The studies on the Church which I began to write some years ago, and to which various reviews such as Vie Spirituelle, Revue Thomiste, Etudes Carmelitaines and others, especially Nova et vetera, have extended a welcome, were meant as sketches or fragments of a comprehensive work in which I hope to explain the Church, from the standpoint of speculative theology, in terms of the four causes from which she results—efficient, material, formal and final. This work is to be in four books.

This is the first of them. It treats of the immediate efficient cause producing the Church in the world, that is to say of the two powers, sacramental and jurisdictional, which by virtue of their union constitute the apostolic hierarchy. We shall consider, by way of corollary, the question of apostolicity.

A second book will study the nature of the Church as composed, in the image of Christ the Head and of men the members, of a spiritual element essentially invisible (the formal cause or soul of the Church) and of a material element essentially visible (the material cause or body of the Church). From the soul of the Church there derives her unity, and from the body of the Church her catholicity.

The third book will deal with the end of the Church, that is to say with God considered as her "separated" Common Good; and then of her interior order which is her immanent common good, and from which results her sanctity.

The fourth and last book will deal with the Church as she was in the days of her preparation before Christ came; and with what she will be in her consummation, in purgatory and in heaven. In this I shall emphasize simultaneously the continuity of her substantial being and the diversity of her accidental modes.

"If St. Thomas should come back to earth," wrote Pere Gardeil, "and could see the dogma of the Church at the point of development it has attained in our day, I do not doubt that he would give it generous space in the third part of his Summa Theologica, between the treatise on the Incarnation and the treatise on the sacraments."[1]

Works on the Church undertaken since St. Thomas' time have been chiefly directed—even the Summa de Ecclesia of Turrecremata is not altogether an exception—to defending the Church's authority, called in question since the end of the medieval period either by the civil power or by various forms of heresy. The result is that even today the questions discussed in treatises on the Church mainly concern either the hierarchy, that is to say the power of order and the power of jurisdiction, or the marks by which the true Church is to be recognized. These will be found for the most part in this first book.

This concentration upon apologetic has tended to exclude from treatises de Ecclesia all deeper study of the intimate constitution and essential mystery of the Church. It is precisely these, however, that most interest us today. We usually find them treated separately under the heading of the Mystical Body of Christ. Doubtless we could justify such a separation on grounds of convenience; but it would be a fatal thing if it led us to believe in the existence of two distinct theological treatises, one, on the Church, dealing with the hierarchical organization, the other, on the Mystical Body, with the inner life of the members of Christ. For that could mean our seeing a separation of the hierarchical organization and the organization of charity, of the Church and the Body of Christ. Pius XII warned us against any such error in his discourse to the seminarists of Rome on June 24th 1939: "It would be erroneous to distinguish between the juridical Church and the Church of charity. That is not how things are, rather this juridically established Church, having the Sovereign Pontiff for head, is also the Church of Christ, the Church of charity, and of the universal family of Christians."[2]

Any such error is impossible if we set out to explain the Church in terms of the four causes on which she essentially depends. The apostolic hierarchy will then represent no more than the immediate efficient cause of the Church, of the Mystical Body. Its proper effect is to give existence to the Church herself, "Christ diffused and communicated," along with her two constitutive causes, the soul that makes her wholly spiritual and the body that makes her wholly visible; and to set her on the way towards her final cause namely the divine sanctity, which it is her mission to reflect and communicate.

In this perspective the four marks, the four notes of the Church, naturally fall into place as corollaries of each of her four causes respectively.[3] They are seen as rooted in and growing out of the very essence of the Church, an exteriorization, a normal manifestation, of her mystery. After that we can leave it to apologetic to make the most of these marks in the concrete, to give them a more supple and detailed application as changing times and circumstances may demand.

An important question—various aspects of which we shall meet with later on—must be settled at the outset of this work. What meaning is to be attached, in speculative theology, to the word "Church"?

The word Church may be taken, and I shall in this book take it, in its formal, or ontological, or theological sense. So taken it indicates the Church in her entirety, body and soul together. But it indicates the Church alone, pure and unmixed, to the exclusion of all that is other than herself.

Looked at in this way, the Church is composed of just men and sinners. But that statement needs further precision. The Church contains sinners. But she does not contain sin. It is only in virtue of what remains pure and holy in them, that sinners belong to her—that is to say in virtue of the sacramental characters of Baptism and Confirmation, and of the theological habits of faith and hope if they still have them. That is the part of their being by which they still cleave to the Church, and are still within her. But in virtue of the mortal sin which has found its way into them and fills their hearts, they belong chiefly to the world and to the devil. "He who commits sin is of the devil" (1 John iii. 8).

Similarly we can say that the Church contains the just; but precisely in so far as they are just. To the extent to which, beside the profound choice of the will that unites them to God, they still harbour a region of shadows, a concession to venial sin, to that extent they are partially outside the Church.[4] Two categories of members alone are wholly within her—the newly baptized who have not yet sinned, and those souls that are consummated in sanctity, all absorbed by the light, like those of whom St. John of the Cross writes, in the last strophe of his Canticle, that henceforth they are no more troubled by the assaults of the devil or by the revolts of the passions. To them the words of the Apostle fully apply: "Whoever is born of God committeth not sin: for his seed abideth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil." (1 John iii. 9-10.)

Thus the frontier of the Church passes through each one of those who call themselves her members, enclosing within her bounds all that is pure and holy, leaving outside all that is sin and stain, "more piercing than any two-edged sword and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart" (cf. Heb. iv. 12). So that even here below, in the days of her pilgrimage, in the midst of the evil and sin at war in each one of her children, the Church herself remains immaculate; and we can apply to her quite fully and without any restriction the passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians (V. 25-28): "Christ also loved the Church and delivered himself up for it: that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life: that he might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish."[5]

It is therefore always in this formal and theological sense that we take the word "Church" when we call her One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, the Bride and Body of Christ, the temple and dwelling-place of the Trinity. The sins of her members are not to be identified with the Church, or the imperfections of Christians with Christianity. It is not these that constitute her, or make her visible; but rather her true body, always illuminated by her soul—though the intensity of the illumination may vary from one age to another.

But the word "Church" can also be taken in a material manner. We may say, as before, that the Church is composed of just men and sinners. But in this sense the sinners are regarded as entirely within the Church, their sins included, and the Church herself is seen as a mingling of sanctity and sin. Evil has penetrated within her boundaries.

This material way of looking at the Church may arise from two very different preoccupations.

We meet with it on the one hand among the empiricists, notably the historians, who tend professionally to consider the Church from an exterior, descriptive and phenomenal standpoint. Seeing in her good men and bad men intermixed, they refer the actions of either indiscriminately to herself. They see her as responsible for all the good and all the evil which her members produce in time; she is at once the source, and the scene, of all the high achievements and all the unworthy lapses of Christians.

This material way of looking at the Church may be found on the other hand, and for almost opposite reasons, among preachers and the apostolically minded. They are not wanting in love, or in a sense of the mystery of the Church. But they are led to consider this mystery less under its ontological aspect, which appeals most to the speculative theologian, than under its dynamic, moral, and deontological aspect. Anxious to show Christians that de jure, in virtue of the law of their Baptism, they ought to live altogether in the light, altogether within the frontiers of the Church, they are inclined to assign her not her real frontiers, but the frontiers which she should have, and which indeed she has, as we said, in the newly baptized and in the saints. They cannot bear to envisage any limits to the Church within the soul of any single Christian; they want to push those limits back until they touch the extreme regions of the man, and end by encircling all the obediential powers of his soul. Thus they see the sins of Christians as within the very bosom of the Church, thereby strongly accentuating their almost sacrilegious character. Origen could say that lust and avarice had turned the Church, in certain places, into a den of thieves, and could make Christ Himself borrow the Psalmist's words to bewail her disorders: "Of what avail is my blood, since I descend into corruption?" St. Augustine could say that she limps, St. Catherine of Siena that she is leprous. These paradoxical modes of expression may, of course, derive from the famous words of the Apostle: "Know you not that your bodies are the members of Christ?. . Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a harlot?. . . Or know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price." (1 Cor. vi. 15, 19.) Taken formally and ontologically such expressions as those of Origen and Augustine and Catherine might seem to mean that "Christ sins and has always sinned in His members"—a proposition condemned by the twenty-second session of the Council of Basle.[6] It can be said that Christ lives, suffers, and sanctifies Himself in His members. It cannot be said that He sins in His members.

It is then from the formal and ontological standpoint that we shall consider the mystery of the Church. Steadily so to see her makes certain demands upon us. We must resist every tendency to materialize the Church, to confuse her real frontiers with those of the persons who belong to her, of the groups or parties in which they are enrolled. We must be always redrawing by faith her true and living frontiers within these persons, groups and parties, indeed within our own proper personality. And if it be true that nobody knows for certain whether he is worthy of love or of hatred, it is also true that no Christian knows for certain how the boundaries of the Church cut across his own being, whether they pass on this side or that of his heart's centre of gravity; none of us can do more than say with the Psalmist in fear and trembling: "Judica me Deus, et discerne causam meam. . . ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me." Of this Church—which comes from God by way of Christ and the hierarchy, which is visible, which includes sinners but not their sins—we shall have to say that she is at once purer and vaster than is commonly believed; purer, because she rejects all stain of sin, and vaster because she draws to herself everything that begins to spring up in the world from the seed of grace.

There is presumption in undertaking a comprehensive essay on the mystery of the Church, the mystery of the incomprehensible riches of Christ as they superabound in the heart of the world's misery. But the passage of time inescapably poses very grave questions to every contemporary mind; and no mere surface apologetic can cope with them. If we can bring into an organic whole the scattered insights that are offered us by the past, these questions can be answered at their true depth. If therefore anything be thought to be true in the pages that follow, let it be attributed to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose faithful disciple I have tried to be. When one has such masters to follow, nothing is easier than to betray by a fidelity that goes no farther than the words, nothing is more difficult than to rediscover beneath familiar, almost banal formulae, the deep intuition that gave them birth. In these great Doctors I have found a theology of the Church more living, more far-reaching and more liberating than that which our manuals commonly contain. In them we feel the active presence of a vision of the mystery of the Church understood as an extension of the Incarnation. That vision we find in the Fathers, Latin as well as Greek; it is supported by the whole tenor of the New Testament. None of the heresies ever managed to see it in its entirety, but it was seen from the first and developed down the centuries with infinite delicacy, by the magisterium of this Roman Church which Thomas Aquinas revered so devoutly and to whose correction, when he came to die, he submitted all his writings. This same vision of faith continued to illumine the work of later theologians, and it is good indeed to experience the intimate communion which brings together on such high ground minds that are otherwise so diverse, even opposed: even when on problems not yet decided by the Church I have adopted another opinion than that maintained by some of them, the point at which I have had to abandon them serves but to show the length of the road we have traveled together. And up to a point one can say the same about certain thinkers who have remained outside the Church.

Inasmuch as they help us to share in the primordial intuitions of the faith, the texts of the past are never wearisome. They lead the mind into pastures that are always new, which we leave refreshed, not only towards the past, but also towards the problems and situations of today. There is only one way in which a tree can prove that it lives, and that is by sending out new shoots and new flowers every spring. Thus, to be always truly itself, the theology of the Church should be always abundant in new consequences. How should we ever have perceived them unless we had been guided by the writings of our contemporaries, whether theologians by vocation or otherwise?—and those that are not so are occasionally the more sensitive to vibrations coming from worlds that are still in formation.[7]

The reader will find many repetitions, because my aim has been, while treating of each particular truth concerning the Church, to make the weight of all the others felt. In this first book, the reader should find a sort of sketch foreshadowing all that is to be developed in the rest.

