8. The Communion of Saints

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If one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it: or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it (1 Cor. xii, 26).

The way of the saints leads from earth through the place of purification to heaven. It is no lonely way. We travel it in the fellowship of the body of Christ, growing and blossoming in the fullness of Christ, giving and taking one from another "according to the grace that is given to each member." We have already pointed out that the saints in heaven and on earth win their positive and proportionate importance in the organism of the Body of Christ by this reciprocal give and take. When the Church speaks of the Communion of Saints she is thinking primarily of this interaction, of this confluence of the powers of Jesus that work in His saints, of this supernatural interchange of graces, of this solidarity of life and movement. For it is important to note that the Communion of Saints does not simply mean that every member of the Body exercises its own special function faithfully for the good of the whole, and that every saint practices this communion simply by fulfilling his personal task. St. Paul says: "If one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it. If one member glory, all the members rejoice with it" (1 Cor. xii, 26). All the saints are bound together, over and above their personal functions, by a close community of life and sentiment, by a fellowship and sympathy in sorrow and joy. Being members of Christ, their souls do not stand before God as isolated units. However individual may be the character of their sanctity, yet it is still the life of a member of Christ and as such belongs to all. Consequently, although the doctrine of the Communion of Saints was not inserted in the Apostles' Creed until about the middle of the fifth century, yet it is substantially contained in St. Paul's teaching. In effect the doctrine represents the practice of the early Church in its prayer, and does no more than set forth the full meaning of the Christian fellowship. We shall in the following pages consider the various aspect of this close fellowship, and in so doing we shall realize anew how world-wide and even God-wide is the Catholic outlook, and how it comprehends both God and man in one mighty circle of life, so that God may be "all in all"; and yet, on the other hand, stands silent in lowliest reverence before the majesty of God and anxiously observes the limits imposed upon every creature by the nature of its being.

The Communion of Saints comprises, and is made fruitful by, three great vital movements. A stream of ardent love flows from the Church Triumphant to the members of Christ on earth, and thence returns in countless rushing brooks to the blessed in heaven. A similar traffic of love takes place between the members of the Church Suffering and the Church Militant. And thirdly that same communion operates between the several members of the Church Militant, producing those fruitful centers of life whereby the earthly fellowship is continually renewed.

The Church Triumphant and the Church Militant.—The relations of these two consist in the veneration of angels and saints on the one hand, and on the other in their intercession for us and the application to us of the merits of the saints. It is a fundamental principle of the Church's teaching that adoration belongs to God alone. From the account of St. Polycarp's martyrdom (xvii, 3), which is our earliest evidence for the veneration of the martyrs, through St. Augustine and St. Jerome, both eloquent advocates of the veneration of the saints, down to St. Thomas Aquinas, who has defined with unequaled lucidity the nature of this Catholic practice, the theology of the Church is plain, and emphatically insists that the veneration which we give to angels and saints is essentially (specifice) different from the worship which we offer to God. The difference is in fact the whole difference between the creature and the Creator. To God alone belongs the complete service of the whole man, the worship of adoration, that worship and prayer which are inspired by awe before the mystery of God (cultus latriae). To God alone do we cry, "Lord, have mercy on us!" since God alone is the All- perfect, the Infinite, the Lord. But so pervasive and so creative is God's glory that it does not shine only in the face of His Only-begotten Son, but is reflected also in all those who in Him have become children of God, and therefore illuminates with unfading radiance the countenances of the blessed. So we love them as countless dewdrops in which the sun's radiance is mirrored. We venerate them because we find God in them. "Their name liveth unto generation and generation. Let the people shew forth their wisdom and the church declare their praise." (Ecclus. xliv, 14-15). And because God is in them, therefore are we confident that they can and will help us; for where God is, there is our help. They do not help us through any strength of their own, but through the strength of God, and they help us only so far as creatures may. They cannot themselves sanctify us. For sanctification, the new life in God, is to be obtained only from Him who is Himself the divine life, that is from our divine Redeemer. St. Augustine tells us that the power of awakening souls to this life belongs to God alone[1] So the Catholic knows that he belongs to God alone, is related only to Him and lives only in Him, and that not only in the substance of his natural being, but also in his supernatural life. In comparison with our intimate and vital conjunction with God, and with that marvelous contact with the Infinite Being, where difference is annulled and where the Divine Life penetrates our souls and continually pervades them anew, the activity of even angels and saints pales into insignificance. For it is God and God only who redeems us and gives us life. Yet angels and saints have the power to accompany the great work of our redemption with their fostering love and by their "intercession" (intercessione) to elevate our prayers for help into the great solitary prayer of the whole Body of Christ. It is true that God knows our necessities, and needs no saints to tell Him. And it is true also that His Only-begotten Son by His sacrifice on the Cross merited His grace and mercy for us once and for all, so that they are ever near us. Yet, for the very reason that Jesus Christ, the God-man, is the Mediator of our redemption, the saints also have a share in it. For they are members of our Redeemer. He is not without them, and they are not without Him. No help comes to us, but that the members of Christ in their manner co-operate with their Head. We say "in their manner," that is, otherwise than the Head. This is the fulfillment of the law of love, the great structural law of the Kingdom of God. God redeems men in such a way that every love-force in the Body of Christ has its proper share in the work. The Body of Christ of its very nature implies communion and co-operation, and so the divine blessing never works without the members, but only in and through their unity. God can help us without the saints; but He will not help us without their co-operation, for it is His nature and will to be communicative love.

