Confirmation by the Wonderful Life of the Church: Sanctity, Catholic Unity, and Unshaken Stability
Article 2 — The Sanctity of the Church, Shown in Its Spiritual Fecundity and in the Constancy of Its Martyrs
Extraordinary and manifest sanctity is a divine sign that can come from God alone. Heroic sanctity implies the prompt, easy, and frequent performance of arduous works that exceed the ordinary capabilities of man.
I. The Church possesses, for all her members, the principles and the means of sanctity — a fact clear as regards her doctrine, her worship, and her discipline alike. (A) In doctrine, the Church, now as in the earliest ages of Christianity, teaches the whole doctrine of Christ as contained in Scripture and Tradition, and has consistently opposed errors on both sides of the truth — errors of excess and of defect: Monophysitism and Nestorianism regarding Christ, Arianism and Sabellianism regarding the Trinity, Pelagianism and Jansenism regarding grace, rigorism and laxity regarding conscience. She encourages generous souls to embrace the evangelical counsels and self-denial, and to imitate, so far as their state of life allows, the example of Christ Himself. (B) In worship, the Church treasures above all the Sacrifice of the Mass, in which, as the Council of Trent teaches, “the same Christ is contained and offered in an unbloody manner who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the Cross” (Sess. XXII, c. 2) — a Sacrifice by which the merits of Christ’s Passion are applied and the fruit of the Redemption offered anew to the faithful. She treasures, too, the sacraments as channels of divine grace, and consistently stresses the necessity of prayer and of good works. (C) In discipline, the laws of the Church impose the duties of hearing Mass on Sundays and holy days, of annual Communion, of fasting and abstinence, and the like — a whole disciplined structure of life oriented toward growth in holiness.
II. The extraordinary sanctity of the Church appears, further, in the heroic constancy of her martyrs.
1° The sheer number of the martyrs. In 1684, H. Dodwell wrote a dissertation entitled On the Fewness of the Martyrs, arguing that the ancient persecutions were never truly general; Ruinart, in his Acta Martyrum, examined and thoroughly refuted this thesis. According to Lactantius there were, between A.D. 64 and 313, six distinct general persecutions, and it is certain that many thousands of martyrs suffered in the city of Rome alone. Tacitus speaks of an “immense multitude” (multitudo ingens) of Christians put to death under Nero in A.D. 64 (Annals, XV, 44); Eusebius records that many suffered under Trajan (A.D. 98–117), that great numbers of martyrs bore witness both within and beyond the imperial frontiers under Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161–180), that martyrs were found in every church, especially at Alexandria, under Severus, and again, on an even larger scale, under Decius (A.D. 250–251); Lactantius records how entire “batches” of Christians were burned under Diocletian and Maximian. Inscriptions discovered in the Roman catacombs record, in one instance, “550 Martyrs of Christ,” in another “150 Martyrs of Christ.” St. Cyprian declared that the martyrs of his own day were too numerous to be counted (De Exhortatione Martyrii, c. 11); Sozomen estimates that some 190,000 Christians suffered in Persia under King Sapor; and in later centuries, in Mahometan lands, in Japan, China, Annam, and across Asia and Africa, the testimony of Christian blood has continued, at intervals, almost without cease.
2° The social condition of those who suffered spanned every level of society: unlettered men, such as Theodotus and Severus, alongside nobles such as Flavius Clemens and Apollonius; the learned, such as Justin, Irenaeus, and Cyprian; the physically strong, such as the soldier-martyrs Victor, Sebastian, and Mauritius, alongside women such as Perpetua, Cecilia, Agatha, Blandina, and Potamiaena; the very old, such as Polycarp and Simeon, alongside children, such as Tarcisius, Quiricus, Eulalia, and Agnes.
3° Their motive, throughout, was filial reverence toward God and faith in Christ, the Son of God — the Greek word “martyr” itself simply means “witness.” Public calamities, moreover, were routinely blamed on the Christians themselves: “if the Tiber floods its banks, if the Nile fails to rise, if there is famine or plague — Christians to the lions!” as Tertullian records the popular cry (Apologeticum, c. 40). Yet the Christians were, in fact, loyal subjects of the Empire, persecuted not for any political disloyalty but purely for their religious convictions — precisely as Christ Himself had foretold: “you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles” (Matt. 10:18).
