Sermon III. The Perpetual Office of the Council of Trent
Cbxs Sermon
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED.
THE PERPETUAL OFFICE
" Wisdom hath built herself a house." Proverbs, ix, 1.
Who is this mighty builder but the eternal God, and what is the house that He has built, but the manifestations of His Almighty power? In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and the foun dations of the house were laid. For six days in order and in symmetry this edifice of Eternal Wisdom rose from perfection to perfection. But the glories and the forms of the first creation did but shadow forth His power and Godhead. There were greater things to come a house mightier and more glorious, more ample and more divine, for God had decreed that He would become incarnate. He prepared this mystery of His power in the Immaculate Conception of His Blessed Mother. In that work of His eternal, all-creating Spirit, the foundations of a nobler house w r ere laid. And " the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us:" His tabernacle was our very man hood. Nor yet was the work of Wisdom done.
There was another house still to arise, built upon His own Incarnation that is, His mystical body, which is the Church of God. And in the day when He said, u Thou art Peter," words came from the lips of God, which for power have no parallel, save when He said, " Let there be light," and the splendours of the firmament were created; when the floods and inundations of brightness were poured forth, and the unity and harmonv of all the heavenlv lights arose together in
/ *. ^D < * their multitude and their glory. So when He spake those words, " On this rock I will build my Church:" the unity, and harmony, and universality, and complex beauty of the Church of God began. Time and succession of days were needed to unfold all that was spoken, but year by year, generation by generation, this mighty structure of the Incarnate Wisdom of God arose to its perfection. First came the line of Pon tiffs vicars of the Incarnate Word, one by one ascending in the firmament of the Church in his peculiar splendour: each distinct, but glorious like Him whose vicar he was. There was Leo, penetrated and glowing with the consciousness of the divine message of the Incarnate Word. There was the first Gregory ruling over the Church with the patriarchal sway of a father s love. There was another Gregory, the seventh of the name, subduing the enemies of the Church, breaking them with his iron will, ruling them with a rod of iron, and governing the Church with the fire and energy of an angel of God. There was the third Innocent, leo gislating for the nations like his Master, in the mountain. Each arose in his own radiance and beauty. Then came the constellations of the Church the mighty Councils: the Council of Nice, invested with the glory of the consubstantial Son; Ephesus, in the splendour of His Immaculate Mother; Lateran, luminous with the glory of the Holy Eucharist; Florence, with the majestic supremacy of Christ s vicar upon earth, each one in its order, as the Eternal Wisdom saw fit to raise the edifice of His power, layer upon layer, stone upon stone. And yet there was still one to arise one constellation more, the central sun of all, one around which, as their centre, all the Councils of the Church find their path, in which the splendours of all others are united.
The time had arrived, foreseen in the Eternal Wis dom, when men s hearts had waxed cold, when the islands of the Saints were barren, and the lands of the north, which had borne servants of God, sent forth no longer Evangelists or Apostles; when Spain, once so glorious in the Church, had become a trader in the west, and when Portugal the handmaid of the Holy See had lost its zeal in the marts and markets of the east; when Germany sent forth a brood of errors to lay waste the fair fields of the Faith. The time was come that another manifestation of Wisdom should arise; and for eighteen years the Episcopate of the Church sat in Trent, under the Legates of the Holy See, with power of intellect, with consciousness of divine commission, and with the presence of the Holy Ghost to legislate for the future. Then there arose alight above all other lights such as that described by the Prophet, when he said "The light of the moon should be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun sevenfold as the light of seven days." For three hundred years this Great Council has ruled the Church. Its voice and its spirit have reigned with undiminished power. It stands supreme, the test of faith, and the rule of all legislation, for the Catholic world. But time forbids me to do more than touch lightly upon some of the special characters and prerogatives of the Council of Trent.
