Himself a human body and soul, and thus assuming a human nature unto His 7 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH divine personality, becoming Jesus Christ, the Man- God. Needless to say, this Incarnation itself and all i ts consequent marvels, came only af ter thousands and thousands of years. Many other preparatory actions are therefore presupposed on the part of God, for the Incarnation is not only a fur ther exalt- ation of our race, it is also a restoration. Our investigations, therefore, must include at least a brief sketch of the earliest beginnings in themselves, their motives and their effects; for thus only can we duly pass on to the stupendous angel-heralded marvels of Bethlehem. Our thought must then follow the lofty personality and life of Christ on earth, as He stood forth in Himself both God and man, amongst the people. We must follow Him as He went about "doing good", in His heavenly mis- sion. We must see His careful plan for the vicarious continuance of his personal mission. Thus we come to His Church and its life, and its granitic juridic foundations. Most of all, we must come to know and to love that Church with its last and incomparably highest prerogative, divine grace, like the rich arterial blood of Christ, coursing through all its being, penetrating its very fibre, and ever vivifying anew and incessantly its high supernatural existence, life and power. For this is that wondrous mystical body of Christ which the Scriptures so often and so profoundly place before our view; it is tha t Church before which the divine oracles say all hostile forces must inexorably yield, until there be only one fold and one shepherd. Even af ter we have thus prefaced the Incarnation, and followed the fur ther course of our explicit sub- 8 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH jects to their furthest limits, we must still go on in our thought very much far ther . Just as we could never fully understand the Incarnation without the creation which preceded it and founded it, so we shall never understand its full significance, (indeed we shall fall most lamentably short of so doing) unless we look beyond all the limits of earth to that final eternal glorification of angels and of men in heaven which is its only real object and aim. Since, moreover, in the affairs of God, the ultimate end which He has in view not only infallibly determines the very beginnings, but also pervades and controls every step in the progress of His work, we must bear this final purpose of rest and peace everywhere with us as a divine talisman guiding not only our earliest, but also our later, and latest, thoughts. Men, when they first raised their altars to God in the open, could not foresee the vast dome of St, Peter 's; but God, even in His very first formation of intellectual natures, foresaw not only the Incar- nation and all. the fu ture vast splendors of earth based upon i t ; but also, and even more directly, He foresaw and prepared all the last glories of eternal life, the Incarnation's ultimate, eternal term. If, therefore, we stand, as it were, behind the great infinite Artist, and watch His first bold strokes on the void of the ages, we shall ever af terwards more fully understand all His fur ther completing and completed works—precisely the task before us today. Our real thesis is that the most sacred In- carnation and all the Incarnate God's own acts and ordinations, were only a heavier accent and empha- sis placed by God on His own initial creative plan; a plan of union with His intellectual creatures, the C H R I S T AND HIS CHURCH 9 realization of an intimate society of men and angels with their God, a divine friendship inspired by a common purpose of life and happiness in the bonds of a reasoned knowledge and a reasoned reciprocal love. Firs t of all we must note that this is not to be a question of dualism in any of its forms. Too often evil is f a r too highly honored by being placed in di- rect antithesis with good. Nor are we to occupy ourselves with any history of the perpetual antag- onism between the two. We are weary of sin and misery, of darkness and deformity. For the time, let God alone and His actions be our sufficient theme, as it shall be forever in eternity. For the moment, at least, let us here use our right of thinking only of Him. He is positive light and beauty, and these are what men most need today. More than anything else, they need to use their native right and privi- lege of living in His stainless splendor, undisturbed and unmoved by whatever of good or of evil created wills have finally done with the glorious liberty so so grandly given. Created defections must be brushed aside, as specks of dust f rom a telescope's lens, if we are ever to study the f a r heavens of God's majesty aright. He never willed the misera- ble failures which we call evil. They formed and they form no part of Himself. They formed no par t of His plan. Nor were they in any way indispensa- ble to Him, or to us, for the full revelation and realization of Himself or any of His mighty attri- butes. They are, and they were, and they always will be, only obstacles. So f a r f rom acting on ac- count of them, God acted in spite of them; and we must do the same. He attended to evil indeed, but 10 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH only in a manner that was extremely minor and passing. His deep eternal anxiety and action con- cerned His own vast realities of t ru th and of love as destined for man. Christ bled f rom His very pores when He thought of sin; and we should cast f a r f rom us whatever we really abhor. We are temples of the Holy Ghost, not receptacles of refuse. "For the temple of God is holy, which you are," (1 COR. iii, 17) says St. Paul. "Know ye not," he again cries, "that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost who is in you, whom you have f rom God; and you are not your own?" (1 COR. vi, 17). We do not allow the idle and the evil to use our homes for their crimes and their debaucheries. Much less need we tolerate the continual thought of sin and defilement in the divinely chosen and sacredly dedicated living sanctuaries of our own minds and hearts. Secondly, our purpose here is by no means polemi- cal. Enough that we are simply to present a state- ment as lucid as may be of positive truths for the same men of good will of whom the angels sang at Bethlehem, when Christ—our real subject—was born. We are seeking to be the fai thful messengers of a divine revelation, of which we ourselves are not the author, and of which we could give no adequate merely rational explanation; and it is clear that in this high realm ordinary human attestation would be patently absurd. We accept these t ruths as re- vealed by God, and therefore demanding our as- sent. Once accepted on the authority of God, the t ruths which unaided human reason could never have ascertained are found of course in every way consonant with the postulates of right thinking. Di- 11 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH vine Faith is a g i f t of God. The Incarnation is a t ru th we hold by Faith. Yet no man should be in- different here. When God has placed all the inef- fable treasures of eternal light and life openly be- fore a creature utterly insufficient for itself—before man— that creature—man—must at once recognize an inexorable obligation of seeking Truth, and, once convinced, of unreserved acceptance and assent, with all their very grave implications and consequences. To the man doing his best to know t ruth God will not deny His grace. The persevering will to find Truth will bring the divine light needed. In the beginning, then, we find God saying "let Us make man to our image and likeness." (GEN. i, 26). The subsequent progress of the sacred text shows that these were words of sacramental power, words that at once effected what they signified; for we at once fur ther find, and with emphatic repeti- tion, that "God created man in His own image, to the 'image of God he created him" (GEN. i, 27). "To the image of His own likeness He made him." (WISD. ii, 23). The Scriptures are very parsimon- ious of their words, and repetitions such as these form a very strong insistence on their inner t ru th and meaning. God did so make man. He made him to His own image and likeness. He did so, first of all, by making him an epitome of all things; by making him what he has so often and so justly been called, a microcosmos, a contracted, concen- trated universe. Man possesses in himself an "element of every grade of created being, f rom the highest angel down to dead, unconscious matter. In this all-embracing representation he may be said to be like God, the eternal and necessary archetype of 12 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH all created things. Further, God made man to His own image and likeness precisely because of the purely spiritual soul which He gave him; for God Himself is also a spirit. Further still, God made man like to Himself by His included gi f t of an intelleit and a wiil; a double gif t which allowed man to share in God's own lofty life as a spirit ; a gif t moreover whose real significance and worth will be appreciated only when we remember that an intel- lectual nature is God's own highest prerogative. All this is the merely natural order. God did not stop there. For at once, in the very • first instant of creation, He raised man to an incomparably higher order, to high supernatural realms, with the supreme vision of God as his end and aim. More still, in His wondrous unlimited goodness, God perfected man in his likeness to God by making divine sup- ernatural grace a real participation in His own very nature. So fa r surpassing man's most daring as- pirations is this lavish goodness of God to us, that we truly need the definite statement of St. Peter, that by the gif t of God we are made "partakers of the divine nature." Surely God's desire to make man like to Himself was not in vain. He did not stop even here. For to man in this exalted and sanctified state, God then came, as it were, on a personal visit; and the Trinity made his privileged soul its home. Still, there was as yet no attempt at intrinsic, personal union with man. This still remained in God's infinite treasure-house of re- sources. There still remained the one untried expedient of personality. God, impatient, as it were, drew it forth, and put it into execution in the Incarnation, a supreme act of union. Christ as 13 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH the eternal Word of God became man; and in terms of exactest equality. He possessed in His own single Being the' whole creation and all the treasures of infinity, and could offer them all, with an infinite right, to the great Primal Prin- ciple f rom which all had come. In a manner it could be said that the Incarnation and the Creation needed each other. Christ needed man that He might pre- sent all things in one to His eternal Father. All created things, already one in man, needed a divine personality to link them duly to God. In the new and greater creation, in the Incarnation, this was done. "Verily t ruth is sprung out of the earth, and justice hath looked down from heaven" .Ps. lxxxiv, 12). This last marvel of marvels was consummated when man and all things were thus linked in ineffa- ble union with God. God hath done this thing! What unheard of sacrilegious violence it would now be to wrench the Incarnation f rom the keystone of loftiest created exaltation. Could such a thing be, earth must be made void anew, and heaven forever lose its crowning created splendor. We need have no fear. The works of God are without repentance. If Pilate could say: "What I have written, I have written" of Christ in His shame, we surely can say of that -same Christ in His glory, "what God has done He has done." Such, in briefest outline, is the Incarnation in its eternal setting. I t is* our hope to commence the real development of this glorious theme in our next meeting with you over the radio. 14 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH THE MOTIVE AND THE MYSTERY (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, January 11, .1931) On last Sunday, in our first outlining thought, we sought to consider the Incarnation in its general setting, in the place, that is, which it holds in God's entire vast scale of being. We found that both by right and by actual possession, it occupies the cul- minating point in man's supernatural exaltation and assimilation to God. We recognized then in that ineffable hypostatic, that is personal, union, our own common humanity's supreme and complete return to the infinite Source from which it came; the Source to which it ever owes its entire continued existence, and to which it must ever tend, as to its own last perfection. We found the bright glories of the Incarnation foreshadowed in the first anticipat- ing splendors of Eden; and we knew it to be the last created glory of heaven. Truly, a most beautiful background and a most beautiful scene for our future labors. A word of explanation may be helpful concerning certain words and phrases which have come to have a precise, well-defined and scientific meaning in Catholic thought. They form par t of the .termin- ology which has come down to us f rom the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, as formulae of our faith, accepted throughout the ages, and by all united Christendom. They are the crystalized ex- pressions of definite doctrine and belief. They are understood in the same exact sense by Catholics in every country where the Church is organized. They are not subject to change of meaning, and thus make up, as it were, a technical language as proper to 15 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Theology as is, and must be,' the terminology of our Schools of Medicine and of Law to those respective professions. These terms are naturally, for the most part, Latin derivatives, with occasionally a Greek usage, as in the case of the expression "hypostatic union," to indicate the single personality of Christ in His two complete natures. This tech- nical language of the Church is one of the surest safeguards of the soundness and authenticity of her doctrine. We cherish it as a sacred heritage f rom our forefathers in the Faith. I t has resulted in certain words and phrases expressing to us today exact truths to which these expressions were conse- crated in the very earliest periods of the Church. On the one hand, therefore, we are very justly proud of the ancient lineage of our doctrinal terms,'even as we also rest content, on the other hand, in their safeguarding of our ancient beliefs. Where it may seem necessary in these sermons, we shall be glad to enter fully into the significance of the terms we use, and in this sermon we shall so explain the Cath- olic meaning of the hypostatic union in the Incar- nation. Entering upon the field of motive in regard to the Incarnation, our answer is—love. Our thesis here tonight, in so fa r as it concerns the motive, is that the Incarnation is God's greatest earthly acf of love for man. We assert here as the motive of the In- carnation, a divine love, single in its altitude and intensity, a love to which all others were leading, and in which all found their ultimate earthly mean- ing, their supreme exalted earthly expression. The Scriptures sustain us in this more definite and specific contention. "Yea, I have loved thee with an 16 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH everlasting love, therefore have I drawn thee, taking pity on thee," says God Himself (JER. xxxi, 3). Our Lord Himself says: "I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly." (JOHN x, 10). Again, in the course of the trial which de- termined His death, when surely He set for th the purpose of His coming, He said: "For this was I born, and for this I came into the world, that I should give testimony to the t ru th" (JOHN xviii, 37). Thus a more abundant life and a clearer t ruth are the f ru i ts attainable by man f rom the Incarnation. They are the f ru i t s prompted by love, and in keeping with our assertion here tonight, that a very special love was the deep incentive to the Incarnation; that the Incarnation first took form in its own beauty in the eternal fire of infinite love in the Trinity; and there- fore it needs no other justification. I t is in keeping with God's creative plan that, having formed man in His own image and likeness, there was found no obstacle that could make God's union with man unworthy of God. God would never have thrown the bridge of divine personality over the chasm between infinity and humanity if either of the abut- ments was insecure ; if both were not