Therefore, although the veneration of the saints has undergone some development in the course of the Church's history—in so far as the primitive veneration of apostles, prophets and martyrs expanded about the middle of the third century to include all the saints, and then in the fourth century, not uninfluenced by that veneration of our Lady which was promoted by the Nestorian conflicts, was deepened into faith in their intercession—yet such veneration was from the beginning germinally contained in the nature of the Church as the Body of Christ, in the Christian conviction of the fellowship and solidarity of His members, and ultimately in the comprehensive validity of the Christian commandment of love. It is no pagan growth, but indigenous to Christianity.[2] It has this much in common with pagan hero-worship, that it venerates the historical achievement of the saintly figure and reverences the manifestation of the divine in human form. But that is an impulse which is not specifically pagan, but belongs to our common humanity and is therefore of universal validity. But the special characteristic of paganism was to obliterate the boundaries between the divine and human and to cultivate polytheism. In that respect the influence of paganism upon the development of the veneration of the saints was rather to impede than to promote, for it was the fear of polytheistic instincts which prevented the earlier blossoming of this veneration. It was not until the Christian conception of God and the worship of our Lord were deeply and firmly rooted in the consciousness of the masses, that the ground was ready for the specifically Christian form of hero-worship.

The intervention of the saints is effected especially in their intercession with God, that is, in the special love with which, as they see us in God, they follow up our fortunes and recommend them to Him. Like Onias, the High Priest, and the Prophet Jeremias, who "as friends of the brethren on earth pray much for the people and for the holy city" (cf. 2 Macch. xv, 14), so does the great company of the saints supplicate for the struggling members of Christ on the earth. Their intercessory prayer manifests their ardent longing that the name of God should be sanctified and His will accomplished on earth as well as in Heaven. And so it is nothing but living and active love, and a true expression of their blessed life. The Church is not deaf to the pulsation of this life, and therefore continually commends herself anew to their intercession. She cannot think of her Head, without also naming His holy members. Her whole liturgy is a going "to Mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel" (Hebr. xii, 22-24). Above all she turns to Mary, in trustful prayer. The Catholic regards Mary's intercession as all-powerful with God, and Catholic Christianity is becoming more and more clearly conscious that as mother of the Redeemer and as aware of every pulsation of her Son's heart, Mary is the mother also of all His grace.

If Mary is the mother of all the faithful; the influence of the other saints is defined by the position which they occupy in the whole organism of the Body of Christ. This belief that angels and saints have special spheres and special tasks of love is the foundation of Catholic doctrine concerning the Guardian Angels, abundantly attested in the Scriptures (Tob. xii, 12; Zach. i, 12; Hebr. i, 14), and of Catholic faith in the special help of Patron Saints.

But the ministry of the saints to the faithful on earth is not limited to loving intercession. It is also a love of self-sacrifice and service, a love which is ready to share its own wealth with all the struggling members of the Body of Christ, to the widest extent that it can so share it. The saints during their mortal life amassed beyond the measure of their duty a store of wealth and of sacrificial values made precious by the Blood of Christ. The superabundance of their love and penance forms a rich deposit. United with the superabundance of the merits of Christ, and derived from those merits, this wealth of the saints is that "treasure of the Church" (thesaurus ecclesiae), that sacred family inheritance, which belongs to all the members of the Body of Christ, and which is at the service especially of its sick and feeble members. "If a member suffers, all the members suffer with it." When a member has not made sufficient reparation for his sins, when after the forgiveness of sin and the remission of its eternal punishment, there yet remains a debt of "temporal" punishment, which the just God in His wise ordinance attaches still to forgiven sin, then all the members of the Body help to bear this burden of punishment, and then the Church in virtue of her power of binding and loosing may supplement the poverty of one member out of the wealth of another. And thus she grants "indulgences," that is to say, supplements the insufficient reparation of her weaker members by means of the vicarious superabundance of the merits of Christ and His saints. So that the indulgence not only attests the seriousness of sin and teaches that guilt must be expiated "to the last farthing," but is also an illustration of the blessed potency of the Communion of Saints and of the vicarious expiation which is interwoven with it. All the main ideas upon which the doctrine of indulgences is based—the necessity of expiation for sin, the co-operative expiation of the members of the Body of Christ, the Church's power so to bind and loose on earth that her action is valid in heaven—all these ideas are contained in holy Scripture. So that although the historical form of the indulgence has undergone some change—from the vicarious expiatory suffering of the martyrs and confessors, and the penitential "redemptions" of the Middle Ages down to our modern indulgenced prayer—and may in the future undergo further change, and although the theology of indulgences has only been gradually elaborated, yet in its substance the doctrine is in line with the pure thought of the Scriptures. Here, as in no other practice of the Church, do the members of the Body of Christ co-operate in loving expiation. All the earnestness and joyfulness, humility and contrition, love and fidelity, which animate the Body are here especially combined and manifested. For that reason, as the Council of Trent says, "the use of indulgences is very salutary for the people of Christ" (Sess. 25 De indulg.), But, because indulgences are based upon truths which are not easy for the rude and uneducated, distortion and abuse are very possible, especially where the people are not well instructed in religion and where Church authority is not vigilant. There were many abuses during the period before the Council of Trent, and we are still suffering their evil consequences. But it is a proof of the permanent value of indulgences that abuses have not been able to kill them, but have only purged them with cleansing fire and aroused them to a new and deeper life. They have become in our day, more than ever, a valuable adjunct to pastoral work. Every instructed Catholic knows that an indulgence is not a remission of sin, but only of the temporal penalties attached to sin. He knows that it belongs therefore not to the center and core of the life of grace, but only to its outermost circumference. The granting of an indulgence is not a sacramental or priestly act, but an act of Church authority. Every indulgenced practice has meaning and value only in so far as it is at the same time a simple prayer in the Holy Ghost. A man who would want to use prayer, not for loving converse with God, but merely for the gaining of indulgences, would misuse it and would display a bad misunderstanding of its meaning and nature. The supreme aim of all Christian piety, the one absolutely necessary thing, is to live a new life in God and to be delivered by the power of this life from the guilt of sin and from eternal punishment. No indulgence can exempt from this duty. Indeed the gaining of an indulgence presupposes this one necessary thing, for there can be no remission of temporal punishment where there is no remission of guilt and eternal punishment. So that indulgences may be said to operate at least indirectly towards this purification from sin and towards the establishment of the new life in God. The indulgence, therefore, of its nature is not instituted for the externalizing of the religious life, but for its deepening and enrichment. It is an emphatic summons to repentance, a strong impulse to vital incorporation in the Body of Christ, so as to obtain His blessing. And as an indulgence does not simply abolish the whole burden of temporal punishment, but remits it only so far as your works, exactly prescribed by the Church, unite with the merits of Christ and His saints, it may serve also to arouse the sluggish conscience and to make it sensitive, not only to the infinite seriousness of sin, but also to the unparalleled blessings contained in the fellowship of the members of Christ.