4° Their torments were severe in both body and mind. Tacitus describes how Christians were sewn into the skins of wild beasts to be torn apart by dogs, others crucified, others still burned alive as living torches to illuminate the night (Annals, XV, 44); Tertullian, Lactantius, and Eusebius bear witness that Christians were thrown to wild beasts, impaled, burned with torches, had their limbs broken and their flesh torn until no place remained for further wounding. The moral torments were, if anything, no less severe: entire families were reduced to extreme poverty, and martyrs were called upon to withstand the tears and pleading of parents, wives, and children — exactly as Our Lord had foretold: “he that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37).
5° Their heroic fortitude. Martyrdom is, above all, an act of the virtue of fortitude, which represses fear — a more difficult achievement, properly speaking, than merely moderating excessive boldness; and fortitude, to remain a true virtue rather than degenerating into mere obstinacy, must be joined to the other virtues and directed by prudence, so as to give strength for the achievement of a genuine good rather than the blind persistence of pride (cf. Benedict XIV, De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, III, c. 21). The martyrs endured atrocious torments with a consistent set of dispositions: (1) being fully human, they often felt genuine fear, but prayed and mastered that passion rather than being ruled by it; (2) they were never carried away by desperation, but bore their sufferings with real tranquillity of soul; (3) their fortitude was everywhere joined with charity, faith, hope, prudence, justice, chastity, humility, and meekness, so that, like Christ and like St. Stephen, they prayed for their own executioners; and (4) they went to their deaths cheerfully, as though going to a victory celebration, their interior joy persisting even in the midst of torment — exactly like the Apostles, who “went from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus” (Acts 5:41). St. Ignatius of Antioch’s words, written on his way to martyrdom, remain famous: “I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may become the pure bread of Christ.” Similar words of thanksgiving and joy are recorded of Sts. Polycarp, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Felix, Victor, Vincent, and Theodore, among many others; and women bore witness with an equally heroic constancy — Sts. Perpetua, Felicitas, and Blandina among them.
This heroic fortitude constitutes, in itself, a genuine miracle of the moral order:
Major: Such fortitude implies heroic acts of the principal virtues, repeated again and again — heroic acts accomplished by countless men, women, and children, of every social condition, accomplished cheerfully and constantly amid the most severe physical and moral torments, without any hope of temporal reward except by abandoning the Faith outright. Minor: But heroic acts of the principal virtues cannot be accomplished so often, so cheerfully, and so constantly, amid such atrocious sufferings, by multitudes of every social condition, age, and sex, entirely without ordinary human motive, unless there be some extraordinary intervention of divine assistance. Conclusion: Therefore the fortitude of the martyrs, all the circumstances considered, is a genuine miracle of the moral order.
The Major of this syllogism is a matter of plain historical fact. The Minor is proved in two complementary ways — indirectly, by excluding purely natural causes as insufficient to explain it, and directly, by showing that the constancy of the martyrs is itself a manifestation of an extraordinary sanctity that is, quite simply, the work of God.
(a) The indirect proof. Rationalists see in the constancy of the martyrs nothing more than fanaticism, or perhaps the mere hope of posthumous praise. But fanaticism is a blind obstinacy, entirely removed from the wisdom, prudence, moderation, and meekness the martyrs actually displayed — in their case, St. Paul’s words found their exact fulfilment: “being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it; being blasphemed, we entreat” (1 Cor. 4:12–13). Nor can the hope of praise explain their constancy: they were as humble as they were magnanimous, and this rare union of virtues itself points to a special divine help; moreover, many martyrs were executed secretly, in circumstances where the hope of public praise could not possibly have entered into their calculations at all.
(b) The direct proof. The extraordinary sanctity displayed by the martyrs itself implies the special help of God: martyrdom is a sign of the highest degree of charity, a charity joined to every other virtue, a charity that remains joyful even in the crisis of horrible torture — and this joy, precisely, manifests its supernatural origin. The fact appealed to, in other words, is not the bare fact of dying for a belief, but the specific character of the martyrs’ constancy, insofar as it is manifestly different from mere fanatical obstinacy. Rationalists object that similar constancy can be found elsewhere from purely natural causes — in the heroism of soldiers in battle, in men like Regulus and Scaevola, in the widows of India who, until recently, mounted the funeral pyres of their dead husbands, or in the Montanists and the more modern Anabaptists, who died for their own religious opinions, or, more recently still (1885–86), in the Ugandan Protestants who died for their beliefs. The Church’s own answer is straightforward: those who die in good faith and with genuinely good dispositions for beliefs that are truly Christian, even outside the visible bounds of the Catholic Church, are recognized by her own teaching as martyrs in the sight of God; in the other cases cited, what is actually manifested is fanaticism or mere natural enthusiasm, quite distinguishable, on close examination, from the specifically supernatural constancy of the Church’s own martyrs — a constancy that must be assessed in light of (1) the sheer number of martyrs from the beginning down to the present time; (2) their extraordinary diversity of social condition, age, and sex; (3) the horrible character of their torments, physical and moral alike; (4) the cheerfulness and serenity with which they suffered, joined to charity, humility, meekness, and prayer for their persecutors; and (5) the miracles frequently wrought in confirmation of their sanctity.