eternally able to bear the strain with absolute firmness and honor. There was no impediment to the fulfillment of love's desire for union. The divine nature and the human nature met in the person of God, and the Incarna- tion became a fact, because an infinite love used its absolute right. Out of that love, f ru i t fu l in the Incarnation, comes peace to men of good will. Long ago the midnight shepherds on the Judean hills said one to another: "Let us go over to Bethlehem, and see this word." 17 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH (LUKE ii, 15) Like the shepherds of Judea, we hasten to explore the high angelic message, "which the Lord hath showed to us" much more fully than to them; and each of us individually and personally can repeat and modify Elizabeth's inspired question, and reach to God's own desire by asking anew: "Whence is this to me that my Lord should come to me?" There is, and there can be, one only answer for so supreme a thing. The answer of a love that is supreme. Usually it is in the center of a question that we expect to find its greatest difficulty. Yet not always is this so, and not in the Incarnation. Arriving, as we now have done, at our most intrinsic inquiry as to the Incarnation in its own nature, we find our- selves, as it were, in an oasis of easiness; in the most open and facile of all our investigations. The Incarnation in itself is easy in the sense that air and light are easy; in the sense that we feel them and know them without any conscious effort. We breathe, and life surges within us. We gaze, and God's glories flash all around. We may know much or little about life or air, but we know that we breathe and see. The Incarnation is thus easy, because we have its terms. To understand Christ's humanity, we have only to look within ourselves. To understand His divinity, we have all the count- less messages of the ages, divine, angelic and human, that tell us of His power, His wisdom, and His love. Understanding these two—understanding human-> ity and divinity—we understand at least the ter- minals of the Incarnation, for the terms of the Incarnation are God and man. There are no others. The Incarnation is not angelic. I t is exclusively 18 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH human and divine. If Christ is consubstantial with the Father, He is also consubstantial with us, and we with Him. Truly did Paul say: "although he be not f a r f rom every one of us" (ACTS xvii, 27). Even naturally, we know the beating of a human heart ; and supernaturally we know the beating of a heart that is divine. By our own equal elements, we know the body and the soul of Christ; and by and in His grace, we share the very nature that • gives Him omnipotence. This is to know the living, pulsing Incarnation in its highest life. We may know much or little concerning its scientific theo- logical explanation; but we know and we feel the all-precious fac t ; and we know it in the best of all ways: in its interior life and expression within ourselves. Even with regard to the wondrous bond between these two—between divinity and humanity in the Incarnation—we are not wholly without fa- miliar light. For we ourselves have a purely spiritual soul, united in a substantial manner with a material body; and the God-man is a spirit united substantially with our entire humanity, body and soul. While there is much that is wholly dissimilar in these two unions, there is also much that is alike, and the very discernment of the discrepancies illustrates both. It may well seem that this assertion with regard to the Incarnation is strange; but an assertion that God had openly failed in any of His designs would be stranger still. Yet if God has not utterly failed in this great work, the Incarnation must be easy and clear. His aim in the Incarnation was to make divinity plain to humanity. As stated by the Church itself in the Preface of the Nativity, God's design 19 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH here was that "through this mystery of the Incar- nate Word a new light of Thy splendor shone for th before the eyes of our mind, in order that while we know God in a visible form, we may be rapt to the love of invisible things." This-new light of that old splendor, this God in visible form, were a failure if the old difficulty should remain in any- thing like its old exclusiveness. God's principal design in the Incarnation was to rend the veil of divine inaccessability f rom top to bottom. Failing in this, He would have failed in all. Any mode of union enmeshed with difficulties would only have given our weary minds another exacting task. The penitent thief on the cross was the first theologian to grasp the full import of the Incarnation. Had he been crucified amid the thunders of Sinai, it is probable that he would have lost his reason, instead of gaining the courage that gave him an eternity. As it was, he had only to look f rom one cross to an- other, and speak gently to a poor Fellow-sufferer. It is doubtful whether we could find anywhere else an example as fully expressing the whole purpose and method of the Incarnation. We are more like that poor thief than we know; and we should hasten to be more like him still. We do not by any means say that there are no mysteries in the Incarnation. We ourselves have already elsewhere asserted the intimate association of the Incarnation with the first and the last of God's Works; and as a matter of fact it is deeply connected with all of God's other mysteries, and thus shares in all their heights and their depths. What we do intend to say is that very much indeed that was hidden has become known to ua 20 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH through the Man-God. That which is thus known is the part most important for us, and that which remains—like the inner, physical factors of light or of air,—is not necessary for its principal f rui ts . We can be at peace, leaving our highest knowledge for heaven. There are countless mysteries still remaining in a single blade of grass; yet we pass the green fields without stopping, and in this very matter of the Incarnation, St. Augustine points out our usual human inconsistency. "Men seek the essence of this mystery, which was effected but once," he says, "when they can by no means give an explanation of what is always taking place; that is, how, in order that a human being may exist, the soul is blended with the body. But just as corporeal and incorporeal things are united, that man may be made, so man was united to God, and Christ came into existence." Coming a little closer to the technical heart of things, we may note that the Council of Chalcedon has become a classical guide in the matter of Christ's union with His humanity. And it says: "We teach that all men must confess one and the same Christ the Son and Lord only begotten (existing) in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, undividedly and inseparably, the difference in the natures never being taken away through this union, but rather with the specific character of each nature preserved, and entering into the one person and subsistence; not being sundered or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son only-begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Apud Hurter, Comp. 2-n, 488, p. 394, Ed. 1900). The union of God, therefore, with man in the 21 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Incarnation, is a union whose sole bond is person- ality ; and that personality is single, individual, and unshared by any other personality. That personality is divine. I t is eternal. I t is immutable. I t always was, and it always will be. The Incarnation has brought it no new wealth. It is the Word of God Himself, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. There is no human personality in the In- carnation. There never was any human personality associated with the human nature of Christ. The humanity of Christ was formed personless in the very first instant of this union with a personality that was divine. In the very first instant of their existence, the body and soul of Christ found them- selves supported in being by something which sup- plied to a superlative excess all the need of a created personality. We can say, and we must say, that f rom this unparalleled union there resulted only one being, not two. Yet there was no blending, no fusion of humanity and divinity. The one being here existing could be called complex, but only in the sense that there are now two natures: two natures wholly unblended and unconfused, and in themselves, as i t were, standing side by side under the same divine personality, and supported in being by its power. We can say, and we must say, that the personality of Christ af ter the Incarnation is truly composite. Here as elsewhere in these high mysteries, we must be equally on our guard against defect and excess. In our zeal to protect the divine personality of Christ f rom any mixture or change, we are exposed to the equally fatal mistake of making the hypostatic union merely a name, without any corresponding 22 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH reality. The human nature of Christ is really united in a union whose intimate bond is the closest of which a created thing is capable. I t is, there- fore, very real indeed. That bond, in so f a r as created language can describe it, is the bond of actual existence supplied to the human nature of Christ by Christ's ever-infinite personal existence. This infinite and eternal personality of Christ, therefore, altogether simple before the Incarnation, became at that time composite, in the sense that subsisting at first with only one nature, and acting through only one channel of energy, it subsisted af ter the Incarnation with two natures, and there- fore with two modes of action. The personality of Christ itself remains forever and eternally, now as well as then, wholly unblended and unmixed with anything else, though giving subsistence to both the divine and human nature. These expressions are not easily formed, since we are dealing with a kind of union of which we have no other example. From this unparalleled union; f rom this duality of natures and singleness of person, there arises the possibility of many strange statements. These ex- pressions owe nothing whatever to any mere figured language or poetical liberty. They are simple state- ments of fact. They have great value for us here tonight, since they are short and accurate avenues to a true and scientific knowledge of the mystery of which we are treating. Christ Himself, with His own mortal lips of flesh and blood, with lips received only with time and a few years before, said: "Before Abraham was, I am" (JOHN viii, 58). And He could just as well have said "Before Adam" or "before Lucifer," for it is written "before the 23 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH day-star I begot thee" (Ps. cix, 3). This, it is clear, was said by Christ of Himself, not inasmuch as He was a man, not inasmuch as He possessed the lips that spoke, but inasmuch as He was and ever is the Eternal God. In like manner, He truly said: "The Father is greater than I." (JOHN xiv, 28) and yet, not less truly, "I and the Father are one." (JOHN x, 30). The reason is always the same: two natures and one personality. Christ in the God-head is one with the Father. As man He shares the finite limitations of men. Thus, we ourselves can say with perfect t ru th : "Immortality died on the cross." "Immortal Life was put to death £y mortal man." Immortality is predicated of the person. We can say that Christ is human; we can say that Christ is divine. We can always say that Christ is His own divinity; we can never say that Christ is His own humanity. We can say that man is God; we can say that God is man. Pilate said t ruly: "Behold the man;" he could have truly said: "Behold God," and had he added this, he would have unconsciously given the whole formula of the Incarnation. Because of this same oneness of person, possess- ing as it does in Christ two natures, with either of which it can act at will, it is clear that the same diversity found in Christ's composite being must also be looked for in Christ's double activity. As to actions, however, it must be noted that what- ever He did in either nature had always an infinite dignity and power and merit, because everything was the act of a God. Actions belong to persons, but are according to nature^ His humanity enabled Him to suffer. His divinity made those sufferings 24 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH divine, and of infinite price. Yet not only in sorrow was He infinite. The Transfiguration was His truest earthly appearance. Yet while t rue to Himself on Tabor, He was also true to Himself on Calvary. Speaking here the revealed t ru th that Jesus was both God and man, one person in two natures, we have told the mystery of the Incarnation as the man of Faith accepts it. Next Sunday evening we shall consider the proof of Christ's divinity as offered by the Messianic prophecies and their ful- fillment in the person of the God-man. 25 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH CHRIST, IN TYPE AND PROPHECY (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, January 18, 1931) During the long centuries of the old dispensation believers strained forward in time, in search of the Redeemer that was to come. The ancients forgot that Christ as their Mediator, and His spiritual kingdom in their regard were already established facts. Not as any mere poetic abstraction, but in all reality as a juridic fact, the religion of Christ was established by the words: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head." (GEN. iii, 15) (Cf. Billot, inc. ed. 1900, p. 45). By these words, a new order came into existence: the order of Christ as the new and the only remaining hope of men. The Christian religion commenced with Adam; and with it, His high supernatural grace became a real human heritage. Christ 's first temple was built on the ruins of Eden and from its stones. From the very first, the later words of St. Peter, "There is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved," (ACTS iv, 12) were fully and formally true. When, therefore, we consider Christ—as we are considering Him here tonight—as the Messiah of the old dispensation, we can refer properly only to His later corporeal existence, and to a fuller develop- ment of the reality already present even in those early days. The bases of the spiritual kingdom of Christ were founded before the blush of shame had faded f rom Adam's cheek. The vision of God as man's only real end, and divine grace as his means to that end were still facts ; and the infinite merits 26 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH shining from the cross of Christ were already- active then. In this very true sense Adam and Eve were the real first Christians, not those of Antioch or the catacombs. It is a serious error and a very misleading mis- take to consider all the early thousands of years as wholly outside of God's infinite care and deprived of the treasures of grace. The ordinary concepts of God's supposed early angry neglect of man are extremely untrue. Men desert God. He never deserts them. God's great heart was then, all through those centuries, as it is now, ever open to His wandering and wayward children. As a matter of fact many who lived before Christ was made man reached a sanctity fa r surpassing that of great mul- titudes who have lived since He came. All even of the earliest whisperings of God's love for man were cast in the tones of Christ. There is always a vast continuity in God's works. Thus we trace the ever more and more definite image of the Messiah through type and prophecy, and the words and works of Christ Himself when He came. Our principal thesis here is the divinity of Christ. Our assertion is that Christ our Lord is God as well as man. We are walking by the light of revelation; we are dealing with positive acts of God; we can learn of these only through His own chosen channels of information. The entire olden order was only a preparation for the new; and its very best service was precisely this of leaving indisputable proofs that the Author of the new was to be divine." This office is fulfilled by securing and preserving the types and the prophecies regarding Him who was to come; and it must be our task here to adduce 27 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH and consider some of these testimonies to the truth of our position, the divinity of Christ. I t is impor- tant to remember that we shall use the Scriptures here without appealing to their inspired character, and only inasmuch as they form a