Catholicism
Never, even by perfecting itself without cessation, would the simple cult of men have attained God, as it attains Him in the Man-God. But, unless one stops it halfway, the religion of Christ can only be the Catholic religion.
Christ, in fact, is not complete without the Church, which prolongs Him, and the Church which prolongs Christ is the Roman Church. We must briefly consider these two truths one after the other.
The Man-God is not complete without the Church, which is His prolongation.
To know what the complete Christ is, we must consult Scripture and Tradition, as we did in order to know what Christ is as an isolated individual.
But such a study would demand a long development, which may be found in other works.[1] Here some indications will suffice.
In Scripture we shall consider only some of the principal books. In the first place the Synoptic Gospels. They furnish only some isolated traits, but they are extremely clear. The Kingdom of God, which Jesus came to establish, is presented to us as closely united to the Saviour; it implies the perpetual presence of Jesus in the midst of His own; still more, a unity between Him and the faithful. So, when the Judge on the last day shall pronounce the definitive sentence on our race, He will sum up all our history and all the history of the Kingdom in an affirmation of identity: "I was hungry," He will say, "and you gave Me to eat; thirsty and you gave Me to drink; I was naked and you clothed Me." He alone then, in some sort, will have truly existed on the earth, and to Him alone will have been done all that has been done.
Then, continues Saint Paul, Christ and his own form not two, but one; one organism, one body, one man, one only Christ. He is the Head, they the members, and He the whole. Jesus Himself came down from Heaven to teach this doctrine to Paul: "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest," He said to him; and thereafter Paul wished to know nothing else. Everywhere he announces that Christ is in the faithful and the faithful in Christ; that the life, the death, and above all the resurrection and the glorification of the Saviour are continued in men, and that they are even their only hope and their only justice here below. God does not see nor bless them except in His well-beloved Son; thenceforth, all, Jews, Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians, are equally called to the same supernatural dignity in the one Body of Christ.
So, Saint John adds, pushing the same doctrine to its last consequences, Christians, united in Christ, are, in Him, something at once divine and human, as He Himself is at the same time man and God. The Incarnation is continued in the grace which divinises, and the fourth Gospel was written only to give this total view of the plan of God: that Christians might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that, believing, they might have life in Him. Between the eternal generation of the Son and our justification in the Man-God, there is no division: as Christ lives of the Father, Christians live of Christ; He is the Vine, they are the branches; He is the Light and they see in Him; they dwell in Him and He in them.
We can conceive of nothing stronger than the last words of Jesus in the last of His discourses. Jesus asks of His Father that, as He is one with the Father, so His own, among themselves, may be one. The unity of Christians, the unity of the Mystical Body, has its beginning and its exemplar in the unity of the divine Persons. A participated unity; a very imperfect participation, and one which comes to us only in the measure in which all is common between the head and the members. But a real participation, and one which even forces the love of the Father to descend to the last of the faithful, because thus far Christ extends: ut dilectio, qua dilexisti Me, in ipsis sit, et ego in ipsis. The Mystical Body is theandric, through the Man-God and in imitation of the Man-God.
On this inspired theme Christian thought has meditated through the ages.
And just as Christ assumes His fulness in the Church, this truth has found its full expression in ecclesiastical dogma.
Little by little, a doctrine has been elaborated, which, in formulating the Incarnation, has formulated at the same time the vivification of men in the Incarnate Word. It was the work of ages, as we have already said in speaking of Christological dogma; it was an ecclesiastical work also, in which, one after the other, all the great theological authorities have co-operated. It comes to an end in the fifth century in the teaching of Saint Cyril of Alexandria.
For the doctor of the Incarnation, as for the evangelist of the Incarnation there is continuity between the Incarnation and the vivification of Christians in the Incarnate Word. The Word has assumed humanity, he says; but, He is life; it must then follow that His humanity too is life, in its own way. It must then have in it that wherewith to vivify before God the entire Church. The entire Church, and each Christian in the Church, will live then with a life which shall be the prolongation of the life of Christ, and Ecclesiology, in consequence, will be only a continuation of Christology.
The Scholastics, for their part, though they considered things from a completely different point of view and with a very different method, have arrived at a similar system. The humanity of Christ, they teach, since it constitutes only one person with God, has in plenitude that intrinsic divinisation, which is grace. It must then, have it in sufficient abundance to effect, in the Church, the intrinsic divinisation of all Christians. So, with them too, Christology, without ceasing to be Christology, becomes an Ecclesiology.