The Church Suffering and the Church Militant constitute in their relations a second circle of most vital activities. Having entered into the night "wherein no man can work," the Suffering Church cannot ripen to its final blessedness by any efforts of its own, but only through the help of others—through the intercessory prayers and sacrifices (suffragia) of those living members of the Body of Christ who being still in this world are able in the grace of Christ to perform expiatory works. The Church has from the earliest times faithfully guarded the words of Scripture (2 Macch. xii, 43 ff.) that "it is a holy and a wholesome thing to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins." The suppliant cry of her liturgy: "Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them," can be heard already in the Acts of the martyrdom of SS Perpetua and Felicitas (A.D. 203) and is represented in numerous sepulchral inscriptions of the most ancient period, while theologians and Fathers of the Church, beginning with Tertullian, have supplied its substantial proof. The theology of the schismatical Greek Church agrees with Latin theology in its belief in the efficacy of prayers for the dead. So fundamental indeed and so natural to man's hope and desire and love is this belief, that historians of religion have discovered it among almost all non-Christian civilized peoples: a striking illustration of Tertullian's saying that the human soul is naturally Christian.

The Catholic, therefore, is jealous to expiate and suffer for the "poor souls," especially by offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice, wherein Christ's infinite expiation on the Cross is sacramentally re-presented, and stimulating and joining itself with the expiatory works of the faithful, passes to the Church Suffering according to the measure determined by God's wisdom and mercy. So the saying of St. Paul that the members of the Body of Christ "are mutually careful one for another" (1 Cor. xii, 25) is nowhere more comprehensively and luminously fulfilled than in the Church's suffrages for her dead children. When, in the Memento of the Mass, in the presence of the sacred Oblation and under the gaze so to speak of the Church Triumphant, she cries to heaven: "Be mindful also, O Lord, of thy servants and handmaids .... who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in the sleep of peace," then truly heaven and earth greet each other, the Church Triumphant, Suffering and Militant meet in a "holy kiss," and the "whole" Christ with all His members celebrates a blessed love-feast (agape), a memorial of their communion in love and joy and pain.

The relations between the Church of this world and the Church of the next are many and various; scarcely less rich and fruitful is the loving and vital fellowship that exists between the earthly members themselves of the Body of Christ. When the Fathers, beginning with Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana at the commencement of the fifth century, speak of the Communion of Saints, they are thinking especially of this earthly fellowship, and it was this that St. Paul also had specially in mind. It is the mysterious inner life of the Church, the mysterious exchange and commerce in functions and graces between its members, the mysterious process whereby the fellowship of Christ grows up organically into a "holy temple in the Lord," into the habitation of God in the Spirit (Eph. ii, 21-22)

The communion of the members of Christ with the priesthood of their Head is of fundamental importance for their mutual commerce of love. There is but one priesthood in the Church, the priesthood of the God-man, who redeemed us by His whole life, but especially by the sacrifice of His death. But because this invisible priesthood of Christ would make use of visible instruments and organs, so that Christ's grace may be ministered to His people in sacramental words and signs, there rightly exists in the Church a visible priesthood. And that visible priesthood has existed from the beginning, though its full significance was not at first manifest to the consciousness of the faithful, nor expressed in a precise terminology. Whenever the most holy Eucharist was celebrated and whenever sins were forgiven, whenever the grace of Christ was imparted under visible forms, then instrumental agents were employed, and were called sometimes "presbyteri" or priests, sometimes presidents, sometimes overseers (episcopi). The visible priesthood is nothing else than a visible attestation of the continual living and working of Christ in the world.

