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| New from Archbishop Viganò: The Great Reset from start to finish |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 05:49 PM - Forum: Archbishop Viganò
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New from Archbishop Viganò: The Great Reset from start to finish
With the pandemic, little by little they told us that isolation, lockdowns, masks, curfews, 'live-streamed Masses,' distance-learning, 'smartworking,' recovery funds, vaccines, and 'green passes' would permit us to come out of the emergency, and, believing in this lie, we renounced the rights and lifestyles that they warned us would never return:
'Nothing will be the same again.'
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
May 31, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – This first Festival of Philosophy [1] is dedicated to Msgr. Antonio Livi, of whom we all preserve a heartfelt and grateful memory, both for his witness of faith as well for his rare erudition in the theological disciplines. The learned Roman prelate is united to me in a particular way by his path of “conversion” to Tradition, which led him, a few years before me, to the assiduous celebration of the venerable Apostolic Liturgy, in perfect coherence with the doctrine in which he was extremely well-versed. Both of us found ourselves rediscovering the treasures of the Mass of our Ordination, with the consolation of also rediscovering our Priesthood in its fullness. If we wish to remember Monsignor Livi worthily today, I think that we cannot neglect the School of “Common Sense” of which he was the initiator, and that in this moment represents an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the present reality: the great upheavals of this past year, the so-called pandemic, and, more generally, the crisis in which both the world and the Church find themselves. The lack of “common sense” in individuals has in large part made possible this assault against God, against the Church, and against the human race that is represented by the Great Reset and the ideology it expresses. Irrationality, the abdication of reason, the annihilation of critical judgment and the denial of evidence are the true pandemic virus of our time, which in rebellion against God manifests a delirium of omnipotence and in collective madness reveals the just nemesis of this wicked challenge. Saint Paul exhorts us to a rational faith, rationabile obsequium (Rom 12;1), in which faith and reason, like two wings, make us ascend to the contemplation of the Truth, that is, of God Himself. Thus, the Apostle’s warning also implies a healthy distance from the thinking of the world: nolite conformari huic sæculo (Rom 12:2).
A significant precedent
When Stalin decided in 1932 to eliminate millions of Ukrainians in the genocide of Holodomor, he planned a famine as an instrument of social engineering, through which to nationalize agricultural lands and then allocate the profits to industry. Stalin wrote:
Quote:In order to eliminate the Kulaks as a class, the policy of limiting and eliminating single groups of Kulaks is not enough... it is necessary to break the resistance of this class with an open battle and to deprive it of the economic sources of its existence and development. (Josef Stalin, Questioni di leninismo, Rome, 1945).
Stalin then had wheat, beets, potatoes, vegetables, and every sort of food seized; he forbade any sort of commerce – does this sound familiar? – and confiscated the financial resources of the Ukrainians. Children fleeing the countryside were arrested and deported to collective farms called “kolkhozes” and to orphanages, where they died from malnutrition. The Central Committee prohibited movement – a sort of lockdown ante litteram – and accused those who denounced the massacre of the Ukrainians of being the enemy of the people. Holodomor deniers – using the term in its proper sense – maintain that the genocide of 1932-1933 in the Soviet Ukraine never happened or that it occurred without premeditation. The regime’s censorship contributed to hiding a tragedy that today is recognized by many countries as a crime against humanity and that, upon analysis of its method and goal, was also an example of a “Great Reset.”
If a Ukrainian had wondered how it could be that the Russian government, faced with a famine, did not help the population by sending food but rather forbade commercial activity and movement, thereby aggravating the situation, he would have committed the same error as many today who, in the presence of an alleged pandemic, ask why governments have preemptively undermined public health, weakened national pandemic plans, forbidden effective treatments, and administered harmful if not deadly treatments and are now forcing citizens – using the blackmail of perpetual lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and unconstitutional “green passes” – to submit to vaccines that not only do not guarantee any immunity but actually carry serious short-term and long-term side effects, as well as further spreading more resistant forms of the virus.
Changing our point of view
Looking for any sort of logic in what is told us by the mainstream media, by our government leaders, by virologists and so-called “experts” is an arduous challenge that disappears as if by magic and turns into the most cynical rationality if we only have the intellectual honesty to overturn our point of view. We should therefore renounce the comforting premise which tells us that our leaders act for our good, and more generally the idea that our interlocutors are honest, sincere, and animated by good principles.
Believe me, I understand that it would be easier to bask in the illusion that “everything will be fine” and that this pandemic really is a huge disaster that none of us were prepared for. It is much easier to think that the leaders of the world ought to be judged with grateful indulgence, forgiving them for mistakes that anyone in the same position could have made in the fight against the “invisible enemy.” It warms the heart to believe that the multinational pharmaceutical companies and international health agencies have nothing at heart but our good, and that they could never distribute, solely for economic calculation, experimental drugs that will end up making us all chronically ill or will exterminate us. And it is incredibly difficult and psychologically exhausting to face the daily domestic struggle we have to endure with relatives and friends, acquaintances and colleagues at work, simply because we consider the COVID narrative absurd. Being considered “conspiracy theorists” or “deniers” and being made the object of pity, contempt, or social condemnation is a thankless fate, especially when the people who believe in the global lie are dear to us. And it is even more thankless to feel discriminated against and ostracized even from our ecclesial community, all the more so when we see the ideological flattening in conformity with the mainstream narrative on the part of the bishops and the highest levels of the Hierarchy.
The reality is quite different, and not wanting to accept it makes us fall into that cognitive dissonance that social psychology has extensively studied. The reality is not only different but diametrically opposed to what we are being told, and it will be better for us if we want to understand it, recognize it, face it, and fight it with all our strength – also because the modus operandi with which similar cases have been carried out in the course of history is substantially the same.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the proponents of the Great Reset
Let’s start from the point of view of those who organized this plot rather than of those who are suffering it unknowingly. If we put ourselves in the shoes of a Bill Gates, a George Soros, or a Klaus Schwab, it will not be difficult to understand that if we shamelessly declare that we have decided to decimate the world population by means of a gene serum, in all probability we will not obtain the consent of the masses nor the support of institutions, because making our criminal plan known would provoke a revolt and above all it would reveal our cards.
In reality, we have even declared our plans on several occasions; we have written them in the proceedings of our congresses; we have reiterated them in interviews and institutional meetings; we have even had them engraved on the Georgia Guidestones. Perhaps our admission of this criminal design sounded too brazen, and those who may have felt threatened preferred to look elsewhere, blaming instead those who raised the alarm, unheeded like Laocoon.[2]
And so we decide to tell the “beautiful fable” of global commitment, of eco-sustainability, of inclusivity, of resilience in the face of a virus that we ourselves probably created in a laboratory in Wuhan financed by us, presenting it as a deadly pandemic that requires immediate measures to be taken that are justified by the health emergency. And since there could not really be an emergency since it is simply a flu syndrome, an almost normal coronavirus just as happens in any other year, we have to ask the officials of the WHO – an entity financed almost completely by us and by our ally the Chinese communist dictatorship – to give directives prohibiting treatment, creating a high number of deaths attributable to COVID, and leading patients to death by imposing forced ventilation on them. Obviously the pharmaceutical companies, of which we are shareholders through the Black Rock investment fund, have every interest in producing vaccines without the usual experimentation period, because at the same time that treatments are prohibited, the laws protecting public health can also be waived, and the vaccines – or rather, the gene serums – can be authorized for experimental distribution. And to seal the pactum sceleris with the Chinese regime, we can snow it under with orders for masks, swabs tests, ventilators, and medical supplies, even though we know that they are useless and do not comply with health parameters. In the meantime, our “experts” – who are almost always former employees or whose institutes and consultancies we sponsor – sow panic in the media with projections and forecasts as absurd as they are terrifying, while journalists and television hosts prostitute themselves to their new boss, renouncing professional ethics and their duty to respect the truth at all costs. But we know well that money and fame can easily purchase the sycophantic collaboration and complicit silence of many, especially if they owe their positions to us, if we are shareholders of the newspapers they work for or the main buyers of their advertising space. At the same time, we ensure that public funds are allocated to fund the media, obviously with the implicit expectation that they will promote the official narrative and censor every dissenting voice.
Healthcare is also in our hands, and for years now! We have progressively destroyed the public healthcare system, making use of our personnel in national governments, in the European Union, and in international organizations; and after destroying it we lamented its inefficiency and recommended that it be replaced with private healthcare, of which we are shareholders. What remains of public health is nevertheless set up on a business model that places profit before the provision of services, and in any case it is always the State that pays off the debts of healthcare companies. We know well that the profits to be made off the pandemic are quite tempting to many, even to the point of remaining silent in the face of hospitalizations that are useless or that will even lead to the death of the patient as a result of the treatments that we have mentioned instead of giving them home care. Three thousand euros per day for an intensive care bed for a COVID patient thus legitimizes the social alarm, because those beds are few – we have had their number reduced in recent years thanks to complacent politicians – and in order to increase them during a full pandemic emergency the State spends exorbitant amounts without going through a process of taking bids. If we then manage to use swab tests to make people believe that a very high percentage of the population is positive for the virus, we will guarantee the persistence of the state of emergency, and with it the lockdown and containment measures that destroy the economy. And this is exactly what we want: to cancel small businesses, forcing the population to purchase online everything they can no longer buy in the local family-run store, making money even off the pizza parlor or the restaurant that in order to survive is forced to use delivery companies of which we made sure we were shareholders. Finally, in order to make this assault complete, we increase illegal immigration thanks to our “humanitarian” foundations and NGOs, thereby increasing crime, diverting funds from citizens that are earmarked instead towards dealing with immigration costs, and making Europe be invaded by waves of Muslims who demand rights. Their presence allows us to inexorably break up the social and religious fabric of nations, in the name of “welcoming” and leveraging the sense of guilt, the danger of racism and the do-good rhetoric that we have even succeeded in getting the Catholic Church to accept. Obviously the social destabilization we have created allows us to promulgate laws against discrimination and racial hatred, repressing the dissent of those who feel invaded and threatened. Finally, thanks to the State debt due to the pandemic and the social emergency we have artificially created, we are able to impose the disbursement of funds from the International Monetary Fund, the Central European Bank, and the European Union, putting the population into the noose of debt and constraining it to invest those funds according to criteria and “conditionalities” that only serve to make the transformation of society, the technological community, and the “green economy” even more irreversible: this is the Great Reset.
First we succeeded in creating fear of an “invisible enemy” and silencing the dissenting voices of scientists, intellectuals, and simple citizens; then we succeeded in making people believe that the salvation of the world depends on vaccines; now we are able to blackmail billions of human beings, who will be told that if they want to return to some form of loosening of the restrictions that have been imposed they must accept the “green pass” in order to travel abroad, go to the stadium or go shopping. The pressure we have placed on the masses is such that many will accept these forms of control. Soon they will put out their hands to have a subcutaneous chip implanted that will permit us to bring our plan to its completion.
All this is now a reality: both the vaccine passport, which will not necessarily be limited to COVID, as well as electronic payments in place of cash. “No one could buy or sell unless he had the mark” (Rev 13:17). Thus it will only take pressing a button to cancel a person from social life – and we will be the ones who press it.
And as an insult against the civilization we hate, we force the masses to feed on beetles and larvae, extolling their nutritional properties and their low environmental impact, while we reserve choice meats for ourselves. We ask them to renounce private property in exchange for universal income, with which they can pay us the leasing for their 30-square-meter housing unit, obviously with zero emissions. We send them around on electric scooters made in China while we ride in custom-built cars that cause all sorts of pollution, cruise around on very expensive yachts and travel by helicopter. And while laid-off fifty year olds get jobs as delivery boys, we receive billions in dividends from our companies based in tax havens. We have reached such a level of enslavement of the masses that we have no reason to fear any revolt, which in any case would be quelled with truncheon blows as the media and our ally the Left remained silent.
Even if the pandemic farce does not have the desired effects due to unforeseen events, we already have the next step ready: the climate emergency as the pretext for imposing the “ecological transition” and “sustainable development.” Or else we will start yet another conflict in the Middle East so as to provoke terrorist attacks in our cities and sow panic among the population. And if these tried and tested methods don’t succeed, we could invent – why not? – an alien attack, about which some of our friends are beginning to open the famous Overton Window: what better than extra-terrestrials can be considered an “invisible enemy” to feed collective fear, after decades of films in which we show invasions of creatures from outer space? On the other hand, the masses believe everything the mainstream media tells them – as we have seen in recent months – no matter how absurd and irrational it may be. If you see it on television, it must be true!
The modus operandi of the Great Reset
And now, taking off the shoes of Gates and Soros, we observe the entire operation from the outside, seeking to identify the recurring elements. The first, as I said earlier, is the secrecy of the criminal design of the elite and the need to cloak it in acceptable ideals. The second is the creation of an emergency situation – in the past it could have been a war fought with weapons, today a bacteriological war or a conflict fought financially – that makes recourse to the solutions that the elite has prepared and planned inevitable. The third element consists in the apparent solution that allows for the implementation of those “reforms” and limitations of personal liberties that in normal times would be unacceptable and illegitimate. This will split society internally, creating new enemies of the people and distracting them from the real architects of the conflict.
If we think about the attack of September 11, 2001, we understand that the modus operandi is essentially the same, as also happened with the Gulf War or the Libyan Civil War. The terrorist threat was used as prophasis, an apparent cause, a false pretext for authorizing investments in the military industry, the tightening of controls on the populace, political upheavals, and to appropriate energy resources in Iraq and Libya and prevent the economic independence of the nations of the former French colonies in West and Central Africa. The destabilization thus achieved fueled the ethnic substitution plan in Europe and at the same time stripped Africa of the young generations that would have been able to make it prosperous and autonomous. It also struck the Catholic communities in the former colonies by fueling Islamic fanaticism as a prerequisite for bloody conflicts and now exports those conflicts to a de-Christianized Europe that inertly watches the daily burning of its churches, while a petulant Swedish girl is used by the system as an apocalyptic preacher of climate change and global warming.
At the base of this modus operandi there is always a lie, that serves to hide the true intentions of the elite and makes us accept as inevitable those changes that, in conditions of relative normality, would have resulted in revolts that were difficult to stifle. The blaming of dissenters, the criminalization of those who do not accept subjecting themselves to the vaccine, the psychiatrization of “deniers” or “conspiracy theorists” are taking shape in recent months with the formation of detention camps, the prohibition of travelling without health checks and above all thanks to the pounding drum of the media. The spread of 5G technology, which in many countries has gone unnoticed due to the lockdowns, will allow population tracking by means of apps or a subcutaneous chip in constant connection with the internet.
The Great Reset has numerous precedents
The lie, therefore, is the consistent mark of the architects of the various Great Resets of the last few centuries. The Protestant Pseudo-Reformation was a Great Reset, which struck at Europe’s unity of faith, creating a laceration whose disastrous consequences are still seen today. The French Revolution was a Great Reset, as was the Italian Risorgimento, as well as the Russian Revolution. The two World Wars were Great Resets, along with the Industrial Revolution, the Revolution of 1968, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each time, if you notice, the apparent reason for these revolutions never corresponded to the real one. The selling of indulgences as a pretext for Luther’s revolt leveraged the desire of the German Princes to take possession of the monasteries and dioceses and had to obtain the spread of heresy in the world and the weakening of the Papacy, the first defense of Christianity. In France, the poverty of the people was a pretext for the cancellation of the monarchy and the establishment of the Masonic and anti-Christian Republic. The division of the Italian States and the aspiration to an ideal of national unity was the pretext for the destruction of kingdoms and duchies and the annexation of the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy, whose monarchy was subservient to the Masonic lodges and in its turn was cancelled by them as soon as the task was completed. The oppression of the Russian peasants was the pretext for the elimination of the Czar and the establishment of the communist dictatorship. The claim of individual nationalities was the pretext for the First World War in order to cancel the Austro-Hungarian Empire and perpetuate ethnic conflicts. In the Second World War, Nazism – first financed and then combatted – was a pretext for colonizing Europe and subjecting it economically and culturally to American liberal capitalism and Russian communism, thereby weakening it. The condition of laborers was the pretext for exploiting them in the factories and feeding the Moloch of modern capitalism. Young people’s desire for freedom was the pretext for corrupting their intellect and will, for breaking up the traditional family with divorce, cancelling motherhood with contraceptives and abortion, and striking at the very concept of authority. The end of the Soviet Bloc and its satellite countries was the pretext for spreading liberal capitalism and consumerism and morally corrupting a people exhausted by seventy years of communist dictatorship, whose strenuous opposition to the New World Order is the reason for the recent and continuous attacks on President Putin.
The Great Reset also involves the Church
In this long series of Great Resets organized by the same elite of conspirators, not even the Catholic Church has managed to escape. She too, with Vatican II, saw a greater understanding of the liturgy by the people given as a pretext for destroying the apostolic Mass, cancelling the sacred language and profaning the rites. And the longing for unity with heretics and schismatics was the pretext by which conciliar ecumenism was inaugurated, which laid the ideological foundations for the present apostasy. The democratization of the Church, in the name of an alleged greater participation of the laity, has served only as a pretext for progressively undermining papal power and parliamentarizing the power of the bishops, who are today reduced to mere executors of the decisions of the Bishops’ Conferences.
The lies of the various Great Resets
Like all frauds, those that are hatched by the devil and his servants are based on false promises that will never be kept, in exchange for which we give up a certain good that will never be restored to us. In Eden, the prospect of becoming like gods led to the loss of friendship with God and to exclusion from eternal salvation, which only the redemptive Sacrifice of Our Lord was able to repair. The revolution against the Catholic monarchies was obtained by the promise made to the lower classes, which was never kept, offering them prosperity and a reduction of taxes. Those who believed in the deception saw their world collapse and found themselves much more oppressed than before. The Industrial Revolution was accepted because it promised new jobs in the factories, but those who left the countryside or the family shop found themselves exploited on the assembly line, torn from the traditional rhythms of the village and crammed together in the bleak outskirts of the large metropolises.
With the pandemic, little by little they told us that isolation, lockdowns, masks, curfews, “live-streamed Masses,” distance-learning, “smartworking,” recovery funds, vaccines, and “green passes” would permit us to come out of the emergency, and, believing in this lie, we renounced the rights and lifestyles that they warned us would never return: “Nothing will be the same again.” The “new normal” will still be presented to us as a concession that will require us to accept the deprivation of freedoms that we had taken for granted, and accordingly we will compromise without understanding the absurdity of our compliance and the obscenity of the demands of those who command us, giving us orders so absurd that they truly require a total abdication of reason and dignity. At each step there is a new turn of the screw and a further step towards the abyss: if we do not stop ourselves in this race towards collective suicide we will never go back.
The lie, therefore. A lie that we also find denounced in Sacred Scripture: if the Serpent had said to Adam and Eve that by eating the fruit of the tree they would lose immortal life and all of the gifts that God had given them, we would still be in Eden. But what can we expect from the one who is “a murderer from the beginning,” “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). Was it not thanks to lies and false testimony that Our Lord was condemned, accused by the Sanhedrin of having told people not to pay taxes to Caesar? Was it not with deception and blackmail that the High Priests pushed Pilate to have the Son of God crucified, threatening Pilate that if he found Him innocent he would set himself against the Roman Emperor?
The Great Reset is the last step before the New World Order
It is our duty to reveal the deception of this Great Reset, because it may be traced back to all the other assaults that in the course of history have tried to nullify the work of redemption and establish the tyranny of the Antichrist. Because this is in reality what the architects of the Great Reset intend. The New World Order – a name which significantly echoes the conciliar Novus Ordo – overturns the divine cosmos in order to spread infernal chaos, in which everything that civilization has painstakingly constructed over the course of millennia under the inspiration of grace is overturned and perverted, corrupted and cancelled.
Each of us must understand that what is happening is not the fruit of an unfortunate sequence of chance occurrences, but corresponds rather to a diabolical plan – in the sense that the Evil One is behind all this – which over the centuries pursues a single goal: destroying the work of creation, nullifying the redemption, and cancelling every trace of good on the earth. And in order to obtain this, the final step is the establishment of a synarchy in which command is seized by a few faceless tyrants who thirst for power, who are given over to the worship of death and sin and to the hatred of life, virtue and beauty because in them shines forth the greatness of that God against whom they still cry out their infernal “Non serviam.” The members of this accursed sect are not only Bill Gates, George Soros, or Klaus Schwab, but also those who for centuries have been plotting in the shadows in order to overthrow the Kingdom of Christ: the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, and those who today have formed an alliance with the highest levels of the Church, using the moral authority of the Pope and bishops to convince the faithful to get vaccinated.
The corruption of authority is the necessary premise of the Great Reset
Along with an awareness of the criminal lie of the entire system, we must also take note of the corruption of authority and the failure of the social, political and religious model that is the child of the Revolution. Modern democracy has proven to be, once again, a deception with which it was desired to oust Christ the King from His lordship over individuals and over societies, under the apparent pretext of giving the people a power that has in fact been usurped by an anti-Christian and antichristic elite. When it is stated that authority does not derive from God but resides in the people; when religion is not considered as a supernatural transcendent principle but instead as an amorphous immanent sentimentalism or a variant of anthropology; when morality loses its bond with the eternal law inscribed by God in human nature and instead adapts to fashions, nothing prevents those who govern as well as the governed from being dishonest and simply pursuing their own particular interests, because there is no longer good and evil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell. Everything is then based on a perverted concept of liberty corrupted into license: one can betray, steal, kill, and lie without hesitation, without that fear of God that in other times was able to curb our inclination to evil: if not out of love for the Creator and Redeemer than at least out of fear of the punishment that our evil conduct would inexorably entail.
We find ourselves facing a political class without ideals, in whom the bonum commune was first replaced by political programs which they used to obtain consent, and today by the simple subservience of those who govern us to the interests who get them elected, pay them, and demand their absolute obedience to the demands of the New World Order. We have reached the point at which even the vote, which was once exalted as the highest expression of democracy, is considered an annoying tinsel, to be granted only if those in charge are certain that they can bend it in their favor, and where it is expressed otherwise it can be modified or ignored: the colossal electoral fraud of the American presidential elections is a striking example of this.
But if the politicians and world leaders are subservient to the globalist elite and do not pursue the good of the citizens, the social contract fails, and the authority with which they believe they are endowed is lost, since it has no ratification, either from above – since the supernatural principle and bond of authority have been cancelled – or from below. And this is nothing but infamous dictatorship and hateful tyranny – a tyranny that cannot be overthrown by appealing to the revolutionary principles that determined it, but by returning to recognize that “there is no authority except from God” (Rom 13:1), and that the “secularism” of the State is a blasphemy, since it denies the sovereign rights of the Creator and Redeemer over those whom He has created and redeemed.
A crisis of authority that also involves the Hierarchy
That authority which, since the French Revolution, was usurped from the Lord and attributed to the popular will, had remained intact within the Church to some extent. Up until sixty years ago she proclaimed the Kingship of Christ not only over His subjects, over societies and nations, but principally over Herself, recognizing Our Lord as the Head of the Mystical Body and the Pope as His Vicar on earth. Vatican II shifted the Kingship of Christ in an eschatological key, and the Church thus found herself a victim of that same democratic deception into which civil societies had fallen almost two centuries earlier. By weakening the doctrine on sin, making the morality of each situation unique, and recognizing the legitimacy of error and false religions, the Catholic Church dethroned herself with her own hands, reducing herself to having to beg for approval and legitimization from the powerful of this world, to whose orders she has submitted. It is no coincidence that Bergoglio has archived the title “Vicar of Christ” as being a thing of the past: if the Church is replaced by an NGO that preaches “green theology”, promotes the Inclusive Capitalism of the Rothschilds and organizes conferences on vaccines with Anthony Fauci, whoever presides over her does not exercise authority in the name of Christ but ends up being a puppet accomplice in the hands of the puppeteer:
He who, on earth, usurps my place,
my place, my place,
which in the presence of the Son of God is vacant,
of my burial-ground hath made a sewer
of blood and stench; whereby the Pervert,
who fell from hence, is there below appeased.
(Paradiso XXVII, lines 22 and ff.)[3]
In this crisis of authority – which involves both temporal and spiritual power – a great responsibility must be attributed to the so-called moderates, who appear to be the voluntary or involuntary fifth column within the social body. Among these we must include almost all of the representatives of the parliamentary oppositions in the various nations – the Italian opposition first of all – and the parties of the so-called center-right. Even those who criticize the illegitimate and unconstitutional rules enacted by the present governments under the pretext of the pandemic do not in the least question the ideological bases of free-market capitalism that today has merged with communism in an alliance that would have been inconceivable in other times. And they do not question these bases because they agree with them.
The error of the ‘moderates’
The same mistake of deploring the effects without recognizing and fighting the causes is made by conservative Catholics, who while understanding the apostasy of the highest levels of the Hierarchy under the reign of Bergoglio, do not dare to admit that if it has reached the point of offering idolatrous worship to the Pachamama, this has been made possible thanks to Dignitatis Humanae, that the sabbath of Astana is the coherent application of Nostra Aetate, and that the German Synodal Path – that is, the declaration of schism without its official condemnation by the Holy See – is the logical conclusion of Gaudium et Spes. And there is no need to demonstrate that the conciliar documents are nothing more than the translation of revolutionary and Masonic principles into the ecclesial context.
We know, however, that the lie is the emblem of the Devil, the distinctive sign of his servants, the hallmark of the enemies of God and the Church. God is truth; the Word of God is true, and He Himself is God. Speaking the truth, shouting it from the rooftops, and unveiling the deception is a sacred work, and no Catholic – nor anyone who has still preserved a shred of decency and honor – may shrink from this duty.
The response of the good
Each of us has been desired, thought of, and created in order to give glory to God and to be part of a great design of providence. From all eternity the Lord has called us to share with Him in the work of redemption, to cooperate in the salvation of souls and the triumph of the good. Each of us today has the possibility of choosing to align himself with Christ or against Christ, to fight for the cause of good or to make himself an accomplice of the workers of iniquity. The victory of God is most certain, as certain as the reward that awaits those who make the choice to enter the battlefield alongside the King of kings; and the defeat of those who serve the enemy is also certain, as is their eternal damnation.
Do you want to lose the supreme good that has been prepared for you, only for the sake of a quiet life and not to stand out from the crowd, out of cowardice and human respect, trading eternity for an apparent and ephemeral good? I exhort you to be witnesses of Christ, courageous champions of truth and goodness: on the benches of parliament, in hospital wards, from the chairs of schools and universities, from the altar and the pulpit, at work, in the office, in the shop, in the family, in your daily commitments and, yes, even in pains and trials. Be worthy heirs of the saints who have preceded you, remembering that you will have to answer for your silence, your complicity, and your cooperation with evil. If you can escape the condemnation of men, you will not be able to escape the judgment of God; just as you will be rewarded for the good you have done and witnessed to.
This rebellious and apostate generation can be fought with everyone’s contribution: from the doctor who finally denounces the harmful treatments imposed by criminal protocols, to the policeman who refuses to apply illegitimate rules; from the parliamentarian who votes against unfair laws, to the magistrate who opens a file for crimes against humanity; from the professor who teaches students to think for themselves, to the journalist who reveals the deceptions and conflicts of interest of the powerful; from the father who defends his children against vaccination, to the son who protects his elderly parent without abandoning him in a nursing home; from the citizen who claims the right to natural freedoms, to the artisan and restaurateur who do not accept the oppression of those who prevent them from opening their business; from the grandfather who warns his grandchildren about the dangers of the dictatorship, to the youth who does not allow himself to be seduced by fashions and influencers.
Let us restore the Crown to Christ the King that was torn from him by the Revolution
And when this farce has collapsed – because it will inexorably collapse, and it will collapse soon – commit yourselves everyone, with renewed zeal, so that the crown that His enemies have torn from Him may be restored to our king. Make Our Lord reign in your souls, in your families, in your communities, in the nation, in work, in education, in the laws and courts, in the arts, in information, in all areas of private and public life. May our most holy mother and queen, Mary Most Holy, who many times has admonished us about the dangers and punishments that await the world if it does not convert and do penance and may Jesus Christ reign in the holy Church, driving out the unworthy, the fornicators and the mercenaries.
Only where Christ reigns is there true peace and concord: pax Christi in regno Christi. To Him, the beginning and end of all things, the Alpha and the Omega, may the confident and fervent prayer arise from each one of us and from the human family, asking Him to preserve us in His grace, strengthen us in virtue, and make us courageous witnesses of the Gospel so that we may thus achieve eternal beatitude in Heaven.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
30 May 2021
In Festo Ss.mæ Trinitatis
Endnotes
[1] http://www.accademianuovaitalia.it/index...nezia-2021
[2] Laocoon, the priest of Apollo, warned the Trojans to “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” when they wanted to accept the Trojan horse.
[3] In Dante’s Paradiso, these words are spoken by Saint Peter in condemnation of Boniface VIII.
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| May 31st - Sts. Petronilla and Angela de Merici |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 09:42 AM - Forum: May
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May 31 – St Petronilla, Virgin
Though the Church makes but a simple commemoration of this illustrious Virgin in the office of this day, we will not fail to offer her the homage of our devout veneration. On the twelfth of this month, we kept the feast of the noble Virgin and Martyr, Flavia Domitilla; it is probable that Aurelia Petronilla was also of the imperial family of the Flavians. The early traditions of the Church speak of her as being the spiritual daughter of the Prince of the Apostles; and though she did not, like Domitilla, lay down her life for the Faith, yet she offered to Jesus that next richest gift—her Virginity. The same venerable authorities tell us, also, that a Roman Patrician, by name Flaccus, having asked her in marriage, she requested three days for consideration, during which she confidently besought the aid of her Divine Spouse. Flaccus presented himself on the third day, but found the palace in mourning, and her family busy in preparing the funeral obsequies of the young Virgin, who had taken her flight to heaven, as a dove that is startled by an intruder’s approach.
In the 8th Century, the holy Pope Paul the First had the body of Petronilla taken from the Cemetery of Domitilla, on the Ardeatine Way. Her relics were found in a marble sarcophagus, the lid of which was adorned, at each corner, with a dolphin. The Pope had them enshrined in a little Church, which he built near the south side of the Vatican Basilica. This Church was destroyed in the 16th Century, in consequence of the alterations needed for the building of the new Basilica of Saint Peter; and the Relics of St. Petronilla were translated to one of its Altars on the west side. It was but just that she should await her glorious Resurrection under the shadow of the great Apostle who had initiated her in the Faith and prepared her for her eternal nuptials for the Lamb.
Thy triumph, O Petronilla, is one of our Easter joys! We lovingly venerate thy blessed memory. Thou disdainedst the pleasures and honors of the world, and thy virginal name is one of the first on the list of the Church of Rome, which was thy mother. Aid her, now, by thy prayers. Protect those who seek thine intercession, and teach us how to celebrate, with holy enthusiasm, the Solemnities that are soon to gladden us.