reliable human document. Leaving proof to its own proper place, we here simply recall the fact that even the human authority that invests the Old Testiment Scrip- tures as historical documents is higher than that of any other document of equal antiquity that we possess. God allowed no long delay in filling out the out- lines of His first vague promise of a Redeemer. That promise that the seed of the^woman should crush the head of evil was contained in the first chapter of Genesis, and in the fourth chapter we have the first all-fair type of Christ, Abel, struck down by his brother Cain. Anyone standing long enough, and thinking deeply enough, before Guido Reni's "Death of Abel," or any other proper treat- ment of that subject, will easily vision another bleeding figure taking mystic form above i t ; will recognize other pitiless hands as the author of the fatal blow; and will see the first vivid, unmistaka- ble type of Christ. Each was innocent, and each fell, under the intensity of guilt's fratracidal hate. Later, yet twenty-two centuries before his great Principal, the tender and innocent Isaac, carrying the wood for his sacrifice up the mountain and lying bound on the altar of sacrifice, and looking up to the cruel dagger clutched in his father 's inexorable hand, and about to be plunged into his own trem- bling bosom, is another appalling type of what men were to do to the Holy One of Israel when He had 28 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH carried His cross and stretched Himself upon it on Calvary's height; only on Calvary there was no angel hand to avert the blow of death, and death really came. Moses delivered a troublesome and recalcitrant people from the galling bondage of Egypt, and the blood of the Paschal Lamb was the sign of their salvation. Christ had to complain on the cross mark- ed with His saving blood that, "I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people." (ISA. ix, 2). Both tarried on the toilsome way; both sank down defeated though knowing their pur- pose to be accomplished. Samson, as the Scriptures say, "killed many more at his death than he had killed before in his life," (JUDGES xvi, 30) and Christ once said, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself" (JOHN xii, 32), and the- Evangelist says that He here spoke of His death. Samson could sin, but he could also repent; and God gave him back his strength,—even made him a type of himself. For him as for his fu ture Redeemer alike, the mo- ment of defeat was also the moment of triumph. Samson shook down the crowded house of his enemies. Christ threw the far-spreading fanes of Satan to the ground, and destroyed the temple of a faithless people. Each conquered most signally, each in his own way, when he finally sank down in death. David, by his kingship, and by his sufferings patiently borne, was another outstanding type of the Redeemer to come of his own family and race. Solomon, by his wisdom and glory, held the same office, but rather for the final magnificence of 29 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Christ's ultimate kingdom on earth, and His final glory in heaven. Turning now to the written proofs, to the pro- phecies—the force of the demonstration must lie in the fact that none but an eternal mind could have provided such proofs. Only an eternal mind could see and provide for the numberless complexi- ties of human conditions in which these predictions, af ter thousands and thousands of years, would finally find their ultimate and exact fulfillment. More- over, an unnumbered multitude of these complexi- ties would be the result of actions on the par t of wills that were wholly and truly f ree ; and that could have, therefore, under the same circumstances, placed exactly contrary actions. Eternity is an attribute exclusively divine. Therefore, the will was divine and the agent was God. The desire of God thus recorded was that the promised Redeemer should be God, as well as man. God is omnipotent as well as eternal. Therefore the Redeemer that came was God as well as man. Such our thesis concerning^ the progressive Messianic prediction made in the older order before Christ came. The first promise of a Redeemer to come was very vague and negative, merely as it »were, non-pun- ishment. We find it in the third chapter of Genesis, the fifteenth verse: "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." Even by the time of Abraham (GEN. xxii, 16) and Isaac ( GEN. xxvi, 4) it had already risen to the fullest and most magnificent positive terms of blessings, of universal homage and power: "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be 8 0 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH blessed;" terms repeated to Jacob in his earlier vision. Then, in Jacob's blessing of Juda, (GEN. xlix, 10) prophecy was made all but complete by the words "The Scepter shall not be taken away f rom Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till He come that is to be sent, and He shall be the expectation of the nations." In these prophecies we have the race and the family of the Redeemer. We have also the time of His coming during the crumbling yet still endur- ing political existence of Judea. Finally, the vast changes are indicated in the entire Gentile world that would result f rom His coming. We have not yet left the first book of the Scriptures; we are still turning the few early pages of Genesis. Yet divinity, splendor and power have already become the theme. With the later Psalms of David, and in the divinely plaintive periods of Isaias, a new note is heard, a note of desolation and most anguished suffering. The written word verges into the crimson blood of the types. The mode of the redemption is shown. The Redeemer becomes "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with infirmities." The passion of Christ takes the place of His divinity and power. With every last little detail included, we are told—a thousand years4before the event—just how Christ was to die. The" pitiful lacerations which He bore, the .derision of His executioners, the gall given Him to drink, the casting of lots for His garments,— all are here. We had already been told also—seven hundred years before Christ—that "a Virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel." (ISA. vii, 14). Then Daniel gives the exact time (DAN. ix, 21) and Malachy first points out the precursor and then closes a 31 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH series of prophecies of the older law by most sol- emnly announcing the final and complete reprobation of the old cult, and the universal substitution of a new and clean oblation to be offered everywhere f rom the rising of the sun to its setting. Then three hundred years of silence and of wait- ing until "While all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, thy almighty Word leaped down f rom heaven f rom thy royal throne," and the man who was also God, the God Who was also man, Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, so long and so exactly prefigured and foretold, became forever a reality. The expected of the nations means, however, the expected of the world and therefore of the Gentiles. God is their God as truly as He is our God, as He was and is the God of the Jews. Very often we.are prone to be selfish Jansenists, none the less cruel and selfish because we are not avowedly such. We admit with our lips that Christ died for all, yet we speak very coolly of the untold pagan millions that we so easily presume to be lost. The pagan world of the time of Christ, and all mankind from the very beginning, had at times very serious thoughts of God, and of their responsibilities. The Queen of Sheba came to Solomon. Nineveh did penance in sackcloth and ashes, when the chosen people of God were sinking to the very last dregs of their final degradation. The Gentile world knew of these long and unbroken traditions of salvation among the Jews. St. Augustine makes this clear in his "City of God"—that unapproached classic on the times in question. Such knowledge, however, was almost wholly inoperative as the same work sets forth. The 32 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH "Expectation of Nations," therefore, mentioned by the Patriarch Jacob, showed rather the duty of the nations than what they actually did look for or desire. As our overshadowing aim is to establish the divinity of Christ the series of prophecies to which we have alluded from the unquestioned historical sources of the Old Testament is amply sufficient. These prophecies indeed have a very special value as proofs; The miracles of Christ 's actual life were rather for those who saw them. While they, too, even taken alone, are amply able to prove that Christ acted as no mere man ever acted or could act, they still stand subject now to the sneering and carping criticism of the man of no faith-or of badfaith. These age-old records of prophetic predictions, however, are written on the skies. They are as present now as • they ever were. Their force has a kind of eternity. No one can question that long series of foreshadowings coupled at last with their exact fulfillment in ever most minute detail. The old dis- pensation gives us eternally* Christ as divine,—"our unpayable debt to the past." 33 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST (Address delivered by Right Rev Msgr. Josephi M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, January 25, 1931) About two thousand three hundred years before Christ—four thousand three hundred f rom us—a weary pilgrim walked along the dusty roads of cen- tral Samaria, directing his steps into a vast unknown that God Himself had directed him to enter. This pilgrim of serious mien was Abraham, the great chosen father of a great chosen people, and the spiritual head of all fai thful souls in every land, until time shall be no more. He paused tired, it would seem, near Sichem, at the place of the "noble vale," as the Scriptures call it. Here God's general promise made to him at Haran first became detailed to the effect that this was the land that was to be his. Here accordingly Abraham raised the first altar to the true God in that pagan land. - Later, yet still two thousand years before Christ four thousand years f rom us—Jacob, af ter his deadly peril f rom Esau and his reconciliation with him, came exulting to this same Sichem, dug a deep well there for his family and his flocks, and "raising an altar there, he invoked upon it the most mighty God of Israel." This name of Israel was his own new name given to him by God and replacing that of Jacob. Here too, at this same Sichem, twelve hundred years before C h r i s t - t h r e e thousand two hundred years ago—Josue buried the ashes of Joseph; who, dying hundreds of years before, and f a r away in a strange land, had wished to find his final rest in the holy ground of his fathers. Then through a real silence of twelve hundred 34 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH years, years of human struggle, treason, and decay, the very name of Samaria and Samaritan became a synonym of reproach, and the children of Abra- ham, Jacob and Joseph here became the least worthy of the promises made in their regard on this very ground. Yet at last—two thousand years ago—the glory of God once more came to that "noble vale." "It was about the sixth hour," a single figure, a poor woman emerged f rom the neighboring town, and approached the well that Jacob had dug two thousand years before, "a woman of Samaria," coming to draw water. She was a product of her times, more sinned against by false leaders than sinning. All at once she saw on the well curb a stranger, not only to her but to all that land. Clear- ly he was of a hostile people, a Judean—and the Jews were the sworn enemies of her countrymen. The stranger "being wearied with His journey sat thus on the well," wearied like Abraham and Jacob from the same dusty road so long before. He had come—names change with the years—"to a city of Samaria which is called Sichar, near the land which Jacob gave to his son Joseph." "Now Jacob's well was there." Thus it had come that Jesus—for the wearied figure was that of no other—sat on that well curb this day, on the very spot where Abraham received his first definite knowledge of a promised land, where Jacob had heard strange voices of fur ther magnificence, and where both had offered solemn sacrifice of acknowledgement and of grati- tude to the Eternal Father of this late tired pilgrim. I t will doubtless be asked why, in these pressing circumstances of limited time, we have made so 35 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH much of this Samaritan scene. The answer is that it was here, for the first and only time, that Jesus Christ flatly said that He was God; surely a suffi- cient warrant to immortalize the event itself, and to visualize its all-significant setting. How beauti- fully in keeping with the simple yet sublime purpose of the Incarnation was this utterance made by Christ Who was Himself the divine seed promised to Adam and to Abraham, Who was the actual ful- fillment of the promises made on this very spot. This poor woman—with her shame now all discov- ered—had said: "I know that the Messias cometh, (Who is called Chris t) ; therefore, when He is come He will tell us all things." The words of Christ in answer are, "I am He, Who am speaking with thee." Christ used no reticence here and He left no place for subtleties by anyone else. The scene is one that well could stand forever alone. I t is is a lesson to the proud rationalist demanding that fai th be sup- planted by demonstration. Such a man demanding proofs proudly feels that he is reasonable. He is, and that is precisely his complete and hopeless undoing. He insists on confining himself within the narrowing walls of his own demonstration. This is equally true of all who reject revelation because the t ruths revealed surpass the power of man's groping un- aided reason. Human intelligence is thus limited, whether it is considered in the men who stand on the street in f ront of the university, or who occupy positions of the highest t rus t and responsibility within its stately halls. In spiritual realms, in the things which exist f a r above all the measures of sense, God's t ruth finds readiest acceptance in hum- ble and patient hearts. "But my fai th," all will 36 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH say, "must be reasonable;" and it is t rue that we must all make use of our mental powers. How much? We do not know, and cannot know, in any single case. God's proportions between His grace and the use of our natural powers are 'probably different in each individual case. Certainly, how- ever, we cannot expect that Christ Himself will personally throw us all down from our own conceit into the dust of the road like St. Paul that we may all rise seraphs of divine love. The pathway of the poor woman at the well is more secure. What we do know is that God will never be lacking; that when we do our little part, He will supply all our .de- ficiencies; and this is knowledge enough. It is, on the other hand, equally certain that He will never make philosophy out of theology by any com- plete subjugation of revelation to reason, for so faith would be lost. Could we answer all questions by reason, our moment of triumph would also be our moment of utter defeat. To the exact extent of all complete demonstrations, divine faith would necessarily die. We must forever refuse the ration- alist's demand that we make a block of common every-day concrete the cornerstone now formed by Christ for our whole spiritual edifice. It may help this confident man of reason to read- just himself to his real surroundings to know that he is nothing new; that he is in fact as old as more humble and less humble men. In this very matter of the divinity of Christ, a proof-seeker impatiently cried out: "How long dost thou hold our souls in suspense? If Thou be the Christ, tell us plainly." Christ did not tell that man plainly, nor does He speak plainly now to that type of listener. What 37 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH He did say on that occasion was, "I speak to you, and you believe not; the works that I do in the name of my Father, they give testimony of me." A little later here He says "I and the Father are one," sure- ly a plain enough answer; but, "The Jews took up stones to stone Him," because they declared He had blasphemed. It is hard to absolve an obstinate attitude from intellectual pride. The poor degraded woman at Jacob's well has the immortal honor of being the first and only person who ever heard f rom the lips of Christ a distinct and direct avowal of His own