However manifold and various its names and duties were and are, there is nevertheless but one single priesthood, since the priesthood of Christ is but one. The priesthood is always only the visible manifestation and mediation of the one grace of the one High Priest. Nevertheless the visible priesthood must have its inner differentiation, according to the intimacy with which its holders are incorporated into the priesthood of Christ, and consequently, according to their sacramental authority to realize that priesthood. It is in this sense that Catholic theology definitely distinguishes the specific priesthood from the priesthood of the laity, and not as though the latter did not imply a genuine participation in the priesthood of Christ. St. Augustine (De civ. Dei, xx, 10) and St. Thomas (Summa, 3, Ixiii, 3) are pre-eminent in insisting that it does. A consideration of the Church's teaching with regard to the character which is given by some of the sacraments, may make this point clearer.

It is one of the profoundest truths of Catholic theology that besides the purely personal, the religious and moral relation of the Christian to Christ, as manifested in faith and sanctifying love, there is also an extra-personal and wholly factual relation, which consecrates the Christian abidingly to Christ independently of his subjective life in grace, which gives him Christ irrevocably for his own, which incorporates him once and for all into Christ's high priesthood, and which thereby establishes that indissoluble religious basis upon which the loving intercourse and mutual commerce of Christ and His members is founded. Even the most delicate relation that exists within the Body of Christ, the relation that is of the individual human soul to Christ, is determined by a system of sacred ordinances, of fixed and indissoluble form and of unalterable interconnexion. As in the natural world all free movement of powers is based upon the determinate statics of natural being and its laws, and as all the activity of our subjective powers presupposes the objective world and its stable ordinances, so also in the supernatural world the life of grace with all its striving is closely knit to a permanent basis, to the fixed and inward relations and laws of the Body of Christ. Here once more we recognize the trend of Catholicism towards reality, its complete and fundamental preference for the objective fact and the fixed form. The ultimate basis of this is the fundamental dogma that it is God, and not man, who is the author of natural and supernatural reality, that the new order of being is determined not from below, but from above, and that in the world of religion we have to deal with supernatural facts, which man must simply accept and which do not depend upon him. Man can effectively realize the grace which is imparted to him only on the basis of this sacramental order and within it. Now there are three sacraments which give the Christian his fixed and definite place within the Body of Christ, his fundamental relation to the whole Body, and thereby to the high-priesthood of Christ which supports and pervades the whole. They are the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders. Each of these three sacraments not merely confers grace, but also imparts to the soul of the Christian an abiding religious character, whereby the soul is incorporated in the high-priesthood of Christ in a greater or less degree according to the substance and nature of the sacrament, and remains permanently incorporated therein (character indelebilis), even though—as in the case of the damned—this impersonal and objective relation to Christ results in no abiding subjective and personal relation of grace and blessedness. The highest form of this sacramental incorporation into the high-priesthood of Christ is contained in the sacrament of Holy Orders. This sacrament confers the ineffaceable aptitude and full faculty of conveying the redeeming grace of Christ to the faithful in its widest extent, by word as well as by sacrament. By the priestly character the Christian is consecrated a "minister of Christ" in the full sense of the words, and in so far as the Church is Christ living on in the world, he is consecrated the "minister of the Church." As the external unity of the members of Christ rests upon pope and bishop, so their inner sacramental unity, their community of grace, rests upon the priest.

That priesthood which is imparted to the Christian along with the sacramental character of Baptism and Confirmation is not so inward as this, nor so comprehensive, and therefore it is specifically different from the priesthood in the narrow sense of the word. It does not, as the full priesthood does, confer on the Christian the special position of a minister of the Body of Christ, and for that reason it comprises only a limited number of priestly powers. Nevertheless it is a true priesthood, for it gives the Christian a genuine participation in the one-identical priesthood of Christ.[3] Every baptism is a consecration to the priesthood of Christ, for baptism removes the man from the profane world, appropriates him to Christ and sanctifies him for the performance of those most general acts of worship which belong to the vocation of the child of God. And the sacramental character of Confirmation intensifies this priesthood, since it fits the Christian to take an active share in the building of the temple of God, and equips him for the apostolate and for its "evidences of the spirit and of power." Therefore the Catholic conception of the priesthood of the laity is very far from being a making void of the original doctrine of the priesthood of all Christians. On the contrary the beautiful words of St. Peter in his First Epistle (ii, 9-10) still hold good in all their original freshness and force: "But you are a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people: that you may declare his wondrous deeds, who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Who in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God. Who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy."

This priestly conjunction of all with the high-priesthood of Christ, an utterly sacred conjunction, is the source whence springs the close fellowship of all in their prayer and faith and love.

If we exclude some very rare and really necessary exceptions, such as the communion prayers of the priest, there is no liturgical prayer of the earthly Church which is not a prayer of all for all. As our Lord, in the great prayer which He taught His disciples, joined all who pray into a single unity and directed them to appeal out of this unity to their common Father, and as St. Paul especially enjoined prayer for one another (Rom. xv, 30; 2 Cor. i, 11; Eph. i, 15, etc.), so the Church prays, not in the name of any individual, nor as the mere sum of all individuals, but as a fellowship, as a priestly unity, as the visible priesthood of Christ.