The Council of Trent was a Council of Recapitulation. It was the heir of all the definitions of the Church. The heresies of old assailed here and there a doctrine of the Faith; but God permitted now a heresy to assail, in a whole line of errors, not only the whole line of the Faith, but also the divine authority of the Church itself. The Council of Trent, therefore, summed up in its decrees what other Councils had declared. All their voices spoke by its one voice, as on the day of Pentecost all the Apostles spoke by Peter. The Councils of Africa again promulgated their decrees of original sin; the Council of Orange, of preventing grace; the Council of Vienne, of the in fusion of spiritual habits in regeneration; the Council of Toledo, of the procession of the Holy Ghost; the Council of Lateran, of the mystery of Transubstantiation; the Council of Florence, which was itself the summary of the Councils of the East, spoke in all their names; all these received their expression in the de crees of Trent. And, further, it not only recapitulated all Councils, but it harmonised all schools of Theology. The scholastic disputations of the Dominican and Franciscan families, the Angelic and Seraphic Theolo gies, found in the Council of Trent their unity and solution. Its decrees form a Summa of Theology. Explicitly and implicitly they present as a whole the revelation of the day of Pentecost. The profession of Faith, promulgated by Pius the Fourth, recapitulates the doctrines of the whole Church of God, East and West in one, and presents it to the world in ample array, bright and resplendent; over against the prolific error of these later days restless with a per verse intellectual activity, and fronts its advance, reaching from wing to wing: " pulchra ut luna, electa lit sol, terribilis ut castrorem acies ordinata."
Again, the Council of Trent was in an eminent sense the Council of Reformation. It would be an unpalatable task to dwell on the evils of the time. But an example or two may suffice. The second see of the West the see founded by St. Barnabas, whose patron was St. Ambrose, had hardly for eighty years seen its Archbishop. It had been governed by vicars, of whom many had better not have been there. There were parish priests who knew not the form of absolution in the sacrament of penance; there were priests celebrating the Holy Mysteries, who believed themselves exempt from the duty of Confession. They dressed as lavmen, and wore arms. If such were the priests, what were the people? There was also the see of St. Antoninus the birthplace of St. Philip and the social life of Florence corrupted by the influx of Oriental luxury. If such was Italy, what were other lands? It w r as to redress such a disordered state that the Council of Trent assembled. Other councils had essayed before what it alone accomplished. It was truly a Council of Reformation. Filled with the Holy Ghost, and consumed with zeal for the house of God, it began its work. The fire of jealousy for the sanctity of the mystical Body of Christ penetrated it throughout. Conscious of the presence of the Vicar of Christ, whose Legates presided over its acts, it began, " totius familiaB Domini status, et ordo nutabit, si quod requiritur in corpore, non inveniatur in Capite." With the Head it opened its work. Judgment began at the House of God, with the sacred College itself. It prescribed their way of life, and the virtues demanded by their state. It then, with a holy boldness, reminded the most blessed Roman Pontiff, that nothing was more needful than that he should choose out of all nations to clothe with the sacred purple those alone who were most fit. It proceeded from Cardinals to Bishops, to their dignity and duties and obligations; then to the Priesthood, to the Religious; and lastly, to the Faithful. With the scourge of discipline, and set on fire with jealousy for the divine honour, it cleansed the sanctuary, after the example of Jesus in the temple of God. And, further, the Council of Trent was a Council of Reconstruction. It anticipated with a wonderful fore sight the needs of the Church in these later ages, and provided for them. The course of the world had for centuries lain heavy upon the freedom and action of the Episcopate. Traditions, and customs, and civil laws trammelled and fettered it. The encroachments of the secular power were confirmed by long prescrip-1 tion and the Holy See had struggled long, and often in vain, to emancipate the Episcopal jurisdiction. It wasatthistime that the spirit and tendencies of modern society were beginning to appear, and the nations of Europe were reconstituting themselves upon a new basis. And with the new forms of political and social power the Church must have to cope. For this end, by its sovereign decrees, the Council of Trent swept away the so-called Ecclesiastical customs and laws, imperial, royal, and national, which usurped upon the Episcopate. It restored to the Pastors of the Church the fulness of their sacred jurisdiction. It gave back to them the sovereignty of their Apostolic thrones and the free use of their prerogatives. And, as the political and social state of the world was changed, a new Ecclesiastical legislation was demanded, both to prevent the renewed accumulation of disorders, and to enable the Church to conform and adapt itself, by its ever-living and creative power, to the new forms and exigencies of modern society. Therefore it imposed on Metro politans the obligation of convening every three years their Provincial Council; and on Bishops, their Diocesan Synod year by year:2 so that the last three centuries have been eminently the centuries of legislation. A multitude of Councils, Provincial and
Diocesan, by their vigilant deliberations and decrees, have perpetuated the action of Trent throughout the whole extent of the Church.