III. The Church produces, without interruption, a constant succession of heroic saints. A full catalogue of the saints would require far more space than can be given here; only a representative handful of names can be listed. (a) Great Doctors of the Church: Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Cyril, Chrysostom, and others. (b) Great Apostles of the Faith: Patrick in Ireland, Augustine in England, Methodius in Russia, Boniface in Frisia, Willibald in Germany. (c) Saints who occupied the Chair of Peter: John I, Felix IV, Agapitus, Sylvester, Gregory the Great, Martin I, Eugenius I, Vitalian, Agatho, Leo II, Benedict II, Sergius I, Pius V, among others. (d) Great founders of religious orders: Benedict, Bernard (Cistercians), Norbert (Premonstratensians), Dominic, Francis, Ignatius, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier, Louis Bertrand, Philip Neri, Charles Borromeo, Vincent de Paul, Paul of the Cross, Alphonsus Liguori, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and the Curé of Ars. (e) Great scholastics: Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure. (f) Great preachers: Vincent Ferrer, Bernardine of Siena, Anthony of Padua. (g) Great women saints: Gertrude, Hildegarde, Clare, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa. (h) Saints among kings: Louis, Henry, Leopold, Stanislaus, Elizabeth of Hungary.
The Church’s pastoral clergy, bound as they are to celibacy, have won, now as in the past, the genuine respect and affection of their people throughout the Church. Her religious orders and institutes are so many schools of perfection, aimed at the attainment of holiness through the practice of the evangelical counsels and a sustained effort to imitate the example of Christ — some devoted to the active life, such as the Sisters of Charity and the great teaching orders, Jesuits and Redemptorists among them, others to the contemplative life, such as the Trappists, the Carthusians, the Carmelites, and the Poor Clares. And the properly Christian virtues are cherished in the Catholic Church as nowhere else. Père Lacordaire wrote memorably on the effects of the practice of chastity, humility, and charity: chastity represses the lust that corrupts the very sources of life, and preserves the sanctity of marriage; humility expels ambition, boasting, and arrogance; charity conquers mere self-interest, and goes far beyond the strict demands of justice in its care for the infirm, the indigent, and the fallen. Even Luther himself was forced to admit that “the world has become worse; men are now more desirous of revenge, more avaricious, more remote from sentiments of mercy, more immodest and undisciplined, than they were under the Papacy” (Postilla, First Sunday of Advent). One need only compare the great saints who flourished after the so-called Reformation with the leading figures of the Reformation itself — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Henry VIII, Elizabeth — or compare the saints of the Catholic Church with Photius, Michael Cerularius, George Cyprius, and Mark of Ephesus, chiefly responsible for the Eastern Schism. Scandals among Catholics, where they occur, occur characteristically among those who do not actually practise their religion, and who fail to avail themselves of the abundant means of sanctity the Church herself freely offers.