divinity. Commentators, contrasting her with the impertinent Jewish interlocutors of Christ, feel that she owed the priceless favor to her humble willingness to learn. In any case she had no idea of taking up stones, like the cultured Jews, to stone Christ for His kindness in telling her who He was. Her actual return for His priceless confidence was that of at once becoming His apostle and going among her own, saying: "Come, and see a man who has told me all things whatsoever I have done. Is He not the Christ?" I t is only right to add here that on a later occa- sion Christ once said "I am He." The question then, however, was not of the Messias or of the Christ as such. The only concern of the soldiers who had come was a certain Jesus of Nazareth, Whom it was their duty to arrest, and their thoughts went no fur ther than that. Therefore, Christ's direct acknowledgement of identity was entirely outside of our present question. It must be remembered: that the proof-seeker already mentioned had an official representative in this matter of Christ's divinity even in the mortal 38 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH days of Christ Himself. "The High Priest rising up said to Him: Answerest Thou nothing to the things which these witness against Thee? I adjure Thee by the living God, that Thou tell us if Thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith to him: Thou hast said it." Here because the question was official and because Christ honored every require- ment of the old law as long as it was in existence, He gave a much clearer and more direct answer than He had given to the insincere questioners in the street; yet one falling f a r short of the response He had given to the poor sinner at Jacob's well. I t was all-sufficient for the t ruth and it offers an occa- sion now for us to understand that Our Lord called Himself the Son of God not in the wide sense in which all good Jews might call themselves sons of God but in the strictest sense of sharing the nature of God and therefore being the equal of God. This is proven by the words and actions of the High Priest on hearing Our Lord's answer. We are told that the High Priest rent his garments, saying: "What fur ther need have we of witnesses? Behold now you have heard the blasphemy: What think you? But they answering, said: He is guilty of death." Every good Jew must tear his garment open at the throat on hearing blasphemy and in the streets the blasphemer was to be stoned. There would be no question of blasphemy if Our Lord were understood to be using the title Son of God in the wider sense of adopted sonship. Therefore the High Priest rending his garments and the crowds on the streets taking up stones to stone Him are both convincing proofs that His indirect yet clearly implied assertion that He was God was well under- 39 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH stood. All that we know of the divine witness to the truth of Our Lord's mission puts the imprint of God's confirmation on every claim that Christ may make. When, therefore, the whole nature of His revealing Himself is the revelation of a divine per- son, the Son of God, the conclusion is peremptory that Jesus Christ, born in time of the Virgin Mary, and therefore true man, was true God, consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Ghost. The argument, if argument need be formulated, can be explicitly stated in this wise: Jesus of Nazareth was either deceived, or a deceiver, or God, as He claimed to be. I t is unthinkable blasphemy that the Messias so long and so exactly foretold, Who came fulfilling those ancient prophecies and citing in support of the t ruth of His divinity the miracles which He performed in His own name and by His own authority, and crowning these miracles by His resurrection from the dead as He Himself had foretold—that He was a deceiver or could be deceived. It would mean that this tremendous power of divine testimony had been borne to a lie. We have only, therefore, to substantiate the fact that He did proclaim His own divinity, that He declared, in the most absolute, unequivocal manner that He is God, the Son of God, equal in all things like to His Father Who sent Him. We turn inevitably to the Gospel account of His life and works and resurrection. We use, it must again be noted, these writings as human documents and for their proven historical value. John the Baptist, himself foretold five hundred years before by Malachi, the last link of Christ's glorious prophets in the older law, pointing to 40 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Christ said: "Behold the lamb of God, behold Him Who taketh away the sin of the world." Jesus Himself claims that which men have always with reason considered as belonging to God alone. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (JOHN xiv, 6). "I am the light of the world; he that fol- loweth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life." (JOHN viii, 12) "I am the resur- rection and the life : he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live." (JOHN xi, 25). Equally clear is the claim of divinity when Jesus forgives sin, and so the Jews understood i t : "Who shall forgive sins but God;" when He declares that He will send" the Holy Spirit, as the Father hath sent Him ; when He announces that He will come at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead, and to render to each one according to his works. Jesus proclaims Himself eternal: "Before Abra- ham was made I am." He shows that He knows all things, even the most secret recesses of the human heart (MATT, ix, 4). He is omnipotent, for it is by His own power that He will rise f rom the dead. (JOHN x, 18). The miracles which He works and which suppose a divine power are performed in His own name and by His own power; it was as sovereign master that Jésus commanded nature, men, angels and demons: "Young man, I say to thee, arise" (LUKE vii, 14). "I will be thou made clean" (MATT, viii, 3. "Lazarus, come for th" from the tomb (JOHN xi, 43). He does not only exercise at will this power which belongs to Him by right, but He delegates it to whom He pleases ; He promises His Apostles that they shall 41 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH work in His name miracles more marvelous than His own. Jesus clearly affirms His identity with the nature of His Father, as well as the distinction of persons, and consequently claims the worship and honors due to God alone, "I and the Father are one" (JOHN x, 30). While He proclaims the divine precept: "The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve," He permits Himself to be adored by the man born blind, by the holy women and by His disciples (MATT, xxviii, 9). When St. Thomas, finally convinced of the resurrection of His Master, said to Him "My Lord and my God," f a r f rom cen- suring these words as blasphemous, Jesus publicly approved the faith of His disciple, and blessed those who in future would imitate his example. On solemn occasions in the presence of His dis- ciples, of His enemies, of His very judges, of the great Council of His nation, Jesus proclaimed His divinity in the most positive and formal manner. We shall see that even those who pursued Him with implacable hatred never misapprehended the mean- ing of His words. He questioned His disciples one day about Him- self: "Whom do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered and said: "Thou art Christ the Son of the living God." Again, that, here true and equal Son- ship is meant is clear f rom the words of Our Lord declaring that St. Peter has been inspired by a revelation f rom the Father in heaven. On another occasion when Jesus said, "I and the Father are one," the Jews took up stones to stone Him as a blasphemer. Jesus said "Many good works I have showed you f rom my Father ; for which of 42 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH those works do you stone me?" The Jews answered Him "For a good work we stone Thee not, but for blasphemy; and because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God." We have already recounted the outcry of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin when Jesus said that He was the Christ the Son of God. From this tribunal Jesus is led to the Roman Governor, who, convinced of His innocence, is about to release Him, but the princes of the people cry: "We have a law; and according to the law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God" (JOHN xix, 7). On Calvary we hear this significant insult: "If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross" (MATT, xxvii, 40). This briefest outline, alone possible in this sermon, can be found fully expounded in any treatise of Catholic doctrine or of true Christian apologetics. In the centuries that have elapsed the glorious con- tinued mission of Christ as prophet, priest and king of mankind has set before the whole world the splendor of these truths as we shall see in the fu r - ther sermons of this course. What has been said here has been for nineteen hundred years the inspir- ation to holiness for countless souls. Surely the recital is sufficient to make any thinking mind, any earnest seeker af ter truth, exclaim with the woman at the well of Samaria: "Is not this the Christ?" even as it is sufficient to fill the hearts of all rejoicing in the beautiful gif t of divine faith and prompt them from grateful hearts to echo the cry of Thomas, "My Lord and my God." 43 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH CHRIST, THE FOUNDER, PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, February 1, 1931) In the first of these addresses, we felt justified in saying that the Incarnation placed our humanity as the keystone of created perfection. Seaching for its motive, we felt that that motive was a very especial and vehement love. Looking at the mystery in itself, we were surprised at its ease, since we had both its terms: humanity, by looking into our own, and Deity, through the numberless revelations of Himself made by God in all the ages of a world no longer young. Regarding Christ more closely, as the Expected of the Nations, as the Messias of the Old Dispensation, we seemed to find in the first half of the title rather a duty than a fac t ; but in the second, an eternal and infallible certainty of Christ's divinity written in prcphecies all divine through thousands and thous&nds of v«ars, and exactly ful- filled at His birth. This evening, we wish to consider Him as He stands ci-ect and fully credited among men: a divine Founder of a new and divine dispensation; a Prophet, a Priest and a King. The first and eternal base of Christ's power is the fact already established, that He is divine. Coming a little nearer to us, and using the only forms of expressions, finite and imperfect though they be, at our disposal, we can say that His right to found a new order on earth lies in the fact that the Christ- Man is a representative and legate of the entire Trinity; with Whom, it need not be said, rests all conceivable power and right. Christ, the God-man, 44 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH represents Himself, as we may say, inasmuch as He is the eternal Word of God, the Second Person of the most holy Trinity; and to His infinite wisdom the Father has entrusted all power; to it, the Holy Ghost has entrusted all the treasures of His infinite Love. Christ, surely, has a right to act for Himself, and any supreme source has a right to delegate its own powers. The Father and the Holy Ghost have used this right of delegation in favor of Christ, in favor of Him Who is man, as well as God. -Any delegation by a supreme source, moreover, can be partial and complete. And whether it is partial or complete can be found only by an inspection of the actual instrument of. delegation. In the case of Christ, the Incarnate God, we can find the terms sufficiently in the inspired, infallible Scriptures. By this test, Christ's powers are complete, not partial or qualified. Certainly, as already noted, He had no need of delegation f rom Himself to Him- self. He is His own all-sufficient reason. And of Him, the Father said: "Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul hath been well pleased . . . In His name, the Gentiles shall hope" (MATT xii, 18; ISA. xiii, 1) words which the Jordan and Tabor had heard before Christ uttered them Himself. "Hear ye Him," that voice from heaven had said on Tabor; and long before the reason had been given, "For my hand shall help Him, and my arm shall strengthen Him" (PS. lxxxviii, 22). Nor was the Holy Ghost want- ing. In a way, He could not be, for He proceeded from the Son, as truly as from the Father. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, wherefore He hath anointed Me; (LUKE iv, 18) "that vision and 45 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH prophecy may be fulfilled, and the Saint of saints may be anointed" (DAN. ix, 24). "Jesus of Nazar- eth: how God anointed Him with the Holy Ghost, and with power" (ACTS x, 38). It was, therefore, no illegal assumption when Christ declared: "All power is given to me in heaven and in ear th;" nor any usurpation when He directed His apostles to baptize, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matt, xxviii, 19). The prophecies of the ages have already shown that Christ was divine; and both the Old Testament and the New openly show His right to speak for the entire most holy Trinity. There can, therefore, be no question of injustice when He did so. With regard to man, there was a fur ther duty. God made man free, and natural equity demands that before any obligation restricting or directing natur- al liberty be imposed, the right to impose it be ade- quately established. Christ never failed in any duty to man. He repeatedly brought the sacred prophecies to the minds of His hearers, and He supplemented them with acts so portentous as to leave no room for .any sincerely remaining doubt. He was not brief or difficult. Even af ter the Resur- rection, and all that had openly preceded it, He permitted and directed the still doubting Thomas to "bring hither thy hand, and put it into Mv side;" (JOHN xx, 27) that all-sacred side that the lance of the soldier had pierced (JOHN xix, 34). Many of our divine Lord's actions, besides being wholly miraculous in themselves, were actual and exact fulfillments of the ancient and accurately converging prophecies in His regard; and we ourselves, like those of other ages, have witnessed the no less exact 46 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH fulfillment of prophecies made by Christ Himself of the ages to come. Even the demons cried out: "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus of Nazareth? I know Who Thou art, the Holy One of God" (MARK i, 24). And that was two thousand years ago, and with much less light than we possess. For we have, first of all, since then, the refulgent testi- mony of Christ's glorious resurrection, and in addition, all these centuries of His life in His Church, explaining and defining much that was but obscurely known, both in the Old Dispensation, and in the earlier part of the New. The testimony of thousands of years has established the divinity of Christ beyond any reasonable doubt, and we shall, therefore, rest His case here,' for, as St. Augustine has pointed out, any man who demands still more proof, when evidence amply sufficient has already been given, deserves no fur ther consideration. We shall, accordingly, here consider Christ's actions as Prophet, Priest and King, rather as an example of His power, than as proofs of its right. The one great differentiating note of the New Dispensation when compared with the Old, is the fact that it is a rule of love ancl attraction, not of fear and repulsion. I t is the change f rom the con- dition of a servant to that of a son. This is no mere poetic fancy. God Himself says, "You have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear ; but you have received the spirit of adoption of sons" (ROM. viii, 15). It was a son that became incarnate. The poor prodigal wished to become a slave, (LUKE xv, 19) but his father, instead of chains to his feet, put a ring on his finger. And again God declares, "For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of 47 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH power and of love" (II TIM. i, 7). The Good Samaritan did not put manacles on the p o o r . wound- ed traveler, or make him his slave, when he grew strong In even tenderer terms Christ Himself recalls! adopts, and makes His own the gentle words of Isaias: "The bruised reed he shall not break, and smoking flax he shall not quench" (ISA. xm, 3; MATT xii, 20). Anyone reading Cicero—a typical cultured representative of ancient pagan society— cannot but be struck by the orator's accumulated adjectives heaping still fur ther and fur ther con- tempt and abuse on the lower classes of men, and on some particular individuals; the very evident purpose being nothing else than a very carefully studied preparation for the final brutal destruction of those already destitute of all fa r ther human hope; a cruel, heartless prelude to the final snapping of the reed, and the placing of a coarse, unfeeling foot upon the but weakly smouldering flax. More than once captive kings, walking on foot chained to a Roman conqueror's triumphal car, covered with dust and ready to drop from sheer exhaustion, found their only release in the dungeon strangulation that ended the horrible spectacle. And Cicero, the cul- tured he who stood more fof his class than for himself—rejoiced and exulted in their hopeless, despairing misery. The gentle Nazarene was the very opposite and antithesis of the self-brutalized Roman. He knew that even the most guilty and most degraded of men were still His brothers. He remembered that precisely because they were so unworthy, and so f a r below all honorable human standards, they needed His help more than anyone else; and He said, "I came not to call the just, but 48 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH sinners" (LUKE v, 32). He came—He founded the New Dispensation—that the reed might be bound up, and again grow tall and straight in verdant beauty; that the now but feebly flickering last embers of a love that had been divine might again mount strong and impetuous even to the flaming heights of heaven. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," He said, "wherefore He hath anointed me . . . to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised," (LUKE iv, 18) "to comfort all that mourn" (ISA lxi, 2). Even more than the scathing words of Malachy, the all-tender, all-exul- tant "Benedictus" of Zachary forms a complete and eternal rejection and abrogation of Sinai's terror and of daily fear. "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel: because He hath visited and wrought the redemption of His people . . . to enlighten them that sit m darkness, and in the shadow of death: to direct our feet into the way of peace" (LUKE i 68 and 79). Nor should this now be wonderful to us. We have seen that the deepest motive of the wondrous Incarnation itself was love. We know that the Incarnation is the closest of all possible unions of God with man; and we know that union and its intimacy is a proof and an infallible measure of love. We know that the Incarnation is a sonship, a filiation, and that filiation is a . deathless founda- tion of love. We have already heard so many lofty inspired texts expressly assigning love as the reason why God sent His Son into this world. The Incar- nation itself, merely as a fact, hopelessly betrays its own tender character. Christ, therefore, the found- er of the New Dispensation, stands between the two 49 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Testaments,—forgiving the Old, elevating the New. Prophet, Priest and King! Christ was all these and incomparably the greatest of all. Any glance at the now hoary prophetic sages of the Old Law will show tha t these Seers announced and inter- preted the will of God, and acted in general as His messengers to His people, quite as often, perhaps, as they predicted fu tu re th ings: our ordinary con- cept of a prophet 's work. When, then we call Christ a prophet, we intend to include both these branches of the prophetic office. He foretold the dread destruction of Jesusalem, and the splendors of His own last coming. He promised heaven to the penitent thief. To every earnest soul, as later to St. Stephen, He opened the portals of Paradise in His own way, and gave the vision of its splendid ulti- mate realities. I t is, however, especially as a Teacher,—the alter- nate and greater office—that we wish to think here of His prophetic action in His own mortal life in this world. For, as such, He very greatly ennobled the objects of our fai th . Before Him, the Trinity was scarcely known; but He made it evident; His very presence on earth added the Incarnation. He not only was the Incarnation, He explained it. He said, "I and the Father are one" ( JOHN x, 30). He said, "The Father is greater than I " (JOHN xiv, 28). He said, "The Father is in me, and I am in the Fa ther" (JOHN x, 38). He said, "All things whatsoever the Fa ther hath, are mine" (JOHN xvi, 15). He said, "As the Father hath sent me, I also send you" (JOHN xx, 21). And this is all we really need to know about the Incarnation. Christ added still other magnificent things to the former t r easu ry 60 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH of earnest souls on earth. He gave us the Sacra- ments of the New Law. He changed and exalted the laws of discipline in many particulars. He gave us the Sermon on the Mount, and by His own daily divine example, He illuminated and illustrated the entire moral law with a new light and a new splen- dor f rom the fur ther heights of heaven. As in the Incarnation, so also in His Priesthood Christ's relation is a relation of identity. From the very beginning of recorded history sacrifice has been the form of worship most acceptable to God. We see this emphasized in the history of the Jewish people; and quite apart from the many ceremonies with which the Temple sacrifices came to be sur- rounded we have a very clear idea of the essential elements. A slab of stone was set up to represent God. The worshipper came before this altar to adore and acknowledge his Creator as the Lord of life and death holding supreme dominion over man, His creature. To indicate this, the worshipper brought with him something over which he had dominion, the power of life and death. Wishing to acknowledge fur ther that, as a sinner, he deserved that the Lord of life and death should strike him for his sins, he struck the thing over which he had the power of life and death. Then the real sacri- ficial act was for the priest to take the blood of the victim and throw it on the altar, asking God to accept the blood of the victim in place of the blood of the sinner, which should have been shed for his sins. It is clear that such a sacrifice in the Old Law could only be a gesture, a plea for mercy. The substitution was utterly inadequate; the victim was too f a r beneath the man in dignity to make adequate repar- 51 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH ation for man's offense against God. On the other hand even if the Victim had been one of man's own race who offered himself for his fellow-man, the sacrifice would still have been inadequate because of theinf ini te ly greater dignity of the offended God. In other words, there was TIO hope of adequate reparation for man's sin involving his right to re- storation to his supernatural destiny unless there be found a victim the equal of man and at the same time the equal of the offended God. So, again we come to the mystery of God's love for the children of men. He might have dismissed man, forgiving him his transgression;, but there was no th ing | fa man that could ever win back his place m the friendship of the God Who made him. He would have been at best a pardoned criminal, with no claim on the companionship of God. God's love for His created image would not brook this, but found a way to hide the majesty of God in the flesh of a helpless baby and be born of a woman s body, that so He might be blood brother to the children of men. So came Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of mankind. When the hour came for Him to make the sacrifice that would not only take away the sins of the world but make such adequate reparation as would restore man in fullest justice to his place in the adopted sonship of God, He alone must be both priest and victim. He alone could offer Himself. Anyone could slay the victim. The priestly office was to offer the blood on the altar of God. His enemies could slay the Christ, but only when He willingly let the red blood of God flow on the white body of Christ, the true altar—no longer a slab of stone rep- resenting God—then was the great sacrifice complete 52 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH and Jesus Christ, t rue God and true man, priest and victim of a clean oblation that His Father must' accept. Such a victim once slain, being an infinite victim, need never be slain again, but could always be offered as long as men had need to call upon that saving sacrifice. Therefore was His priesthood af te r the order of Melchisedech, who had offered bread and wine in type long centuries before. Therefore, at the Last Supper did He give to those first priests- their ordination to the priesthood of Christ according to the order of Melchisedech. Of His power there can be no question. He was God. Just as He had been able to hide the majesty of God in the flesh of a helpless baby, so was He just as able to hide the majesty of God in that piece of bread which He picked up from that table, broke into pieces, making of it an outward sign, saying ' that this was His body which should be broken for men the next day; just as able to take that cup of wine and bid them all drink of it, as it was His blood which should be scattered for the remission of sms. Of His commission to those first priests there can be no question: "Do this in commemora- tion of me, and as often as you do it you will show forth the death of the Lord until He come again " That commission was, therefore, to remain in the priesthood of His Church. It was God speaking. So the prophecy of Malachy came to fulfillment; and down through the centuries His priesthood has ° f 3 d ™ d e r t h e f 0 ™ He chose the clean oblation of the body and the blood of the Victim of Calvary Thus He not only offered the "clean oblation" of Malachy (i, 11); He Himself was that clean oblation. For m the incomparable sacrifice of the New Dis- 53 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH pensation, He is both Victim and Priest; and He thus gives to both sacrifice and priesthood an in- finite dignity and value. He exercised His priest- hood on earth at the Last Supper and on the Cross; and He still exercises it daily and forever in its intercessory character in heaven; "made higher than the heavens;" (HEB. vii, 26) and "always living to make intercession for us" (HEB. vii, 25). Adoration, thanksgiving, atonement and impetration are always the four great ends of any rational sacrifice offered by man to God; and all are met with an infinitely superlative sufficiency, where the Eternal Word made flesh is both Priest and Victim. "If any man shall eat His flesh and drink His blood, he shall not see death forever." In His incompre- hensible goodness He has deigned to share this priestly power with poor, weak mortals. The priests of the New Law are truly such. They act indeed in the power of Christ, but not so exclusively. For the great High Priest has given them a real power over His real Body. Christ was also a King. Anyone wishing an ex- tended and classic exposition of this title—really most lofty in the case of Christ—can find it in the great Encyclical, "Quas primas" of the present Supreme Pontiff Pius XI, issued in December, 1925. In this great pronouncement the Pope first of all makes it clear that he is speaking of Christ as In- carnate, when he calls Him king, for he carefully and explicitly explains that he is speaking of Christus Homo. We shall only say here that kingship is supreme dominion, and that, therefore, anyone for whom kingship is claimed must possess some title to this 54 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH most perfect form of all domination. Evidently, first of all, titles belong to him who is the first maker of the matter and the form and the union of both, as well as the gi f t of actual existence which places the thing in question outside of its causes, and gives it a definite rank in the vast scale of being. God is the first Maker and Author of every entity and existence, substantial or accidental, in the whole range of created being. Christ is God. Christ, therefore, has the first of all titles to dominion over all created things; and having this title, has supreme dominion; and having this supreme dominion, He is their king; for these, as has been noted, are con- vertible terms. Angels and men, therefore, the earth, the ocean and the sky, and all that are in them of created natural or supernatural realities, are His by every possible right and title. The briefest glance at His life shows this kingship acknowledged. We find the good angels ministering to Him in Gethsemane, and the demons fleeing from Him into the swine that were drowned in the sea. The winds and the waves fell silent at His com- mand, and the fig-tree withered at the touch of His word. Anyone reading the question put by God to Job can find where Christ was when the world was made. Or he can ask Christ Himself, and find the answers of Eternal Wisdom—the Second Person of the most Holy Trinity—in the book of Proverbs (viii, 22). When asked by Pilate if He was a King Christ answered that He was. And Pilate himself wrote the inscription placed on the cross: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS, and stubbornly said against all remonstrance, "What I have written, I have written," (JOHN xix, 19-22) 55 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH and the three world languages in which it was couched showed that Christ was king also of some- thing more than the Jews; that He was the world's universal Monarch. Christ is "THE KING OP KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS" (APOC xix, 16). Of His Kingdom there shall be no end. For the Apocalypse is the Book of the Ultimate. 56 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH THE JURIDIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE CHURCH (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, February 8, 1931) Last Sunday evening we considered Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as Prophet, Priest and King and therefore by right the Founder of a new and universal dispensation whereby through Him all men must be saved. This saving power for -all men, even those who never hear His holy name, is in His merits as our great High Priest offering Himself a Victim on Calvary, and continuing that same sacri- fice in the clean oblation of the New Law under the appearance of bread and wine. As Prophet-Teacher He keeps in that religion the stainless purity of truth. Could it fail in truth, that religion would cease to be His and this He has promised will never happen. Finally, in that religion He is King of mankind, asking of all who come to know Him, honor and loyalty. This Kingship of Christ, as the Holy Father beautifully portrayed in his Encyclical referred to last Sunday night, belongs to Our Lord by right of His humanity, which the Holy Father calls a birthright "Jure nativo;" but He is also King by the acquired right of having redeemed us by His precious blood. We are to speak of the Church of Christ tonight in a manner which clearly implies a sincere un- reserved belief in the divinity of Christ. We are not, therefore, here concerned with those who deny or question that divinity. As a consequence, we can use the Scriptures here now in a double capacity: first, that of an undeniable historical document of 57 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH unquestionable human authority; secondly, that of a work inspired by the Holy, Ghost. For any real Christian, the Scriptures are inspired, they are the word of God. Christ cited them as such. On the other hand, there is no reason whatever why the Christian should not prize the other and independent value of the Scriptures as a reliable human document. We can always have both in mind; although either alone would be amply sufficient for our purpose here. Once the divinity of Christ is conceded, His plen- ary right to arrange all the things of religion in accordance with His own infinite wisdom at once emerges as a necessary consequence. This right once conceded, our duty of unreserved obedience at once becomes equally absolute. This leaves only one task here, and that is to find out what arrange- ment Christ did actually make in this matter of due religious service to God. God by no means sets aside all our natural methods and means in any human matter. Our natural method of finding Christ's wish in regard to a church is to examine His words and His works in this connection. That He did something of this kind is, by the consent of all, beyond question* Evi- dently, therefore, we are in the domain of