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| Week after Trinity Sunday |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 09:38 AM - Forum: Pentecost
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Monday After Trinity Sunday
Having, by his divine light, added fresh appreciation towards the sovereign mystery of the august Trinity, the Holy Ghost next leads the Church to contemplate that other marvel, which concentrates in itself all the works of the Incarnate Word, and leads us, even in this present life, to union with God. The mystery of the Holy Eucharist is going to be brought before us in all its magnificence; it behooves us, therefore, to prepare the eyes of our soul for the worthy reception of the light which is so soon to dawn upon us. As during the whole year, we have never lost sight of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and all our worship has unceasingly been offered to the Three diving Persons; so, in like manner, the blessed Eucharist has uninterruptedly accompanied us throughout the whole period of the Liturgical Year, either as the means for our paying our homage to the infinite Majesty of God, or as the nourishment which sustains the supernatural life. Though we knew and loved these two ineffable mysteries before, yet the graces of Pentecost have added much to both our knowledge and our love; yesterday, the mystery of the Trinity beamed upon us with a great clearness than ever; and now we are close upon the solemnity, which is to show us the holy Eucharist with an increase of light and joy to our faith.
The blessed Trinity is, as we have already shown, the essential object of all religion; it is the center to which all our homage converges; and this, even when we do not seem to make it our direct intention. Now, the holy Eucharist is the best of all the means whereby we can give to the Three divine Persons the worship we owe Them; it is, moreover, the bond whereby earth is united with heaven. It is easy, therefore, to understand how it was that holy Church so long deferred the institution of the two festivals immediately following Whitsuntide. All the mysteries we have celebrated up to this time were contained in the august Sacrament, which is the memorial and, so to say, the compendium of the wonderful things wrought in our favor by our Redeemer. It was the reality of Christ’s presence under the sacramental species that enabled us to recognize, in the sacred Host, at Christmas, the Child that was born unto us, in Passiontide the Victim who redeemed us and at Easter the glorious conqueror of death. We could not celebrate all those admirable Mysteries without the aid of the perpetual Sacrifice; neither could that sacrifice be offered up, without its renewing and repeating them.
It was the same with the Feasts of our Blessed Lady and the Saints,—they kept us in the continual contemplation of the holy Sacrament. When we honored Mary on the solemnities of the Immaculate Conception, the Purification, or the Annunciation, we were honoring Her who had, from her own substance, given that Body and Blood which was then offered upon our altars. As to the Apostles and the Martyrs, whose memories we solemnized, whence had they the strength to suffer so much and so bravely for the faith, but from the sacred banquet which we then celebrated, and which gives courage and constancy to them that partake of it? The Confessors and Virgins, as their Feasts came round, seemed to us as so many lovely flowers in the garden of the Church, and that garden itself all fruitful with wheat and clusters of grapes, because of the fertility given by Him who is called in the Scriptures both Wheat and Wine.
Putting together all the means within our reach for honoring these blessed citizens of the heavenly court, we have chanted the grand Psalms of David, and hymns, and canticles, with all the varied formulas of the Liturgy;—but nothing that we could do towards celebrating their praise could be compared to the holy Sacrifice offered to the divine Majesty. It is in that Sacrifice that we entered into direct communication with them, according to the energetic term used by the Church in the Canon of the Mass (communicantes). The blessed in heaven are ever adoring the most holy Trinity by and in Christ Jesus our Lord; and it is by the Sacrifice of the Mass that we were united with them in the one same center, and that we mingled our homage with theirs; hence they received an increase of glory and happiness. So, then, the holy Eucharist, both as Sacrifice and Sacrament, has always been prominently before us. If we are now going to devote several days to a more attentive consideration of its magnificence and power; if we are now going to make more earnest efforts to taste more fully its heavenly sweetness; it is not a something fresh, which attracts our special notice and devotion for a season, and will then give way for something else: no; the Eucharist is that element prepared for us by the love of our Redeemer, of which we must always avail ourselves in order that we may enter into direct communication with our God, and pay him the debt not only of our worship, but also of our love.
And yet, the time would come when the Holy Ghost, who governs the Church, would inspire her with the thought of instituting a special solemnity in honour of that august mystery in which all others are included. There is a sacred element which gives a meaning to every feast that occurs during the Year, and graces it with the beauty of its own divine splendor;—that sacred element is the most holy Eucharist, and itself had a right to a solemn festival in keeping with the dignity of its divine object.
But that festive exaltation of the divine Host and those triumphant processions so deservedly dear to the present generation of Christians, were not practicable in the ages of the early Persecutions. And when those rough times had passed away, and the courageous Martyrs had won victory for the Church, those same modes of honoring the Eucharist would not have suited the spirit and form of the primitive liturgical observances, which were kept up for ages following. Neither were they needed for the maintenance of the lively faith of those times; they would have been superfluous for a period such as that was, when the solemnity of the Sacrifice itself, and the share the people at large took in the sacred Mysteries, and the uninterrupted homage of liturgical chants sustained by the crowds of Faithful adorers around the Altar, gave praise and glory to God, secured correctness of faith and fostered in the people a superabundance of supernatural life, which is not to be found nowadays. The divine Memorial produced its fruits; the intentions our Lord had in instituting the Eucharist were realised and the remembrance of that institution which used then to be solemnised as we now celebrate Mass on Maundy Thursday, was deeply impressed on the minds of the Faithful.
This state of things lasted till the beginning of the 13th Century, when, as the Church expresses it (in the Collect for the Feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis), a certain coldness took possession of the world; faith grew weak, and the vigorous piety which characterised the christians of the previous ages became exceedingly rare. There were grand exceptions, here and there, of individual saintliness; but there was an unmistakable falling off amidst people at large, and the falling off was progressive; so much so indeed that there was danger that the Mystery which, by its very nature, is the Mystery of Faith, would suffer in a special manner from that coldness, that indifference, of the new generation. Even at that period, hell had been at work stirring up sacrilegious teachers here and there who dared to throw doubts upon the dogma of the Real Presence; fortunately, the people easily took alarm, and as a general rule, were too strong in the old faith to be led astray. The Pastors, too, of the Church were alive to the danger,—for there were souls who allowed themselves to be deceived.
Scotus Erigena had formulated the sacramentarian heresy: he had taught that the Eucharist “was but a sign, a figure of spiritual union with Jesus, of which the intellect alone could be cognizant.” His teaching made little impression; it was regarded as mere pedantry and was too novel to make head against catholic tradition such as was to be found exposed in the learned writings of Paschasius Radbert, Abbot of Corbie. The sophistry of Scotus was revived in the 11th Century by Berengarius; but although its new promoter was more crafty and conceited than its originator, and did greater and more lasting mischief, yet it died with him. The time for hell to play havoc with such direct attacks as these had not yet come; they were laid aside for others of a more covert kind. That hotbed of heresies, the empire of Byzantium, fostered the almost extinct germ of Manicheism; the teaching of that sect regarding the flesh,—that it is the work of the evil principle,—was subversive of the dogma of the Eucharist. While Berengarius was trying to bring himself into notice by the noisy, but ineffectual, broachings of his errors, Thrace and Bulgaria were quietly sending their teachers into the West. Lombardy, the Marches, and Tuscany, became infected; so did Austria in several places, and almost all at one and the same time; so, too, did three cities of France—Orleans, Toulouse, and Arras. Forcible measures for repressing the evil were used; but it was one which knew how to grow strong by retreat. Taking the South of France for the basis of its operations, the foul heresy silently organized its strength during the whole of the 12th Century. So great was the progress it made thus unperceived that when it came publicly before the world at the beginning of the 13th Century, it had an army ready for the maintenance of its impious doctrines. Torrents of blood had to be shed in order to subdue it and deprive it of its strongholds; and for years after the defeat of the armed insurrection, the Inquisition had to exercise active watchfulness in the provinces that had been tainted by the Albigensian contagion.
Simon of Montfort was the avenger of the Catholic faith. But while the victorious arm of the Christian hero was dealing a death blow to heresy, God was preparing for his Son, who had been so unworthily outraged by the sectarians in the Sacrament of his love, a triumph of a more peaceful kind, and a more perfect reparation. It was in the year 1208 that a humble Religious of the Congregation of the Hospitallers, by name the Blessed Juliana of Mont-Cornillon near Liége, had a mysterious vision in which she beheld the moon at its full, but having a hollow on its disc. In spite of all her efforts to divert herself from what she was afraid was an illusion, the same vision appeared before her as often as she set herself to pray. After two years of such efforts and earnest supplications, it was revealed to her that the moon signified the Church as it then was; and that hollow she observed on its disc expressed the want of one more solemnity in the Liturgical Year;—a want which God willed should be supplied by the introduction of a feast to be kept annually in honour of the institution of the blessed Eucharist; the solemn commemoration made of the Last Supper, on Maundy Thursday, was no longer sufficient for the children of the Church, shaken as they had been by the influences of heresy; it was not sufficient even for the Church herself, who on that Thursday has her attention divided by the important functions of the day, and is wholly taken up a few hours later by the sad mysteries of the great Friday. At the same time that Juliana received this communication, she was also commanded to set to work and make known to the world what she had been told was the divine will. Twenty years, however, passed before the humble and timid virgin could bring herself to put her person thus forward. She at length mentioned the subject to a Canon of Saint Martin’s of Liége named John of Lausanne, whom she much respected for his great holiness of life; and she besought him to confer with men of theological learning on the subject of the mission confided to her. All agreed that not only there was no reason why such a Feast should not be instituted, but moreover that it would be a means for procuring much glory to God and great good to souls. Encouraged by this decision, the saintly Juliana got a proper Office composed and approved for the future Festival; it begins with the words: Animarum cibus, and a few portions are still extant.
The Church of Liége, to which the universal Church owes the yesterday’s solemnity of the Blessed Trinity, was predestined to have the honor of originating the Feast of Corpus Christi. It was a happy day when in the year 1246, after so many delays and difficulties, the then Bishop of Liége, Robert de Torôte, published a synodical decree that each year, on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, there should be observed in all the Churches of his Diocese, with rest from servile work, and with the preparation of fasting on the eve, a solemn Feast in honour of the Blessed Sacrament.
But the mission of the Blessed Juliana was far from being at an end; she had to be punished for having so long deferred it. The Bishop died; and the decree he had issued would have long been a dead letter, had there not been one, the only one, Church of the Diocese whose Clergy were determined to carry the decree into execution: these were the Canons of Saint Martin-au-Mont. Though there was no authority during the vacancy that cared to enforce the observance, yet in the year 1247, the Feast of Corpus Christi was kept in that privileged Church. Robert’s successor, Henry de Gueldre, a warrior and grandee, took no interest in what his predecessor had had so much at heart. Hugh de Saint Cher, Cardinal of Saint Sabina, and Legate in Germany, having gone to Liége with a view to remedy the disorders to which the new episcopal government had given rise, heard mention of the decree of the late Bishop Robert, and of the new Feast. The Cardinal had formerly been Prior and Provincial in the Order of St Dominic; and was one of the theologians who, having been consulted by John de Lausanne, had favored the project. He was of the same mind when Legate; and claimed the honor of keeping the Feast himself and singing Mass with much solemnity. Not satisfied with that, he issued a Circular dated December 29, 1253, which he addressed to the Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, and Faithful of the territory of his legation; and in that document, he confirmed the decree of the Bishop of Liége and extended it to all the country over which he was Legate, granting one hundred days’ indulgence to all who, contrite, and after confession of their sins should, on the Feast itself or during its Octave, devoutly visit a Church in which the Office of Corpus Christi was being celebrated. In the year following, the Cardinal of Saint George in Velabro, who had succeeded as Legate, confirmed and renewed the ordinances made by the Cardinal of Saint Sabina. These reiterated decrees, however, failed to remove the widespread indifference. A terrible blow had been given, by the proposed Feast, to the powers of hell, and Satan excited every possible opposition to it. As soon as the Legates had taken their departure, several local Superiors, men of note and authority, published their own ordinances in opposition to what had been already given. In 1258, the year of the Blessed Juliana’s death, there was still but the single Church of Saint Martin that would celebrate the Feast, which it was her mission to spread throughout the entire world. But she left the continuation of her work to a holy Recluse of the name of Eve, to whom she had confided her secrets.
On the 29th day of August, 1261, James Pantaléon ascended the papal throne under the name of Urban the Fourth. He owed his election to this dignity to his great personal merits, for by birth (Troyes, in France, was his native town), he had nothing to recommend him. He had been Archdeacon of Liége; and there had met with the Blessed Juliana, and had approved her work. In this his exaltation to the papacy, Eve thought she had an indication of God’s providence. She induced the Bishop, Henry de Gueldre, to send his written congratulations to the new Pontiff, and at the same time, to entreat him to confirm, by his own approbation, the Feast which had been instituted by Robert de Torôte. About that same time, several supernatural events had attracted public attention, and in particular, the prodigy at Bolsena near Orvieto, where the papal court happened to be then residing,—the prodigy of a corporal having been stained with blood by a miraculous Host. These events seemed as though providentially permitted. in order to rouse Urban’s attention, and to confirm him in the holy zeal he had formerly evinced for the glory of the Blessed Sacrament. St. Thomas of Aquin was appointed to compose according to the Roman rite, the Office for the Feast; which Office was to be substituted for the one prepared by the Blessed Juliana, and which she had adapted to the ancient liturgy of France, The Bull Transiturus was published soon after; it made known to the Church the Pope’s intentions. Urban there mentions the revelations which had come to his knowledge before his election; and declares that, in virtue of his apostolic authority, and for the confounding of heresy and for the increase of the true faith, he institutes a special Solemnity in honor of the divine Memorial left by Christ to his Church. The day there fixed for the Feast is the fifth Feria (that is, the Thursday) after the Octave of Pentecost; for the Papal document does not mention, as the decree of the Bishop of Liége had done, the Feast of the Blessed Trinity, which had not yet been received into the calendar of the Church of Rome. In imitation of what had been done by Hugh de Saint Cher, the Pontiff granted a hundred days’ indulgence to all the Faithful who, being contrite and having confessed their sins, should assist at Mass or Matins at first or second Vespers of the Feast; and for assisting at Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, and Compline, forty days for each of those Hours. He also granted a hundred days, for each day within the Octave, to those who should assist on any such day at the Mass and the entire Office. Though thus entering into all these details, there is not an allusion to the Procession, for it was not introduced till the following Century.
All now seemed settled; and yet, owing to the troubles which were then so rife in Italy and the Empire, the Bull of Urban the Fourth was forgotten, and remained a dead letter. Forty years and more elapsed before it was again promulgated and confirmed by Pope Clement the Fifth at the Council of Vienne. John the Twenty-second gave it the force of a settled law by inserting it in the Clementines, about the year 1318; and he had thus the honor of putting the finishing hand to the great work which had taken upwards of a century for its completion.
The Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, or as it is commonly called, Corpus Christi, began a new phase in the Catholic worship of the Holy Eucharist. But in order to understand this, we must go more thoroughly into the question of Eucharistic worship as practised in the previous ages of the Church: the inquiry is one of importance for the full appreciation of the great Feast, for which we must now be preparing our souls. No preparation, so it seems to us, could be more to the point than the devoting the two next days to a faithful and compendious study of the chief features in the history of the Blessed Eucharist.
It belongs to thee, O holy Spirit, to teach us the history of so great a Mystery. Scarcely has thy reign begun upon the earth when, faithful to thy divine mission of glorifying our Emmanuel, who has ascended into heaven, thou at once raisest our eyes and hearts up to that best gift of his love, whereby we still possess him under the eucharistic veil. During those long ages of the expectation of nations it was thou didst bring the Word before mankind; thou spakest of him in the Scriptures, thou proclaimedst him by the Prophets. O thou that art the Gift of the Most High! thou art also infinite Love; and it is through thee, as such, that are wrought all the manifestations which God vouchsafes to make to us his creatures. It was thou that broughtest this divine Person, the Word, into the womb of the immaculate Virgin Mary, there to clothe him with sinless flesh, and so make him our Brother and our Savior. And now that he has ascended to his Father and our Father, depriving us of the sight of his human nature, all beauteous with its perfections and charms; now that we have to go through this vale of tears deprived of his visible company;—he has sent thee unto us; and thou art come, O divine Spirit, as our Consoler. But the consolation thou bringest us, dear Paraclete! is ever the same;—it is the faithful remembrance of our Jesus; yea, more, it is his divine Presence, perpetuated by thee in the Sacrament of Love. We had been already told that this would be so that thou wouldst not speak of thyself or for thyself; but that thou wouldst come to give testimony of the Emmanuel, continue his work, and produce his divine likeness in each one of us.
How admirable is this thy fulfilment of thy sublime mission which is all for the glory of Jesus! O divine Spirit, Guardian of the Word in the Church! it is far beyond our power to describe how great is thy vigilance over the word of teaching, brought by the Savior to this earth of ours, a teaching which is the true expression of himself and which coming, as he himself does, from the mouth of the Father, is the nourishment of his Bride here below. But with what infinite respect and vigilance, O holy Spirit, dost thou not preside over the august Sacrament, wherein is present, with all the reality of his adorable Flesh, that same Incarnate Word who, from the very first of creation, was the center and object of all thy dealings with creatures! It is by the mystery which is produced by thine omnipotence that the exiled Bride recovers her Spouse; it is by thee that she traverses the long ages of time, holding and prizing her infinite treasure; it is by thee that she, with such superhuman wisdom, puts it to profit, by so arranging, so modifying, her discipline, yea, her very life, as to secure in each age of time the greatest possible faith, respect, and love towards the Divine Eucharist. If she anxiously hide It from the profane men that would only turn their knowledge into blasphemy; or if she lavish upon It all that Liturgy can give of pomp and magnificence; or if again she bring It forth from her sacred temples and triumphantly carry It in processions through the crowded streets of cities, or the green lanes of the quiet country, it is thou, O divine Spirit, that inspirest her with what is best; it is thy divine foresight that suggests to her what is the surest means for gaining, in each respective period and age, the most of honour and love for that Jesus of hers who is ever present in the Sacred Host, and who deigns to let his love be delighted with being thus among the children of men.
Vouchsafe, O Holy Ghost, to aid us in our contemplations of this sacred Mystery. Enlighten our understandings, inflame our hearts, during these hours of preparation for its Feast. Give to our souls the knowledge of that Jesus who is coming to us beneath the Sacramental veil.
May this holy Mystery be to us, during this last portion of the year and its liturgy, our Bread to support us on the journey we have still to make through the desert before we can reach the mount of God; we have yet a great way to go, and a way so different from the one we have already passed through, when we had the company of our Jesus in the Mysteries he was working for our salvation. Be thou, O holy Spirit, our guide in those paths which the Church, under thy direction, is courageously traversing, and is every day approaching nearer to the end of her pilgrimage here below. Yet, scarcely have we entered on this second portion of our Year, than thou, divine Spirit, bringest us to the banquet prepared by divine Wisdom where the pilgrim gets the strength he needs for his journey. We will walk on, then, in the strength of this heavenly food; and when our course is run, we will, with the same Bread to support us, cry out with the Spirit and the Bride that our Lord Jesus may come to us, at that last hour, and admit us into his eternal kingdom.
In honor of the adorable Sacrament, and in memory of the Blessed Juliana, to whom the Church owes the Feast she is about to celebrate, we will offer our Readers today and during the Octave the main portions which are still extant of the Office which bears her name. It will be interesting to them to hear how this Office was drawn up; we give the details as supplied to us by the Bollandists, in the Life written of her by one of her contemporaries.
Juliana, then, began to ask herself whom she should get to compose the Office of the great Feast. She knew of no clever man, nor any holy priest, who seemed to her fitted for the work; so, trusting solely to divine Wisdom, she made up her mind to select a young brother of the Hospital, named John (not the John de Lausanne, of whom we have previously spoken), whose innocent life had been revealed to her by God. John refused the work, declaring that it far exceeded his powers or learning; he begged her to excuse him as he was but an ignorant man. Juliana knew all that; but she also knew that divine Wisdom, whose work she was furthering, could speak admirable things through an unlearned man; she kept to her purpose; and John, unable to resist the entreaties and influence of Juliana, began his labours. She prayed, and he wrote; and with the efforts of the two united, the work progressed in a way that surprised the young Brother. He attributed all, and he was not far wrong, to Juliana’s prayers. When he had got any considerable portion of the composition ready, he gave it to her, saying: “This, Sister, is what heaven sends thee: read it, and examine whether I have put down anything, either in the chant or the words, which needs correction.” She would then take it; and by the wonderful infused wisdom which she possessed, would examine and, where needed, correct; but with so much prudence and judgment that not even the most expert critics could find anything to change. And thus, by the wondrous help of God, was completed the whole Office of the new Feast.
The Antiphons we here subjoin were taken, by the Bollandists, from a very ancient Directorium of the Church of Saint-Martin-au-Mont.
They are the Antiphons assigned for the Benedictus and Magnificat of each day within the Octave.
Animarum cibus Dei Sapientia nobis carnem assumptam proposuit in edulium, ut per cibum hujus pietatis invitaret ad gustum divinitatis.
The Wisdom of God, the food of souls, hath offered to us, for our nourishment, the Flesh he had assumed to himself; that, by this food of his love, he might lead us to taste of what is divine.
Discipulis competentem conscribens hereditatem, sui memoriam commendavit inquiens: Hoc facite in mei commemorationem.
Leaving to his Disciples a worthy inheritance, he urged them to be mindful of himself, saying: do this in memory of me.
Totum Christus se nobis exhibet in cibum, ut sicut divinitus nos reficit quem corde gustamus, ita nos humanitus reficiat quem ore manducamus;
Christ gave his whole self to us as our food; that as he, whom we taste with out heart, divinely refreshes us, so he, whom we receive with our mouth, might refresh us by his human nature;
Et sic de visibilibus ad invisibilia, de temporalibus ad æterna, de terrenis ad cœlestia, de humanis ad divina nos transferat.
And thus it is, that he gives us to pass from things visible to invisible, from temporal to eternal, from earthly to heavenly, from human to divine.
Panem angelorum manducavit homo, ut qui secundum animum cibum divinitatis accipimus, secundum carnem cibum humanitatis sumamus: quia sicut anima rationalis et caro unus est homo, ita Deus et homo unus est Christus.
Men hath eaten of the Bread of Angels; so that we who, according to the soul, receive the food of the godhead, may take, according to the flesh, the food of Christ’s humanity: for, as the rational soul and the flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ.
Panis vitæ, panis angelorum, Jesu Christe vera mundi vita; qui semper nos reficis, in te nunquam deficis, nos ab omni sana languore, ut te nostro viatico in terra recreati, te ore plenissimo manducemus in æternum.
O Bread of Life! O Bread of Angels! Jesus Christ, true life of the world! who ever feedest us, and never failest in thyself! heal us of all our weakness; that being refreshed on earth by thee as our viaticum, we may feed on thee, to our fill, in eternity.
Suo Christus sanguine nos lavat quotidie, cum ejus beatæ passionis quotidie memoria renovatur.
Daily doth Christ wash us in his Blood, for daily is renewed the remembrance of his sacred Passion.
Sanguis ejus non infidelium manibus ad ipsorum perniciem funditur; sed quotidie fidelium suavi ore sumitur ad salutem.
His Blood is not shed by the hands of faithless men, which would be to their destruction; but daily is it received, and sweetly, and to their salvation, by the Faithful.
Verus Deus, verus homo semel in cruce pependit, se Patri redemptionis hostiam efficacem offerens: semper tamen invisibiliter est in mysterio, non passus sed quasi pati repræsentatus.
Once did Christ, true God and true Man, hang upon the Cross, and offer himself to the Father, as an effectual victim of redemption; yet is he ever invisibly present in the Mystery, not suffering, but represented as suffering.
Dominus Jesus Christus vulnere quotidie sacrificatus, mortalibus in terra præstitit cœlesti fungi ministerio.
The Lord Jesus Christ, who is daily sacrificed, but without a wound, grants to mortals on earth to fulfill a heavenly mystery.
Hæc igitur singularis victima Christi mortis est recordatio, scelerum nostrorum expurgatio, cunctorum fidelium devotio, et ætern&aelg; vitæ adeptio. This incomparable Victim is, then, the remembrance of Christ’s death, the cleansing away of our crimes, the devotion of all the Faithful, and the pledge of life eternal.
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| Pope Pius XII: Ad Caeli Reginam - Proclaiming the Queenship of Mary |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 08:00 AM - Forum: Encyclicals
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Ad Caeli Reginam
Proclaiming the Queenship of Mary
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To the Venerable Brethren, the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Holy See.
Venerable Brethren, Health and Apostolic Blessing.
From the earliest ages of the Catholic Church a Christian people, whether in time of triumph or more especially in time of crisis, has addressed prayers of petition and hymns of praise and veneration to the Queen of Heaven. And never has that hope wavered which they placed in the Mother of the Divine King, Jesus Christ; nor has that faith ever failed by which we are taught that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, reigns with a mother’s solicitude over the entire world, just as she is crowned in heavenly blessedness with the glory of a Queen.
2. Following upon the frightful calamities which before Our very eyes have reduced flourishing cities, towns, and villages to ruins, We see to Our sorrow that many great moral evils are being spread abroad in what may be described as a violent flood. Occasionally We behold justice giving way; and, on the one hand and the other, the victory of the powers of corruption. The threat of this fearful crisis fills Us with a great anguish, and so with confidence We have recourse to Mary Our Queen, making known to her those sentiments of filial reverence which are not Ours alone, but which belong to all those who glory in the name of Christian.
3. It is gratifying to recall that We ourselves, on the first day of November of the Holy Year 1950, before a huge multitude of Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and of the faithful who had assembled from every part of the world, defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven[1] where she is present in soul and body reigning, together with her only Son, amid the heavenly choirs of angels and Saints. Moreover, since almost a century has passed since Our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, proclaimed and defined the dogma that the great Mother of God had been conceived without any stain of original sin, We instituted the current Marian Year[2] And now it is a great consolation to Us to see great multitudes here in Rome — and especially in the Liberian Basilica — giving testimony in a striking way to their faith and ardent love for their heavenly Mother. In all parts of the world We learn that devotion to the Virgin Mother of God is flourishing more and more, and that the principal shrines of Mary have been visited and are still being visited by many throngs of Catholic pilgrims gathered in prayer.
4. It is well known that we have taken advantage of every opportunity — through personal audiences and radio broadcasts — to exhort Our children in Christ to a strong and tender love, as becomes children, for Our most gracious and exalted Mother. On this point it is particularly fitting to call to mind the radio message which We addressed to the people of Portugal, when the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary which is venerated at Fatima was being crowned with a golden diadem.[3] We Ourselves called this the heralding of the “sovereignty” of Mary.[4]
5. And now, that We may bring the Year of Mary to a happy and beneficial conclusion, and in response to petitions which have come to Us from all over the world, We have decided to institute the liturgical feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen. This will afford a climax, as it were, to the manifold demonstrations of Our devotion to Mary, which the Christian people have supported with such enthusiasm.
6. In this matter We do not wish to propose a new truth to be believed by Christians, since the title and the arguments on which Mary’s queenly dignity is based have already been clearly set forth, and are to be found in ancient documents of the Church and in the books of the sacred liturgy.
7. It is Our pleasure to recall these things in the present encyclical letter, that We may renew the praises of Our heavenly Mother, and enkindle a more fervent devotion towards her, to the spiritual benefit of all mankind.
8. From early times Christians have believed, and not without reason, that she of whom was born the Son of the Most High received privileges of grace above all other beings created by God. He “will reign in the house of Jacob forever,”[5] “the Prince of Peace,”[6] the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”[7] And when Christians reflected upon the intimate connection that obtains between a mother and a son, they readily acknowledged the supreme royal dignity of the Mother of God.
9. Hence it is not surprising that the early writers of the Church called Mary “the Mother of the King” and “the Mother of the Lord,” basing their stand on the words of St. Gabriel the archangel, who foretold that the Son of Mary would reign forever,[8] and on the words of Elizabeth who greeted her with reverence and called her “the Mother of my Lord.”[9] Thereby they clearly signified that she derived a certain eminence and exalted station from the royal dignity of her Son.
10. So it is that St. Ephrem, burning with poetic inspiration, represents her as speaking in this way: “Let Heaven sustain me in its embrace, because I am honored above it. For heaven was not Thy mother, but Thou hast made it Thy throne. How much more honorable and venerable than the throne of a king is her mother.”[10] And in another place he thus prays to her: “. . . Majestic and Heavenly Maid, Lady, Queen, protect and keep me under your wing lest Satan the sower of destruction glory over me, lest my wicked foe be victorious against me.”[11]
11. St. Gregory Nazianzen calls Mary “the Mother of the King of the universe,” and the “Virgin Mother who brought forth the King of the whole world,”[12] while Prudentius asserts that the Mother marvels “that she has brought forth God as man, and even as Supreme King.”[13]
12. And this royal dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is quite clearly indicated through direct assertion by those who call her “Lady,” “Ruler” and “Queen.”
13. In one of the homilies attributed to Origen, Elizabeth calls Mary “the Mother of my Lord.” and even addresses her as “Thou, my Lady.”[14]
14. The same thing is found in the writings of St. Jerome where he makes the following statement amidst various interpretations of Mary’s name: “We should realize that Mary means Lady in the Syrian Language.”[15] After him St. Chrysologus says the same thing more explicitly in these words: “The Hebrew word ‘Mary’ means ‘Domina.’ The Angel therefore addresses her as ‘Lady’ to preclude all servile fear in the Lord’s Mother, who was born and was called ‘Lady’ by the authority and command of her own Son.”[16]
15. Moreover Epiphanius, the bishop of Constantinople, writing to the Sovereign Pontiff Hormisdas, says that we should pray that the unity of the Church may be preserved “by the grace of the holy and consubstantial Trinity and by the prayers of Mary, Our Lady, the holy and glorious Virgin and Mother of God.”[17]
16. The Blessed Virgin, sitting at the right hand of God to pray for us is hailed by another writer of that same era in these words, “the Queen of mortal man, the most holy Mother of God.”[18]
17. St. Andrew of Crete frequently attributes the dignity of a Queen to the Virgin Mary. For example, he writes, “Today He transports from her earthly dwelling, as Queen of the human race, His ever-Virgin Mother, from whose womb He, the living God, took on human form.”[19]
18. And in another place he speaks of “the Queen of the entire human race faithful to the exact meaning of her name, who is exalted above all things save only God himself.”[20]
19. Likewise St. Germanus speaks to the humble Virgin in these words: “Be enthroned, Lady, for it is fitting that you should sit in an exalted place since you are a Queen and glorious above all kings.”[21] He likewise calls her the “Queen of all of those who dwell on earth.”[22]
20. She is called by St. John Damascene: “Queen, ruler, and lady,”[23] and also “the Queen of every creature.”[24] Another ancient writer of the Eastern Church calls her “favored Queen,” “the perpetual Queen beside the King, her son,” whose “snow-white brow is crowned with a golden diadem.”[25]
21. And finally St. Ildephonsus of Toledo gathers together almost all of her titles of honor in this salutation: “O my Lady, my Sovereign, You who rule over me, Mother of my Lord . . . Lady among handmaids, Queen among sisters.”[26]
22. The theologians of the Church, deriving their teaching from these and almost innumerable other testimonies handed down long ago, have called the most Blessed Virgin the Queen of all creatures, the Queen of the world, and the Ruler of all.