IV. The inexhaustible spiritual fecundity of the Church appears at three distinct levels. (1) Her influence on individuals: the Church has liberated men and women from errors regarding God, the world, and the meaning of human life — from utilitarianism, determinism, and materialism alike — and preaches the Gospel, offering the means of salvation, to all without distinction, to the unlettered and the poor no less than to the rich and the learned. (2) Her influence on family life: the Church has consistently protected the dignity of woman and the indissolubility of marriage — in sharp contrast to Luther, Bucer, and Melanchthon, who in 1540 permitted Philip of Hesse to take Margaret von der Saale as a second wife while his lawful wife Christina was still living. De Maistre could rightly write that the most effective means of elevating man is to ennoble and exalt woman (Du Pape, III, c. 2). The Church has provided for the education of children by founding countless orphanages, schools, colleges, and universities; her confraternities help both young and old to practise virtue and to persevere in it; and she secured, over time, the gradual emancipation of slaves — her spiritual treasures, being no respecter of persons, are offered equally to the lowest and to the highest, and slaves themselves have been admitted to the priesthood; one former slave, Callistus, by the grace of Christ’s own example of humility, rose even to become Pope. In her whole attitude toward slavery, the excellence of Christian charity over pagan ethics stands out clearly: Aristotle himself had maintained that “one man may usefully be subjected to the rule of a wiser man” (Politics, I, c. 3), and before the diffusion of Christianity slavery was widely regarded as simply necessary, on the assumption that the majority of men were not sufficiently wise or rightly disposed to make good use of civil liberty. Religion alone can confer on the uneducated the rectitude of judgment and of will needed to prevent such an abuse of freedom — and it was precisely religion, in the person of the Church, that gradually ennobled human labour as such. (3) Her influence on civil society: the Church has fixed the just relation between social authority and individual liberty by teaching that all legitimate power comes from God, and must be directed to the common good — “he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Rom. 13:2) — so that obedience rendered to legitimate authority is rendered, ultimately, to God Himself, and is thereby ennobled rather than degraded. The Church has consistently sought to provide for the needs of the poor and the sick, her motto ever “blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”: Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum defended the workman’s claim to a wage sufficient for a decent maintenance (honesta sustentatio) of himself and his family, while the same Pope’s Quod Apostolici Muneris condemned that form of Socialism which denies the right to private property and rejects legitimate authority outright. The Church has, finally, consistently sought to establish amicable relations between different nations, placing the law of charity and of Christian fraternity above the mere self-interest of any single nation — her own ideal has always been “Christendom,” a far more statesmanlike aim than mere “internationalism.” Nationalism since the so-called Reformation has too often meant not genuine patriotism but jealousy and hatred of other nations; and false nationalism and militarism — the evil offspring of an evil parentage — brought about the world tragedy of 1914–1918. Until the God of peace, who is “King of kings, and Lord of lords” (Apoc. 19:16), is once again duly honoured and obeyed among the nations, there can be little real hope for their permanent well-being.
Article 3 — Catholic Unity and the Unshaken Stability of the Church
I. The Catholic Church alone is truly one. She is endowed with a genuine unity of faith, of worship, and of discipline. (A) Unity of faith: every one of the faithful, believing what the Church teaches, believes thereby, at least implicitly, the whole body of revealed truth as handed down from the time of the Apostles; all accept the same symbols of faith, interpreted in the same way, while in matters not themselves of faith a genuine liberty of opinion is preserved — the Church’s own position summed up in the well-known aphorism: in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas — in necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity. (B) Unity of worship: the Sacrifice of the Mass and the seven sacraments are accepted and revered by every part of the Church alike. (C) Unity of discipline: the clergy and laity together (the ecclesia discens) are subject to their own bishops and, through them, to the Pope; the bishops themselves are subject to the Pope; Pope and bishops together constitute the ecclesia docens, the teaching Church, and all obey a common body of law, while in disputed matters the decision of the competent Roman authority is universally accepted.
Such formal unity is conspicuously absent elsewhere. (A) In Protestantism, the very principle of “private judgment” is fatal to any real unity: Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans differ sharply among themselves on matters of faith; some Liberal Protestants do not accept even the divinity of Christ except in some merely symbolic or metaphorical sense; in worship, some recognize two sacraments, others only Baptism, others reject the whole sacramental system outright; and in discipline, there are Episcopalians and non-Episcopalians divided from one another as a matter of principle. (B) The Greek Church, likewise, possesses no formal unity: no single patriarch heads the whole of the Greek Church, which today comprises some fourteen mutually independent national churches.
II. Catholicity, in the full sense, belongs exclusively to the “Catholic” Church. (A) Virtual catholicity, or catholicity de jure, means the Church’s own inherent aptitude for universal extension among all nations — an aptitude that overrides mere individualism and nationalism alike, whether in doctrine, in government, or in worship. In doctrine, the Church’s teaching must, by Christ’s own express will, be preached to every people, and transcends every particular characteristic of individual persons, social conditions, places, and times. In government, the Church is not national but supra-national: she is subject to no single state and to no Caesar, recognizes the legitimate authority of every form of civil government whatsoever, and her own governing power remains purely moral in character. In worship, too, the Church is universal, since the offering of the sacrificial Victim in the Mass, and the grace of the sacraments, are alike intended for all mankind without distinction.