I am enough in love with speculative theology to give it the greater part of my time; but I am well aware that a higher wisdom exists, one which St. Thomas speaks of on the very threshold of his Summa, and which consists, he tells us, in "suffering" divine things. When I come to speak of the omnipresence of charity, I shall call attention to this experimental knowledge, in virtue of which an individual soul can wonderfully experience the universal mystery of the Church. It was almost exclusively in this way that St. Catherine of Siena knew the Church, and what she has to say of it is better calculated to kindle our hearts than all the writings of the theologians. That is why her name will be found at the head of this book. While writing it I have had in mind another and a greater than she, one in whom were recapitulated and summed up all the riches that the Church, taken as distinct from Christ, taken as the bride of Christ, could offer successively down the ages of faith: all the splendours, all the purity, all the heart-rending sorrow and compassion. I mean the Blessed Virgin Mary.

NOTE. For the English translation of the first volume of L'Eglise du Verbe incarne, two Excursus have been added: II: Some Recent Views on the Sacrament of Order: X: The Origins and Transmission of Political Power. Several of the notes have been revised in accordance with these additions, and I have had the opportunity in a considerable number of places of improving upon what I originally wrote.

The first act of the divine omnipotence is that by which it creates the universe from nothing, and maintains the substantial being of things by virtue of an unceasing immediate contact. "Now in each thing," says St. Thomas, "there is a proximate and immediate effect of God. For we proved. . . that God alone can create. Also, in each thing there is something caused by creation: in bodies, there is primary matter; in incorporeal beings there is their simple essence. . . Accordingly God must be present in all things at the same time: especially since those things He called into being from non—being, are continually preserved in being by Him. Wherefore it is said {Jeremias xxiii. 24}: I fill heaven and earth; and {Psalm cxxxviii. 8 (Vulg.) }: If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there: if I descend into hell, thou art present."[8]

The second act of the divine omnipotence is even more astonishing. It is that by which it seeks to invest and enrich human persons with gifts so wonderful and so pure that these persons can become, in union with each other and with God, a collective living abode in which God Himself will delight to dwell. When, in the Old Testament, Wisdom speaks, it is to say: "And in all these {peoples and nations} I sought rest, and I shall abide in the inheritance of the Lord" (Eccles. xxiv. 11 Sept.) Similarly, towards the end of the Apocalypse, the Church appears to St. John as "the holy city, the new Jerusalem"; and he hears a great voice coming from the throne and saying: "Behold, the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people: and God himself with them shall be their God" (xxi. 2—3).

Now what are we to say of this act by which God has produced the Church, His abode among men—whether we call the Church a miserable hovel on account of human sin, or a temple on account of the Guest it shelters? Has it known but a single form, unchanged down all the ages? Did God from the beginning produce His Church as it stands today, and has time no other part to play than to lend endurance to what was perfect from the start?

The answer is clear. The divine act that produced the Church has been marked by several phases. These might be called the various divine regimes under which the people of God have lived during the course of the ages, the divine regimes of the Church. For God led the Church through various successive states, and the purpose of time is to enable this Church not only to endure, but also to progress till it reaches that state which is to be the last one in this world, the state in which it enters the era of the Incarnation and of Pentecost.[9]

Let us briefly recall the succession of the divine regimes of the people of God and of the Church.

The Angelic Doctor teaches that God originally decided to act upon men directly, that is to say without any intermediary cause, to invest them with the grace of innocence and so to make of them the living abode in which He would come to dwell upon earth. In that respect the first regime of the people of God was profoundly different from those that followed the Fall and with which the Church properly so-called was to begin her course. Neither the mediation of Christ, nor that of any instrumental causes such as the sacramental or jurisdictional powers, was then in question at all.

It is clear in fact that the supernatural gifts of grace and truth with which the first man was to be endowed, could not pass by way of Christ, since the Word was not yet incarnate. We must go further. These supernatural gifts were not even given in view of the future sufferings of Christ, since, had man not sinned, God would not have had to redeem him by His sufferings; since indeed, as St. Thomas thought towards the end of his life, had man not sinned God would never have become incarnate.[10] Consequently, neither the grace conferred on the first man, nor that conferred on the angels, could, properly speaking, be the grace of Christ, gratia Christi. In connection with this point however, to which we shall return, there is a difference between the grace of the first man and the grace of the angels. While on the one hand the grace of innocence had to be lost in order to give place to that of redemption, to which it was ordered only indirectly and materially, the grace of the angels was ontologically pre-accorded (both intensively and extensively) to the perfect grace that was to fill the soul of Christ when the Word should eventually become incarnate. Consequently, when man's sin had shattered the harmony of innocence and the Word had resolved to become incarnate so as to die on the cross, the plenary grace created at that instant in His heart became the centre of reference, the locus, of all the graces that existed beforehand in the angels, just as the centre marked afterwards in an already existing circle becomes the locus of every point in the circumference.[11] We can go further along this road and add that as soon as the incarnation of the Word was accomplished, the angels began to receive, through the physical intermediation of the humanity of Christ, those graces which hitherto they had received immediately. Thus Christ is indeed the King of angels, now distributing to them the essential grace they have always possessed and the accidental graces superadded thereto.[12]

It is clear furthermore, according to the doctrine of St. Thomas, that had mankind continued in innocence the supernatural gifts of grace and truth would have reached them without passing through instrumental causes such as the sacramental or jurisdictional powers. The law of innocence meant in fact that spiritual life would flow from God to the soul and from the soul to the body: it would have been a breach of this law if grace and truth had come to the soul, which is spiritual, by way of sensible means or signs.[13]

Thus the divine omnipotence was the sole cause of the people of God in its first form. Doubtless the ministry of angels was already in operation to fortify men against the wiles of the devil [14] and to bring them the divine commands; [15] but the object of this mediation, which, in any case, was wholly spiritual, remained accidental. The essential gifts of grace and truth came immediately from God. Thus the divine government, prior to the coming of the Church, excluded all corporeal or visible intermediaries.

Why did God allow the state of innocence to be destroyed? We know the answer: God permits evil only to make of it the occasion for a greater good.[16] To the regime of creation, which might appear perfect succeeds the regime of redemption which, on the whole, is to be better still. These two regimes differ profoundly. That of creation excluded every visible mediator; [17] that of redemption was to be essentially the regime of a Mediator, awaited, then recognized, "the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a redemption for all" (1 Tim. ii. 6). The first regime gave birth to the first form of the people of God. The regimes that followed were to give birth to the Church properly so-called, which was not to be a people of God pure and simple, but a people of God marked with the sign of the redemptive Incarnation, a people of God called the "Body" of Christ, a people whose vocation it would be to prolong in space and time His temporal life.

Immediately after the Fall the first of the regimes of the Church began. Grace and truth were now to be dispensed through a visible mediation.

The grace bestowed on souls from then onwards was that same grace which the Redeemer would one day merit by His love and pay for by His sufferings. In this sense it was already the grace of Christ, gratia Christi. And that is why it worked inwardly not only to begin the organization of the new people of God, but to lead this people gradually through the vicissitudes of their history towards the concrete and definitive status which it was to receive from Christ Himself.

To make it obscurely felt from the very outset that it came by anticipation from the mystery of the redemptive Incarnation, that is to say from the mystery of a God who made Himself visible and came down into our flesh, this grace was now given in dependence on visible signs, on outward actions, which theologians were to call sacraments. These sacraments were doubtless rudimentary. They were not yet, as they were to become under the New Law, the instrumental means and causes of grace; they were merely practical signs of it, serving to designate those on whom God in His mercy sent Hi s grace immediately, provided they were rightly disposed.[18] These sacraments existed already under the law of nature, but their number and importance was to be laid down in detail under the Law of Moses. As the history of the people of God unfolds, and the work of salvation progresses, we shall see the sacramental principle coming more and more to the fore.

An analogous course was followed in the preaching of divine truth. First of all the primitive revelation was transmitted exteriorly by the organ of a magisterium essentially fallible. God contented Himself with inwardly enlightening each particular soul by hidden inspirations. But under this regime the dangers besetting the work of salvation outweighed its advances. Then God raised up men whose mission was not merely to recall the content of the primitive revelation, but also to make it more explicit and more precise as time went on. These were the prophets. With them the principle of an exterior infallible teaching, first oral, then written, as a normal means of divine government, entered history for the first time.

Thus, in the measure in which the work of salvation proceeds, the importance of a visible mediation appears more and more clearly. Immediation is a sign of inferiority, mediation a sign of perfection and of progress. Why this law, at once so general and so mysterious? The answer is not far to seek. Visible mediation does not mean that God relaxes His care for the governing of men; it means on the contrary that His condescension begins to be more urgent, more helpful to a human nature wounded by sin. The moment it is introduced the immediate and direct solicitations of love, far from diminishing, become more abundant than ever. We may lay down the principle that for every outward promulgation of the law, there corresponds an inward inpouring of grace. These things are clear enough to anyone who understands that the regime of visible mediation is, from its very inception, a sort of adumbration and luminous shadow of the mystery of the Incarnation.

It remains true however that so long as this regime lasted, the visible mediation involved was still too imprecise to allow the act productive of the Church to bring with it the fullness of its effects of grace and truth:

1. Grace still came down directly from God to man. It did not pass through the humanity of Christ, so that it was not yet that rejoicing love which was to be concentrated first in the heart of the Word made flesh as the love with which the Father loved Christ, to overflow thence on all other men. Nor did it pass through the sacraments, which at this stage merely signified it but did not cause it: hence it still lacked the virtue and riches of those sacramental graces by which Christ was to establish His Church in its perfect state.

2. Moreover, supernatural truth, in the absence of a fully developed visible mediation, was neither completely revealed nor perfectly preserved.

Hence the first regime of the Church in its various realizations under the natural or the legal state, represents only a preparatory phase of the act productive of the Church.

It was only when God, inaugurating the final era of history, chose to pour out at last upon men the supreme favours reserved for them from all eternity, that He established the Church in its definitive temporal status by bringing the regime of visible mediation to its highest point of perfection. This brought with it at once the deepest joy and the most effective help, but also the hardest trial and the most exacting exercise of our faith: the greatest joy and help, because there is nothing so connatural to man as to receive divine things humanly; [19] the hardest trial and effort, because there is no more surprising mystery than this collaboration of the uncreated with the created, of omnipotence with indigence, of eternity with time, of immensity with place.

First the Word is sent from heaven into our flesh, and then, having promised the help of the Spirit, He sends His own disciples into the world: "As the Father hath sent me, so also I send you" (John xx. 21). Hence the perfect regime of the Church militant involves a double visible mediation: that of the Incarnation and that of the hierarchy.

The first and principal mediation is that of the human nature of Christ which from the moment of the Incarnation became the organ of the Divinity, [20] the instrument by which the divine action [21] is to fill the world with the good things of grace. Henceforth, all gifts that come down to us from the abyss of the Deity first pass into the heart of Christ; it is of His fullness that all men—and even angels, as we have seen—receive. But how then can the human nature of Christ, which is finite and circumscribed by reason of the body, extend its influence over all men in the world, and even to the angels? Just as an instrument can produce, in virtue of the principal agent, an effect that surpasses its own powers and bears the stamp of the principal agent, so the created nature of Christ, by becoming the instrument of the divine immensity, can overleap its natural boundaries and receive a virtue beyond all limits.[22] And it is precisely because Christ is able to pour the rays of His charity upon all men without exception, because He can knock at the door of every soul, and play a part in the inner drama of each individual conscience, that God has made Him the absolutely universal instrument for the sanctification of the world to the exclusion of all others, so that, since His coming, no saving grace is ever given apart from Him. Hence it is that divine grace—now rightfully called the grace of Christ not only because it was merited by His charity and sufferings, but also because it passes through His heart before reaching us—brings with it new privileges.