This harmony is instructive, as it shows how truly Christian doctrine lives, in Christ, a life which is one.
II
But, the Church which truly is the plenitude of the Man-God, is the Catholic Church. The doctrine of Chalcedon, we shall now see, is, unless one halts it half-way, the doctrine of Trent and of the Vatican: the teaching is the same with the same tone and the same sense, but articulated to the end.
Let us take then, some truths particularly essential to Christianity; let us compare the Catholic teaching on these points with that of the dissident sects, especially with the teaching of Protestantism, of which we are thinking especially here, and let us see on which side one is faithful to Christological dogma and, hence, to Jesus Christ.[2]
In the first place, what is the Christian life, the religion which is in us?
It is not a product of our nature, reply all Christians: it comes from Christ, and, like Christ, it comes from God.
And likewise, the Protestants will continue, it is only for Christ: He alone is holy, even in us, and we, we are nothing before Him. Only, His holiness is so vast that it covers our miseries, and God sees, in those who have the faith, only the splendid veil of the merits under which Christ hides them.
But in that case, says the Catholic Church, Christ is not truly the life of souls, since He does not make them live.
And if He is not holy enough to cause in them a real and intrinsic holiness, can we still say that He constitutes only one Person with the Holy of Holies? In the Saviour, the union between the divine nature and the human nature is perfect. Why then hold as separate, in them who are His members, the divine and the human, grace and nature?
Why then still speak, in the Christian, of a humanity corrupted and powerless to do good? In Christ, the two natures are most intimately united and His humanity neither subsists nor acts outside the divinity. How then, in Christians, could nature exist apart and act apart, escaping totally the grasp of the Word, which was made flesh?
But nature, of itself alone, is nothing from the supernatural point of view, the Protestants will say. Yes, without doubt; but such a contention is quite beside the point for, in fact, nature alone is so slight a thing apart from grace that it does not even have to be considered. It is merely that which grace lays hold on, sanctifies and divinises.
Christ is everything, they will say.—Yes, without doubt; but annihilation is not the object of His coming. He is all in us.—Yes; but there will be nothing there, if His entry into our soul consists only in driving us out. In order that He may be all, in order that our justification may neither add nor suppress anything in the mystery of the Incarnation, it must be the Incarnation mystically prolonged. But then our supernatural life, derived from that of Christ, must be analogous in us to what it is in Him. But in our Chief, the humanity is holy in itself, though not of itself. We must then say that in us also, who are His Body, it is holy in itself, though not of itself.
This then, is the Catholic doctrine of justification. It alone, as we see, is not ashamed of the Incarnation.
The same thing appears, and almost in the same manner, in the doctrine of good works.
We must do good, we must try to resemble the Incarnate Word in His acts and His dispositions of soul: all Christians declare this.
But, continue the Protestants, it must not be imagined that these good works have any efficacy in the work of salvation. Deo non fit additio. They are necessary, because God requires them: but they are useless, because, being finite, they can add nothing to the Infinite.
All this might be true, replies the Catholic Church, if the Word had not become flesh: one adds nothing to God; but God has joined Himself to humanity. Human action is then integrated in Christ in the theandric operation of one sole agent, the Man-God. In us, will it be so different from what it is in our Chief, that it will remain, even when we are incorporated in Him, the mere effect of our resources alone? Perish such a sufficiency and such a dereliction! Natural activity and supernatural activity are united in us— making all the necessary distinctions, for there are distinctions to be made here—as the two operations) human and divine, are united in Christ. No separation, no confusion either: "each form produces, but in communion with the other, what is proper to it," according to the formula of Saint Leo. "Non ego tamen, sed gratia Dei mecum," according to the formula of Saint Paul. What acts in our good works is not ourselves alone, nor grace alone, but we and grace with us. When the work is done, it has a divine value because of grace; it is ours, because of our operation, and it is a unit, because the grace of the Incarnation is the union of the divine and the human. We do then truly perform divine works worthy of eternal reward. To deny it would be to assert that the work of the Incarnation does not proceed to its normal term, that is to say, to the Mystical Body.
In order to make more apparent the continuity between the Catholic doctrine of good works and Christology, let us compare the role assigned by the two sides to human effort. The humanity of Christ has saved us, say the Fathers, but not by being the first principle of our salvation. In the beginning there was only the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and it is from Them that everything comes. In Christ, the first principle of everything is the Divinity. Only, in Christ, the Word unites itself to humanity, in order that its action may be more adapted to men and that men, in Him, may approach God. This mediating humanity is then for Him a means, an instrument, and the causality which it exercises is an instrumental causality. As the Scholastics, for the most part at least, have explained it, this instrumental causality is real, physical, and it even holds, among the instrumental causalities, a place apart, so excellent is it.