And for this end, it recognized more amply than any other Council of the Church, even than those over which the Sovereign Pontiffs in person had pre sided, the supreme legislation and executive authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. It committed to him the confirmation and accomplishment of its decrees. And for this the reigning Pontiff, Pius the Fourth, by three great acts of sovereign power, provided. First, he abolished all ecclesiastical prescriptions and customs contrariant to the decrees of this Council. Next, as our Divine Lord withered the fig-tree and dried up its future life, he declared that no prescription should ever acquire force against the decrees of Trent.3 And lastly, he forbade under pains all interpretation of its text, reserving to himself and to his successors the sole and exclusive power to interpret its letter and its will.f
It may be likewise said, that the Council of Trent was in a special way the Council of Active Charity. It gave an impulse to the works of the Church, which not only endure, but go on multiplying to this day.
The times foretold by our Divine Lord were already come: " Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold." The nations of Christen-j O dom had long been growing cold. Centuries, dreary and dark, had swept over the Church since the fires of Pentecost descended, and lands which once glowed with the love of Jesus, had grown bleak and barren. Not that the sacred Heart of Jesus, which is the Heart of the Mystical Body, had ceased to beat, or its pulse to vibrate with as intense and fervent a love as in the beginning; but that the hearts of men had ceased to respond to it and to kindle as in the earlier days. It was not, therefore, without a reason thatGod permitted the heresy of imputed righteousness to arise, that the Church should declare that men are justified by the justice of God, "non qua ipse Justus est, sedqua nos justos facit," not by a shadow, but by a substance, by the inherent justice by which, " vere justi nominamur etsumus;" by the in-dwelling of the Holy Ghost and of Charity, inasmuch as "per Spiritum Sanctum, Charitas Dei diffunditur in cordibus eorum qui justificantur, atque ipsis inhj-eret;"4 whereby they become the temple of the Sacred Heart itself: " Cum enim ille ipse Christus Jesus tanquam caput in membra, et tanquam vitis in palmites, in ipsos justificatos, jugiter virtutem influat." Jesus lives and dwells and works in us, and by us, and we work in Him and by Him, and the Sacred Heart is the principle of all the supernatural charity which works throughout the Church. With out doubt, it was the impulse of this decree that re vived again the fires of charity, and made the whole Mystical Body to vibrate, and to stir once more with the impetuous beat of divine love. New forms of zeal, and new industries of mercy, covered the face of the Church. St. Ignatius, St. Philip, St. Charles, St. John of God, St. Francis of Sales, St. Vincent of Paul, were the creations or the witnesses of this Dogma; and they became the creators of new ministries of active charity, needed by the sores and wounds of modern society and the exigencies of the Church. The Sons of St. Benedict and of St. Dominic will not think that I do them wrong if I say that under the majestic shadows of their old Orders, as under the outspreading arms of the cedars of Libanus, the springing grass, the waving corn, and the running vine, have healed and covered the face of the Church. I may say that the Devotion of the Sacred Heart, which has rekindled the devotion of the whole Catholic world, and organised itself in a multitude of forms, and become the very life of ordinary active works of love, was itself the offspring of this great Council. The peculiar character of St.
Francis of Sales was the fruit of this profound dogma of the life of charity. His Treatise on the love of God what is it butthe Tridentine decrees expanded and am plified into a science of mystical Theology; and what is the Order of the Visitation but the fruit of this science of God, poured forth into the heart of St. Francis; and whom did our Divine Lord select to promulgate the worship of His Sacred Heart, butapoor, despised, persecuted, unlettered daughter of the Visitation? It was not to our St. Anselm, illuminated as he was with the Science of the Incarnation, nor to St. Bernard, who burned like a tree of fragrance with the name of Jesus, nor to St. Bernardine of Sienna, whose lips distilled the sweetness of the names of Jesus and of Mary, nor to St. Bonaventure, the seraphic Doctor, nor to St. Thomas, with the sun of the science of God upon his breast, but to the poor Margaret Mary that He vouchsafed the grace and the glory of spreading throughout the Church the knowledge and love of His Sacred Heart, the great devotion of these latter days, the offspring and the interpreter of the Decrees of Trent, the Theology of active charity.
And lastly, for the time warns me to draw to an end, the Council of Trent was, above all, the Council of the Hierarchy and the Priesthood. Other sects had denied or disfigured the doctrine of the Priesthood of the New Law. But no heresy as yet had arisen to deny, with such detailed contradiction, the Pontificate of the Holy See, the power and preeminence of the Episcopate, the proper Priesthood of the Christian Church, its divine institutions, and powers. All was denied in detail, that all in detail might be once again, and once for all, denned. The Councils of the Church had indeed recognised the dignity and sanctity of the Christian Priesthood. They had made laws for its direction, and had invested it with a halo of veneration. But none had as yet drawn out the whole Theology of the Sacrament of Order, its divine institution, its sacramental grace, its indelible character.