23. The Supreme Shepherds of the Church have considered it their duty to promote by eulogy and exhortation the devotion of the Christian people to the heavenly Mother and Queen. Simply passing over the documents of more recent Pontiffs, it is helpful to recall that as early as the seventh century Our predecessor St. Martin I called Mary “our glorious Lady, ever Virgin.”[27] St. Agatho, in the synodal letter sent to the fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council called her “Our Lady, truly and in a proper sense the Mother of God.”[28] And in the eighth century Gregory II in the letter sent to St. Germanus, the patriarch, and read in the Seventh Ecumenical Council with all the Fathers concurring, called the Mother of God: “The Queen of all, the true Mother of God,” and also “the Queen of all Christians.”[29]
24. We wish also to recall that Our predecessor of immortal memory, Sixtus IV, touched favorably upon the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, beginning the Apostolic Letter Cum praeexcelsa[30] with words in which Mary is called “Queen,” “Who is always vigilant to intercede with the king whom she bore.” Benedict XIV declared the same thing in his Apostolic Letter Gloriosae Dominae, in which Mary is called “Queen of heaven and earth,” and it is stated that the sovereign King has in some way communicated to her his ruling power.[31]
25. For all these reasons St. Alphonsus Ligouri, in collecting the testimony of past ages, writes these words with evident devotion: “Because the virgin Mary was raised to such a lofty dignity as to be the mother of the King of kings, it is deservedly and by every right that the Church has honored her with the title of ‘Queen’.”[32]
26. Furthermore, the sacred liturgy, which acts as a faithful reflection of traditional doctrine believed by the Christian people through the course of all the ages both in the East and in the West, has sung the praises of the heavenly Queen and continues to sing them.
27. Ardent voices from the East sing out: “O Mother of God, today thou art carried into heaven on the chariots of the cherubim, the seraphim wait upon thee and the ranks of the heavenly army bow before thee.”[33]
28. Further: “O just, O most blessed Joseph), since thou art sprung from a royal line, thou hast been chosen from among all mankind to be spouse of the pure Queen who, in a way which defies description, will give birth to Jesus the king.”[34] In addition: “I shall sing a hymn to the mother, the Queen, whom I joyously approach in praise, gladly celebrating her wonders in song. . . Our tongue cannot worthily praise thee, O Lady; for thou who hast borne Christ the king art exalted above the seraphim. . . Hail, O Queen of the world; hail, O Mary, Queen of us all.”[35]
29. We read, moreover, in the Ethiopic Missal: “O Mary, center of the whole world, . . . thou art greater than the many-eyed cherubim and the six-winged seraphim . . . Heaven and earth are filled with the sanctity of thy glory.”[36]
30. Furthermore, the Latin Church sings that sweet and ancient prayer called the “Hail, Holy Queen” and the lovely antiphons “Hail, Queen of the Heavens,” “O Queen of Heaven, Rejoice,” and those others which we are accustomed to recite on feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “The Queen stood at Thy right hand in golden vesture surrounded with beauty”[37]; “Heaven and earth praise thee as a powerful Queen”[38]; “Today the Virgin Mary ascends into heaven: rejoice because she reigns with Christ forever.”[39]
31. To these and others should be added the Litany of Loreto which daily invites Christian folk to call upon Mary as Queen. Likewise, for many centuries past Christians have been accustomed to meditate upon the ruling power of Mary which embraces heaven and earth, when they consider the fifth glorious mystery of the rosary which can be called the mystical crown of the heavenly Queen.
32. Finally, art which is based upon Christian principles and is animated by their spirit as something faithfully interpreting the sincere and freely expressed devotion of the faithful, has since the Council of Ephesus portrayed Mary as Queen and Empress seated upon a royal throne adorned with royal insignia, crowned with the royal diadem and surrounded by the host of angels and saints in heaven, and ruling not only over nature and its powers but also over the machinations of Satan. Iconography, in representing the royal dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, has ever been enriched with works of highest artistic value and greatest beauty; it has even taken the form of representing colorfully the divine Redeemer crowning His mother with a resplendent diadem.
33. The Roman Pontiffs, favoring such types of popular devotion, have often crowned, either in their own persons, or through representatives, images of the Virgin Mother of God which were already outstanding by reason of public veneration.
34. As We have already mentioned, Venerable Brothers, according to ancient tradition and the sacred liturgy the main principle on which the royal dignity of Mary rests is without doubt her Divine Motherhood. In Holy Writ, concerning the Son whom Mary will conceive, We read this sentence: “He shall be called the Son of the most High, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end,”[40] and in addition Mary is called “Mother of the Lord”;[41] from this it is easily concluded that she is a Queen, since she bore a son who, at the very moment of His conception, because of the hypostatic union of the human nature with the Word, was also as man King and Lord of all things. So with complete justice St. John Damascene could write: “When she became Mother of the Creator, she truly became Queen of every creature.”[42] Likewise, it can be said that the heavenly voice of the Archangel Gabriel was the first to proclaim Mary’s royal office.
35. But the Blessed Virgin Mary should be called Queen, not only because of her Divine Motherhood, but also because God has willed her to have an exceptional role in the work of our eternal salvation. “What more joyful, what sweeter thought can we have” — as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius XI wrote — “than that Christ is our King not only by natural right, but also by an acquired right: that which He won by the redemption? Would that all men, now forgetful of how much we cost Our Savior, might recall to mind the words, ‘You were redeemed, not with gold or silver which perishes, . . . but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb spotless and undefiled.[43] We belong not to ourselves now, since Christ has bought us ‘at a great price’.”[44]/[45]
36. Now, in the accomplishing of this work of redemption, the Blessed Virgin Mary was most closely associated with Christ; and so it is fitting to sing in the sacred liturgy: “Near the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ there stood, sorrowful, the Blessed Mary, Queen of Heaven and Queen of the World.”[46] Hence, as the devout disciple of St. Anselm (Eadmer, ed.) wrote in the Middle Ages: “just as . . . God, by making all through His power, is Father and Lord of all, so the blessed Mary, by repairing all through her merits, is Mother and Queen of all; for God is the Lord of all things, because by His command He establishes each of them in its own nature, and Mary is the Queen of all things, because she restores each to its original dignity through the grace which she merited.[47]
37. For “just as Christ, because He redeemed us, is our Lord and king by a special title, so the Blessed Virgin also (is our queen), on account of the unique manner in which she assisted in our redemption, by giving of her own substance, by freely offering Him for us, by her singular desire and petition for, and active interest in, our salvation.”[48]
38. From these considerations, the proof develops on these lines: if Mary, in taking an active part in the work of salvation, was, by God’s design, associated with Jesus Christ, the source of salvation itself, in a manner comparable to that in which Eve was associated with Adam, the source of death, so that it may be stated that the work of our salvation was accomplished by a kind of “recapitulation,”[49] in which a virgin was instrumental in the salvation of the human race, just as a virgin had been closely associated with its death; if, moreover, it can likewise be stated that this glorious Lady had been chosen Mother of Christ “in order that she might become a partner in the redemption of the human race”;[50] and if, in truth, “it was she who, free of the stain of actual and original sin, and ever most closely bound to her Son, on Golgotha offered that Son to the Eternal Father together with the complete sacrifice of her maternal rights and maternal love, like a new Eve, for all the sons of Adam, stained as they were by his lamentable fall,”[51] then it may be legitimately concluded that as Christ, the new Adam, must be called a King not merely because He is Son of God, but also because He is our Redeemer, so, analogously, the Most Blessed Virgin is queen not only because she is Mother of God, but also because, as the new Eve, she was associated with the new Adam.
39. Certainly, in the full and strict meaning of the term, only Jesus Christ, the God-Man, is King; but Mary, too, as Mother of the divine Christ, as His associate in the redemption, in his struggle with His enemies and His final victory over them, has a share, though in a limited and analogous way, in His royal dignity. For from her union with Christ she attains a radiant eminence transcending that of any other creature; from her union with Christ she receives the royal right to dispose of the treasures of the Divine Redeemer’s Kingdom; from her union with Christ finally is derived the inexhaustible efficacy of her maternal intercession before the Son and His Father.
40. Hence it cannot be doubted that Mary most Holy is far above all other creatures in dignity, and after her Son possesses primacy over all. “You have surpassed every creature,” sings St. Sophronius. “What can be more sublime than your joy, O Virgin Mother? What more noble than this grace, which you alone have received from God”?[52] To this St. Germanus adds: “Your honor and dignity surpass the whole of creation; your greatness places you above the angels.”[53] And St. John Damascene goes so far as to say: “Limitless is the difference between God’s servants and His Mother.”[54]
41. In order to understand better this sublime dignity of the Mother of God over all creatures let us recall that the holy Mother of God was, at the very moment of her Immaculate Conception, so filled with grace as to surpass the grace of all the Saints. Wherefore, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius IX wrote, God “showered her with heavenly gifts and graces from the treasury of His divinity so far beyond what He gave to all the angels and saints that she was ever free from the least stain of sin; she is so beautiful and perfect, and possesses such fullness of innocence and holiness, that under God a greater could not be dreamed, and only God can comprehend the marvel.”[55]
42. Besides, the Blessed Virgin possessed, after Christ, not only the highest degree of excellence and perfection, but also a share in that influence by which He, her Son and our Redeemer, is rightly said to reign over the minds and wills of men. For if through His Humanity the divine Word performs miracles and gives graces, if He uses His Sacraments and Saints as instruments for the salvation of men, why should He not make use of the role and work of His most holy Mother in imparting to us the fruits of redemption? “With a heart that is truly a mother’s,” to quote again Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, “does she approach the problem of our salvation, and is solicitous for the whole human race; made Queen of heaven and earth by the Lord, exalted above all choirs of angels and saints, and standing at the right hand of her only a Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, she intercedes powerfully for us with a mother’s prayers, obtains what she seeks, and cannot be refused.”[56] On this point another of Our Predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII, has said that an “almost immeasurable” power has been given Mary in the distribution of graces;[57] St. Pius X adds that she fills this office “as by the right of a mother.”[58]
43. Let all Christians, therefore, glory in being subjects of the Virgin Mother of God, who, while wielding royal power, is on fire with a mother’s love.
44. Theologians and preachers, however, when treating these and like questions concerning the Blessed Virgin, must avoid straying from the correct course, with a twofold error to guard against: that is to say, they must beware of unfounded opinions and exaggerated expressions which go beyond the truth, on the other hand, they must watch out for excessive narrowness of mind in weighing that exceptional, sublime, indeed all but divine dignity of the Mother of God, which the Angelic Doctor teaches must be attributed to her “because of the infinite goodness that is God.”[59]
45. For the rest, in this as in other points of Christian doctrine, “the proximate and universal norm of truth” is for all the living Magisterium of the Church, which Christ established “also to illustrate and explain those matters which are contained only in an obscure way, and implicitly in the deposit of faith.”[60]
46. From the ancient Christian documents, from prayers of the liturgy, from the innate piety of the Christian people, from works of art, from every side We have gathered witnesses to the regal dignity of the Virgin Mother of God; We have likewise shown that the arguments deduced by Sacred Theology from the treasure store of the faith fully confirm this truth. Such a wealth of witnesses makes up a resounding chorus which changes the sublimity of the royal dignity of the Mother of God and of men, to whom every creature is subject, who is “exalted to the heavenly throne, above the choirs of angels.”[61]
47. Since we are convinced, after long and serious reflection, that great good will accrue to the Church if this solidly established truth shines forth more clearly to all, like a luminous lamp raised aloft, by Our Apostolic authority We decree and establish the feast of Mary’s Queenship, which is to be celebrated every year in the whole world on the 31st of May. We likewise ordain that on the same day the consecration of the human race to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary be renewed, cherishing the hope that through such consecration a new era may begin, joyous in Christian peace and in the triumph of religion.
48. Let all, therefore, try to approach with greater trust the throne of grace and mercy of our Queen and Mother, and beg for strength in adversity, light in darkness, consolation in sorrow; above all let them strive to free themselves from the slavery of sin and offer an unceasing homage, filled with filial loyalty, to their Queenly Mother. Let her churches be thronged by the faithful, her feast-days honored; may the beads of the Rosary be in the hands of all; may Christians gather, in small numbers and large, to sing her praises in churches, in homes, in hospitals, in prisons. May Mary’s name be held in highest reverence, a name sweeter than honey and more precious than jewels; may none utter blasphemous words, the sign of a defiled soul, against that name graced with such dignity and revered for its motherly goodness; let no one be so bold as to speak a syllable which lacks the respect due to her name.
49. All, according to their state, should strive to bring alive the wondrous virtues of our heavenly Queen and most loving Mother through constant effort of mind and manner. Thus will it come about that all Christians, in honoring and imitating their sublime Queen and Mother, will realize they are truly brothers, and with all envy and avarice thrust aside, will promote love among classes, respect the rights of the weak, cherish peace. No one should think himself a son of Mary, worthy of being received under her powerful protection, unless, like her, he is just, gentle and pure, and shows a sincere desire for true brotherhood, not harming or injuring but rather helping and comforting others.
50. In some countries of the world there are people who are unjustly persecuted for professing their Christian faith and who are deprived of their divine and human rights to freedom; up till now reasonable demands and repeated protests have availed nothing to remove these evils. May the powerful Queen of creation, whose radiant glance banishes storms and tempests and brings back cloudless skies, look upon these her innocent and tormented children with eyes of mercy; may the Virgin, who is able to subdue violence beneath her foot, grant to them that they may soon enjoy the rightful freedom to practice their religion openly, so that, while serving the cause of the Gospel, they may also contribute to the strength and progress of nations by their harmonious cooperation, by the practice of extraordinary virtues which are a glowing example in the midst of bitter trials.
51. By this Encyclical Letter We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. We are convinced that this feast will help to preserve, strengthen and prolong that peace among nations which daily is almost destroyed by recurring crises. Is she not a rainbow in the clouds reaching towards God, the pledge of a covenant of peace?[62] “Look upon the rainbow, and bless Him that made it; surely it is beautiful in its brightness. It encompasses the heaven about with the circle of its glory, the hands of the Most High have displayed it.”[63] Whoever, therefore, reverences the Queen of heaven and earth — and let no one consider himself exemppt from this tribute of a grateful and loving soul — let him invoke the most effective of Queens, the Mediatrix of peace; let him respect and preserve peace, which is not wickedness unpunished nor freedom without restraint, but a well-ordered harmony under the rule of the will of God; to its safeguarding and growth the gentle urgings and commands of the Virgin Mary impel us.
52. Earnestly desiring that the Queen and Mother of Christendom may hear these Our prayers, and by her peace make happy a world shaken by hate, and may, after this exile show unto us all Jesus, Who will be our eternal peace and joy, to you, Venerable Brothers, and to your flocks, as a promise of God’s divine help and a pledge of Our love, from Our heart We impart the Apostolic Benediction.
53. Given at Rome, from St. Peter’s, on the feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the eleventh day of October, 1954, in the sixteenth year of our Pontificate.
REFERENCES:
1. Cf. constitutio apostolica Munificentissirnus Deus: AAS XXXXII 1950, p. 753 sq.
2. Cf. Iitt. enc. Fulgens corona: AAS XXXXV, 1953, p. 577 sq.
3. Cf. AAS XXXVIII, 1946, p. 264 sq.
4. Cf. L’Osservatore Romano, d. 19 Maii, a. 1946.
5. Luc. 1, 32.
6. Isai. IX, 6.
7. Apoc. XIX, 16.
8. Cf. Luc. 1, 32, 33.
9. Luc. 1, 43.
10. S. Ephraem, Hymni de B Mana, ed. Th. J. Lamy, t. II, Mechliniae, 1886, hymn. XIX, p. 624.
11. Idem, Oratio ad Ssmam Dei Matrem; Opera omnia, Ed. Assemani, t. III (graece), Romae, 1747, pag. 546.
12. S. Gregorius Naz., Poemata dogmatica, XVIII, v. 58; PG XXXVII, 485.
13. Prudentius, Dittochaeum, XXVII: PL LX, 102 A.
14. Hom. in S. Lucam, hom. Vll; ed. Rauer, Origenes’ Werke, T. IX, p. 48 (ex catena Marcarii Chrysocephali). Cf. PG XIII, 1902 D.
15. S. Hieronymus, Liber de nominibus hebraeis: PL XXIII, 886.
16. S. Petrus Chrysologus, Sermo 142, De Annuntiatione B.M.V.: PL Lll, 579 C; cf. etiam 582 B; 584 A: “Regina totius exstitit castitatis.”
17. Relatio Epiphanii Ep. Constantin.: PL LXII, 498 D.
18. Encomium in Dormitionem Ssmae Deiparae (inter opera S. Modesti): PG LXXXVI, 3306 B.
19. S. Andreas Cretensis, Homilia II in Dormitionem Ssmae Deiparae: PG XCVII, 1079 B.
20. Id., Homilia III in Dormitionem Ssmae Deiparae: PG XCVII, 1099 A.
21. S. Germanus, In Praesentationem Ssmae Deiparae, 1: PG XCVIII, 303 A.
22. Id., In Praesentationem Ssmae Deiparae, n PG XCVIII, 315 C.
23. S. Ioannes Damascenus, Homilia I in Dormitionem B.M.V.: P.G. XCVI, 719 A.
24. Id., De fide orthodoxa, I, IV, c. 14: PG XLIV, 1158 B.
25. De laudibus Mariae (inter opera Venantii Fortunati): PL LXXXVIII, 282 B et 283 A.
26. Ildefonsus Toletanus, De virginitate perpetua B.M.V.: PL XCVI, 58 A D.
27. S. Martinus 1, Epist. XIV: PL LXXXVII, 199-200 A.
28. S. Agatho: PL LXXXVII, 1221 A.
29. Hardouin, Acta Conciliorum, IV, 234; 238: PL LXXXIX, 508 B.
30. Xystus IV, bulla Cum praeexcelsa. d. d. 28 Febr. a. 1476.
31. Benedictus XIV, bulla Gloriosae Dominae, d. d. 27 Sept. a. 1748.
32. S. Alfonso, Le glone de Maria, p. I, c. I, 1.
33. Ex liturgia Armenorum: in festo Assumptionis, hymnus ad Matutinum.
34. Ex Menaeo (byzantino): Dominica post Natalem, in Canone, ad Matutinum.
35. Officium hymni Axathistos (in ritu byzantino).
36. Missale Aethiopicum, Anaphora Dominae nostrae Mariae, Matris Dei.
37. Brev. Rom., Versiculus sexti Respons.
38. Festum Assumptionis; hymnus Laudum.
39. Ibidem, ad Magnificat 11 Vesp.
40. Luc. 1, 32, 33.
41. Ibid. 1, 43.
42. S. Ioannes Damascenus, De fide orthodoxa, 1. IV, c. 14; PL XCIV, 1158 s. B.
43. I Petr. 1, 18, 19.
44. I Cor. Vl, 20.
45. Pius Xl, litt. enc. Quas primas: AAS XVII, 1925, p. 599.
46. Festum septem dolorum B. Mariae Virg., Tractus.
47. Eadmerus, De excellentia Virginis Mariae, c. 11: PL CLIX, 508 A B.
48. F. Suarez, De mysteriis vitae Christi, disp. XXII, sect. 11 (ed Vives, XIX, 327).
49. S. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., V, 19, 1: PG VII, 1175 B.
50. Pius Xl, epist. Auspicatus profecto: AAS XXV, 1933, p. 80.
51. Pius XII, litt. enc. Mystici Corporis: AAS XXXV, 1943, p. 247.
52. S. Sophronius, In annuntianone Beatae Mariae Virginis: PG LXXXVII, 3238 D; 3242 A.
53. S. Germanus, Hom. II in dormitione Beatae Mariae Virginis: PG XCVIII, 354 B.
54. S. Ioannes Damascenus, Hom. I in Dormitionem Beatae Mariae Virginis: PG XCVI, 715 A.
55. Pius IX, bulla Ineffabilis Deus: Acta Pii IX, I, p. 597-598.
56. Ibid. p. 618.
57. Leo Xlll, litt. enc. Adiumcem populi: ASS, XXVIIl, 1895-1896,p.130.
58. Pius X, litt enc. Ad diem illum: ASS XXXVI, 1903-1904, p.455.
59. S. Thomas, Summa Theol., I, q. 25, a. 6, ad 4.
60. Pius Xll, litt. enc. Humani generis: AAS XLII, 1950, p. 569.
61. Ex Brev. Rom.: Festum Assumptionis Beatae Mariae Virginis.
62. Cf. Gen. IX, 13.
63. Eccl. XLIII, 12-13.
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| May 31st - The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 07:17 AM - Forum: Our Lady
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Excerpt from the Mystical City of God:
The Mystical City of God
Book 8 - Chapter 8
THE CORONATION OF THE MOTHER OF GOD
We call that the throne of the Divinity, from which God manifests Himself to the saints as the principal cause of their glory and as the infinite, eternal God, independent of all things and on whose will all creatures depend, from which He manifests Himself as the Lord, as the King, as the Judge and Master of all that is in existence. This dignity Christ the Redeemer possesses, in as far as He is God, essentially, and as far as He is man, through the hypostatic union, by which He communicates his Godhead to the humanity. Hence in heaven He is the King, the Lord and supreme Judge; and the saints, though their glory exceeds all human calculation, are as servants and inferiors of this inaccessible Majesty. In this the most holy Mary participates in a degree next inferior and in a manner otherwise ineffable and proportionate to a mere creature so closely related to the Godman; and therefore She assists forever at the right hand of her Son as Queen (Ps. 44, 10), Lady and Mistress of all creation, her dominion extending as far as that of her divine Son, although in a different manner.
After placing the most blessed Mary on this exalted and supereminent throne, the Lord declared to the courtiers of heaven all the privileges She should enjoy in virtue of this participation in his majesty. The Person of the eternal Father, as the first principle of all things, speaking to the angels and saints, said to them: “Our Daughter Mary was chosen according to our pleasure from amongst all creatures, the first one to delight Us, and who never fell from the title and position of a Daughter, such as We had given Her in our divine mind; She has a claim on our dominion, which We shall recognize by crowning Her as the legitimate and peerless Lady and Sovereign.” The incarnate Word said: “To my true and natural Mother belong all the creatures which were created and redeemed by Me; and of all things over which I am King, She too shall be the legitimate and supreme Queen.” The Holy Ghost said: “Since She is called my beloved and chosen Spouse, She deserves to be crowned as Queen for all eternity.”
Having thus spoken the three divine Persons placed upon the head of the most blessed Mary a crown of such new splendor and value, that the like has been seen neither before nor after by any mere creature. At the same time a voice sounded from the throne saying: “My Beloved, chosen among the creatures, our kingdom is Thine; Thou shalt be the Lady and the Sovereign of the seraphim, of all the ministering spirits, the angels and of the entire universe of creatures. Attend, proceed and govern prosperously over them, for in our supreme consistory We give Thee power, majesty and sovereignty. Being filled with grace beyond all the rest, Thou hast humiliated Thyself in thy own estimation to the lowest place; receive now the supreme dignity deserved by Thee and, as a participation in our Divinity, the dominion over all the creatures of our Omnipotence. From thy royal throne to the centre of the earth Thou shalt reign; and by the power We now give Thee Thou shalt subject hell with all its demons and inhabitants. Let all of them fear Thee as the supreme Empress and Mistress of those caverns and dwelling–places of our enemies. In thy hands and at thy pleasure We place the influences and forces of the heavens, the moisture of the clouds, the growths of the earth; and of all of them do Thou distribute according to thy will, and our own will shall be at thy disposal for the execution of thy wishes. Thou shalt be the Empress and Mistress of the militant Church, its Protectress, its Advocate, its Mother and Teacher. Thou shalt be the special Patroness of the Catholic countries; and whenever they, or the faithful, or any of the children of Adam call upon Thee from their heart, serve or oblige Thee, Thou shalt relieve and help them in their labors and necessities. Thou shalt be the Friend, the Defender and the Chieftainess of all the just and of our friends; all of them Thou shalt comfort, console and fill with blessings according to their devotion to Thee. In view of all this We make Thee the Depositary of our riches, the Treasurer of our goods; we place into thy hands the helps and blessings of our grace for distribution; nothing do We wish to be given to the world, which does not pass through thy hands; and nothing do We deny, which Thou wishest to concede to men. Grace shall be diffused in thy lips for obtaining all that Thou wishest and ordainest in heaven and on earth, and everywhere shall angels and men obey Thee; because whatever is ours shall be thine, just as Thou hast always been ours; and Thou shalt reign with Us forever.”
In the execution of this decree and privilege conceded to the Mistress of the world, the Almighty commanded all the courtiers of heaven, angels and men, to show Her obedience and recognize Her as their Queen and Lady. There was another mystery concealed in this wonder, namely, it was a recompense for the worship and veneration, which, as is clear from this history, the most blessed Mary, notwithstanding that She was the Mother of God, full of grace and holiness above the angels and saints, had bestowed upon the saints during her mortal pilgrimage. Although during the time when they were comprehensors and She yet a pilgrim, it was for her greater merit, that She should humble Herself beneath them all according to the ordainment of the Lord; yet now, when She was in possession of the kingdom, it was just, that She should be venerated, worshipped and extolled by them as her inferiors and vassals. This they also did in that most blessed state, in which all things are reduced to their proper proportion and order. Both the angelic spirits and the blessed souls, while rendering their adoration to the Lord with fear and worshipful reverence, rendered a like homage in its proportion to His most blessed Mother; and the saints who were there in their bodies prostrated themselves and gave bodily signs of their worship. All these demonstrations at the coronation of the Empress of heaven redounded wonderfully to her glory, to the new joy and jubilee of the saints and to the pleasure of the most blessed Trinity. Altogether festive was this day, and it produced new accidental glory in all the heavens. Those that partook more especially therein were her most fortunate spouse saint Joseph, saint Joachim and Anne and all the other relatives of the Queen, together with the thousand angels of her guard.
Within the glorious body of the Queen, over her heart, was visible to the saints a small globe or monstrance of singular beauty and splendor, which particularly roused and rouses their admiration and joy. It was there in testimony and reward of her having afforded to the sacramental Word an acceptable resting–place and sanctuary, and of her having received holy Communion so worthily, purely and holily, without any defect or imperfection, and with a devotion, love and reverence attained by none other of the saints. In regard to the other rewards and crowns corresponding to her peerless works and virtues, nothing that can be said could give any idea; and therefore I refer it to the beatific vision, where each one shall perceive them in proportion as his doings and his devotion shall have merited.
WORDS OF THE QUEEN
The Virgin Mary speaks to Sister Mary of Agreda, Spain
My daughter, if anything could lessen the enjoyment of the highest felicity and glory which I possess, and if, in it, I could be capable of any sorrow, without a doubt I would be grieved to see the holy Church and the rest of the world in its present state of labor, notwithstanding that men know me to be their Mother, Advocate and Protectress in heaven, ready to guide and assist them to eternal life. In this state of affairs, when the Almighty has granted me so many privileges as his Mother and when there are so many sources of help placed in my hands solely for the benefit of mortals and belonging to me as the Mother of clemency, it is a great cause of sorrow to me to see mortals force me to remain idle, and that, for want of calling upon me, so many souls should be lost. But if I cannot experience grief now, I may justly complain of men, that they load themselves with eternal damnation and refuse me the glory of saving their souls.
How much my intercession and the power I have in heaven are worth has never been hidden in the Church, for I have demonstrated my ability to save all by so many thousands of miracles, prodigies and favors operated in behalf of those devoted to me. With those who have called upon me in their needs I have always shown myself liberal, and the Lord has shown himself liberal to them on my account. The Most High still wishes to give liberally of his infinite treasures and resolves to favor those who know how to gain my intercession before God. This is the secure way and the powerful means of advancing the Church, of improving the Catholic reigns, of spreading the faith, of furthering the welfare of families and of states, of bringing the souls to grace and to the friendship of God.
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| SiSiNoNo (1997): The True Notion of Tradition |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-31-2021, 07:14 AM - Forum: In Defense of Tradition
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SiSiNoNo - January 1997 No. 19
The True Notion of Tradition
An Abridged text of the discourse given by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais at Versailles, May 19, 1995
![[Image: Bishop_Malleraisa.jpg]](http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/SiSiNoNo/Images/1997_January/Bishop_Malleraisa.jpg)
Modernist Rome has declared us schismatics because we hold a supposedly false notion of Tradition. I am going to show that it is the faithful of Tradition who have the true notion of Tradition and, consequently that it is those who declare us schismatics, the neo-modernists, who have a false evolutionary notion of Tradition, which they call "living tradition."
Tradition is essentially immutable, unchangeable: That however does not prevent it from being living-we will show in what manner- nor from undergoing a homogeneous development. To begin, let's look at the first point.
TRADITION IS ESSENTIALLY IMMUTABLE
Card. Billot, under Pope Pius XI, explained this in a work entitled: De Immutabilitate Traditionis Contra Modernam Haeresim Evolutionismi, Concerning the Immutability of Sacred Tradition (1929). This is no invention or opinion, it is the most classic doctrine of the Church: Tradition does not change. In fact, the word tradition comes from the Latin tradere which means to transmit. Tradition is the transmission without change of that which has been deposited. If in the course of the transmission there is a change, then in deed there is a breach of faith, there is a falsification of the deposit transmitted. We see this, for instance, if the transmission of popular tradition (i.e., folklore) ; but fidelity is so much more important in the transmission of the supernatural deposit of divine revelation, that is to say the treasure of truths revealed by the prophets, Our Lord Jesus Christ and ending with the Apostles. The revealed deposit is completed at the time of the death of the last Apostle.
St Pius X in the decree Lamentabili (1907) condemns the following:
Quote:Revelation, constituting the object of the Catholic faith, was not completed with the Apostles [Proposition 21].
The proposition was condemned because it meant that there could have been other later revelations which could have been added to the revelation given to the Apostles. The Magisterium of the Church has solely the role of preserving and faithfully explaining this deposit of Revelation. This is what Vatican Council I says in the decree Pastor aeternus:
Quote:The Holy Spirit has not been promised to the successors of Peter that, under His revelation, they might make known a new doctrine, but in order that, with His assistance, they sacredly preserve and faithfully set forth the revelation transmitted by the Apostles, that is to say, the deposit of the faith.
Pope Pius IX had many years before condemned the error of progression in matters of doctrine held by those who said doctrine must evolve as human knowledge advances in his encyclical Qui pluribus (1846):
Quote:It is by as great a fraud...that these enemies of divine revelation, who bestow the highest praises on human progress, wish, with a truly reckless and sacrilegious audacity, to bring it [the progressist error] into the Catholic religion, as if religion was not the work of God, but that of men, or was some philosophic discovery that human methods could perfect.
Let us hold firmly to the essential immutability of the divine tradition. It is a deposit to faithfully trasmit-and that’s that! Later we will explain in what way there is a certain progress, but this principle must be clearly established and firmly held; otherwise, we cannot continue.
TRADITION IS LIVING BECAUSE EACH ONE OF US LIVES IN IT
This essential immutability does not prevent Tradition from being living. The modernists speak of "living tradition." We also speak of the living tradition, but not in the same way, as we are going to see.
Here is what we understand by "living tradition":
That tradition is immutable does not prevent it from being living; that is to say that Catholics of yesterday, today and tomorrow live in it. Tradition is living because one lives in it.
We are going to see the life and development of divine tradition first as it concerns the individual; then as it manifests itself in the Church considered as a whole. It is very important to make a distinction between these two things.
Tradition is the revealed deposit. What is in the revelation? Essentially, the revelation is the intimate life of God which is communicated to us by grace and by the sacraments. The intimate life of God is God displaying himself in three divine Persons, and the entirety of this life is communicated to us by grace, the sacraments, and Our Lord Jesus Christ. That is the essential core of the Christian revelation, the very terms of this deposit one must keep. Living tradition is the same as saying that one lives the life of God, that one is imbued with this divine life, that one lives it by the intellect, by the will, by faith, by hope, by charity and by all the virtues.