Coherent with itself and with Christian truth, Catholic Theology, in the doctrine of good works, merely adapts to Christian action this conception of the action of Christ. Our efforts have no value of themselves in the order of salvation; that is true. Nevertheless, God, Who has not disdained our race, makes use of them to sanctify us. They have then a wonderful power. And they have it, not by a kind of occasional causality, as if they were only the signal to which forces superior and altogether separate might respond. No, their virtue is in them, though not through them; they have a real efficacity, though secondary and derived; an instrumental efficacity; it cannot be better expressed, if we thoroughly understand that there is question of a free instrument, which, even when prevented by grace, is the initiator of its own action. Attached to Christ by mystic incorporation, as the humanity of Christ is attached to the Word by hypostatic union, they prolong in themselves, through Christ, the quality of instrument of God, which was in Christ. Humility, then, and forgetfulness of our interests, attachment, dependence, obedience: for the saving of ourselves, we are only instruments. But great-heartedness also, joy, gladness: in this divine work we have our active, our indispensable part to play.
We find here again, in the Catholic attitude, that same opposition of grandeur and lowliness, which, from Christ, passes into the Christian attitude. Only here, as the Incarnation goes on in us to the end of its mystic effect and as the extremes are completely in contact, it is in us that the difference shines out between divine grace and sinful humanity.
So the Church cries out for works, for human works, because the divinisation of the universe is at stake. Let the faithful mobilise in their entirety: let them use their greatest ingenuity to combine the surest spiritual doctrines; let them deploy, in order to sanctify themselves, all the energy, all the sagacity, all the responsibility of which men are capable in their own affairs. Therefore, in the field of collective missionary and Catholic action, let there be works —studies on methods, associations and discipline, even assessments, propaganda and advertising. The salvation of the world is a human affair, and, save for miracles and the sacraments, we know nothing, if not that men are responsible for the eternal life of men. Let nothing human then, be cruel enough to absent itself.
Integral humanism, therefore—or rather, supernatural humanism. This exaltation of all human resources has neither its beginning nor its end in man. We must respect our efforts, venerate our prayers, lift up esteem of our action to the dignity of a cult. But we must realize at the same time the lamentable insufficiency of all this equipment. If God is not their strength, they labor in vain who build the house. We must, then, have forgetfulness of ourselves, abnegation and humility. And also, as we shall say in another place, the spirit of penance, of sacrifice, of immolation, in union with Jesus Christ.
Humanism, yes, but one in which man must renounce inflating himself with empty importance, so that he may be taken up, as an instrument, in a work which surpasses him and which comprehends him. Our purpose is not to make ourselves robust and clever rational animals: the destiny of a member of the Saviour is to resemble the eternal Father.
Let us consider the same contrast on still another point. We refer to the human aspect which the work of God takes in us.
One of the reasons which prevent Protestants from really uniting our human action to the divine action is the banality, the heaviness of our effort. Our virtues are so tepid, our progress so imperceptible. How believe that God lives in this? If God lives in us, everything in us should march with His step.
Rigorism then: be of iron and impose on men, upon the instant, a perfect sanctity; or contempt: tell them once and for all to dream no more of mixing in the work of God. But, in any case, piety: do not assert that grace is in their heavy gait.
Catholic spiritual doctrine has never admitted these extremes. Deeply impressed by the fact that God shows Himself to us only in the Man-God, she declares that God's views of us are human. Grace does not turn the natural laws upside down any more than divinity has altered the human nature of the Saviour. Miracles, even interior miracles, are rare. The laws of our Psychology, of our action, of our manner of making progress, are the instruments of which God makes use and not obstacles over which He makes us leap. But in all this, hidden like the life of an organism and secret like the God from whom it comes, circulates the grace of God. The proper marvel of Christianity is not God, but the Man-God, and the marvel of the Christian religion, declares Christianity, is not what God has done alone, but what He has succeeded in making us do. Our efforts are lamentable miseries, certainly, if one compares them to God, and if one sees only their human aspect, but magnificences, if one realizes that they have sent out roots in our dust and that a divine sap is slowly working there.
If we pass now from the order of action to the order of knowledge, we shall see that here, too, Catholicism, and it alone, believes completely in the Incarnation.