For it delivers men for the first time from the penalty of original sin, opening the gates of heaven for them without further delay. That could not be said of the grace given by anticipation to the just men of the Old Law.[23]

Grace moreover, while of its own nature—it divinizes men, does this now by "christening" them, that is to say by working to conform their lives more and more to that of Christ. It is true that the human nature of Christ acts as an organ of the Divinity and that, in a general way, effects resemble their principal cause rather than the instrument; but the human nature of Christ, being henceforth united to the Person of the Word as a human hand is united to a human person, possesses all the fullness of the life that it pours out on other men. It became on this account a privileged instrument, speciale divinitatis instrumentum, [24] causing our salvation "as by its own proper virtue", [25] not by a virtue transmitted as a "separated" instrument does, and as a minister, even a sinful minister, can do. That is why it was that from the Incarnation onwards, more than in earlier times, grace tended to draw men to God by conforming them to Christ.[26]

The second visible mediation, wholly subordinate to the first, is the mediation of the hierarchy.

1. Christ, in the course of His temporal life, could, as physical instrument of the divine power, act in two different ways: either from a distance, or by sensible contact.

This can be seen in the case of the bodily cures. When the Jewish official begs Him to come down to Capharnaum where his son lies dying, Christ sends him back comforted, and straightway the child is healed (John iv. 46-54). When the centurion expressly asks that his servant may be healed by a single word spoken from afar, his prayer too is heard (Matt. viii. 5-13). When the Syrophaenician woman goes home she sees her child already freed from the devil (Mark vii. 29-30); and when the ten lepers are on the way to show themselves to the priests they find themselves suddenly cleansed (Luke xvii. 14). The cures however are, for the most part, wrought in a more direct way, by bodily contact. Our Lord touches a leper in Galilee (Mark i. 41); He spits on the eyes of a blind man at Bethsaida and lays hands on him twice (Mark viii. 23-25); He touches the eyes of two blind men at Capharnaum (Matt. ix. 29); and again at Jericho (Matt. xx. 34); He allows the woman with the issue of blood to touch the hem of His garment (Luke viii. 44); He takes Jairus' daughter by the hand (Luke viii. 54); He touches the bier on which a dead youth is carried (Luke vii. 14); He makes them take away the stone which separates Him from Lazarus (John xi. 39), and so on. Further, Jesus seems to go out of His way, at one time to insist on the value of this sensible contact (as when He puts His fingers into the ears of the deaf-mute to signify that He is going to open them, and moistens his tongue to signify that He will unloose it (Mark vii. 33)); at another, to make His virtue pass by poor and altogether disproportionate material means (as when He puts clay on the eyes of the blind man of Siloe (John ix. 6)); and again, to extend its range by the use of words (as when He commands the paralytic to rise (Mark ii. 11), or Lazarus to come forth (John xi. 43)). Why, finally, did He deliberately prolong an absence without which Lazarus need not have died (John xi. 21 and 32), if not to help us to realize the virtue of His bodily presence?

These bodily cures are, above all, the symbols of spiritual ones. As soon as Jesus appeared, His heart radiated grace to illumine the world from afar. It was from afar that He knew Nathanael under the fig-tree (John i. 48-50), and His glance travels yet farther to all the true adorers in spirit and in truth (John iv. 23), and all the sheep not yet in the fold of Israel (John x. 16). But He acted in a still more marvellous manner on those who approached Him; He slaked their thirst: "If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink" (John vii. 37); He comforted them: "Come to me all ye that labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you" (Matt. xi. 28); He absolved them:". . . but she with ointment hath anointed my feet. Wherefore I say to thee: Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much" (Luke vii. 46-47); He touched their hearts with penitence: "And the Lord, turning, looked on Peter. And Peter remembered. . . and going out wept bitterly" (Luke xxii. 61); He put new heart into them: "Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in the way?" (Luke xxiv. 32); He met their love with love: "Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples whom Jesus loved" (John xiii. 23). Here too we shall see Him use the spoken word to enlarge the field of this sanctifying contact. A word casts out the unclean spirit in the synagogue of Capharnaum (Mark i. 25), and among the Gerasenes (Mark v. 8), and takes away the sins of the paralytic (Mark ii. 5), and cleanses the adulteress (John viii. 11).

It thus appears that in the days of His mortal life Jesus acted in two ways: He scattered His graces far and wide, and that is action from a distance; and He communicated them in a more intimate manner to those whom He could touch, and that is action by contact. Certainly such contact is no indispensable means to His action; but it is His connatural means, the means to which He draws our attention, and for which He takes care to provide all possible opportunity by moving about through Galilee, Samaria, Judea, Decapolis and even to Phoenicia. And if we want the ultimate reason for this procedure we must seek it not merely in the principle (still too general) that direct contact between agent and patient favours the full efficiency of physical action (for when it comes from God through the heart of Christ, physical action can be perfect even at a distance), but above all in the fact, much more immediate, that inasmuch as our nature is wounded, it stands in need of a sensible stimulus to awaken it connaturally to the life of grace.[27] And that explains why the perfection of heaven, where man will be glorified, will not be incompatible with Christ's action from a distance; whereas the perfection of earth, where man remains wounded, requires the action of Christ by sensible contact.[28]

2. Jesus has now been "taken up into heaven", He "sits on the right hand of God" (Mark xvi. 19), and is fully associated with His Father's power. Is His action to be restricted, from now onwards, to action from a distance? Is this the end of His action by contact? No: for before He left us He willed that there should always be among us certain men invested with divine powers, by whom the action that He initiates from heaven may be sensibly conveyed to each of us and may continue to reach us in the only way connatural to us—through direct contact. These are the hierarchic powers. Far from being substituted for Christ's action they are subordinated to it so as to carry it, in some sort, through space and time: like those mists left behind by the rain which continue to refresh the earth when the rain has ceased, they come to birth from the mystery of the Incarnation to perpetuate its blessings among us.[29] These powers are essentially ministerial, that is to say, transmitters; they would be without effect if the divine power, passing into the heart of Christ, did not perpetually come to touch them into life. They comprise two kinds of powers: the jurisdictional power, transmitting truth, and the sacramental power, transmitting grace.[30] Our Lord Himself announced, prepared and instituted them while He was still visible in our midst: He first sent the twelve Apostles into Galilee (Luke ix. 1), then the seventy-two disciples into Judea (Luke x. I), and finally the "Eleven" with a mission to teach all nations until the consummation of the world (Matt. xxviii. 16-20). He baptized, or had baptized, all who came to Him (John iii. 22; iv. 2) [31] and He willed that after His ascension all nations should be baptized (Matt. xxviii. 16-20). And we have a sign, at once mysterious and manifest, that in these hierarchic powers He seeks to establish sensible contact with us. It appears in this, that the end of the highest of these powers, the power of order, is to give us His very presence itself, real and corporeal, under the sacramental veils.

Doubtless God could have saved us without becoming incarnate. Probably even in that case He would have established a visible hierarchy—an opinion that finds support in reasons of a general order, such as the fact that providence habitually rules lower things through higher. Such general reasons cannot content us when others, more precise and immediate, are at hand. We know that it was the desire to come into immediate touch with us that led God to become incarnate. And we know that Christ, after a short time in this world, was taken up into heaven where He sits at the right hand of the Father. How then can sensible contact between Him and ourselves be maintained? There is only one solution: namely that Christ, when about to leave the earth, founded here a visible hierarchy, assisted by Himself, directed by Himself, a hierarchy which, living in our midst, could serve as His instrument in establishing contact with us. He continues then to make contact with us by His action, but under the appearances of the hierarchy; as, in the greatest of the sacraments, He continues to make contact with us by His substance under the appearances of bread and wine. Such is the direct and immediate explanation of the institution of the Christian hierarchy.

To those who seek an explanation of the origin of the hierarchy but fail to rise to this level, it can hardly appear to be more than the product of a process of human self-divinization. We may here recall Chestov's reflections on what he calls the "power of the keys". In this he sees a hand uplifted against the transcendence of God, a progressive attempt at a hellenization of the biblical revelation. For Chestov, Socrates was the first who clearly enunciated the formidable idea that the keys of heaven are on earth, at the disposal of men. The Christians tore this power from the hands of the idolators, and to-day it is the scientific spirit that makes bold to grasp it. "Scratch a modern European, and whether he be positivist or materialist you soon discover under his skin the old medieval Catholic, convinced of his exclusive right to open the gates of heaven. . . If God Himself came to tell us that the potestas clavium belonged to Him alone the mildest of us would revolt."[32] We may find a very similar idea on the significance of our ecclesiastical hierarchy in Karl Barth.

At the bottom of the outlook of these thinkers there lies a fatal misconception of the relations between God and man. They suppose that if God conferred some of His powers on man He would have to resign these powers Himself; that what man possesses ministerially as instrumental cause, God must cease to possess sovereignly as First Cause; that there is, in a word, a concurrence or conflict between the potestas of the Creator and the potestas of His creatures, so that something given to them is something taken from Him. In such an hypothesis, it is evident that the salvific powers—but also all powers in general, even down to the act of existence itself—cannot belong both to God and to man; we must choose whether we shall attribute them to God or to man.

Those who reason thus are the victims of an univocal metaphysic. We do not attribute one and the same power of the keys both to God and to His ministers. The notion of the power of the keys is proportional, analogical. There are the keys of authority (clavis auctoritatis) which are the prerogative of the Holy Trinity; the keys of excellence (clavis excellentiae) which are proper to Christ, in that His human nature is the organ of the Divinity; and finally the keys of the ministry (clavis ministerii) [33] which alone are communicated to the Church and subsist in dependence on the two foregoing as if suspended from them. The first keys contain the second, and the second the third, as the ocean contains all its currents. It is a metaphysical error which falsifies in advance all attempts at exegesis, to imagine that the divine power cannot communicate itself to men by contact without losing something of itself in the process, that it ceases to be sovereign master of the goods it bestows. That the hierarchic powers, along with the created subjects in which they reside remain in uninterrupted dependence on the divine power, is asserted by the author of the Imitation of Christ. Expressing the common doctrine on the most sublime and mysterious of these powers, that of consecrating the Body and Blood of the Saviour, he writes: "The priest is God's minister, using God's word, by God's own command and institution; but it is God who is here the principal Author and invisible Operator, to whom is subject all that He wills, and who is obeyed in all that He commands."[34]

The virtue coming from God through contact with a visible hierarchy—which therefore might be called "hierarchic virtue" or, again, "apostolic virtue "—will have for its proper effect the formation of the Church. It will bear the marks of its double origin, divine and visible. And that is why it will possess characteristics apparently opposed; for instance, it will be perfect, but yet will call for completion; it will be universal, but yet in need of something to supply for it.