It is not I and you that pray, but the mystical Christ. And so the fruits of this prayer belong to all those who in Christ are consecrated to the Father, to the "chosen generation" and "kingly priesthood." And the Church is desirous that her children should remember their priestly character, and in their private life, as well as in the liturgy, pray, offer and suffer, not for their own needs only, but also for the great and holy fellowship of all the redeemed in Christ. The genuine Christian prayer has the priestly quality of the great High Priest: it is offered "for all" (huper pollon, Mk. xiv, 24), a quality which is so strongly marked in ancient Christian prayer (cf. Martyrium Polycarpi, v, 1; viii, 1). And this priestly communion in prayer and sacrifice is nowhere more clearly and strongly emphasized than in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, wherein Christ our High Priest sacramentally re-presents the sacrifice which He once offered on Calvary. It is true that it is the specially consecrated priest who by his instrumental ministry makes the invisible sacrifice of Christ visible, and he performs his service in liturgical vesture and in a liturgical tongue, which, sanctified by the use of the See of Peter and of so many Fathers of the Church, is raised above the vicissitudes of time and is especially suitable for the enactment of the Mystery. But the priest does not offer for himself alone. Nor does he merely offer as the people's representative, so that as in the ancient sacrifices there is only a moral unity between priest and people. On the contrary the unity between priest and people is a mystically real unity, the unity of the priesthood of Christ, in which both priest and people share, though in different degrees. The liturgy of the Church expresses this wonderful fact, when it causes the priest to pray thus after the Consecration: "We thy (priestly) servants, O Lord, but also thy holy people, mindful of the blessed Passion of Christ thy Son, our Lord, as also of his Resurrection from the dead and his glorious Ascension, do offer to thy glorious Majesty, of thy gifts and presents, a pure sacrifice, a holy sacrifice, an immaculate sacrifice, the holy Bread of eternal life and the Chalice of everlasting salvation."

The common faith of the members of Christ is most intimately bound up with their priestly fellowship in prayer. The Catholic fellowship in faith does not mean merely that all the members of the Church loyally profess one and the same faith, presented to them by apostolic authority, that they share the same luminous ideal, the same effective rule and the same fruitful sources of spiritual life. It means more than that. It means that there is a solidarity and partnership of the faith, a reciprocal interaction and fruitful influence, which by intimate and pervasive action make their external union an inward communion in the faith, a communion which out of the depths of the common experience of the faith is ever expressing itself anew in a single "credo" of the mystical Christ.

This solidarity of Catholic belief manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand it communicates the inwardness and strength of your personal faith, the "power of God" that you experience in your own conscience, to other members of the Body of Christ, in ever new impulses and stirrings, and makes them the vital experience of ever wider circles. On the other hand, this solidarity of the faith, returning so to say upon itself, becomes a fertile soil and fruitful-womb, which impregnated by the infallible teaching of the Church produces a constantly deeper insight into the marks of the faith and a constantly richer appreciation of supernatural truth. In its first aspect—as an evidential force—the solidarity of the faith manifests itself in the Catholic practice of the apostolate. The true and most eminent bearers of the apostolate are the successors of the apostles, those bishops who are united together and with the one Peter, and who are "set by the Holy Ghost over the whole earth" (Acts xx, 28). The preaching of the Gospel has been committed to them, the chosen disciples, ever since that hour when the risen Christ sent them out into the whole world and made them the promise that He would be "with them all days, even unto the consummation of the world" (Matt. xxviii, 18). Christendom, in all periods of its history, has recognized in their concordant testimony, but especially in their harmony with the See of Peter, the guarantee and sign of the true apostolic faith as contrasted with all individual "gnosis" and sectional opinion. They incarnate the "teaching Church" (ecclesia docens), and in relation to their authentic teaching the rest of the Church can only be a "learning Church" (ecclesia discens). No layman, priest, teacher, or theologian of the Church may preach the Word of God unless he be commissioned to do so by the apostolic authority of the Church (missio canonica). For, "How shall they preach, unless they be sent?" (Rom. x, 15). But however true it is that the authoritative preaching of Christian truth appertains exclusively to the apostolic teaching authority, it is equally true that the living of this truth, its realization in deed and in truth, is the business of the individual Christian conscience and of the grace which visits that conscience. And therefore the life of faith, that life which is the supreme goal of the Church's preaching, the one thing necessary, the supernatural fruitfulness of the faith, all intimate experience, all consolation, all confidence, all nobility and lofty courage: these things do not belong to any privileged individual, but to the community, to the fellowship of all those who by baptism have been born again in Christ. Faith becomes living, and the seed of preaching strikes root and grows and bears fruit in the fellowship of the members of Christ. The spirit of the faith is never an isolated or an isolating thing, but always a spirit that presses towards fellowship, because it is derived from the Spirit of God, the Spirit of union and love. If the authorities of the Church are the instruments and bearers of the truth, it is by means of the community that the truth becomes life. It is the special task of the community to attest the truth which is proclaimed by the Church in living it, and to live it in attesting it. It is the special mission and apostolate of the community, in St. Bernard's pregnant words, to "experience the faith in prayer."[4] Being finally incorporated into Christ, its Head, by baptism, and being obliged to confess Him by confirmation, the community has its fundamental duty in this, that it give testimony to Christ by the superabundant wealth of its life, a duty from which no man can absolve it. Living by the faith, it gives testimony to the faith. Every life that is lived in faith is necessarily a persuasive and inspiring life, an incarnation of the apostolic message, a building of the temple of God in oneself and in others. It is that "shewing of the spirit and of power" in the face of which all unbelief is dumb, and by which all weakness is made strong. It is the most convincing proof of Christianity, more effective than all the "persuasive words of human wisdom" (1 Cor. ii, 4).