Let us take, for example, the attitude towards theological science, for nothing is more characteristic.
Protestants, always on guard against infiltrations of the natural element into the supernatural, have branded it with shame as a monstrous mixture of human thoughts with the transcendent truth. The Greeks too have a certain suspicion for new systems and new words. As if the Word were not united to flesh in Christ. The Catholic Church on the other hand, from the age of the Fathers, has never hesitated to think about revelation, and never has it ceased nor will it ever cease to seek the most complete understanding of it, to organize it into a system; in brief, to make of it an object of science. She knows, she who prolongs Christ, that ever since, in Christ, the eternal light united itself to a human brain in the unity of a divine Person, the subsistent Truth is bound up with human intelligence. In the same way as Christ, because He is united to life, renders our actions salutary and vivifying, so, because He is one with the light, does He make our eyes luminous. And just as all sanctity, in the Church, is not an addition to the sanctity of Christ, but merely an effect and an efflorescence of that which is in Him in fulness, so too, all that Catholic Theology points out of unity and of beauty in revelation only renders more approachable and more human the plenitude of truth, which is our Chief.
If then, in Theology, we must distinguish carefully between what is a truth of faith and what is a theological explanation, we must not, however, separate the two. The two natures in Christ are united inconfuse, inseparabiliter; so too, in Him, our stammerings are, not principles evidently, but still bearers of eternal light.
We have up to this point considered Christians especially in their separate individualities. It remains to see them in their collective life. Here, too, and here especially, the Catholic conception of the Christian life is alone faithful to the Incarnation.
The humanity of Christ, says the dogma of Chalcedon, because it is united to the Word of life, is the life of the world. The entire world then is vivified by one alone.
Consequently, continues the Catholic dogmatic teaching, the life of each of the faithful communicates, in its principle, with the life of all the others. It is then, though it becomes completely personal to each individual, a universal thing at bottom. Just as, by their own virtue, the actions of Christ were salutary for all humanity, so, by the intrinsic virtue which they have from their intrinsic incorporation in Christ, all the meritorious acts of the faithful co-operate in the salvation of the entire world.
This doctrine of the communion of saints, which is only an aspect of the Catholic doctrine on good works, has, like it, aroused the objections of Protestants.
Blasphemy against Christ, they have said. There is an injury to the universal mediation of the Saviour in this multiplication of salutary interventions. Christ, alone, has done enough for all.
The Catholic Church takes a different position. Refusing still and always to separate in us what God has united in Christ, she sees the mediation of Christ as excellent enough to prolong itself (in lower degree but really) as far as the Mystical Body, through grace, extends the Incarnation. Like the Saviour, all Christians and all the acts of Christians are Catholic and universal. They have then, taken all together, a unity. And this unity, all the Christian confessions declare, is that of Christ.
Also, continue the Protestants, it is not right to add any other. The Church has only one Chief: the Man-God; no man, were he Peter or the Pope, can without blasphemy declare himself the universal pastor.
On the contrary, affirms the Church, in order that the Man-God may remain always our only Chief, it is necessary that the Popes be always His vicars. The unity of the Church, in the Man-God, should be human, and a human unity is a man; and on the part of the Church, which still struggles on the earth, it ought to be a man living on the earth, visible, real, in flesh and bone, as the prolongation of the Incarnation is, on this earth. Not only the words of the Saviour assure it; but even His person and the role played by His visible humanity render it highly admissible: there should be always here below a man whose function, not his person evidently, is that of Jesus. A simple accord, the simple unanimity of a senate of bishops or of patriarchs would not suffice: these tend to exhaustion in the hours of crisis and are not readily discernible in stormy times, precisely when the rallying sign should be most incontestable. These purely spiritual and interior unities are not the ones which God chose when He became incarnate, nor are they the ones which suit our nature, which He has united to Himself.
As it is one in Christ before multiplying itself through deficient participations in the faithful, the Christian life should be one before being multiple and in order to have the power to be multiple.
The Protestants look upon ecclesiastical unity as the result of common aspirations spread abroad among Christians, and as the social aspect of the supernatural. Ecclesiastical authority, in its turn, is for them only the condition of unity and of mutual agreement, a simple function of the collectivity. So, they say, it should not embarrass at all the expansion of private piety nor the liberty of the children of God.
Yes, says the Church, if the Incarnation had not occurred. But, in the supernatural order it is Christ alone who causes life and movement to flow into His own. Unity and authority are then the principle of the multitude of members, and are far from being an emanation of it.