It is perfect because it alone confers those sanctifying effects which are to bring the Church militant to her perfect historical age, to her ultimate specific form, which are to make her the completed Body of Christ, the community having Christ for Head and Christians for members, the marvellous abode in which God dwells somewhat as He dwells in Christ Himself. And yet it has need of completing graces over and above itself to prepare souls for it in the first place, and to perpetuate its effects. How, to start with, would the action of the hierarchy be welcomed by adults if they were not interiorly prepared by hidden influences coming from Christ without mediation to predispose them towards it, and continuing to stir them up afterwards to new progress?[35] And since the hierarchy can only operate by individual acts, from time to time, in a way that is morally continuous of course, but yet physically discontinuous, how could its divine effects in souls—such as the sacramental character and sacramental grace, which nothing else could supply—be kept continuously in existence save by a continuous and secret influx? Certain gifts of plenitude, necessary for the constitution of the Church, could never be given to man without the contact of the hierarchy; but to ensure the acceptance of these gifts and their continuous persistence in time, requires the action of a power of completion, also coming from Christ, but without mediation and wholly invisibly.

Furthermore, the hierarchic virtue is universal, since it is to extend to all nations and to endure for all time: "Going therefore teach ye all nations: baptizing them. . . and behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world" (Matt. xxviii. 19-20). But the hierarchy reaches men through sensible contact. Can such a contact be really universal? Undoubtedly it can. First of all de jure, because the hierarchy is the unique visible instrument chosen by God to form His Church here below and communicate the fullness of grace and evangelical truth to the world; and de facto as well, for on the day of Pentecost the hierarchy established contact with a multitude of men of all conditions, classes and tongues. Yet this factual universality of the hierarchy will be never fully achieved. Conditions for preaching the Gospel can always become more favourable; there can always be a greater readiness to receive it, more active zeal to spread it abroad. To suppose that the universality of the hierarchy will one day reach its theoretical maximum, is to suppose it to make contact not only with each of the great categories of mankind, but also with each subordinate group contained in those categories. That, in fact, is the utmost perfection of universality which we have any right to expect of a visible and social instrument of salvation. Even supposing it achieved, the hierarchy would not necessarily have made contact with each individual of each group; any individual might still be in invincible (non-culpable) ignorance of its divine character. Now we know on the other hand that God "will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. ii. 4), and that no human person, no man endowed with reason and freedom, will ever be abandoned by Him; even though, by no fault of his own, he wholly misses or misconceives the hierarchy. Such a man, living beyond its reach, will at least be visited as from afar by hidden redemptive influences, and only one who knowingly rejects these express invitations will be definitively condemned. We have said: only the outpouring of grace that comes of visible contact with the hierarchy will enable the Church to attain to its final specific state and grow to the fullness of the Body of Christ in this world. But this outpouring, though plenary and universal in its order, calls for another, altogether spiritual and effected from a distance; an outpouring whose normal purpose it will be to complete the former, but whose extraordinary purpose it will also be in a certain measure to supply for it.

Consequently, two influences from Christ are to be recognized. The first is exerted through contact with the hierarchy. It is perfect. It is universal both de jure and de facto, but still in a particular genus, in that way namely in which a hierarchy, a visible and social instrument of salvation, can be said to be universal, i. e. by reaching every class of men, not necessarily each man in each class, genera singulorum, non singula generum; [36] let us call it if you will, "collective universality". The second influence, action from a distance, is universal with the universality possible to a pure ray of the spirit: it enters freely into each human conscience, normally as completing, i. e. as disposing it to receive the hierarchical impulse and retain its effects; but exceptionally, when this latter is lacking, as supplying for it, and filling up in a measure what it lacks. This we may call "individual universality".

The divine power of Christ makes use exclusively of the contact of the J hierarchy to constitute the Church in her last historical epoch, to give men the sacramental characters, the sacramental graces, and the right orientation of their thought and action. And yet the divine power of Christ is not confined to the use of visible instruments.[37] It can dispense with them. It sends into each human conscience from afar, if not the same gifts, at least the elementary grace of salvation. Of this action from a distance, in so far as it is called upon exceptionally to supply for action by contact, I must here say a few words.

It will always be granted till the consummation of the world. For in this world there will always be men who, by no fault of their own, will live in ignorance or misconception of the hierarchy. They will not receive the graces that make them full members of the Church; yet none of them will be deprived, save by his own fault, of the grace of salvation.

If they refuse this grace, they condemn themselves. If they are docile to it to the point of living in love, they are Christ's sheep. They are not yet visibly united to the flock that Peter has to feed. They are sheep still scattered, souls still in exile.

But the grace that comes to their souls is, in itself, a grace bearing them towards the Church. It orientates all men secretly towards the one flock of Christ.[38] It does not always succeed in bringing them in effectively. Many, by no fault of their own, may die without reaching the end of their journey. They are not yet, but nevertheless they can be, of the Church. They are not yet of her in any stable or definitive way, but they can be so in a precarious and provisional way; they are not yet wholly members in achieved act, re, but they can be so incompletely, in virtual act, voto; they are not yet qualified to receive the efficient causal influence of the hierarchic powers, but they can be already en route—perhaps without knowing it, perhaps superficially against the grain—towards regions illuminated and fecundated by the hierarchical powers. So that in a sense there is really only one flock upon earth already, gathered together by Christ and for Christ, and entrusted by Christ to Peter—a flock to which many faithful belong consciously, openly, visibly, and many other faithful unconsciously, secretly and invisibly.

The visible mission of the Word, on the day of the Incarnation, gave the Church Christ for Head; the visible mission of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost gave her the faithful for body; with these missions, the Church entered on her definitive economy. What was inaugurated at that time—which the Apostles insistently called "the last days" (Heb. i. 2) and "the last times" (1 Peter i. 20)—was destined to endure for eternity. For indeed all the riches that God had reserved for us in His heart since the beginning of the world were then really given us. In this world we possess them only under veils and in a nature still gravely injured by sin. But later, when all veils are torn away, we shall possess them fully and openly, in a nature glorified and transfigured. Thus, even in the definitive economy of the Church, we have to distinguish two successive regimes: the regime of earth and the regime of heaven.

The beatifying vision and love of the angels and of the elect plunge them directly and immediately into the very Godhead Itself. The strength by which they know God as He knows Himself and love Him as He loves Himself still comes to them mediately, by way of the human nature of Christ, the eternal King of men and angels; but in heaven, with all our weaknesses healed, [39] the difference between action by contact and action from a distance is of no great importance. The one will penetrate us with the same ease and the same connaturality as the other.

The visible hierarchy will not then be needed any more. Its whole purpose was to continue that sensible contact by which Christ touched our wounds to heal them. That is why the Fathers and Doctors of the Church were so fond of presenting the mediation of the hierarchy in the light of a remedy. It had no raison d'etre in the state of original justice.[40] It will have less still in the state of glorified nature: "When the consummation is come the use of sacraments will cease; for the blessed in celestial glory have no longer any need of the sacramental remedy. They endlessly rejoice in the presence of God, contemplating His glory face to face and, transformed from brightness to brightness in the abyss of Deity, they taste the Word of God made flesh as He was in the beginning and will be for ever."[41]

From the beginning of the Christian revelation to the present day the Church appears as suspended from God by the visible chain of a hierarchy. This is a mystery that at once raises certain questions.

"As the Father hath sent me I also send you. . ." (John xx. 21). "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven. . ." (Matt. xviii. 18). "All power is given me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore teach ye all nations, baptizing them. . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (Matt. xxviii. 18-20).

The Father, Christ, the apostolic body composed of Peter and the other Apostles, the people—these are the links of a chain proclaimed by the whole Gospel.[42] An impulse of extraordinary power began, at the opening of our era, to work for the salvation of men; it comes down to them by steps, passing first into Christ (now hidden from us by the luminous cloud of the Ascension), then from Christ into the apostolic body [43] which is to endure till the end of the world, to teach and baptize all peoples. This extraordinary energy issuing from God, made manifest in Christ, continues operative in the apostolic body (for though its members, as individuals, are constantly replaced, it subsists like a unique living thing from generation to generation). It may be called the virtue of apostolicity, and is the proper cause of the Church, as fire is the proper cause of heat. It is always in act, forming in this world what St. Paul calls the Body of Christ. The Church, in the proper sense of that word, can come to birth and flourish only where the Blessed Trinity, through Our Lord and through the apostolic body, touches our earth; that, presumably, is what we mean when we call her apostolic.[44] The religion of the Gospel in not egalitarian but apostolic; it is not a religion without intermediaries, but hierarchic.

Here certainly is a great mystery. God could be the sole Actor if He wished. He was under no necessity to mingle human nature, always circumscribed, almost always sinful, with the work of the sanctification of the world. He fully foresaw that in having recourse to the ministry of men He would be only too often ill-served, and would provide some with arguments against His goodness. "What !" said Rousseau. "Always these human witnesses, always men who report what other men have reported, always men between God and myself!"[45] And indeed it is true that between God and myself I encounter human nature at every turn, first that of Christ sent by the Father, and then that of the Apostles and their successors sent by Christ.[46] Why?

1. The first answer derives from a general principle which would apply, proportionately, to every form of divine government, whether of the world of nature or the world of grace. Though the very least beings in the universe are directly present to Him, God has chosen nevertheless to rule them by a chain of created intermediaries; below the First Cause there are genuine secondary causes. God has chosen to endow creatures not only with being and the perfection by which they exist, but also with causative virtue and the perfection by which they act.[47] Thus lower things are ruled by higher and these again by higher still. Order is always born of subordination. On the plane of nature children depend on parents, families depend on political governments, whose form is doubtless optional but whose existence is indispensable. This same general principle holds on the plane of grace: "For all things are yours, whether it be Paul, or Apollo or Cephas, [48] or the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come; for all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's" (1 Cor. iii. 21-23).

From this standpoint one of the highest ends of the hierarchy is to provoke the exercise of charity. This is the truth that God showed St. Catherine of Siena: "I could easily have created men possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I chose that they should have need of each other, and should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me. Whether a man will or no he cannot help making an act of love. It is true however that that act, unless made through love of me, profits him nothing as far as grace is concerned. See then that I have made men my ministers, and placed them in diverse stations and various ranks, in order that they may make use of the virtue of love. Wherefore, I show you that in my house are many mansions, and that I wish for no other thing than love."[49] There is light enough in those few lines of the dyer's daughter to dissipate all the paradoxes of the Savoyard Vicar

2. So much for the general principle of hierarchy in relation to all created things. For the Church we can, as we have seen, explain the need for a hierarchy in a more precise and immediate way. God became incarnate and entered into sense contact with men; but Christ, after some years on earth, ascended to the right hand of the Father in heaven; how was that sensible contact, effected of old between Him and ourselves, to continue? Christ about to quit the world, left behind Him a visible hierarchy which thenceforth He was to use as an instrument for establishing contact with us.

It is easy to see that Jesus' most pressing care, after founding the Kingdom of God, was not to set about expanding it Himself, but to form those who would work for its expansion. As death approached He set His face towards Jerusalem and seemed little by little to concentrate His attention first on the Apostles, then on three of them, and then on the foremost of these three.

It was to be their task in return, when they were confirmed, to be His witnesses "in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth" (Acts i. 8). The book of the Acts is the history of this conquest of the world by the Apostles under the action of the Holy Spirit. Though the Magi came to His cradle, Jesus was later to declare that He Himself was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matt. xv. 24); so that it was for Peter, after the vision at Joppa, to open the gates of the Church to the Gentiles (Acts x), and for Paul to make them aware of the mystery of their aggregation to Christ (Eph. iii. 6). Thus the Apostles were to do greater things externally than Jesus; but they did them in virtue of His continuing assistance. "He that believeth in me, the works that I do he also shall do, and greater than these shall he do: because I go to the Father" (John xiv. 12). Never perhaps has the role of the intermediaries in the religion of Jesus been more highly exalted than in this text.[50] It was to be through them that Jesus would conquer the world: "I have sent you to reap that in which you did not labour: others have laboured, and you have entered into their labours" (John iv. 38).