Every individual member of the community should have this living faith and should exercise this confessorship. It will be exercised in infinitely various ways according to each one's particular qualities, according to his bent of mind, the graces he receives, his special vocation, his environment and fortunes. For the one revealed truth may be expressed and applied in an infinite variety of ways. And every one of these various expressions reveals new vistas of its hidden beauty and power, displays new types of the Christian ideal and sets before us new incentives to imitation. The characteristic types of the Christian life—confessor, martyr, prophet, hermit, monk, virgin, widow— change into ever new forms, and each new form contains a creative tendency to further forms, until the whole content of the Christian life is exhausted. The most fundamental, the simplest, and the most effective form in which living faith becomes inspiring testimony will certainly always be found in the Christian family. The family reflects, as no other social institution does, the mystery of the Church, her real union with Christ, her Head (Eph. v, 32). The family illustrates, as it is illustrated nowhere else, the priesthood of the laity and shows it in all its beauty. For bride and bridegroom, in virtue of their priestly character, are themselves the ministers of the sacrament of their union, and, entering upon the life so consecrated, propagate in their children and children's children their own devout faith. The Christian family is the nucleus of the lay apostolate, of that faith which awakens and enkindles faith, which continually flames up anew and through whole generations gives testimony to Christ.

Besides speaking of that Church authority which guides the stream of the Christian life of faith in a sure course and protects it from all contamination, we ought also to consider the stream itself. While it would be modernistic and erroneous to attribute the formulation of dogma simply to the religious needs of the community and not to the authoritative teaching of the Church, yet it is certain on the other hand that we should not separate official teaching from the faith of the community. The two things cannot in fact be separated, because the life of faith is nourished by the truths of faith, and the truths of faith are attested in the life. Authority guards the truth, and the community manifests the life, and therefore these two stand in a close reciprocal relation and must not be separated. Not only does Church authority mould the life of the community with the truths of faith, but the life of the community reacts on the authority itself, protects it, and illuminates with ever new radiance the truths which it conveys. It is because of this essential union of truth and life, of authority and community, that when Church authority has sometimes and in some places failed in its trust, the life of the community has been the fresh source whence the life of the Church has been renewed. In fact history testifies that when truth has seemed barren and authority overcome by human frailty, the grace of Christ, its Head, has brought forth from the womb of the living community members who by the power of their faith have given new life, not only to their own immediate environment, but to the whole Church. It is in this that the providential and salutary influence and the historical importance of so many saints are manifest. St. Bernard and St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Clement Maria Hofbauer and so many others—what else did they do but bring forth from within themselves "streams of living water"? (cf. Jn. vii, 38); Did not the living ardor of their faith give to wide regions of the Church new growth, new youth, a second spring?

But the blessing of the close fellowship of the faith goes deeper still. It does not merely out of its abundant fruitfulness, as a shewing of the Spirit and of power, attest the Gospel before the world and communicate its own living faith to the weak members of the Body of Christ. It plays an important part also in the begetting of the faith and in the development of particular truths. We have already shown that the community co- operates in the begetting of supernatural faith, and that in particular it is by living contact with the church fellowship that faith acquires its absolute certainty (cf. p. 58 ff.). Let us speak here only of those delicate influences whereby the fellowship of the faith, in its mysterious co-operative action, brings about the formulization of a truth of the faith, the definition of a dogma.