(B) Actual catholicity, or catholicity de facto, appears first in the Church’s geographical extension: before the revolt of Luther, virtually the whole of Europe was Catholic, and Catholic missionary activity has since carried the Faith to every continent — figures for Catholic populations across Germany, Switzerland, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia, whatever their precise number in any given decade, together illustrate a genuine universality among the recognized nations of the world; and this super-human mode of diffusion matters, in the end, far more than the bare arithmetic of numbers. Actual catholicity appears, further, in the fact that the Catholic Church comprises people of every social condition: the poor are evangelised; the leprous, literal and figurative alike, are cared for; education is everywhere encouraged, and some sixty-two universities have been founded under papal patronage across the centuries — the Church has been, in a real sense, the Alma Mater of the arts, with architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry all reaching some of their highest points of development under her patronage, and she has consistently favoured scientific research as well: only a few of her many scientist-sons can be named here — Copernicus and Secchi in astronomy, Pasteur and the Abbé Mendel in biology, the Abbé Haüy in crystallography, Ampère and Volta in the study of electricity, Roger Bacon in the founding of inductive science, Cauchy and Le Verrier in mathematics, Bernard in medicine, Fabre in the study of nature, Galileo in physics, Marconi in wireless telegraphy, and Röntgen in the discovery of X-rays.
The note of catholicity, by contrast, is absent from every other form of religion. (A) Protestantism lacks even virtual catholicity, given the individualistic spirit that has produced its many divisions; in some places, England among them, Protestantism was historically propagated by outright persecution of Catholics; in Germany, England, and Scandinavia it remains bound up with, and dependent on, the national state; Protestants, though divided into some one hundred and fifty separate sects, remain numerically fewer overall than Catholics; and Protestant missionary activity has, on the whole, proved comparatively feeble. (B) The Greek Church, similarly, is not one, and is therefore not truly Catholic: the churches of Constantinople, Russia, Greece, and Bulgaria are independent of one another, and largely subject to their respective states; and none of these churches has excelled either in numbers, in geographical extension, or in missionary power — they remain, on the whole, largely destitute of real vitality.
III. The Catholic Church alone possesses an unshaken stability. She has survived, essentially intact, an extraordinary series of assaults: the persecutions of her first three centuries; the rise of Arianism, which for a time drew great numbers away from her; Julian the Apostate, who used both the resources of pagan philosophy and the full prestige of his imperial office in a deliberate effort to destroy her; the invasions of the barbarian nations; the schism of Photius in the ninth century; the attacks of Mahometanism and of the Albigensian heresy; the revolt of Protestantism in the sixteenth century; and the philosophism of the eighteenth century together with the French Revolution. Stability of this kind is, by contrast, conspicuously absent elsewhere: in Protestantism, the principle of “private judgment” is itself a principle of individualism and constant change, such that even fundamental truths — the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Trinity itself — are sometimes rejected outright by one Protestant body or another; and the various Greek churches, lacking any single organic structure, remain largely fixed in what can fairly be called the immobility of death.
IV. These marks of the Catholic Church — Unity, Sanctity, Catholicity, and Stability — cannot be explained by natural causes alone; they are, rather, the fulfilment of ancient prophecy. 1° These four characteristics, found together only in the Catholic Church, have simply not been attained, and cannot be attained, by the same natural means that other religious bodies have employed for their own propagation and self-preservation. 2° The sanctity of the Church, as shown in her fecundity and in her martyrs, is itself extraordinary, and implies a special intervention of God, since the order of any agent’s action must correspond to the order of that agent’s true end — and it is only as the minister of God that the Church could actually lead souls to genuine sanctity on this scale. 3° Catholic unity, similarly, is a far greater achievement than merely natural causes can produce: the more universal a society becomes, in general, the more difficult its unity becomes to sustain, and empires and kingdoms that spring from purely natural causes regularly disappear, sooner or later, in the ordinary course of history. 4° The stability of the Church across nearly two thousand years must be weighed against (a) the manifest mutability of human minds, human institutions, and religious and philosophical opinion generally; (b) violent and repeated persecutions, unjust demands and confiscations by secular powers, and sustained criticism of religion mounted in the name of pseudo-science; and (c) the sheer weakness of the natural means available, at any point, for the Church’s own support. 5° In this whole wonderful life of the Church, finally, the fulfilment of ancient prophecy stands clearly manifest: “arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee … and the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising” (Is. 60:1, 3); “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18); “other sheep I have, that are not of this fold … and there shall be one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16); “you shall be witnesses unto me … even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8); “going therefore, teach ye all nations … and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Matt. 28:19–20).
The declaration of the Vatican Council stands, on this evidence, fully justified: the Church herself is “a perpetual motive of credibility, and an irrefragable testimony of her own divine mission.”