fact, not of general speculation. We are not to tell Christ, or anyone else, what He should have done, as the tendency seems to be today. We are to find out what He did and, as the legal axiom has it, facts are to be proved not presumed. Our pathway to this knowledge will be found in the secure clear narrative of the Scriptures relating the words and works of Christ in regard to His Church. First of all, Christ did not by any means leave 58 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH this matter of due religious service of God to the free choice or option of "men; but very clearly and specifically directed that all should place themselves in the ranks of a clearly specified and definite, or- ganized religious society. The evidences which we offer in support of this assertion are the words of Christ Himself. We learn from the Gospels: first, Christ solemnly promised to institute a church when choosing among His twelve Apostles already selected to carry on His work, one to whom He gave the symbolic name of Peter. He said to him: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." This promise already furnishes incontestable proof, for Christ could not fail in His words. Second, He executed His promise and founded His Church. He gave to His apostles the power and the mission to preach the Gospel to every creature; to administer the sacraments; to govern the Fai thful ; He prom- ised to be with them until the end of time. At the head of the Apostles He placed Simon, now called Peter, to whom He gave universal jurisdiction over the whole organization. This certainly was found- ing a religious society, a church. In founding this church, Christ did not make this society racial or national or of any multiplied form, but made it one and exclusive. In proof of this assertion we offer His own words written by St. Luke (xi, 23) : "He that gathereth not with me," scattereth;" and by St. Mark (xvi, 15) : "Go ye into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." Christ was too good an executive to found overlapping or conflicting jurisdictions. Con- sequently, He fur ther says of any outsider: "If he 59 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican" (MATT, xviii, 17). Christ made the right and the duty of this relig- ious society universal in place. He said: Go ye into the whole world," "preach to every creature, "teach ye all nations." After words such as these, this part of our thesis will hardly appear presump- tuous. He made this Society universal in time. He Him- self said: "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (MATT, xxviii, 20). Moreover, all the age-old prophecies, all fully en- dorsed either directly or indirectly by Christ Him- self as well as many of the direct prophecies made by Christ Himself alone, show the "kingdom of heaven;" the "kingdom of God," where these phrases must mean His Church on earth, to be eter- nal in the diminished yet frequent sense of spanning all subsequent time. This society was to be efficient in all that per- tains to its strict specific domain of fa i th and morals. In proof of this assertion we adduce anew the words of Christ just given: "And"—the conjunction is very important here—"behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world." "All days," therefore with no intermediate lapses at any time. "Even to the consummation of the world," therefore no fur ther lapses of any kind. Now Christ did not promise His own presence merely for the doing of some unimportant work. His only conceivable purpose in this steady, uninterrupted presence and vigilance is to guide His Church in its specific teach- ing capacity. This means infallibility, unless we wish to assert that Christ could make essential 60 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH blunders or permit them right in His own presence on the part of the organization entrusted by Him- self with the earthly care of men's eternal salvation. Referring, moreover, to the Holy Ghost, Christ fur ther said: "When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come He will teach you all t ruth . . . and the things that are to come, He will show you" (JOHN xvi, 13). "But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you" (JOHN xiv, 26). Now this to a corporate body of men, af ter the Last Supper when He Himself in His own visible presence was leaving the world forever; that is, when He was giving His last supreme act of commission to those who were to continue His work amongst men. He here promised most solemnly, and most solemnly repeated the assurance, that the Holy Ghost would teach them all things; and the very first thing He would need to teach was how to keep out of error. If this means anything at all, it means infallibility. Christ also equipped this society with all needed power both of order and of jurisdiction; with the power of order for its sacrificial and sacramental ministration; and with the power of jurisdiction in all its complete legislative, judicial and sanctioning aspects for the necessary and effective administra- tion of its right, mission and duty. In proof of this assertion where it touches the power of order in the sacrificial act included in the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper we adduce the words of Christ there spoken: "Do this for a commemora- tion of me" (LUKE xxii, 19). Where the power CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH 61 of order touches the judicial and sanctioning func- tions of His priests we quote the words of the Gos- pel (JOHN xx, 23) : After the resurrection He "breathed on them and He said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." As regards jurisdiction for the legislative authority of His church, as well as for its judicial power, we have these words of Christ : "All power is given to Me in heaven and m e a r t h y "As the Father hath sent Me I also send you; "Going therefore, teach ye all nations . . • Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." To His Church in the per- son of Peter He said: "Thou art Peter; and upon t h i s rock I will build My church, . . . I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." He renews this tremendous commission: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sif t you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren" (Luke xxn 31 and 32). Through this prayer confirming Peter s commission Christ promises that the fa i th of Peter, the future head of the Church, and consequently the faith also of his successors, shall remain invulnera- ble, and that through them the other members of the Church shall be preserved firm in the fai th despite the trials to which they may be subjected. To Peter, moreover, is given the universal task : "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep." These words ad- 62 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH dressed to Peter alone confer upon him the mission of feeding the lambs and the sheep; that is, the fai thful and those who are their spiritual fa thers ; hence, all the members of the Church in general. Now the food of souls is t ruth. If Peter could fail in his dispensing of Christ's truth, then would fol- low the unthinkable absurdity that Christ would let His flock be poisoned by the one chosen to repre- sent Him as chief shepherd. These assertions are clear historical facts. For the believer that Christ is God these facts are con- clusive of the organization, power and jurisdiction of one established corporate body to continue the mission of Christ for the salvation of men. Such facts are established, as we have already noted, f rom the Scriptures as historical documents. As data, however, undoubtedly contained in the canon- ical inspired Scriptures, considered as the word of God, these facts add weight to the demonstration though not really necessary. If we have used single passages of Scriptures or only a few words to estab- lish each fact, we by no means imply that there are no others to the same effect, as any intelligent stu- dent knows. Our whole intention is to be as brief as a real sufficiency of proof will permit. We have progressed in the purpose of this series to a point where a resumé should be helpful. Let us place ourselves, therefore, at the side of Adam, when once the first bitter t ruth of his ban- ishment had rankled less deep in his heart. Let us be with him, as he looks to the East, and sees some- thing more beautiful than the dawn now flashing a fa r over the Armenian summits; sees the first alluring outlines of the gentle Redeemer, and now 63 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH would not ask that aught be changed. His thoughts had perchance begun to mold themselves into the first fa int foreshadowings of that "Felix culpa "Happy fault" of which the Church now so confi- dently sings. We, standing there, already see a universal church of Christ glowing faintly over the nascent world; fai th in Christ to come, its heavenly light; and His already anticipated merits, its heav- enly life. Were we to stand there thousands of years we should see it still shining, with the all but inspired patriarchs moving about in the white incense of the dewy morn as its only priests and pontiffs. At last, more than two thousands years, however before the full light came, we could notice, as we did in a previous discourse, a lonely pilgrim setting out at a divine command, f rom Ur of the Chaldees, paus- ing at Haran and then resuming his weary foot- steps to Sichem and Bethel, to become the father of a chosen portion of the now far-flung multitudes of mankind—that is, we see Abraham and we hear the promise made to Adam repeated and growing more distinct and splendid. Yet we must remember that the outer Church of Christ among the nations did not cease through this special adoption of the 'Jews. Nor was that outer Church of Christ abrogated or its power diminished when, a thousand years later still, Moses gave the written law to a rescued people. Everywhere in the outer world and to the very core of the Jewish people Christ was ever the Alpha and the Omega of every legitimate hope. Since the fall, there has never been any other name under heaven by which men could be saved; and there never has been a time or a place where that name was. not 64 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH sufficient. Then in the fullness of time, vagueness gave way to splendor, Christ came in all reality and His glorious, indefectible Church became the reality of which we are speaking here this evening. Up to the time of Abraham the law of nature was man's only guide, wherever he might be; with the patriarchs again appearing as its sole interpreters. The pact made with Abraham was so brief and so simple, despite its all-significant value, as to leave the natural law almost undisturbed. That natural law written in man's own heart declared his duty of adoration, thanksgiving, atonement, and petition, in regard to the great infinite Creator f rom whom he came. With Moses, a new order commenced in man's juridic relations with God. For Moses set up a formulated law, and new obligations at once came into being. The Mosaic law became at once opera- tive for all the Jews, the outer world still remaining, as before, belonging to Christ indeed, but only in the form which the natural law suggested and en- forced. For the Jewish people, the synagogue now became a full juridic reality, and remained such up to its abrogation by Christ in favor of the Church as we now know it. Then the synagogue fell. Christ had come. His right and His sway in the new form determined by Him became universal; universal in all their juridic force for all to whom it was inti- mated; yet still bearing but lightly on those who had no due knowledge of its supreme all-including powers. No man is excluded f rom participation in the f rui ts of the Redemption save through his own fault, through resistance to grace, and each one will be judged according to that which he has received. It 65 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH is a theological axiom "to him who does what de- pends upon himself God will not refuse His grace. He who shall have followed the light of reason and lived in conformity with that which he believes is . t rue cannot be lost. "One may," says the learned Cardinal Dechamps, "belong in heart though not in body to the Church. Is it not very clear that every man in good fai th belongs in heart to the Church, since he would enter it if he recognized it as teaching t ru th 9 Are not all who have a sincere and general desire to cling to truth, to do God's will m this disposition?" Thus many who have never heard the name of Christ and many others so invincibly deceived that they do not recognize the visible society which is the body of the Church of Christ, may still, through sanctifying grace, belong to the soul of the one exclusive divinely founded society of Christ s faithful. This Church stands alone today, juridically speaking. ' Where, therefore, are found the unfailing because infallible teachings of Christ, where His priesthood continues His sacrifice under the form of bread and wine, where hearts hold faithfully to Him as their King—there surely is the Church of Christ of the New Dispensation, there truly is Christ recognized and accepted as Prophet, Priest and King. There shall never be any other, divine or human, to succeed it. I t is of this one, last, universal, exclusive Church of Christ that we have been seeking to speak in some poor way tonight. 66 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH THE CHURCH: CHRIST'S MYSTICAL BODY (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, February 15, 1931) Last Sunday we considered the Church as founded by Jesus Christ to continue His divine work here below. The Church is not only the guardian of the doctrine and law of Christ, but as well distributor of His graces among men. This Church is a visible society, founded by Christ to continue His sanctify- ing mission here below; she appears thus as a living organism. The Church, however, must also be regarded as the holy and invisible society of all the souls that share by grace in Christ's divine sonship. These form the kingdom He won by His blood. This is what St. Paul calls the Body of Christ, not of course, His physical Body, but Hiß mystical Body. Now it is true that the invisible Church or the soul of the Church is more important than the visible Church, but in the normal economy of Christianity, it is only by union with the visible society that souls have participation in the possessions and privileges of the invisible kingdom of Christ. In such words does the Abbot Marmion set forth this important distinction. Likewise a recent writer in the "Civilta Cattolica" calls St. Paul's exposition of this doctrine of an interior companionship with Christ, "the theology of the relations of the soul with Christ the Saviour." We can see that instead of speaking of Christ's mystical body, the Church, we can more accurately speak, since the Church has unjustified members, of Christ's mystical life in the just. He is indeed the Good Shepherd. He seeks the repro- 67 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH bate and the lost; but He does not live in them. He seeks them, however, precisely in order to do so. I t is in St. Paul's inspired formulae that wepos- sess, indeed, the highest expression Thrif t in the soulsvof the faithful. I live, the great Apostle cries, "now not I ; but Christ liveth in ^ ( g I l A T . ii, 20). "And that I flesh: I live in the fai th of the Son of God. To me to live is Christ" (PHILIP, L 21). "Know you not your own selves, that Christ Jesus is in you? (2 Cor. xiii, 5). Wondrous words, indeed; yet words, too, that can seem almost natural, and even necessary, when we recall the words of our divine Lord declaring that "He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him" (JOHN vi, 57). "As the Hvlng Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he-that eateth Me, the same also shall live by Me" (JOHN vi, 58). Slight marvel that overwhelming effects could flow from so overwhelm- ing a cause. Slight marvel that such a life, shall not taste death forever" (JOHN vni 52) Slight marvel that Paul is ecstatic, if his life m Christ is even the faintest of copies of Christ's own life in the bosom of His Father. The copy, however, is not faint. It is a copy divinely desired, designed, in- tended, and executed through Christ, by that Father Himself. His power is not partial or hesitant. The words that I have spoken to you, are spirit and life" (JOHN vi, 64). After all, we were made to the image and- likeness of God in the very begin- ning; and in that beginning, the Incarnation was already present in archetypal form