"I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do" (John xvii. 4). What priest on his death-bed, calling to memory these words of Jesus to His Father for the last time, would dare to repeat them without feeling judged by them and indeed without feeling shaken to the depths of his soul by the vision of the evil occasioned by the negligences and errors of his life?

He knows, to be sure, that God, by secret and unlooked-for illuminations, offers every soul His love, and that none of the lost will complain at the day of judgment that their fate is no fault of their own. But he knows also that if he had imitated the Cure of Ars, even very inadequately, a flood of grace would have been poured out over souls on his account and would have sanctified them by thousands. The thought could become so oppressive that only a special mercy would save him from despair.

And, given that the body of the faithful as a whole, in so far as it puts the gifts it has received into act, is the cause of the life and radiance of the Church, every Catholic conscious of the mission which has lain upon him since Baptism and Confirmation, might well feel the like anguish. St. Catherine of Siena, lamb without spot, broken by unheard-of penances, accused herself with tears, while she lay dying, of all the disorders which then disfigured Christendom.

And with reason; for it is natural that the faith, which involves acceptance of Christ's words on the mediation of weak men and thus lays unlimited responsibilities upon us, should thereby also give us a glimpse of the incalculable and disquieting consequences of a single one of our shortcomings.

When the divine virtue passed through the human nature of Christ to bring grace and truth to the sinners among whom He lived, then, although it remained essentially mysterious, it embodied itself in space and time, and became in a measure manifest, on account of the visible means it borrowed. Thus too, the same mysterious virtue by which today the Church is formed in the world, having come from its source in the Trinity and passed through the human nature of Our Lord now glorified and ascended to heaven, continues, by passing through the hierarchy, to incarnate itself in space and time and to make itself in a measure visible, by reason of the means whereby it enters into sensible contact with us. It is thus invisible and mysterious in its inner depths, but visible and evident up to a point in virtue of the sensible vesture with which it clothes itself in order to reach us

We need no faith to perceive the sacramental signs and the jurisdictional organization of the Church. Faith will be needed, however, to recognize that these signs and this organization are the envelope of a hidden, divine and ever-active virtue, without which the very being and existence of the Church would soon founder into nothingness. That is the mystery we confess when we say, in the words of the Nicaeo-Constantinopolitan Creed: "I believe in the apostolic Church." We believe—it is a truth of faith revealed in Scripture—that a supernatural virtue penetrates the hierarchy, the apostolic body, for the forming of the Body of Christ in the world.

Yet, however mysterious in itself, the divine virtue that forms and maintains the Church is revealed, inadequately no doubt, in one of its effects: the marvellous permanence of the Church. To anyone who is alive to the impermanence and fragility of all known societies, the uninterrupted substantial continuity of the Church, in the midst of the revolutions of the Western world, must surely seem a sociological fact for which no natural explanation will suffice. The permanence of the Church under one same hierarchy is not a mystery to be seen only by the eye of faith; it is a fact verifiable in history; and its miraculous character bears witness to the divine origin of the Church. In this sense Bossuet could write: "Besides the advantage which the Church of Jesus Christ alone possesses in being founded on miraculous and divine facts openly proclaimed without fear of contradiction at the very time when they happened, here, for those who live in later times, we have a permanent miracle confirming the truth of all the others: the persistence of a religion consistently victorious over all the errors that attempt to destroy it."[51]

The hierarchy is mysterious and, as such, an object of faith, in so far as it is a dispenser of divine grace and truth, and in so far as it is the instrumental cause of the Body of Christ which is the Church. But it is also miraculous, and, as such, observable, inasmuch as in the turmoil and confusion of the world it communicates a constancy, a persistence, to all that we can see of the Church—a constancy of doctrine and of practice which the laws that preside over the evolution of human societies cannot sufficiently explain.

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The apostolic hierarchy divides into two great powers, the power of order and the power of jurisdiction. We must examine the basis of this division, and the nature of both powers.

Christ is "the head of the body, the Church" (Col. i. 18). God has made Him "head over all the Church, which is his body" (Eph. i. 22-23). "Christ is the head of the Church, the Saviour of his body" (Eph. v. 23). In this comparison of head and body St. Paul indicates the whole mystery of the action of Christ on His Church.

The Word takes flesh and becomes the Head of the Church. He acts on her in two ways. First, by a hidden influx from within, He communicates the life of grace. And again He teaches her, from without, by words that reach the mind through the ear, the ways of truth. Thus, by a two-fold contact, the one, more mysterious, pouring out grace, the other, more external, showing her the truth, Christ saves the Church which is His Body. That is why He appeared to the Apostles "full of grace and truth" (John i. 14); Moses had brought only the Law, but "by Jesus Christ", by contact with Him, "came grace and truth" (John i. 17). He is Priest, full of grace, and King, full of truth.

Now the Lord Jesus, says St. Mark (xvi. 19), "was taken up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God"; He is, says St. Matthew (xxvi. 64), "sitting on the right hand of the power of God"; Stephen saw Him "standing on the right hand of God" (Acts vii. 55). He is thus associated with the divine omnipotence in the work of directing and sustaining His Church. How then does He sustain, and how direct her?

He willed to form her by the double contact of His sanctifying influx and His living teaching. Does it then follow that in order to conserve her He will act on her only from a distance? He willed first to be united to her as head to body: must we believe that on the day of the Ascension the Head was, as it were, taken from the Body?

No. The glorified Christ who is in heaven remains closely united to the crucified body of His Church. He touches it, no longer through the contact of His own proper Person, save in the Eucharist, but through the persons of the hierarchy who have given themselves to be used by Him: for by this, explains the Apostle, we cleave to "the head, from which the whole body, by joints and bands, being supplied with nourishment and compacted, groweth unto the increase of God" (Col. ii. 19). If He has Himself appointed "some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors", it is "for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: until we all meet into the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ", and so that "doing the truth in charity we may in all things grow up in him who is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body, being compacted and fitly joined together, by what every joint supplieth, according to the operation in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity" (Eph. iv. 11-16).

From the twofold action of Christ comes the distinction of the two great hierarchic powers. The power of serving as instrument of Christ the Priest to perpetuate the redemptive sacrifice in the Mass and to communicate the fullness of Christian grace through the sacraments—this is the power of order.[52] And the power of serving as instrument of Christ the King, so as to continue under His action to preach the fullness of Christian truth to the world—this is the power of jurisdiction, the pastoral power, [53] the authority to teach what is to be believed and what done.

The end of the power of order is to convey to all ages in a hidden manner the drama of the Redemption and its fruits. The end of the power of jurisdiction, understood here in the broadest sense as covering both the extraordinary authority of the Apostles and the regular authority of their successors, is to prolong Christ's witness to the truth by openly proclaiming to all ages the whole plenitude of Christian truth, both speculative and practical.

The power of order which bestows grace and justifies from sin, opens heaven directly, se extendit ad ipsum coelum immediate, directe, as St. Thomas says.[54] The power of jurisdiction points the way to heaven: it enabled the Apostles to reveal new truths, it enables the Pope to determine the object of faith, to assemble a General Council, [55] to regulate the legitimate use of the power of order, to absolve, excommunicate, grant indulgences, [56] and to control all things in the Church militant.[57]

The power of order and that of jurisdiction differ not only in their purpose, but in their nature, and in the mode of their transmission.

1. The two powers differ in nature. The power of order is a participation of the priesthood of Christ. The sacramental characters, says St. Thomas, "are nothing else than certain participations of Christ's priesthood, flowing from Christ Himself".[58] The power of jurisdiction is a participation of Christ's kingship: Christ being Head of the Church in a sovereign manner and in virtue of His own proper authority, the others being heads in a dependent manner and as delegated by Christ.[59]

The end of Christ's priesthood is to pour into souls the very virtue of the Redemption. The created intermediaries are unable to produce so divine an effect save as simple instruments. The sacramental power is therefore a purely instrumental [60] ministerial power. Hence it is infallible, not of course on account of its own proper virtue, but because it transmits the virtue of a Principal Agent.[61] But the end of Christ's kingship is the outward proclamation of the full divine revelation, so that the created intermediaries can here play a freer part. The power of jurisdiction is still ministerial; but it can be said to act more in the manner of a secondary cause; and it will not be infallible save in so far as it is divinely aided.

The power of order, which exists to bring the redemptive virtue to souls, is a physical spiritual participation of the spiritual power of Christ the Priest. For if "the instrument must be proportioned to the agent"[62] there will have to be a proportion, a conformity between those who act as the habitual instruments of redemption and Christ, who is its source. Hence the power of order. Like every sacramental character, the power of order is a physical spiritual power and hence indelible.[63] It can persist, and can even be transmitted, in schism and heresy.[64] The power of jurisdiction, which exists for the external preaching of Christian truth, speculative and practical, is a moral authority, mission and power; it is kept on the line of truth and preserved from error by providential aid involving various prophetic graces ranging from oral and scriptural inspiration, the privilege of the Apostles, to the graces of assistance given to their successors. It is lost as soon as the subject leaves the Church. Apostolic authority, but not the power of order, was lost to Judas. No regular jurisdiction can of itself continue under conditions of heresy and schism.[65]

2. The two powers differ in the mode of their transmission. The sacramental power, being physical, will be normally conferred by way of consecration, per consecrationem (consecration received from Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders). The power of jurisdiction, being moral, will be normally conferred by way of designation, of commission, of mandate, ex simplici injunctione.[66]

The two powers of order and jurisdiction are really distinct. But they are not independent of each other.

One of the functions of the power of jurisdiction is to determine the conditions under which the power of order is to be exercised. In this respect, it is the power of order that depends on that of jurisdiction. It does so always for its legitimate exercise. It does so even at times for its valid exercise: thus jurisdiction is required for the valid administration of the sacrament of Penance; thus a simple priest cannot validly confer Confirmation and the Minor Orders without delegation from the Sovereign Pontiff; thus most theologians consider that the Church can determine, in individuo, the valid matter and form of certain sacraments, such as those of Confirmation and Order. Moreover the most general end of the power of jurisdiction is the preservation to all ages of the full truth of the Christian revelation; and without that, the very existence of the power of order would be precarious. And the extraordinary jurisdiction of the Apostles carried with it, besides authority to reveal the divine economy of Christianity to the world, the power, not indeed of instituting, but of promulgating certain sacraments.

On the other hand the power of jurisdiction resides in a regular and connatural manner only in the bishops, in whom is the plenitude of the power of order. In this respect it is the power of jurisdiction that depends on that of order. And if the power of jurisdiction can in fact exist in those who lack the power of order, its ultimate and definitive subject is to be found, not in them, but in others who possess it.

Since the sovereign priesthood and the supreme kingship are inseparable in Christ who is the Head, it is to be expected that the powers of jurisdiction and order, their two-fold derivative, should be strictly united in order to act on the Church which is His Body. They constitute, according to St. Paul's image, the system of joints and ligaments by which the increase of charity and truth, and, in a word, the unity of one life, descends from head to body. It would be an error therefore to think of two hierarchies, one of order and the other of jurisdiction. There is one sole hierarchy, with two distinct but interdependent powers. It is there already with the first degrees of the power of order. It reaches completion in the bishops, in whom resides the plenitude of the power of order, and who possess permanent jurisdiction by ordinary and proper title. It is finally consummated in the Bishop of Rome, in whom alone resides permanent universal jurisdiction. The ministers of lower rank, and the priests, belong to the hierarchy, but their powers are incomplete and dependent; the two permanent powers of the hierarchy, those of order and of jurisdiction, are fully reunited only in the body apostolic directly constituted by the Pope and the bishops.