And more than this. Other Councils, in earlier days, had uttered urgent and moving exhortations for the better rearing and forming of Priests in the Schools of the Church: but it was the Council of Trent that for the first time denned and described the idea of a Seminary, and imposed upon the conscience of every several Bishop, by a positive and grave obligation in the form of a decree, the duty of founding near the Cathedral Church, a Seminary for his Diocese. And this because the work of the Church upon the world is measured by its work first upon itself, and its work upon itself is centred in its work upon its Priesthood.
Though the supernatural element of the Church is changeless, and works sacramentally upon the world, nevertheless the cultivation and perfection of its Pas tors is a condition of its success. For the germ of the Church is the living body of men, who succeed to the Apostolic office. They are the centre, the productive principle of the whole body, of its organization and of its expansion. " Vos estis lux mundi," ye are the light of the science of God; " Vos estis sal terras," ye are the savour of inward sanctity. To you, Right Rev. Fathers, is committed the custody and the transmission of these supernatural gifts. To you has been entrusted the power of the Son of God to choose, to call, to create the Priesthood of the Church. You have the supernatural power to mould, to shape, to transform, to transfigure the youth of the Church for the service of the Altar. You can do what no other may attempt. Others may minister sacraments, preach the doctrines of Faith, study, and teach Theology; but you alone can call before you a mere stripling, impress upon him the token of the crown of thorns, bid him to say with you, " This is my body," " This is the chalice of my blood," and speak over him, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven: and whose sins ye retain, they are retained." This power is yours alone. With you is the very life, the future, the ripeness, the multiplication of the Church. " Spes messis in se-mine." The harvest shall indeed be plenteous, and whiten in due season to the reaping. But the seed is the youth crowned with the tonsure, and bearing the future of the Church in his heart.
Such are a few of the leading characters of this Great Council, which summed up in itself the mind of Christendom for its fifteen hundred years, and for three hundred years has ruled the Church, as with a perpetual living voice. Never before has so long an interval elapsed between Council and Council, and never has any reigned so supreme. I do not forget your legislative powers, Right Rev. Fathers, when I say that every Provincial Council in these three centuries past has been, as it were, a particular Congregation of the Council of Trent, guided by its light and influence, and subject to its sovereign decrees. I do not forget that the Council of Trent has invested you especially with the powers by which it is characterised, as Judges and Guardians of the Faith, Reformers, Legislators, Guides of the Charity, and Fathers of the Priesthood of the Church. As such you have assembled here to legislate and to decree for the Church in England.
a Bonum est nos hie esse." It is good for us there fore to be here in the heart of this nineteenth century. There is a feebleness of character which spends itself in musing on the past, and in dreaming of the future; but the sphere of action and the time of our probation is in this living, energetic, and masculine present. It is an amiable weakness to admire the time gone by, which spreads before us as a beautiful illusion, or to lose ourselves in hope and anticipation of a splendid and stirring future, which may never be, at least for us: both are equally unreal and equally unprofitable. Our season and our work are here and now, in the moment, which is passing. It is indeed a common thing to exaggerate the events of our times, and to believe them to be greater, or worse, or nobler, or more momentous than any that have yet been. Nevertheless, it may be said that our days are days of great events: great powers are abroad, great conflicts are fighting, great gains or losses must be made.
It is a time when the power and working of him whom the Apostle called 6 avo/to? " ille iniquus," the wicked,5 the lawless one is sensibly abroad and rife. The spirit of social disorder, the enmity against all heads anointed with Royal and Sacerdotal union, is in fuller presence and force than in the ages past. Empires and kingdoms have gone down before it; nations have dissolved, and the social order of Christian Europe has been disintegrated as by a corrosive.
The mightiest monarchies have crumbled under its action. The Church alone has resisted its power, and stands the sole principle of order, the only structure which cannot be destroyed.