in the mind of God. Paul's ecstasy, therefore, is caused only by 68 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH the wondrous perfection to which Christ has now brought that initial resemblance. Let us note, first of all, that Paul does not assert this privileged state as a special condition of his own high personal sanctity but proclaims it as a necessary consequence of the state of grace. "Know you not," he asks, "your own selves, that Christ Jesus is in you, unless perhaps you be reprobates?" (2 COR. xiii, 5). Paul was not a herald of his own glory but the long pre-ordained and fully authorized teacher of world-wide truth, for it is of him that Christ said: "This man is to Me a vessel of election, to carry My Name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel" (ACTS ix, 15). Secondly, let us remember that there is no real sacrifice of personality here. Despite all the em- phasis of Paul's inspired words, we must remember that the Saviour came to make perfect, not to de- stroy. Every act of Christ in the human heart, every act of even the highest grace, must still be an act of our own. In every case it is the person who acts. Paul himself truly lived on, despite all his strongly negating phrases; and he himself lived and acted all the more deeply and truly the more he partook of Christ's eternal imperishable life. Even under the highest impellings of grace and of Christ, our independent, personal, human life must remain specifically such. It must be lived principally in the intellect and in the will. Christ's life in Paul—for Paul is still in Christ's mystic body—and Christ's life in us must find its principal expression in the mind and in the heart. In the present "body of this death" (ROM. vii, 24) our conversation must be in the heaven of Christ's mind and heart. We must 69 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH think His thoughts and love His loves. His life, too, both as man and as God, in Himself and in Paul and in us, is specifically that of intellection and volition. The Most Blessed Eucharist proves that Christ by no means ignores His Body or ours. Both we and He have true human bodies with which to participate in the mutual expression of love, but the supreme interchange must be in the faculties which make us like to God. With these distinctions clearly in mind we may hope to understand in some small measure the glor ious mystery in the Christian soul of the faith that works through love; the mystery of our participa- tion in the very nature and the life of Christ our Saviour. First and most deeply, He lives in us by an in- terior, intrinsic communication of the divine nature itself; an assertion altogether too darmg, if St. Peter, under divine inspiration, had not said rt be- fore us. St. Peter, however, did so speak. "By Whom" (by Christ), he says, "He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature (II PETER i, 4). Theologians have taken these words as the nearest attainable approach to a defini- tion of grace in its most fundamental aspects. The Church itself has taken them in their plain open sense, and has used them in her most sacred liturgy of the Mass. At the blending of the wine and water in the chalice this beautiful prayer is used: "O God, Who in creating human nature has wonder- fully dignified it, and still more wonderfully re- formed i t ; grant that by the mystery of this water and wine we may be made partakers of His divine 70 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH nature, Who didst vouchsafe to become partaker of our human nature, Jesus Christ, our Lord, Thy Son." In our own human way, searching for a reason why this should be so, the connection is plain. If we are to live the life of God—and that is a true description of the supernatural life —we must have some share in the nature of God. Everywhere nature is the base and measure of action. St. Peter has shown us that we have this internal principle. That principle we call grace, divine, supernatural grace. We can reach to some measure of understanding of the nature of sanctifying grace by recogniz- ing it as the quality in our soul which makes us lov- able in the sight of God. True love will not stoop below its own nature. Where love exists between two human beings the attraction of the will is to Some good already existing in the beloved. The desire of the lover to possess this attractive good in the beloved constitutes the essential act of loving. Here between equals the quality which calls forth the love has been already existing. When God deigns to love with an especial love the creature He has made, He must give to that creature the quality which will elevate him to the plane of the divine and at the same time make him lovable in the sight of his Creator. That quality granted to the human soul is in the nature of a habit and inheres in the essence of the soul. This quality is a participation of the sonship of Christ and renders the human soul already created in the likeness of God worthy of the love accorded to sonship by adoption. This adoption by grace, however, is not an external fiction of law but an act of God which, without changing CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH 71 what is essential to the order of our nature, raises i t by this gif t to the point of making us truly chil- dren of God. I t is thus that we become partakers of the divine nature. Such participation constitutes our holiness, and thus this grace is called sancti- fying. Thus grace elevates our nature, without disrupting it. Our nature, however, needs faculties as well as a soul. God, therefore, having enriched our soul by supernatural grace, also gives us supernatural facul- ties with which we can fitly bring into action the energies of grace. These supernatural faculties are principally Faith for the intellect, and Charity, with its handmaid Hope, for the will. Then also are infused Prudence, and Justice, and Fortitude, and Temperance; considered standards of action. These together span the vast heaven of our super- natural l ife; fading like the colors of the rainbow, insensibly one into the other, and forming a bow of promise of things yet higher still to come beyond their earthly extension. To this habitual sanctification, God's love is always adding numberless passing suggestions of His light and power to ever greater achievement. These are the actual graces. Using these faithfully we can say with Paul, "Forgetting the things that are behind, and stretching forth myself to those that are before, I press towards the mark, to the prize of the supernal vocation of God in Christ Jesus" (PHIL, iii, 13-14). Both the transient and the habitual phases of Christ's life within us are united in the Most Blessed Eucharist—made effective by His repeated reception in Holy Communion. Indeed, on His own 72 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH authority, without His intimate companionship through this Sacrament, we must die. "Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and dring His blood, you shall not have life in you" (JOHN vi, 54). The receiving of Christ in the Eucharist is an act of union. Since one of the persons here united is divine, and since an infinite love is really the bond of union, Christ, with our consent and desire, assumes a dominion over our entire being, regards it as His own and shares with it in some measure the love that He gives to His own ever sacred humanity. Thus we are strengthened in supernat- ural things beyond any strength of our own. What is weak, blended with what is strong, does not be- come the victor, but the vanquished. The water blended with the wine in the chalice does not turn that wine into water, but is itself turned first into wine, then into the very Blood of Christ. So, as the priest prays in the prayer already quoted, we, united with Christ in Holy Communion, do not depress His divinity but are ourselves ele- vated to a share in His divine nature. We have the happiness of, belonging to Christ. We are called to live the life of Christ, but it is from Him that we must all receive it. He has the supreme power of giving this grace to "every man that cometh into this world." He has a primacy of divine influence by being, for every soul in a different degree, the one source of the grace by which they live. "Christ," says St. Thomas, "has received the fullness of grace not only for Himself, but in His capacity as head of the Church." It is because we are united so closely to Christ, forming with Him a single body that Christ has willed that all His works should be 73 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH ours. St. Thomas tells us that the fact that Christ has suffered voluntarily in our place and in our name, constitutes so great a good that, for having found this good in human nature, God, being ap- peased, forgets all offences in those who unite themselves to Christ. St. Thomas says fur ther that ' the head and members are, as it were, one mystical person and, therefore, the satisfaction of Christ pertains to all the fai thful as to His members. Should these things seem to any hearer tremen- dous issues f a r removed f rom the concrete and the obvious which men so love today, the reason is to be sought precisely in the loss of those fundamentals of fa i th from which these conclusions are easily and logically deduced. The universality of participa- tion in the life of Christ by men and women of good will is the doctrine, as we have seen, openly pro- claimed by the Apostle St. Paul for all who, like himself, "love His coming" (the coming of Christ). I t is t rue that the life of the Christian as we have portrayed it deals with high, ceaseless activity in the supernatural order. That order, however, does actually exist all round about us in the world today. Thanks be to His Holy Name, the men and women are numbered by millions who in Christ live, move, and have their being. On one occasion, it is true, our Lord said to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world," (JOHN xviii, 36) but we must always remember that there are two very real worlds. There is a world fully represented by Pilate, the world of reckless, unprincipled, self-seeking; the world of material, external splendor, the world of the coward and the craven, the world of force and coercion—the world of which even Christ was forced 74 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH to say, "I pray not for the world," (JOHN xvii, 9) and it was of this world that Christ said to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." There is also another very real world, a world more true and more lasting than the first; for even here there is a world of justice, and love, a world of the heart a world of gentle, patient, brave, forbearing people' a world of kindly thought for others, the world of all true kings, and here Christ is supreme. His kingdom is precisely this glorious realm in which heaven and earth have met, where He has reconciled the lowest and the highest. Yet despite all the splendor of this wondrous kingdom of God in the individual human soul, there is another and greater beyond the stars: a kingdom that is essentially needed to explain and complete the present kingdom. Christ is not only the arch that spans the abyss between, He is not only the way and the truth and the life, He is also the splen- dor of that other kingdom, the bright star of eternity's fadeless morning. He is Omega as well as Alpha. He is the last as well as the first. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," said St. John; and we can say: "In the end will be the Word and the Word will be with God, and the Word will be God " In the vast final harmony of that divine eternal Word, m the eternal conclusiveness of that great Omega closing the alphabet of all earthly affairs there will be fulfilled for all of us the words of that same great St. Paul, "The Spirit Himself giveth tes- timony to our spirit, that we are the sons of God And if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ" (Rom. VIII, i 6 and 17) Always Christ. L ' > ' 77 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH ONE FOLD AND ONE SHEPHERD (Address delivered by Right Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan in the Catholic Hour, February 22, 1931) I We considered last Sunday the mission of Christ living in the souls of the faithful. We reflected on the loye underlying the action of God elevating man to a share in the divine nature. This elevation, we found, can be merited by no mere human effort. I t is the work of God alone. God gives Himself with the most gratuitous mercy and love. I t is the Church doctrine that every movement of man toward God is initiated and supported by God's grace. Such a grace we call an "actual" grace, and such is every holy thought, every good resolution, and every pure affection. The state of direct communion of life and love with God, the condition and quality of the soul which we call "sanctifying" grace is effected in the soul likewise by God alone. We are made sons of God solely by the eternal love of God. For thé individual this is the central fact of the glad tidings of Christianity: "As many as received Him, He gave them power to be made the sons of God" ( JOHN i, 12). The child of God, the fai thful soul, is, therefore, according to the Church's view, essentially a creation of grace, a child of the eternal Love. Since it is the function of Christ and of Christianity—the continu- ing mission of Christ—to bring the love and grace of God to sense-bound man under the veil of visible and evident signs, it is clear that the Church is to serve thé fai thful through the sacramental mediation of the grace of Christ. The seven Sacraments are God's appointed means whereby man shall ordinarily experience the action of the grace of Christ, the 76 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH elevation of his being into the stream of God's life and love. We say that this is the ordinary medium of God's grace and, consequently, extraordinary ways and activities of God's grace in souls not attached to the visible society which dispenses the Sacraments are not excluded. God gives His grace in all the infinite freedom of His omnipotence. We speak here of that which we have found made mani- fest as His intended plan of salvation, historically set forth in the inspired narration of His life and actions. On the other hand, man is not purely passive under the action of grace. As the Church conceives original sin, man's religious and moral faculties are not impaired in their natural substance, but weak- ened in their operation inasmuch as original sin deflects them from their supernatural course and gives them, therefore, a false direction.. The effect of grace, as the upsurging of eternal love within him, is to bring a man's faculties back again into their original course, and so set them free. The Church conceives of grace as a vital force which awakens and summons the powers of man's soul, inspires them with a new love. When grace thus works on the sinner it produces in man those spir- itual acts of fai th and trust and -of fear of God's judgments, which are the preparation, on the human side, for justification. The justification itself which follows those acts is the sole work of God. Adam in the "Spirit of Catholicism," which we have just been quoting, completes this idea with these words: "In the Sacrament of Baptism or Penance God answers the appeal of the penitent with His kiss of forgiving love: 'I baptize thee, I absolve thee . ' " CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH This beautiful relationship was set forth by Our Lord in many striking parables. One on which He •dwelt with tender insistence places before us a pic- tu re of His care for the souls of men as He would have His Church understand Her mission. In the eighteenth chapter of 'St . Matthew Our divine Lord asks: "If a man have a hundred sheep, and one of them should go as t ray: doth he not leave the ninety- nine in the mountains, and goeth to seek that which is gone astray?" There can be no doubt as to who -that shepherd is. He is Christ, the fairest of all the sons of men, and the eternal Son of God. We see Him as He finds what He sought. He lifts it up, places it upon His shoulder and retraces His pathway. We have all heard of scenes in which •some thoughtless child has mounted one step af ter .another into a place of peril, and stands frightened .at last and helpless, too, perhaps without human aid at hand. We have all done things like that at -times; like that straying sheep or that little child, we seek forbidden pleasures and forbidden heights, for reasons we could scarcely define, and yet which possess a strangely potent