Now this Christian life-this life of tradition in our hearts, persons, and surroundings-is a participation in the immutable life of God. God does not change. The blessed in heaven contemplate the immutable God in eternity which fills them with an immense joy for all eternity. They are delighted to contemplate the same and unchanging God forever, the Source of an inconceivable and inexpressible life. This is their eternal rejoicing, and nevertheless they are fixed in the immutable. See then the error of the progressists, who wish that this would not be constant change…. No! - The spiritual life is the most unchangeable! Look at the saints in their contemplation. They are fixed on God and that is sufficient for them and nourishes their lives. I am not speaking of the ecstasies possible on earth with the body almost suspended. I am speaking of the soul who, while conducting his ordinary activities, is completely immersed and transformed in God, firm and unchangeable. We understand well that the more we live this Tradition, the more we will be fixed in the immutable who is God, and the further we will be removed from the evolution of perpetual change.
For the modem evolutionists on the contrary, life consists of perpetual change. It is very difficult for them to conceive that the highest life which already exists here on earth for the saints, for the contemplatives and those who devote themselves to prayer and meditation, consists of the contemplation of the unchangeable-and yet, thus it is!
But this life of tradition, this contemplation of the unchangeable, should nevertheless progress within each one of the faithful. There is a progression, a progressive deepening in the course of the spiritual life;
1) First, there is a development in the object of the faith. The faithful should not only learn more and more about the scope of all the revealed truths but also the consequences of the revealed truths in practical life, e.g., the consequences of the divinity of Jesus Christ for social and political life, etc….
2) There is also a development in the intensity of the faith, in the extent that we live this revealed truth more vigorously (STI, II q.52). Great saints have a deeper faith because they adhere more steadfastly to God and His revelation.
3) There is also another development as regards the individual. This is the advancement in the power of faith when the Christian submits his entire life to the rule of the Faith. As Sacred Scripture says: "The just man lives by the faith" (Rom. 1:17).
4) Finally, in the individual, there is also a development in the fruits of the faith. A living faith is accompanied by charity and the entire retinue of the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost, whose intrinsic law is to grow without ceasing, provided that the tendencies toward vice are fought. The Faith is then the root of the progress of each Catholic towards holiness.
It is undeniable that living tradition exists in each individual, provided that there has been authentic transmission, and that this tradition has been increased within the individual by the deepening and fruitfulness of the faith.
FALSE IDEAS OF DEVELOPMENT
This development of the Faith, of Christian virtues, of the life of Tradition does not apply to the Church taken in her totality. In effect, neither in the sources of the spiritual life nor in the case of the holiness of the most saintly among the Catholics, nor in the number of saints, can one establish a spiritual development.
1) Let us first consider the sources of this life of Tradition. These sources do not increase, do not change. The Church possesses from Her inception the seven sacraments. N o one can add an eighth sacrament, as the charismatics do with their laying on of hands. No one can suppress one or another of the sacraments as the modernists do, as for example in the case of Confirmation or of Penance. The sources of holiness are always the same. They are always as plentiful. One has only to drink at them.
2) Can there be an evolution in the model of holiness? -No, there is no development. The model of sanctity no longer evolves because "the form of all perfection" is Our Lord Jesus Christ, as it states in the ritual for the taking of the habit by religious sisters. Though saints may appear different, they are only variations on the same theme,...different arrangements of the same flowers of the same bouquet, as St. Francis de Sales explains. Thus the code of the sanctity of the Church does not change, just as the code of morality does not change. This is of equal value for all times. To wish to establish a new religious life in the 20th century is an illusion. It is an error. Opus Dei, with that which could be its motto: "Work, Commitment, Influence" is the very example of this illusion.
3) Perhaps you could object: "But nevertheless, in the degree of sanctity there is a development in the Church. In the 20th century the saints are much more holy than before! There are some great saints in the 20th century!"...Count them on the fingers of one hand! Martyrs have been canonised, it is true. St Pius X was canonised, it is true, but that was before the Council. Padre Pio is just before the Council. After the Council does one find saints? Surely, there will always be some of them, but they are few indeed and I promise that they are not of the conciliar Church! We are far from progress. In fact, there is a regression.
However, let us admit that an increase in sanctity in the Church lover time is not necessary. However, let us admit that an increase in sanctity in the Church over time is not necessary. God raises up the saints as He wishes, when He wishes, to lift the level of each century, but one does not observe that one century regularly produces more great saints than the preceding century .We do not have this imaginary progress in which the modernists believe. Let us then refute the ideas of this pseudo-progress.
In spite of everything, there is, in this immutable Tradition, an admirable capacity for application to all contingent circumstances. It is a matter of applying the eternal and unchanging principles to the problems and necessities of each century .The Council of Nicea is not the same as the Council of Florence, the Council of Florence is not the same as the Council of Trent, the Council of Trent is not the same as Vatican Council I. In each there is a different application, but the principles were always the same. Hence, we see here that there is a vitality to tradition in that it is capable of applying itself to each era.
Tradition is alive in that it applies itself above all to struggling against the errors of each era, against the dangers which threaten the souls of each century .It was of this that Pope Pius IX was speaking in Gravissimas Inter (1862):
Quote:The Church, because of her divine institution, must take the greatest care to keep intact and inviolate the deposit of the divine faith, keep unceasing watch over all her efforts for the salvation of souls and pay great attention to driving away and eliminating everything which can be opposed to the faith and can put in danger, in one way or another, the salvation of souls [His Excellency's emphasis added-Ed.].
Doctrine has this marvelous faculty of application!-to condemn, to eliminate, to reject everything which opposes the Faith and salvation of souls.
THE FALSE AGGIORNAMENTO OF VATICAN II
After Vatican Council II, the opposite was done. No one any longer wished to condemn anything and there was talk of adaptation, of aggiornamento. But this is a false adaptation! The proof of it was they did not wish to condemn the con- temporary errors such as Communism. The 400 signatures gathered by Archbishop Lefebvre to condemn it remained in a desk drawer. They did not want to condemn the contemporary errors of Liberalism, of Modernism, etc…. They did not want to apply the revealed deposit to the danger which was currently threatening souls. This unrealistic claim of adaptation on the part of the modernists is nonsense!
Vatican II wanted to make an adaptation that was a mutation a priori, artificial, with a Protestant and modernist interpretation. Catholic application is not a mutation. It is simply the applying of unchangeable principles to contingent circumstances. The principles are living because they apply themselves! That is the important thing! It is precisely because the transmission is living, that is to say applied, that the Church constantly draws new propositions from her own and immutable treasure...new condemnations of heresies for example, or new dogmatic definitions. It is necessary at certain times to put the finger on certain errors, to add a certain dogmatic precision, as for example when the Council of Trent defined (against the Protestant errors) the Mass. That is applying the immutable principle to the needs of the era. That is what Vatican Council II did not do. It let the principles fall, under the pretext of adaptation, to the thinking of the modern world! Where there is a true adaptation, there is a battle in proportion to the errors to be battled and to the dangers which menace the eternal life of souls.
It remains to be shown how, in this matter of application in the course of time, tradition undergoes a homogeneous development.
THE HOMOGENEOUS DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA
This application-this necessity to respond to the needs of each era and protect souls against errors properly constitutes, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the divine force of a certain development of doctrine, e.g., new dogmatic definitions. But be on guard! This development is homogeneous. It is not a mutation but a homogeneous development. This is contrary to the view of the modernists who wish it to be an evolutionary development. The homogeneous progress of the Tradition of the Church is entirely a progress in l) precision, and 2) explanation.
That is to say, that which had been universally believed in previous times is, in later years, isolated and embossed. It is like a rough diamond, having been mined from the quarry and not yet very pretty, taken to the gem cutter who is going to chisel it into a thousand surfaces in order that one can view it from all its angles with thousands of reflections. But it is the same diamond! There is simply a development in the particulars-all the colors of the rainbow are going to be refracted but there is no development in substance. A gem cutter who might want to re-chisel it afterwards would fail. This is development in precision.
There is also a development in explanation. There is a passing from the implicit to the explicit. That which one believed implicitly is going to be believed explicitly. For example, the primacy of jurisdiction of the Pope over all the bishops of the world. This has always been believed, but implicitly {otherwise the Church would not have survived). After Vatican Council I, this is now believed explicitly.
St. Thomas, while addressing the growth of the articles of Faith in the course of the Old Testament, sets forth a doctrine that can also, in a certain way, be applied to the New Testament:
Quote:…..alone must say then that the articles of faith are never increased in their substantial content, as time goes by, because all that the later men have believed had been contained, although implicitly, in the faith of the Fathers who preceded them [thus, that which Isaiah said was contained in the faith of Moses, for example, was already in the faith of Abraham].
We must remember this very important doctrine of St. Thomas: in the Old Testament, the number of articles of the faith increased because the Holy Spirit disclosed more and more explicitly the revealed truths {STII,II, q.l, a.7).
After the New Testament {with the death of St. John) there is no more revelation. But there is the proposition by the Magisterium of the Church. In the Old Testament there had been an increase of the Revelation and thus of the articles of Faith. In the New Testament there is an increase in the proposition by the organs of Tradition, especially the Magisterium, and hence a passage from the implicit to the explicit. In the Old Testament it is God's Rev- elation itself which passes from the implicit to the explicit; in the New Testament, Revelation is ended, it is the proposition by the Church which passes from the implicit to the explicit. There is then a development, not in the articles of the Faith but in the explanation of the truths of the revealed deposit.
It is a homogeneous development. It is a development like a bud which blossoms...like a bud which opens up very beautifully, but remains the same bud. There is an unfolding, but without alteration; a displaying of all that which had been contained within from the outset. One calls this homogeneous because there is no mutation. It is the same living species, the same plant, it is a development without mutation, it is the same reality unfolding itself and making explicit all its details, but it is the same reality.
THE UNSURPASSABLE SUMMIT
Finally, this homogeneous development leads to a point which cannot be surpassed, which is, precisely, the defined truth. Once a truth is defined, for example, ex cathedra by a pope or in an ecumenical council, as was the Immaculate Conception (by Pope Pius IX) or the Assumption of the Most Holy Virgin (by Pope Pius XII), that truth, thus defined, constitutes an unsurpassable peak. One cannot improve upon it.
Catholic doctrine says that defined truths are irrevocable. They are no longer susceptible to development. They must always be believed in the same meaning in eodem sensu eademque semper sententia as the Anti-Modernist Oath puts it. They have been stated precisely with the assistance of the Holy Ghost. They are no longer subject to a subsequent development, even, I would say, in their formulation. The dogmatic formulas, the words employed, are no longer subject to improvement. Take for example the word transubstantiation used to ex- press the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at the Mass The word conversion is a very vague word in Latin. It means change and/or passage from one condition to another, but it does not suffice. One must state precisely that it is a transubstantiation: all the substance of the bread is changed into the Body of Christ, all the substance of the wine is changed into the Blood of Christ. And indeed it could never be better stated. One cannot imagine of a new formulation which could say it better, because this is the diamond finely crafted by the Holy Ghost. And all the subsequent heretics are going to try to find another word, for example Fr. Schillebeeckx, who invents the word transignification and falls into heresy. Time and again, in each newly defined dogma, the Church eventually attains an unsurpassable height. That is to say that the truths which have not yet been defined have not yet reached their unsurpassable summit, and, therefore, they can still have an homogeneous development.
It remains no less true that, in the aggregate, the doctrine of the faith grows and develops itself homogeneously. It is open to development by a further preciseness in the explanation of points which have not yet been defined.
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
This is the way we must understand what St. Vincent of Lerins said in his celebrated Commonitorium which affirms the immutability of Tradition and at the same time homogeneous development, too.
But perhaps someone will say "is there then within the Church no progress in religion?" Assuredly there is, and a very great progress, for who is there who would be so hardened against men and so hateful towards God that he would dare oppose such a progress? It is however in this manner; there is a progress, there is in truth an advancement in the faith, but not a change.
St. Vincent of Lerins (d.445) remains very timely, replying to today's modernists that there is a development in the faith, but not a change, not a mutation: "There is a development when a thing in itself is enlarged; there is a change when something is changed into another thing" (RJ2174).
This change is inadmissible for tradition, for the deposit of the faith. St. Vincent wrote:
Quote:...[u]nderstanding, knowledge and wisdom must increase and powerfully grow in one and in all, both in each individual man and in the Church, during the passage of time and of the ages, but grow solely within its own species, that is to say within the same dogma, in the same sense and in the same meaning. In eodem dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia [This expression was lifted textually by Vatican Council I and for the Anti-Modernist Oath-Ed.]
Thus, St. Vincent of Lerins insists on continuity .There is a development he says, but a homogeneous development. There is no substantial change.
THE HOMOGENEOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE LITURGY
The liturgy has also experienced a homogeneous development. The so-called "Mass of St. Pius V" is the result of centuries of liturgical developments which have, little by little, sculptured the prayers of the Mass and the other liturgical prayers of the missal, to form that inestimable jewel that the holy Pope St. Pius V codified. The Canon, the essential part of this Mass, was al- ready completed by the time of St. Gregory the Great (reigning 590- 604). There had previously been a whole development; and indeed afterwards prayers were added, by no means secondary, such as those of the Offertory. We don't in the least assert that the Mass of St. Pius V "descended from heaven," for that would not conform to reality. It was perfected during the 11th to the 14th century. But when St. Pius V codified it his bull Quo Primum (1570), it becomes an unsurpassable summit. It is the completed liturgical expression of the dogmas of the Mass (e.g., Real Presence, Eucharistic Sacrifice, true sacrifice which is one and the same as the Sacrifice of the Cross) and of the veneration which is due to that which is effected by the holy Mass. And St. Pius V codified this Ordo Missae precisely as the insurmountable barrier raised up against the Protestant heresy and all subsequent heresies.
One must affirm then that this Mass is an unsurpassable expression of faith and adoration, and, therefore, we must affirm that the fabrication by Pope Paul VI of a new Mass-by his experts, notably Mgr. Bugnini-by the reconstitution of ancient formulas which had fallen into disuse and which, in particular, had not been retained by St. Pius V, is something artificial. It is not a homogeneous development. It is a thing artificially constrained and not a time-honored and spontaneous advancement. They attempted an abrupt development, but this was erroneous.
This new Mass is no longer a precise manifestation of the Faith, rather it is a regression. The dogmas are less clearly manifested, the Real Presence is less affirmed, the propitiatory Sacrifice is toned down. One passes from the explicit to the implicit, from the clear to the ambiguous. It is the opposite of an homogeneous development which is an advancement in explanation. The New Mass is the opposite of true progress and that is why we do not accept it. That is the reason that we ask the faithful to not assist at the New Mass except for reasons of expediency. And if one assists at the New Mass, at such a time, it is in a passive way. One cannot assist actively at the New Mass because the Mass does not express the Faith and the respect due that which is taking place. This Mass "represents a striking departure from" the dogma on the Holy Mass, defined at the Council of Trent (Session 22), as Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci wrote to Pope Paul VI (The Ottaviani Intervention, Sept., 1969).
THE "LIVING TRADITION" OF THE NEO-MODERNISTS
What about the evolutionary concept of the so-called "living tradition" of the Conciliar Church. What do the modernists mean by this term?- They mean a non-homogeneous evolution, hence, a change. By the term "living tradition," the Conciliar Church does not mean an inviolate transmission of a deposit which one lives and which progresses in a homogeneous fashion through explanation. It is not that at all! What is it then?-It is an evolutive tradition! -evolutive via a twofold process:
1) The assimilation of elements foreign to the revealed deposit. (One is going to add exterior elements to the revealed deposit—extraneous elements.)
2) By regression from the explicit to the ambiguous, from the clear to the equivocal.
Regarding the second point, you have a clear illustration of this regression from the explicit to the ambiguous in the New Mass. In- deed the many mixed doctrinal declarations (catholico-protestant and/ or catholico-orthodox) of recent years produce some ambiguous texts where truth and error blend together under the sign of equivocation.
Let's talk about the first process of the evolution of tradition as understood by modernists, that is, the assimilation of extraneous elements into the revealed deposit. Vatican Council II, in a passage perhaps too little understood, makes a declaration of intention:
Quote:The Council intends above all to judge by this light [of the Faith] the values most highly esteemed by our contemporaries, and to link them again to their divine source (Gaudium et Spes, #11).
What are those values esteemed by our contemporaries? ...Roger Aubert, a priest-precursor of the council, will tell us that they are democracy and freedom. It is a case then of introducing them into the doctrine of the Church, by the re-linking of these values "to their divine source." The Council continues:
Quote:In fact, these values [of our contemporaries], to the extent that they originate in human nature, which is a gift of God, are very good, but the corruption of the human heart often turns them from the requisite order, and that is why they need to be purified.
So, if one "purifies" these values of "liberty," of "democracy," of "the rights of man," etc, they are very good and can be assimilated into Catholic doctrine. This is to say that the new profane "dogmas" of the French Revolution-liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, the rights of man, all that-must be assimilated by Catholic doctrine. One is going to find religious liberty, freedom of conscience, ideological pluralism in the State, and the free concurrence of ideologies (as proclaimed by Pope John Paul II when he spoke at Strasbourg to the European Parliamentl in letting it be understood that Communism is ultimately a chance for the Church, a competition between two rival ideologies, etc.).
This assimilation of dubious elements, completely foreign to rev- elation, is an alienating hodge-podge and thus an execration which profanes the deposit of the Faith and, moreover, has been condemned by the popes. Here is the authorised commentary on Gaudium et Spes (#11), that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger proposes:
Quote:The problem of the 1960s was to acquire the better of the values drawn from two centuries of "liberal" culture. There are in fact some values which, although born outside the Church, can find their place purified and corrected in its vision of the world. This is what has been done.2
Thus, under the pretext that Tradition and divine Revelation should be adaptable to the contemporary mentality, they want to introduce into Catholic doctrine these contemporary ideas, these false principles of the contemporary spirit, which is to say the liberal, revolutionary spirit.
Now that which Vatican II says in Gaudium et Spes (#11), one finds in the works of Card. Congar (de- ceased), and also in those of Roger Aubert, a specialist in Church history .Yves Congar and Roger Aubert were writing in that vein around 1950, 15 years before Gaudium et Spes. They are truly the precursors of the Council. Gaudium et Spes ( #11 ) is an implicit citation of Fr. Congar:
Quote:The progressivists of the 19th century [e.g., Abbe Felicite-Robert de Lamennais, the French liberal hero of the 19th century] too often took, just as they stood, ideas born in another and often hostile world, ideas still laden with a hostile spirit, and tried to introduce them into Christianity-thinking, that is, to "baptise" them Reconciling the Church with a positive modern world [which was ruled upon and condemned in its entirety by the Syllahusin 1864] could not be done by introducing the ideas of the modern world into the Church just as they stood. That required a work in depth by which the permanent principles of Catholicism would take a new development by assimilating, after extracting and purifying as necessary , the valid contributions of that modern world.3
Note that this last sentence will be repeated exactly in Gaudium et Spes (*11)!... It is thus a development of doctrine by assimilation of liberal ideas; an assimilation absolutely inadmissible, absolutely impossible.
Secondly, it is an illusion to wish to "extract and purify" these ideas of the modern world. The popes have condemned them purely and simply. They did not seek to "purify" them. But Yves Congar is mightier than all those popes! ? ...than Pius VI, Pius VII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and St. Pius X who have condemned these errors without appeal.
In 1951, Church historian Fr. Roger Aubert takes up the Congarian thesis of purification and assimilation:
Quote:The collaborators of I’Avenir [the newspaper of De Lamennais] had not taken sufficient care in rethinking the principles which were going to permit them, by means of the necessary discernments and purifications, to assimilate into Christianity the ideas of democracy and liberty, which, born outside "of the Church, had developed in a spirit hostile to it.4
And so you see how modernists use, the tactic of copying one another in order to propagandize their false doctrine. Yet, despite this false credibility, the Church can never rectify and assimilate elements foreign to Her and condemned by Her.
But a disciple of Fr. Congar and of Roger Aubert, Fr. Bernard Sesboue, SJ ., recycles the Congarian thesis and dresses it up as a critique, explicit this time, of the popes of the 19th century:
Quote:The drama of those pontifical declarations is that they had not discerned the element of Christian truth which lay hidden in demands that appeared at that time as attacks against religion and as a revolt against the rights of God. ...Thus the ideal which was signified by "the rights of man" was blocked off for a long time because men did not succeed in recognising there the distant heritage of the Gospel.5
The popes did not lack discernment! They condemned those errors. Those errors were condemned and remain condemned. The popes have declared these pseudo-values incapable of being assimilated into Catholic doctrine.6 To claim that these popes had not known how to make the distinction, to assert that the condemnation of liberal "values" is therefore a mistake, is an act of impiety against these popes; it is an injustice; it is a lie. The popes have done their duty, with the assistance of the Holy Ghost. They have vigorously excluded any attempt at reconciliation between the Church and the principles of the Revolution. They have been genuine witnesses of Tradition, witnesses of a Tradition which lives because it combats.
THE FRUITS OF STERILITY AND OF DEATH
The faithful transmission of Tradition is the necessary condition of its spiritual fecundity, just as sterility, when such is the case, is an infallible sign of infidelity in the transmission of the deposit. It is an illustration of Our Lord's words on the false prophets:
Quote:By their fruits you will know them. Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit (Mt. 7:17- 18).
Thanks be to God, there is good fruit amongst us. Therefore the tree is good and the Tradition authentic. It is fruitful in zeal for one's own conversion by the Spiritual Exercises; for the conversion of one's neighbour by the work of the apostolate. It bears the fruit of families with numerous children, where the flame of the Faith is passed on to a whole new generation. It is fruitful in priestly and religious vocations, etc….
On the contrary, we verify that wherever Tradition has been adulterated, there we find the fruits of sterility and of death. In general, the so-called conciliar Church is languishing and dying of sterility. Parents no longer have children. Catholics no longer get married. There are no longer large families, thus no more vocations, and, as a result, seminaries are closing. Novitiate houses are empty, churches also, and they are being sold. It is the apostasy of the young generation. The young are completely lost. They abandon the Faith which has not been passed on to them. There has been a break in its transmission.
Let us remember this lesson. Tradition is alive as long as the deposit of the Faith is accurately transmitted. On the contrary, it dies of sterility where the transmission has been interrupted. Neo-modemism has killed Tradition because it has not transmitted it. It has falsified it; it has adulterated it, disarming it when faced with error in order to join it to the error. Archbishop Lefebvre had the great grace of simply passing on that which he had received, as was engraved on his tombstone at Econe, according to the words of St. Paul (1 Co. 11:23): Tradidi quod et accepi…. I have transmitted that which myself have received. But to transmit it faithfully, what a struggle he had to carry on! What intrepid resistance to all the pressures exerted on him to make him adopt the New Mass!-to prevent him from continuing the seminary and his work in 1975-76! What a heroic struggle in 1988 to resist the enticement of a booby-trapped consecration and to proceed with "Operation Survival of Tradition," even against the wishes of the pope!
This is the fighting Tradition which assures, by its struggle, the necessary conditions of its integral transmission and of its vitality. It is especially the Holy Mass of all times, which needs neither permission nor indult to remain in force and to make the Christian life fruitful. It is the Mass which constitutes "tradition at its highest degree of power and solemnity," as our teacher Dom Guillon loved to say, following the lead of Dom Gueranger.7 By its permanence and its fruits in the midst of the "antiliturgical heresy,"8 it is the traditional Roman Mass which sums up and focuses the essential struggle and the combative vitality of the authentic tradition of the Church. Pray then to God that He gives us the grace of fidelity to this Mass, and this Mass will assure us of receiving the genuine Tradition and of transmitting it faithfully to a whole new generation.
- Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais
1. Discours au Parlement Europen, II act. 1988 n.8.
2. Interview with Vittorio Messori, "Pourquoi la foi est en crise," in the monthly]e'sus, *II Nov. 1984, p.2.
3. Vraie etfaus-se re'form dans I~glise, Cerf, Paris 1950, pp.345-346.
4. In Tolerance et Communaute Humaine, Rencontr. de la Sarte 'a Huy, Castermann, act. 1951, pp.81-82.
5. "La doctrine de la liberte religieuse est-elle contraire ala tradition de l'Eglise? ." In Docu. mentsEpiscopat, the bulletin of the Secretaria1 of the Bishops' Conference of France, * 15, act. 1986, p15.
6. Cf. Syllabus, the last condemned propositioI1 (*80): "The Roman Pontiff can, and ough1 to, reconcile himself, and come to terms widJ erogress, liberalism and modern civilization: (DZ 1780).
7. The liturgy is "tradition at its highest power" Dom Gueranger says in his Institutiom Liturgiques in the chapter entitled "La Composante Antiliturgique du Protestantisme."
8. Dom Gueranger's expression, ibid
[Emphasis mine.]
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| SiSiNoNo (1996): Who Remembers Fatima? |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 11:18 AM - Forum: Our Lady
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SiSiNoNo - June 1996 No. 16
Who Remembers Fatima?
This past May 13th was the seventy-ninth anniversary of the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. This great event has fallen into complete oblivion due to the inaction of the Catholic hierarchy. A shroud of complete silence covers the only survivor of the three seers of that event, Sr. Maria Lucia of the Immaculate Heart, known as Sr. Lucy. Though cloistered in the Carmel of Coimbra since 1948, she used to receive authorized visits from Church personalities, from cardinals and researchers of the apparitions, as well as letters from all over the world. Since 1954, these visits were limited by Church authorities, to the point of being abolished altogether in 1960. In that year the public revelation of the famous "Third Secret" of Fatima by the Pope was to take place, which never happened. Since 1960 Sr. Lucy has been forbidden to talk about the apparitions, not even by letter, except to cardinals (since they have free access to the cloister) and close relatives and acquaintances if approved by the authorities. No one can approach her in the visiting parlor of the convent. The permits for the visits are issued by Joseph Card. Ratzinger, prefect of the congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, but he has not granted any for many years. The very one who has seen and spoken to Mary and Our Lord is "cut off" beyond the already rigid rules of the cloister.
That the Vatican wants to forget Fatima is shown by the fact that the fundamental scientific and official studies done on the apparitions have yet to be authorized by the authorities in charge. We refer to Fr. Alonso's 14-volume publication (1976) which gathered, classified, and commented on 5,396 Fatima documents, including interviews with Sr. Lucy.1
Does the hierarchy understand the importance of the "Message of Fatima"? We refer especially to the requests for the Communion of Reparation of the five First Saturdays, and to the Consecration of Russia to Her by a public act, made simultaneously by all the bishops of the world.
THE REAL CONSECRATION OF RUSSIA, IGNORED BY PIUS XI AND PIUS XII
None of these requests has ever been fulfilled. The first one has received little notoriety. For the second, if some consecrations did take place, none were valid because none were carried out as specified. The two requests are interconnected. Our Lady of Fatima said on July 13, 1917:
Quote:...I come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the first Saturdays of the month. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. Otherwise she will spread her errors throughout the world provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will suffer martyrdom, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, it will convert and a period of peace will be given to the world.
This consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was asked for the first time in an apparition in the Convent of Tuy, Spain, on June 13, 1929. Pope Pius XI was made aware of it before August, 1931:
Quote:[T]he time has come where God asks the Holy Father to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart, in union with all the Bishops of the world, promising by this act to save her.
The result of this solemn consecration would be the conversion of Russia to the Catholic Faith. Russia will not convert to the Faith without Divine intervention, in which, however, churchmen have been called to co-operate.
But fear of Russia's reaction and that of the world's other superpowers has been stronger than the desire to fulfill the Divine request! Subsequent to Pius XI, who did nothing regarding it in order to safeguard his (failed) attempt to establish an opening with the Soviet Union, there took place consecrations concerning Russia in many forms but not as prescribed by the Blessed Mother. In his radio message of October 31, 1942, to Portugal, Pius XII consecrated the Church and the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, containing a special mention, however very discreet, of Russia. This act, however, was ineffective towards the conversion of Russia because it lacked the necessary prerequisites. The Blessed Mother asked specifically for Russia alone to be consecrated. Besides, it must take place with the all bishops of the world. Neither of these two necessary conditions was met on the occasion of this papal address.
Following this, on July 7, 1952, Pius XII in his Apostolic letter, Sacro Vergente Anno, addressed to the people of Russia, made a consecration of "all the people of Russia" to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that there would come about "a true peace, brotherly harmony and the freedom due to everyone." Note that this was a consecration made in general terms, with no mention of reparation nor of conversion and lacking any solemnity. There was no order given to the bishops of all the world to join explicitly with the Pope in this consecration.
Pope John XXIII, with his policy emphasis on Ostpolitik, did nothing. In the closing session of the Second Vatican Council (Nov. 26, 1964), Pope Paul VI limited himself to the consecration to Mary Immaculate of "all the human family." The attitude of Pope Paul VI to the Fatima message was skeptical aloofness. He went to Portugal on the occasion of the Jubilee of the Apparitions (May 13, 1967) but limited his visit to one day. He never went to the apparition site and did not give Sr. Lucy the private audience she desired.
THE NEGLECT CONTINUES WITH JOHN PAUL II
The present pontiff showed interest in Fatima after having suffered the well-known attempt on his life on May 13, 1981. In a month's time he entrusted the entire "human family" to the protection of the Virgin. Sr. Lucy insisted in interviews with Church officials that the consecrations of Pius XII were not valid. Pope John Paul II proceeded then to make new consecrations in the form of an "Act of Dedication" of the world to God through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This was done in union - purely spiritually - with "all of the pastors of the Church," none of whom, on their part, consecrated anything. This was repeated on October 16, 1983, and on March 25, 1984, in Rome. But these "acts" are to be considered totally void because they defied the conditions. Russia was not even mentioned and the world's bishops were not physically assembled.
Since then, attempts have been made to obtain a consecration as prescribed. The Pope and Church leaders have reacted with annoyance, stating that everything required had been accomplished. The question was closed. In 1989, typewritten statements appeared, attributed to Sr. Lucy, which affirmed that the Act of Dedication of 1984 met the requests of the Madonna. But an error consistently appears in these letters saying that the papal Act of Dedication [by Pope John Paul II] fulfilled Our Lady's request to consecrate "the world." However, Sr. Lucy has always said the Blessed Mother said that "Russia" was to be consecrated exclusively and never "the world." Hence, the authenticity of these statements is dubious. To save credibility, an attempt has been made to establish that the recent upheaval in Eastern Europe and the "Communist crisis" demonstrated that the Act of Dedication of Pope John Paul II was bearing results. Russia was seen as starting to convert. Our Lady, however, did not say she wanted Russia to convert to freedom of conscience or to democracy, but to the Catholic Faith. Instead of expanding, Catholicism in Russia suffers yet another persecution. The facts show that the Pope has not carried out the wishes of the Blessed Mother.
A TERRIBLE WARNING
When heaven commands, man cannot do as he pleases. He must follow the example of Naaman the Syrian, who obeyed to the letter what Eliseus the Prophet had commanded him to do despite what he thought of such a command - to be cured of leprosy by washing seven times in the Jordan River, indeed (IV Kings 5:1-14)!? Nevertheless that is exactly what happened. The above-mentioned popes have not possessed the faith of Naaman. They have not believed that by a mere act of consecration (as Our Lady has requested) there could take place such a great event as the conversion of Russia.