There is no revealed doctrine (dogma explicitum) proclaimed by the Church which is not contained in its exact substance (formaliter) in the sources of revelation, that is, in Scripture and Tradition. But it is not always expressly (explicite) revealed in its specific content, and is often contained so to say wrapped up (implicite) in other truths. As the history of dogma shows, it sometimes needed a long process to free such truths from their wrappings and to make them plain and visible. More than six centuries passed before the Church set forth the central Christian dogma of Jesus, God and Man, in all its aspects and formulated it exhaustively. The doctrine of transubstantiation was not defined as a revealed dogma until the year 1215, nor the infallibility and plenary jurisdiction of the pope until 1870. This dogmatic development, fulfilled under the assistance of the Holy Spirit and under the supervision and guidance of the Church's teaching office, is not always effected in a purely logical manner, by mere juxtaposition of revealed truths, or by philosophical methods, by demonstrating that a truth is attested by Scripture and Tradition, however indispensable may be the labors of theologians in elucidation and demonstration. For the legacy of the faith as left us in the revelation has not been transmitted to us in the form of a clear logical system, but is wrapped up rather in the forms of its time; nor was it always so lucidly and plainly set forth in those forms, that its inner content and irresistible external proof were immediately obvious. And sometimes, when the source of a doctrine is to be sought, not in holy Scripture, but in that age-long tradition which is represented in the most various documents, the discriminating eye of the theologian has the greatest difficulty in determining clearly what is the pure gold of revelation and what the product of purely human wisdom and purely human faith. Often enough he will find Fathers and theologians expressing views which impair their unanimous witness (unanimis consensus patrum). And so the exegesis and argument of the theologians are not able unaided to prepare the way effectively for the definitive decisions of the Church's teaching authority. Indeed, were they such a decisive factor in the construction of dogma, then—to mention only one of the latest of dogmas—the beautiful truth of our Lady's Immaculate Conception might never have been defined. For two most distinguished Mariologists, St. Bernard and St. Thomas, expressly questioned its revealed character, nay even denied it. How then, in spite of all obstacles, was the dogma ultimately defined? And how was the dogma of Papal Infallibility defined? Certainly it is Church authority under the guidance of the Holy Ghost which by its ordinary and extraordinary teaching strews the seeds of revealed truth in the field of the Church, and like a careful gardener protects their sprouting, guards the tender shoots from foreign growths and prunes away all evil tendencies. The teaching authority, guarded by the Holy Ghost, is therefore the decisive active factor in dogmatic development. But—to keep to our metaphor—the gardener does not do the whole of the work. For the very reason that the seed of revealed truth is a living and organic thing, it requires for its progressive growth a fertile field, a maternal soil, which may foster the seed committed to it and bring it to maturity. The living community is this fertile soil. Theologians speak of a passive infallibility of the faithful, and in the same way the community may be called the passive factor in the formation of dogma. The living community of the faithful, hearing and obeying the revelation which the teaching authority proclaims, itself shares in the infallibility of the Church as it accepts this revelation, cherishes it and bears fruit. Such is the nature of the influence which the community exercised in the development of the dogmas above mentioned, especially that of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady. It was the Catholic body, the fellowship of the faithful, in its vital movement, and with its vivid sense and profound instinct for the faith, which refused to abandon these truths, even when authoritative theologians sought to deprive it of them. All these truths germinated in the soil of the community, like living seeds, be protected and fostered by pope and bishop until their time came. And even though these truths—as for instance the particular one of the Immaculate Conception of Mary—circulated originally among the faithful in distorted and legendary forms which will not bear historical criticism, yet the living community grasped their substance and inner value too intimately, vitally, and immediately to be able to sacrifice their eternal content along with the imperfect forms and expressions to which the theologians objected. The divine spirit of its faith was too sensitive, the moral and religious experience produced in so many of its members by that truth was too rich, manifold and profound, and the Church's custody of the deposit of faith too vigilant, to allow of such a consummation. Because of the solidarity of its life, this common experience of a truth, new and yet old, belonged to the whole community, and became deeper and stronger the more widely it spread, until all shared it. And since this life of faith was not a spasmodic and fortuitous phenomenon, but was steadily evolved under the purifying and promoting influence of the teaching authority, and thereby drew strength and guidance from its profound connection with the whole mass of supernatural revelation, it became for that reason a life full of divine clarity and purity. It is not the sectional belief of this or that group of the faithful, but a life in the whole and of the whole infallible Church, of the whole Body of Christ, a life inspired by Christ. It would be by no means difficult to show that the compact fellowship of the faith exercised this quasi-maternal function in the growth and ripening of most of our dogmas, from the consubstantiality of the Son to the infallibility of the pope, and that it is exercising it at present in respect of that belief in the universal intercessory mediatorship of Mary, which is beginning to become ripe for definition. It is the teaching authority of the Church which proclaims the revelation in its complete fullness, together with the truths which are contained only germinally (implicite) in it; and it is the same authority which watches over the process of the unfolding of these implicit truths and by the help of the theologians excludes all spurious elements. And lastly it is the teaching authority alone that gives the final solemn decision regarding the revealed character of a truth. We should grievously misconceive the absolutely pre-eminent and decisive authority of the "teaching Church" if we supposed that its function was merely one of registering and ratifying the unanimous belief of the "learning Church" and that it played no independent and decisive part in the formation of dogma.[5] Yet on the other hand it is the maternal organism of the compact fellowship which fertilized by the Church's teaching, brings dogmas to maturity, until they receive their definitive form in the Church's authoritative definition.

Accordingly the development of the faith originates in the Church's teaching authority, not only as regards that deepening which it receives at the hands of the theologians, but also as regards that extension in the dimensions of length and breadth which it receives from the compact living fellowship of the faithful. There is therefore no piece of dogmatic knowledge which is the knowledge of individuals and not at the same time an experience and love of the many in the Holy Ghost. In this sense every new dogma is the child not only of authority, but of love, of the love of the fellowship of the faith, of the heart of the praying Church. Every dogma is consecrated by the reverence and earnestness, by the conscientiousness and loyalty, by the inwardness and devotion, with which the fellowship of the members of Christ "rooted and grounded in love" (Eph. iii, 17) "confirms the testimony of Christ in itself" (cf. 1 Cor. i, 6). As a rule the "lex orandi," the unwritten law of prayerful, lived faith, precedes the "lex credendi," the authoritative formulization of a truth as a dogma. Whenever any dogma has been attacked in the name of historical criticism, its impugners have overlooked this vital power of the living fellowship and its function in the formation of dogma. When Dollinger (28 March 1871) wrote to Archbishop Scherr of Munchen-Freising: "We have to do, in the present distracted state of the Church, with a purely historical question, which, therefore, must be handled and decided by means only of those resources which are at our command, and according to the rules which govern every historical inquiry, every manipulation of things in the past,"[6] he overlooked the fact that the Church is not a dead, but a living organism; and he failed to recognize that vigorous life of faith which pulsates in the Church and which as a living thing cannot be found in dead documents but only in the hearts of the faithful, in the compact fellowship of the faith united with pope and bishops. Such was the tragedy of his intellectual development: he could not see the surging life of the present he saw only the petrified life of history.