According to the Code of Canon Law, which here summarizes the Councils of Trent and the Vatican, the permanent hierarchy "comprises in virtue of divine right, in the line of order: bishops, priests, and ministers; and, in the line of jurisdiction: a supreme pontificate and a subordinated episcopate."[67]

The hierarchic powers of the Church are often called "the Church teaching" as opposed to the "Church believing".

The hierarchy carries the two-fold power of order and of jurisdiction, and is therefore not only the "Church teaching" but also the "Church sanctifying".

1. To these terms would be opposed "the Church taught" and "the Church sanctified;" or rather, the Church believing and the Church loving. That of course is not a division of the Church into two distinct societies, or two halves of a society each with its own distinct set of members. It is a division between a power assisted by Christ to define the truth, speculative and practical, on the one hand, and all who recognize this power, not excluding the Sovereign Pontiff, the bishops and the clergy, on the other.[68] Inasmuch as they are the depositaries and the organs of the power of jurisdiction, the Pope and the bishops constitute the Church teaching; but inasmuch as they too have souls to save, minds and hearts to be dedicated to God, they are parts of the Church believing and loving." They are bound, like all other Christians, under pain of endangering their eternal salvation, to accept all utterances pertaining to the divine law, even when it falls to their lot to propose them solemnly to the world for the first time: thus, not to lose his faith, Pius IX had to believe, along with the rest of us, the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of Papal Infallibility. As to decrees resting on ecclesiastical law that they themselves have promulgated, here again the hierarchy are bound to conform; not, doubtless, because a ruler can bind himself juridically before men by his own decrees, but because he binds himself morally before God, who will accuse him at the Last Day of "having said and not done", with having laid heavy burdens on men's shoulders and stirred no finger to lift them (Matt. xxiii. 3-4).[69]

The division of the Church into Church teaching and sanctifying on the one hand, and Church believing and loving on the other, does not correspond to any division into active and passive. The Church teaching and sanctifying is, admittedly, active with respect to the Church believing, loving and doing; but this latter, in order to be profoundly docile to the jurisdiction that Jesus has left in the world, is by no means inert. There is nothing more alive than a faith that knows what it has to believe, than a love that knows what it ought to love and to do.[70]

2. The hierarchic powers of order and jurisdiction have for their depositaries men who, in themselves, are part of the Church believing. These powers are exterior to the Church believing as an efficient cause (ministerial) is exterior to its effect; and it is from this standpoint that we shall chiefly consider them in this first book. But under another aspect they are interior to the Church, for they reside in men who are members of the Church believing, and who share in the faith and charity common to Christians. And that suffices to bring out the profound unity of the Church teaching and the Church believing. It can be compared to the sense of sight which might be said in a way to direct our bodily motions from without, but which nevertheless belongs to the body, and verifies the same law of assimilation and transmutation as do all the other bodily organs. "A man's body is all one though it has a number of different organs. . . so it is with Christ. . . And you are Christ's body, organs of it depending upon each other. God has given us different positions in the Church; apostles first, then prophets, and thirdly teachers. . ." (1 Cor. xii. 12 and 27).

Note however that properly speaking the hierarchic powers are not spontaneously generated by the life of the Church believing, as for example the organ of sight is spontaneously generated at a definite instant in the physiological development of the embryo. The hierarchic powers themselves preside from the outset over the formation and conservation of the Church of faith and of charity. They are prior to her; not with a priority of temporal succession, but with the priority which an always active ministerial cause can have over the effect it unceasingly produces. The hierarchic power, which we have called the apostolic body, is an organic institution founded by Christ and enjoying an uninterrupted life. The individual members pass away, but the body as such does not pass away; it is as an everlasting living thing—it will last, to be precise, as long as history. Hence there will never come a moment in the life of the Church when, having been deprived of its hierarchy, the Church believing will have to reconstitute it by a kind of exteriorisation and re-achievement of itself; as the evolutive power of the embryo calls up the sense of sight from the depths of the organism.

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The Church derives her most precious and most inward gifts from the hierarchy; and from the imprint which the hierarchy stamps upon her comes her created soul.[71] This latter has power to construct, animate and organize under it the whole great body of the Church.

I shall here attempt a very summary sketch of the Church as seen from this standpoint; turning to account what we already know of her and drawing by anticipation on what remains to be said.

We shall consider the following points. 1. The power of order helps to enrich the Church with two fundamental spiritual elements: the sacramental character and sacramental grace. 2. The jurisdictional or pastoral power, whose directives are interiorized in the hearts of Christians by faith and obedience, orientates all their activity, contemplative and practical, to divine truth. 3. The created soul of the Church is now constituted in its integrity. Under its influence the visible Church takes form—a Church outside of which is no salvation, but within which those already begin to be included who belong to it "by desire", that is to say by a genuine movement of charity. 4. The just who are still said to be "outside" the Church, although they are not yet fully within it, are on the way to be so; they are within it in virtual act. 5. Membership by desire can be concealed under quite a variety of different outward attitudes.

Finally, something will be said concerning Catholic oecumenicism.

The power of order enables those who possess it to act as instrumental causes in the transmission of the sacramental power (or the sacramental character) and of sacramental grace.

In this respect the Church distinguishes her children according as they are laymen or in Holy Orders.

The laity, as the name indicates (laos people) are the Christian people. They too are already consecrated. It is the modern world, not the Church, that opposes the terms "laic" and "consecrated".[72] The non-consecrated consist, in reality, of the catechumens and, more generally, all the unbaptized whether in good or bad faith. As to the laity, the consecrations effected by Baptism and Confirmation give them a certain participation of the sacerdotal power of Christ. They are members qualified to offer liturgically, along with the priest, the sacrifice of the New Law, to be ministers of the sacrament of their own marriages, and to receive the other sacraments from the hands of the priest.

Those who receive the sacrament of Order participate in a third consecration thanks to which the sacrifice and sacrament of the Eucharist are perpetuated in the world, and thanks to which the two-fold lay consecration attains to its full exercise and full significance.

The consecrations bestowed by Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders are spiritual and supernatural powers.[73] They are supernatural, not simply in the mode of their production, like miracles, but also in themselves. They bring us participation in what is most inward and hidden in the omnipotence of the Deity.[74] In this sense, their spirituality is even more precious than that of the angels if we consider them simply in their nature. The saints understand the grandeur of the sacramental characters and have even caught miraculous glimpses of it—notably that of order. What we know only by faith, became on occasion actually visible to them. St. Philip Neri guessed that a certain youth of sixteen or seventeen in layman's clothing had been secretly ordained priest, saying "that he had seen a great splendour on the forehead of this young man which could be only the sacerdotal character imprinted on his soul."[75] It has been granted to other saints "habitually to perceive the sacerdotal character in the souls of priests. It appeared to them as no merely superadded and separable exterior ornament, but as an intimate constituent of the very substance of the soul, in the manner of sanctifying grace, transforming it and making it a participant of the eternal priesthood of Christ, of His dignity and powers." The consecrated hands of priests meant far more to them than hands marked with the stigmata.

The invisible consecration conferred by the sacraments, the sacramental character, is thus an essential element of the Church, a spiritual component of the Church. It belongs to the created soul of the Church.

The power of order furthermore enables those who have it to act, whether by exclusive or normal title, as instrumental causes in the transmission of grace.[76] Now the sacraments confer grace not simply in its simple and naked substance—as it is found in the catechumen, in the "savage", in the unbaptized in good faith whom God justifies in secret—but also, up to a point, with those full and perfect modalities that it had in the soul of Our Lord. This is because Jesus chose the sacraments as the means for conveying grace from His heart to ours, so that it comes through these channels in its integrity and vigour and delicacy, under the immediate influence of His sacred humanity.[77] The words "immediate influence" need comment. We have here not what the ancients called the immediacy "of the suppositum", for the whole sacrament with its rite and minister is interposed between Christ and the recipient, but what they called a "virtual immediacy", since the whole virtue of the sacrament is due, not to the sacrament itself, but solely to Christ. Thus the grace that comes by the sacraments is rich in formalities denied to grace that is given without them. It is rather like the light of the sun and the light of the moon—they are of the same species, says John of St. Thomas, but the former is charged with more virtualities. So also grace is of the same species in one who receives the sacraments in fact (re) and in one who receives them only in desire (voto); but in the first case, though it might be less intense, it would of necessity be in some ways more complete. We must distinguish between the sanctifying grace needful for the salvation of all men without exception, and the sacramental grace which gives sanctifying grace its freest and fullest development, enabling it to take on those characteristics that it had in Christ, and thus to form in space and time the lineaments of His Mystical Body, that is to say of His Church. Thus it is within that one sole religious society, brought forth, formed and fed by the sacraments, that the fullness of Christ is represented, and the Body of Christ is unmutilated. In those who, like the catechumens and the "good savage", receive the sacraments only in desire, and not in fact, grace lacks a certain special modality.[78] They are like wanderers searching for their own country, sheep already won for Christ but not yet numbered with the flock.

Thus among the spiritual components of the Church, we must count not only the sacramental character but sacramental grace. So that this too belongs to the created soul of the Church.

Sacramental grace, which can be given in its fullness only by aid of the power of order, is the very substance of the Christian life. It is to be the principle of all its ulterior developments. For supernatural life cannot remain always dormant, as in the soul of a baptized child. It is destined to awaken and to become active. One cannot conceive of faith thinking of nothing, hope expecting nothing, charity loving nothing—or, for that matter, as thinking of, hoping for, or loving anything and everything indifferently. This would be spiritual death. Life demands to develop, to pass from the indeterminate to the determinate, from power to act; by its very nature it must choose. And if the life in question is supernatural and divine, its choices, if nothing untoward occurs, will be likewise supernatural and divine. It needs to know with divine and supernatural certitude what is to be believed or not believed, what is to be hoped for or not hoped for, what loved or not loved, what done or not done. The God who created it will not leave it without speculative and practical directions which it will be its business to follow. It postulates them, feels after them, and often anticipates them. The power of order, by which God normally awakens supernatural life in the soul, corresponds to the power of jurisdiction by which He normally shows it the way it should go.[79] So that even sacramental grace, when deprived of the guidance that comes from jurisdiction, lives an attenuated and constantly threatened life, only too likely to atrophy. Thus both powers are needed, the one to give sanctifying grace the fullness of its being and vigour, the other to direct and specify it. Thus and thus only can grace, conjointly with the sacramental character, form the created soul of the Church, the unifying form that holds the Church together in the bonds of truth and of love, and stamps her with the stamp of Him whose faithful and abiding image, in every place and time, it is her destiny to be.

Thus we must include among the spiritual elements which go to make up the Ecclesia credens, the right orientation which the jurisdictional power communicates to the divine potencies and virtues—given of course that this orientation is freely accepted by the faith and obedience of the faithful, i. e. assimilated by them and interiorized within them. The sacramental character, sacramental grace, the jurisdictional orientation duly interiorized—there we have the three spiritual components of the created soul of the Church.