But, the grace of the Incarnation continues to vivify us. God occupies Himself with us, not in a manner altogether interior and spiritual, but in a visible manner. Grace forms a unit with exterior rites, with gestures, with persons. In this consists what we may call the sacramental order, of which the sacraments are the perfect realization, but whose principle rules all the economy of salvation. The entire Church is like a vast sacrament, in the wide sense of the word: a visible form of invisible grace, an empiric organism which serves as an instrument and as a canal for the divine life.
Also, submission to the magisterium, observance of ecclesiastical precepts—and still more, total obedience, religious obedience—are not constraints, but the necessary bonds which attach the members to the body and the tool to the worker; and the closer the bonds the more beneficent they are. Constraint and complete suffocation result when one is cut off from life and from truth.
The Christian life, once again, is only a prolongation of the life of Christ. Alone among Christian confessions, Catholicism is completely Christian.
III
Catholicism is not then one of the Christian religions, but "The Christian Religion"; just as Christianity is, not one of the human religions, but "The Religion."
In the presence of the other Christian confessions its attitude is at once simple and complex: because its purity and its totality are the criterion for judging what is mixed and incomplete in them.
On the one hand, they possess authentic Christian elements, in variable quantities, certainly, and tending at times, alas! towards zero. But they possess them: they believe in the Incarnation, in our union in Christ with the Father and the Spirit; they recommend the filial attitude towards God, confidence, humility, prayer; they have the Our Father, the Sign of the Cross, apostolic rites, and even veritable sacraments. These gifts of heaven conserve their transcendent value, whatever may be the sins of us Christians, who have broken by our faults the unity of Christ. Wherever they are found they claim from us a veneration full of love, and Protestantism, because of them and in spite of everything, is holy.
But this veneration cannot degenerate into doctrinal indifference. In fact, alongside the Christian elements which it conserves, Protestantism has placed a negation. Following a natural repugnance to admitting that our substance, our acts, our knowledge, our ecclesiastical unity and its authority, are truly united to the divine action and intrinsically divinised, it does not wish to admit, in Christians, that union of the divine and the human, which, realised in fulness, constitutes Christ.
If it limited itself to saying that an elevation like this surpasses our human merits, it would say the very truth. If it brought up only a difficulty of fact, by maintaining that the conferring of this grace is not sufficiently demonstrated, there would be place only for a discussion of facts. But in reality, it seems very clear, the objection is a question of principle. It does not believe our nature capable of such grandeur, and it sees blasphemy—an excessive kenosis—in uniting God so closely with our clay.
But, with due proportion, the blasphemy is exactly the one which was found intolerable on the lips of Jesus, "How dost thou, being a man, make thyself God?" He was asked.
And in fact this repugnance to admitting in Christians the real and intrinsic union of the human and the divine, is aimed directly at the transcendent exemplar of this union, at the Man-God and the Incarnation.
And still, Protestantism wishes to believe in the Incarnation. It is then constituted by two opposed tendencies, bearing on the same object: faith in the incarnate God and incredulity towards this same incarnate God, as He is continued in Catholicism.
No stability is possible with such an interior antagonism. Even if it escapes an earlier stagnation and death, Protestantism can develop only by opposing itself more and more to itself, to end, by dint of clashing with itself, in exhaustion.
Of two things, one: either negation will win, or affirmation. If it is negation, if, through respect for God, through contempt for man, or through concern for natural autonomy, Protestants must separate the divine from the human in the Christian, the same reasons will demand the same separation in Christ. No more of the Man-God then, and no more Christianity.
And can they stop even there? If God must be considered far from us, what becomes of religion, which is, by essence, only a tendency towards God? The true God, we shall have to say, is inaccessible and unknowable: for us He is as if He were not. Imprisoned as we are in our finite being, we attain in our aspirations towards the transcendent only poor human fancies; religion is only a dream and a sentiment; some will say even a nightmare; let us call it the most beautiful of dreams and of ideas; in the last analysis, it is a vapor of the brain.
So a rent develops. In this closely woven fabric, which the work of God is, all holds together: to attack the Church is to sin against Christ and against God.
But also, in the inverse sense, to take oneself as one is, to tend to the supreme Good with all one's energies, is to be ready, though on an inferior level, to mount by grace towards the incarnate God. And above all, to be a Christian, even in an incomplete way, is to possess in one's self a Catholic element, which tends towards the Catholic Church.