Will the popes continue to ignore Heaven's requests? No. The consecration will be made, but it will be made late. This is what was foretold by Our Lord to the seer, emphasising what the Blessed Mother had said at Fatima, in a vision going back to 1931, at Rianjo, Spain, in the face of the passive attitude of Pius XI:
Quote:[T]ell my ministers, who behave like the king of France by procrastinating in carrying out my wishes, that they will follow him into suffering the same misfortune. It is never too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary....Like the king of France, they will regret it and will do it, even though late...
What is the significance of this reference to the king of France? To what event does Our Lord refer? It is the request made in a vision to St. Margaret Mary Alacocque and brought to the attention of Louis XIV in 1689, to consecrate explicitly France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; but which the "Sun King" did not fulfill. Louis XVI did make an act of consecration, but it was already "too late." He was overthrown and was executed. According to this prophecy, then, the popes could suffer a similar fate, due to their obstinacy. A Pope will, finally, make the consecration forced by a situation of extreme danger for the Church. There hovers over the papacy the prophecy of a terrible punishment because of continual disobedience and lack of faith. But it is a prophecy which can be thwarted by a change of heart on the part of those for whom the message was intended. It is an awesome prophecy because it does not say that it will be "too late," but "late," leaving one to understand that after the consecration, however late it will be, the Church will undergo a rebirth.
THE QUESTION OF THE THIRD SECRET
Continual refusal has persisted to a greater degree in the matter of the revelation of the so-called Third Secret of Fatima. By this is meant the third part of the secret given the three little seers on Friday, July 13, 1917 and made public gradually by Sr. Lucy (with the exception precisely of the Third Secret). The secret forms part of a single unit. It contains "three things": (1) the vision of hell; (2) the proclamation to establish the devotion of the five First Saturdays, and the Consecration of Russia to avoid the chastisement of World War II (prophesied with extreme exactness). In the second part of the Secret, then, Our Lady, after having announced that the First World War was about to end, seemed to connect the beginning of the Second World War to the lack of the consecration of Russia; (3) the third part or "Third Secret," put into writing by Sr. Lucy in January, 1944, and given to the Bishop of Leiria (who did not want to read it) on May 17, 1944 and transmitted to Rome on April 16, 1957. Even Pius XII did not want to read it. By the instructions given by Sr. Lucy, it was to be made public by 1960. The seer has always said that, because of its contents, this part of the secret of Fatima could not be revealed in the same way as the other two. As for its being made public, she has deferred to the judgement of the higher ecclesiastic authorities.
The Third Secret begins almost certainly after the last sentence of the text of the other two messages Sr. Lucy has made known. This sentence is:
Quote:In Portugal the dogma of Faith will always be kept, etc.
The presence of that "etc.," shows that Sr. Lucy has given to understand the sentence in question is not a prophecy which is aimed at Portugal exclusively (as some have attempted to claim) but is the beginning of an announcement concerning the keeping of the dogma of Faith in the Christian nations. In all likelihood, the Third Secret is concerned with the preservation of the deposit of Faith, that is to say, its specific object is Holy Mother the Church. It is very likely that in it are prophesied the grave upheavals the Catholic Church was to be subjected to due to the actions of its hierarchy. The betrayal of the Faith through the fault of its shepherds is surely foreseen in the Third Secret. This is why the present Official Church, of which these shepherds hold the controls of power, have not the least reason to make it known and do everything in their power to make sure that it would fall into oblivion.
It does not deal with the end of the world, as some have tried to insinuate, even though one cannot rule out that it also mentions material punishments. The Third Secret concerns the Church, the painful obfuscation of the Faith in which we find ourselves. This can be deduced also from what Pope John Paul II said to Sr. Lucy in the brief meeting (May 13, 1985) which she confided to Card. Oddi in 1985: That it is not convenient to make the secret known because the world "would not have understood it." What could there possibly be in the secret that would be difficult for the faithful to understand, if not the revelation that the Third Secret prophesies that the present Official Church is a Church apostate from the Catholic truth?
But haven't the faithful sensed this by now? What can they think of a Church that instead of worshipping God practices the worship of man and woman?...that has removed the Most Holy Trinity from Holy Mass?...that proclaims belief in a "One God" valid for all religions, even the most contrary to Christianity?...which no longer mentions original sin, immortality of the soul, particular nor final judgement, nor Paradise?...which allows the belief that hell is empty?...that when it is compelled to talk about traditional truths in the New Catechism, she explains them as being opinions (subjective) of Church Traditions instead of being truths, (objective) which by and for themselves are dogmas which the Church makes her own?...that has established a Novus Ordo Mass of which the Protestants approve?...that often maintains silence about the Divine nature of Christ, because if it proclaimed it, its so-called "dialogue" would end abruptly?...which affirms that by His death on the Cross, Jesus has already saved everybody, even those who do not believe in Him as being the Son of God?...that no longer takes into consideration that the conversion of the world to Christ is a fundamental duty, because to attempt to convert would be a violation of "freedom of conscience" of the followers of other religions?...that has embraced in everything the errors of Protestant theology?…which honors the "martyrs" of the heretics and erases its own from the calendar?...that works tirelessly for the unification of Catholicism with all of the other religions and sects, dissolving itself thereby in the embrace of false ecumenism?...that speaks obsessively about the world's problems, especially political, and never about Eternal Life, and which replaces Catholicism by a deistic humanism, such as that of the Masons?
In what is purported to be the last interview allowed to her (Dec. 26, 1957), Sr. Lucy complained to Fr. Fuentes about the ever-advancing spiritual deafness and loss of faith:
Quote:Father, the Holy Virgin is very sad because no one pays any attention to her message, neither the good nor the bad. The good keep up on their own way, but without concerning themselves about the message. The bad, seeing that God's chastisement has not touched them yet, continue on with their sinful living and do not care about the message. Father, God is about to punish the world and He will do it in a terrible way. The Heavenly chastisement is imminent. [This was on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, which has represented for the Church - the late Father Congar stated - what the states General were for the French Revolution - Ed.] Tell them [the Bishop of Leiria and Pius XII, who refused to read the Third Secret - Ed.] that the Holy Virgin said to my cousins Francisco and Jacinta and to me repeatedly that many nations will disappear from the face of the earth, that Russia will be the means used to accomplish the punishment from Heaven, if we do not succeed in the conversion of this poor Nation, first....Father, the devil is about to begin a decisive battle against the Virgin, and because he is capable of offending principally God and perverting in a short time the greater number of souls, he is doing everything in his power to gain the souls of the persons consecrated to God Father, let us not expect to receive calls to penance from the Holy Father, addressed to the entire world; and don't let us even expect them to come from our Bishops, each in his own diocese, nor from the Religious congregations (or orders). No, Our Lord has already used these means, but the world has ignored them. This is why it is now necessary for each one of us to begin, on his own, the spiritual reform of self. Each one must save not only his own, but all the souls that God has placed in his path.
And the means to bring about the "spiritual reform" of ourselves and of others are the true Catholic means for the salvation of souls, that is, "prayer and sacrifice," "the Holy Rosary," and the "devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary "
- Aemillianus
1. All dates and facts quoted in this article are taken from the fundamental works on Fatima. The three volumes by Br. Michel de la Sainte Trinite, Toute la verite sur Fatima, editions de la Contre Reforme Catholique, Sait Parres-les-Vaudes, 1985, ss., and from the abridged version by Br. François de Marie des Anges, Fatima, joie intime, evenement mondial, by the same publisher, 1991. The text of the secret, which we partially quote, is found on pp.59-63 of the latter book and the interview granted to Fr. Fuentes, quoted pp.283-286.
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| SiSiNoNo: To Apostasy by Way of Obedience |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 11:05 AM - Forum: Vatican II and the Fruits of Modernism
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SiSiNoNo [slightly adapted]- November 1996 No. 18
To Apostasy by Way of Obedience
This article is an answer to a letter to the Editor written to Courrier de Rome, the French translation of Si Si No No.
The letter, written by a bewildered priest follows immediately, preceding the article.
Quote:To the Editor:
Please clarify me on the following. In the editorial of Fr. Giancarlo Politi in the bulletin Mondo e Missione (Feb., 1995), I read on the subject of our four Catholic missionaries slain in Algeria. I quote verbatim:
"They were not in that part of Africa to conduct crusades or to proselytize, an objective that the Church nowhere pursues."
I have read the same thing in the newsletter of Fr.Van Straaten whom I have always admired and even supported in a modest way. I would like to know if the injunction of Jesus to his apostles “Go and teach all nations….” no longer implies proselytizing, and, if it doesn’t, since when. I have always believed that that was indeed the task of the apostles. Has the mission of the priesthood been changed?
Sincerely,
(Signed by Fr. X)
[The editor answers.]
...To help you to understand, let's recall two pontifical texts. The first is taken from the encyclical Pascendi of Pope St. Pius X against Modernism:
Quote:That we should act without delay in this matter [to condemn Modernism] is made imperative especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; but what is to be most dreaded and deplored, in her very bosom,…We allude...to many who belong...to the priesthood itself, who, animated by a false zeal for the Church, lacking the solid safeguards of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, put themselves forward as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the Person of the Divine Redeemer, Whom, with sacrilegious audacity, they degrade to the condition of a simple and ordinary man…Enemies of the Church they certainly are, nor indeed would he be wrong in regarding them as the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For, as We have said, they put into operation their designs for her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate. Moreover, they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers. And once having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to diffuse poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth which they leave untouched, none that they do not strive to corrupt [from Daughters of St. Paul edition. - Ed.].
That was in 1907. Forty years later, Pius XII in his encyclical Humani Generis against neo-Modernism or the "New Theology" wrote:
Quote:it is apparent, however, that some today, as in apostolic times, desirous of novelty, and fearing to be considered ignorant of recent scientific findings, try to withdraw themselves from the sacred Teaching Authority and are accordingly in danger of gradually departing from revealed truth and of drawing others along with them into error.
There is another danger all the more serious because it is concealed beneath the mask of virtue. There are many who, deploring disagreement among men and intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire to do away with the barrier that divides good and honest men. These advocate an eirenism by which they set aside questions dividing men and aim not only at joining forces to repel the attacks of atheism, but also at reconciling things opposed to one another in the field of dogma…Through their enthusiasm for an imprudenteirenism they consider as an obstacle to fraternal union things founded on the laws and principles given by Christ and on institutions founded by Him, or which are the defense and support of the integrity of the Faith, the removal of which would bring about the union of all but only to their destruction. [from the Daughters of St. Paul edition - Ed.]
Pius XII tells us these ruinous opinions were then being disseminated "among the secular and regular clergy, in seminaries and religious institutions."
That was in 1950. Today those Churchmen, deformed by neo-Modernism in the seminaries and religious institutions and having stage-managed the last Council, are in power in the Church and occupy the key positions in the Catholic hierarchy, putting to work their "counsels of destruction" to unify the human race "in a common ruin." "Blind and leaders of the blind...," says St. Pius X:
Quote:...puffed up with the proud name of science, they have reached that pitch of folly at which they pervert the eternal concept of truth and the true meaning of religion; in introducing a new system in which "they are seen to be under the sway of a blind and unchecked passion for novelty, thinking not at all of finding some solid foundation of truth, but despising the holy and apostolic traditions, they embrace other and vain, futile, uncertain doctrines, unapproved by the Church, on which, in the height of their vanity , they think they can base and maintain truth itself” (Pascendi).
Amidst this Modernism, resistance by a Catholic, and most particularly by a priest, is a duty. It's a matter of choosing between aberrant and erroneous human judgments and the infallible judgment of the Church, which for 2000 years has taught that ... :
Quote:...nothing which pertains to the perennial and certain doctrine of the Church and which, in any way whatsoever, direct or indirect, relates to the truths of faith or morals, nothing of the constitution of the Church, nothing of that which has been fixed by Christ and, through His mandate, by the holy Apostles is subject to change (G .Siri, La Giovinezza della Chiesa, ed. Giardini, Pisa, 1983).
We repeat to these destructive clerics the words of St. Edmund Campion, martyr of the Anglican schism:
Quote:"In condemning us, you condemn the Church of all times. For what is there that She believed and taught that we also do not believe?"
The current ordeal is one of extreme severity because "the masterstroke of Satan," as Archbishop Lefebvre has called it, has placed the authority of popes at the service of neo-Modernism, and therefore the deception is much more grave and widespread. Nevertheless, the problem is not insurmountable. It is sufficient to recall that in the conflict between Faith and authority the Faith will prevail because authority is at the service of the Faith and not the contrary.
For we can do nothing against the truth, but only for the truth (II Cor. 13:8).
Let us take the case of Fr . Werenfried van Straaten in the article "A Fruit of the Heretical Post-Conciliar Ecclesiology: the New Charity of Fr. Van Straaten" (Courrier de Rome, March, 1995). To justify his total reversal of direction, he echoes Pope John Paul II:
Quote:Rightly the Pope has forbidden all forms of proselytism. In that case we must help in the formation of Orthodox priests in order that they would be capable of instructing those that they are going to baptize (L 'echo de l'amour, Oct. 1994).
This premise must be proven and to prove it one must prove that the Vicar is superior to the Invisible Head of the Church, who has commanded that which John Paul II forbids! Now, in the conflict between an inferior authority (a pope) and a superior authority (Our Lord Jesus Christ), obedience is owed to the superior authority. It is Catholic moral theology which teaches this. In such a case the subject does not disobey the Superior, but he obeys an authority higher than the Superior: "I owe you my love," St. Bruno writes to Pope Pascal II, "but I owe a greater love to the One who has created both you and me" (P.L. 163 col.463). But Leo XIII writes in two encyclicals:
Quote:[w]hen...an order of authority is contrary to reason, to the eternal law, to the authority of God, then we wish to make it known, it is legitimate to disobey in order to obey God (Libertas Praestantissimum, 1888).
And it would not be just to accuse those who act in this manner of disregarding the duty of submission to authority; for the princes whose wills are in opposition to the will and the laws of God, thereby over-step the limits of their power. (Diuturnum Illud).
Obedience to the pope, the prince of the Church, does not evade the moral law: the duty to obey him always supposes that his order would be both licit and lawful, that is to say that it would not be in opposition to reason, to the eternal law and to the divine order. On the other hand, the principle according to which one must "obey God rather than men" applies to the pope just as to any other authority on earth. On this point Catholic theologians, although differing widely on the question of an "heretical pope," are in perfect agreement.
Unlike yesteryear, it is necessary today to have these principles clearly in mind so one does not risk justifying what is contrary to the Gospel (as Fr. Van Straaten does) solely because the pope said it, even though it means abandoning the Faith of the Universal Church to follow the private thought of a man simply because he sits on the chair of Peter while Peter is not speaking by his mouth. St. Thomas teaches (Summa Theologica II, II, Q.2a) that the subjects also sin against the Faith when they follow the "authorities in the Faith" [bishops and popes], even if at the same time they warn these authorities that they are falling away from the Faith of the Universal Church. In this case, subjects are released from their normal ties of subjection and obedience and they have the duty and the right to defend their own Faith.
Quote:When the shepherd changes into a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself. Normally, without doubt, doctrine descends from the bishops to the faithful, and those who are subjects, in the order of the faith, are not to judge their superiors. But in the treasure of revelation there are some essential points which every Christian, by the very fact of his title as Christian, is bound to know and defend (The Liturgical Year, Vol. IV, Dom Guéranger; Feast of St. Cyril of Alexandria).
"BUT THE POPE IS INFALLIBLE"
Some will object, "But the pope is infallible." Be careful! First of all, infallibility has not been promised in order to add "novelties" to the "deposit of the faith," but solely to preserve, explain and defend the truths already revealed:
Quote:The Holy Spirit has been promised to the successors of Peter not that they may make known, under His revelation, a new doctrine, but in order that, with His assistance, they may piously preserve and faithfully set forth the revelation transmitted by the Apostles, that is to say the deposit of the faith. (Vatican I, Constitution De Ecclesia Christi, D.1836).
Besides, the pope can express himself at four very distinct levels:
1. at the level of the extraordinary infallible Magisterium (ex cathedra).
2. at the level of the ordinary infallible Magisterium.
3. at the level of the ordinary non-infallible Magisterium.
4. at the level of the theologian or of the private person. (This is the case in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II's recent book-interview.)
We immediately exclude from infallibility this last level, because it is evident that infallibility has not been promised to the pope as a private person.
The extraordinary infallible magisterium (ex cathedra) applies when the pope "fulfilling his charge as pastor and teacher of all Christians;...defines, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, that a doctrine on faith or morals must be held by the entire Church" (Pastor Aeternus, see also Vatican I, D.1839, etc.).
The ordinary infallible magisterium applies when the truth being taught is proposed by the pope...:
Quote:...as having been previously defined, or as having always been believed or acknowledged in the Church, or as being attested to by the unanimous and continuing consent of theologians as Catholic truth (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, t. VIII col. 1705).
Thus, for example, Leo XIII is infallible when, in the encyclical Providentissimus, he teaches as always believed by the Church the absolute absence of errors in the faithfully preserved texts of Sacred Scripture.
It is only at these two primary levels that the teaching the pope exposes is guaranteed to expose faithfully that which is truly contained in divine Revelation. There is, on the other hand, the ordinary magisterium non-infallible, simply authenticated, wherein...:
Quote:...a teaching is praised, recommended, or simply affirmed [by the pope] without any indication of its belonging to revelation or to the constant and universal Catholic tradition and without any indication of strict obligation imposed by the faith or by the submission due to the sovereign authority of the Roman Pontiff (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, to VII col. 1713).
Normally one also owes obedience, even if it is neither unconditional nor absolute, to the non-infallible and merely authentic magisterium of the pope. However, one does not owe him any obedience whatsoever when, opposed to a non-infallible judgment of the Church or even of the constant and universal faith of the Church. In this case, resistance is not only justified, it is a duty. It is born not of a spirit of error nor of rebellion, but rather of charity.
Quote:
Fr. Van Straaten’s project to finance the Russian Orthodox Church did not go down well with some benefactors of the association he founded, “Aid to the Suffering Church.”… “They sustain that it would be wrong to finance a ‘schismatic’ Church, separated from Rome and a slave to the former Communist regime.”… “The former Soviet Union is a mission field and the western Church is not up to evangelizing this vast territory,” he said. “Only the Orthodox Church can do that and we should help it with all the means - financial and non - we have at our disposal.” He is certain that the Pope will approve his initiative. “John Paul II has said that reconciliation with the Orthodox Church is the greatest task entrusted to us at the end of this second millennium. He has been informed of this initiative of ours to guarantee an annual wage of $1,000 to each of the 6,000 priests of the Russian Church and he has urged us to press on,” said Fr. Van Straaten. “They used to call me the last Cold War general,” he said. “I have always had many enemies some of whom are priests with progressive ideas. Now they are saying: look at that old conservative….what a surprise he has turned out to be.” - (30 Days, No.12, 1994)
The gravity of the current crisis is precisely owing to the lack of security in the faithful that, in normal times, was offered to them by the ordinary non-infallible magisterium of the popes. It is true, however, that, at this level, Our Lord Jesus Christ did not promise any infallibility to Peter (Mt. 16: 18; Lk. 22:22) or to his successors “according to the constant interpretation of theologians," but only concerning his ex cathedra teaching (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, t. VII col. 1717). The assurance which in normal times is derived from the non-infallible magisterium of the pope is only linked to the care that he takes not to deviate from the doctrine transmitted by the Apostles. Today this care has disappeared because that "unchecked passion for novelty" of which St. Pius X spoke also corrupts the mentality of the one who sits on the throne of Peter and who so wrongfully affirmed it at the beginning of his pontificate:
Quote:If the Lord has called me "with such thoughts...with such sentiments, it is in order that they ...find a resonance in my new and universal ministry (The Angelus, March, 1979).
This is the same as saying, "It is no longer the pope who must conform himself to Tradition, but Tradition which must conform itself to the mentality of the pope."
One risks tremendous aberrations if these sad realities are ignored and one conducts himself as if all goes well without hindrance in the current ecclesiastical situation. From his unproven and erroneous premise - "Rightly the Pope has forbidden all forms of proselytism" - Fr. Van Straaten deduces that Catholics must subsidize the proselytism of the Orthodox churches, in aiding "the formation of Orthodox priests in order that they would be capable of instructing those that they are going to baptize." It is no indifferent matter to God whether souls should be baptized in His one and only Catholic Church or in schism and heresy!
The Church has always condemned the subsidizing of non-Catholics as a grave sin against truth and charity (see Encyclopedia Cattolica, under the word Cooperation, col. 498). Fr. Van Straaten has forgotten his dogmatic and moral theology. He no longer seems to have the Faith which tells us the pope is there to keep and promote the Catholic Faith and not to demolish it (II Cor. 10:8). All this because of a false concept of obedience improperly raised to the level of a theological virtue. Yet, it is a moral virtue in which one can sin, yes, by default, but also by excess, in obeying "in matters contrary to a law or to a superior precept." This constitutes an "improper obedience" or, more accurately, "servility" (Roberti-Palazzini, Dizionario di teologia morale, ed. Studium).
As we have written:
Quote:In practice, no one has ever explicitly imposed upon a Catholic in the name of obedience a denial of his very Faith…But they have and do impose on him a new "course for the Church" which, in implying the negation of everything that the Church has taught and done on the basis of the doctrinal principles up until Vatican Council II, leads straight to apostasy. (Courrier de Rome, March, 1990, "The Duty to Resist!").
In other words, to apostasy by way of "obedience," which is by nature a denial of reason.
- Hirpinus
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| May 30th - St. Joan of Arc |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 08:11 AM - Forum: May
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May 30th - St Joan of Arc, Virgin
While the angelic hosts acclaim the Incarnate Word as he tak possession of his eternal throne, a virgin at the head of the armies of earth re-echoes the praises of heaven She was a child of the countryside, pious, gentle, and utterly ignorant, especially of the art of war, but Michael the soldier of God trained her with the aid of the Virgin Martyrs Catherine and Margaret, and suddenly like a challenge thrown to modern naturalism in the broad daylight of history, she made her appearance, at the age of seventeen as an incomparable warrior. Her victories, her personal influence and strategical genius equal those of the most famous captains of any times. But she surpasses them all in heroism , in her childlike simplicity, virginal purity, and faith in her Lord Jesus, the Son of St. Mary, for whom she died—even greater at the stake at Rouen than in the days of her triumph.” De par le Roi du ciel” (By order of the King of Heaven) was the motto on her banner. By order of The King of Heaven, her sovereign liege, in whose royal service she is day by day, she calls upon cities to return to their lawful obedience. By the order of the King of Heaven she intimates to the English that she has been sent to drive them out of France. ‘For,’ as she declared to the Dauphin’s representative, ‘the kingdom does not appertain to the Dauphin, but to my Lord. But it is the will of my Lord that the Dauphin should be made king and should hold the kingdom in commendam.’ ‘And who is thy Lord?’ asked Baudricourt. ‘My Lord is the King of heaven.’
To Charles she said: “I am called Joan the Maid, and through me does the King of heaven give you to understand that you shall be viceregent of the king of heaven who is king of France.” To the Duke of Burgundy, who was then in alliance with the enemy, she said: “I tell you by order of the King of heaven, that all who make war on the said holy kingdom, make war on the king Jesus, the King of heaven and of all the earth.”
Joan came into the world on the feast of the glorious Epiphany, which manifested the divine Child to the world as the Lord of lords. It was during these days of his Ascension, when he takes his seat at the right hand of his Father, that she began her campaigns in 1428, achieved her greatest triumph in 1429, and closed her warlike career in 1430.
She died May 30, 1431, the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi ― a worthy consummation for a life like hers, a supreme consecration for her cause. as her soul rose from the flames to join Michael and his hosts and the Virgin Martyrs at the court of the immortal King of Ages, she left the church on earth prostrate before Christ, the King, the Ruler of the Nations, who as it were, holds his royal assizes where he is glorified in the mystery of faith.
![[Image: Joan-of-Arc-Coronation-Charles-VII-Reims...1024&ssl=1]](https://i2.wp.com/sensusfidelium.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Joan-of-Arc-Coronation-Charles-VII-Reims-1854.jpg?resize=745%2C1024&ssl=1)
The following account of her life is given by the Church:
Quote:Joan of Arc was born in the town of Domrémy (which was once in the diocese of Toul, but belongs now to that of Saint Dié) in the year of our Lord 1412. Her parents were noted for their virtue and piety. When she was but thirteen years old, and knew nothing but house work, field work, and the first elements of religion, she learnt that God had chosen her to deliver France from her enemies and restore the kingdom to its former independence. She enjoyed familiar intercourse with the Archangel Michael and SS Catherine and Margaret, who during five years, instructed her how to fulfill her mission. Then, desiring to obey the command of God, she addressed herself to the governor of Vaucouleurs, who, after having several times repulsed her, at length gave her and escort to take her to King Charles.
Following in all things the divine commands, she overcame all the difficulties of the long journey, and arrived at Chinon in Touraine, where she furnished the king with proofs that her mission was from God. She proceeded to Orleans, and in a few days inflicted three defeats on the enemy, relieved the town, and raised her banner aloft in triumph. Then, after other military successes in which the assistance of God was clearly manifested, she brought Charles to Rheims, where he was solemnly crowned king. She would not rest even then, but, having learnt from her heavenly voices that God would permit her to fall into the hands of the enemy she went bravely on to meet what was to befall her.
She was taken prisoner at Compiègne, sold to the English, and sent to Rouen for trial. She had to defend herself against many accusations, but her purity was never impugned. She suffered all things with patience for the sake of Lord Jesus Christ. The wicked judges who tried this gentle and innocent virgin, condemned her to be burnt. So, fortified by the holy Eucharist, which she had long desired, and her eyes fixed upon the Cross while she constantly murmured the name of Jesus, she took her flight to heaven on May 30, in the nineteenth year of her age. The holy Roman Church which she had always loved, and to which she had often appealed, undertook, under Pope Calixtus III, her rehabilitation, and towards the end of the nineteenth century Leo XIII gave permissions for the introduction of the cause of beatification. Finally, after diligent examination and approbation of fresh miracles Pius X inscribed her among the Blessed and permitted the diocese of France to keep the feast with a special Office and Mass.
O King of Glory, who dost today ascend above the heights of heaven, thou didst drink of the torrent in the way and therefore dost thou now lift up thy head. Thy ancestor David prophesied it, thine Apostle proclaimed it. Thou didst humble thyself unto death, even the death of the cross, and therefore has God the Father exalted thee on this day, therefore does every knee bow at thy name, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. It was becoming that the law of the Head should be the law also of all those who were to be called to share his glory. Before all ages, in the great Counsel of which, as the Church sings on Christmas Day, thou wert the Angel, the conditions of definitive victory and eternal success were thus laid down.
The Gospel tells us that the hour would come fro the disciples of Jesus to give testimony and that men would think to serve God by putting them to death. Joan, like Jesus, was questioned, judged and condemned with all the legal forms and imposing ceremonial of orthodoxy. But, O ye enemies of Joan and of France, ye thought yourselves her executioners, and ye were offering her in sacrifice. France was saved, for God accepted the virginal victim. Her passing mission became a permanent patronage, and the deliverer of her country on earth has become her immortal protectress in heaven.
![[Image: 8-.jpeg?w=694&ssl=1]](https://i0.wp.com/sensusfidelium.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/8-.jpeg?w=694&ssl=1) |
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| May 30th - Sts. Felix and Ferdinand |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 07:58 AM - Forum: May
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May 30 – St Felix I, Pope and Martyr
The holy Popes of the primitive ages of the Church abound during these last days of our Paschal Season. Today, we have Felix the First, a Martyr of the persecution under Aurelian, in the 3rd Century. His Acts have been lost, with the exception of this one detail; that he proclaimed the dogma of the Incarnation, with admirable precision, in a Letter addressed to the Church of Alexandria—a passage of which was read, with much applause, at the two Œcumenical Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.
We also learn from a law he passed for those troubled times of the Church, that this holy Pontiff was zealous in procuring for the Martyrs the honor that is due to them. He decreed that the Holy Sacrifice should be offered up on their tombs. The Church has kept up a remnant of this law, by requiring that all Altars, whether fixed or portable, must have, amongst the Relics that are placed in them, a portion of some belonging to the Martyrs. We shall have to speak of this custom in a future volume.
The Liturgy gives us this short notice regarding the holy Pontiff.
Quote:Felix, a Roman by birth, and son of Constantius, governed the Church during the reign of the emperor Aurelian. He decreed that the Mass should be celebrated upon the shrines and tombs of the Martyrs. He held two ordinations in the month of December, and made nine Priests, five Deacons, and five Bishops for divers places. He was crowned with Martyrdom, and was buried on the Aurelian Way, in a Basilica which he himself had built and dedicated. He reigned two years, four months, and twenty-nine days.
Thou, O holy Pontiff, didst imitate thy Divine Master in his Death, for thou gavest thy life for thy sheep. Like him, too, thou art to rise from thy tomb, and thy happy soul shall be reunited to its body, which suffered death in testimony of the truth thou proclaimedst at Rome. Jesus is the first-born of the dead; thou followedst him in his Passion, thou shalt follow him in his Resurrection. Thy body was laid in those venerable vaults, which the piety of early Christians honored with the appellation of Cemeteries—a word which signifies a place wherein to sleep. Thou, O Felix, wilt awaken on that great day, whereon the Pasch is to receive its last and perfect fulfillment:—pray that we also may then share with thee in that happy Resurrection. Obtain for us that we may be faithful to the graces received in this year’s Easter; and prepare us for the visit of the Holy Ghost, who is soon to descend upon us, that he may give stability to the work that has been achieved in our souls by our merciful Savior.
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| 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia: The Blessed Trinity |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 07:28 AM - Forum: Church Doctrine & Teaching
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The Blessed Trinity
This article is divided as follows:
- Dogma of the Trinity
- Proof of the doctrine from Scripture
- Proof of the doctrine from Tradition
- The Trinity as a mystery
- The doctrine as interpreted in Greek theology
- The doctrine as interpreted in Latin theology
The dogma of the Trinity
The Trinity is the term employed to signify the central doctrine of the Christian religion — the truth that in the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another.
Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: "the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God." In this Trinity of Persons the Son is begotten of the Father by an eternal generation, and the Holy Spirit proceeds by an eternal procession from the Father and the Son. Yet, notwithstanding this difference as to origin, the Persons are co-eternal and co-equal: all alike are uncreated and omnipotent. This, the Church teaches, is the revelation regarding God's nature which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came upon earth to deliver to the world: and which she proposes to man as the foundation of her whole dogmatic system.
In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word trias (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A.D. 180. He speaks of "the Trinity of God [the Father], His Word and His Wisdom (To Autolycus II.15). The term may, of course, have been in use before his time. Afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian (On Pudicity 21). In the next century the word is in general use. It is found in many passages of Origen ("In Ps. xvii", 15). The first creed in which it appears is that of Origen's pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus. In his Ekthesis tes pisteos composed between 260 and 270, he writes:
Quote:There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever (P.G., X, 986).