It is at the precise point at which God, by the two-fold power of the apostolic hierarchy, makes contact with men that we must look for the created soul of the Church, and then go on to study the body it animates. For the created soul and the body of the Church are, of themselves, coextensive—in other words, the created soul does not extend beyond its body, nor the body beyond its soul. "The faithful" wrote St. Augustine," must become the Body of Christ if they would live by the Spirit of Christ. Understand, my brothers, what I have said. You are a man, you have a spirit and you have a body. A spirit, I say, called the soul, by which it appears that you are man, because composed of soul and body. You have then an invisible spirit and a visible body. Tell me now, which of these two lives by the other—is it your spirit that lives by your body, or your body by your spirit? Every living man will know how to reply, and if anyone cannot reply I know not whether he lives. And what does every living man reply? That it is the body, of course, that lives by the spirit. Would you then, for your part, live by the Spirit of Christ? Then be in the Body of Christ. Does my body live by your spirit? Mine lives by my spirit, and yours by yours. The Body of Christ cannot live at all, if not by the Spirit of Christ." He adds a little further on: "It is the Spirit that quickens, for it is the spirit that makes the members live. It gives life to those members only whom it finds in the body it quickens. The spirit that is in you, O man, and by which you are a man—does it then quicken any member that has been separated from your flesh? Your spirit is what I call your soul, and your soul quickens only those members that are in your body; if you cut off any one of them it soon ceases to be quickened by your soul, since it has no longer any share in the unity of your body. I say these things that you should learn to love unity and fear separation. The Christian should fear nothing so much as separation from the Body of Christ. Once he is separated he is no longer a member of Christ; and if he is not a member of Christ he is no longer quickened by the Spirit of Christ. For, says the Apostle, he who has not the Spirit of Christ, is not of Christ."[80] The fundamental law of the coextension of the created soul and body of the Church is not contradicted by the fact that sanctifying grace may be found among the unbaptized or the non-Catholic baptized. There are two reasons for this. First of all, grace has to be sacramental and duly orientated before it contributes to the constitution of the perfect soul of the Church; and secondly, although the soul of the Church is only prefigured where the sacramental character, or sacramental grace, or orientated grace are lacking, yet the body of the Church begins to be prefigured there too. Nor is the fundamental law of the co-extension of the created soul and body of the Church contradicted by the fact that many sinners lacking grace continue to be members of the Church; for it can be said that to the extent to which they still adhere to the Church these sinners receive spiritual influences which emanate from the entire soul of the Church, which in this sense is in them by its efficiency and, as it were, dynamically.

The preachers and apologists of the nineteenth century rather lost sight of St. Augustine's great doctrine. How were they to reconcile the axiom "Outside the Church, no salvation"[81] with the doctrine, everywhere received, that those who remain ignorant of the Church in good faith may nevertheless be in a state of grace and in the way to save their souls? Protestantism, prompt to dissociate invisible realities from visible, answered that there exists an "invisible Church" to which the just of all times belong, and a "visible Church" (or many visible Churches) which nobody is bound to enter. A certain number of Catholic writers, without wishing to dislocate the Church in this manner, imagined that her soul, i. e. sanctifying grace as they said, extended far beyond the limits of her body. They added that the just who in good faith remain ignorant of the Church, belong to the soul of the Church, and are therefore not outside her.

In the first place, however, such a mode of distinguishing the soul and body of the Church is without foundation in the authentic documents of the magisterium.[82] It would seem to have been influenced by the Protestant conception of a "spiritual Church", distinct from the "visible Church"[83], and its use appears to be dangerous.[84] On the other hand we can easily see that the soul of the Church is not sanctifying grace pure and simple, as found in those who remain ignorant of the Church in good faith, but sanctifying grace as transmitted by the sacramental power and ruled by the jurisdictional power.

To reconcile the axiom "Outside the Church, no salvation", with the doctrine of the possible salvation of those who remain ignorant of the Church in all good faith, there is no need to manufacture any new theory. All we have to do is to apply to the Church the traditional distinction made in connection with the necessity of Baptism, the door by which the Church is entered. To the question: Can anybody be saved without Baptism? St. Thomas, who here draws on the thought of St. Ambrose, replies that those who lack Baptism re et voto, that is to say who neither are nor want to be baptized, cannot come to salvation, "since they are neither sacramentally nor mentally incorporated into Christ, by whom alone is salvation". But those who lack Baptism re, sed non voto, that is to say "who desire Baptism, but are accidentally overtaken by death before receiving it, can be saved without actual Baptism, in virtue of their desire for Baptism, coming from a faith that works by charity, by which God, whose power is not circumscribed by visible sacraments, sanctifies man interiorly".[85] Conformably with this distinction we shall say that the axiom "No salvation outside the Church" is true of those who do not belong to the Church, which in herself is visible, either visibly (corporaliter) or even invisibly, either by the sacraments (sacramentaliter) or even in spirit (mentaliter); either fully (re) or even by desire (voto); either in accomplished act or even in virtual act.[86] The axiom does not concern the just who, without yet belonging to the Church visibly, in accomplished act (re), do so invisibly, in virtual act, in spirit, by desire (mentaliter, voto), that is to say in virtue of the supernatural righteousness of their lives, even while, through insurmountable ignorance, they know nothing of the sanctity, or even of the existence, of the Church.[87]

I do not say that there is no supernatural life at all outside the Church, but simply that there is none that does not look towards her.[88] As preliminary to a deeper study of the soul of the Church, let us examine more closely the position of the just "outside".

They are to be found either in those groups which lack the sacraments of the New Law (paganism, Islam, Judaism, and Protestant sects such as the Quakers), or in those groups which, while separating themselves from the Church, have kept, among other good things, various genuine sacraments. (We may call them dissidents: Graeco-Russians, and traditionalist Protestants.) [89]

1. The just of the first category enjoy supernatural life—i. e. sanctifying grace issuing in the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The whole tendency of this life is to grow towards completion, to enrich itself with those modalities which grace possesses in the sacred humanity of Christ, to open out, in a word, into that sacramental grace which, as we have seen, is a primary and fundamental element of the soul of the Church. It thus creates in those who have it a kind of living aspiration to that soul, a real and ontological desire for the Church. Men of this sort are of the Church, say the theologians, not yet re but already voto, mentaliter, by desire. Membership re and membership voto are here opposed, not as real membership to unreal, but as actual, consummated ontological membership to virtual, prefigured ontological membership, as membership in achieved act to membership in virtual act. Membership re, visible, corporeal, terminal, achieved, may be compared with membership voto, invisible, spiritual, prefigured, of desire; as the plant in flower is compared with the plant in bud; or, to take Bellarmine's comparison, as the man with the child still hidden in his mother's womb.[90]

However reduced may be the activities of grace in such souls, they will still be in need of speculative and practical directives. They must know, for example—if they are to believe in them supernaturally—of the existence and providence of God, of the principles of morality and so on. Data of this sort are doubtless woven into the religious and cultural web within which they live, but are bound to be vitiated by endless errors. Each will have to do what he can on his own account, under the inner influence of the Holy Spirit who fails no one—though we may all too easily mistake our own voice for His—to sift the true from the false, the good from the bad. There will be omissions and inaccuracies, more or less serious according to the religious group concerned—Judaism for example or Islam being more helpful than paganism, itself a thing of many degrees. In so far as these religions shut out the truth they are instruments of darkness; but by such truths as they have retained (or perhaps regained), they may, however accidentally and imperfectly, be sources of light for millions of souls inwardly sustained by the Holy Spirit.

2. The just of the second category, the dissident groups, are in a better position. Like the rest, they belong to the Church not completely—not re—but in a way that is initial, virtual, beginning, voto. Note however that membership by desire is realized in an analogous or proportional manner; more feebly in the first category, and to a greater degree of perfection in the second, where certain genuine sacraments of the New Law have been retained, along with numerous traditional data in the speculative and practical orders.

The Graeco-Russian dissidents have kept the power of order with its three degrees: bishops, priests, and deacons. It has been perpetuated among them in virtue of the validly transmitted consecration of those who first made the schism. Thanks to the power of order the redemptive sacrifice is offered and the sacraments preserved: Baptism undoubtedly, and Confirmation, enabling the laity to partake to a certain extent of the sacerdotal power of Christ; the Eucharist too, the end of all the other sacraments, which of itself, whenever it is received with the right dispositions, tends to bestow spiritual life—not, like Baptism, in an inchoate state, but in a consummated state [91]—and to form the Church, the Body of Christ, the "sacrament of piety, the sign of unity, the bond of charity."[92] The just who belong to these Graeco-Russian groups truly possess, besides the triple sacramental character that enables them validly to continue the celebration of the Christian rite, that sacramental grace which though not, in isolation, the soul of the Church, is nevertheless a primary and fundamental constituent of the soul of the Church.

Those dissident groups of the Reformed in which Baptism is still validly administered—whose marriages are therefore held by the Roman Church to be authentically sacramental [93]—can still participate, but in an attenuated way, in the sacramental benefits: the sacerdotal power of Christ is imparted to them only in Baptism, sacramental grace only in Baptism and the sacrament of Matrimony.

As to the supernatural directives needed to give sacramental grace its collective orientation and the final perfection which will make it the soul of the Church, an immanent form uniting, ruling, and vivifying the whole Mystical Body of Christ, they exist outside the Catholic Church as doctrinal patterns—much more important and closely organized in Graeco-Russian Christianity, where the process of separation has not gone so far, than in the Protestant variety, and much more important in Protestantism, where the two Testaments are respected, than in the religions of the non-baptized. That the number of the sacraments should diminish with the value of these doctrinal patterns is easy to understand. When the Protestants of England ceased to believe in the Eucharist their ordinations ceased to be valid, and the power of order lost its divine significance.[94] Today, the Protestant modernists, who do not believe in original sin, no longer attach any great importance to the reception of Baptism. The denial of any divine power of jurisdiction, and the consequent denial of any infallible truth in dogmatic pronouncements, tends of itself to the suppression of the sacramental power.

3. In the unbaptized just, and in those of the Protestant and Graeco-Russian groups, the soul of the Church is, as it were, in formation, yet can nowhere come to fulfilment. For even where sacramental grace attains the fullness of its being and of its modalities, as among the Graeco-Russians, it lacks light, encountering directives which are not always sufficient and not always certain, neither infallibly guaranteed as a whole nor protected from the corrosive influence of modern errors; and it cannot possibly achieve that plenitude which would issue in the created soul of the Church, the immanent ruling form of the Mystical Body of Christ.

It is important to note here that when we say that the Church is in formation outside the Church, we are looking at things in a way which, from an ecclesiological standpoint, is accidental and secondary. We mean that those who broke with the Church took with them certain good things which by their very nature belong to her. In themselves, in virtue of their own internal exigencies, these scattered fragments demand to be reintegrated in the Church, and we know that the universal saving virtue of the God of mercy works mysteriously and incessantly for their reintegration. But clearly this reintegrating movement works in precisely the opposite direction to the original movement by which the dissident Churches cut themselves off from the true Church, and it can gain ground only by sapping the specific principle by which these Churches willed, and still will, to differ from the true Church. Outside the Church the Church is in formation, but this comes about accidentally, by violence done to the course things have taken. Outside the Church, the Church, of itself, is in decomposition. Any fragments of life broken off from her are no sooner detached from their native whole and subjected to the influence of the principle of dissidence, than they begin to disintegrate and decay.

Thus it is entirely right to hold that the struggle of light against darkness is the struggle of the Church against the world; but we must add that even in this world the Church has One who works for her in secret, the hidden God who mysteriously enlightens every man, whose wisdom reaches from end to end of the universe, and who does not reap where He has not sown.

Other things being equal—that is to say, supposing an equal intensity of charity everywhere—membership of the Church by desire possesses a greater and greater degree of perfection as we pass from the non-baptized just to those of the traditionalist Protestant Churches, and then to those of the Graeco-Russian Churches. But by a very disconcerting paradox, the movement of conversion to the Church is not necessarily in direct, but rather in inverse, ratio to the religious perfection of these various groups. It may be that there is some mystery here like that of the Gentiles, whose conversion en masse is to precede the entry of Israel into the Church.