The fellowship of prayer and faith is perfected in the fellowship of love. This love is love towards one another and for one another; it is the strong consciousness that we are bound to one another in prosperity and in misfortune, not merely by natural bonds, but by a supernatural kinship through communion in the Body and Blood of Christ, our Head. This love produces a feeling of mutual responsibility in sorrow and in joy, a warm sympathy, a magnanimous generosity, an absolute loyalty of service to others, as St. Paul so beautifully depicts it (1 Cor. xiii). This love is that solidarity of Christian sentiment which ever first envisages the whole and comes back to the individual and to itself only from the whole; which with deep reverence of soul sees in every member of Christ, even in the least, a brother or sister of the Lord, yes, Christ Himself. This love is the most precious fruit of the Communion of the Saints on earth. It is this love that gives to the external and visible organism of the Body of Christ, to papacy and episcopacy, the vital inspiration of Christ (see p. 42 ff.) and it is this alone that creates and maintains its inner wealth. In truth and in fact this love is therefore the lifeblood of the Body of Christ, which, welling forth out of the heart of the God-man, flows through the whole Body and gives it form and strength and beauty. Without this love the Body of Christ on earth would be a rigid corpse, and all Church ordinances and offices, all sacraments, all dogmas, all faith would be stale and unprofitable, like sounding brass or tinkling cymbal," or, in the words of St. Augustine, mere "forms of piety." Moreover the inner history of the Body of Christ, the course of its ills and difficulties, of its progress and development, is determined by the sincerity, inwardness and fertility of this love. There is no more perilous crisis for it than when its love is in jeopardy. When it can no longer be said of the majority of its members: "See how these Christians love one another!" then will be the most dangerous crisis of all, that time when, in our Lord's words, "the charity of many shall grow cold" (Matt. xxiv, 12) For there is nothing so essentially alien to the Body of Christ, nothing so inimical, as that its members should abandon their mutual love. For Christ our Lord is the incarnate revelation of God's love, nor is the Body of Christ anything else but the implanting and growth of that same love, in all those who are incorporated into Christ. Wherever Christianity is, there is love. According to St. Augustine's striking saying, love is the motive weight of the Christian being.[7] It can be manifested nowhere else in such purity, inwardness and power as in Christ and His Body. And so the development of the Body of Christ on earth is characterized by nothing so plainly as by the growth of this love. All development of dogma, of worship, of government and of law, is profitable to the Body of Christ only because it produces this growth of love. And the Body of Christ will not be fully mature and perfect, until love, as the soul of all the virtues (forma virtutum), has become not merely in some members but in all, both in the shepherd and in the flock, the fundamental and dominant principle of all living, suffering and dying. By no other mark shall men know that they are the disciples of Christ than by this, that they have love one to another.

Communion of Saints—what a glad and blessed light illumines it! It is the hidden treasure, the secret joy of the Catholic. When he thinks on the Communion of Saints his heart is enlarged. He passes out of the solitariness of here and of there, of yesterday and tomorrow, of "I" and "thou," and he is enfolded in an unspeakably intimate communion of spirit and of life, far surpassing his needs and dearest wishes, with all those great ones whom the grace of God has forged from the refractory stuff of our humanity and raised to His height, to participation in His Being. Here are no limitations of space and time. From out of the remote ages of the past, from civilizations and countries of which the memory is now only faintly echoed in legend, the saints pass into his presence, and call him brother, and enfold him with their love. The Catholic is never alone. Christ, the Head, is ever with him, and along with Christ all the holy members of His Body in heaven and on earth. Streams of invisible, mysterious life flow thence through the Catholic fellowship, forces of fertilizing, beneficent love, forces of renewal, of a youthfulness that is ever flowering anew. They pass into the natural, visible forces of the Catholic fellowship, especially to pope and bishop, completing and perfecting them. He who does not see and appreciate these forces, cannot fully understand and expound the nature and working of Catholicism. And, indeed, it is simple, child-like faith alone which perceives these forces; and therefore that faith alone discovers the road to sanctity. For such is the prayer of Jesus: "I praise thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in they sight' (Lk. X, 21).

Endnotes

1. Propria majestas Dei suscitantis (Sermo XCVIII, 6).

2. Heiler (p. 183 ff.) distinguishes between popular piety and the official theology of the Church, thus making the road easy for an elaborate analysis in which he characterizes popular devotion to the saints as veiled polytheism. But the alleged distinction between Catholic theory and practice does not really exist, since the devout Catholic has recourse to the saints because of his very faith in God who is "wonderful in his saints," and because of his reverence and awe before the mystery of God. So that popular devotion to the saints is in line with dogma and is utterly monotheistic in its character. Nor does that devotion, as it might appear from Heiler's presentation, comprise the whole of popular piety. If the devout Catholic turns to the saints in special need, yet, for the ordinary and fundamental concerns of his soul, he practices after the pattern of the saints and supported by their intercession an immediate intercourse of prayer with God, especially in the reception of the sacraments and in the use of those private devotions, such as devotions to the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart, which cultivate a direct child-like relation with God. It is true that special needs may become manifold and frequent, and that devotion to the saints may occupy what seems a disproportionate space in the religious life of this or that individual. Yet the Church rightly avoids restricting in any way the satisfaction of these individual religious needs, in order not to endanger the freedom of religious movement within the limits of dogmatic truth and so imperil the fertility of the religious life.

3. St. Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologica, Pars tertia," Q. LXIII, A. 3: Sactamentales characteres nihil aliud sunt quam quaedam participationes sacerdotii Christi ab ipso Christo detivatae.

4. Experimur orantes (In Cant. XXXII, 3).

5. Pope Pius X condemned the modernist proposition that "in definiendis veritatibus ita collaborant discens et docens ecclesia, ut docenti ecclesiae nihil supersit nisi communes discentis opinationes sancire (Decree Lamentabili, 1907, n. 6).

6. See Dollinger on the Infallibility of the Pope. A Letter addressed to the Archbishop of Munich, London, 1871. p. 18.

7. Pondus meum amor meus. Conf. XIII, 9.

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