It is manifest that a dogma so mysterious presupposes a Divine revelation. When the fact of revelation, understood in its full sense as the speech of God to man, is no longer admitted, the rejection of the doctrine follows as a necessary consequence. For this reason it has no place in the Liberal Protestantism of today. The writers of this school contend that the doctrine of the Trinity, as professed by the Church, is not contained in the New Testament, but that it was first formulated in the second century and received final approbation in the fourth, as the result of the Arian and Macedonian controversies. In view of this assertion it is necessary to consider in some detail the evidence afforded by Holy Scripture. Attempts have been made recently to apply the more extreme theories of comparative religion to the doctrine of the Trinity, and to account for it by an imaginary law of nature compelling men to group the objects of their worship in threes. It seems needless to give more than a reference to these extravagant views, which serious thinkers of every school reject as destitute of foundation.
Proof of doctrine from Scripture
New Testament
The evidence from the Gospels culminates in the baptismal commission of Matthew 28:20. It is manifest from the narratives of the Evangelists that Christ only made the great truth known to the Twelve step by step.
First He taught them to recognize in Himself the Eternal Son of God. When His ministry was drawing to a close, He promised that the Father would send another Divine Person, the Holy Spirit, in His place. Finally after His resurrection, He revealed the doctrine in explicit terms, bidding them "go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 28:18). The force of this passage is decisive. That "the Father" and "the Son" are distinct Persons follows from the terms themselves, which are mutually exclusive. The mention of the Holy Spirit in the same series, the names being connected one with the other by the conjunctions "and . . . and" is evidence that we have here a Third Person co-ordinate with the Father and the Son, and excludes altogether the supposition that the Apostles understood the Holy Spirit not as a distinct Person, but as God viewed in His action on creatures.
The phrase "in the name" (eis to onoma) affirms alike the Godhead of the Persons and their unity of nature. Among the Jews and in the Apostolic Church the Divine name was representative of God. He who had a right to use it was invested with vast authority: for he wielded the supernatural powers of Him whose name he employed. It is incredible that the phrase "in the name" should be here employed, were not all the Persons mentioned equally Divine. Moreover, the use of the singular, "name," and not the plural, shows that these Three Persons are that One Omnipotent God in whom the Apostles believed. Indeed the unity of God is so fundamental a tenet alike of the Hebrew and of the Christian religion, and is affirmed in such countless passages of the Old and New Testaments, that any explanation inconsistent with this doctrine would be altogether inadmissible.
The supernatural appearance at the baptism of Christ is often cited as an explicit revelation of Trinitarian doctrine, given at the very commencement of the Ministry. This, it seems to us, is a mistake. The Evangelists, it is true, see in it a manifestation of the Three Divine Persons. Yet, apart from Christ's subsequent teaching, the dogmatic meaning of the scene would hardly have been understood. Moreover, the Gospel narratives appear to signify that none but Christ and the Baptist were privileged to see the Mystic Dove, and hear the words attesting the Divine sonship of the Messias.
Besides these passages there are many others in the Gospels which refer to one or other of the Three Persons in particular and clearly express the separate personality and Divinity of each. In regard to the First Person it will not be necessary to give special citations: those which declare that Jesus Christ is God the Son, affirm thereby also the separate personality of the Father. The Divinity of Christ is amply attested not merely by St. John, but by the Synoptists. As this point is treated elsewhere, it will be sufficient here to enumerate a few of the more important messages from the Synoptists, in which Christ bears witness to His Divine Nature.
- He declares that He will come to be the judge of all men (Matthew 25:31). In Jewish theology the judgment of the world was a distinctively Divine, and not a Messianic, prerogative.
- In the parable of the wicked husbandmen, He describes Himself as the son of the householder, while the Prophets, one and all, are represented as the servants (Matthew 21:33 sqq.).
- He is the Lord of Angels, who execute His command (Matthew 24:31).
- He approves the confession of Peter when he recognizes Him, not as Messias — a step long since taken by all the Apostles — but explicitly as the Son of God: and He declares the knowledge due to a special revelation from the Father (Matthew 16:16-17).
- Finally, before Caiphas He not merely declares Himself to be the Messias, but in reply to a second and distinct question affirms His claim to be the Son of God. He is instantly declared by the high priest to be guilty of blasphemy, an offense which could not have been attached to the claim to be simply the Messias (Luke 22:66-71).
St. John's testimony is yet more explicit than that of the Synoptists. He expressly asserts that the very purpose of his Gospel is to establish the Divinity of Jesus Christ (John 20:31). In the prologue he identifies Him with the Word, the only-begotten of the Father, Who from all eternity exists with God, Who is God (John 1:1-18). The immanence of the Son in the Father and of the Father in the Son is declared in Christ's words to St. Philip: "Do you not believe, that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me?" (14:10), and in other passages no less explicit (14:7; 16:15; 17:21). The oneness of Their power and Their action is affirmed: "Whatever he [the Father] does, the Son also does in like manner" (5:19, cf. 10:38); and to the Son no less than to the Father belongs the Divine attribute of conferring life on whom He will (5:21). In 10:29, Christ expressly teaches His unity of essence with the Father: "That which my Father hath given me, is greater than all . . . I and the Father are one." The words, "That which my Father hath given me," can, having regard to the context, have no other meaning than the Divine Name, possessed in its fullness by the Son as by the Father.
Rationalist critics lay great stress upon the text: "The Father is greater than I" (14:28). They argue that this suffices to establish that the author of the Gospel held subordinationist views, and they expound in this sense certain texts in which the Son declares His dependence on the Father (5:19; 8:28). In point of fact the doctrine of the Incarnation involves that, in regard of His Human Nature, the Son should be less than the Father. No argument against Catholic doctrine can, therefore, be drawn from this text. So too, the passages referring to the dependence of the Son upon the Father do but express what is essential to Trinitarian dogma, namely, that the Father is the supreme source from Whom the Divine Nature and perfections flow to the Son. (On the essential difference between St. John's doctrine as to the Person of Christ and the Logos doctrine of the Alexandrine Philo, to which many Rationalists have attempted to trace it, see LOGOS.)
In regard to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the passages which can be cited from the Synoptists as attesting His distinct personality are few. The words of Gabriel (Luke 1:35), having regard to the use of the term, "the Spirit," in the Old Testament, to signify God as operative in His creatures, can hardly be said to contain a definite revelation of the doctrine. For the same reason it is dubious whether Christ's warning to the Pharisees as regards blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31) can be brought forward as proof. But in Luke 12:12, "The Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what you must say" (Matthew 10:20, and Luke 24:49), His personality is clearly implied. These passages, taken in connection with Matthew 28:19, postulate the existence of such teaching as we find in the discourses in the Cenacle reported by St. John (14, 15, 16). We have in these chapters the necessary preparation for the baptismal commission. In them the Apostles are instructed not only as the personality of the Spirit, but as to His office towards the Church. His work is to teach whatsoever He shall hear (16:13) to bring back their minds the teaching of Christ (14:26), to convince the world of sin (16:8). It is evident that, were the Spirit not a Person, Christ could not have spoken of His presence with the Apostles as comparable to His own presence with them (14:16). Again, were He not a Divine Person it could not have been expedient for the Apostles that Christ should leave them, and the Paraclete take His place (16:7). Moreover, notwithstanding the neuter form of the word (pneuma), the pronoun used in His regard is the masculine ekeinos. The distinction of the Holy Spirit from the Father and from the Son is involved in the express statements that He proceeds from the Father and is sent by the Son (15:26; cf. 14:16, 14:26). Nevertheless, He is one with Them: His presence with the Disciples is at the same time the presence of the Son (14:17-18), while the presence of the Son is the presence of the Father (14:23).
In the remaining New Testament writings numerous passages attest how clear and definite was the belief of the Apostolic Church in the three Divine Persons. In certain texts the coordination of Father, Son, and Spirit leaves no possible doubt as to the meaning of the writer. Thus in 2 Corinthians 13:13, St. Paul writes: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the charity of God, and the communication of the Holy Ghost be with you all." Here the construction shows that the Apostle is speaking of three distinct Persons. Moreover, since the names God and Holy Ghost are alike Divine names, it follows that Jesus Christ is also regarded as a Divine Person. So also, in 1 Corinthians 12:4-11: "There are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit; and there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord: and there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all [of them] in all [persons]." (Cf. also Ephesians 4:4-6; 1 Peter 1:2-3)
But apart from passages such as these, where there is express mention of the Three Persons, the teaching of the New Testament regarding Christ and the Holy Spirit is free from all ambiguity. In regard to Christ, the Apostles employ modes of speech which, to men brought up in the Hebrew faith, necessarily signified belief in His Divinity. Such, for instance, is the use of the Doxology in reference to Him. The Doxology, "To Him be glory for ever and ever" (cf. 1 Chronicles 16:38; 29:11; Psalm 103:31; 28:2), is an expression of praise offered to God alone. In the New Testament we find it addressed not alone to God the Father, but to Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 4:18; 2 Peter 3:18; Revelation 1:6; Hebrews 13:20-21), and to God the Father and Christ in conjunction (Revelations 5:13, 7:10).
Not less convincing is the use of the title Lord (Kyrios). This term represents the Hebrew Adonai, just as God (Theos) represents Elohim. The two are equally Divine names (cf. 1 Corinthians 8:4). In the Apostolic writings Theos may almost be said to be treated as a proper name of God the Father, and Kyrios of the Son (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 12:5-6); in only a few passages do we find Kyrios used of the Father (1 Corinthians 3:5; 7:17) or Theos of Christ. The Apostles from time to time apply to Christ passages of the Old Testament in which Kyrios is used, for example, 1 Corinthians 10:9 (Numbers 21:7), Hebrews 1:10-12 (Psalm 101:26-28); and they use such expressions as "the fear of the Lord" (Acts 9:31; 2 Corinthians 5:11; Ephesians 5:21), "call upon the name of the Lord," indifferently of God the Father and of Christ (Acts 2:21; 9:14; Romans 10:13). The profession that "Jesus is the Lord" (Kyrion Iesoun, Romans 10:9; Kyrios Iesous, 1 Corinthians 12:3) is the acknowledgment of Jesus as Jahweh. The texts in which St. Paul affirms that in Christ dwells the plenitude of the Godhead (Colossians 2:9), that before His Incarnation He possessed the essential nature of God (Philippians 2:6), that He "is over all things, God blessed for ever" (Romans 9:5) tell us nothing that is not implied in many other passages of his Epistles.
The doctrine as to the Holy Spirit is equally clear. That His distinct personality was fully recognized is shown by many passages. Thus He reveals His commands to the Church's ministers: "As they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Ghost said to them: Separate me Saul and Barnabas . . ." (Acts 13:2). He directs the missionary journey of the Apostles: "They attempted to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not" (Acts 16:7; cf. Acts 5:3; 15:28; Romans 15:30). Divine attributes are affirmed of Him.
- He possesses omniscience and reveals to the Church mysteries known only to God (1 Corinthians 2:10);
- it is He who distributes charismata (1 Corinthians 12:11);
- He is the giver of supernatural life (2 Corinthians 3:8);
- He dwells in the Church and in the souls of individual men, as in His temple (Romans 8:9-11; 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19).
- The work of justification and sanctification is attributed to Him (1 Corinthians 6:11; Romans 15:16), just as in other passages the same operations are attributed to Christ (1 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 2:17).
To sum up: the various elements of the Trinitarian doctrine are all expressly taught in the New Testament. The Divinity of the Three Persons is asserted or implied in passages too numerous to count. The unity of essence is not merely postulated by the strict monotheism of men nurtured in the religion of Israel, to whom "subordinate deities" would have been unthinkable; but it is, as we have seen, involved in the baptismal commission of Matthew 28:19, and, in regard to the Father and the Son, expressly asserted in John 10:38. That the Persons are co-eternal and coequal is a mere corollary from this. In regard to the Divine processions, the doctrine of the first procession is contained in the very terms Father and Son: the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son is taught in the discourse of the Lord reported by St. John (14-17).
Old Testament
The early Fathers were persuaded that indications of the doctrine of the Trinity must exist in the Old Testament and they found such indications in not a few passages. Many of them not merely believed that the Prophets had testified of it, they held that it had been made known even to the Patriarchs. They regarded it as certain that the Divine messenger of Genesis 16:7, 16:18, 21:17, 31:11; Exodus 3:2, was God the Son; for reasons to be mentioned below (III. B.) they considered it evident that God the Father could not have thus manifested Himself (cf. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 60; Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.7-11; Tertullian, Against Praxeas 15-16; Theophilus, To Autolycus II.22; Novatian, On the Trinity 18, 25, etc.). They held that, when the inspired writers speak of "the Spirit of the Lord", the reference was to the Third Person of the Trinity; and one or two (Irenaeus, Against Heresies II.30.9; Theophilus, To Autolycus II.15; Hippolytus, Against Noetus 10) interpret the hypostatic Wisdom of the Sapiential books, not, with St. Paul, of the Son (Hebrews 1:3; cf. Wisdom 7:25-26), but of the Holy Spirit. But in others of the Fathers is found what would appear to be the sounder view, that no distinct intimation of the doctrine was given under the Old Covenant. (Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Fifth Theological Oration 31; Epiphanius, "Ancor." 73, "Haer.", 74; Basil, Against Eunomius II.22; Cyril of Alexandria, "In Joan.", xii, 20.)
Some of these, however, admitted that a knowledge of the mystery was granted to the Prophets and saints of the Old Dispensation (Epiphanius, "Haer.", viii, 5; Cyril of Alexandria, "Con. Julian., " I). It may be readily conceded that the way is prepared for the revelation in some of the prophecies. The names Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14) and God the Mighty (Isaiah 9:6) affirmed of the Messias make mention of the Divine Nature of the promised deliverer. Yet it seems that the Gospel revelation was needed to render the full meaning of the passages clear. Even these exalted titles did not lead the Jews to recognize that the Saviour to come was to be none other than God Himself. The Septuagint translators do not even venture to render the words God the Mighty literally, but give us, in their place, "the angel of great counsel."
A still higher stage of preparation is found in the doctrine of the Sapiential books regarding the Divine Wisdom. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom appears personified, and in a manner which suggests that the sacred author was not employing a mere metaphor, but had before his mind a real person (cf. verses 22, 23). Similar teaching occurs in Ecclesiasticus 24, in a discourse which Wisdom is declared to utter in "the assembly of the Most High", i.e. in the presence of the angels. This phrase certainly supposes Wisdom to be conceived as person. The nature of the personality is left obscure; but we are told that the whole earth is Wisdom's Kingdom, that she finds her delight in all the works of God, but that Israel is in a special manner her portion and her inheritance (Ecclesiasticus 24:8-13).
In the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon we find a still further advance. Here Wisdom is clearly distinguished from Jehovah: "She is . . . a certain pure emanation of the glory of the almighty God. . .the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness" (Wisdom 7:25-26. Cf. Hebrews 1:3). She is, moreover, described as "the worker of all things" (panton technitis, 7:21), an expression indicating that the creation is in some manner attributable to her. Yet in later Judaism this exalted doctrine suffered eclipse, and seems to have passed into oblivion. Nor indeed can it be said that the passage, even though it manifests some knowledge of a second personality in the Godhead, constitutes a revelation of the Trinity. For nowhere in the Old Testament do we find any clear indication of a Third Person. Mention is often made of the Spirit of the Lord, but there is nothing to show that the Spirit was viewed as distinct from Jahweh Himself. The term is always employed to signify God considered in His working, whether in the universe or in the soul of man. The matter seems to be correctly summed up by Epiphanius, when he says: "The One Godhead is above all declared by Moses, and the twofold personality (of Father and Son) is strenuously asserted by the Prophets. The Trinity is made known by the Gospel" ("Haer.", lxxiv).
Proof of the doctrine from Tradition
The Church Fathers
In this section we shall show that the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity has from the earliest times been taught by the Catholic Church and professed by her members. As none deny this for any period subsequent to the Arian and Macedonian controversies, it will be sufficient if we here consider the faith of the first four centuries only. An argument of very great weight is provided in the liturgical forms of the Church. The highest probative force must necessarily attach to these, since they express not the private opinion of a single individual, but the public belief of the whole body of the faithful. Nor can it be objected that the notions of Christians on the subject were vague and confused, and that their liturgical forms reflect this frame of mind. On such a point vagueness was impossible. Any Christian might be called on to seal with his blood his belief that there is but One God. The answer of Saint Maximus (c. A.D. 250) to the command of the proconsul that he should sacrifice to the gods, "I offer no sacrifice save to the One True God," is typical of many such replies in the Acts of the martyrs. It is out of the question to suppose that men who were prepared to give their lives on behalf of this fundamental truth were in point of fact in so great confusion in regard to it that they were unaware whether their creed was monotheistic, ditheistic, or tritheistic. Moreover, we know that their instruction regarding the doctrines of their religion was solid. The writers of that age bear witness that even the unlettered were thoroughly familiar with the truths of faith (cf. Justin, First Apology 60; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.4.2).
(1) Baptismal formulas
We may notice first the baptismal formula, which all acknowledge to be primitive. It has already been shown that the words as prescribed by Christ (Matthew 28:19) clearly express the Godhead of the Three Persons as well as their distinction, but another consideration may here be added. Baptism, with its formal renunciation of Satan and his works, was understood to be the rejection of the idolatry of paganism and the solemn consecration of the baptised to the one true God (Tertullian, De Spectaculis 4; Justin, First Apology 4). The act of consecration was the invocation over them of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The supposition that they regarded the Second and Third Persons as created beings, and were in fact consecrating themselves to the service of creatures, is manifestly absurd. St. Hippolytus has expressed the faith of the Church in the clearest terms: "He who descends into this laver of regeneration with faith forsakes the Evil One and engages himself to Christ, renounces the enemy and confesses that Christ is God . . . he returns from the font a son of God and a coheir of Christ. To Whom with the all holy, the good and lifegiving Spirit be glory now and always, forever and ever. Amen" (Sermon on Theophany 10).
(2) The doxologies
The witness of the doxologies is no less striking. The form now universal, "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost," so clearly expresses the Trinitarian dogma that the Arians found it necessary to deny that it had been in use previous to the time of Flavian of Antioch (Philostorgius, "Hist. eccl.", III, xiii).
It is true that up to the period of the Arian controversy another form, "Glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit," had been more common (cf. Clement's Epistle to the Corinthians 58-59; Justin, First Apology 67). This latter form is indeed perfectly consistent with Trinitarian belief: it, however, expresses not the coequality of the Three Persons, but their operation in regard to man. We live in the Spirit, and through Him we are made partakers in Christ (Galatians 5:25; Romans 8:9); and it is through Christ, as His members, that we are worthy to offer praise to God (Hebrews 13:15).
But there are many passages in the ante-Nicene Fathers which show that the form, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to [with] the Holy Spirit," was also in use.
- In the narrative of St. Polycarp's martyrdom we read: "With Whom to Thee and the Holy Spirit be glory now and for the ages to come" (Martyrdom of Polycarp 14; cf. 22).
- Clement of Alexandria bids men "give thanks and praise to the only Father and Son, to the Son and Father with the Holy Spirit" (The Pedagogue III.12).
- St. Hippolytus closes his work against Noetus with the words: "To Him be glory and power with the Father and the Holy Spirit in Holy Church now and always for ever and ever. Amen" (Against Noetus 18).
- Denis of Alexandria uses almost the same words: "To God the Father and to His Son Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit be honour and glory forever and ever, Amen" (in St. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29.72).
- St. Basil further tells us that it was an immemorial custom among Christians when they lit the evening lamp to give thanks to God with prayer: Ainoumen Patera kai Gion kai Hagion Pneuma Theou ("We praise the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit of God").
(3) Other patristic writings
The doctrine of the Trinity is formally taught in every class of ecclesiastical writing. From among the apologists we may note Justin, First Apology 6; Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 12. The latter tells us that Christians "are conducted to the future life by this one thing alone, that they know God and His Logos, what is the oneness of the Son with the Father, what the communion of the Father with the Son, what is the Spirit, what is the unity of these three, the Spirit, the Son, and the Father, and their distinction in unity." It would be impossible to be more explicit. And we may be sure that an apologist, writing for pagans, would weigh well the words in which he dealt with this doctrine.
Amongst polemical writers we may refer to Irenaeus (Against Heresies I.22 and IV.20.1-6). In these passages he rejects the Gnostic figment that the world was created by aeons who had emanated from God, but were not consubstantial with Him, and teaches the consubstantiality of the Word and the Spirit by Whom God created all things.
Clement of Alexandria professes the doctrine in The Pedagogue I.6, and somewhat later Gregory Thaumaturgus, as we have already seen, lays it down in the most express terms in his Creed.
(4) As contrasted with heretical teachings
Yet further evidence regarding the Church's doctrine is furnished by a comparison of her teaching with that of heretical sects.
The controversy with the Sabellians in the third century proves conclusively that she would tolerate no deviation from Trinitarian doctrine. Noetus of Smyrna, the originator of the error, was condemned by a local synod, about A.D. 200. Sabellius, who propagated the same heresy at Rome c. A.D. 220, was excommunicated by St. Callistus.
It is notorious that the sect made no appeal to tradition: it found Trinitarianism in possession wherever it appeared — at Smyrna, at Rome, in Africa, in Egypt. On the other hand, St. Hippolytus, who combats it in the "Contra Noetum", claims Apostolic tradition for the doctrine of the Catholic Church: "Let us believe, beloved brethren, in accordance with the tradition of the Apostles, that God the Word came down from heaven to the holy Virgin Mary to save man."
Somewhat later (c. A.D. 260) Denis of Alexandria found that the error was widespread in the Libyan Pentapolis, and he addressed a dogmatic letter against it to two bishops, Euphranor and Ammonius. In this, in order to emphasize the distinction between the Persons, he termed the Son poiema tou Theou and used other expressions capable of suggesting that the Son is to be reckoned among creatures. He was accused of heterodoxy to St. Dionysius of Rome, who held a council and addressed to him a letter dealing with the true Catholic doctrine on the point in question. The Bishop of Alexandria replied with a defense of his orthodoxy entitled "Elegxhos kai apologia," in which he corrected whatever had been erroneous. He expressly professes his belief in the consubstantiality of the Son, using the very term, homoousios, which afterwards became the touchstone of orthodoxy at Nicaea (P.G., XXV, 505). The story of the controversy is conclusive as to the doctrinal standard of the Church. It shows us that she was firm in rejecting on the one hand any confusion of the Persons and on the other hand any denial of their consubstantiality.
The information we possess regarding another heresy — that of Montanus — supplies us with further proof that the doctrine of the Trinity was the Church's teaching in A.D. 150. Tertullian affirms in the clearest terms that what he held as to the Trinity when a Catholic he still holds as a Montanist (Against Praxeas 2); and in the same work he explicitly teaches the Divinity of the Three Persons, their distinction, the eternity of God the Son (Against Praxeas 27). Epiphanius in the same way asserts the orthodoxy of the Montanists on this subject (Haer., lxviii). Now it is not to be supposed that the Montanists had accepted any novel teaching from the Catholic Church since their secession in the middle of the second century. Hence, inasmuch as there was full agreement between the two bodies in regard to the Trinity, we have here again a clear proof that Trinitarianism was an article of faith at a time when the Apostolic tradition was far too recent for any error to have arisen on a point so vital.
Later controversy
Notwithstanding the force of the arguments we have just summarised, a vigorous controversy has been carried on from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day regarding the Trinitarian doctrine of the ante-Nicene Fathers. The Socinian writers of the seventeenth century (e.g. Sand, "Nucleus historiae ecclesiastic", Amsterdam, 1668) asserted that the language of the early Fathers in many passages of their works shows that they agreed not with Athanasius, but with Arius. Petavius, who was at that period engaged on his great theological work, was convinced by their arguments, and allowed that at least some of these Fathers had fallen into grave errors. On the other hand, their orthodoxy was vigorously defended by the Anglican divine Dr. George Bull ("Defensio Fidei Nicaean", Oxford, 1685) and subsequently by Bossuet, Thomassinus, and other Catholic theologians. Those who take the less favourable view assert that they teach the following points inconsistent with the post-Nicene belief of the Church:
- That the Son even as regards His Divine Nature is inferior and not equal to the Father;
- that the Son alone appeared in the theophanies of the Old Testament, inasmuch as the Father is essentially invisible, the Son, however, not so;
- that the Son is a created being;
- that the generation of the Son is not eternal, but took place in time.
We shall examine these four points in order.
(1) In proof of the assertion that many of the Fathers deny the equality of the Son with the Father, passages are cited from Justin (First Apology 13, 32), Irenaeus (Against Heresies III.8.3), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata VII.2), Hippolytus (Against Noetus 14), Origen (Against Celsus VIII.15). Thus Irenaeus (Against Heresies III.8.3) says: "He commanded, and they were created . . . Whom did He command? His Word, by whom, says the Scripture, the heavens were established. And Origen (Against Celsus VIII.15) says: "We declare that the Son is not mightier than the Father, but inferior to Him. And this belief we ground on the saying of Jesus Himself: "The Father who sent me is greater than I."
Now in regard to these passages it must be borne in mind that there are two ways of considering the Trinity. We may view the Three Persons insofar as they are equally possessed of the Divine Nature or we may consider the Son and the Spirit as deriving from the Father, Who is the sole source of Godhead, and from Whom They receive all They have and are. The former mode of considering them has been the more common since the Arian heresy. The latter, however, was more frequent previously to that period. Under this aspect, the Father, as being the sole source of all, may be termed greater than the Son. Thus Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Fathers of the Council of Sardica, in their synodical letter, all treat our Lord's words, teaches "The Father is greater than I" as having reference to His Godhead (cf. Petavius, "De Trin.", II, ii, 7, vi, 11). From this point of view it may be said that in the creation of the world the Father commanded, the Son obeyed. The expression is not one which would have been employed by Latin writers who insist that creation and all God's works proceed from Him as One and not from the Persons as distinct from each other. But this truth was unfamiliar to the early Fathers.
(2) Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 60) Irenaeus (Against Heresies IV.20.7-11), Tertullian ("C. Marc.", II, 27; Against Praxeas 15-16), Novatian (On the Trinity 18.25), Theophilus (To Autolycus II.22), are accused of teaching that the theophanies were incompatible with the essential nature of the Father, yet not incompatible with that of the Son. In this case also the difficulty is largely removed if it be remembered that these writers regarded all the Divine operations as proceeding from the Three Persons as such, and not from the Godhead viewed as one. Now Revelation teaches us that in the work of the creation and redemption of the world the Father effects His purpose through the Son. Through Him He made the world; through Him He redeemed it; through Him He will judge it. Hence it was believed by these writers that, having regard to the present disposition of Providence, the theophanies could only have been the work of the Son. Moreover, in Colossians 1:15, the Son is expressly termed "the image of the invisible God" (eikon tou Theou rou aoratou). This expression they seem to have taken with strict literalness. The function of an eikon is to manifest what is itself hidden (cf. St. John Damascene, "De imagin.", III, n. 17). Hence they held that the work of revealing the Father belongs by nature to the Second Person of the Trinity, and concluded that the theophanies were His work.
(3) Expressions which appear to contain the statement that the Son was created are found in Clement of Alexandria (Stromata V.14 and VI.7), Tatian (Address to the Greeks 5), Tertullian (Against Praxeas 6; Against Hermogenes 18-20), Origen (Commentary on John I.22). Clement speaks of Wisdom as "created before all things" (protoktistos), and Tatian terms the Word the "first-begotten work of (ergon prototokon) the Father."
Yet the meaning of these authors is clear. In Colossians 1:16, St. Paul says that all things were created in the Son. This was understood to signify that creation took place according to exemplar ideas predetermined by God and existing in the Word. In view of this, it might be said that the Father created the Word, this term being used in place of the more accurate generated, inasmuch as the exemplar ideas of creation were communicated by the Father to the Son. Or, again, the actual Creation of the world might be termed the creation of the Word, since it takes place according to the ideas which exist in the Word. The context invariably shows that the passage is to be understood in one or another of these senses.
The expression is undoubtedly very harsh, and it certainly would never have been employed but for the verse, Proverbs 8:22, which is rendered in the Septuagint and the old Latin versions, "The Lord created (ektise) me, who am the beginning of His ways." As the passage was understood as having reference to the Son, it gave rise to the question how it could be said that Wisdom was created (Origen, De Principiis I.2.3). It is further to be remembered that accurate terminology in regard to the relations between the Three Persons was the fruit of the controversies which sprang up in the fourth century. The writers of an earlier period were not concerned with Arianism, and employed expressions which in the light of subsequent errors are seen to be not merely inaccurate, but dangerous.
(4) Greater difficulty is perhaps presented by a series of passages which appear to assert that prior to the Creation of the world the Word was not a distinct hypostasis from the Father. These are found in Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 61), Tatian (Address to the Greeks 5), Athenagoras (A Plea for the Christians 10), Theophilus (To Autolycus II.10); Hippolytus (Against Noetus 10); Tertullian (Against Praxeas 5-7; Against Hermogenes 18). Thus Theophilus writes (To Autolycus II.22):
What else is this voice [heard in Paradise] but the Word of God Who is also His Son? . . . For before anything came into being, He had Him as a counsellor, being His own mind and thought [i.e. as the logos endiathetos, c. x]). But when God wished to make all that He had determined on, then did He beget Him as the uttered Word [logos prophorikos], the firstborn of all creation, not, however, Himself being left without Reason (logos), but having begotten Reason, and ever holding converse with Reason.
Expressions such as these are undoubtedly due to the influence of the Stoic philosophy: the logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos were current conceptions of that school. It is evident that these apologists were seeking to explain the Christian Faith to their pagan readers in terms with which the latter were familiar. Some Catholic writers have indeed thought that the influence of their previous training did lead some of them into Subordinationism, although the Church herself was never involved in the error. Yet it does not seem necessary to adopt this conclusion. If the point of view of the writers be borne in mind, the expressions, strange as they are, will be seen not to be incompatible with orthodox belief. The early Fathers, as we have said, regarded Proverbs 8:22, and Colossians 1:15, as distinctly teaching that there is a sense in which the Word, begotten before all worlds, may rightly be said to have been begotten also in time. This temporal generation they conceived to be none other than the act of creation. They viewed this as the complement of the eternal generation, inasmuch as it is the external manifestation of those creative ideas which from all eternity the Father has communicated to the Eternal Word. Since, in the very same works which contain these perplexing expressions, other passages are found teaching explicitly the eternity of the Son, it appears most natural to interpret them in this sense.
It should further be remembered that throughout this period theologians, when treating of the relation of the Divine Persons to each other, invariably regard them in connection with the cosmogony. Only later, in the Nicene epoch, did they learn to prescind from the question of creation and deal with the threefold Personality exclusively from the point of view of the Divine life of the Godhead. When that stage was reached expressions such as these became impossible.
The Trinity as a Mystery
The [First] Vatican Council has explained the meaning to be attributed to the term mystery in theology. It lays down that a mystery is a truth which we are not merely incapable of discovering apart from Divine Revelation, but which, even when revealed, remains "hidden by the veil of faith and enveloped, so to speak, by a kind of darkness" (Constitution, "De fide. cath.", iv). In other words, our understanding of it remains only partial, even after we have accepted it as part of the Divine message. Through analogies and types we can form a representative concept expressive of what is revealed, but we cannot attain that fuller knowledge which supposes that the various elements of the concept are clearly grasped and their reciprocal compatibility manifest. As regards the vindication of a mystery, the office of the natural reason is solely to show that it contains no intrinsic impossibility, that any objection urged against it on Reason. "Expressions such as these are undoubtedly the score that it violates the laws of thought is invalid. More than this it cannot do.