Such is the second member of the alternative which presents itself at the interior of the Christian confessions. By the grace of God, affirmation can win over negation, faith in the Man-God can win over repugnance to admitting the theandric reality of the Church. As the aspiration towards God renders easy the belief in an incarnate God, attachment to Christ will bring faith in that organism, visible and one, in which Christ continues to be attached to His own.
And, for this return to unity the germ is found in all the Christian religions : it consists in everything Christian which they have retained. There is nothing to take away, consequently, except mutilations; nothing to suppress, except halts: it is a road which ascends, a seed developing, a flower which opens out at last. . . . Let the Christian life be intensified in the separated confessions, let the Christian elements, which are their enduring glory, reach their full unfolding: Christ and His Church have nothing else to ask. On the day when their Christianity shall be integral, they will have done everything necessary for entering into unity.
They will be, finally, themselves; for now they are not themselves. Bearing in their very life the negation of their life, they are in the anguish of death, or of birth.
In attaching themselves to the Catholic Church, they will find themselves, not in strange surroundings, but at home, in the unique family dwelling which God has made for the human race, and in which each nation has its exact place, prepared in advance.
They will have gained everything, and themselves besides. The Church will have acquired nothing, at least nothing essential. For secondary perfections, even important ones, are a different matter.
Made for humanity, Christianity does not attain its full meaning and its complete physiognomy except, by informing all humanity. Each race, each people, realizes the human type in a different manner: the Latin genius is one, another the Anglo-Saxon, American or Germanic, another the Japanese, Hindu or Congolian.
There are then certain manners of resembling Christ, of being the divine man in the theandric Church, which only certain peoples can realize. The Catholic Church will not be perfectly Christian until the incorporation of all the nations into the unique body of Christ shall permit her to make explicit all the divinising virtualities of the Saviour.
But this will be only an accidental perfecting and not a true addition.
At this moment she presents herself as Catholic and total. And this totality permits her to be as intransigeant as she is sweet and humble; she is infinitely comprehensive, not because she is capable of being distorted, but because she is so complete.
Non est quo a te omni modo recedatur. One does not succeed, when one has been united with Christ, at breaking absolutely with her. So the Church can, and should, consider as her own everything Christian that exists, no matter where. In respecting and in loving what is good in the other confessions, she does not doubt either her own unique love or her exclusive fidelity to the Spouse. What she insists on admiring in the fallen branches is what the tree has put in them, and what, with every vital force within them, cries out to be again attached to the root. Total exigencies, but no slightest aggression; the Church wishes to be everything, but not by suppressing anything; on the contrary she wishes to give to the rest its plenitude.
And that is what differentiates her from the other Christian confessions, and establishes in her the centre of attraction of all them: she is distinguished from them, not by a nuance or a particularity, but by her integrality: differt ipsa ratione quasi generica christianitatis. The others are constituted by their limits; she by the fulness with which she allows herself to be assimilated by the Man-God.
Toti non fit additio. To such perfection nothing can be added. By the return of the separated churches, the Church will gain nothing, except that she will at last expand in all their fulness her bound energies and her repressed vitality.
It is true that in fact the work of God, in our heavy hands, has scarcely begun and is already lacerated. It makes no difference. The Church stands erect as a demand, a promise, a leaven, of universal unity. The Spirit which is in her makes her solicitous about the human race.
We shall live truly with her life when we are tormented with the same anxiety.
It is not only on the map of the religions of the world that there are frontiers and divisions. Who would dare to say that he is Catholic, universal, in heart and soul, as he is in name? Our interests, our narrowness, our vanities, our incomprehensions, based on persons, caste, race, civilization, prevent us, not merely from being men in all the grandeur of that term, but from knowing and from feeling all the love that God places in our Church for the human race which He wishes to unite in the Man-God.
In our souls then, as on the surface of the earth, the Christian life is in combat against frontiers. A distant mission, and a mission wholly interior; but everywhere the same militant push, the same ocean which hurls itself into the assault against the dikes.
Our egoisms must surely yield at last; we shall become Catholic, and on the face of the Church will shine the immense invitation and the immense goodness of God.
On that day the world will not resist Jesus Christ; Catholicity will be a fact.
For, let us say in closing, Catholicism is "Christianity"; and Christianity is Religion, the Religion supernaturally perfect; and Religion is the whole of man. Humanity is then made for Catholicism, as Catholicism is made for humanity.
ENDNOTES
1 The Whole Christ, Mersch.
2 Cf. la Symbolique, F. Lachat and la Robe Sans Couture, P. P. Charles.
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