Turning now from groups of believers to individual persons, we note that membership by desire—that is to say the authentic movement of charity which effectively unites a soul to the Church—may co-exist with very diverse attitudes of mind, some of which may strike the faithful as rather strange. But it is not for the faithful, or for the theologians or even for the jurisdictional authority, to be the final judge of the salvation of each particular soul. That is for God alone. There are three typical attitudes, around which we may easily group the others.

First there is that of the catechumens. They have expressly asked for Baptism and the gates of the Church, which they know to be the Body of Christ, stand open before them. Their desire for her is fully conscious and explicit.

The second attitude is that of the unbaptized child who awakes at one and the same time to the life of reason and to the life of faith, and turns to his last end with a profound aspiration which will count as Baptism by desire and will bring him to the heart of the Kingdom of God.[95] One grown to manhood in the forests, away from the company of men, and suddenly illumined by an inner inspiration showing him what to believe, would be in a similar position.[96] In these two cases, and others like them, the desire that saves these men, though it springs from a faith vitalized by charity, is not always accompanied by explicit knowledge of Baptism or of the Church, nor even perhaps of the Incarnation and the Trinity: the explicit content of faith then amounting to two points which, in the supereminent mystery of their riches, contain all the articles of the creed: namely that "God is, and rewards those who seek after Him" (Heb. xi. 6).

The third attitude is that of men who are aware of the existence and activity of the Church, but who, far from seeming to move towards her, show themselves ill-disposed, perhaps oppose her with all their conscious powers, even persecute her; and yet do this because of insurmountable errors for which God does not hold them responsible, sincerely convinced as they are that they work for justice and truth. Their hostility to the Church can coexist with an authentic movement of faith working by charity, which attaches them closely to the very Church that they detest, but whose sons they already are. Newman had long given up "choosing his way" and was content to be led by the divine light; yet still the Church of Rome seemed to him to be allied with Antichrist. There are more things in a man's heart than are dreamt of in his philosophy; or even, often enough, in his theology.

In an important and well-documented work, profoundly original in its approach, in which he considers how dissidents (whether as individuals or as Churches) should be regarded by Catholics, and discusses the burning questions raised by the present divisions among Christians, Pere Congar has tried to define the principles of a Catholic oecumenicism.[97]

1. Taken in the Protestant sense, he says, oecumenicism "is neither the attempt nor the wish to re-unite Christian groups, considered as dissident, to a single Church considered as the sole true one. It arises among those who hold that no Christian confession in its present state possesses the fullness of Christianity; that even if some one of them is true, it does not, as a confession, possess the totality of truth, but that other Christian values exist outside it, not only among Christians confessionally separated from it, but in other confessions or other Churches, as confessions and as Churches." Pere Congar does not expressly dissociate himself from these last words.[98] But he goes on at once to declare that:

"To the extent to which this oecumenicism supposes that the different existing Christianities, having all failed at some point, possess each but a part of the truth and ought therefore, repenting and humbling themselves before God, to negotiate on a footing of equality, to consent to some sacrifices, and to unite in the profession of what of Christian truth is common to them all, while mutually respecting their differences—to the extent to which oecumenicism is that, there can be no such thing as a Catholic oecumenicism.

"But if oecumenicism, as a specific movement of thought and action, is simply an awareness that a problem of re-union exists, that this problem is not exhausted, nor even fully opened up, by an exclusive emphasis on individual conversions, but that there is room for a theological determination of the status of the dissident Christianities as Christianities, of the relations of the dissident Churches, as Churches, to the true Church and to its unity—then indeed there can be, and we think that there ought to be and is, a Catholic oecumenicism."

2. Desirous of pushing courtesy and good feeling as far as possible, Congar seems to distinguish two moments in the spiritual attitude whence dissidence springs—at the inception of Luther's revolt for instance, or Calvin's. There is first an extremely vivid awareness of some authentically Christian truth: gratuitousness of justification in Luther's case, transcendence of the divine holiness in Calvin's. Then comes a second moment which consists in tearing this truth away from the organic wholeness of the revealed deposit in which it was given us, so as to live it apart and thus to falsify it. From this standpoint it can be said that "at the origin of the great secessions there was as a rule a genuine spiritual impetus which, in so far as it was positive and disinterested, was truly Catholic;"[99] or again that Lutheranism is true "as a spiritual attitude", but that the error which, precisely, constitutes Lutheranism comes from the fact that "Luther, taking into account nothing but his own violent and personal experience, projected it into an abstract and universal theological doctrine;"[100] or again, that "what is true in, for instance, the Lutheran. . . experience is. . . a loss to the Catholic Church of today, and calls by its very nature for reintegration in it;" that, "all that is pure in Protestant or Orthodox piety or in that pietas Anglicana which gives Anglicanism its peculiar ethos is a loss, not indeed to the substance of the Church but to the expression and embodiment of its life, or at least to the wholeness of that expression."[101]

I think, for my part, that it would be more correct to take the original intuition, the "seminal reason" whence Lutheranism was to spring, as something essentially indivisible, impossible to decompose into an authentically Christian truth on the one hand, and a complication of this truth with distorting errors on the other. I believe that the primitive Lutheran intuition of justification was itself intrinsically falsified because it inseparably associated the gratuitousness of justification with its forensic character. The Barthian intuition is false in itself because it inseparably associates the transcendence of the divine holiness with its incommunicability. The idee-mere of Lutheranism, Calvinism, Barthianism and the rest, appears to me to be the doubtless complex but unique concept, the unique idea and experience of a deformed truth, not a juxtaposition of two ideas, two experiences, one true and the other false.

Undoubtedly Luther might have undergone authentic Christian experiences, whether before the rupture (against Grisar, I do not believe that his great trials before 1518 were due to any neurotic crisis) [102] or even after—the thing is possible but remains God's secret; in any case these Christian experiences, if authentic, are exterior to the specifically Lutheran basic experience. And doubtless too Luther retained, alongside the basic intuition of Lutheranism, an important inheritance of authentic Christian truths; the drama of the history of Protestantism as a doctrine lies precisely in the internal tension between the old and the new in it, the divine and the human. Upright and saintly Protestants who have inherited the Lutheran patrimony may certainly be in possession of authentic Christian values, but the purity of these values will be compromised by them in the precise measure in which, whether in formulating them or in living them, they give way to the vertigo of the primitive Lutheran experience. And it will be safeguarded, contrariwise, in the measure in which they are freed from it by the inner power of the Spirit, who breathes wheresoever He will.

Yet it is possible—and may often happen—that the state of dissidence in which such men find themselves may accidentally favour the discovery of new aspects of the Christian inheritance. We do not imagine, for example, that we have nothing of religious value to learn from the Orthodox or the Anglicans. Heresies, said St. Augustine, are thorns that prick us out of our torpor: and amongst the thorns we may at times find roses. But in the measure in which the discoveries or experiences of dissidents have occurred under the influence of heresy, they will need to be rectified before they can be integrated. A certain theologian, illustrating his doctrine by a comparison, has supposed that just as blindness develops an extreme delicacy of touch, so dissidence could accidentally bring to light new spiritual aspects of the Gospel. But this comparison passes over a point that is not to be neglected. Blindness in no wise falsifies the sense of touch, whereas dissidence always more or less falsifies the outlook on religious life. As Pere Congar forcibly says, we shall never ask our separated fellow-Christians to abandon any of the true values they hold. We shall only ask them to replace these values in the organic whole of Christian life and truth from which in the past they were torn, purifying them, where necessary, with a view to this reintegration. To purify is not to diminish. Unfortunately to the natural man purification commonly looks like an amputation !

Let us add, with Pere Congar, that if our separated fellow-Christians of East and West had only remained with us in the Church they would have helped us, not only by their personal qualities, but by reason of their own peculiar ethnic or spiritual temperament, to develop less imperfectly the riches of our Church. For she, being divine, has more in her than the Latin genius alone—or the genius of all the peoples of the world together—can seize and live.

To return to our late problem, it may well be that between Pere Congar and myself there is merely a difference of presentation and point of view, and at bottom a real accord. This would seem to be proved by passages such as the following: "To the extent to which the dissident Christianities have preserved the principles of communion with God left by Christ to His Church, there remains in them, with whatever mingling of errors, still something of the Church, some fibres of her being; and it may be true to say that souls can sanctify themselves in them not merely in spite of their confession, but in and by their confession. Only we must understand what we are saying. The thing is true only in virtue of what the dissident confessions have retained of the Church; it is true of them, if one may put it so, against them; for, in virtue of what they have of their own and in themselves, it is indeed in spite of them that souls are sanctified in their midst."[103] Briefly, souls of the dissident groups are sanctified in virtue of what is Catholic in their confession, and in spite of the principle of dissidence.

3. In a remarkable passage of his Unity in the Church (Die Einheit in der Kirche), where he sets out to define "the true nature of the contrasts in the Church", Moehler touches on the question of the ontological relations between the Church and the dissident formations that arose out of heresy. The organic life of the Church, he says, is the resultant at once of the closest unity and the richest diversity. It harmonises contrasts which, outside the Church, tend to start apart into contradictions: the contemplative and active tendencies, the mystical and the speculative, and so on. The heresies, escaping the control of the unifying form of the Church, are incapable of preserving the living harmony of the contrasts, so that these rapidly dissolve into contradictions. Some heresies are characterized by activity only, others by repose; but in the Church repose is active and activity is in repose—the contrasts interpenetrate and issue in a unity.[104]

Moehler was asked whether the Church should not unite with the heresies so as to issue in a still higher and richer reality. The answer was easy: by uniting with the heresies the Church would be absorbing not contrasts but contradictions. She takes up already into her unity, he said, all those contrasts, all those Christian truths, which heresy arrays against each other. She is integral. But the principle that sets the heresies at odds with each other is not included in her unity. Thus she is the unconscious unity of all the heresies before their separation, and their conscious unity after their separation; during the separation she is opposed to all of them, as they are opposed to each other. What constituted Montanism or Gnosticism and made them what they were had absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, either in content or in form; and hence these elements are not Christian contrasts, and cannot be taken up into the unity of the Christian life.

How then can we claim that heresies are necessary for the development of the life of the Church?[105] It will not be out of place to remark that evil is always at work in Christians [106] and naturally issues in errors. "It is due to the influence of evil that elements which nature destined to be mere contrasts turn into contradictions; while it is always possible and even necessary that the faithful, respecting the true nature of contrasts, should give expression to all the possibilities of development within the Christian religion, making the free and harmonious play of diverse individualities concur to the enrichment of her life. But since the contrasts, without which there would be no life, turn into contradictions so often, the Church profits from the contribution brought to her life by the contrasts under this abortive form, without, for all that, recognizing them as absolutely necessary, and so as good. Thus evil never becomes good, although it can be the occasion of good, and we are not to suppose that the help of evil is needed in order to produce the good."

4. The Church asks for no easy thing. Neither a certain oecumenicism among non-Catholics, which suppresses the problem of conversion, nor the particularism of certain Catholics, who put up high fences round their charity, is according to her heart. We should endorse the following lines, which describe these two opposite deviations: "I distrust a friendship between believers of all denominations which is unaccompanied by any kind of compunction or sadness of soul, any friendship which is easy and comfortable; just as I distrust a universalism which claims to bring together all modes of belief and of worship in one same service of God and one same all-transcending piety. The duty of being faithful to the light, of always following it as soon as it is seen, is a duty not to be avoided. In other words, the problem of conversion