The Vatican Council further defined that the Christian Faith contains mysteries strictly so called (can. 4). All theologians admit that the doctrine of the Trinity is of the number of these. Indeed, of all revealed truths this is the most impenetrable to reason. Hence, to declare this to be no mystery would be a virtual denial of the canon in question. Moreover, our Lord's words, Matthew 11:27, "No one knoweth the Son, but the Father," seem to declare expressly that the plurality of Persons in the Godhead is a truth entirely beyond the scope of any created intellect. The Fathers supply many passages in which the incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature is affirmed. St. Jerome says, in a well-known phrase: "The true profession of the mystery of the Trinity is to own that we do not comprehend it" (De mysterio Trinitatus recta confessio est ignoratio scientiae — "Proem ad 1. xviii in Isai."). The controversy with the Eunomians, who declared that the Divine Essence was fully expressed in the absolutely simple notion of "the Innascible" (agennetos), and that this was fully comprehensible by the human mind, led many of the Greek Fathers to insist on the incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature, more especially in regard to the internal processions. St. Basil, Against Eunomius I.14; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures VI; St. John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.2, etc.).
At a later date, however, some famous names are to be found defending a contrary opinion. Anselm ("Monol.", 64), Abelard ("ln Ep. ad Rom."), Hugo of St. Victor ("De sacram." III, xi), and Richard of St. Victor ("De Trin.", III, v) all declare that it is possible to assign peremptory reasons why God should be both One and Three. In explanation of this it should be noted that at that period the relation of philosophy to revealed doctrine was but obscurely understood. Only after the Aristotelean system had obtained recognition from theologians was this question thoroughly treated. In the intellectual ferment of the time Abelard initiated a Rationalistic tendency: not merely did he claim a knowledge of the Trinity for the pagan philosophers, but his own Trinitarian doctrine was practically Sabellian. Anselm's error was due not to Rationalism, but to too wide an application of the Augustinian principle "Crede ut intelligas". Hugh and Richard of St. Victor were, however, certainly influenced by Abelard's teaching. Raymond Lully's (1235-1315) errors in this regard were even more extreme. They were expressly condemned by Gregory XI in 1376. In the nineteenth century the influence of the prevailing Rationalism manifested itself in several Catholic writers. Frohschammer and Günther both asserted that the dogma of the Trinity was capable of proof. Pius IX reprobated their opinions on more than one occasion (Denzinger, 1655 sq., 1666 sq., 1709 sq.), and it was to guard against this tendency that the Vatican Council issued the decrees to which reference has been made. A somewhat similar, though less aggravated, error on the part of Rosmini was condemned, 14 December, 1887 (Denz., 1915).
The Doctrine as interpreted in Greek Theology
Nature and personality
The Greek Fathers approached the problem of Trinitarian doctrine in a way which differs in an important particular from that which, since the days of St. Augustine, has become traditional in Latin theology.
In Latin theology thought fixed first on the Nature and only subsequently on the Persons. Personality is viewed as being, so to speak, the final complement of the Nature: the Nature is regarded as logically prior to the Personality. Hence, because God's Nature is one, He is known to us as One God before He can be known as Three Persons. And when theologians speak of God without special mention of a Person, conceive Him under this aspect.
This is entirely different from the Greek point of view. Greek thought fixed primarily on the Three distinct Persons: the Father, to Whom, as the source and origin of all, the name of God (Theos) more especially belongs; the Son, proceeding from the Father by an eternal generation, and therefore rightly termed God also; and the Divine Spirit, proceeding from the Father through the Son. The Personality is treated as logically prior to the Nature. Just as human nature is something which the individual men possesses, and which can only be conceived as belonging to and dependent on the individual, so the Divine Nature is something which belongs to the Persons and cannot be conceived independently of Them.
The contrast appears strikingly in regard to the question of creation. All Western theologians teach that creation, like all God's external works, proceeds from Him as One: the separate Personalities do not enter into consideration. The Greeks invariably speak as though, in all the Divine works, each Person exercises a separate office. Irenaeus replies to the Gnostics, who held that the world was created by a demiurge other than the supreme God, by affirming that God is the one Creator, and that He made all things by His Word and His Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit (Against Heresies I.22, II.4.4-5, II.30.9 and IV.20.1). A formula often found among the Greek Fathers is that all things are from the Father and are effected by the Son in the Spirit (Athanasius, "Ad Serap.", I, xxxi; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 38; Cyril of Alexandria, "De Trin. dial.", VI). Thus, too, Hippolytus (Against Noetus 10) says that God has fashioned all things by His Word and His Wisdom creating them by His Word, adorning them by His Wisdom (gar ta genomena dia Logou kai Sophias technazetai, Logo men ktizon Sophia de kosmon). The Nicene Creed still preserves for us this point of view. In it we still profess our belief "in one God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth . . . and in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . by Whom all things were made . . . and in the Holy Ghost."
The Divine Unity
The Greek Fathers did not neglect to safeguard the doctrine of the Divine Unity, though manifestly their standpoint requires a different treatment from that employed in the West. The consubstantiality of the Persons is asserted by St. Irenæus when he tells us that God created the world by His Son and His Spirit, "His two hands" (Against Heresies IV.20.1). The purport of the phrase is evidently to indicate that the Second and Third Persons are not substantially distinct from the First. A more philosophical description is the doctrine of the Recapitulation (sygkephalaiosis). This seems to be first found in the correspondence between St. Denis of Alexandria and St. Dionysius of Rome. The former writes: "We thus [i.e., by the twofold procession] extend the Monad [the First Person] to the Trinity, without causing any division, and were capitulate the Trinity in the Monad without causing diminution" (outo men emeis eis te ten Triada ten Monada, platynomen adiaireton, kai ten Triada palin ameioton eis ten Monada sygkephalaioumetha — P.G., XXV, 504). Here the consubstantiality is affirmed on the ground that the Son and Spirit, proceeding from the Father, are nevertheless not separated from Him; while they again, with all their perfections, can be regarded as contained within Him.
This doctrine supposes a point of view very different from that with which we are now familiar. The Greek Fathers regarded the Son as the Wisdom and power of the Father (1 Corinthians 1:24) in a formal sense, and in like manner, the Spirit as His Sanctity. Apart from the Son the Father would be without His Wisdom; apart from the Spirit He would be without His Sanctity. Thus the Son and the Spirit are termed "Powers" (Dynameis) of the Father. But while in creatures the powers and faculties are mere accidental perfections, in the Godhead they are subsistent hypostases. Denis of Alexandria regarding the Second and Third Persons as the Father's "Powers", speaks of the First Person as being "extended" to them, and not divided from them. And, since whatever they have and are flows from Him, this writer asserts that if we fix our thoughts on the sole source of Deity alone, we find in Him undiminished all that is contained in them.
The Arian controversy led to insistence on the Homoüsia. But with the Greeks this is not a starting point, but a conclusion, the result of reflective analysis. The sonship of the Second Person implies that He has received the Divine Nature in its fullness, for all generation implies the origination of one who is like in nature to the originating principle. But here, mere specific unity is out of the question. The Divine Essence is not capable of numerical multiplication; it is therefore, they reasoned, identically the same nature which both possess. A similar line of argument establishes that the Divine Nature as communicated to the Holy Spirit is not specifically, but numerically, one with that of the Father and the Son. Unity of nature was understood by the Greek Fathers as involving unity of will and unity of action (energeia). This they declared the Three Persons to possess (Athanasius, "Adv. Sabell.", xii, 13; Basil, Epistle 189, no. 7; Gregory of Nyssa, "De orat. dom., " John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith III.14). Here we see an important advance in the theology of the Godhead. For, as we have noted, the earlier Fathers invariably conceive the Three Persons as each exercising a distinct and separate function.
Finally we have the doctrine of Circuminsession (perichoresis). By this is signified the reciprocal inexistence and compenetration of the Three Persons. The term perichoresis is first used by St. John Damascene. Yet the doctrine is found much earlier. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria says that the Son is called the Word and Wisdom of the Father "because of the reciprocal inherence of these and the mind" (dia ten eis allela . . . ., hos an eipoi tis, antembolen). St. John Damascene assigns a twofold basis for this inexistence of the Persons. In some passages he explains it by the doctrine already mentioned, that the Son and the Spirit are dynameis of the Father (cf. "De recta sententia"). Thus understood, the Circuminsession is a corollary of the doctrine of Recapitulation. He also understands it as signifying the identity of essence, will, and action in the Persons. Wherever these are peculiar to the individual, as is the case in all creatures, there, he tells us, we have separate existence (kechorismenos einai). In the Godhead the essence, will, and action are but one. Hence we have not separate existence, but Circuminsession (perichoresis) (Of the Orthodox Faith I.8). Here, then, the Circuminsession has its basis in the Homoüsia.
It is easy to see that the Greek system was less well adapted to meet the cavils of the Arian and Macedonian heretics than was that subsequently developed by St. Augustine. Indeed the controversies of the fourth century brought some of the Greek Fathers notably nearer to the positions of Latin theology. We have seen that they were led to affirm the action of the Three Persons to be but one. Didymus even employs expressions which seem to show that he, like the Latins, conceived the Nature as logically antecedent to the Persons. He understands the term God as signifying the whole Trinity, and not, as do the other Greeks, the Father alone: "When we pray, whether we say 'Kyrie eleison', or 'O God aid us', we do not miss our mark: for we include the whole of the Blessed Trinity in one Godhead" (De Trin., II, xix).
Mediate and Immediate Procession
The doctrine that the Spirit is the image of the Son, as the Son is the image of the Father, is characteristic of Greek theology. It is asserted by St. Gregory Thaumaturgus in his Creed. It is assumed by St. Athanasius as an indisputable premise in his controversy with the Macedonians (Ad Serap., I, xx, xxi, xxiv; II, i, iv). It is implied in the comparisons employed both by him (Ad Serap. I, xix) and by St. Gregory Nazianzen (Orations 31.31-32), of the Three Divine Persons to the sun, the ray, the light; and to the source, the spring, and the stream. We find it also in St. Cyril of Alexandria ("Thesaurus assert.", 33), St. John Damascene (Of the Orthodox Faith I.13), etc. This supposes that the procession of the Son from the Father is immediate; that of the Spirit from the Father is mediate. He proceeds from the Father through the Son.
Bessarion rightly observes that the Fathers who used these expressions conceived the Divine Procession as taking place, so to speak, along a straight line (P.G., CLXI, 224). On the other hand, in Western theology the symbolic diagram of the Trinity has ever been the triangle, the relations of the Three Persons one to another being precisely similar. The point is worth noting, for this diversity of symbolic representation leads inevitably to very different expressions of the same dogmatic truth. It is plain that these Fathers would have rejected no less firmly than the Latins the later Photian heresy that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.
The Son
The Greek theology of the Divine Generation differs in certain particulars from the Latin. Most Western theologians base their theory on the name, Logos, given by St. John to the Second Person. This they understand in the sense of "concept" (verbum mentale), and hold that the Divine Generation is analogous to the act by which the created intellect produces its concept. Among Greek writers this explanation is unknown. They declare the manner of the Divine Generation to be altogether beyond our comprehension. We know by revelation that God has a Son; and various other terms besides Son employed regarding Him in Scripture, such as Word, Brightness of His glory, etc., show us that His sonship must be conceived as free from any relation. More we know not (cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 29.8, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XI.19; John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.8). One explanation only can be given, namely, that the perfection we call fecundity must needs be found in God the Absolutely Perfect (St. John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.8). Indeed it would seem that the great majority of the Greek Fathers understood logos not of the mental thought; but of the uttered word (Athanasius, Dionysius of Alexandria, ibid.; Cyril of Alexandria, "De Trin.", II). They did not see in the term a revelation that the Son is begotten by way of intellectual procession, but viewed it as a metaphor intended to exclude the material associations of human sonship (Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius IV; Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 30; Basil, "Hom. xvi"; Cyril of Alexandria, "Thesaurus assert.", vi).
We have already adverted to the view that the Son is the Wisdom and Power of the Father in the full and formal sense. This teaching constantly recurs from the time of Origen to that of St. John Damascene (Origen apud Athanasius, De decr. Nic.; Athanasius, Against the Arians I; Cyril of Alexandria, "Thesaurus"; John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.12). It is based on the Platonic philosophy accepted by the Alexandrine School. This differs in a fundamental point from the Aristoteleanism of the Scholastic theologians. In Aristotelean philosophy perfection is always conceived statically. No action, transient or immanent, can proceed from any agent unless that agent, as statically conceived, possesses whatever perfection is contained in the action. The Alexandrine standpoint was other than this. To them perfection must be sought in dynamic activity. God, as the supreme perfection, is from all eternity self-moving, ever adorning Himself with His own attributes: they issue from Him and, being Divine, are not accidents, but subsistent realities. To these thinkers, therefore, there was no impossibility in the supposition that God is wise with the Wisdom which is the result of His own immanent action, powerful with the Power which proceeds from Him. The arguments of the Greek Fathers frequently presuppose this philosophy as their basis; and unless it be clearly grasped, reasoning which on their premises is conclusive will appear to us invalid and fallacious. Thus it is sometimes urged as a reason for rejecting Arianism that, if there were a time when the Son was not, it follows that God must then have been devoid of Wisdom and of Power — a conclusion from which even Arians would shrink.
The Holy Spirit
A point which in Western theology gives occasion for some discussion is the question as to why the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is termed the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine suggests that it is because He proceeds from both the Father and the Son, and hence He rightly receives a name applicable to both (On the Trinity XV.37). To the Greek Fathers, who developed the theology of the Spirit in the light of the philosophical principles which we have just noticed, the question presented no difficulty. His name, they held, reveals to us His distinctive character as the Third Person, just as the names Father and Son manifest the distinctive characters of the First and Second Persons (cf. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Declaration of Faith; Basil, Epistle 214.4; Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 25.16). He is autoagiotes, the hypostatic holiness of God, the holiness by which God is holy. Just as the Son is the Wisdom and Power by which God is wise and powerful, so the Spirit is the Holiness by which He is holy. Had there ever been a time, as the Macedonians dared to say, when the Holy Spirit was not, then at that time God would have not been holy (St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 31.4).
On the other hand, pneuma was often understood in the light of John 10:22 where Christ, appearing to the Apostles, breathed on them and conferred on them the Holy Spirit. He is the breath of Christ (John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.8), breathed by Him into us, and dwelling in us as the breath of life by which we enjoy the supernatural life of God's children (Cyril of Alexandria, "Thesaurus"; cf. Petav., "De Trin", V, viii). The office of the Holy Spirit in thus elevating us to the supernatural order is, however, conceived in a manner somewhat different from that of Western theologians. According to Western doctrine, God bestows on man sanctifying grace, and consequent on that gift the Three Persons come to his soul.
In Greek theology the order is reversed: the Holy Spirit does not come to us because we have received sanctifying grace; but it is through His presence we receive the gift. He is the seal, Himself impressing on us the Divine image. That Divine image is indeed realized in us, but the seal must be present to secure the continued existence of the impression. Apart from Him it is not found (Origen, Commentary on John II.6; Didymus, "De Spiritu Sancto", x, 11; Athanasius, "Ep. ad. Serap.", III, iii). This Union with the Holy Spirit constitutes our deification (theopoiesis). Inasmuch as He is the image of Christ, He imprints the likeness of Christ upon us; since Christ is the image of the Father, we too receive the true character of God's children (Athanasius, loc. cit.; Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 31.4). It is in reference to this work in our regard that in the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed the Holy Spirit is termed the Giver of life (zoopoios). In the West we more naturally speak of grace as the life of the soul. But to the Greeks it was the Spirit through whose personal presence we live. Just as God gave natural life to Adam by breathing into his inanimate frame the breath of life, so did Christ give spiritual life to us when He bestowed on us the gift of the Holy Ghost.
The Doctrine as interpreted in Latin Theology
The transition to the Latin theology of the Trinity was the work of St. Augustine. Western theologians have never departed from the main lines which he laid down, although in the Golden Age of Scholasticism his system was developed, its details completed, and its terminology perfected.
It received its final and classical form from St. Thomas Aquinas. But it is necessary first to indicate in what consisted the transition effected by St. Augustine. This may be summed up in three points:
- He views the Divine Nature as prior to the Personalities. Deus is for him not God the Father, but the Trinity. This was a step of the first importance, safeguarding as it did alike the unity of God and the equality of the Persons in a manner which the Greek system could never do. As we have seen, one at least of the Greeks, Didymus, had adopted this standpoint and it is possible that Augustine may have derived this method of viewing the mystery from him. But to make it the basis for the whole treatment of the doctrine was the work of Augustine's genius.
- He insists that every external operation of God is due to the whole Trinity, and cannot be attributed to one Person alone, save by appropriation (see HOLY GHOST). The Greek Fathers had, as we have seen, been led to affirm that the action (energeia) of the Three Persons was one, and one alone. But the doctrine of appropriation was unknown to them, and thus the value of this conclusion was obscured by a traditional theology implying the distinct activities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
- By indicating the analogy between the two processions within the Godhead and the internal acts of thought and will in the human mind (On the Trinity IX.3.3 and X.11.17), he became the founder of the psychological theory of the Trinity, which, with a very few exceptions, was accepted by every subsequent Latin writer.
In the following exposition of the Latin doctrines, we shall follow St. Thomas Aquinas, whose treatment of the doctrine is now universally accepted by Catholic theologians. It should be observed, however, that this is not the only form in which the psychological theory has been proposed. Thus Richard of St. Victor, Alexander of Hales, and St. Bonaventure, while adhering in the main to Western tradition, were more influenced by Greek thought, and give us a system differing somewhat from that of St. Thomas.
The Son
Among the terms employed in Scripture to designate the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is the Word (John 1:1). This is understood by St. Thomas of the Verbum mentale, or intellectual concept. As applied to the Son, the name, he holds, signifies that He proceeds from the Father as the term of an intellectual procession, in a manner analogous to that in which a concept is generated by the human mind in all acts of natural knowledge. It is, indeed, of faith that the Son proceeds from the Father by a veritable generation. He is, says the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed, begotten before all worlds". But the Procession of a Divine Person as the term of the act by which God knows His own nature is rightly called generation. This may be readily shown. As an act of intellectual conception, it necessarily produces the likeness of the object known. And further, being Divine action, it is not an accidental act resulting in a term, itself a mere accident, but the act is the very substance of the Divinity, and the term is likewise substantial. A process tending necessarily to the production of a substantial term like in nature to the Person from Whom it proceeds is a process of generation. In regard to this view as to the procession of the Son, a difficulty was felt by St. Anselm (Monol., lxiv) on the score that it would seem to involve that each of the Three Persons must needs generate a subsistent Word. Since all the Powers possess the same mind, does it not follow, he asked, that in each case thought produces a similar term? This difficulty St. Thomas succeeds in removing. According to his psychology the formation of a concept is not essential to thought as such, though absolutely requisite to all natural human knowledge. There is, therefore, no ground in reason, apart from revelation, for holding that the Divine intellect produces a Verbum mentale. It is the testimony of Scripture alone which tells us that the Father has from all eternity begotten His consubstantial Word. But neither reason nor revelation suggests it in the case of the Second and Third Persons (I:34:1, ad 3).
Not a few writers of great weight hold that there is sufficient consensus among the Fathers and Scholastic theologians as to the meaning of the names Word and Wisdom (Proverbs 8), applied to the Son, for us to regard the intellectual procession of the Second Person as at least theologically certain, if not a revealed truth (cf. Francisco Suárez, "De Trin.", I, v, p. 4; Petavius, VI, i, 7; Franzelin, "De Trin.", Thesis xxvi). This, however, seems to be an exaggeration. The immense majority of the Greek Fathers, as we have already noticed, interpret logos of the spoken word, and consider the significance of the name to lie not in any teaching as to intellectual procession, but in the fact that it implies a mode of generation devoid of all passion. Nor is the tradition as to the interpretation of Proverbs 8, in any sense unanimous. In view of these facts the opinion of those theologians seems the sounder who regard this explanation of the procession simply as a theological opinion of great probability and harmonizing well with revealed truth.
The Holy Spirit
Just as the Son proceeds as the term of the immanent act of the intellect, so does the Holy Spirit proceed as the term of the act of the Divine will. In human love, as St. Thomas teaches (I:27:3), even though the object be external to us, yet the immanent act of love arouses in the soul a state of ardour which is, as it were, an impression of the thing loved. In virtue of this the object of love is present to our affections, much as, by means of the concept, the object of thought is present to our intellect. This experience is the term of the internal act. The Holy Spirit, it is contended, proceeds from the Father and the Son as the term of the love by which God loves Himself. He is not the love of God in the sense of being Himself formally the love by which God loves; but in loving Himself God breathes forth this subsistent term. He is Hypostatic Love. Here, however, it is necessary to safeguard a point of revealed doctrine. It is of faith that the procession of the Holy Spirit is not generation. The Son is "the only begotten of the Father" (John 1:14). And the Athanasian Creed expressly lays it down that the Holy Ghost is "from the Father and the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding."
If the immanent act of the intellect is rightly termed generation, on what grounds can that name be denied to the act of the will? The answers given in reply to this difficulty by St. Thomas, Richard of St. Victor, and Alexander of Hales are very different. It will be sufficient here to note St. Thomas's solution. Intellectual procession, he says, is of its very nature the production of a term in the likeness of the thing conceived. This is not so in regard to the act of the will. Here the primary result is simply to attract the subject to the object of his love. This difference in the acts explains why the name generation is applicable only to the act of the intellect. Generation is essentially the production of like by like. And no process which is not essentially of that character can claim the name.
The doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit by means of the act of the Divine will is due entirely to Augustine. It is nowhere found among the Greeks, who simply declare the procession of the Spirit to be beyond our comprehension, nor is it found in the Latins before his time. He mentions the opinion with favour in the "De fide et symbolo" (A.D. 393); and in the "De Trinitate" (A.D. 415) develops it at length. His teaching was accepted by the West. The Scholastics seek for Scriptural support for it in the name Holy Spirit. This must, they argue, be, like the names Father and Son, a name expressive of a relation within the Godhead proper to the Person who bears it. Now the attribute holy, as applied to person or thing, signifies that the being of which it is affirmed is devoted to God. It follows therefore that, when applied to a Divine Person as designating the relation uniting Him to the other Persons, it must signify that the procession determining His origin is one which of its nature involves devotion to God. But that by which any person is devoted to God is love. The argument is ingenious, but hardly convincing; and the same may be said of a somewhat similar piece of reasoning regarding the name Spirit (I:36:1). The Latin theory is a noble effort of the human reason to penetrate the verities which revelation has left veiled in mystery. It harmonizes, as we have said, with all the truths of faith. It is admirably adapted to assist us to a fuller comprehension of the fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion. But more than this must not be claimed. It does not possess the sanction of revelation.
The Divine Relations
The existence of relations in the Godhead may be immediately inferred from the doctrine of processions, and as such is a truth of Revelation. Where there is a real procession the principle and the term are really related. Hence, both the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit must involve the existence of real and objective relations. This part of Trinitarian doctrine was familiar to the Greek Fathers. In answer to the Eunomian objection, that consubstantiality rendered any distinction between the Persons impossible, Gregory of Nyssa replies: "Though we hold that the nature [in the Three Persons] is not different, we do not deny the difference arising in regard of the source and that which proceeds from the source [ten katato aition kai to aitiaton diaphoran]; but in this alone do we admit that one Person differs from another" ("Quod non sunt tres dii"; cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Fifth Theological Oration 9; John Damascene, Of the Orthodox Faith I.8). Augustine insists that of the ten Aristotelean categories two, stance and relation, are found in God (On the Trinity V.5). But it was at the hands the Scholastic theologians that the question received its full development. The results to which they led, though not to be reckoned as part of the dogma, were found to throw great light upon the mystery, and to be of vast service in the objections urged against it.
From the fact that there are two processions in Godhead, each involving both a principle and term, it follows that there must be four relations, two origination (paternitas and spiratio) and two of procession (filiatio and processio). These relations are what constitute the distinction between the Persons. They cannot be distinguished by any absolute attribute, for every absolute attribute must belong to the infinite Divine Nature and this is common to the Three Persons. Whatever distinction there is must be in the relations alone. This conclusion is held as absolutely certain by all theologians. Equivalently contained in the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa, it was clearly enunciated by St. Anselm ("De process. Sp. S.", ii) and received ecclesiastical sanction in the "Decretum pro Jacobitis" in the form: "[In divinis] omnia sunt unum ubi non obviat relationis oppositio." Since this is so, it is manifest that the four relations suppose but Three Persons. For there is no relative opposition between spiration on the one hand and either paternity or filiation on the other. Hence the attribute of spiration is found in conjunction with each of these, and in virtue of it they are each distinguished from procession. As they share one and the same Divine Nature, so they possess the same virtus spirationis, and thus constitute a single originating principle of the Holy Spirit.
Inasmuch as the relations, and they alone, are distinct realities in the Godhead, it follows that the Divine Persons are none other than these relations. The Father is the Divine Paternity, the Son the Divine Filiation, the Holy Spirit the Divine Procession. Here it must be borne in mind that the relations are not mere accidental determinations as these abstract terms might suggest. Whatever is in God must needs be subsistent. He is the Supreme Substance, transcending the divisions of the Aristotelean categories. Hence, at one and the same time He is both substance and relation. (How it is that there should be in God real relations, though it is altogether impossible that quantity or quality should be found in Him, is a question involving a discussion regarding the metaphysics of relations, which would be out of place in an article such as the present.)
It will be seen that the doctrine of the Divine relations provides an answer to the objection that the dogma of the Trinity involves the falsity of the axiom that things which are identical with the same thing are identical one with another. We reply that the axiom is perfectly true in regard to absolute entities, to which alone it refers. But in the dogma of the Trinity when we affirm that the Father and Son are alike identical with the Divine Essence, we are affirming that the Supreme Infinite Substance is identical not with two absolute entities, but with each of two relations. These relations, in virtue of their nature as correlatives, are necessarily opposed the one to the other and therefore different. Again it is said that if there are Three Persons in the Godhead none can be infinite, for each must lack something which the others possess. We reply that a relation, viewed precisely as such, is not, like quantity or quality, an intrinsic perfection. When we affirm again it is relation of anything, we affirm that it regards something other than itself. The whole perfection of the Godhead is contained in the one infinite Divine Essence. The Father is that Essence as it eternally regards the Son and the Spirit; the Son is that Essence as it eternally regards the Father and the Spirit; the Holy Spirit is that Essence as it eternally regards the Father and the Son. But the eternal regard by which each of the Three Persons is constituted is not an addition to the infinite perfection of the Godhead.
The theory of relations also indicates the solution to the difficulty now most frequently proposed by anti-Trinitarians. It is urged that since there are Three Persons there must be three self-consciousnesses: but the Divine mind ex hypothesi is one, and therefore can possess but one self-consciousness; in other words, the dogma contains an irreconcilable contradiction. This whole objection rests on a petitio principii: for it takes for granted the identification of person and of mind with self-consciousness. This identification is rejected by Catholic philosophers as altogether misleading. Neither person nor mind is self-consciousness; though a person must needs possess self-consciousness, and consciousness attests the existence of mind. Granted that in the infinite mind, in which the categories are transcended, there are three relations which are subsistent realities, distinguished one from another in virtue of their relative opposition then it will follow that the same mind will have a three-fold consciousness, knowing itself in three ways in accordance with its three modes of existence. It is impossible to establish that, in regard of the infinite mind, such a supposition involves a contradiction.
The question was raised by the Scholastics: In what sense are we to understand the Divine act of generation? As we conceive things, the relations of paternity and filiation are due to an act by which the Father generates the Son; the relations of spiration and procession, to an act by which Father and Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas replies that the acts are identical with the relations of generation and spiration; only the mode of expression on our part is different (I:41:3, ad 2). This is due to the fact that the forms alike of our thought and our language are moulded upon the material world in which we live. In this world origination is in every case due to the effecting of a change. We call the effecting of the change action, and its reception passion. Thus, action and passion are different from the permanent relations consequent on them. But in the Godhead origination is eternal: it is not the result of change. Hence the term signifying action denotes not the production of the relation, but purely the relation of the Originator to the Originated. The terminology is unavoidable because the limitations of our experience force us to represent this relation as due to an act. Indeed throughout this whole subject we are hampered by the imperfection of human language as an instrument wherewith to express verities higher than the facts of the world. When, for instance, we say that the Son possesses filiation and spiration the terms seem to suggest that these are forms inherent in Him as in a subject. We know, indeed, that in the Divine Persons there can be no composition: they are absolutely simple. Yet we are forced to speak thus: for the one Personality, not withstanding its simplicity, is related to both the others, and by different relations. We cannot express this save by attributing to Him filiation and spiration (I:32:2).
Divine Mission
It has been seen that every action of God in regard of the created world proceeds from the Three Persons indifferently. In what sense, then, are we to understand such texts as "God sent . . . his Son into the world" (John 3:17), and "the Paraclete cometh, whom I will send you from the Father" (John 15:26)? What is meant by the mission of the Son and of the Holy Spirit? To this it is answered that mission supposes two conditions:
- That the person sent should in some way proceed from the sender and
- that the person sent should come to be at the place indicated.
The procession, however, may take place in various ways — by command, or counsel, or even origination. Thus we say that a king sends a messenger, and that a tree sends forth buds. The second condition, too, is satisfied either if the person sent comes to be somewhere where previously he was not, or if, although he was already there, he comes to be there in a new manner. Though God the Son was already present in the world by reason of His Godhead, His Incarnation made Him present there in a new way. In virtue of this new presence and of His procession from the Father, He is rightly said to have been sent into the world. So, too, in regard to the mission of the Holy Spirit. The gift of grace renders the Blessed Trinity present to the soul in a new manner: that is, as the object of direct, though inchoative, knowledge and as the object of experimental love. By reason of this new mode of presence common to the whole Trinity, the Second and the Third Persons, inasmuch as each receives the Divine Nature by means of a procession, may be said to be sent into the soul.
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| Quotes from the Early Church Fathers: On the Trinity |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 07:03 AM - Forum: Fathers of the Church
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Quotes from the Early Church Fathers: On the Trinity
Taken from here [slightly adapted]
The following are excerpts of Trinitarian doctrines found in the early Church Fathers writings. The time frame spans from after the Apostles to Saint Augustine.
St. Ignatius A.D. 30–107
Since, also, there is but one unbegotten Being, God, even the Father; and one only-begotten Son, God, the Word and man; and one Comforter, the Spirit of truth; and also one preaching, and one faith, and one baptism;
- The Epistle of Ignatius to the Philadelphians Chapter IV
But the Holy Spirit does not speak His own things, but those of Christ, and that not from himself, but from the Lord; even as the Lord also announced to us the things that He received from the Father. For, says He, “the word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father’s, who sent Me.” And says He of the Holy Spirit, “He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever things He shall hear from Me.” And He says of Himself to the Father, “I have,” says He, “glorified Thee upon the earth; I have finished the work which, Thou gavest Me; I have manifested Thy name to men.” And of the Holy Ghost, “He shall glorify Me, for He receives of Mine.”
- The Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians Chapter IX
For if there is one God of the universe, the Father of Christ, “of whom are all things;” and one Lord Jesus Christ, our [Lord], “by whom are all things;” and also one Holy Spirit, who wrought in Moses, and in the prophets and apostles;
- The Epistle of Ignatius to the Philippians Chapter I
St. Justin Martyr A.D. 110–165
For, in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the washing with water.