efficiency. Perhaps we d o not study or notice our actions until at a late ins tant we recognize that the very pathway of our progress has become a pitiless peril. Ill were it then for us, were there not some gentle yet power- f u l hand to draw us back to safety, some shepherd tha t came as Christ comes before us today. This -evening we wish to use this divinely drawn picture in yet another divinely suggested scene. Christ .once spoke of a time when there would be one 'fold and one shepherd—again there is no doubt as to ^the shepherd, nor is there any uncertainty regarding 78 CHRIST AND HIS •CHURCH the fold. For the shepherd is Christ and the fold is His Church; and the gathering of all fa i thful ¡.J3 from the uttermost confines of the earth Into the one fold of Christ claims our thought for a few minutes tonight. Clearly, we should search in vain for any inspiration greater or t ruer than the picture of Christ, descending the hills with the missing sheep upon His rescuing shoulders. His power is complete in providential repetitions to make His fold universal. Indeed, for a thousand reasons of type and of promise and of prophecy, any other conclusion would be inconceivable. In the vast continuity of God's work from Genesis to the Apocalypse, we have seen Christ ever more and more fully revealed as; the head of a spiritual kingdom that was ever in- creasing from glory to glory towards the most mig- nificent final splendor, with no place left even on earth for final outstanding defeat. Christ has de- clared more than once that not even the slightest part of any of His words can pass away without complete fulfillment. He has said that there will be a time when all mankind will form a single and harmonious religious body under a common head» If God's glorious promises were to prove a formal failure at the end even here, Christ's kingdom would be but a pitiable pretense, God's pact with Abraham would be falsified. Liberation of Moses would be but a disastrous postponement of a still greater ser- vitude. David and Solomon would be but mislead- ing types. Christ's own glorious resurrection f rom the dead would be a fantastic prelude to a deeper and more profound entombment of earthly failure. The gates of hell would have prevailed against the 79 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Church. In any heart, in any thousands of hearts, in any nation, Christ must triumph here or He will not triumph hereafter. Ear th can be a failure only inasmuch as heaven can be a failure. Ear th is the only stadium of probation. At its fur ther limit, "If the tree fall to the south, or to the north, in what place soever it shall fall, there shall it be" (ECCL. xi, 3). Referring to His own death, Christ once said: "And I, if I be lifted up f rom the earth, will draw all things to Myself" (JOHN xii, 32), again a false prediction, if, even af ter the entire course of all earthly ages, rebellion still seethes around Him. F a r be it f rom Our God to fail where He has claimed success and completion. God made man—all men every man—for Himself; and He has made this whole great world for Himself; not for a stage on which evil was to deride Him. "Christ loved the Church," the great Apostle St. Paul declared, "and delivered Himself up for i t ; . . . that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that it should be . . . without blemish" (EPH. v, 25, 26, 27). This were an utterly fallacious design and fallacious hope, if that Church is never to be f ree f rom str i fe; if it, His mystical body, is forever to be maimed. One may say his ideal-is f a r f rom accomplishment. This grave t ru th saddens the earnest Christian everywhere throughout the world but does not im- pinge upon his fai th and his hope, his knowledge that the word of God will be fulfilled. "The Church," says Cardinal Newman, "is ever ailing and lingers on in weakness, 'always bearing about in the body, the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of 80 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Jesus might be m a d e manifest. ' " I t is an essential property of the Church to be so, because of her vocation to save men. Nowhere else does evil be- come so visible because nowhere else is it so keenly fought. That f a r day of triumph awaits the fulfill- ment of God's designs; and if it seems f a r distant in an age which seems so bent on bartering Christ, not for thirty pieces of silver, but for any profit that the hour offers, in an age which seems loudly to choose the Barabbas of a materialistic humanity and in the language of action to be crying "away with Christ," the fai thful heart will know that God is not mocked and that the supernatural life of grace is a glorious thing even now upon the earth, in the hearts of millions accepting Our Lord's promises. The fai thful know that the perfection of the Church i s yet to be, that the Church of glory will not appear until the end of time, and that, therefore, it is ac- cording to the economy of salvation that the Church of the present should remain unfinished, incomplete, until the coming of the Son of Man. I t is enough tha t we have His promise—the gates of hell will not prevail against her and His spirit will abide with her until the end of the world. Century by century men of good will find the grace of Christ a vital bond joining them to God. The great fold of His believers, the living members of His mystical body a re using the shelter and nourishment to be found in His Church and Sacraments. The Good Shepherd reaching out, going a fa r into the pathways of human weakness and even among the brambles of wilful passions is finding every day the straying ones who will accept His loving offer of rescue. The fold in- creases as His love reaches through the years, and CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH we can leave to His loving decision the day of triumph as certain to come. Earnest hearts the world- over must make re- doubled and sustained prayer for that unity of fai th and of religious practice which has been Christ's constant wish and design f rom the first sunrise that ever flashed over a broken world up to the present moment here tonight. Never for even an instant since the world was spoiled has man had peace in the realm of his highest interests. The innocent Abel was slain at the very threshhold of Paradise on religious grounds: and the insane struggle is still unabated in destructive violence today. This is wholly man's work. There is not the slightest necessity for this senseless internecine strife, no valid excuse for this incessant fratricidal hostility. The instant that each man does his duty as he knows it this rabid disorder will cease. Standing in the way of this due religious har- mony, there is perhaps no obstacle greater than the natural personal wish to deal directly with God, and to spurn all human interposition. I t is t rue that this feeling is natural. I t is even instinctive. I t is also a dictate, however, of reason and of na ture to obey our God and our Creator whenever and wherever He has spoken. He has made our sub- mission to authorities acting in His name obliga- tory in matters of religion. Why He has done so, it is not ours to ask. Our task is simple obedience. If Christ had told us to spurn all attempts on the par t of men to influence, guide, or control our re- ligious actions we should all be very happy to do so. The love of liberty is innate. All men feel it alike. As a matter of fact Christ has ordained the exact 82 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH opposite. He has established human authorities in religious affairs, and He has classed us with the heathen and the publican if and when we disobey. He Himself obeyed when He was here. St. Paul, a disciple, followed without question where so great a master had led. Like ourselves, St. Paul liked di- rect converse with God, and even before he arose "trembling and astonished" from the dust of the Da- mascus road, he asked, in the very best of disposi- tions. "Lord, what wilt thou have me do?" Despite, however, St. Paul's undoubted good faith, God did not endorse that directness, told him to seek human direction, told him to go into the city, "and there it shall be be told thee what thou must do" (ACTS ix, 6, 7). Like him, we too must go into the city, into the city of God, into the Church, to find what we must do. Where Christ and St. Paul could afford to obey, we need not fear any undue servility. If there could be any unforgivable sin, it would seem to be that of still fomenting religious strife today, when the dawn of a better state of feeling is undoubted. After two thousand years of open and necessarily exposed development, there is written large across the sky a record of unity, of rule and of belief, of pureness and exaltation of doctrine, of universality of existence, and of Apostolic continuity of religious life, that even on natural grounds im- poses an unescapable responsibility of investigation on all intelligent men. RECAPITULATION In the beginning of these discourses, we called attention to the need of earnest cooperation on the par t of the hearer. Men are not mere automatons, nor are their proper rules those of a log or a stone 83 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH or a thoughtless child. God exacts, as He has a right to do, the due use of the intellectual powers H e has given us. Every individual man is under a serious obligation of aiding t ru th and justice in a darkened and struggling world. As the measure of a man's influence widens, in precisely the same measure increases his responsibility in this impor- t an t matter. Every sensible man should forever put aside the morbid feeling that God or God's Church will gain anything by his own personal accession to the ranks of earnest, honest, active religious believ- ers. The sunlight gains nothing when we step into its warmth. I t is we that feel the grateful change f rom the chill of the shade. Whatever of gain there may be in our due and right action in religious af- fa i r s is for ourselves alone, not for God or for the vast organization which places all His divine wealth a t our disposal. If this serious attention due so serious a subject has been given, the Incarnation will have been recognized as a crowning act of God's creative power. I t will have been seen that its motive was no other than a vast overpowering love; that in itself it was a union of divinity and humanity, to elevate the one and render the other more accessible; tha t it was divinely foretold both in general and in exactest detail for thousands of years before it was an actual fac t ; that it became familiar and real to men through Christ's daily l ife; that that same Christ founded a new and higher spiritual kingdom and realm with Himself as its Prophet, its Priest, and its King; that He left a Church with full juridic warrant to continue His heavenly work; that He Himself nevertheless remains forever with that 84 CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH Church as its hidden mystic life; and, finally, tha t f rom both the ancient prophecies and f rom Christ 's own words that Church is one day to include all men and all nations in one peaceful fold—surely, a body of doctrine to which no reasonable man can refuse the tribute of earnest and continued investi- gation and prolonged meditation. One word more: Among the many who have sa graciously written to us during the course of these sermons, a very few have unhappily taken from our words the idea that we declared all persons not members of the visible body of Christ's Church, cut off f rom salvation through Christ. We, of course, said no such thing. Indeed, our care has been to emphasize the glorious knowledge that Christ died for all men. We did indeed set forth the clear his- torical fact that Christ established His Church, a visible society, to carry on His mission, and tha t , consequently membership in that Church was, ini the New Law, the ordinary means of salvation through Christ's grace in the Sacraments. Since, however, millions of men have never heard of Christ in the course of long centuries, and many others have been born and reared under circum- stances which have kept them, without any fault of theirs, f rom Faith in Christ, or f rom the fullness of that Faith, we have pointed out that, doing all that lies in their power to be true and good and fai thful according to the light granted them, such men and women may belong to the Soul of Christ 's Church, and the power of Christ's grace is unlimited for their salvation. I It is precisely in the desire t& see all such sharing in the intimacy of the household of the Faith that we long for the triumphant fu l - CHRIST AND HIS CHtJRCfi 86 fillment of Our Lord's promise that all men will one day in unity of Faith wear His Name, and be gladly and proudly His. A f a r greater than I has told you these very days the persistent hope and prayer of the Church for unity. Indeed, this sacred task entrusted to me, so dear to me even while so fa r beyond my halting powers ; this noble privilege of broadcasting for the first time across this nation the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, Our Lord and our blood Brother, could have no happier close than to re-echo the prayer of Our Holy Father, heard round the world so recently,, asking for all men the light and guidance which will lead them to The One Fold of the One Shepherd, Jequs Christ, Amen. CARDINAL HATES STATES AIMS OF THE CATHOLIC RADIO HOUR (Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the Studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York City, March 2, 1930). Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of inquiries, must be met. That responsibility rests upon the National Council of Catholic Men . . . . This radio hour is for all the people of the United States. To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora- tion, foundation and growth of our glorious Country. . . . Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our country-men. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material, and a more spiritual standard among our people. With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa- thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue. So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there- fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known, to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine through Christ: pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques- tioning hearts. OTHER RADIO TALKS PUBLISHED OUR SUNDAY VISITOR is the authorized publisher of all Catholic Hour Radio addresses in pamphlet form. The following is a list of these pamphlets published up to date: "The Divine Romance," the seven lectures delivered by the Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, Ph. D., D.D., LL. D., an 80-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 20c postpaid. In quantities, $9.00 per 100. "The Moral Order" and "Mary, the Mother of Jesus," the six addresses by the Rev. George Johnson, a 64-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 15c postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100. "A Trilogy on Prayer," the three addresses by the Rev. Thomas P. Burke, a 32-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 10c postpaid. In quantities, $5.00 per 100. "The Story of the Bible," the five addresses by the Rev. Dr. Francis L. Keenan, a 64-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 15c postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100. "Four Religious Founders," a collection of the five addresses by Rev. Dr. Francis J. Connell, C. SS. R., Rev. Benedict Bradley, O. S. B., Rev. Thomas M. Schwertner, O. P., Rev. Sigmund Cratz, O. M. Cap., and Rev. M. J. Ahern, S. J., a 56-page pamph- let. Single copy, price 15c postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100. "The Philosophy of Catholic Education," the three addresses by the Rev. Dr. Charles L. O'Donnell, a 32-page pamphlet. Sin- gle copy, price 10 postpaid. In quantities, $5.00 per 100. "Christianity and the Modern Mind," the six addresses by the Rev. John A. McClorey, S. J., a 64-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 15c postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100. "The Moral Law," the eight addresses by. the Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., editor of the Catholic World, an 88 page pamph- let. Single copy, price 25c postpaid. In quantities, $9.50 per 100. "Christ and His Church," the eight addresses by the Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan, D.D., LL.D., an 88-page pamphlet. Single copy, price 25c postpaid. 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