It is good for us to be here, under the glorious Pontificate which marks an epoch in the centuries of the Church. The name of Pius was crowned with martyrdom in the first who bore it; and twice in this half-century they who bore it have been con fessors and exiles. It is not therefore from the exile of the reigning Pontiff that this century will take its character and its greatness. But the age will be marked in the history of the Church by a dignity more divine. As the fourth century was glorious by the definition of the Godhead of the Consubstantial Son, and the fifth by that of His two perfect natures^ and the thirteenth by that of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, so the nineteenth will be glorious by the definition of the Immaculate Conception. We have seen the day and are glad, and the age will take its character from this event. Neither is it a little thing that in the midst of the scorn of the world, from the uplifted palms of the Vicar of Christ, constellations of Apostolic Thrones have descended upon the waste places of the earth: and on every side the Church has begun to legislate in Council, and to adapt its inexhaustible powers of government, and subdue the world. This nineteenth century will mark a great epoch in the history of the Church: it summons us to great works and to great conflicts, but it pledges to us great helps, great sacrifices, and great rewards: wherefore also it is good for us to be here.
And lastly, it is good for us to be here in England. It is yours, Right Rev. Fathers, to subjugate and to subdue, to bend and to break the will of an imperial race, the will which, as the will of Rome of old, rules over nations and people, invincible and inflexible. You have to rear the House of Wisdom which was fallen; and to do this, you have now, as the Apostles then, to gather from the spiritual quarry the stones which shall build up the house of God. You have to call the legionaries and the tribunes, the patricians, and the people of aconqueringrace, and to subdue, change, transform, transfigure them one by one to the likeness of the Son of God. With such a Priesthood, what may not be done? What Evangelists and soldiers of Jesus Christ may not arise from the inexhaustible energy, the steady courage, the fearless enterprise, the intellectual capacity, the indomitable will of England? You have a great commission to fulfil, and great is the prize for which you strive. Surely, a soldier s eye and a soldier s heart would choose by intuition this field of
England for the warfare of Faith. None ampler or nobler couldbe found. WhatNicewas toArianism and Ephesus to the heresy of Nestorius, and Africa to the schism which withered before the presence of St. Augustine, such is England to the master-heresy of these latter days. It is the head of Protestantism, the centre of its movements, and the stronghold of its powers. Weakened in England, it is paralyzed everywhere: conquered in England, it is conquered throughout the world, once overthrown here, all is but a war of detail. All the roads of the whole world meet in one point, and this point reached, the whole world lies open to the Church s will. It is the key of the whole position of modern error. England, once restored to Faith, becomes the Evangelist of the world. In the midst of the religions of men which are crumb ling around, " Wisdom is building herself a house." And the Church in Council has to do for England, what it has already done for Spain and for Lombardy. Spain was overrun by Arianism, mined and tainted even by Judaism, furrowed by internal wars, and its civil power was hardly Christian when the Councils of Toledo, a long line and glorious, reconstituted it once more a Christian and Catholic monarchy. Lombardy was corrupt and disordered in every state and condition of its ecclesiastical and social life. The Seven Councils of Milan, under the inflexible will and glorious spirit, which reigns there still supreme, restored it to be the mirror of the Council of Trent, and the example of the Church. What may not the Councils of Westminster achieve? Three times you have met in Synod here. The first laid the foundations, and the second and the third are raising the structure: the others were full of a future, but this if possible still more. Who knows what may be in store for us; what you, Right Rev. Fathers, may be now preparing for the ages to come? All things call us to work and to hasten: the times in which we live, the land in which we are, the admo nitions of this place. It was but the other day, and all the splendours of the Synod were darkened; its gold and its fair colours were veiled; the altar was stripped of its beauty, and all was changed to the hues of mourning, the plaints of intercession, and the solemnities of the last absolution. In the vacant space where you are sitting, there was a bier, the memorial of those who were and are not, the warning to us who are, and shall not be. A few short years ago they were here as we are now; as full of intellectual power, of Apostolic authority, and of sacerdotal grace. They are passed, and others hold their place: as we too shall pass and be no more remem bered. Build then, Fathers and Brethren, while you may." Exibit homo ad opus suum, etad operationem suam usque ad vesperum."6 Man shall go forth to his work and to his labour until the evening. It is a brief day at longest. It is the eventide with many here. "Mane nobiscum Domine quoniam jam advesperascit." Who shall sit here when the next Synod of Westminster shall deliberate? The day is far spent, for most. Little remains for a work beyond the proportions of a life. Our time is short and fleeting; but it is not its shortness or its fleetness that is the true measure of how brief it is. It is the greatness of the work we have to do. We work and live for the glory of the Holy Trinity, for the salvation of mankind, bought by the most Precious Blood, for the building of the Church of Jesus Christ: for such a work, the life of the youngest here is short indeed. What then is ours, which already is towards evening? u Work then while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work."
Footnotes
Chapter 4 of 14