- The First Apology Chapter LXI
St. Ireneaus A.D. 120–202
The Church, though dispersed through our the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one,” . . .
- Against Heresies Book I Chapter X
The rule of truth which we hold, is, that there is one God Almighty, who made all things by His Word, and fashioned and formed, out of that which had no existence, all things which exist. Thus saith the Scripture, to that effect “By the Word of the Lord were the heavens established, and all the might of them, by the spirit of His mouth.” And again, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made.” There is no exception or deduction stated; but the Father made all things by Him, whether visible or invisible, objects of sense or of intelligence, temporal, on account of a certain character given them, or eternal; and these eternal things He did not make by angels, or by any powers separated from His Ennœa. For God needs none of all these things, but is He who, by His Word and Spirit, makes, and disposes, and governs all things, and commands all things into existence,—He who formed the world (for the world is of all),—He who fashioned man,—He [who] is the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, above whom there is no other God, nor initial principle, nor power, nor pleroma,—He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as we shall prove.
- Against Heresies Book I Chapter XXII
Therefore neither would the Lord, nor the Holy Spirit, nor the apostles, have ever named as God, definitely and absolutely, him who was not God, unless he were truly God; nor would they have named any one in his own person Lord, except God the Father ruling over all, and His Son who has received dominion from His Father over all creation, as this passage has it: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.” Here the [Scripture] represents to us the Father addressing the Son; He who gave Him the inheritance of the heathen, and subjected to Him all His enemies. Since, therefore, the Father is truly Lord, and the Son truly Lord, the Holy Spirit has fitly designated them by the title of Lord.
- Against Heresies Book III Chapter VI
For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things, to whom also He speaks, saying, “Let Us make man after Our image and likeness;” He taking from Himself the substance of the creatures [formed], and the pattern of things made, and the type of all the adornments in the world.
- Against Heresies Book IV Chapter XX
St. Clement of Alexandria A.D. 153–217
O mystic marvel! The universal Father is one, and one the universal Word; and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere, . . .
- The Instructor. Book I Chapter VI
Tertullian A.D. 145–220
In the course of time, then, the Father forsooth was born, and the Father suffered, God Himself, the Lord Almighty, whom in their preaching they declare to be Jesus Christ. We, however, as we indeed always have done (and more especially since we have been better instructed by the Paraclete, who leads men indeed into all truth), believe that there is one only God, but under the following dispensation, or οἰκονομία , as it is called, that this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. Him we believe to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and to have been born of her—being both Man and God, the Son of Man and the Son of God, and to have been called by the name of Jesus Christ; we believe Him to have suffered, died, and been buried, according to the Scriptures, and, after He had been raised again by the Father and taken back to heaven, to be sitting at the right hand of the Father, and that He will come to judge the quick and the dead; who sent also from heaven from the Father, according to His own promise, the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.
But keeping this prescriptive rule inviolate, still some opportunity must be given for reviewing (the statements of heretics), with a view to the instruction and protection of divers persons; were it only that it may not seem that each perversion of the truth is condemned without examination, and simply prejudged; especially in the case of this heresy, which supposes itself to possess the pure truth, in thinking that one cannot believe in One Only God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are the very selfsame Person. As if in this way also one were not All, in that All are of One, by unity (that is) of substance; while the mystery of the dispensation is still guarded, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three, however, not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. How they are susceptible of number without division, will be shown as our treatise proceeds.
- Against Praxeas Chapter II
The simple, indeed, (I will not call them unwise and unlearned,) who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One), on the ground that their very rule of faith withdraws them from the world’s plurality of gods to the one only true God; not understanding that, although He is the one only God, He must yet be believed in with His own οἰκονομία . The numerical order and distribution of the Trinity they assume to be a division of the Unity; whereas the Unity which derives the Trinity out of its own self is so far from being destroyed, that it is actually supported by it. They are constantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves pre-eminently the credit of being worshippers of the One God; just as if the Unity itself with irrational deductions did not produce heresy, and the Trinity rationally considered constitute the truth.
- Against Praxeas Chapter III
But as for me, who derive the Son from no other source but from the substance of the Father, and (represent Him) as doing nothing without the Father’s will, and as having received all power from the Father, how can I be possibly destroying the Monarchy from the faith, when I preserve it in the Son just as it was committed to Him by the Father? The same remark (I wish also to be formally) made by me with respect to the third degree in the Godhead, because I believe the Spirit to proceed from no other source than from the Father through the Son.
- Against Praxeas Chapter IV
Bear always in mind that this is the rule of faith which I profess; by it I testify that the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit are inseparable from each other, and so will you know in what sense this is said. Now, observe, my assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that They are distinct from Each Other. This statement is taken in a wrong sense by every uneducated as well as every perversely disposed person, as if it predicated a diversity, in such a sense as to imply a separation among the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit. I am, moreover, obliged to say this, when (extolling the Monarchy at the expense of the Economy) they contend for the identity of the Father and Son and Spirit, that it is not by way of diversity that the Son differs from the Father, but by distribution: it is not by division that He is different, but by distinction; because the Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other in the mode of their being. For the Father is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole, as He Himself acknowledges: “My Father is greater than I.” In the Psalm His inferiority is described as being “a little lower than the angels.” Thus the Father is distinct from the Son, being greater than the Son, inasmuch as He who begets is one, and He who is begotten is another; He, too, who sends is one, and He who is sent is another; and He, again, who makes is one, and He through whom the thing is made is another.
Happily the Lord Himself employs this expression of the person of the Paraclete (Holy Spirit), so as to signify not a division or severance, but a disposition (of mutual relations in the Godhead); for He says, “I will pray the Father, and He shall send you another Comforter…even the Spirit of truth,” thus making the Paraclete distinct from Himself, even as we say that the Son is also distinct from the Father; so that He showed a third degree in the Paraclete, as we believe the second degree is in the Son, by reason of the order observed in the Economy. Besides, does not the very fact that they have the distinct names of Father and Son amount to a declaration that they are distinct in personality? For, of course, all things will be what their names represent them to be; and what they are and ever will be, that will they be called; and the distinction indicated by the names does not at all admit of any confusion, because there is none in the things which they designate. “Yes is yes, and no is no; for what is more than these, cometh of evil.”
- Against Praxeas Chapter IX
Origen A.D. 185–254
From all which we learn that the person of the Holy Spirit was of such authority and dignity, that saving baptism was not complete except by the authority of the most excellent Trinity of them all, i.e., by the naming of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and by joining to the unbegotten God the Father, and to His only-begotten Son, the name also of the Holy Spirit. . . . Nevertheless it seems proper to inquire what is the reason why he who is regenerated by God unto salvation has to do both with Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and does not obtain salvation unless with the co-operation of the entire Trinity; and why it is impossible to become partaker of the Father or the Son without the Holy Spirit.
- Origen De Principiis. Book I Chapter III
But in our desire to show the divine benefits bestowed upon us by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Trinity is the fountain of all holiness, we have fallen, in what we have said, into a digression, having considered that the subject of the soul, which accidentally came before us, should be touched on, although cursorily, seeing we were discussing a cognate topic relating to our rational nature. We shall, however, with the permission of God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, more conveniently consider in the proper place the subject of all rational beings, which are distinguished into three genera and species.
- Origen De Principiis. Book I Chapter IV
For the end is always like the beginning: and, therefore, as there is one end to all things, so ought we to understand that there was one beginning; and as there is one end to many things, so there spring from one beginning many differences and varieties, which again, through the goodness of God, and by subjection to Christ, and through the unity of the Holy Spirit, are recalled to one end, which is like unto the beginning: all those, viz., who, bending the knee at the name of Jesus, make known by so doing their subjection to Him: and these are they who are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: by which three classes the whole universe of things is pointed out, those, viz., who from that one beginning were arranged, each according to the diversity of his conduct, among the different orders, in accordance with their desert; for there was no goodness in them by essential being, as in God and His Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. For in the Trinity alone, which is the author of all things, does goodness exist in virtue of essential being; while others possess it as an accidental and perishable quality, and only then enjoy blessedness, when they participate in holiness and wisdom, and in divinity itself.
- Origen De Principiis. Book I Chapter VI
After these points, now, we proved to the best of our power in the preceding pages that all things which exist were made by God, and that there was nothing which was not made, save the nature of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and that God, who is by nature good, desiring to have those upon whom He might confer benefits, and who might rejoice in receiving His benefits, created creatures worthy (of this), i.e., who were capable of receiving Him in a worthy manner, who, He says, are also begotten by Him as his sons. He made all things, moreover, by number and measure. For there is nothing before God without either limit or measure. For by His power He comprehends all things, and He Himself is comprehended by the strength of no created thing, because that nature is known to itself alone. For the Father alone knoweth the Son, and the Son alone knoweth the Father, and the Holy Spirit alone searcheth even the deep things of God.
- Origen De Principiis. Book IV Chapter I.35
If the heavenly virtues, then, partake of intellectual light, i.e., of divine nature, because they participate in wisdom and holiness, and if human souls, have partaken of the same light and wisdom, and thus are mutually of one nature and of one essence,—then, since the heavenly virtues are incorruptible and immortal, the essence of the human soul will also be immortal and incorruptible. And not only so, but because the nature of Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, whose intellectual light alone all created things have a share, is incorruptible and eternal, it is altogether consistent and necessary that every substance which partakes of that eternal nature should last for ever, and be incorruptible and eternal, so that the eternity of divine goodness may be understood also in this respect, that they who obtain its benefits are also eternal. But as, in the instances referred to, a diversity in the participation of the light was observed, when the glance of the beholder was described as being duller or more acute, so also a diversity is to be noted in the participation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, varying with the degree of zeal or capacity of mind.
- Origen De Principiis. Book IV Chapter I.36
St. Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria A.D. 200–265
The individual names uttered by me can neither be separated from one another, nor parted. I spoke of the Father, and before I made mention of the Son I already signified Him in the Father. I added the Son; and the Father, even although I had not previously named Him, had already been absolutely comprehended in the Son. I added the Holy Spirit; but, at the same time, I conveyed under the name whence and by whom He proceeded. But they are ignorant that neither the Father, in that He is Father, can be separated from the Son, for that name is the evident ground of coherence and conjunction; nor can the Son be separated from the Father, for this word Father indicates association between them. And there is, moreover, evident a Spirit who can neither be disjoined from Him who sends, nor from Him who brings Him. How, then, should I who use such names think that these are absolutely divided and separated the one from the other? . . . Thus, indeed, we expand the indivisible Unity into a Trinity; and again we contract the Trinity, which cannot be diminished, into a Unity.
(From the Same Second Book.)In the beginning was the Word. But that was not the Word which produced the Word. For “the Word was with God.” The Lord is Wisdom; it was not therefore Wisdom that produced Wisdom; for “I was that” says He, “wherein He delighted.” Christ is truth; but “blessed,” says He, “is the God of truth.”
(The Conclusion of the Entire Treatise.)In accordance with all these things, the form, moreover, and rule being received from the elders who have lived before us, we also, with a voice in accordance with them, will both acquit ourselves of thanks to you, and of the letter which we are now writing. And to God the Father, and His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
- The Works of Dionysius. Extant Fragments. Part I Chapter IV
St. Cyprian A.D. 200–258
Finally, when, after the resurrection, the apostles are sent by the Lord to the heathens, they are bidden to baptize the Gentiles “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” How, then, do some say, that a Gentile baptized without, outside the Church, yea, and in opposition to the Church, so that it be only in the name of Jesus Christ, everywhere, and in whatever manner, can obtain remission of sin, when Christ Himself commands the heathen to be baptized in the full and united Trinity?
- Epistle LXXII.5.18
St. Augustine of Hippo A.D. 354–430
Those holy angels come to the knowledge of God not by audible words, but by the presence to their souls of immutable truth, i.e., of the only-begotten Word of God; and they know this Word Himself, and the Father, and their Holy Spirit, and that this Trinity is indivisible, and that the three persons of it are one substance, and that there are not three Gods but one God; and this they so know that it is better understood by them than we are by ourselves.
- Augustine The City of God Book 11 Chapter 29
The true objects of enjoyment, then, are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all, and common to all who enjoy Him, if He is an object, and not rather the cause of all objects, or indeed even if He is the cause of all. For it is not easy to find a name that will suitably express so great excellence, unless it is better to speak in this way: The Trinity, one God, of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things. Thus the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and each of these by Himself, is God, and at the same time they are all one God; and each of them by Himself is a complete substance, and yet they are all one substance. The Father is not the Son nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is not the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is not the Father nor the Son: but the Father is only Father, the Son is only Son, and the Holy Spirit is only Holy Spirit. To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power. In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality; and these three attributes are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, and all harmonious because of the Holy Spirit.
- On Christian Doctrine Book I. Chapter 5.5
Wherefore, our Lord God helping, we will undertake to render, as far as we are able, that very account which they so importunately demand: viz., that the Trinity is the one and only and true God, and also how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are rightly said, believed, understood, to be of one and the same substance or essence; in such wise that they may not fancy themselves mocked by excuses on our part, but may find by actual trial, both that the highest good is that which is discerned by the most purified minds, and that for this reason it cannot be discerned or understood by themselves, because the eye of the human mind, being weak, is dazzled in that so transcendent light, unless it be invigorated by the nourishment of the righteousness of faith.
- On the Trinity Book I. Chapter 2.4
And I would make this pious and safe agreement, in the presence of our Lord God, with all who read my writings, as well in all other cases as, above all, in the case of those which inquire into the unity of the Trinity, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; because in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.
- On the Trinity Book I. Chapter 3.5
All those Catholic expounders of the divine Scriptures, both Old and New, whom I have been able to read, who have written before me concerning the Trinity, Who is God, have purposed to teach, according to the Scriptures, this doctrine, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit intimate a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality; and therefore that they are not three Gods, but one God: although the Father hath begotten the Son, and so He who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and so He who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, Himself also co-equal with the Father and the Son, and pertaining to the unity of the Trinity. Yet not that this Trinity was born of the Virgin Mary, and crucified under Pontius Pilate, and buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven, but only the Son. Nor, again, that this Trinity descended in the form of a dove upon Jesus when He was baptized; nor that, on the day of Pentecost, after the ascension of the Lord, when “there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind,” the same Trinity “sat upon each of them with cloven tongues like as of fire,” but only the Holy Spirit. Nor yet that this Trinity said from heaven, “Thou art my Son,” whether when He was baptized by John, or when the three disciples were with Him in the mount, or when the voice sounded, saying, “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again;” but that it was a word of the Father only, spoken to the Son; although the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as they are indivisible, so work indivisibly. This is also my faith, since it is the Catholic faith.
- On the Trinity Book I. Chapter 4.7
Some persons, however, find a difficulty in this faith; when they hear that the Father is God, and the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God, and yet that this Trinity is not three Gods, but one God; and they ask how they are to understand this: especially when it is said that the Trinity works indivisibly in everything that God works, and yet that a certain voice of the Father spoke, which is not the voice of the Son; and that none except the Son was born in the flesh, and suffered, and rose again, and ascended into heaven; and that none except the Holy Spirit came in the form of a dove. They wish to understand how the Trinity uttered that voice which was only of the Father; and how the same Trinity created that flesh in which the Son only was born of the Virgin; and how the very same Trinity itself wrought that form of a dove, in which the Holy Spirit only appeared. Yet, otherwise, the Trinity does not work indivisibly, but the Father does some things, the Son other things, and the Holy Spirit yet others: or else, if they do some things together, some severally, then the Trinity is not indivisible. It is a difficulty, too, to them, in what manner the Holy Spirit is in the Trinity, whom neither the Father nor the Son, nor both, have begotten, although He is the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son.
- On the Trinity Book I. Chapter 5.8.
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| Trinity Sunday |
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Posted by: Stone - 05-30-2021, 06:09 AM - Forum: Pentecost
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FEAST OF THE HOLY TRINITY
From Fr. Leonard Goffine's Explanations of the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays, Holydays, and Festivals throughout the Ecclesiastical Year 36th edition, 1880
This festival is celebrated on the Sunday after Pentecost, because as soon as the apostles
were instructed and consoled by the Holy Ghost, they began to preach openly that which Christ had taught them.
Why do we celebrate this festival?
That we may openly profess our faith in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is the first of Christian truths, the foundation of the Christian religion, and the most sublime of all mysteries; and that we may render thanks, to the Father for having created us, to the Son for having redeemed us, and to the Holy Ghost for having sanctified us.
In praise and honor of the most Holy Trinity, the Church sings at the Introit of this day's Mass:
INTROIT Blessed be the holy Trinity and undivided Unity: we will give glory to him, because he hath shown his mercy to us: (Tob. XII.) O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is thy name in all the earth! (Ps. VIII. 1.) Glory be to the Father, etc.
COLLECT Almighty, everlasting God, who hast granted to Thy servants, in the confession of the true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of Thy, majesty, to adore the Unity: grant that, by steadfastness in the same faith, we may ever be defended from all adversities. Thro'.
EPISTLE (ROM XI. 33-36.) O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and recompense shall be made him? For of him, and by him, and in him, are all things: to him be glory forever. Amen.
Quote:EXPLANATION St. Paul's exclamations, in this epistle, are caused by the inscrutable judgment of God in rejecting the Jews and calling the Gentiles. The Church makes use of these words to express her admiration for the incomprehensible mystery of the most Holy Trinity, which surpasses our understanding, and yet is the worthy object of our faith, hope and love. Although neither angels nor men can fathom this mystery, it cannot be difficult for the sound human intellect to believe it, since it is indubitably and evidently revealed by God, arid we, in many natural and human things, accept for true and certain much that we cannot comprehend. Let us submit our intellect, there fore, and yield ourselves up to faith; as there was indeed a time when men were martyred, when even persons of all ages and conditions preferred to die rather than to abandon this faith, so let us rather wait until our faith is changed to contemplation, until we see the Triune God, face to face, as He is, and in the sight of that countenance become eternally happy. Thither should all our hopes, wishes,' and desires be directed, and we should cease all fruitless investigations, endeavoring by humble faith and active love, to prove worthy of the beatific vision; for if we do not love Him who is our all, our last end and aim, and lovingly desire Him, we will have to hope of one day possessing Him.
ASPIRATION O incomprehensible, Triune God! O Abyss of wisdom, power, and goodness! To Thee all glory and adoration! In Thee I lose myself; I cannot contain Thee, do Thou, contain me. I believe in Thee, though I cannot comprehend Thee; do Thou increase my faith; I hope in. Thee, for Thou art the source of all good; do Thou enliven my hope; I love Thee, because Thou art worthy, of all love; do Thou inflame ever more my love, that in Thy love I may live and die. Amen.
GOSPEL (Matt. XXVIII. 18-20.) At that time Jesus said to His disciples: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore; teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; 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.
Quote:EXPLANATION Christ being God had from all eternity the same power that His Father had; being man, He had this same power by the union of His divinity with His humanity, and on account of the infinite merits of His passion. In virtue of this power, He said to His apostles, before the ascension, that, as His Heavenly Father had sent Him, even so He sent them to all nations, without exception, to teach all that He had commanded, and to receive them, by means of baptism, into the Church; at the same time He promised to be with them to the end of the world, that is, that He would console them in suffering, strengthen them in persecution, preserve them from error, and always protect them and their successors, the bishops and priests, even unto the consummation of the world.
(See Instruction on the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church for the first Sunday after Easter.)
ASPIRATION Be with us, O Lord, for without Thee our pastors cannot produce fruit, nor their hearers profit anything from their words. Be with us always, for we always need Thy help. All power is given to Thee, Thou bast then the right to command, and we are bound to obey Thy commands which by Thy Church Thou bast made known to us. This we have promised in baptism, and now before Thee we renew those vows. Grant now that those promises which without Thee we could not have made, and without Thee cannot keep, may be fulfilled in our actions. Leave us not to ourselves, but be Thou with us, and make us obedient to Thee, that by cheerful submission to Thee true may receive happiness.
INSTRUCTION ON THE HOLY SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM
Going, therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matt. XXVIII. 19.)
Is Baptism a Sacrament?
Yes because in it the baptized person receives the grace of God by means of an external sign, instituted by Christ.
What is this external sign?
The immersion, or the pouring of water, accompanied by the words: "I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
What does the baptismal grace effect?
It removes original and actual sin; causing ,man to be spiritually born again, made a new creature, a child of God, and joint heir with Christ.
How many kinds of baptism are there?
There are three kinds: The baptism of desire, which consists in a heartfelt desire for the baptism of water, joined with a perfect love of God, or a perfect sorrow for sins committed, and with the purpose to obey all God's commands; the baptism of blood, which is received by those who suffer martyrdom for the true faith, without having received the baptism of water; the baptism of water, which is the Sacrament of Baptism.
What do the different ceremonies of this Sacrament signify?
They are the external signs of the effects which baptism produces inwardly upon the soul, and should impress us with deep reverence for this Sacrament.
Why is it customary to have a godfather or godmother?
That there may be a witness that the child has received baptism; that in case of the death of the parents, the sponsors may assume their place, and have the child instructed in the truths of religion. St. Augustine speaking of the duties of sponsors, very beautifully says: "They should use all care, often to admonish in true love their godchildren that they may strive to lead a pure life; they should warn them against all detraction, all improper songs, and keep them from pride, envy, anger, and revenge; they should watch over them that they may preserve the Catholic faith, attend the church services, listen to the word of God, and obey their parents and their pastors." Sponsors must therefore be true believers, and of unquestionable morality. No one, unless a Catholic can be chosen for a sponsor, because one who is not a Catholic would not instruct the child in the Catholic faith, or see that others do it; but would be more likely, as experience shows, to draw the child over to error.
What results from this sponsorship?
In baptism, as in confirmation, a spiritual affinity originates between, the sponsors, the one who baptizes or confirms, with the one baptized or confirmed, and with the parents, so that, by a decision of the Church a godfather or godmother cannot contract marriage with any of these parties, unless the impediment is removed by dispensation, that is, by a special permission received from a spiritual superior. But the sponsors have no spiritual relationship to each other.
Why has the Church instituted this spiritual relation?
From reverence for these holy Sacraments, and that by this spiritual bond the sponsors may be more closely connected with their godchildren, and be incited earnestly to discharge their obligation.
Why must the person to be baptized wait at the entrance of the church?
To indicate that until he has thrown off the yoke of sin, and submitted to Christ, and His authority, he is unworthy to enter, because Baptism is the door of God's grace, to the kingdom of heaven, and the communion of saints.
Why does the person receive a saint's name?
That by this name he may be enrolled, through baptism, into the number of Christians whom St. Paul calls saints; that he may have a patron and intercessor, and that the saint, whose name he bears, may be his model and example, by which he may regulate his own life.
Why does the priest breathe in the face of the one to be baptized?
In imitation of Christ who breathed on His apostles when He gave them the Holy Ghost. (John XX. 22.) St. Chrysostom says that in baptism supernatural life is given to the soul as God imparted natural life to Adam by breathing on him.
Why does the priest impose his hand so many times upon the head of the person to be baptized?
To show that he is now the property of God and is under His protection.
What do the many exorcisms signify?
That the evil spirit who previous to baptism holds the person in bondage is now commanded in the name of God to depart, that a dwelling?place may be prepared for the Holy Ghost.
Why is the person so often signed with the sign of the cross?
To signify that through the power of Christ's merits and of His death on the cross, baptism washes away original sin; that the person is to be henceforth a follower of Christ the Crucified, and as such must fight valiantly under the banner of the cross, against the enemies of his salvation, and must follow Christ on the way of the cross even unto death.
What does the salt signify which is put into the person's mouth?
It is an emblem of Christian wisdom and of preservation from the corruption of sin.
Why are his ears and nose touched with spittle?
That as Christ put spittle on the eyes. of the man born blind, thus restoring his sight, so by baptism, the spiritual blindness of the soul is removed, and his mind receives light to behold heavenly wisdom. Also, as St. Ambrose says, the candidate is thus instructed to open his ears to priestly, admonitions, and become a sweet odor of Christ.
Why does the priest ask: "Dust thou renounce the devil; and all his works, and all his pomps?"
That the Christian may know that his vocation requires him to renounce and combat the devil, his works, suggestions and pomps. Thus St. Ambrose very beautifully addresses a person just baptized: "When the priest asked: `Dust thou renounce the devil and all his works,' what didst thou reply? `I renounce them.' `Dost thou renounce the world, its lusts and its pomps?' `I renounce them.' Think of these promises, and let them never depart from thy mind. Thou hast given thy hand?writing to the priest,, who stands for Christ; when thou host given thy note to a man, a thou art bound to him. Now thy word is not on earth but preserved in heaven; say not thou knowest nothing of this promise; this exculpates thee no better than the excuse of a soldier who in time of battle should say he knew not that by becoming a soldier he would have to fight."
Why is the person anointed on the shoulder and breast with holy oil?
As SS. Ambrose and Chrysostom explain this is done to strengthen him to fight bravely for Christ; as the combatants of old anointed themselves with oil before they entered the arena, so is he anointed, on the breast, that he may gain courage and force, bravely to combat the world, the flesh, and the devil, and on the shoulder, that he may be strong to bear constantly and untiringly, the yoke of Christ's commands, and persue the toilsome course of life in unwavering. fidelity to God and His holy law.
Why are, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed said at baptism?
That, when the child is a grown person an acknowledgment of faith may by this means be made m the face of the Church; when children are baptized, these prayers are said by the sponsors who are thus reminded to see that their godchildren are well instructed in these as in all other Christian truths.
Why does the priest expressly ask the person if he will be baptized?
Because as man, through Adam, of his own free will obeyed the devil, so now when he would be received among the number of Christ's children, he must, to obtain salvation, of his own free will obey the precepts of God.
Why is water poured three times upon the person's head?
This is done, as St. Gregory the Great writes, in token that man after this thrice-repeated ablution rises from the death of sin, as Christ, after His three days' burial, rose from the dead. (Rom. VI. 4.5.) In early times the candidate for baptism was immersed three times in the water. For many 'reasons this custom has been abolished.
Why is the person anointed on the top of the head with chrism?
This anointing is, so to speak, the crown of the young Christian. As in the Old Law the kings were anointed, (I Kings X. 1.) as Jesus is the Anointed One, and as the Apostle St. Peter calls the Christians a chosen race, a kingly priesthood, a holy people, (I Peter II. 9.) so the baptized by means of this unction is embodied in Christ, the Anointed One, and participates in His priesthood and kingly dignity. What an exalted position is the Christian's! He is the anointed one of the Lord, and in a spiritual sense a priest, because he constantly brings himself to the Lord God as a pleasing sacrifice in prayer, mortification, &c. He is king when he rules over his inclinations, submits them to reason, and reason to the Lord. Besides this he is king by the claims which, through baptism, he possesses to the kingdom of heaven. Through the chrism he becomes the blessed temple of the Holy Ghost, the sacred vessel which in time, through communion, will contain the precious body and blood of Christ. How does he desecrate this temple when, by grievous sin, he tramples this exalted dignity under his feet and. stains the temple of the Holy Ghost, his soul!
What does the white robe signify?
The holy Fathers teach that this represents the glory to which by baptism we are born again; the purity and beauty with which the soul, having been washed from sin in the Sacrament of baptism, is adorned, and the innocence which the baptized should preserve through his whole life.
Why is a lighted candle placed in his hand?
It is an emblem of the Christian doctrine which preserves the baptized from the darkness of error, ignorance, and sin, illumines his understanding, and leads him safely in the way of virtue; it represents the flame of. love for God and our neighbor which the baptized should henceforth continually carry, like the five prudent virgins, (Matt. XXV. 13.) on the path to meet the Lord, that when his life is ended he may be admitted to the eternal wedding feast; it signifies also the light of good example which he should keep ever burning.
Who is the minister of this Sacrament?
The ordinary minister is the priest of the Church; but in case of necessity any layman or woman, even the father or mother can baptize. Parents, however, should not baptize their own child unless no other Catholic can be procured. The reason why lay persons are permitted to baptize is that no one may be deprived of salvation.
What must be observed particularly in private baptism?
The person who baptizes must be careful to use only natural water, which must be poured on the child's head saying at the same time the words: I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; having at the same time the intention of baptizing as the Church does, in the manner required by Christ.
INSTRUCTION ON THE RENEWAL OF BAPTISMAL VOWS
All the graces and dignities which we receive in baptism, God secures to us for the future, only on condition that we keep our baptismal vows. Every Christian in baptism makes a bond with God through the meditation of Christ who has sealed it with His blood. This bond consists, on man's part, in the promise to renounce forever the devil, all his works and all his pomps, that is, constantly to suppress the threefold lust of the eyes, the flesh and the pride of life, by which the devil leads us to sin, and to believe all that God has revealed, and all that His holy Church proposes to our belief, and diligently and properly to make use of all the means of salvation. On the part of God this bond consists in cleansing us from all sin, in bestowing the gifts of the Holy Ghost, in adopting us as His children, and. in the assurance to the inheritance of heaven. This bond will never be broken by God who is infinitely true and faithful, but it is often violated by weak and fickle man. In compliance with the desire of the Church we should often reflect upon it, and from time to time renew it in the sight of God. This should be done particularly before receiving the holy Sacrament of Confirmation, before first Communion, on the vigils of Easter and Pentecost, at the blessing of baptismal water, on the anniversaries of our baptism and confirmation, before making any solemn vow, before entering into matrimony and when in danger of death. This renewal of baptismal vows can be made in the following manner: Placing ourselves in the presence of God, we kneel down, fold our hands, and say with fervent devotion:
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born and suffered for us.
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.
I renounce the devil; all his works and all his pomps.
Christ Jesus ! With Thee I am united, to Thee alone I cling, Thee only will I follow, for Thee I desire to live and die. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
DOCTRINE ON THE HOLY TRINITY
What is God?
GOD is the most perfect being, the highest, best Good, who exists, from all eternity, by whom heaven and earth are create, and from whom all things derive and hold life and existence, for of Him, and by Him, and in Him are all things. (Rom. XI. 36.)
What is the Blessed Trinity?
The Blessed Trinity is this one God who is one in nature and threefold in person, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Is each of these three persons God?
Yes, because each of them has the divine nature and substance.
Are they not three Gods?
No, because all three of these persons have one and the same divine nature and substance.
Is any one of these three persons older, mightier, or greater than the other?
By, no means, they are all three from eternity entirely equal to each .other in divine omnipotence greatness and majesty, and must, therefore, be equally adored and venerated.
Ought one to give himself up to the investigation of the most Blessed Trinity?
No; "For," says the saintly Bishop Martin, "the mystery of the Trinity cannot be comprehended by the human intellect, no one however eloquent can exhaust it; if entire books were written about it, so that the whole world were filled with them, yet the unspeakable wisdom of God would not be expressed. God who is indescribable, can in no way be described. When the human mind ceases to speak of Him, then it but begins to speak." Therefore the true Christian throws his intellect under the feet of faith, not seeking to understand that which the human mind can as little comprehend, as a tiny hole in the sand can contain the immeasurable sea. An humble and active faith will make us worthy some day in the other world, to see with ' the greatest bliss this mystery as it is, for in this consists eternal life, that by a pious life we may glorify and know the only true God, Christ Jesus His Son, and the Holy Ghost.
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